The barrier is sometimes just a road. Due to roads that are not planned according to their needs, our disabled friends are pushed outside the daily life. Are you aware?


The barrier is sometimes just a toilet. Due to the lack of toilets that are specifically designated for their needs, our disabled friends run into many frustrating moments during the course of their day. Are you aware?

The barrier is sometimes just a drain. Due to the lack of walking areas specifically designated for them, our disabled friends are pushed outside the social life. Are you aware?

Agency: McCann Erickson Istanbul, Turkey
Creative Director: Ugur Çakır
Associate Creative Director: Oktar Akın
Art Director: Fırat Yıldız
Copywriter: Deniz Tan
Photography: Gökçe Erenmemişoğlu
Retouch: Gökçe Erenmemişoğlu, Fırat Yıldız

Jaago Re was one of the very successful social campaigns by the largest tea manufacturer in India (Tata Tea) to awaken people to cast their vote. The Jaago Re website witnessed nearly 2.8 Million visitors and one-fourth of them actually voted finally.

They have come a long way now and started their new campaign against corruption.

Watch the TVC here:

http://vimeo.com/6266009

Corruption is a prevalent problem in our society and this campaign can really spark a fire. But I feel a little doubt about this campaign for following reasons compared to the voting campaign

1) The time was ripe to release that campaign as it was election time and it is not an ongoing phenomenon like Corruption so a good or bad timing can not be decided.

2) Secondly and more importantly the greater onus lies on “Jo Khilata hai”(The Bribe giver) according to this campaign.Voting is a duty which some people can choose not to perform. But people willingly giving bribes can be rarely found except those who are indulged in wrong-doing.

3) The campaign is focusing to awaken people not to give bribes. But an important thing to note here is that people compelled to give bribes have no liberty to decide on this issue except complaining in vigilance and bear the official hassles and those people who give bribes for their wrong deeds, I have serious doubts if such social campaigns can affect their conscious.

Besides the TV commercial, many BTL activities will also be carried out for this campaign like website and Mobile Touch points. All will appeal not to bribe. But bribing is not an option for many and does impact direct benefits unlike voting.

Surely if Tata Tea takes up the responsibility through its Jaago Re website to register complaints against officials indulged in bribing and getting these complaints resolved, a positive change can be expected.

But no doubt this campaign will bring lot of ‘publicity’ to Tata Tea and a ray of hope to common man.

Just released is the ‘2009 Marketing Industry Trends Report‘ by Equation Research, who says it is “unique in that we opened up survey development to the Marketing Community — and did so by leveraging a Web 2.0 strategy of crowdsourcing the survey questions directly from marketers.”

The report highlights some trends in social media that are not only important for adopters to understand, but which also allow us to showcase the capabilities of Social-smart as a solution to marketers looking for answers. This five part blog post series looks at the details of the Social-smart solution in relation to the areas highlighted in the report.

Just released is the ‘2009 Marketing Industry Trends Report‘ by Equation Research, who says it is “unique in that we opened up survey development to the Marketing Community—and did so by leveraging a Web 2.0 strategy ofcrowdsourcing the survey questions directly from marketers”.

The report highlights some trends in social media that are not only important for adopters to understand, but which also allow us to showcase the capabilities of Social-smart as a solution to marketers looking for answers. This five part blog post series looks at the details of the Social-smart solution in relation to the areas highlighted in the report.

The Marketing Trends Survey shows that Facebook, Twitter, online video and blogs are the four most popular Social Media tools.

2009 Marketing Industry Trends - Equation Research

At the recent BlogWell – San Francisco Case Study Presentation Dell’s Digital Media Manager, Lionel Menchaca, gave some important insights into the importance of using the tools that your customers are using. He related how in the early days they made the mistake of hosting their own content, on their own servers. Company IT Departments tend to argue that you have more control over things like ‘quality’ when content is distributed from company servers.  But Dell soon found that quality is not the point – it is accessibility and shareability that matters.

