In 2005 they concentrated on markets based on their geographical locations, providing various products to fit the local demands. 2006 onwards individuals became a very interesting market for Blackberry. In 2008 it was the main focus of the company, even more than it’s business users. 2009 marks an important shift in Blackberry’s branding strategy to go from a very corporate look and feel to a very consumer focused. First time ever, Blackberry could be considered as a end user focused product, from the branding perspective. 2010 clearly shows off it’s social features, solely focused on the consumer. The corporate image has completely disappeared from it’s homepage. It’s now competing heads on with iPhone/Android as a user friendly social device.

2002

Corporate market centric, reflecting branding of it’s time.

2003

Blackberry integrating it’s offering with Microsoft and Lotus’s software packages

2004

Blackberry brings some life into it’s offering by focusing on bright colours and product, as oppose to it’s audience. Blackberry also categorises it’s offering to various industries, very typical for a B2B enterprise.

2005

Blackberry get’s more involved in developing new product range and focused on it’s markets based on it’s geographic location

2006

Individuals become very important to Blackberry’s market

2007

2007 showcases a role back on it’s strategy to focus on businesses

2008

Blackberry was back focusing on individuals before businesses.

2009

Important shift in strategy, making Blackberry a end-user focused brand competing with Apple/Google

2010

Blackberry is all about the user, highly social via integration with social media tools.

According to fonerbooks.com that implies that the book is selling just under 300 books per week on Amazon.com alone based on the graph (below) and multiplying a factor of three (as suggested by) Morris:

“Amazon announced in July of 2010 that Kindle sales are running 3X the rate of the first half of 2009, so you may want to triple the numbers on the sales/week axis below”

Thanks to everyone who has bought the book and thanks for the support! If you haven’t bought a copy, you can download a free first chapter of the book.

About the Book

The book highlights the power of recruiting people with Social Media! Social Media is not only an effective marketing tool to get candidates and customers onboard but also a tool to help decrease costs on communication, interaction, knowledge management/ transfer inside a company and externally with suppliers and customers.

Update (16th December 2010) The book is now available on Amazon.com / Amazon.co.uk/ Sony Reader Store / Infibeam.com (Asia)

Book Information

Amazon.com

Fedex

Continental

Toblerone

Baskin Robins

Sony Vaio

Carrefour

Unilever

Formula 1

Sun Microsystems

NBC

Impressive how the product placements like Aston Martin/ BMW / Omega Watches in Bond movies, Courvoisier in Busta Rhymes video and other luxury goods have been replaced by websites and multimedia devices. There is much more to come, I believe in the future we will see a whole heap of social media, gambling and online services sites.

Are we ready for the digital revolution?

My favourite aspects of their presentation is their take on types of Innovation:

Disruptive Innovation?

Most businesses try to be disruptive innovators but are either just catching up with their competitors i.e. evolving or growing as a company hence just expanding. Truly disruptive innovation requires thinking out of the box, which has it’s own challenges but also potentially opens new doors.

Too many features?

Also, during various parts of the presentation it explains that many companies are knowingly or unknowingly involved in feature creep, although the product or service is truly innovative when one can’t remove anything else from it, to improve it’s performance. So it’s not about more cool stuff, it’s actually about few things which work perfectly.

Social Sourcing and Future of Blogging

SourcerSrini mentions how he is uses social media for sourcing candidates.
PunkRockHR good insight on the future of blogging.

Innovative startup in Recruitment

@James_Mayes talks about innovative stuff they are doing within their new start-up

Hardware and electronics have seen the 47% cuts on other online advertising, biggest in percentage, although social media advertising has risen by 56%.  So harware stores like Halfords and B&Q prefer to advertise on Facebook and LinkedIn as oppose to ITV.com and  Guardian.co.uk. Below is an analysis of why we are seeing these changes and why social media advertising is becoming so

Pros of SMA:

1. Social Media advertisements are more engaging.

Have you seen Facebook advertising? It allows you to conduct polls and get users to like your advertisement. If the user likes the advert (and clicks on the thumbs up icon), it automatically tells their friends that someone they know has endorsed the ad. It’s great way for your friends to recommend products and brands to you.

Also, if the user doesn’t find the advertisements relevant, they can click on the close button and that will stop advertisements similar to the ones displayed earlier. Saving advertisers money by targeting relevant people and making users happy about the adverts they see.

2. More targeted.

Click to enlarge

Social Media advertisers on Facebook can target a niche, in the example I’m looking to target executve vice presidents and executive directors who live in the UK. What’s great is that it gives me an estimate on number of people in this category in real time. I can no loosen the criteria to get more people to see my campaign or vice versa.

