Speaking as someone who has worked hard to build a brand and launch my hobbies (writing/filmmaking) into professional pastimes, I find social media to be a necessary but double edged sword.

Each platform has its benefits and drawbacks:

Blog.
Pro: Total control, creative space, your stamp on the web. Wordpress is free, easy and FAST (I setup one guy's site in 2 hours start to end, including ordering the domain - easy money).
Con: Takes ages to build traffic, requires lots of effort to write and keep going (I did 80,000 words last year!), google ranking becomes important.

Facebook.
Pro: Everyone has it. Easy to use.
Con: Limits your market to friends and friends of friends. No one takes it seriously. Can't do article length posts very easily. Importantly: You don't own the site and your content can disappear. Also: a Facebook fan page would dilute the forum as the "go to" place.

Twitter.
Pro: Everyone in the US has it. Cutting edge for news & press releases. Can get followers outside your sphere of people.
Con: Short, short, short. Content ages very quickly.

Forum.
Pro: Focused base of addicts/fans. Can be built into a hub of cool "ambassadors" for your brand.
Con: Can be full of bile and hate. Old fashioned in the extreme. Need to direct traffic to it (google doesn't crawl it so well).

Reddit/Stumbleupon.
Pro: Can get you massive hit spikes (I got 16k uniques per day for 4 days after one article was posted, massive spike for me).
Con: Full of idiots. Seriously.


My ideas for a brand like CWL would be:

[*]Facebook account plugin for the forum (if you haven't already).
[*]Some sort of "behind the scenes" blog as CWL is all about a personal connection to the brand maker.
[*]Facebook Page (Easy peasy to do), with news about the brand.
[*]The above linked to Twitter (again easy to do) for cross posting.
[*]Social media buttons integrated into the sales site.
[*]SEO the forum a little more. Create a "Classics" or "monster island" sub forum to hold the best threads.

Then push the public events such as competitions, etc. Give-aways (not necessarily watches), public appearances schedules, sneak peaks, etc. Make sure these events get into the faces of the blogs watching the market.

Be careful not to go too mainstream. Watching the main competition for their moves and price changes.

Just my 2cp,

Regards,


Basho

Oh, one thing I didn't say was that there is SO much CWL gets bang on right already! I love receiving mail, email and how the web site looks.

Kip wrote:If I in fact I offend some customers by this type of marketing, does my company stand to gain far more overall than I would lose?

i'm not sure why a customer should be offended by social media marketing. it would be one thing if you spammed your customers. but when you create an "opt-in" form of marketing and you don't abuse it, nobody should be getting any more information than they asked for. the other key is to make sure what you send out has some value and isn't, well, junk. i don't think you have to post things constantly to have value, but you should post information regularly.

Kip wrote:What do you think should be the social media strategy and what should it involve/not involve with regard to your company.

It would depend on company strategy. What is your target demographic, how do you want your merchandise, in this case your watches, to be perceived. The approach would be wastly different if you are targeting people wanting watches as a cheapish fashion accessory, or people willing to pay serious money for mechanical watches.
Check what the competition is doing successfully.

One thing to think about is that "social" media needs to be regularly updated. If you are going to do it then you have to commit to it. There is nothing worse than viewing a 'twitter feed/blog page/whatever else' and see that it hasn't been updated for weeks or months. Twitter can be very powerful and can reach a huge audience - just look at all the important news information that is on there first.

Surely it can only be a good thing if CW finds a bigger market share? It will increase revenue and will allow them to invest more in the business and develop even more great watches.

Isn't that sort of the point.....for companies to reach the "humans"?

It seems that several watch companies, as well as many other corporations, are now using Facebook to provide exposure for their products.

Would this not be a good thing regardless of how we feel of the media itself?

The confusion for me is that companies are willing to spend money on marketing which appears to be fairly uncontrolled, untargetted and unstructured - kind of like a scatter gun approach.

If you go back in time, this is how things started. Then we got 'clever' marketing which identified target groups/demographics and the like. At this point, we believed that focussed messages would be more successful.

Now we've gone full circle again.

Throughout all of this, in my opinion the most successful companies have had two core attributes - firstly, great products and secondly, a consistent message.

The product is the most important. With great product, you can achieve a convincing message.

The rest is just fluff.

I don't disagree Richard, but I have to think that social media is a way to reach/expand a new audience for very little investment compared to the cost of more targeted advertising and marketing, despite the shotgun approach.

Social media, it seems to me, is something that can take off and generate publicity, albeit good/bad, on its own if somehow handled correctly. If this is done in conjunction with the core values, how can it be bad?

downer wrote:The confusion for me is that companies are willing to spend money on marketing which appears to be fairly uncontrolled, untargetted and unstructured - kind of like a scatter gun approach.

If you go back in time, this is how things started. Then we got 'clever' marketing which identified target groups/demographics and the like. At this point, we believed that focussed messages would be more successful.

Now we've gone full circle again.

Throughout all of this, in my opinion the most successful companies have had two core attributes - firstly, great products and secondly, a consistent message.

The product is the most important. With great product, you can achieve a convincing message.

The rest is just fluff.

I so agree with you. Very succinctly put.

Kip wrote:I don't disagree Richard, but I have to think that social media is a way to reach/expand a new audience for very little investment compared to the cost of more targeted advertising and marketing, despite the shotgun approach.

Social media, it seems to me, is something that can take off and generate publicity, albeit good/bad, on its own if somehow handled correctly. If this is done in conjunction with the core values, how can it be bad?

I don't think it can be bad, but I also doubt it will be overly effective, and either way, the impact will be impossible to measure.

I just think it is the 'great product' and 'consistent message' that is important.

JAG wrote:#C600IPY my owner just took a shower and took me off his wrist

Good one

Like it or not social media is an essential marketing tool for businesses; how much they use it depends on the business but it requires some investment in time and money.

Social media would go well with the Chr. Ward rebrand and the ladies watches.

By the way don't Chr. Ward pay a company to come up with great (sarcasm) marketing? Shouldn't you be asking them?

CW need to be more proactive on Social Media. The difficulty with having a Facebook page and not using it, is that the Social Media savvy will regard you as sloppy. I cannot think of a quality brand that doesn't use Facebook so why an Internet-only brand or its supporters should think that CW doesn't have to or shouldn't is beyond me. Not everyone is a fan of FB or social media more generally OR for that matter blogging. But SOMEBODY will appreciate CW involvement so why wouldn't a brand want to use all channels? Some forum members may not be fans BUT are any of us so marketing-savvy that we would advise CW that 800 million global users of FB have ALL got it wrong. My tuppence worth for CW is embrace it and embrace it quickly.

Of course there's...
http://www.facebook.com/omega
http://www.facebook.com/Breitling
http://www.facebook.com/Hamiltonwatch
... and many, many others, so perhaps CWL needs to be in these forms of communication in order to follow the herd.

Mind you, Facebook could learn something from CWL's web designers.

Loddonite wrote:Of course there's...
http://www.facebook.com/omega
http://www.facebook.com/Breitling
http://www.facebook.com/Hamiltonwatch
... and many, many others, so perhaps CWL needs to be in these forms of communication in order to follow the herd.

Mind you, Facebook could learn something from CWL's web designers.

Here is a link to the CW Facebook page.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Christoph ... 5610416390