Social Media Marketing - book review
“How data analytics help to monetise the user base in telecoms, social networks media and advertising in a converged ecosystem”
Ajit Jaokar, Brian Jacobs, Alan Moore and Jouko Ahvenainen
http://socialmediamarketing.futuretext.com/
Before you read my review of this book, you need to know that I am not entirely without bias. I am the co-author with Ajit for “mobile web 2.0” and Open Gardens”. I know Alan Moore and we have spend time working up ideas. I know Jouko Ahvenainen from xtract and I am a major supporter of his company. I don’t know Brian. I am about to publish “My Digital Footprint” http://www.mydigitalfootprint.com which has a high degree of correlation to many of the topics cover in this book, so I am very sympathetic to the focus and emphasis.
This is an airplane book, easy to read and you can get through it in a round trip to Barcelona. It is not a detailed read as it is about setting up a framework and moves the discussion forward.
The books takes time to set out in the first few chapters that markets are conversations and how if you can understand who is talking to who about what, you have the basic armoury to go into battle. To understand this you need to appreciate that all those tracks, trails, clicks, messages, blogs, comments that you leave behind in a digital world are there to be collected and harvested. The more data, the more analysis the more value you should be able to create. The book looks at social networks and there is a brief look at how media agencies work and how they are reacting (or not) to change.
Page 65 starts to look at the telco market and makes the valid point that operators think they own the customer, whereas they should be thinking the could get to know the customer ( difference between monopoly and loyalty!)
In getting to know the customer there are three rules to follow:- give the customer an incentive, an open platform or ecosystem and touch points. These are then explored.
From Page 75 there is a good summary of Alan Moores Book “Communities Dominate Brands” and brings out the key point of alpha users, those who are most influential in attracting and keeping friends as part of the customer base.
On page 94 there is a move from the economics and marketing into psychology and emotional behaviour as the book moves to talk about trust and reputation.
On page 112 the book points out that due to the social network, social data and life stream mean that we now have a living profile. Once the bedrock of marketing, demographic segmentation and lifestyle categorisation; which was fixed for a period of your life and describes strata’s of the population, will now possibly become redundant. Our new profile built on digital footprints will be living real time representations. The eternal issue facing us all, however, is how do we extract the value from the data!
The later parts of the book drift into privacy and identity and the impact on people willingness to provide or give up data.
Overall well worth a flight read as it is likely to stimulate new ideas and ways of looking at your customers and the data you have (or should have) and the analysis you do do ( or should do)
Migrating some original work - May 2009