MarketingSherpa Blog

This week, MarketingSherpa is reporting live from the exhibit floor of the Internet Retailer Exhibition and Conference in Chicago. With a projected 10,000 attendees, IRCE is the world’s largest e-commerce marketing event, and we’re hosting its official Media Center, right in the middle of bustling McCormick Place.

We’ve interviewed IRCE speakers and attendees to get the pulse on e-commerce marketing in 2014. Interviewees have sat in  the hot seat to share what they’ve discovered on topics such as email, social, mobile and much more.

On the set with @DanielBurstein of @MarketingSherpa at #IRCE #IRCE2014 pic.twitter.com/z9j3PqL6Yr

— Carlos Gil (@CarlosGil83) June 10, 2014

In today’s MarketingSherpa Blog post, watch this video with Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, MECLABS, talking with Carlos Gil, Senior Manager, Digital Marketing, Save-A-Lot, on engaging with millennials on social media.

“Social media is not advertising; social media is relationship building,” Carlos said.

In his interview, Carlos stressed the importance of engaging with millennials on social media, rather than trying to sell them. According to Carlos, millennials behave differently online than other demographic groups, such as baby boomers, and marketers should adjust their efforts accordingly.

A great example of a brand doing social media right is Taco Bell, Carlos explained.

Watch his video to learn more, as well as insights on developing a personal brand and why picking the right social media platform for your own unique brand is so important.

Throughout IRCE, we’ll be posting the latest interviews from the Media Center, as well as live streaming straight from the set on MarketingSherpa.com/IRCE. You can also see alerts of the freshest content by following @MarketingSherpa on Twitter.

Want to dive deeper into e-commerce data? We recently conducted a nine-month editorially independent research study, made possible by a research grant from Magento, on the state of e-commerce marketing. With insights gathered from 4,346 marketers, download your complimentary MarketingSherpa E-commerce Benchmark Study to learn:

• What is happening to the e-commerce landscape
• What strategies successful e-commerce companies are employing
• What marketing tactics successful e-commerce marketers are leveraging
• And much more

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When I was growing up, I remember a phrase my dad would use as a delay tactic on making big ticket purchase decisions that often frustrated my mother.

“I’ll ask the boys at work,“ he would reply.

My dad’s insistence on consulting people he perceived as experts before making a purchase is telling of human behavior – customers prefer to make decisions based on information, not persuasion.

I mention this because a shift to information over persuasion is coming to social media, driven by Facebook’s new Graph Search tool.

The way Graph Search works is simple … it filters our search results by what our friends and neighbors have previously liked and shared with us.

From a business intelligence perspective, the implications of this new function could be far reaching, given Graph Search allows users to formulate their perceptions of goods and services based on reviews from people they know and trust, potentially sidestepping most marketing efforts.

Here’s an example of Graph Search in action using the surroundings of our office here in Jacksonville Beach to put this into further perspective …

With Graph Search, relevance is king

Imagine you’ve just bought a beach cruiser and you’re searching Facebook to find the best spots for fun and entertainment in Jacksonville Beach.

Now, let’s say you search for “fun places to bike in Jacksonville Beach.”

Graph Search will present options your friends or other bicycle enthusiasts in a given geographical proximity have liked and shared.

From a customer’s perspective, this makes total sense.

Would you prefer to sift through a laundry list of options presented at random, or evaluate choices your friends and other biking enthusiasts are recommending?

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When I was a kid fresh out of high school, I was a little socially awkward. I didn’t exactly understand the various types of social gatherings to which I was invited to, and I consequentially always showed up dressed incorrectly, saying the wrong things and bearing the wrong gifts. We all know the guy who shows up to the baby shower with a bottle of tequila, right?

Unfortunately, a similar situation exists in marketing circles when advertisers crash the proverbial wedding of social media platforms wearing board shorts and flip flops. That metaphor may be a little dense, so follow me…

For all of the analysis currently existing about how to best leverage social networks for marketing success, we actually understand comparatively little about how the various platforms work. Frequently, despite best efforts to the contrary, marketers end up looking like the odd man out simply by taking the wrong platform-specific tones with their campaigns.

