January 29, 2009 • 7:40 pm
The impending extinction of the traditional 1-to-many relationship model between a company and its customers has long been recognized by marketers. ”1 to 1″ relationship marketing has been the natural successor to mass media, as database technology and marketing ingenuity have enabled unprecedented levels of personalization.
And while the relationship between a company (brand) and a customer will continue to be significant, there’s a new kind of relationship evolving: the relationship between customers. This is the fundamental basis of social media and social technologies.
Marketers used to have the luxury of defining their own brand — but that’s no longer the case. In very real, practical terms, your brand is what your customers think (and are saying) it is. This is supported by a Forrester Research survey in which the opinion of friends or acquaintances ranked as the most trusted source of information about products or services.
Filed under: Marketing , Relationship Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking
Laptops have been outselling desktops for years. Just as importantly, virtually every laptop sold today includes a built-in web cam. Throw in ever-increasing computational power and ubiquitous highspeed wireless internet access, and we can see the perfect storm brewing that will push video services & applications to the next level, beyond YouTube (finally).
A great example is Hawaii’s recently launched, 2-way live video conferencing service that connects doctors with patients. It’s the virtual house call. In Ontario, we have a telehealth service that provides immediate phone access to nurses that can help you to diagnose and recommend treatment. Evolving this platform to leverage video could enable better diagnosis (“Show me where it hurts” vs. “Tell me where you’re hurt”), and improve resulting treatment.
Where else could this work? How often and significant is human interaction for closing a sale? While visiting the website of a bank when researching financial and insurance solutions, how would the ability to interact with a real person (perhaps to ask questions you may not be comfortable typing out) compare to visiting another bank’s website, where all you get is static text? (Not to mention an amazing opportunity for a sales rep to pick-up on visual cues from the prospective customer, in order to better respond and dig deeper for insights into the user’s unique needs.)
I’m also waiting for the “Record Video” button for email for the masses. While video messaging is still “technically expensive” (high bandwidth, high storage), a large player like Google could step in to make this highly accessible. Voice recognition technology could be used to pick out keywords in the conversation to deliver relevant (yet unobstrusive) advertising. Gmail, of course, already does this with text-based email.
Filed under: Marketing, Technology , Relationship Marketing, Video, Video Conferencing, Video Email
