Sales and Social Media

Last week Adage (www.adage.com) came out with a news article stating that Coca-Cola Company study finds no sales impact (lift) from online chatter (For more details you could read the article here
http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/coca-cola-sees-sales-impact-online-buzz-digital-display-effective-tv/240409/

The article goes on to detail the study and the client input that Online advertising do work, and that social media plays a crucial role...However, some interesting pointers from the article:

  1. Can you link sales objective (especially short term) with social media, especially when it comes to FMCG or CPG? I say, plain stupid to even try and spend time seeking such results. This can only be successful, if there is social media led tactical campaigns to drive sales... Overall sales depends on the time, distribution, space (shelf), competition activities, price, etc
  2. What should your social media objectives be? No silver bullet here. But for a FMCG or CPG brand; it should be more about knowing the pulse of the audience. It is about understanding what the audience do beyond your brand page or brand interactions... It should act as a barometer to your markets rather than a stimulus for sales
  3. Understanding the sentiments. Bots don’t understand sentiments, humans do... Please don’t treat what your Buzz monitoring tools throws up as sacrosanct; it needs a human oversight to see what exactly they are saying. As the article suggests - Buzz monitoring on Twitter feeds are more or less accurate..but falters when it comes to longer posts like - Blogs and articles
  4. The main thought should be about media leverage through convergence. All Medias are not created equal. Each has its inherent advantages and disadvantages. The Cost-per-Reach of a TV or Print may not be matched by a Search/Email campaign... While in the case of effectiveness, it could be the opposite. The idea is leveraging media convergence... for example - using Television as a stimulus media and Social as the response media...

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