There will always be customers. As human beings it is our nature to want to grow, prosper and enjoy life. We will always need services, products and education and will always yearn for more. So post recession times can be seen through rose colored glasses. Once consumer confidence is back to normal, businesses have the opportunity to flourish. The question is how do we convey marketing messages to this new consumer?

I say new consumer because throughout this recession certain things have happened. Not only did newspaper subscription decline so much that many have gone belly up, but Twitter traffic now surpasses NYT and WSJ. Direct Marketers will be eliminating or drastically minimizing budgets for Free Standing Inserts (FSI) as well as print ads as readership goes down. Online banner ads on the web versions have lost their value as well. The new consumer wants to engage and feel proud they are a customer. They want to be a fan and announce to the world they stand behind your product and are happy to pass the good news on to others.

Direct mail will certainly feel the heat as well, as consumers will want to know about what you have to offer in 140 characters or less. And they want to know immediately. By the time a mail piece goes through design; copywriters; editors; marketing; upper management for approval; printing quotes; printing process; blue line proofs; etc, it is a month or months too late. Micro-sites, landing pages that can be created on the fly will prevail. E-brochures will also be part of this “new” movement. All of this can quickly go viral by links passing through the social networks, passed on by the best marketers of them all, the loyal customer.

The future of Pay Per Click? Well, the consumer is getting smarter. It appears that they want to know a company is top ranked organically to feel a part of the “Best Practices” club. Unless sponsored links are morphed into a community message, this will lose its ROI factor as well.

The marketing role will be redefined to match the new consumer. It’s all coming together, no fail whale on the horizon. T-shirt companies are already capitalizing on the moment. Will you?

I had so many titles for this blog post, “Will You Be Late to the Party?”, “Accident Waiting To Happen”, “Being the Number One Viral Marketing Video Does Not Equal Success”, “How Much Worse Can It Be For Dominos? Employees Contaminating Food and one was a Sex Offender” . But I had to choose, and I chose to address Tom Davenport, Blogger of “Is Twitter For Serious Marketers.”

It was a busy week for viral messages, but ones that companies would never want to happen.

1) Dominos. Just created their very own twitter account, April 15th, TWO DAYS after the debacle involving two employees sharing a rather grotesque video of how they handle food at work. Dominos’ first posting can be found at: “#dominos video.- The pair was fired & criminal complaints filed. There are warrants for their arrest. http://bit.ly/12MX3n – please RT!”

Spokesman Tim McIntyre of Domino’s provided a statement on the situation, “Any idiot with a webcam and an internet connection can attempt to undo all that’s right about the brand,” Hmmm? Perhaps this is why smart companies are joining the social media conversation early and empowering their staff to positively represent their company to prevent occurrences like this from happening. After the fact statements like the President of Dominos on YouTube, have comments posted below such as:

“Sorry Mr. Dominos President. After that video it will be hard to eat out ANYWHERE but I will always think of Dominoes and my cheese being up someone’s nose.”

“I used to eat Dominos at least once a week. Not anymore. I can’t even look at a Dominos corporate logo without feeling queasy.”

Addressing the incident on the Today Show isn’t enough damage control for this one. Viral messages on Twitter such as “I don’t care what dominos does…never eating it again” seem to prevail.

2) Amazon or shall I say, #Amazonfail From Advertising Age: “By far the biggest issue most of the angry Twitterers had was that Amazon didn’t respond until late Sunday and, when it did, the vague answer it offered to CNet referred to the problem as a “glitch in the system” that was being fixed. This didn’t satisfy the masses who had already spent the better part of Easter getting fired up. The next response from Amazon came Monday night, when it issued a statement calling the incident an “embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error.”

Almost 24 hours later came the response. Why so late? They are one of, if not the biggest ecommerce e-tail stores out there. I just quickly looked up Amazon and I have no idea if they have an authentic Twitter account to this date. @amazondeals is listed in twibs, but all they do is list discounted items.

Social Media is not to be ignored, nor should you think that your company or persona is immune. Reputation Management and Social Media Strategy will be on the top of many company’s lists to implement in the near future if it has not been done so already. We learn from mistakes, Dominos will go down in the history books as “The Consequences of Not Taking Social Media Seriously”. Companies like Zappos, where they clearly take employee management and customer service to the next level will be the winners. “Happy Employees=Happy Customers is their motto. Whole Foods is another company that I would say stands out from the crowd and is doing a great job of listening to their customer chatter and responding quickly. I have seen them reply immediately to customer complaints, questions and suggestions such as “@laurenoboy Let your store know directly what you’d like to see. Every store decides its offerings in large part b/c of local demand.” They are a Twitterolemodels!

Today I attended an all day Virtual Conference hosted by Marketing Profs and boy this is a new revolution my friends. This was out of the ball park, a home run and a great eye opener on so many levels. And, get this, it was FREE! Yes f-r-e-e. With over 14,000 world wide attendees, their message regarding the organization, their membership and on site events will clearly be known to many others in a short amount of time. Have a look at #mpworld in your twitter search(hashtags are used to track a conversation). Testimonials galore plus key learning’s from the attendees, including me!

So what did this Virtual Conference have and what was it like to be an attendee? Let’s see:
-first you create a profile that includes your avatar, contact information, skype handle, short bio etc. this creates your “v-card”
-There were concurrent sessions starting at 11:00am all the way through to 5pm, with both B2C and B2B tracks
-The Exhibitor hall was where you visited exhibitor’s booths, chat with the booth managers and pick up cool free stuff like white papers and case studies to put in your briefcase to download later.
-a lounge to network, chat, and exchange v-cards
-Outstanding and educational guest speakers included well known author of World Wide Rave David Meerman Scott and keynote speaker David Plouffe, Campaign Manager, Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential Campaign.
-and if you missed anything, you have 90 days to watch the presentations on demand

Blow out of a conference and a revolution of an idea. Putting 100% trust that viral marketing will pay off in the end from happy happy customers, they provided the whole conference for free. Well it was an easy sell for me, I visited the Marketing Profs booth several times during the day and at the end of the conference signed up for their premium membership. I like what I saw, and I wanted more.

Enjoy life virtually, next one coming up fall 2009, don’t miss it.