Discovering business opportunities

Geoff Livingston, CEO  Livingston Communications  (a company specialised in public relations and social media), Marketing, PR and New Media Strategist, Author of the book “Now is gone”

1. Nowadays a new (and old in the same time) term has appeared – c2c (consumer-to consumer). What is the importance of c2c marketing and how marketers should deal with?

My big issue with the term “C2C” marketing is that it assumes consumers make a conscious decision to market products. That’s not necessarily what’s happening, although affiliate programs and eBay are certainly examples of true C2C.

When Word of Mouth (WOM) referrals occur it’s because a customer believes in a product.  The brand promise of marketing has been matched by the actual user experience.  Thus, they are happy to confirm the marketing and lend their credibility to the product/service/solution.  This is third party credibility, a result of good public relations using social media tools, not a conscious paid-for-marketing action. 

Word of mouth cannot be paid for so easily.  It can be inspired, but products and services must also be inspiring.  Marketing can only accelerate the consumer’s excitement for a product they would generally like anyway.  At the same time marketing and WOM can also accelerate a bad product’s failure.

2. How the social networking can be used to achieve profitable sales results?

That’s easy.  Use a call to action.  My client Goodwill of Greater Washington sees a 5 percent click through rate from its blog to its eBay store.  SouthWest airlines offer a downloadable ticket widget with its offering, and in August they reported $150 million of sales.
 

3. Is it enough to have a positive WOM (word of mouth) to expect the sales raise? Why?

Not necessarily.  It gets back to the intent of the social media program.  There are many possible outcomes, including better brand perception (GM and Dell), brand awareness (Google’s OpenSocial), political action (green programs) and, of course, sales.

If the outcome is sales, then the program must be engineered to generate sales.  Consider the previous examples.  WOMM used to generate excitement about vintage clothes or the Southwest experience.  But the marketers involved assume that some participants would want more, so they made intelligent calls-to-action as part of their program.

Now if a program is engineered to build excitement with an obvious call to action, and nothing happens than there are several issues that could be in play.  The most obvious is the company or organization placed too much emphasis on the sale and too little on creating value for the community through the social media or WOM effort.  In the end, creating value drives consumer interest in WOM campaigns and this can never be supplanted by the actual desired outcome.
 

4. What do you think is the key for a successful WOM campaign? How can we measure it?

The key to WOM is not marketing.  It’s understanding the community, and serving it with excellent information that they care about.  If you can provide that information in a manner that’s sexy and exciting then it is even better.  But never mistake marketing for value.  In today’s world, consumers smell marketing a mile away.  They really want great valuable information.

Measurement occurs by building the desired outcome as part of the strategy.  From there you can select the appropriate measurement tools to not only know if you achieve the goal, but also to monitor progress. If progress isn’t going the right way, you can always tinker with the program before it’s too late.  Smart marketers always measure and monitor their programs.

For more information see:
C2C ROI – http://www.clickz.com/showPage.html?page=3626386
The Measurement Meme:  http://www.livingstonbuzz.com/blog/2007/11/07/the-measurement-meme/

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