Apple doesn’t do social

Remember my post Brands like friends?

I concluded: “That’s why of all the things you can say about brands, this one is imperative: they have to be consistent. If not, it’s psychotic, schizofrenic, or – at best – somewhat confused. Most people don’t want to be friends with friends like that.”

But what about brands that don’t really want to be friends, like Apple? Apple is the most admired brand around, the brand most people want to become friends with.

Apple is very consistent in it’s behaviour towards the market. They create brilliant consumer electronics, build and dominate new categories, and make lots of money doing so. iPad 1 generated $9.7 Billion incremental revenue for Apple in about 10 months time. iPad 2, introduced 2 weeks ago, will probably do better. Meanwhile, iPad 1 goes down in price, leaving the competition battling the user experience of an aged product, forced to go down in price without even having launched their products yet – they don’t stand a chance.

Apple made me think about communities this week. Simply because they do not invest in building or supporting a community. They don’t do social. They don’t have Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter accounts – it’s not a lack of focus, it’s a statement. So I was wrong in another recent post, when I said that Apple wouldn’t buy Twitter, because they’d probably want to create their own social platform. Rubbish. They don’t do social.

Nevertheless, research after research shows that Apple is the strongest brand, the most admired company, with the largest fanbase in the history of high tech. And that fanbase is of course a community – the corporation Apple is just not investing in it.

This is very much aligned with their Do It Yourself customer support (outside of the US, where it is quite hard to find an Apple store, the website is about the only means of support). With Steve Jobs’ famous one liner: “You can’t expect the customer to know what he wants.” They don’t listen to the market, they create and direct the market. They are fundamentally not interested in their buyers, their fans. And although I am a fan of Apple’s products, and an admirer of their marketing strategy, I am sure this attitude will eventually bring Apple Inc. down. Because every successful product (strategy) will be copied, and you just can’t be brilliant all the time.

When I walked by the Apple flagship store in Palo Alto, California three hours before it started selling iPad 2 on 11 March, there was an endless line of fans waiting, filmed by television crews from all over the world, who in their turn were filmed by film crews from all over the world. Apple had provided them all with umbrella’s, customers and media the same, to keep them safe from sunburn.

1 year, 1,000 tweets, 28 blog posts later…

Welcome to my blog’s one year anniversary party! This is the 28th blogpost, which I will promote with my tweet #1000 from HootSuite, to around 470 Twitter followers, 230 LinkedIn connections, and a handful of Facebook friends (note to myself: Must to do more on FB!). Since I upped the posting frequency to at least 4 entries per month, this blog is attracting 100+ visitors a week, with a significant spike in November of last year, when it welcomed 217 visitors in 1 single day, with traffic amounting to a stunning 491 over the course of that week. Over the last year, 3,150 people landed on this page. I will order a glass of fine champaign tonight to celebrate, and drink to your health; a blog without readership is a sad thing – so keep breathing and coming back.

I started this blog in February 2010 for 3 reasons:

1. To learn about social media, and the way various social media platforms could (and maybe should) be integrated in order to drive maximum engagement. The marketing organisation within my company was talking about social media a lot without actually engaging, so I figured the only way to move things forward was to dive in myself. And it payed off – I haven’t seen a single marketing plan for 2011 without Social Media as one of the key pillars of the communications strategy. Even our recruitment team invited me to have a look at their plans, and see where social media could support their goals. People are talking about driving conversations now. The big challenge will be to integrate social media into the broader marketing communications mix in a way that makes sense to (prospective) customers and channel partners, and adds value to our operations.

2. To connect with other marketers researching the same exact questions and concepts around social marketing. Back then, most conversations where around Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, LinkedIn et cetera, so quite tactical. Over the year, strategic marketers and communications professionals started focusing on content marketing to employ social media (and any other media we have available within the marcoms mix to deliver the right message, to the right audience at the right time and through the right communications channel). This is by no means a new charter for marketing, but one that has expanded profoundly with the rise of social media.

3. To build my personal brand, and support my company’s efforts in the market place – when and only when related to marketing. The 500-hitting blog entry provided my view on a guerilla marketing activity conducted by our main competitor EMC. They have become much more aggressive in the global storage market place since, which means many people are looking for details – which brings a steady flow of readers to that particular post still. Strong, relevant posts with a sense of urgency can have a very long tail.

The great thing about a blog is that it allows you to air your personal views, and forces you to think and have an opinion about the things you care about. It will draw the attention of the interest group, vaguely referred to as ‘the community’. It’s hard to move a crowd. If your tone is too strong, you’ll push people away (or attract lunetics). If you’re too soft, you won’t entertain big crowds – people are looking for strong positions to help them build their own. Depending on your character type and community goals, a blog is a great platform to challenge ideas, people, organisations, and initiatives on a local, regional or even global level.

