June 11, 2009 

Integrating Earned Media in the Purchase Path

BO_twitter

Through a great exchange over Twitter and his Blog, Dirk Shaw revives a concept that I’ve been harboring over the past year: how important it is to bring some element of social networking activity back to the brand home site.

Whether it’s a blog, B2B, B2C, or your basic brand hub, it pays to bring these elements back in for many of the same reasons that the social network platforms are doing so well:

Your site: in the context of people

One of the major elements of social media is that it is blending people and technology at the interface level. To me, it’s a societal backlash from decades of corporate-era computerization-as-efficiency-builder. Starting with data centers, then mainframes, then PCs, and moving towards ubiquitous computing, this blend of people as machine-operators is only going to become more important.

MyBlogLog is an early example, along with site reviews on Amazon. Putting product on a site used to be good enough. Now you need to start creating a strategy to bring that product or service within the context of the people who are more apt to use it.

Of course, many companies will say that they can’t do this, that there’s not enough interest, or that their product wouldn’t get the attention to drive social interaction. There’s an answer to this too:

Adding your people to the page

earned media in product pagesWhat if we completely disregard the apparently high-minded notion that people will want to see and be seen around product or service. What about the basic element of putting a picture and a small bit of text of the person or people responsible for bringing that ite to the page people are viewing?

I talk about this at length in the Bring Twitter Back Home article, but the basic gist is how poerful of a sales tool it is to add the “Why” in the context of people on the page. Why did the buyer pick this product to sell over another? Why did the designer lay out the page like this? Why did the writer choose these words to depict the product. These are perceptually personal insights that provide users with dynamic reasons to add the product to the cart they may not have ever considered. This isn’t earned media at all, but it walks and talks like it, and may be a way to catalize engagement or test the potential.

Of course, this doesn’t even touch the concept of people doing your distributed content marketing for you. Curious what you think about the topic, as it seems to me a crucial element of increasing sales today, and surviving tomorrow.

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Related posts:

  1. Boosting Loyalty By Integrating Social and CRM
  2. The Brand Cause: Focusing Social Media Strategy
  3. Social Media User Experience: Is it the Contrast?
  4. Four Critical Social Media Readiness Questions to Ask First

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  • http://www.dirkshaw.com dirkmshaw

    Hey Michael.

    Great stuff. All of this points to the fact that brands need to become more human, not that your logo needs to talk. But that you need place either the people doing the work in front of customer for interaction or lets your customers do the talking. The fundamental challenge seems to be in giving up some control.

    But moving forward as you stated, this will become the accepted norm and those who embrace now will be ahead of the curve.

    dirk

  • http://www.dirkshaw.com dirkmshaw

    Hey Michael.

    Great stuff. All of this points to the fact that brands need to become more human, not that your logo needs to talk. But that you need place either the people doing the work in front of customer for interaction or lets your customers do the talking. The fundamental challenge seems to be in giving up some control.

    But moving forward as you stated, this will become the accepted norm and those who embrace now will be ahead of the curve.

    dirk

  • http://www.dirkshaw.com dirkmshaw

    Hey Michael.

    Great stuff. All of this points to the fact that brands need to become more human, not that your logo needs to talk. But that you need place either the people doing the work in front of customer for interaction or lets your customers do the talking. The fundamental challenge seems to be in giving up some control.

    But moving forward as you stated, this will become the accepted norm and those who embrace now will be ahead of the curve.

    dirk

  • http://www.dirkshaw.com dirkmshaw

    Hey Michael.

    Great stuff. All of this points to the fact that brands need to become more human, not that your logo needs to talk. But that you need place either the people doing the work in front of customer for interaction or lets your customers do the talking. The fundamental challenge seems to be in giving up some control.

    But moving forward as you stated, this will become the accepted norm and those who embrace now will be ahead of the curve.

    dirk

  • http://twitter.com/mleis Michael Leis

    It's funny, I think saying “Brands need to be more human” makes it seem like brands aren't already human. But they really are. They're chock full of people working on their behalf. In some senses, it's like the open kitchen. Does anyone go up there and actually closely watch the chefs? No. But it does enhance the dining experience.

    Same thing goes here. There's no real loss of control, or real interaction (in many cases) for that matter: only the perception of both. Mostly, it ends up amounting to “people marketing” where you're leading with personal benefits that bring potential customers into the product features.

    Thanks again for continually sparking my thinking on all this.

  • http://twitter.com/mleis Michael Leis

    It's funny, I think saying “Brands need to be more human” makes it seem like brands aren't already human. But they really are. They're chock full of people working on their behalf. In some senses, it's like the open kitchen. Does anyone go up there and actually closely watch the chefs? No. But it does enhance the dining experience.

    Same thing goes here. There's no real loss of control, or real interaction (in many cases) for that matter: only the perception of both. Mostly, it ends up amounting to “people marketing” where you're leading with personal benefits that bring potential customers into the product features.

    Thanks again for continually sparking my thinking on all this.

  • http://twitter.com/mleis Michael Leis

    It's funny, I think saying “Brands need to be more human” makes it seem like brands aren't already human. But they really are. They're chock full of people working on their behalf. In some senses, it's like the open kitchen. Does anyone go up there and actually closely watch the chefs? No. But it does enhance the dining experience.

    Same thing goes here. There's no real loss of control, or real interaction (in many cases) for that matter: only the perception of both. Mostly, it ends up amounting to “people marketing” where you're leading with personal benefits that bring potential customers into the product features.

    Thanks again for continually sparking my thinking on all this.

  • http://twitter.com/mleis Michael Leis

    It's funny, I think saying “Brands need to be more human” makes it seem like brands aren't already human. But they really are. They're chock full of people working on their behalf. In some senses, it's like the open kitchen. Does anyone go up there and actually closely watch the chefs? No. But it does enhance the dining experience.

    Same thing goes here. There's no real loss of control, or real interaction (in many cases) for that matter: only the perception of both. Mostly, it ends up amounting to “people marketing” where you're leading with personal benefits that bring potential customers into the product features.

    Thanks again for continually sparking my thinking on all this.

  • http://blog.michaelleis.com/2009/09/only-run-digital-strategy-as-far-as-you-can-run-back/ Only Run Digital Strategy As Far As You Can Run Back | Michael Leis

    [...] Ken Burbary does a great job collecting and analyzing current examples (read the comments, too. Lots of good ones) as this concept of integration is dawning on larger consumer-facing brands. I’ve talked about it a few times before as well, specifically about bringing Twitter back home, and pivoting off Dirk Shaw’s concept of integrating earned media. [...]

  • http://blog.michaelleis.com/2010/01/apis-start-slant-drilling-the-social-web/ APIs: Start Slant-Drilling the Social Web | Michael Leis

    [...] created a fan page. The more involved you get with APIs like facebook connect, the more you can integrate social techniques, like pictures of friends and their earned media — putting the brand at the center of the social discourse in a larger context the brand [...]