Affiliate Programs and Affiliate Reviews
Anyone who has reviewed their 401(k) statements lately has received a very personal and immediate measure of just how the last four weeks of financial turmoil have affected them. Take that urgency, multiply it by the number of companies that use distribution channels, and you get a sense of the angst and frustration over the lack of sales through channel partners today.
Despite how quickly social networking is becoming integrated in enterprises, it still isn’t scaling to meet the most complex problems faced today. The well-known success stories of customer service being made more accountable and responsive are emanating out of how @ComCastCares, @JetBlue, @SouthwestAir and other companies are using Twitter as a means to better solve customer problems.
Marketing is going through a revolution online, thanks to the continual adoption of the Web 2.0 concepts originally defined by Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty. If you want to see some excellent graphics and analysis explaining Web 2.0, subscribe to Ross Dawson’s blog, Trends in the Living Networks.
With so many companies tightening their budgets in the midst of the tough, uncertain economic climate, there’s a tendency to look at social networking as the new, free panacea. I’ve seen a few companies start social networking strategies, promising to be open and reach out to their customers — only to turn these strategies into yet another communication channel where they do all the talking and none of the listening.
Attaining the optimal mix of product selection, pricing and content in catalogs and collateral; and the tailoring of guided selling and navigation within multichannel management strategies is too important to leave to just trial and error. Lacking frameworks to define optimal mix of resources, anecdotal data instead of actual results often define the mix of resources across channels.