Blogging is exercising the freedom of speech in its purest form (maybe after standing up and speech from your own little stage in Speaker’s Corner – which has a far smaller potential audience). I’ve enjoyed the ride so far, and look forward to another year of writing to you.

Cheers!

Rant on Marketing while boarding an airplane

- “So, tell me, do we have any cool new marketing campaigns upcoming?”, a fellow European colleague asked me, while we were getting ready to board our ride from San Francisco back to Amsterdam earlier today. He is one of our best technical sales engineers.

- “What do you mean when you say ‘marketing campaign’?”, I asked in return.

- “Well, you know,” he replied, “with solid price promotions, lots of advertising, events, online banners, emails, that kind of stuff – marketing campaigns!”

- “I don’t think we’ll have those types of marketing campaigns ever again,” I said.

- He: “Are you serious? So what’s marketing doing to get new customers signed up, and develop them into loyal, frequently spending accounts – if not by running cool campaigns?”

- I: “Well for one, we’ll stop shouting at them, pushing them around, pulling them in by the hair kicking and screaming. We’ll be talking to them where they are, when they’re ready to engage, delivering the right messages for that very specific person, place, time, business challenge, and conversation. To show them we understand their world, and that we’re the ones best suited to help them solve their problems.”

- “Okay! But how will they ever know that you’re the one to talk to about their pains and itches? You’d still need a conversation starter, wouldn’t you? Something to get the engagement going, like an event, email, or telephone call? Isn’t that what marketing is?

- “No, that’s not what marketing is, that’s what marketing has been turned into by people who think customers are cash cows with short memory spans. Marketing proper represents markets, customers and prospects within the company, making sure the right products and services are created, delivered, supported, and constantly improved in order to create maximum customer value and brand equity.”

- “…”

- “You see, Marketing proper drives and advocates business focus, high quality content and engagements, two way communications, and actual listening to customers and prospects. That has little to do with fancy events, bulky billboards, and unsollicited emails, don’t you agree?”

- “Uh, yeah sure, if you say so. But I bet the sales guys would disagree. They love fancy events!”

- “By no means. They’re sales guys, so this is core to their everyday reality. They grasp the value of a good conversation. They understand that high quality engagements eventually result in extended customer life cycles, deeper investment, and greater customer loyalty. They know this approach will pay off. And apropos: The days that high value conversations where taking place at industry events, have long gone. Event marketing in the B2B segment has become a business in and of its own, one which is delivering ever lower show rates and returns on investment. It’s an old school, zero conversion marketing tactic, and smart sales guys know this. Even they stopped showing up to man our stand!”

This is where we boarded our plane, and I started writing this entry.

What do you think Marketing should aspire to?

Who’s who in The Buyer’s Journey 2.0

It just occurred to me that I had 5 conversations over the last week centered around the topic of the buyer’s journey – the journey that essentially turns a prospect into a customer. Obviously, this journey will always be an important topic in any business, but things are changing out there, and 5 conversations tells me it’s due time for a blog post. So let’s try to make sense of it all.

My 5 conversations:

• 1 with a PR strategist
• 1 with a Demand generation manager
• 1 with an IT Industry researcher
• 1 with a Community manager
• 1 with a Field Marketing Manager

The buyer’s journey takes the prospect through 4 phases: Discovery, Consideration, Decision, Advocate, Discovery and so on. The sales funnel is a buying cycle.

To guide the prospect along the way, all content the vendor lines up for him, ideally maps perfectly to the buyer’s cycle. It should be available whereever the prospect is looking for information. And whenever a prospect consumes content, there should be clear next step available – to open the door to the next phase of the journey. It’s a game – it should be fun.

To do it right, you need integrated communication strategies in owned, paid and earned media, quality content, and a strong focus on database management – to understand buyer’s behaviour.

It is not fun & games yet. Social media have thrown many things up in the air. On the buyer’s side, and therefore also on the vendor’s side. Traditional roles are shifting all around.

The IT researcher shows information consumption patterns, and tells me which information carriers I should provide in each of the phases of the buyer’s journey.

The PR strategist said PR 2.0 means that PR firms now have two main target audiences, instead of one: press and people in social space. Traditional media will no longer be able to reach and activate audiences, he said. Actually, many news items are provided by people these days. You should use that to your advantage.

The demand generation manager just wants to generate demand, is a strong believer in event marketing, and is “not really into the whole social media thing yet”.

The community manager is not close enough to the field to understand which conversations should be seeded in Russia. And he doesn’t understand a word of Russian to begin with.

The Field Marketing Manager wants the PR firm and the community manager to help him become more of a community manager himself, but lacks the know-how and the resources to set it all up, and make it tick. He does understand the research data though. To create compelling content, one needs funds – the pr strategist advised. Hmmm.

Roles are shifting, behaviours are changing – try to keep up. I like this sheet (Copyright: SiriusDecisions, via Babcock & Jenkins).