Riding the Google Wave to Social Marketing

Over the last few weeks there has been a great deal of buzz around Google Wave, and what it means to online marketing. Billed as an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration, the Google Wave allows people to work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps and other tools.

The introduction of the Wave will evolve social networking to social marketing and allow marketers to better target and effectively encourage customer behavior such as communication, collaboration, interaction and ideally, purchase.

The Wave builds on the concept of cloud computing. Through cloud computing, a single application can be delivered through a Web browser to thousands of customers using a multitenant architecture. One of the best-known examples among enterprise applications is Salesforce.com. In its basic form, a cloud allows multiple users to access applications hosted on a hub instead of having the application installed on their PC, removing the need for a laptop to have to support anything other than connection to the internet. To understand in real-life terms, it’s like a chess game created as an application, hosted on a Wave, where users play against each other in real time with the ability to view the Wave in the present, as well as activities that happened previously in that same Wave.

For marketers, the Wave can be seen as a way to communicate through an application with customers in real time and adjust messaging and strategies based on the tone and feedback. For example, a financial services company can create an application through a Wave that tracks commodity prices in real time. The tool also might allow customers who access the Wave to comment and communicate also in real time. If a potential customer has a question for a call center representative, they can hit a “speak to a representative” button that lives on the Wave. The call center representative may then access the wave and see all conversations that the customer has had in relation to the rise and fall of the commodity price throughout the day, so when they connect privately with them they can address concerns specific to that individual based on their behavior within the Wave.

Opportunities also exist for retail marketers. Google’s Wave technology is based on the HTML 5.0 toolkit, which allows it to exist as a natural element of HTML coding for supporting browsers. This enables email content to be hosted on a Wave. The email could direct recipients to a Wave where they are viewing the content in real time with hundreds or thousands of other potential customers. Here they may comment on the email and offers, as well as engage in discussion around these offerings. With customer feedback, retail marketers can update, in real time, the content the customers are most interested in. The new content is seen in real time and the retailer can allow the customer to see the evolution of the content based on their demands. Thus customers opening their email multiple times in a day may see multiple pieces of content based on how the wave is evolving. This takes targeting and customization to a new level, with content immediately tailored to each individual customer based on their feedback within the Wave.

While the Wave is still in its infancy, there is a great deal of power behind marketing within a Wave. Marketers will have the ability to create customer experiences online in real time. While marketers continue to struggle to connect with consumers through traditional social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook, the concept of a cloud, or Wave collaborations, fit neatly into marketing strategies and concepts like targeting and measurability. Marketers will finally have the ability to define and capitalize on “Social Marketing.”

How do you prepare?
· Shift focus from social networking towards social marketing
· Research cloud applications and Google’s Wave functionality
· Work with developers to begin testing social marketing applications in a Wave
· Focus and plan an online social marketing strategy – think about your industry and how you traditionally interact with your core audience. Think about making these interactions more interactive and dynamic
· Leverage your agencies or digital vendors to help you prepare for this marketing shift

Dino Michetti is the vice president/general manager of Epsilon.