What really matters is cutting through the noise and finding a sweet spot for your brand, said social media consultant Debbie Weil while speaking at the What’s Next: DC conference. Hitting the sweet spot means finding the marketing approach that best aligns your company’s goals with what consumers want.  Without this point of common interest, it doesn’t matter how many social-media networks your brand has invested in. What you need is the right approach to spur your followers into action.

One example Weil cited was the Nike-Lance Armstrong Foundation partnership, which sold yellow bracelets for a 2004 fundraiser. It began as a small venture, but eventually athletes, celebrities and politicians were all sporting the Livestrong bracelet. Why?

Cancer is something that affects everyone in some way, so the bracelets were a win-win-win situation, Weil says. Consumers got an emotional connection; the Lance Armstrong Foundation raised money for its cause; and Nike made enough to cover its manufacturing costs while raising its brand awareness. It was the “perfect congruence of what Nike … wanted, and what we wanted — which is to connect with something that we believe in,” Weil said.

Weil says there are three major players when it comes to marketing:

• The Marketer: Serves as a public-relations vehicle to build the brand
• The Employer: Creates the product while looking to expand its own communication tools
• The Customers: Looks for products that fill their needs or desires

Finding the sweet spot means finding a way to meet the goals of all three groups. What you want as a marketer needs to coincide with what can benefit the customer. Fulfill the needs of your customer while meeting your own goals and the goals of your company, and you’ll hit the spot. Pretty sweet.

Image credit: pavlen, via iStockPhoto

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MARY ELLEN: Many of our readers are relatively new to social media. How would you explain crowdsourcing to a marketer or PR professional who had never heard the term?

MARK: Briefly, it is asking the crowd to answer a question or fill a need you have. The crowd is either the whole world … i.e. the world wide Web, or some segmented subset of it that has raised their hand and said they are good at a certain thing. A couple of examples:

• Need advice on how to string a lacrosse stick? Ask subscribers to Insidelacrosse.com for a video of them doing it in slo-mo so you can follow along step by step.

• Need new ideas for an ad campaign to help prevent teenage smoking? Put up an RFP (request for proposal) on a site like GeniusRocket and get all sorts of logos and taglines and viral videos that you can purchase and use.

The essence of crowdsourcing is getting a lot of different solutions, perspectives, answers and creativity from many people that you sort through and employ. The hard part is figuring out how to compensate people for it.

Besides Genius Rocket’s clients, are there any particular companies, agencies or nonprofits that you think are using crowdsourcing particularly well right now?

• Dorito’s did it with their Superbowl ad, where the crowdsourcing exercise was, in and of itself, an ad campaign, too. Plus they got an award-winning TV commercial out it.

• InnoCentive is doing it well in the drug-discovery and drug-development sector, and some of the better “Question and Answer” platforms are showing that you can post all sorts of questions and get some good answers.

• eLance is another good example.

What advice can you offer for someone who wants to experiment with this for their organization, but is meeting resistance from peers or senior management?

• Changing legacy behavior always scares a lot of people. Understand that and don’t take it personally

• Use the services of the crowdsourcer to minimize risk and embarrassment in your “trial.” (Genius Rocket offers “private” crowdsourcing where you don’t have to announce what the brand or need is until people have signed non-disclosure agreements.)

• Reassure the ad agency, the marketing department, the head of PR, or whomever is most worried, that crowdsourcing is a tactic, not a replacement to what was … so everyone is still safe.

Image credit, Mental Art, via iStock

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