You can target your audience by their location, age, sexuality, job roles, music genre preference, political views, books they read, authors they like, etc. That sort of pin point accuracy is very hard to achieve on other sites and even search engines.

3. Larger communities for large campaigns.

Social networks have a larger audience than most of the other sites. This is fantastic, if the mission of your advertisement is brand awareness. For example if you are looking to target corporate or business owners, it might strike you that LinkedIn has 5.4million active members versus other business publications with an online presence.For instance WSJ.com (Wall Street Journal) has 3million, Forbes.com 2.9million and BusinessWeek 1.3million. If you are looking to target a wider audience (niche or generic), sites like LinkedIn provide you with a huge opportunity.

4. Social media are the search engines of tomorrow.

As the search engine market is maturing, users are increasingly realising that most sites on the front two pages are highly optimised sites. Mainly owned by large publications, who pay a lot to get on the front two pages of major search engines. It doesn’t work for them when they are looking to get opinions on ‘How to get a graduate job’, ‘Which car to buy’ etc. They need forums  and real user feedback on questions they ask. Social Media allows users to achieve that as a conversation and not a broadcast as forums, groups, blogs etc.

5. Better User Experience.

Social Media’s success is based on good online technology coupled with intuitive usability, making lives simpler for the end user. We usually find social media easier to use than the average software or website. Less clutter and making sure the user is happy, this is the reason why you don’t require a manual to use social networking sites. Better user experience also means that punters are more informed, for instance they know the advertisement areas on the site and if they are interested, they would follow the adverts through. Some websites disguise the advertising areas and as a result users click on it, to realise that they have been redirected to another site.

Another aspect to it is connecting Facebook advertisements to your corporate Facebook Pages. Many users on clicking an advertisement want to stay on the same platform, typically on clicking on an advert, on search engine you go to a new website for which you might need to register or login. With Facebook you can develop a page and have a related advertisement on the site. It’s a great way to get user engagement and brand awareness.

Cons of Social Media Advertising

1. SMA is Interrupted Advertising.

Most social media sites like Myspace, YouTube, Bebo etc have advertisements which are placed around profiles, inbox, multimedia pages etc. As a busy user the chances are that you overlook the adverts are high. On the flip side sites like Myspace where advertisements include flashy banners, distracts users from their social networking experience, causing anger and frustration. Hence I often think of some social networking sites as experts in interrupted advertising, more often than not, users ignore them.

2. Timing of Advertisement.

Search engines are great for advertising because generally when you are looking for a product or a service you go on to a site like Google and type to find typical costs, suppliers, best practices etc. When it comes to social networks the chances are that advertisements are not relevant to you at the time, even though you are the right demographic.

Unfortunately social media sites won’t be able to put advertisements on their searches as Overture Inc. a paid search specialist pioneered the bid-for-placement mechanism. In July 2001, the US patent office issued Overture a patent for the mechanism.Patent 6,269,361; also known as the ’361 patent, essentially covered all AdWords like business models.

Conclusion

Looking at all the pros and cons of social network advertising, my conclusion is that we have just seen the tip of the iceberg. Social networking is barely 8 years old and SMA even younger. There are new platforms like Spotify popping up who are revolutionising the way we advertise and engage with audience on social media. Facebook is certainly the leader in innovative social network advertising, I’m sure we’ll see much more from them in the coming years.

I want to take the opportunity to thank everyone who has supported and worked with me in the past. I also want to invite you to suggest burning topics you want to read on social media.

Drop me a line on me <at> rajanand.biz or tweet @rajanand

Social Media is now genuinely used for brand building. More recognisable organisations are using Twitter, Facebook etc to communicate with their audience.  Recently got hold of an internal meeting presentation (available below) held by a major Canadian Advertising/integrated marketing Agency, BSL.com. In short they are using social media to:

1. Compete against rival Advertising Agency, Acart.
2. Awareness: Increase internal understanding of Social Media.
3. Social Media Event: Start a Social Media related client event.
4. Grow Business: Build external awareness of BSL capabilities in Social Media Strategy.
5. Social Media Case Study: Work toward a case study that is Marketing Profs worthy.

Inorder to really make this work their social media strategy is to:

• Use Facebook page with links to corporate Twitter, RSS etc
• Use Twitter: Directors will have Twitter links on the corporate website. On Twitter directors will have BSL brand.
• LinkedIn company page for BSL.
• Blog serves as a way to provide clients or potential clients with our brand personality and self promotion without a lot of sales messages.
• All social media properties like Twitter, Blog, LinkedIn etc should be linked for maximum value.

First Social Media Meeting

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