Tumbling into the Marketing Mix

 

Tum­blr, a social blog­ging plat­form, launched in 2007. My first blog post on Tum­blr was Novem­ber 25, 2009. I began using the blog­ging plat­form sim­ply to learn and grad­u­ally built a theme around my per­sonal blog; how­ever, I only knew a few other friends using the plat­form at the time.

Three years later, my per­sonal blog theme has changed, but the more impor­tant fact is that the plat­form has grown by leaps and bounds. eMar­keter and The Nielsen Com­pany have recently pub­lished reports stat­ing that Tum­blr expe­ri­enced 183% growth in just one year (May 2010 — May 2011). Accord­ing to Mash­able, Tum­blr is now a more estab­lished blog­ging site than Word­Press in num­ber of blogs hosted (29 mil­lion blogs as of Sep­tem­ber 2011).

I recently gath­ered together Engauge’s Dig­i­tal Inno­va­tion Group to dis­cuss and brain­storm the growth and use of Tum­blr for indi­vid­u­als as well as brands. We have been div­ing deep into the world of Tum­blr and even cre­ated a pri­vate Tum­blr blog to house all of our research.

Tum­blr is chang­ing the way peo­ple blog by adding social shara­bil­ity within an easy-to-use web and mobile interface. The social fea­tures of Tum­blr make blog­gers more aware of their audi­ence. Blog­gers have been able to track URL vis­its on many other blog­ging plat­form; how­ever, Tum­blr specif­i­cally noti­fies users when other users fol­low, reblog, like or com­ment on their posts.

Tum­blr is not only mak­ing a huge impact on the blog world, but the plat­form is also an impor­tant piece of the over­all mar­ket­ing mix.

I was thrilled to see promi­nent web sources such as Read­WriteWeb and Mash­able recently imple­ment a Tum­blr share but­ton on their articles.

 

Social shar­ing inte­gra­tion is an impor­tant ele­ment in the over­all mar­ket­ing mix because it allows indi­vid­u­als to eas­ily share con­tent to the platform(s) of their choice. I know that I am more likely to share con­tent if it means I sim­ply click a few buttons.

Try it out on with this blog. I updated the social shar­ing with a Tum­blr but­ton (see the top and bot­tom of this post).

 

So how is Tum­blr chang­ing the mar­ket­ing mix?

Tum­blr is another plat­form to take into con­sid­er­a­tion when mar­ket­ing a brand or build­ing a campaign.

Should your brand jump on Tum­blr just because “every­one else is doing it?”

Not nec­es­sar­ily. Plat­forms and tools, such as Tum­blr, are not the core of mar­ket­ing. The core of mar­ket­ing is con­sumers — focus­ing on indi­vid­u­als and how to best com­mu­ni­ca­tion with them. Mar­keters need to research their tar­get audience(s) and goals before jump on any plat­form includ­ing Tumblr.

It is very impor­tant to back away from the fancy tools and focus on strat­egy. You can use all the fancy tools in the world, but you will not get any­where with­out thought­ful strategy.

Below are a few recent exam­ples of brands using Tumblr:

• Tar­get high­lighted by Busi­ness 2 Community 
• Oscar de la Renta high­lighted by Mash­able
• 60 Brands Using Tum­blr by Social Fresh