Social Media: Innovation for Small and Large Companies

            With increased competition in the global marketplace, many businesses are shifting their focus to social networking sites. Some examples of social networks, besides the top three of Facebook, Twitter, and LinkIn, are YouTube, Microblogging, Myspace, and Widgets. These sites, are now allowing companies, both large and small, to go beyond customers’ expectations and improve their market position and more importantly customer service opportunities. In such a technological world where individuals are continuously connected to one another through computers, mobile phones, and now even their televisions, customers are demanding faster response times for support and assistance. Social media is an excellent tool for both large and small companies to learn about their customers and to stay visible in this hi-tech age. 
               By creating accounts in Facebook and Twitter, managers of smaller businesses can easily track both positive and negative feedback comments made by their customers, by setting up RSS feeds. Understanding what an organization needs to work on and improve can greatly effect the customer satisfaction levels within your company. Social media also allows IT representatives to offer support through virtual chat rooms, which allow problems to be solved at a faster and more efficient rate, rather than responding to an automated voice messaging system. 
             In the article Six Reasons Companies Are Still Scared of Social Media, one main issue of why small businesses avoid social networking sites is the aspect that there is a fine line on offering either too many status updates or not enough. In other words you can be the annoying company or the unseen company. However, if a small business effectively manages their content, social media can enhance the company's image resulting in greater customer satisfaction and overall appreciation. On that note, social media is an important tool that should be used by businesses both large and small. 

Marketing: The New Form of Mind Control

      In only 30 seconds, television ads are becoming a harder form of communication as an effective marketing tool. Television advertisement is not an easy task; companies need to convey a message to their potential client base and hopefully gain increased consumption of their products and services. 

      Neuromarketing is a new marketing tool used to measure consumer's brain waves, eye-tracking, and skin responsiveness to determine what a consumer is thinking. In addition to understanding external consumption behaviors, marketing is evolving to include study effects on individuals' sub-conscience.  Many scientists are persuaded this new technology will change the way organizations conduct marketing research in the future.

      After purchasing the machine for over "$5 million," one might first ask if neuromarketing can accurately understand "consumer's propensity to purchase?"  Accurate tests on brain waves might be beneficial to some, but neuromarketing fails to address cultural differences among individuals. A person's background, financial status, and environmental upbringing are never included in this research tool. Another question one must consider is if neuromarketing will be seen as a manipulative instrument used to control consumer's purchasing power. If organizations can accurately understand your psyche and persuade television ads without you knowing, couldn't that be considered brainwashing and even obtrusive? I thought this was a free market, where consumers had a choice in what they buy.

     Even though we live in a highly technological age, where change is expected, the best approach to marketing might just be first knowing your client base and then using traditional marketing tools that have proven to be effective in the past.

Marketing is fun... don't believe me just read below.

To lighten the mood on my first blog post, I thought I'd offer some fun topics dealing with marketing and blogging.

Just remember there is never one absolute answer in marketing. Finding the correct decision for your organization really might have you saying "it depends"...

Please enjoy!