This week’s #Socialmedia Tweetchat Topic: Social and the New Model For Market Segmentation #sm48

Posted on February 23, 2010 by marc meyer

So you know by now that we attempt to shake things up a bit and challenge people to think differently about topics and their impact on business. Our topic this week is no exception and with the skills of our moderator, we are going to test those limits. This week’s discussion is around market segmentation and how social can change how we approach it.

Market segmentation is more than what markers do with homogeneous products before deciding which actress to use in the commercial to best reach a desired consumer group. Market segmentation is defined by Wikipedia as:

“A market segment is a sub-set of a market made up of people or organizations sharing one or more characteristics that cause them to demand similar product and/or services based on qualities of those products such as price or function.”

This is a good start as a definition, however this does not even begin to scratch the surface. How do we take this to the next level? To explore ways by which to re-imagine consumer grouping, we must get past the traditional segmenting like demographics, geography, income, even behavioral. For many marketers, they look at data models that break out behavioral with layers of demo and geographics mashed in. This modeling then determines a budgeted ad spend for a period in time like 3 or 6 months where the messaging is developed, pricing assigned and commercial created. The problem is that by the time the ads hit, the data models have shifted and the intended groups have moved on. Now with peer reviews and endless product content the real-time web is heavily influencing consumer preferences that continue to change with increased velocity.

Savvy marketers have been using insights for more than just marketing also. Savvy marketers use segmentation for product development, pricing, marketing channel, and even customer retention. Using the last example, customer retention, the segmenting considers factors like profitability, strategic fit, product version and longevity. Can you service your customers differently with better targeting for profitability or would you be more proactive with customers who were ripe for renewal or upgrades? Now consider going beyond your internal gates and imagine the results if you combined internal factors along with external or social listening capabilities. Maybe that customer who is really loud socially is a drain on your profitability.

So what this means is that the social web is having a profound affect on preferences, therefore insights that are not derived in near-real time are simply missing the mark. If we open our research and insights departments to the social web, how can they can they use these tools that have never been considered before? Every company will find different value in different social instances, however there are some great new possibilities that are emerging:

What if you titled the buckets of your listening tools with Underserved, Disenfranchised and Contemplators? Could you use that insight to build better products or price more according to near real-time inputs?
What if you targeted people who played Mafia Wars on Facebook or joined relevant fan pages. Could you use those applications for consumers to self segment themselves and find commonalities?
What if you targeted people who used certain hashtags (#) on Twitter or similar platforms. Could you infer commonalities from everyone who tweeted #farm, #beer or #sweets?

Understanding and using social segmentation is challenging. The pace at which social moves and the pace by which people flutter around digitally are simply exhausting. Marketers like General Mills and Coke are early adopters of social segmentation and blazing a trail for others to follow. This week’s moderator Ken Burbary is going to help us sort out this topic. Ken manages the social media duties for Ernst & Young where he develops these types of solutions for their respective clients. The topic this week is:

TOPIC: Social and the New Model For Market Segmentation

Q1) Is traditional market segmentation still relevant?

Q2) What should be more important for Brands: social segmentation or engagement?

Q3) How are you segmenting your customers with Social Media?

Please join us Tuesday 2/23 at noon EST by using #sm48 on Twitter or follow our LIVE page

via hashtagsocialmedia.com

Posted via web from marcmeyer’s posterous

10 social sites for your week

Posted on December 18, 2009 by marc meyer

This weeks selection of social sites cover the gamut from social media monitoring to a few juicy blog posts on community, strategy and real time search, to a couple of new social networks. Have any I should add? Lemme know!

1) Check out Zoho, It appears that Zoho offers everything from a business solutions standpoint to a new set of tires. (Just kidding on the tires)

2) 46 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools Free is good

3) Free is really good. 7 Essential multimedia tools and their free alternatives

4) From the SEOMoz Blog –How To Monitor & Track Google’s Real-time Search-Pay attention to this, it’s going to loom large.

5) Daily Mugshot is fun. Change the wrapper on your personal brand every day!

