"Carpe Cerevisi!" with Pintley

I'm a big fan of beer. Wait, let me rephrase - I'm a big fan of well crafted beer. I may have alluded to this before, but there's no harm in a reminder. This week in class, we covered industry-specific social networks, so imagine my delight to find an existing platform like "Pintley!" If you've never heard of it, it's a peer-to-peer network about craft beer.

The Boston-based beer website came to fruition in 2008 after co-founder Tim Noetzel spent time abroad immersed in European beer culture. The platform went public in 2010, targeting the beer lovers of the world by providing a space for users to write reviews and share recommendations. Pintley is also a tool of discovery - learning your tastes, suggesting other beers you'll love, and evolving your taste profile as you supply more information from your drinking experience. 

My Pintley Profile and Beer Recommendations

It's simplistic in appearance and only provides a numerical description. This is especially helpful for those who know little about varying brewing styles, hops, and tasting notes. Pintley clearly relays to consumers, "This, according to a lot of people, tastes good." 

Seems easy enough, right? What's more, its registration process is just as basic. You sign up with an email address or link it to your Facebook profile, log in and start rating beers. Pintley is an important platform mainly for its efforts to change how beer is marketed and sold, by leveraging both small craft brewers, established breweries, and well-known companies like Samuel Adams. On this platform, smaller brands are on the same playing field with big companies. The market share is spread more evenly. 

Overall, I think Pintley has their work cut out for them. There are a number of other similar beer sites and applications with information on local breweries that provide opportunities for discovery, recommendations and social features. On the other hand, Pintley is different from the rest, with its ambitious goal of creating "brand evangelists" who assist brewers build word-of-mouth marketing campaigns. I have a good feeling that if they can get more paying brewing companies to participate, there's a better chance of them standing out from the other players.  

We also talked about proximity marketing this week, and how marketers promote brands to highly targeted, on-location audiences via mobile device. The Pintley staff found a way to cater to consumers demanding products tailored to their tastes with a mobile application. Within the element of proximity marketing, they bring their online network to real-world settings by inviting users to rare beer events, like craft beer launch parties and free local tastings in major cities across the country. Their efforts create a win-win-win for the drinker, brewer, and bar. 

Pintley is much more than a consumer app. It's a content community. Its mobile application features a newsfeed, a Notes section where users can comment on beers and see what friends think, and a forum in which users can discuss any beer-related topic. While the app creates the possibility of consumers helping craft brewers with future product development, shareable social sites like Facebook and Twitter, work well alongside this platform with its integrated marketing communications efforts.

Read More

Direction of Communication and Scope

Direction of Communication

In discussing the aspect of direction of communication, classic marketing is unidirectional. This means information and brand awareness is spread actively from the company to a passive audience. I would say classic marketing was appropriate when the messages highlighted the most commonly demanded goods to the largest common denominator of consumers via mass media like TV, radio, newspaper, and billboards. Marketers targeted specific demographics and reached a large audience in doing so. To rely solely on unidirectional marketing in this day and age, though, would be a marketing fail.

 

On the other hand, the new, social way of marketing can expect the best benefits of promotion and exchange of dialogue. Both the company and customers actively talk and listen to one another. There is a plethora of pros to social marketing, but here are two I deem most important:

1. It's where the brand's consumers are - the average person spends at least 23 minutes per day on Facebook, giving the brand optimized ad placement based on their preferences and psychographics.

2. Social media presents an opportunity for a degree of personalization, thus creating involvement and relevance, not just awareness (See Mass Marketing vs. Personalization infographic here on Social Media Today).

 

 

Campaigns have proven to be more effective when they include multimedia and multi-channels. With participatory channels, influence becomes more powerful than reach (Young, 2010). Classic marketing is better than social when traditional marketing channels are able to create especially memorable and emotional occasions with a brand and integrate tools of social media to create dialogue. This works well because it has the potential to lead to viral marketing. Direction of communication refers to social marketing channels like Facebook and Twitter where consumers spend most of their time and are prone to sharing "likes" of particular brands, organizations, and customer service experiences with their network of friends and fans. 

 

Scope

Classic marketing and social media marketing both want to gain market share for a product or service. The classic approach is smaller in scope, only because the bigger the audience you want to reach, the more it costs. Classic marketing allows for delivering to large audiences, measured by demographics that advertisers bought. This is noted with the product or service sale, but engagement ends there. In this way, I believe classic to be better than social.

 

Social is accessible by anyone regardless of their location. The downfall is you lose targeting. According to the reading from Mitch Joel's The World is Changing has Changed, the average post from a Facebook brand page only reaches 16% of its fans. So trying to reach a certain demographic may prove to be difficult.

 

A social media marketing campaign can be just as successful as its classic counterpart if it has knowledge of demographics from their users. Without it, there's only opportunity for the brand to target by content behavior and response (Young, 2010). Social marketing allows for more interaction with the brand since the consumer is digitally-enabled and connected. The consumers' appetite for information and entertainment grows exponentially, as the focus now shifts from markets and products to the brand's customers, their relationships and interaction over time. Although sharing an opinion of the product or service becomes as easy as a like or re-tweet button, the social model demands much more than what's normally included in marketing.

 

A brand's marketing campaign will retain its competitive edge by raising awareness via classic marketing and then engaging their audience through their social media platforms.

 

Source:

Bennett, S. (2013, December 1). Facebook Vs Twitter: Revenue, Users, Average Time Spent, Key Mobile Data [STATS]. - AllTwitter.
http://www.mediabistro.com/alltwitter/facebook-vs-twitter-data-stats_b51335

Jones, M. (2013, May 13). Mass Marketing vs One-to-One Personalization [INFOGRAPHIC]. RSS.
http://socialmediatoday.com/martinjones/1452891/mass-marketing-vs-one-one-personalization-infographic

Stone, J. J. (2014, February 26). Social Media vs. Classic Marketing - We teach you how to start your own business in 60 days. We teach you how to start your own business in 60 days.
http://60daymba.com/social-media-vs-classic-marketing/

Young, A. (2010). Brand Media Strategy: Integrated Communications Planning in the Digital Era. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Read More