www.www / / David Alston, Vice President Marketing, Radian6
What impact is the recession having on marketing?
I think it’s causing most marketers to take a long hard look at what they have habitually done year after year. Did that dinner sponsorship buy us anything? How many customers did I get from giving away a ton of t-shirts. The focus is shifting to initiatives that can be tracked. Great news for online and social media endeavours because they leave lots of “digital breadcrumbs” to monitor, measure and link back to customer relationships or sales.
Which online tools and sources of information do you rely on?
The majority of our sales are generated from word of mouth (WOM) and much of that WOM is created via social media. Thus we use our own platform at Radian6 to uncover potential needs to fulfill, influencers to get to know, market trends to incorporate in our messaging, fans to thank and so on. To be able to live alongside the community that we serve provides us with incredible insight and feedback.
Where do you go online when you login in the morning?
Usually, once I get past the email inbox, I visit all of the sites that have referenced Radian6 overnight. This could be tweets on Twitter, various blog posts, comments and the like. I use targeted listening to focus my reading on topics of primary interest to our brand and to my role.
Who do you follow online?
Generally whom I follow falls into two categories: folks that I know personally (either locally or in the social media space), and folks that I would like to know (generally in the PR, community management, marketing or advertising fields). I generally use Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook for connections though I also see growth on Friendfeed and TripIt.
When and how do you measure digital marketing success?
While I track the traditional website analytics to know the number of visitors to our site, I also spend a lot of time measuring our impact within social media. I look to our share of conversation compared to our competitors, our volume of conversation after launching any new initiative, number of fan tweets per month etc.. I also classify our level and type of engagement with each social media conversation we have and the resulting action taken.
Why are companies reluctant to embrace social media?
I think it’s primarily due to a lack of understand of what it truly is. It’s not a “media” for one-way delivery of messages. It is a two-way channel just like the phone that customers are reaching out to you on. However, it’s also a public channel that is seen by all of their friends and cached for eternity by Google for searching. It’s now easier in some cases for customers to use social networking applications than it is to find a company’s phone number to call. Gone are the days of customers lining up to talk to a company – companies must now realize they are in the business of getting in line for their customers.
Michelle Corsano is a Web and social media marketer with 15+ years experience in business-to-business technology marketing. She is President of 
