When salesforce.com was founded 10 years ago we built our business around the website. The model was to generate traffic, figure out how to convert that traffic, and follow up with leads by phone or email. If we weren’t able to get a hold of our leads or if they weren’t ready to buy, we’d add them to our marketing email list.

While this model is still important to our business, it feels very transactional.

With the rise of social sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, the web has been become much more personal. Nowadays people expect high-quality, personalized content that adds immediate value to them. If product marketers want to be successful, they have to meet those customer expectations.

Here are a few examples of the new user behaviors have transformed the traditional web campaigns into “always on” marketing:

The Website ➜ Content Marketing

With the traditional marketing the website is essentially a product brochure. Depending on what you are selling, the positioning needs to be refreshed every 6 months to a year. From time-to-time you might have a successful webinar, but the most common offers are contact me, demo center, and free trial.

If your company wants to adapt to the latest trends and use social media to general leads then game completely changes. Social media marketing requires a lot more content that a website. A good social content calendar might include 1 good video a month, 4 blog posts, 8 facebook posts, and 16 tweets. That type of cadence is a challenge for product marketers, especially when they’re still responsible for all their traditional duties. The content also takes on a different tone when you’re marketing in what is perceived as a “commerce-free” zone like Facebook or Twitter.

Batch-and-Blast Emails ➜ Personalized Journeys

The traditional approach to email marketing is often referred to as batch-and-blast. To generate leads you come up with an offer, design the email, pull the list, and hit send. This approach is effective -- at least in the short run -- and it doesn’t require a tremendous amount of sophistication.

The new formula for email marketing is all about delivering the right message at the right time. Instead of sending one email campaign with hundreds of thousands of recipients, you have to define the buyer’s journey and lead scoring rules to deliver personalized relevant communication. This can be a difficult shift because it is the difference between immediate gratification and an annuity stream.

Interruption Marketing ➜  Listen, Engage, Delight

Traditional marketing is all about me. My product, my service, our customers. These are important messages at the bottom of the funnel but they don’t work as well on social channels.

With the rise of the social, customer brands can no longer sit on the sidelines and rely on advertising to broadcast their message. They need to set up a social media listening & engagement strategy to be part of the conversation that is taking place every day. They need to learn how to attract and retain audiences by acting as storytellers and journalists.

Customer Showcase ➜ Army of Advocates

Customer reference programs often seek out individuals from recognizable brands who have big titles and are willing to provide a quote.

In the new world we live in companies are going to need to build community MVP programs to recognize individuals who are contributing regularly and exemplifying the types of behaviors you want to encourage. That might be answering questions, facilitating conversation, or standing up for the brand. They might not have big titles or work for well-known brands, but they represent a disproportionate percentage of the conversation. There are others who might not participate as regularly but they want to endorse the brand. The question becomes, how to you capture references at scale. How do you expand beyond the 50 customers in the showcase and get tens of thousands of people endorsing your product? 

Customer Surveys ➜ Social Analytics

One of the traditional ways to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts is to conduct brand recall surveys. These surveys are expensive so they’re typically not done more than once or twice a year.

With social analytics you can measure share of conversation globally, in real-time. You can see where people are talking about your brand, what is the sentiment, and how is it trending. This allows you to adjust your marketing tactics with much greater speed and efficiency than ever before.

So these are just a couple of example. Let’s open the question to you.

• How do you think social is changing the way we engage our customers and market products? 
• What are some success stories which you think inspire others?