Just a quick note to highlight an excellent post on the ReadWriteWeb, entitled Why Generation Y Is Going To Change The Web, including a particularly good riff on marketing:
Marketing Has To Change: Because Gen Y is media savvy and conscious of being marketed to, brands that succeed in the future will be those that open a dialog with their customers, admit their mistakes, and essentially become more transparent (save one notable exception, apparently). Companies’ web sites that want to attract GenY’ers will become more like today’s Web 2.0 sites. Social networking will be just a feature. Blogs will be standard ways for companies to reach their customers. Customer service won’t just be a phone call away, it will be available via non-traditional means, too. Today, savvy companies might be using Twitter, but that could change at any time if Gen Y moves on. Companies will have to keep up with Gen Y and not get too comfortable using any one format. (Oh, and you can stop calling everything “viral” – that’s lame.)
1 response so far ↓
1 Dave Kellogg // Jun 9, 2008 at 2:35 pm
DK: here was an email I rec’d on this post that I thought worth sharing:
Hey Dave–
EXACTLY! Having spent 3 years in the bruising world of customer references – and seeing what worked and what did not – I reached a very similar conclusion.
Vendors must expose a space somewhere for customers to ‘discuss amongst themselves’ and to provide real dialog over vendor performance and direction. Customer must feel like they are getting the real deal and not some pre-fabricated marketing fluff, that goes down like cotton candy without satisfying the hunger for proof.
And, having completed a consulting project at [big companies you've heard of], the space cannot be set up trivially, otherwise it will be as organized and easy to navigate as a bazaar.
What’s the good of searching for a discussion, if you can only hear noise?
Anyway, here is my short list of what worked (top), what kinda worked (middle), and what did not (bottom)
- One-to-one phone calls – unbeatable, but the most expensive to produce
- One-to-many conf calls – where an agenda of topics was established before-hand
- Open customer led webinars – where critical questions were asked (what would you have done differently? Where would you have liked things to be different?)
- Analyst webinars – this was very hit-or-miss, and depended on the name brand of the analyst, and what they said
- Unqualified one-to-many conf calls – where no agenda was established, and the customer may be too ripe in the buying cycle
- Controlled ‘one-way’ webinars – where a customer gives his presentation, and no questions are permitted.
…and then way at the bottom…
- case studies – what do these things provide?? Such a time-suck, and NO ONE takes them at face value
- press releases – when given to a customer by an account manager, bc they don’t know what else to give
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