“The most important consideration is to use the same tools consumers use – you are enabling your customers to share and embed your content – but its also about reaching out to people who are using those tools … nurturing those communities, and when you use their videos etc, it engenders a sense of loyalty – it allows you to elevate them in the work that they are already doing.“

Dell uses YouTube and Flickr precisely because their community is using them. For smaller companies it also makes sense from a practical and financial point of view, too. You can end up paying for a lot of bandwidth if you have customers downloading a lot of video from your servers – and why re-invent the wheel when there are perfectly good free tools out there that your customers are already using? The key for businesses is to know which channels their customers are using, and to be able to efficiently manage all those channels in one operation.  At Dell, blogs, forums, wikis and media galleries were all separate, but, this year, they have been merged into one operation on the same platform. Content from other areas of the business, like press releases for example are all coordinated through the Communications Dept – where Lionel works. This is precisely the kind of operation that Social-smart was designed to facilitate — multiple managers/moderators needing to access the campaign assets collaboratively. All their campaign social network channels, messaging, and analytics can be easily accessed by the campaign’s teammembers for efficiently monitoring, managing, and measuring the company’s social engagements with one login. Social-smart will help companies customize the dashboard for their individual needs and goals.

The Marketing Trends Survey clearly shows that

“None of these channels are being used in isolation – there are on average 5 to 7 other Social Media tools being either actively used or dabbled with by Marketers at the same time – there is substantial experimentation going on among Marketers who use Social Media … the feeling is that as ‘knowledge’ is one of the main barriers (see part 1 of this series), a good portion of this experimentation is probably undirected. For these companies, building Social Media strategy will be more about harnessing and coordinating disparate efforts than beginning from a clean slate“.

Whether you are trying to coordinate your disparate efforts or just planning to begin, the combination of Social Media Campaign Checklist and the Social-smart dashboard is exactly what you need to efficiently plan, monitor, manage and measure your own social media campaign. See our demo video and check out the dashboard’s capabilities for yourself?

social campaign in East Java, Indonesia

Different companies (and agencies) are at different stages of getting a grip on how to effectively implement social media marketing campaigns. It is a new phenomenon to most marketers, and with new technologies coming online almost weekly, it’s a moving target. Although the Social-smart dashboard was designed to integrate a campaign’s search strategy, social media (social networks), and messaging and email strategies, together — it was clear that we needed to provide more than just a tool. We also needed to offer a roadmap of best-practices to help clients get to market quickly. That is why we provide a Social Media Marketing Campaign Checklist that clients can use to plan a customized campaign solution with.

Developed over several months, and combining many years of marketing experience, the Social Media Strategy Checklist is very much part of the value proposition of the Social-smart solution, and it comes in two parts:

The free Campaign Checklist is designed to let clients review the basic preparations for launching a social media marketing campaign, and see the professional Social-smart features they can use to monitor, manage, and measure the campaign components – I will detail this more below. Social-smart subscribers also get access to a more comprehensive online Wiki checklist — with regularly updated social media campaign best-practices information, industry resources, and valuable dashboard tips and tutorials. This is a great way to stay up-to-date with the new dashboard features that are added as Social-smart continually improves to respond to new marketing needs. It’s also a great way for new team members to get up to speed with the dashboard.

The FREE Campaign Checklist is available as a PDF download, and is split into the following sections:

Goals & Objectives
The first stage in any social media campaign is to define the business goals and objectives. This includes defining your Return on Investment (ROI) targets, a program plan and, of course, a budget. Without these being clearly laid out from the beginning you will end up expending a lot of time and effort without any clear direction or aim – and with no way to measure whether that effort is worth the time or money being expended on it. Depending on the set-up of the company, and/or the set-up and relationship of the Agency/Client Company, there may be several different people and/or departments involved in the setting of these goals. Which takes us to -

Campaign Management
It is important that all parties involved in the campaign understand their respective roles and responsibilities. Those roles need to be defined, social media experts and resources identified, and the team set up, whether that be an in-house company team or a combination of company and agency personnel. One of the key benefits of the Social-smart dashboard is ability for multiple moderators to login to the same dashboard, for instant access the campaign’s social networks, conversation, and analytics.

