David Wesson's Digital Culture

Social Media set to overtake Google as the main source of product information!

"There is a very fundamental shift going on from the information Web to the social Web, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg stated at the recent San Francisco web 2.0 summit. 
At the moment most online marketing is geared to visibility in Google but I am going to go out on a limb and predict in the next two years social media will have overtaken Google as the main method by which we find out information about goods and services.
The  5 ways that social media is changing our lives” puts into context that whilst Companies currently are spending thousands of dollars each year to rank highly in Google this will be a thing of the past if the in the not too distant future and that the whole way to do marketing is fundamentally changing at an alarming rate which companies are struggling to keep up with.
 With US Corporate’s such as P&G now willing to pay for advertising based on Customer engagement  and the birth of the real-time web as a viable form of marketing for companies, is it any wonder that people who used to turn to Google for the latest information now turn to Twitter search instead  .
It therefore really comes as no real surprise Google is about to unveil social search in an attempt to protect its online monopoly BUT perhaps more interesting is the news that very soon Bing will have access to all of twitters search feed so you will be able to search Bing for public tweets which is a pretty major coup for Microsoft.
The development of the real time web furthermore has prompted prominent technology blogger Louis Gray to declare “did you know there is a second parallel internet and its name is Twitter and forget about linking instead of re-tweeting .That’s the old way of web 1.0 dinosaurs" 
So why not ponder how much time do you spend floating in and out of the real time web and static websites on a daily basis and how will your marketing be geared to these very different domains.
Watch Louis Gray’s fascinating take on the real time web below and make up your own mind what the future has in store for you and your online marketing!

4 Simple Questions to highlight the Importance of Online & Viral marketing

Traditionally people talk about their products and provide information on a corporate website and quite frankly people are not interested.

A sure fire way to stress to anybody the importance of online marketing is to ask them the them the following questions:

1/In the last 2 months have you or anybody you know answered a direct mail advertisement?

2/In the last 2 months have you or anybody you know used mainstream media to answer a question or researched a product or service?

3/in the last 2 months Have you or anybody you know used Google or another search engine to answer a question or researched a product or service?

4/ In the last 2 months have you or anybody you know used social media or a peer to peer network like e-mail, IM or facebook, to answer a question or researched a product or service and the answer came back was a URL that you linked to?

Chances are that you would answer a resounding yes to using a search engine and yes to being referred by a friend to a product or service via URL via social media but possibly to mainstream media and doubtful to direct mail.

A statistic that is backed up wholeheartedly in a May 2008 Nielsen Online survey that said Eight out of ten respondents who had recently made consumer electronics purchases in a brick-and-mortar store said they had visited the store's Website first. More than one-half said they purchased from the retailer on whose Website they had spent the most time.'

Conclusion is that potential customers today most likely have already researched what your company's products on your websites. And is much further along in the sales process than you might think.

The spread of idea's through viral marketing by social media and peer to peer networks has quite simply the power to transform an ordinary everyday products like toilets into some thing cool which gets people talking and when David Meerman Scott showed the below video depicting a Swedish self cleaning toilet at a recent Podcamp keynote address to a room full of B2B marketers the penny dropped.

So next time a business colleague talks about the problems they have marketing their product tell them to watch this video and ask themselves what they cool thing can they do to get people talking about their product. Ordinary everyday items never looked so good!

The Swedish self cleaning toilet viral video sensation viewed 2 million times.