As I normally do on Sundays, this post will recap marketing strategies and social marketing topics discussed in my blog over the past week, updating the information provided in the blog with comments posted here or on Facebook. I also like to take this opportunity to propose topics for next week. As always, visitors are encouraged to comment and suggest future blog posts and I try to accommodate these suggestions. I’m also looking for guest bloggers who have expertise in marketing marketing strategy, innovation, social media, etc to bring new perspectives to my visitors. My goal, as always is to build community not sell you something.
Recap of Marketing Analytics
Last week I attended the SPSS Predictive Analytics workshop in Washington DC. It was a great program and I provided an overview to the new marketing analytics I learned in my blog on Wednesday. I followed up on Thursday with a post on 5 reasons why you need a Listening Post, which is a great tool for marketing strategy as it tracks brand mentions to allow you to monitor consumer attitudes toward your brand. As a result, I got some more suggestions for ways to track online conversations — one called a Conversation Index is based on a book by Brain Solis. These were suggested by Terry Ebaugh, who is a very knowledgeable and forward thinking operations architect at AOL. Although not trained in marketing or marketing strategy, he’s really jumped on the social media bandwagon and reads on these topics voraciously. He also suggested another site to see a listening post, although its limited to Twitter
The second topic in marketing analytics was using the new SPSS Direct Marketing Module as a tool to do social network marketing more strategically. Although the folks at SPSS haven’t really embraced the notion of social media, the tool they’ve developed can be used very effectively of managing social media marketing strategy, as laid out in my post.
Marketing Strategy for a Bad Economy
On Tuesday, I discussed some issues covered in a special issue of the Journal of Business Research I’m co-editing with Wes Johnston, from Georgia State University. This special issue discusses the marketing aspects leading to the current global financial crisis and some suggestions where marketing concepts might be used to strengthen the economy, speed the recovery, and contribute to eliminating future economic slowdowns. I’m still looking for reviewers for papers submitted to this special issue so please contact me if you are interested.
Is Social Media a Joke?
On Monday, I weighed in on a discussion going around the Marketing and Communication group of LinkedIn as to whether social media is a joke. My own feeling is that social media is here to stay, but must be used strategically as part of an overall marketing strategy to be successful. Its really spammers who misuse the tactic who are the joke, not the tool.
“Ask a Marketing Expert” and NEW CHANGES
Ask a Marketing Expert is growing from week to week, with new folks dropping in every week with questions. However, we seem to have some logically issues with matching attendance of questioners and answerers. For instance, I often see several marketing experts sitting on the sidelines waiting to have a question, then when questions are entered later, there’s no one there to answer the questions. Thus, I’m changing the hours of operation to NOON to 2 PM (EST). This will hopefully result in a more active discussion. If you can’t drop in between those hours, feel free to ask your question as early at Thursday afternoon and come back later to see the answers. If you’re a marketing expert, feel free to answer questions later, as I post the entire conversation in an archive on this site. I’ll even go back to update the archive if the answer is entered several days later.
[update 4/30/2015 — Ask a Marketing Expert morphed into a Facebook Group called Social Media Marketing Tribe. Please join us there to ask questions or share content]
This weeks topics dealt with FOCUS GROUPS and whether they were valuable tools for marketing research. The consensus is that they can be valuable, depending on the question addressed and how the focus group is conducted. This contradicted the impression the questioner received after a webinar on the topic, so I think our answers helped him.
The next question was on a listening post. I referred to this in my post of Thursday, so I referred the questioner to that. Any additional comments on this question would be highly appreciated.
The final topic was a podcast from the Harvard Business Review on internal consumers and generating innovation. It was interesting and some attendees enjoyed the discussion of leadership by the presenter. However, others felt the podcast rehashed old material and didn’t add much.
Topics for Next Week
I’ll finish discussing new applications I learned at the SPSS Predictive Analytics workshop. Specifically, I’ll discuss updates to SPSS version 17 and new Text Analysis software they’ve developed. I’ll also discuss a session I attended on Cognos software, which, while not part of SPSS, is another IBM company and had several session at the workshop.
I’ll also be discussing the use of newsletters as a marketing strategy tool. It will be part of my regular Thursday feature of the TOP 5 list.
So, please come back to read about these topics and make comments here or on my Facebook regarding topics you’d like to see covered, tools you’d like to have considered for review here, or to apply to be a guest blogger.
Marketing Strategy Last Week and Upcoming http://tinyurl.com/3gm7vlu