Search Strategy
A big part of any online strategy is bound up in SEO keywords, especially when it comes to monitoring the ‘buzz’. It also plays a big part in people finding your content in the first place. ‘Sharing’ plays a large role as well, but it is not the whole story. Therefore, defining your keyword and linking strategy early-on will increase the effectiveness of your campaign with more web traffic and social participation.

Social Media Strategy
THE most important first step of any social media strategy is to define your customer profile. what David Meerman Scott, in his book ‘World Wide Rave,’ calls the ‘buyer persona’ -

“By truly understanding the market problems that your products or services solve for your buyer personas, you transform your marketing from mere product-specific, egocentric gobbledygook that only you understand and care about into valuable information people are eager to consume and that they use to make the choice to do business with your organization.”

In order to make that information ‘valuable’ you should anchor the campaign with a creative theme (supporting the brand image or product positioning); define a social policy that states what you are doing and want to achieve (to keep the team authentic, and focused on results); define the campaign’s social media channels (the media mix); and define engaging content that the target audience will want to interact with (and share, and subscribe to).

Messaging and Email Strategy
You then have to define how you will respond to customers when they interact with you. Are there specific brand, product or legal aspects you want to include in your messaging, for example? Are there ‘influencer’ resources you want to share in your responses, like a link to an industry blogger or review site for example? Have you other resources to offer – newsletters, promotions, etc that can be targeted to particular customers whose interests you have tagged in your customer database? The follow-up, or re-marketing, is an essential extension of the social engagement funnel — after you use Social-smart for automating list-generation, customer acquisition, and eCommerce conversions.

Business ROI
The one thing everyone wants to know how to quantify! ROI is totally related to the goals and objectives you have set for the campaign. It is completely quantifiable as long as you know which parameters to measure. It is therefore important to benchmark your results at each stage of the engagement, from search results, to web traffic, and community engagement. Be deliberate: regularly track social metrics, customer opinion and sentiment, conversions and, of course, your goals. Web analytics tools and social network insights are integrated in the dashboard to make campaign measurement, and results, a seamless process.

The Wiki Checklist that subscribers get access to is a more comprehensive “living document” from the developers of Social-smart, and with insights  crowd-sourced from our clients. The free Campaign Checklist helps organize the basic details for planning and streamlining a successful campaign — especially helpful for clients new to social media marketing. We hope you find it useful and would welcome any feedback you care to offer.

niezły pomysł na kampanię społeczną
internauta może sprawdzić z jakimi konsekwencjami wiąże się zażywanie narkotyków

http://www.xperiment.ca/#

It was chosen ‘Idea of the Week’ by AdAge.

Barcelona’s statue of Christopher Columbus pointing his finger west toward America is an iconic landmark in Spain. So when reports and images appeared showing that the statue’s index finger had gone missing, there was an enormous amount of buzz across the web. The brand behind the hoax was Samsung, which wanted to raise awareness about its new touch-screen phone, Omnia, and cut through the dominating presence of Apple and its iPhone. Samsung’s strategy aimed to appeal to tech-savvy 25- to 35-year-olds and show them that the phone could make their lives easier. An elaborate series of clues and animated fingers featured on eBay and Wikipedia eventually led people to Touch City, a virtual city of finger personalities, with Columbus’s finger sitting on an animated plinth at the center. There people could find out more about the Omnia’s capabilities.

h/t to Creative Minority Report.

Info from YouTube –

New Moment New Ideas Company TV commercial for the Government of the Republic of Macedonia, Ministry of Education and Science. Social campaign (series of commercials) aimed at promoting education.

Headline of commercial: Religion is knowledge, too. Bringing religion back to school. Headline of campaign: Knowledge is power.

Social-smart supports social marketing campaigns with professional creative development, too – from copywriting and video production; to engaging interactive design for microsites, apps, and search ads.

See this demo real on YouTube:

There has been so much discussion about social monitoring. And there are so may companies doing it already (Nielsen Buzzmetrics, Visible Technologies, ComScore, Networked Insights, ScoutLabs, Radian6, KISSmetrics, Trackur, Twitter, WhosTalking, Google Analytics/Alerts/Search, Quantcast, and others) that you have to wonder how any one of them is sustainable.