Companies simply can’t expect to behave the same at different social functions and receive an overwhelmingly good response. Since we’re on the analogy train today, I’ll try to keep the theme going.

Facebook is a pub crawl

People spend most of their Facebook time interacting with their “friends.” In truth, most of the “friends” with whom we interact with on Facebook are merely acquaintances.

Nevertheless, the environment yields similarities to the dynamics of a pub crawl. Surrounded by acquaintances and, yes, a few old friends, we dive into topics of various levels of seriousness ranging from the patently absurd, to the politically charged before wandering aimlessly from topic to topic for a spell.

We do so without expecting to be inundated with marketing messaging, much the same as we would expect to not be rudely interrupted by an insurance salesman while we were in the middle of telling our best frat house story from college at the local bar.

In order to market effectively on Facebook, you first have to win a seat at the table, or be interesting enough to be the topic of our slightly buzzed conversation.

Twitter is a speed date

You’ve got 140 characters to impress me, so you’d better make it work for you.

I might spend a few extra minutes after the last round of speed dating with a particularly interesting person (company, product, etc.), but if I do, it will be because you have done or said something particularly compelling in your allotted time slot.  Equally as fun as interviewing potential dates, I can wander sneakily around the room to see what other people are saying about me …

“That guy has impeccable taste in clothing,” says one. “He’s stunningly good looking,” says another.

Brands can do the same with Twitter, getting a better idea of how the market is responding to their product offerings. In order to market on Twitter, you have to learn how to answer the question of what you’re into right now, and answer it in a compelling enough fashion for me to care when you’re done talking.

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According to the 2012 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, CMOs see social media and mobile as the developments that will have the biggest impact on email marketing in the near future …

Q. What new developments will most affect your email marketing program in the next 12 months? Select up to five developments.

Click to enlarge

So here’s the challenge to you, email marketers of the world. Not only must you integrate social media into your email marketing, you must integrate a rapidly changing social media environment.

Just when you thought you could rest after successfully integrating Twitter and Facebook, for example, along comes Pinterest.

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Let’s face it: Marketing used to be easier, especially for entrepreneurs running small, localized businesses. You once needed nothing more than a Yellow Pages ad to secure a steady stream of business as, let’s say, a local tire shop.

Then came the Internet, and it was still just a matter of having a webpage with your address and contact information. A minor inconvenience, but worth it for those businesses whose customer segments dictated taking extraordinary measures to reach the most tech-savvy people.

Next came Web 2.0, and suddenly it wasn’t enough to just have an online presence anymore. The Web was becoming social. Also, as the bell curve of innovation adoption for the Internet shifted toward mainstream acceptance, it became necessary to engage a wider range of age groups in digital format.

Can potential customers easily research your company and product?

Generation Y has proven itself to be savvy beyond belief in terms of product research, and discriminating to a fault against those brands that don’t make themselves available for online investigation.

A recent study by Lim Ying San and his colleagues from the Multimedia University in Malaysia indicates that a positive significant relationship exists between access and customers’ perceived online retail service quality. Online consumers often want to access a variety of informative sources to obtain up-to-date and useful information for making informed purchasing decisions.

Those sources may include social media, Google and other search engines, and online shopping resources, such as Amazon, as means of price comparison.

In other words, the bare minimum for online marketing and social media for small businesses has changed.

You have no choice

Increasingly, if you can’t be found on the first two pages of a Google search, you don’t exist. If young consumers cannot easily interact with your brand on Facebook, Twitter and, for some companies, even Pinterest, you are worse than out of sight. You are out of mind.

In my house, as I suspect is the case in many Generation Y abodes, we use phone books to hold up the broken coffee table where the leg used to be. Even if I wanted to look at the Yellow Pages, it would only result in spilled coffee. If you want to talk to me about your brand, you need to do the following:

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