An enlightening article by Lara Lee on Forbes describes the advantages of managing Community Relations by businesses (embracing communities, creating them or helping them thrive): Communities cost less, they grow loyalty, maintain authenticity, drive innovation and support natural reinvention.
And here is a related presentation by Awareness:
The role of marketers has long been to hunt out clients and, with the aid of salespeople, capture this prey. However, particularly with the maturation of the Internet, the tide is turning. For instance, in the vacation market now, many people hunt out the holiday they want themselves. They use the Internet to find and then make choices, sometimes interrogating potential sellers online. In industries like this, the role of marketing is to make sure that a company’s products or services are easily found online, and that the company responds effectively to potential customers.
(Mistakes Marketer Make by David Corkindale, published in the recent MIT Sloan Business Insight edition).
Been a long and quiet Saturday with plenty of time to catch up with my long waiting reading materials. Following are some recommended inks.
Yesterday we (at Blink) launched a blogospheric campaign for Peugeot 308 (Hebrew), which is about to arrive to Israel in the next couple of weeks. The campaign invites Israeli bloggers to join a cross-country tour with the car and blog about their experiences (they are encouraged to travel to and write about their favorite places, and not necessarily about the car itself). Currently bloggers are invited to register (and many already have), but eventually only seven of them will go on the tour. Each blogger will drive the car for two days and pass it on to the next blogger. The tour will start at the north and end at the most southern (and fun) point of Israel - Eilat. The tour will be followed by the 308BlogTour anchor blog. Needless to say - the Tour is first and foremost about the bloggers and their stories. This is the first time a commodity is being launched exclusively in the Israeli blogosphere, and I think it shows that the Israeli groundswell is finally getting the recognition it deserves from the local business community. Community engagement of this sort is very hard to achieve, especially since bloggers are suspicious when it comes to communicating with brands and organizations. We are getting great feedback from local members of the blogging community, most of them note that they also see this campaign as a blogging-awareness campaign, and we are very (!) happy about it. Yesterday must have been the “social media and cars day”, since besides our launch of the 308BlogTour, Shel Israel published a video interview with Bob Lutz from GM about his personal experience with social media. It is a very sincere and inspiring report about the role social media is playing in GM, and its impact on GM’s PR, marketing, media relations, customer and employee engagement. I have been following GM’s social media adoption for quite some time now and getting the “behind the curtain” perspective was very enlightening for me.