With all the noise about monitoring, it’s easy to forget the reason for monitoring in the first place. To identify and engage the right conversations.

While the Social-smart dashboard already has Google Alerts (Free!) built in to monitor keyword buzz from online News, Blogs, and Videos — it has been developed to primarily focus on the engagement side. Once users identify where the conversation is, they can immediately post comments into the conversation. The dashboard’s message editor makes it easy to compose messaging with pre-approved ‘fragments.’ Users can include email addresses and links to a landing page to build participation, and create lead-generation organically.

Cunoasterea este o forma de putere. Acesta este titlul unei campanii sociale  ce promoveaza educatia in scolile din Republica Macedonia. “Lupta” pentru pastrarea religiei in scoli ca o alta forma de educatie a celor mici, nu numai ca a parcurs drumul mediatic in toate formele sale, ci s-a prezervat si in cateva campanii cu tenta sociala memorabile. Cand eram mica nu stiam chiar asa de multe cum stiu copiii din ziua de azi, dar parca atunci nu aveam asa o copilarie artificiala de care altii se “bucura” acum. Religia este o forma de cunoastere si ar trebui pastrata in continuare in programa scolara.

When it comes to social media advertisement, there is a fine line between success and failure. It´s all about having enough gun powder to kick start a viral campaign through all your social media networks, AND rely on your friends, colleagues and contacts to do exactly the same.

Apparently there is a 48 hour window for you to create success. A 48 hour audition to prove that your campaign will pass your network, your friends network and finally, if it is a success, viral across network after network after network.

Had a very exciting social media meeting today. The way they presented the process of planning, preparing and launching a social media campaign was really brilliant. I now truly value my networks, but wished they were 10 times the size

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• 25 Steps to Choosing a Social Media Consultant and Educator (kylelacy.com)

1. Conduct an initial landscape analysis of your professional and company reputations online: Take a 12+ month look back into online sources such as blogs, social  networks,  forums  and  chatrooms  to  benchmark  and obtain a clear understanding of what has been said historically about you and your company.

2. Monitor your digital reputation regularly and embrace SEO: Search  engine  results,  blogs  and  other  forums  can  help determine what exists  in  the public view since competitors, customers,  allies  and  the  media  are  making  split  second judgments about your and your company’s reputations. Make online  monitoring  and  search  engine  optimisation  (SEO) a  critical  element  of  your  ongoing  reputation management process.

3. Engage in the online community: Identify one or more passionate employees who can participate in the social networking arena on your company’s behalf.

4. Build reputation shield early on: Plant the seeds of genuine positive content or stories in multiple destinations across the web as soon as possible to create an enduring online reputation. Realise that journalists may be getting  their  reputational  intelligence  from  the  internet,  too. If a company delays  its efforts until a crisis unfolds or other negative news appears on the horizon, its reputation will not be  strong enough  to  repel  the flood waters  that can engulf and wash away years of strong performance.

5. Know when to respond online: Create a plan for incidents that takes into account all categories of issues: those requiring an immediate response, a wait-and-see approach and no response at all.

6. Get inline using all your media assets: traditional and online: Recognise  that  reputational  power  lies  in  using  all  available communications channels. Also,  the growing number of new online media sites and new technologies are only going to increasingly wreak havoc in the corporate world. The core of any successful public relations programme will be a combination of online and offline (“inline”), not one or the other.

7. Identify reputation threats early on. Plan for the worst-case scenario: Rule out any surprises and always be on your guard. Many companies now have, or need to consider building, a ready-to-launch  “dark  site”  that  can  be  activated  if  a worst-case scenario suddenly occurs. Remember, whoever  talks first  is in a better position to set the tone.

8. Endlessly listen to your employees: Listen and respond to employees before they potentially attack you  online,  intentionally  or  unintentionally.  Listening means more than fielding a survey or putting a suggestion box in the lunchroom. It means reviewing employee satisfaction surveys and exit interviews, and monitoring your reputation daily using key words  that can be searched on sites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Turn your employees into advocates!