6) What is thankfulfor? It’s your personal gratitude journal. It’s also a collective gratitude journal, for all of us. Very cool and simple.

7) A strategic plan has a better chance of being successful when it’s easy to understand, easy to find, and easy to share. With that being said check out this post by Ben McConnell

8. Shiv Singh talks about Ken Burbary’s Social Analytics Lifecycle. I agree with Shiv on this, I like where it’s going and it is certainly a work in progress, but I would add consumer and influencer insights as an input as well too.

9) Check Daniel Eden’s Vinyl Art work out. This could definitely be a present for someone you know.

10) Share your experiences through Gowalla. I haven’t played with this to any degree yet, but I do like the UI.

11 Must Save Social Media Links For The Week

Posted on November 24, 2009 by marc meyer

I have thousands of bookmarks and chances are you do too. From a social media purists standpoint, it’s good karma to share links and websites that are worth a second look. Here are 11 of them in no particular order.

One of the smart guys out there is Jay Baer, last week he wrote a post titled the 11 Must Do’s For the Serious Blogger. As I have been wont to say on various occassions, not all of you should or can blog. Jay’s post is for those that can, and are serious about it.

Do you know what a KPI is? If you are an online marketer of any kind and don’t know, then quit reading and go work out, eat some yogurt, or go to Starbucks. For those that do know the importance of KPI’s, here’s a great little checklist of sorts titled, 35 social medis KPI’s to measure engagement.

If you use Tweetdeck or Seesmic for Twitter, you know the importance of grouping the people or topics you follow. Well Twitter responded by creating Lists. So how do you make heads or tails of that? Try out Listorious, which will bring some order to your chaos.

If you use Twitter for content and I do, it’s my filter for content. But I don’t like when I DON’T know about something and I should. There is no good way to avoid this, it will happen. Enter Twitter Tim.es, which generates a personalized ‘newspaper’ for you based on what the people that you follow are talking about.

Speaking of things happening now, check out this cool little app, Surchur, real time search and real time discovery.

I’ve said this before but my friend Ken Burbary has assembled one helluva wiki of social media monitoring solutions. It is the best, most complete list that I have seen out there on the topic.

Want to see what kind of influence you have based on your Twitter presence? Well, Edelman has put together a pretty cool little tool called Tweetlevel. Don’t read too much into it though, It’s just another tool that measures your presence in the ether.

Last month JD Lasica put together a nice deck of the top 10 pharma efforts in social media that dovetailed nicely into the FDA hearings on social media 2 weeks ago. If you care about Pharma’s involvement in social media, then this is a must read, if you don’t, then keep moving…

And 2 for the road…

BatchBook is the social CRM built for small businesses and entrepreneurs, I thought this had a lot of promise because it addressed a niche that doesn’t get the same CRM love that the enterprise gets.

I read this post and already knew the answer, Is Facebook getting uncool for 18-24’s?

I hope this helps make things easier, enlightens you or simplifies your work flow. Either way, feel free to share these with others who might benefit.

Share this Post

The Virtual Street Cred of Twitter

Posted on January 24, 2009 by marc meyer

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about virtual credibility. I guess because a lot of the people that follow me on Twitter have some interesting bios. Some that would have you thinking or believing, “wow this person is impressive.” They say they do this and they have x amount of followers etc. etc.

Simply put, at some point your bio, your connections and the number of followers you have are going to mean nothing unless you can back it up with true hands on experience and knowledge. I will venture to say though, that you can learn a lot about someone via 140 characters or less. Consider that the ice breaker or the get to know someone phase if you will. And you know what? It can become pretty obvious after awhile, when actually talking to someone whether they have the “chops” or not. That’s the difference between virtual credibility and “virtual street cred.”

“Virtual Street Cred”

I could refer you to the urban dictionary for the loosely defined version of “street cred” but attaching the word “virtual” to it simply means that it’s one thing to talk it in the virtual space that is the blogosphere or Twitter, but it’s a whole nuther’ thing to walk it.

