Next Steps

The Last Wave?

November 5, 2009 @ 12:40pm

Updated — November 16, 2009 @ 3:25pm

by Austin Edgington

Every twenty five years or so, a really big communication wave comes along that sweeps innovation and change into our lives. The first one I remember occurred when network television replaced radio as a focus for info-tainment and created modern advertising; so nicely portrayed by the butt puffing men of Mad Man. Yes, I’m old enough to remember when a ‘Winston tasted good like a cigarette should,’ and other tobacco pedaling jingles. In the 80’s, cable TV launched and undermined the network’s dominance by decimating advertising revenues with lower costs and wider choice of programs, characterized by re-runs, ESPN, and faux news show.

Then Web 2.0 crashed on our shores a few years ago, washing in social media and revolutionary web platforms like Facebook and Hulu.com. What’s interesting about this shift is the audience social media created. Techies, artists, writers, housewives, students, innovative business leaders, anyone with an opinion and others looking for connections beyond their daily toil flocked to Vox, Facebook, Twitter, Plaxo, Linked In, and more. They formed communities, groups, relationships, and trust arising from dialogue among one another in ways not imaginable by marketers in the past. It’s weird, it’s wonderful and it’s happening now.

The reality is that this new media, a term I use to describe the aggregate of social media and new web offerings, has disrupted marketing. For example, blogging news sites like the Huffington Post changed the way public relations is conducted. Social utilities like Facebook allow businesses to easily run ads and changes the way ad agencies can reach target audiences, while social media platforms like Vox, where people from tight, trusted neighborhoods converse about everything from their parents divorce to whether to purchase a VW or a BMW…changed web marketing as we knew it.

The traditional paradigm of engaging customers based on creating awareness, to create interest, which leads to a desire that prompts a consumer to purchase has been replaced by a new model that has more steps, but, paradoxically is more immediate and happens virtually 24/7.

In the new media model consumers take different steps purchasing. We call it the “Five R’s”;

Referral – A potential customer can easily be referred to your product or service by a friend or neighbor from their social network, and often the customer has never met the friend or even know their real name.
Research – Based on their online buddy’s referral (or not), they can research your brand on Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Conversely, you must now research where they are, what sites they travel, and what they have to say about your brand to be effective in reaching them.
Relationship – In doing so they may develop relationships with other brand users and further discuss brand attributes. They are developing a now have a relationship with your brand and are arriving at the purchase decision.
Reliability – Now the ball is in your court, and you must easily, seamlessly capture the purchase, facilitate the delivery, and follow up with customer service. This is more and more becoming what is known as the annoying ‘pile-on’ method, which often erodes your credibility. Comcast will drive you nuts with this approach after a botched service implementation.
Responsiveness – Being responsive to your customers needs in a reliable manner is most important. Drop the ball on this and immediately negative responses will begin to emerge on the very sites you are searching for customers. Two great examples of doing this right are Zappos and Amazon.

With the current wave washing away the way marketing has been conducted in the past, which is often last month in new media time, the question often posed by clients is: What’s a marketer to do? The answer is innovate. As the late great Hunter S. Thompson once quipped, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” Marketers need to look the weirdness of social media in the eye and turn social media pro. They need to think like those they wish to engage and go where they are; and do so with the credibility and authenticity the defines the trust that hinges the culture of the new media together. If you’re a CEO you will get much more mileage out your blog or tweets if you pen them yourself, even if you are not a witty communicator like Tony Hsieh of Zappos. The medium is the message, and authenticity rules the message.

The way to ride this wave is to embrace change, innovate, and partner with those who are riding it with knowledge of the waters they navigate and an eye on the future. After all, in new media time, it will soon be the last wave.

Comments

View & Post Comments

Yahoo hosting, no htaccess, and permalinks

January 21, 2009 @ 3:08pm

by Rob Sanchez

So everyone wants clean permalinks these days; those search engine friendly URLs are everywhere (even on our own site!), and made ubiquitous by Wordpress and other CMSes. The usual technique is to use Apache’s mod_rewrite module and an htaccess file to re-write the URLs (see here). But what if you can’t use an htaccess file? Well, I found out recently that Yahoo Small Business hosting does not allow htaccess files, at all, and I had to find a solution for that.

The solution for me? PATH_INFO, an environment variable in Apache, which is basically extra “information” at the end of a file path/URL. So if you have a URL like “www.xyz.com/index.php/permalink/” the PATH_INFO would be “/permalink/”. In PHP, it’s available in the $_SERVER global:

<?php $path_info = explode('/', $_SERVER['PATH_INFO']); // start parsing $path_info however you see fit ?>

Now, we already had a custom engine for using handling the mod_rewrite output, and I was able to use that parsed URL data and put it into our system. And have some nice-looking permalinks. There was a small compromise in having that extra “/index.php” in the URL, but I think it is still worth doing and better than no clean permalinks at all.