The connected buyer in the social networking age: welcome to the ‘pull’ customer


Connectedcustomer When looking back at this week’s earlier post regarding the shift from selling to buying, I remembered an article I wrote a while ago about what I then called ‘the pull customer’. 

The marketing and communication reality has changed dramatically since the arrival of new digital media. Whether we call it Web 2.0, social media or any other buzzword, we tend to summarize these changes as the end of mass communication as we knew it, an explosion of new communication channels, the fragmentation of media, the participation of people in the marketing and communication process, customer-centricity, more focus on value and relevance and so on.

One of the changes, that is going on since many years now, is the fact that communication and marketing have increasingly become a ‘pull’ instead of a ‘push’ process. Remember those words? Push versus pull marketing?

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Social networking usage (Facebook…) surpassed email: what does it mean?

Morgan Stanley yesterday released its latest Internet trends report.

In the PDF version of that report, which is a nice collection of stats and graphs for your next PowerPoint presentation, there is a graphic that shows that, from a communications perspective, social networking has surpassed email.

The graph, that is based on comScore data, clearly indicates that social networking usage surpassed email.

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