Trialogue: Marketing in the New Economy

Here's a piece I wrote for a banking client's internal newsletter.  It describes the transformation from the mass media era to the digital media era and the implications of that shift for marketers and so I thought I would share it here.  Enjoy and, as always, spread the fire. GS

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A revolution in media and marketing triggered by recent digital technologies has fundamentally changed the world.  Most companies see it as a threat.  You can see it as an opportunity. 

 For the last century advertising involved a monologue.  Brands spoke to consumers through mass media with powerful results.  Brands also enjoyed a message monopoly.  The cost and complexity of television, radio, print, and outdoor prevented consumers from participating, but no more.  Personal computers, smart phones, affordable software, social web applications, and ubiquitous broadband connections have equipped and empowered nearly everyone to take part and people are using this new-found power to express their love or loathing for brands.  This groundswell of connected consumers’ represents a threat to companies entrenched in the past, but a vast resource to businesses prepared to engage them in new ways.  But how?

 Trialogue

Thriving in this new environment requires engaging audiences in a Trialogue™.  Trialogue is more than a communications tactic; it is a strategic platform that routes the true experience of a brand among all its constituents.  In a Trialogue, messages and experience move along three dimensions:

 B:A - From the brand to the audience

A:B - From the audience to the brand

A:A - Among audience members

 All brands exist in a Trialogue.  The only choice is whether and how to participate.  Those that strategically leverage it can develop more relevant brand strategies, expand their advertising impressions, better manage their image, and enhance the trustworthiness and authority of their messaging in a marketplace they no longer control.

 Trialogue by Fire

Dell discovered the need for Trialogue when, in 2005, blogger Jeff Jarvis began recounting his customer service nightmares on his BuzzMachine blog in a post titled “Dell Hell.”  Like a magnet, his post attracted other unhappy customers who left similarly scathing comments.  Soon it was all over the web.  Search “Dell” on Google at that time and “Dell Hell” was on the first page of organic results.

 To its credit, Dell embraced Trialogue and transformed a nightmare into a vision for the future.  

·        It built a system for tracking online conversations involving its brand and began proactively reaching out to people with problems. 

·        It joined the conversation by starting its own blog; winning praise from customers for authentically addressing positive and negative issues.

·        It launched IdeaStorm, a site where customers can suggest and prioritize ideas from new products to service improvements and Dell can report on its plans and progress.

Today Dell relies on Trialogue interaction with its customers to support its rejuvenated business.

 Implementing Trialogue

Implementing Trialogue in your business involves three steps.

Listen

The best brands, like best friends, are good listeners.  Begin by uncovering brand conversations.  The Buntin Group recently built a Brand Monitoring Dashboard for a client that monitored websites, blogs, chat rooms, forums, and even Twitter in real-time for conversations involving the client’s brand or its competitor’s.  It tracked the volume and tone of that chatter and identified the people making those comments so the client could connect with them online.

Lead

The most effective way to influence your brand image in the Trialogue era is to control your customer’s experience.  With a quality product and excellent customer service in place, you can further lead by:

·        Creating venues for brand discussions like social networks and forums

·        Inviting your customers to participate in new product development and service improvements.

·        Designing systems that enable customers to more effectively engage with your business.  ATM’s and online banking are good examples from the financial services industry.

·        Joining the conversation by commenting on existing blogs and forums, and/or starting your own.

·        Reinforcing brand truths with targeted advertising through traditional channels. 

Leverage

Equip the audience with tools that leverage its connectivity to help them share your brand message with their social network. New digital tools make this easy and affordable and can radically extend brand strategy, communications reach, and advertising impressions. 

 At The Buntin Group, the agency in Nashville where I work, we believe Trialogue is a transformational business driver and also a unique business intelligence tool and have retooled our creative, media planning and digital functions to enable brand-fluent Trialogue solutions that deliver business results.