Last week, at the Marketing Pioneers event one major theme emerged: the importance of having a social media strategy. Forrester, Tribal and Jackie Huba talked about it.

Forrester

First, Reineke Reitsma from Forrester talked about what the usage of blogs, reviews and communities related to products means for businesses. She first showed the Social Technographics Ladder, where customers are divided into Inactives, Spectatotors, Joiners, Collectors, Critics and Creators. She pointed out that a business who wants to introduce a social media strategy, must know how its customers are placed on this ladder.

She then explained how a social media strategy can have a range of objectives from 'listening to customers' to 'embracing them' (making customers part of your business process), but in all of these cases the strategy must be bottom-up rather top-down. She defined a method called P.O.S.T., in which a social strategy is planned on the basis of People, Objectives, Strategy and Technology. In short: Businesses need to provide social media features that provide value for users rather than just themselves. The talk can be found through this link.

Tribal

Secondly, as one of the PEP talks, Michiel de Nijs of Tribal spoke about the do's and dont's of social media usage.  Do monitor conversations about your product, but don’t try to counteract a bad review by posting your own good one. Do participate in and facilitate conversations about your product using a blog, but avoid social spamming.

Jackie Huba

Thirdly, the headline speaker was Jackie Huba who gave a very interesting presentation. She also introduced a ladder for customers, this one with the notion of Satisfaction, Retention, Referrals, Evangelism and Ownership (see photo). It all had to do with positive word of mouth, one of a company’s most important assets. How many people would recommend a product or service to friends and family is the number one predictor for growth of a company. In fact, she said that Participation is the fifth "P" in marketing, the others being Product, Price, Place and Promotion, and essential for success.

Customer participation can be done directly in the product development process, such as in the case of a company like Threadless, where the product is featured and voted on by the crowd before the production process is started. Already 750 thousand people participate in the Threadless community, either through submitting designs, buying designs or just showing their purchased designs.

Customer participation can also be done via referrals. She mentioned Fred Reich's, Net Promoter index: 'how likely is someone referring the product or service to someone else?'.

She ended her talk by noting that the “unofficial” social media around your product may reach a bigger audience of your target customers than the “official” marketing materials, e.g. The MacNuggets rap: