As customers are coming forward to contribute their expertise, time, and resources in marketing exchanges in blogs, social media, and many interactive forums, we are witnessing the emergence of collaborative marketing. Collaborative marketing is now becoming the process of working together with customers to create value in marketing exchanges.

Some of the top companies that have used relationship marketing are required to think first about how to relate to their customers. In contrast, with the active customer, collaborative marketing requires companies to think about collaborating with customers, making sure they have an integral part in the company’s marketing activities. In collaborative marketing, the strategy network becomes the enabler of collaborative exchanges and goes way beyond relationship exchanges because companies involve mutual dependence and maximization of shared benefits to their customers.

Collaborative innovation and marketing allow companies to tap into the customers’ expertise by integrating customers with the company’s new product and service development process. They have taken forum marketing to the next level on the Internet. For example, if a company wants to launch a new product, they can have their potential customers register online and sample the new ideas or products. Communities may be created online to discuss the new initiative or product and give honest feedback. This allows the potential customer to be more open and honest with the feedback and not be in a room face-to-face in an environment where a focus group is established and participants often feel the pressure of not saying the right thing for the research answers.

The Collaborative Process

Collaborative communication now becomes a just-in-time marketing through communication that is relevant to your customer. Relative messaging now turns conventional advertising from a just-in-case marketing communication that is created from traditional advertising to a just-in-time communication initiated by the customers, and is truly relevant to the context.

Collaborative support from potential and existing customers allows companies to reduce costs while increasing overall satisfaction. This is done by allowing customers to have dialogue with the company to help solve problems. A great example is Cisco’s online community that allows their customers to get answers to support questions from peers and experts. By allowing customers to take part in the support operation, Cisco is able to decrease customer support costs, while increasing overall customer satisfaction. The community first started out as a customer support initiative and became a valuable resource for new product ideas and competitive intelligence.

While smaller businesses may not have the support staff for something as elaborate as Cisco, they can still utilize an online community to help with new product launches. They also can do this while getting the feedback needed from potential customers to help make relevant decisions about moving forward with a new campaign or product and save money. It also helps all businesses to stop and listen to the customers’ feedback to increase customer satisfaction.

To enable this collaborative process, companies need to build technology platforms that allow the customer to connect to their business processes. Collaboration will not succeed unless both the customer and the company in the collaborative exchange have the appropriate incentives. A key challenge is to determine how to engage the potential customer to want to take the time and effort to provide the pertinent feedback in your online community area. Marketing is taken to the next level when companies understand that the Internet is an excellent channel for marketing to customers. This is true only if the power lies with customers – by making the customer an integral part of the company’s marketing activities and seeing that their feedback is valuable to the organization. Harnessing the power of collaborative marketing is only as good as seeing the customer as a virtual extension of your company’s overall marketing strategy.

While there are many benefits to be gained through collaborative marketing, there are also challenges that you should be aware of such as lack of a common mission, lack of commitment, costs of group decision-making, and barriers for entering and existing in this collaborative marketing effort. A common mission meets common objectives in this new online community. In order to enjoy the rewards of working together, there needs to be a new shift in the way of thinking and acting.

The shift in thinking goes from independent to interdependent thinking, and is one of the most difficult challenges for a business when organizing a collaborative marketing effort. While each of us has an independent mind, we need to adapt to a logical or natural connections association between two or more things associated with interdependent thinking, for example: seek first to understand, then to be understood; synergize and think win-win for connection, correlation, interconnection, and interrelationships.)

Are you ready for this paradigm shift? The answer to this question must be well thought out and carefully planned before you begin this new collaborative endeavor. If done correctly and utilized properly, this could grow your business exponentially.

About DJ Heckes, Author of Full BRAIN Marketing and Owner of EXHIB-IT! Tradeshow Marketing Experts

DJ Heckes is CEO of EXHIB-IT! Tradeshow Marketing Experts and Full BRAIN Marketing .  She focuses on educating and training companies to significantly improve their Small Business Marketing strategies.  DJ Heckes also presents customized training programs for Business Marketing, Social Media, Leadership and Trade Show Marketing. Learn more at www.EXHIB-IT.com  and www.fullBRAINMarketing.com.  Be sure to follow us!

DJ Heckes, CEO & Author
EXHIB-IT! Tradeshow Marketing Experts
www.exhib-it.com
Full BRAIN Marketing
www.fullbrainmarketing.com

A good thing to realize is that we use technology and technology does not use us. One does not have to use Twitter as discussed above, and there is no reason to jump in and do everything at once. It is best to start with listening. What are people saying about you? What conversations can you be a part of? What types of proactive reach can you do and what do you need to be reactive to? For you and for your company, be sure to choose how to use the technology.

If a commitment is made to become part of an online community and conversations, commit to taking the feedback to the company and asking what you can do to change and actually make the company change. Determine what the customers want and figure out a way to get back to the company mission and values. 

Benchmark your social media efforts and see if they are creating any return on investment on organic search engines through relevant content and information. Use a trend graph when trying to benchmark your social media and Internet strategy efforts. (A trend graph provides information at a glance through graphing out ups, downs, and horizontals [growth stalls] to provide metrics of valuable information needed in the study being performed.)

Message boards and forums are important ways for companies to brand. Think about why a person joins a forum; it is based on similar interests and commonalities. Online communities become trusted resources to ask advice about things not related to the same online forum or online community. However, relationships have been developed and trust is gained.

According to http://www.big-boards.com, the most active message boards and forums on the Web, they list out and rate different blog posts. When visiting this Web site, it is easy to sort and filter by different blog posts, memberships, page views, traffic, online users, Alexa ranking (a relative measurement of how popular a Web site is among the Internet community), and much more.

Knowing blogs are becoming a relevant communication tool, this is something you may want to consider doing for your own exposure, as long as you have relevant content that people will want to follow.

We are experiencing an explosion in social media participation around the world. It is becoming harder and harder to run a business without using social media. It is time to figure out how your business fits into this social media world and how to develop a strategic market place online. Social media is much different than Internet marketing. Once you understand the mind-set of social media, the core of all your social ability, and heart of your search engine optimization (SEO), the rankings will be paid off through more visibility, more leads, and potentially more sales.

Learn about these online communities and how to engage in them. With a Web presence, active social media usage, and search engine optimization strategies, you can deliver a content strategy designed to sell your products and services online. I have found social media to be very beneficial both personally and professionally. Social media content I am personally using are LinkedIn, Twitter, Squidoo, Facebook, Google+, WordPress and lots of widgets for measuring my time and efforts in Social Media. 

Spread links, contents, and messages to the far reaches of the social sphere. Tie all of this into a constant web of influence while gaining higher search engine ability. Integrated social media initiatives will increase Web presence and grow your business strategies.

About DJ Heckes, Author of Full BRAIN Marketing and Owner of EXHIB-IT! Tradeshow Marketing Experts

DJ Heckes is CEO of EXHIB-IT! Tradeshow Marketing Experts and Full BRAIN Marketing .  She focuses on educating and training companies to significantly improve their Small Business Marketing strategies.  DJ Heckes also presents customized training programs for Business Marketing, Social Media, Leadership and Trade Show Marketing. Learn more at www.EXHIB-IT.com  and www.fullBRAINMarketing.com.  Be sure to follow us!

DJ Heckes, CEO & Author
EXHIB-IT! Tradeshow Marketing Experts
www.exhib-it.com
Full BRAIN Marketing
www.fullbrainmarketing.com

How do you get people who are afraid to write to find their voice? Blogging is not always the right tool for everyone. It is OK not to blog. If you are afraid to write, then don’t blog. If you start writing blogs, set clear boundaries for what you want to accomplish.

Twitter is one of my favorite social media sites. Many companies use Twitter for business, including Dell. Dell has one of the largest turnaround stories for correcting its reputation through using social media. Several years ago, Jeff Jarvis created a Web site titled “Buzz Machine” (www.buzzmachine.com). Jeff Jarvis posted blogs regarding Dell Hell and it was widely covered in the media. Dell Hell taught Dell a very important lesson about listening to what people were saying about them online and finding new avenues to connect with their consumers and customers. Dell has a team of about forty people led by Richard Dell on Twitter (http://twitter.com/RichardAtDell). Dell is connecting Richard Dell with their consumers on Twitter. The company wants to know if consumers and their customers are talking about them and they respond by asking how they can help.

Twitter has its ups and downs, but there is a critical mass there with early adopters. Another example of a company using Twitter for customer service is Comcast (http://twitter.com/COMCASTCARES). Frank Eliason out of their Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, office heads up this Twitter social media site. Eliason discovered that by doing a search for the word “Comcast” (and occasionally “Comcrap”), he could find tweeters who just happened to mention service complaints and he could address these complaints quickly himself. While Twitter is not a replacement for phone and e-mail assistance, Eliason says it is an avenue through which people have gotten to know Comcast. He feels it is a little more personal with back-and-forth discussions in a less formal environment. It also provides immediacy to interactions.

Dell, Zappos, and Comcast are the three highest profile companies I found using Twitter as a customer service social media site. There are lots of newspaper companies, journalists, and other companies also using Twitter, but the three listed seem to be the most interactive that I have read so far. Zappos (http://www.zappos.com/ and http://twitter.zappos.com/) has about four hundred employees identified on Twitter who are building relationships with real people. There is something to be said about knowing and connecting with a person at a real company that can be very valuable.

Is social media for everyone? No, but it is important to have social media on your radar and help customers and clients get on a radar to be in the know about certain topics in your industry and most importantly, building online relationships. It is also important to learn search skills and go beyond Google and use specific search tools such as:

• http://search.twitter.com

• http://googleblog.blogspot.com

• http://boardreader.com

There is a whole suite of social media and each type has a different search engine. Do not think that Google is the only search engine. Try using RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. This is a resource that teaches people how to make the Web more useful and cut back on the number of e-mails received.

Ethical Online Marketing – Things You Should Know

Another important organization to become familiar with is Word of Mouth Marketing (www.womma.org). This organization stresses using ethics when using online resources for marketing and when using social media. The essence of the WOMMA ethics code comes down to the honesty ROI, which is known as:

• Honesty of Relationship – You say who you’re speaking for

• Honesty of Opinion – You say what you believe

• Honesty of Identity – You never obscure your identity

When using social media, disclosure and honesty are very important. What value do you offer the online community? Do not let people promise you a million views for a video you want to post without showing you the return on investment, because your video may end up on a porn site or anywhere to meet the promised statement.

The first mistake most people make in social media is failing to commit to social media or to a community. People start blogging for about six weeks and then get bored. There should be an understanding that everyone is committed to being part of the online community that is selected. When I committed to blog consistently, it was an eye-opener for me. I realized the time that I invest is the pay off. When I first started piddling around with social media, it was more of a fad to see what it was about. For the first few months, I would go in weekly and slowly build a network. Then one weekend, I dedicated some time and started first with LinkedIn to see who was in my “connection.” I went to each connection to view his or her connections and the next thing I knew I was building my business network referral system.

I would send out LinkedIn e-mails to seek an answer for something I wanted to know and would get responses within minutes. Some of the connections that are on my LinkedIn page may also be contacts that I have e-mailed through Microsoft Outlook in the past, but I was finding the responses were much quicker through social media than general e-mail. I see Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and MySpace social media sites as extensions of some sort of blogging, but in shorter sound bites. Even though I do not personally use MySpace at this time, since I have focused on other social media avenues. That does not mean it may not be effective for you or your business.

It is important to remember that social media is not a cure-all. Do not think that just because you start a blog or get on Twitter for customer service that the problems of a company will be fixed like magic. Online conversations reveal a lot about a company’s DNA. In the old days, more social networking was used than any of this technology social media. Now things are digital and searchable and information is much easier to find.

About DJ Heckes, Author of Full BRAIN Marketing and Owner of EXHIB-IT! Tradeshow Marketing Experts

DJ Heckes is CEO of EXHIB-IT! Tradeshow Marketing Experts and Full BRAIN Marketing .  She focuses on educating and training companies to significantly improve their Small Business Marketing strategies.  DJ Heckes also presents customized training programs for Business Marketing, Social Media, Leadership and Trade Show Marketing. Learn more at www.EXHIB-IT.com  and www.fullBRAINMarketing.com.  Be sure to follow us!

DJ Heckes, CEO & Author
EXHIB-IT! Tradeshow Marketing Experts
www.exhib-it.com
Full BRAIN Marketing
www.fullbrainmarketing.com