Social Marketing is changing the rules: from technology to people

It is true that there are a series of words that have been introduced into our language during the last year; words such as prosumer, facebook, web 2.0, blogger, twitter or skype are current words that we usually use or work with. The problem is that we tend to link these words with technologies, blog platforms, nanoblogs, social networks; when we might relate them to people. We are facing a period in which we are changing attitudes, rules and behaviors where technologies can help, but only as a mean not as a goal.

These concepts are extremely important when we are talking about marketing especially when we try to the difference between e-Marketing and Social Marketing. The new marketing tool known as e-Marketing refers to the marketing strategies applied through Internet implying a relationship between a person and a specific technology. Traditional customer service processes, electronic commerce, on-line product catalogs, on-line advertisements, etc. they are all thought as managing an interaction between technology and user, but we no longer think about people sharing information. 

Social Marketing cares about the relationship between people. Technology is only a mean; currently most of brands are interested in conversations, they want to establish relationships between them and their customers to listen to them, to gather information, to detect trends, in other words, to find out what they want and how they want it. We are all surfing on Internet; giving our opinion in Forums, Chats or Blogs, recommending the products we tried or we plan to purchase and, creating at least an environment where we feel comfortable to give our expert opinion in the subjects we master. So technology, in the end, it doesn’t matter.

From now on, marketing departments might understand this change. They are not here to design and develop new environments or technology to serve the company; companies are here to encourage and drive relationships, to listen, talk and manage interactions between people.

Rules are changing and that causes a dramatic change in our life, because people are using the Internet to establish relationships. It can be drawn from the last elections in which politicians were trying to establish direct relationships with their voters to gain more votes or commitment. It is impossible to be connected with 1,000,000 at the same time. That enhances the value of people and team commitment.

Related to the same topic, we can talk about small and medium companies that are finding a new opportunity to gather information, listen to consumers and to ask them questions. It is important because consumers are on the Internet to compare opinions, to share knowledge and reduce their uncertainty and risk when purchasing products.

As Francis Pisani highlighted in his last book, “La Alquimia de las Multitudes (Spanish version)”. After the 2001 Boom of the Internet, users have continued using the Internet, and so people’s revolution came after the bourgeois revolution. Small and medium companies are not scared about consumer’s opinion because there’s no technology cost for the use of social media, so they can take advantage of this insignificant cost to compete against big companies.

Finally, there are some elements that can justify these structural changes that are allowing us to say that this sector is going to grow faster than other sectors. New business models are appearing to take advantage of these new tools and the ways to relate to people are evolving to networks and social media, so everything is pointing at the same direction: people and technology as a mean.

P.D: It has no connection to the topic I was treating but I want to show you these two ads, because I really liked them. They are about Blackberry and Apple. 

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVO8o_PKvVg

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ7iGjAC03I