Don’t Get Lost in Translation

Cassandra Jeyaram, PhD, Social Marketing Manager, Global Consumer Marketing at InterContinental Hotels Group, offered this key takeaway as marketers think about how to engage consumers and prospects online: “Be transparent and make a commitment. One of the biggest mistakes I see companies making is that they’ll set up a Facebook page or community and then ignore it. Social marketing tools are designed to build and foster relationships. They need nurturing and attention. Failure to connect and engage in a transparent way can lead to extremely disappointing results — not to mention wasted resources.”

In this age of globalization, there are important social, linguistic and behavioral differences between even the most similar of cultures, of which marketers need be aware as they try to expand their customer base beyond the US. I am reminded of this daily as I venture out in London. Someone always asks me, “Are you okay?” To an American, such a question might seem off-putting, as if the other party is in possession of some insider knowledge that I have been ailing in some way. However, after living in London for almost a year, I realize that this is the British way of asking “How are you doing?” and I answer accordingly: “Fine, thank you. You okay?”In short, is not simply enough to engage with Brits in the same manner as you’d engage with Americans, or with Australian consumers as you’d engage with Chinese ones. While new social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter may unify global audiences, they are not yet great homogenizers — many important cultural differences still remain.

Read the three lessons to be learned by marketers who engage global communities and download an interesting study.

Online Communities Are Impacting Business – really?

Rubicon Consulting‘s web practice team recently conducted a study which produced interesting results. The study shows that only a small percentage of users actively (and only from time to time) participates in online communities, therefore generating user content:

• 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
• 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
• 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

So what’s the buzz about user generated content if only a small percentage of web visitors are “creators”?  Well, it has been a long-known fact that the vast majority of online conversation is driven by a small group of web users — less than ten percent of them. The rest of the web community sits back and watches the interactions as a mostly-passive audience that only occasionally injects a few comments.

And that’s where the opportunity lies. Those personal reviews and comments about your service are far more influential than official reviews posted by a website or magazine, or information posted online by a you – the destination, hotel, tour company, attraction, airline etc.

The study continues to show that there are different types of web communities which have very different dynamics and user bases. Approaches that work well in one type of community may fail utterly in another, concludes the study.  There are five broad categories:

• Proximity, where users share a geographic location (Craigslist is an example)
• Purpose, where they share a common task (eBay, Wikipedia)
• Passion, where they share a common interest (YouTube, Dogster)
• Practice, where they share a common career or field of business (many online professional groups fall in this category; a great source for professional groups is LinkedIn)
• Providence, where they discover connections with others (Facebook)

Business lesson: “Keep doing nothing except listening until you’ve worked out the reasoning and motivation behind those conversations, what it is customers really want, what types of customers hang around in your social media markets, who the most important or vociferous ones are and what makes them passionate about your product/service,” says Sachendra Yadav on his blog.

Read complete article here.