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.

Twitter doubts

My first blog post will be about Twitter doubts. I have now tried Twitter for a while, just to understand what it does and how people & companies are using it, and I am still very much in doubt. Where is the value?

If people are following 1,200 people, there is no way of following their posts if you have anything else to do than watching www.twitter.com. I have a few, and some of them are posting loads of tweets every day, filling my page without doubt. I follow Obama, as he started following me the other day - yes, he is one of the ones I've lost! I follow Kennametal as they are following me and I want to see what they do with Twitter - not much if you ask me - and I follow SJ which is the company that impresses me the most. They really have a plan, they have fun and they make the most out of Twitter as far as I understand. It would be nice to see if they have measured any Return On Investment or rather Return Of Engagement. I'll have to ask them!

Then I follow some friends with limited posts, which of course are the most fun ones to follow. To few twittering friends however.

So, the doubts are ever present. How do I use this?!