Tim Ho Thoughts, ideas, and a bit of everything

Holiday marketing has been changing in these few years due to the ridiculous growth of social media. Marketers these days can no longer rely on the old marketing mix. According to a survey conducted by Shop.org, 47.1% of the online retailers plan to increase the use of social media for Christmas 2009. How do marketers use social media as a tool to gain most out of this shopping season?

I did a quick example here by using Apple products:

I use targeted keywords to find online conversations about Christmas gift ideas. Result was that from social networks, forums and blogs, people have been talking about iPod Touch the most, then iPhone 3Gs.
Therefore, most people can be either buying iPod Touch, or thinking about buying it for Christmas.

Marketers can use this data to build strategies to boost sales of iPod Touch, or create special promotions for iPod shuffle, really depends on the goals/ resources of an organization.

Related posts:

1. Marketers, do you watch “Kitchen Nightmares”?
2. Hong Kong: More female than male use Internet in 2009?
3. “Indirect” Direct Marketing