Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Dance with the groundswell




I believe that some people still remember this picture; it is one of the covers of time magazine in 2006, so called “Person of the Year”. It recognized the millions of people who anonymously contribute user-generated content to wikis (including Wikipedia), YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and the multitudes of other websites featuring user contribution.

Like the textbook says: “A social trend in which people use technologies to get the things they need from each other, rather than from traditional institutions like corporations.” The groundswell is a new era both with opportunity and risk. It’s also coming fast and penetrative. Instead of avoiding it, the sensible way is to welcome it, or I would like to say: “to dance with it”.

Time goes by, today, input “social media” on YouTube; people could found about 4,240,000 results. Most of them are aim to explain the impact of social media.

Listening always is an important process of communication, while, for groundswell, listening by itself is sterile. We need strategies and technologies to get new insights. Since we are in the trend of global economic integration, I think the brands should not only listen to domestic information, but also the intercultural information. Here I found a tool to help multinational brands listening to the groundswell in intercultural situation. It’s called Obuzz, it is a systematic and comprehensive Chinese Internet word-of-mouth tracking tool, which provide by Ogilvy& mather.



Actually, the Obuzz has already been deployed for clients in China including Adidas, Intel and GSK, crawls thousands of blogs and social media sites to give marketers an unadulterated glimpse of discussions around their brands and competitors, as well as an instantaneous view on consumer sentiment related to a product or category. 

Talking with the groundswell is different with traditional marketing, “Marketers no longer dictate the path people take, nor do they lead the dialogue.” Turning viral video into a conversation could be an awesome strategy. Here I found a video that describes the impact of video in social media. 



Social Media & Video Statistics for 2014

At last, the more I read the book, the more I found I have misunderstood about marketing with social media. It is more complicated than I expected. In my opinion, to provide a fit social media for a company not only needs lots of quality and quantity research, but also need to back to the basic, to understand about the brand, its culture, its objective, and its characteristic. 

2 comments:

  1. well done! watch out for URL issues with the videos thought :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you for your common, but I don't understand the "URL issues", do you mean you can watch the video on my blog?

      Delete