Old Strategies No Longer Work!

This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series Social Media DirectionsHistorically strategies have been developed based on assumption made about how the markets respond and to what.

The aim of a strategy is to develop market differential, awareness and value that the market would respond to.

Old methods relied heavily on “old media” as the means to create messages, branding and attention from targeted markets.The aim of a strategy is  to out perform competition, capture the ...

market attention and ultimately earn a transaction.

A strategic process includes market research to understand the markets behavior, what is your competition  doing and the subsequent data  helped organizations to think through what it should do differently.

Markets have dramatically changed and thus old strategic thinking and related methods are no longer relevant to the market. They simply don’t work anymore.

What Has Changed?

In an Article titled Transparency is the new marketing Clay Shirky writes “When organizations think about strategy, it’s often in the context of their own objectives. But when the surrounding reality changes—as it is doing in the media landscape—both strategy and goals need to adjust.  The disgruntled can now organize, publish, and protest on their own, without using any professional media outlet. Until recently organizations of all stripes were better able to get their messages into the media than any motley groups of individuals. That is no longer true, because two critical organizational advantages—the ability to coordinate group effort and to coordinate group access to the means of publishing—are now ubiquitous, global, and free.”

“Clients of an organization, whether they are citizens or customers, now have ready access to these tools.  For all the supposed decisiveness of managed organizations, by relying on legal and PR departments to respond, most companies now react more slowly than their customers. In the new world we’ve entered, you can only stonewall things on your side of the wall, yet most media is no longer on that side of the wall.”

Strategy is Now Driven From the Other Side of the Wall

Creating a road map of how your organization will succeed is now a process influenced by the market of conversations. Previously strategy included an assessment of the market but limited by the perspective and terms of how one defines “the market“. The definition  has changed in that consumers and business are now  defining the market in real-time events, conversations. The definition and sentiment of a market is framed  by real-time conversations about anything, everything, anyone and everyone.

Market sentiment has historically been contained within the walls of a corporation. Complaints have been reviewed  and contained as have compliments. Compliments were added to the marketing mix while complaints were buried until results reflected the need for change.

Today both complaints and praises are in real-time and transparent for everyone to see and hear. Anything placed on the web enters the digital library and the more conversations that reference your business the more visible it is to Google, the universal linrary.  The higher the visibility the easier it will be found by others.

Before making a purchase of taking a job what do people do? 95% go the web to gather references and intelligence.  Said references and intelligence are no longer driven by your media rather driven by the media from the market.

Three satisfied customers may tell three friends and those three friends may tell twenty-seven.  The power of influence is now propagated by the web. The same is true about angry customers. One angry customer can reach 3,000 people at the click of a mouse. Those three thousand can reach over 100,000 through the power of social distribution.

The web works based on a rate of change and a rate of interest. Which gets you the highest rate? Satisfied or angry customers? Do the math.

Strategy is critical for any business but if you are following old strategic methods  then you will fail critically. Today failure is instantaneously spread at the click of a mouse.  The markets of conversations spread faster than most organizations can react.  Building a strategy from the outside in is vital to your future success. When markets change so must your strategy. Much has to change and thus the thinking about “how” to build an effective strategy must also change. Get it?

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