So yesterday I tweeted that I was thinking about virtual credibility, when Rachel Happe, whose views and opinion I respect very much, asked the following question:

Is “virtual credibility” like virtual currency…it’s not really money but it looks like it on the internet? 🙂

Bingo! So, over the past few months, I’ve been having actual conversations with people I’ve gotten to know from Twitter. This is significant on a number of levels. Not the least of which is the virtual relationship has become something other than “tweeting” back and forth. Another significant aspect, is that before Twitter, I might have still been able to talk to people in the marketing, social media, PR and decision maker space but…It would have taken perhaps a cold call or semi-warm one at best to engage them. And many more to get to some type of comfort level.

Twitter has allowed us ways to create amazing relationships and opportunities at a rapid rate. Prior to Twitter we would have had to work twice as hard to get to know each other. As Brian Solis puts it in his most recent post:

As Twitter gains in relevance and prominence, its conversation platform will ring the alarms of any business that monetizes relationships, connections, and information exchange

From Twitter I’ve received opportunities to work on projects. I’ve also, on a daily basis been privy to a massive stable of talent that I can refer to for help, perspective, resources, advice, knowledge, expertise, partnerships and wisdom and most of all friendship. I have gotten to know people from so many diverse backgrounds that would have never happened otherwise. The majority of these people are a mere DM away. That is an amazing aspect that is not overlooked by me. Some of these people now have, in my eyes attained.

“Virtual Street Cred”

In the comments section of a post by Radian 6’s Amber Naslund, Marketer Beth Harte says the following.

I used to think Twitter was silly (hated it really), but now, it’s invaluable. All those tweets really build a character of the people you interact with. And then when you meet them in person, it’s like you already know them well and you can move past the ‘getting to know you’ phase into a deeper relationship. Imagine that from a business perspective…wow!

I feel that way too.

How about you? What has happened to you since you’ve embarked on Twitter? Good, bad, or indifferent?

The top 10 blogs to read in 2009

Posted on December 23, 2008 by marc meyer

Yep add my blog post as one of those end of year “lists’. But as I’ve stated, I’m going to scale back what I read. I’m going to hone in on quality. With that being said here is my list with reasons why. They also are in no particular order either.

Paul Chaney’s Conversational Media Marketing blog always has an interesting post or content. It’s light, it’s a good read and it’s insightful.
Shannon Paul’s Very Official Blog is always in the sweet spot. Her stuff is short, generally, always to the point, and it resonates on many levels.
Lee Odden’s Online Marketing Blog is a no brainer. It’s updated daily and it’s chock full of content that makes you better at what you do. Even if you don’t do “it”, it’s worth reading.
Chris Brogan is our Grand Poobah”. Now I know he’s taken hits lately but look, Chris gives away 10 times more than he takes, and thus he should be a blog that you check in on from time to time. He’s a content creating fool.
Valeria Maltoni true to her tag line, “connects her ideas with people”, and will make you think. When I read her stuff, that’s what happens. Her blog is another that I dip into every once in a while for perspective. She’s current, always on point and she’s eloquent.
I like the Ignite Social Media Blog but it might be because it’s very vertical for me. I’m entitled to one or two of these, and this is one of them.
Ok, so something about Joseph Jaffe makes me want to read his stuff. It’s funny usually, and underneath it all, there’s generally some sort of marketing theme or message.
Beth Harte is one smart cookie. She says it in a straight shootin way. She’s respected, she’s connected and she knows all things marketing. You will love her perspective.
Brian Solis is a good read, he churns out content, it’s not over your head, it’s current and it’s useful. Boom.
Mashable is the source or the site you would go to if you needed information, if you need updates and if you could only go to one site. This is it. Check it out.

Honorable Mentions

Here are 10 more that I read because they are prolific in cranking out content that is in tune with the issues of marketing, PR, social media, and life. You didn’t think I could just read 10 blogs a day did you? Well neither will you, not with this much quality out there!

Like I said, it’s quality over quantity, though all of these people churn out some pretty good quantities of content. I could only hope to do the same. I look forward to continued learning from all of them.