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Archived in Next month everyone will be able to start playing around with Google’s snazzy new app: Google Wave. It’s already being billed as the future of email and revolutionising the way we collaborate on the web, as the hype machine pumps out superlatives.
So is the hype justified? Does Google Wave truly offer marketers new opportunities for starting a real dialogue with customers? Or will it be another niche tool few will use outside the web savvy crowd?
What is Google Wave?
Imagine the love child of email and instant messaging and you’re not far away from picturing Google Wave.
Instead of emails you send ‘waves’, to which recipients can reply, edit your message or chat in real time just as you would on messenger. Members of the wave can also drag and drop photos, videos and links into the conversation, as well as go back and edit earlier posts.
The ability to build a group conversation in this way obviously offers great potential for collaborating on projects. But does Google Wave offer anything new to marketers?
Is Google Wave the future of email?
You’ll often hear email marketing being described as an ‘ongoing dialogue with customers’ or a ‘one-to-one conversation’. But marketing emails often seem more like infomercial broadcasts than a two way dialogue.
Well, Google Wave could change all that with its welding together of email and instant messaging. And it has the potential to offer email marketers the level of engagement they’ve been striving for.
If Google Wave becomes a success, instead of asking website visitors for an email address you’ll ask them to join your wave. As well as receiving your latest promotional offers, members of your wave will be able to ask questions in real time and interact with other members in an open format.
This level of interactivity means marketing messages will have to be about more than just encouraging clicks to buy your products. They will, in fact, be more like sitting around a table having a chat with your customers, than making a speech to a captive audience.
But how can you have 100s of conversations at once?
Google Wave offers great potential for greater customer engagement with your brand. But it also presents a challenge: how can you manage conversations with 100s or 1000s of your customers at once?
Well, if Google Wave does prove to be the success its creators hope, and starts to replace email, marketers will have to find a way of using what could be the ultimate conversational marketing tool.
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BDA (Buckingham Design Associates) blog – real people giving real opinions, and a complete lack of agency waffle. BDA deliver an exciting blend of design and creative marketing for the Oxford, Milton Keynes, Northampton and London region.
August 21st, 2009 at 1:23 pm
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