9. Multiply your bad news online by 100: Realise that once bad news reaches the corner office, it may sound like a whisper but it’s already a shout. You can take this news and multiply it hundredfold.

10. Don’t neglect industry discussion: Boards and blogs: Enlist  your  senior management  and  other members  of  your workforce  in  digital  boot  camp.  Ignoring  influential  bloggers and complaining customers causes reputational harm. Reach out  to  bloggers  and  posters with  solutions  to  problems with your products/ services.

11. Review your website as if you were a prospective customer or competitor: Road  test  the  user  experience  of  your  company  website  in terms of functionality, interactivity and transparency.

12. Customerise the online reputation of your products and services: Ask  for  and  respond  to  customer  feedback,  and  include customers in new product development. Boost your company’s credibility  by  including  on  your  website  negative  customer comments (excluding those that may be slanderous or similarly inappropriate) as well as positive comments. Use  technology to build consumer trust.

13. Accept your employee nation: Understand  that  employees  will  go  online  to  criticise  and praise your company—so prepare,  review and communicate your  corporate  employee  blogging  and  social media  guidelines. Online conversation will only increase in the years ahead as online conversation continues to heat up.

14. Be on the lookout for errant emails: Use  technology  to audit outbound email content and monitor text in webmail and other HTTP traffic. Also use technology to detect intellectual property that should remain within corporate firewalls. Regular employee training in electronic message liability and propriety must be enforced at all levels.

15. Find your online advocates. Prime the pump for badvocates: Create an ongoing dialogue with your supporters, fans and enthusiasts before problems spread via word-of-mouth or on the web. These brand champions are a company’s best defence against  badvocates,  whose  words  and  actions  detract  from
brands or products.

Here are five reasons why social media is relevant to B2B now more than ever.

1. Search Is Becoming More Relevant – The user generated content created on social media platforms means that the Internet is becoming flooded with data everyday. With this continued influx of data comes the need for businesses to sort and find the most relevant information to them. Think about how often your employees use search engines for researching every day. Think about the most recent searches you have done. You probably remember seeing results for  a YouTube video, message board thread, or a blog. This is not a trend that will go away. Search will get much more social. If your business continues to print sales collateral and brochures and your only data online is a five page company Web site then you will we be lost in the mountain of search data and become irrelevant.

2. Social Media Helps Sales Staff Merchandise Information To Prospects – A battle that I have long witnessed in the B2B world is ensuring that communication with sales staff and the marketing team are open. Taking that a step further, many marketers have a difficult time providing their sales staff with materials that the sales team can leverage to close a sale. A big part of this problem has always been relevancy.  The tactic in the past has been to get a case study or feature article published in an important trade publication and then provide the sales team with reprints to discuss and leave behind with potential customers. This is a good thing to do, but it leaves a lot holes unfilled: How does the sales staff stay current on industry trends? How do they get customized information that is relevant to their customers?

Social media can begin to fill in these gaps.  An organization should set up a Google Reader account for each sale team member and include industry news, as well as a shared feed where the marketing team can instantly share new articles with the sales team.

3. Social Data Enables Better Customer Dialogue – The long standing belief by those in the B2B world is that relationships are paramount to the success of the organization. Social media is all about developing relationships and sharing information. So shouldn’t B2B organizations and social media be aligned with each other? Part of having and building good relationships is understanding what is going on in your customers’ industry, with its suppliers and even locally within its community.  I talked about the industry news part in my second point in this post, but what about the local community aspect?

Let’s say you are flying into Seattle for a customer meeting and it has been awhile since you have been in town. You need to know what is going on there and you need to know it fast. I have two free social media related suggestions for you. The first is to do a quick blog search for local blogs that discuss Seattle related events and news. I find that local blogs get to the meat of the issues in a more direct way than traditional media. Additionally you can sign up for a service like Near.ly which will e-mail you hyperlocal news links based on your Twitter location. This will let you zero in on information from where your customer lives and works.

