Social marketing 2009

According to Forbes, four trends have been obvious during 2009 when it comes to social marketing:

1. The recession has made people band together to share, learn, communicate and socialize. On top of this, a lot of people have had oceans of time to connect to others due to unemployment.
2. The recession again has made companies cut their marketing budgets, making them experimenting with unconventional media. Word-of-mouth campaigns actually encourage the consumers to do the marketing themselves.
3. When it comes to technology, the trend is that social networks are connecting with other systems, which makes the users able to reach many networks from one place - like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc.
4. The spread of customer experience in social media is a new challenge that companies have to react to quicker than ever before.

Still, while a lot of companies have started interacting with their consumers through social media, most companies don't. One lesson to learn from the Forbes four trends is however that even if we are slow in using the latest technology for marketing purposes, we definitely need a strategy and a plan to react to customer feedback through the latest technology. Even if we are not using the technology - our customers will.