Jeremiah Owyang Social Media Guru and principal analyst at the Altimeter Group, in a radio interview about the relevance of Social Media integration into corporate websites, suggested that in the new order of things, a company???s product pages are no longer about the products themselves, but about the people who have bought those products.
To underline the importance of this statement, we???ll say it again: your product pages are NOT about your products; they ARE about the people who have bought those products.
Understanding this concept is fundamental to leveraging the power of Social Media in your marketing programs.
To get to the heart of this idea it may be useful to look at one important aspect of how we as consumers make purchasing decisions. Trust.
TRUST is a function of several things; honest presentation of the facts (for example: this Apple device has a processor that runs at a certain speed, a given amount of RAM, and a screen resolution of such and such ??? all facts that could be very easily verified without the risk of purchase), consistent messaging (Apple has always said that they were cooler than the competition) and reliable product performance (with very few exceptions, Apple products do what they say on the label).
We relied upon Apple for information, and could only hope that our trust was reinforced by our own experience with the product.
The rise of Social Media has added an additional element to the equation. We???re no longer wholly dependant on (and in some cases even interested in) an organization???s own marketing messages as the a primary source of information. Indeed, we now have an infinite number of alternative sources of information about a particular product or service in the form of blogs and review sites, and in fact, anyone else who may have used a product and seen fit to publish their thoughts online.
A 2010 Nielson Global Trust Study found that product websites themselves were only fourth in terms of brand trustworthiness, behind family, friends and online product reviews. And interestingly, the same study suggested that a staggering 40% of consumers looked online for (source: Nielson).
Online peer recommendation is now one of the most important considerations (if not the most important) in the purchase process. The conversations that we intuitively knew consumers were having about our brands (word of mouth) are now happening online. And the smart marketers have already figured out how to integrate the relevant parts of those same conversations into every phase of their product/consumer lifecycle.
Here are some simple ways that you can leverage the power of Social Media in your marketing efforts:
- Encourage your customers to write reviews of your products right there in your site
- Get customers to rate your products – preferably on your product pages
- Start a blog about your company and its offerings; allow users to comment
- Use Facebook Connect as a method of connecting people who have bought your product with each other
If you???re still weighing up the pros and cons of allowing Social Media widgets and other integration into your website and other digital assets, don???t. You???ve got nothing to lose, and everything to gain. At the very least, you???ll be giving your loyal customers an avenue to broadcast their affinity.