4. The “My Customers Aren’t On Social Networks” Excuse Is Quickly Fading – This is probably the biggest argument against social media in B2B organizations. They simply say, my customers aren’t online, and for some companies this is true. I contend that more B2B customers are online than most companies are willing to believe. I know that I have seen this happen first-hand with B2B clients that start in social media only to realize many more of their customers are there then they originally thought. I would also contend that if your customers aren’t there now, they will be soon. And this is the perfect time to take hold of the online market for your industry. The cost of entry is relatively low and I would suggest establishing your web presence. Also begin to monitor social media with a tool like Radiance 6 to help prepare you for your customer’s shifting online behaviors.

5.  Without Adoption Of Social Media You will Lose The Talent War – Most of the business owners I have worked with declare that great talent is the key to their success. I am here to tell you that unless you start to evolve your views on social media the next generation of worker will not want to work for you. I realize that the economy is bad right now and it is currently easier to find good talent, however great talent is also a competitive market. The future generation, whether you like it or not, does not want to work some place where they have to print e-mails for you to review or can’t access Facebook or YouTube. These social tools are a part of how they research and facilitate relationships. The companies that adapt and grow with the changing online landscape will win the talent war.

I am sure that my five points have sparked some thought and disagreement with you. If so please take a second and provide your thoughts in the comments and I will make sure I respond to each of you.

What is Join-the-Conversation as it relates to Social Media Marketing?

First of all, this is not a new concept, in October, 2007, Joseph Jaffe published the book “Join the Conversation” and National Public Radio has been using the “Join the Conversation” phrase for quite a while.

Even though some conversations happen outside online social networks (they really do!), in this post we will stay inside.

What is a Conversation from the perspective of Social Media Marketing?

There are two types of conversations; the consumer-to-consumer and the marketer-to-consumer conversations. Online conversations generally means that consumers and marketers are talking in social networks or online forums. Conversations range from the casual to the important matters of the day.

Why is a Conversation good for a social media marketer?

It is a good thing when consumers talk to consumers about a marketer’s products and services. Consumer-to-consumer conversations means engaged consumers means more insight to the marketer; what’s the buzz, what are future trends? Conversations means pointing out the high-influencers that can be turned into brand advocates and even part of a business’ product development teams.

Marketer to consumer: a marketer needs to join a conversation when conversations run afoul of community guide lines or when conversations needs to be “un-stuck,” or in cases where there is no conversation and the marketer needs to start up conversations, or when marketers wants to move the conversations towards a specific goal. Moreover, marketers need to join conversations when they turn negative about the marketer’s products.

Once a conversation turns negative, a marketer must engage consumers head on. Not engaging means that consumers, even positively inclined consumers, lose trust in the business’ credibility and the outcome is lower sales. As a marketer, you take positive action on a negative event like Johnson & Johnson reaction to the Tylenol poisoning (Sep 1982) or you engage in heated conversations like GM’s blog responses to Tom Friedman’s attack on GM in NY times (June 2006). On a case by case basis, a marketer must determine the course of action where no action is a no op.

For more info about Join-the-Conversation Social Media Marketing campaigns, we have a 30 min Social-smart Social Media Marketing demo every Tuesday and Thursday at 12:30p EDT. Reserve a seat by going to Social-smart Social Media Marketing Demo.

Don’t forget to add comments to this posting. I am very interested in what you have to say.

“Such initiatives are important because even the smallest action goes a long way in contributing to the change that we want to see in society,” said Nandita Das in support of the All India Peoples Manifesto campaign.

More on: Nandita Das supports People’s Manifesto campaign

Here’s a great list of easy ways to syndicate your Twitter feed that I ran across on Einfo blog.  Originally, the information was obtained from Profileomat.com – a helpful profile aggregator.

1. Facebook – The Twitter Facebook App (good tutorial) will pull in your status updates from Twitter.
2. FriendFeed – Another social network where you can import your Twitter feed.
3. LinkedIn – This professionally skewed networking site now provides the ability to incorporate your Twitter feed right into your profile. Just note that you have to list your Twitter URL as one of your “Websites” in order to use the “Blog Link” application.
4. MyBlogLog – This social networking site allows you to managed your online profiles, including Twitter. Once you add your Twitter information, it will pull your feed onto your profile page. The links within the posts are dofollows as well as the link to your Twitter page.
5. Plaxo – This site also allows you to pull in your Twitter feed.
6. Tumblr – A hosted blogging solution will pull in your Twitter feed as a daily aggregated post. The blog will provide dofollow links within the Twitter posts.
7. Yahoo!360 - The profile page on Yahoo!360 allows you to add RSS feeds to your profile page. No link love here. All of the links redirect, but you still have an opportunity to share your Tweets with your friends on this network.

