This past week, MarketingVOX discussed the announcement that Jeep is turning to social peer networks MySpace and Facebook to help it launch Jeep Compass, its new vehicle aimed at young adults. Jeep’s agency noted that they will not be using them to drive traffic back to Jeep.com. Instead, they have set up profile pages on each that they will use as a destination page for the banners they are buying. Jeep is leveraging these brands to build a community and drive purchase consideration and they are not the only ones who see the business potential here.

Peer networking is clearly here to stay in the consumer market (Fox just bet $580 million on it), but will we see this take off in the IT market anytime soon? P2P has been discussed for quite some time in IT, but has yet to be fully embraced. This is no surprise as IT marketing trends typically follow consumer trends (see podcasts), but the way decisions are made in the IT market (outside of publishers and search engines, we all know that IT people rely heavily on colleagues and peers) suggests a market that is ready for P2P sooner rather than later.

Many companies look for ways to position themselves as a thought leader in their market.

There are many ways to build your reputation as a thought leader – press releases, public speeches, and differentiating yourself through content.  I had a client in the CRM space looking to position themselves as a thought leader that offers a service that no other company offers.

My answer was to run a banner roadblock to create initial buzz. To maintain consistent presence the campaign followed up with an integrated online campaign that included banners, e-newsletters and print.  They started with a white paper offer followed by a webcast offer in order to educate and raise awareness for their user experience monitoring solution.  Insightful content (webcast/white paper) is extremely important in how the company differentiates themselves in the market place.  This client used a 3rd party expert to write the white paper and to participate in the webcast.  They also included prominent, easily recognizable companies as case studies to lend credibility and strengthen their case.  The results of the campaign were very successful. This is one example, of positioning a company as a thought leader - Does anyone else have other suggestions?

I notice that clients are looking for a better way to measure the effectiveness of branding.  They have issues understanding how relevant their company, product, service or concept is in the marketplace. Being able to measure the potential effectiveness of a program before launching a broad initiative or understanding to what level of awareness, leadership, or purchase intent a company currently has with a segment of their audience could save millions of dollars in marketing expenses.  This type of intelligence also enables better sales opportunities, shorter sales cycles and higher profit margins.  For example, we measure branding success through pre- and post-campaign surveying online to compare the changes, but how do others do it?  What type of goals do vendors try and use to measure their branding?

Bringing a message to a new market is a common challenge amongst many companies.

Recently, a network access management company switched their main marketing messaging from networking decision makers to security decision makers. This company has been very successful in the past advertising to our network audience. They wanted to leverage this success and reach out to the Security Audience.

To get their voice heard above the clutter, we created a single web page listing all their relevant security white paper and Webcast content. We also sent out a large amount of emails and ran banners to gain market presence for them in the Security space. In addition, we highlighted their content assets (linking to their single web page) on the home pages of SearchSecurity.com. Our media plan was to reach as broad yet targeted an audience as possible.