Also do not forget to submit your Twitter feed to RSS directories as well. Here are a couple of strong RSS directories: Feedage, RSS2, Feedest, RSSMotron, and Feedagg.

If you have any other suggestions or resources – please share!

Where exactly did this year go?  It seems like just yesterday, we were celebrating the beginning of 2008 – and here we are, another revolution around our sun, and it’s time to consider steps for the new year.

During this traditionally “slow” business time of year, there is a perfect opportunity to take a few steps to help set a course to consider for 2009. Here are a few things you might focus your current marketing efforts:

1. Attract – don’t sell.
Don’t promote yourself in the “Look at me! Look at me!” way that is so rampant throughout today’s social media sites.  Instead, provide your audience with insights and ideas that may prove useful to them.  In time, you’ll attract the customers you seek as opposed to turning them off to your message.

2. Add the 5th “P” – Participation .
Product, Price, Place and Promotion have been the staple of marketing for many years.  It’s time to add the newest member of the “4 P’s”: Participation. Establish a new model that allows customers, employees and partners to engage your company.

3. Find and build your niche.
“Micro specificity” is today’s mantra.  Define your target customer to the smallest detail – then target them with your specific niche messaging.

4. Audit, audit, audit.
Place each and every customer experience you provide up for review.  Every interface is an opportunity to provide a better level of service, and establish a stronger following through word-of-mouth marketing.

5. Build your social network.
Do it on Facebook, or Ning or the good ol’ fashioned way: an advisory board.

6. Eliminate stupid policies.
One bad customer experience often establishes a pattern how to treat future customers.  This is, in fact, the very worst thing you can do.  One person’s circumstances cannot be made policy for all – and in the end, you’ll be establishing counter-active procedures that hurt you.

7. Develop your social media training in-house.
In 2009,  word-of-mouth advertising will be accelerated by social media even more than it was in 2008.  Truly understanding the core basics of social media, how it works and its effects on reputation and sales should be part of everyone’s company training programs.

8. Ban the word “consumer” from your vocabulary.
Using “consumers” to describe your customers, or end-customers discounts their individuality and complexity.

9. Raise your ethics bar.
Dedicate yourself to making 2009 the year you set a higher standard for ethical behavior. Make these new standards clear to employees, partners and vendors – then enforce them.

10. Do what you love.
We hear it all the time – enough that it has become trite.  But if you truly don’t love what you do, it will show.  And if it shows, how can you expect anyone else to share your passion?

(11.)  Ok… I said 10 Easy Marketing Tactics…but certainly, there are more.

What’s yours?

Eric Widjaja
Thinking Room Inc.
Gedung Kemang Point
Jl. Kemang Raya No.3 Lantai 2-06
Jakarta 12730
eric@thinkingroominc.com
+62 812 886 7800

www.thinkingroominc.com

Eric Widjaja is the founder behind Thinking Room Inc., a graphic design studio that focuses not merely on design but the whole concept altogether. Somewhat considered radical by his peers, Eric is not limiting himself to conventional rules and norms in delivering design solutions to his clients.

Upon graduation from Academy of Art University, San Francisco, California, Eric had undertaken an internship at Landor Associates where he worked with designers in developing brand identity, print, packaging, and multimedia project for clients such as Levi’s, GE, and Xerox.

Today, his studio has worked with range from large corporations such as Bank Internasional Indonesia, Fujifilm, JAL, Plaza Indonesia, and Sinarmas to entrepreneurial organizations, to name a few Adrian Gan, Matsurika, Shiok!, Cork & Screw and Loewy.

In his spare time he is involved in social campaign for Make Trade Fair/OXFAM, home recording, and cooking.

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