Structuring Your Digital Marketing Channels

Last week Marketing Sherpa, with sponsorship by Marketo, presented a webinar on inbound marketing architecture. I found it thoughtful and informative and I’d encourage you to download the presentation.

That said, the webinar dealt only with the three inbound channels. Blogs and social media seem unarguable in that list. Some, like HubSpot, call content marketing the third channel, while Marketing Sherpa’s research used organic search as the third channel. When you stop to think about it, content marketing requires optimization of both content and website for organic search, so it adds up to three channels, whichever descriptors you use.



They identify blogs and the website as conversion points. The actual conversion/sale will take place on the website, but blogs can be highly influential in the later stages of the customer purchase process. A recent study suggests this is especially true of women consumers. In this sense, both the website and the corporate blog are conversion points. For that matter, so are other influential (trusted) blogs.

 

As long as you limit yourself to inbound channels, the Marketing Sherpa architecture hits the nail squarely on the head. The trouble is, and in spite of the well documented continuing shift to inbound channels, there are other channels to be considered as marketers identify and integrate their communications mix.

I’ve crafted my own version, sticking with the hub and spoke structure, which I think is essential. For one thing, it answers a question I’m frequently asked, “Can I get along with just a Facebook page?” Absolutely not. It’s one of the spokes, not a hub.

My version includes email, although it doesn’t show up in any of these cost of lead charts. Email isn’t a good lead generator, but it does have influence in the latter stages of the purchase process. It is also reasonable to hypothesize that email and text messaging are going to be more important as mobile continues its growth. Likewise, even though many are more expensive and less effective than digital channels, real world channels still figure into the process.

All that  is a reminder of the complexity of the process. It’s a matrix, with one dimension being customer channel preferences and another being channel effectiveness, given the state in the purchase process.

So I herald the trend to inbound marketing, even as marketers:

1. Need to learn to use it well
2. Must remember that outbound and physical world channels still have a role.

Social Media Marketing Isn't a Popularity Contest

For social media marketers it must be about monetizing their social media activities. Part of the inspiration for this approach comes from Wilson Kerr who made a stellar presentation last week on the subject of monetizing mobile media—more about that later. David Carter’s presentation the week before, based on the Social Funnel ebook from Awareness, laid the groundwork. In my blog post I quoted Jeremiah Owyang as saying not to show engagement metrics to C-level executives; they are interested in business results, not a popularity contest.

I watch social media marketers in all markets struggle with this issue. So I decided to pick out one case study each from B2B, B2C and NP. I’ve intentionally chosen small, not terribly well known companies. It may sound easy for Dell to make sales with its Twitter program and Taco Bell to sell chalupas and burritos with coupons distributed on its Facebook page, although it’s less easy than it sounds. But my point is that small companies, even individuals, can do important things in social media if they keep their eyes on the prize—monetizing their activities.

The biggest monetization opportunity in B2B is far and away the generation of qualified leads. Breaking Point is a cyber security firm who says its products “harden the resiliency of vulnerable converged networks and train cyber warriors” to prevent and deter cyber attacks. Are your eyes glazing over already? It’s incredibly important but at first glance it may not seem to be a candidate for social media marketing. Using a corporate blog, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts and a revamped PR strategy, they joined in the online conversation, staking out a position as a respected industry source. After 6 months, 75% of their leads were coming from the inbound traffic generated by these social media activities. Their blog is well organized—a video, a list of topics, the appropriate social media chicklets, and posts that only an IT security professional could love. That is their target audience, after all! Read the details and 5 other excellent B2B case studies in the HubSpot/Marketing Sherpa presentation.

Depending on your age and gender, you may be equally unmoved by the funky shoes that Canadian B2C entrepreneur John Fluevog sells online and from a growing number of retail stores in Canada and the US. According to Australian marketer Ginger, whose blog is credited with this captivating image, Fluevog reported that sales increased 40% in 2009, the year of their entry into social media marketing. If you search the corporate name, John Fluevog Boots & Shoes Ltd., you’ll find an array of social media activities including reviews and a lot of local marketing using Google’s Places. If you look at their Facebook wall, you see a few administrator posts but mostly customers showing off their shoes and loving them. On their Twitter page they cross promote offers seen on the Facebook page and actively respond to customer questions and issues. This nicely integrated social media program (see the links on their wall page) takes time, but not a lot of money. It’s within reach of any small business.

The social media space can be productive for non-profit (NP) marketers also. Dave Morin’s birthday wish is a great story of what a single individual can accomplish. His wish on October 14, 2010 was to raise $10,000 for the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital by the end of the year. He actually raised the $10k within 24 hours! The fundraising continues, with almost $14K to date and mention of a new initiative focusing on children’s health worldwide. In the interest of full disclosure, Dave Morin is hardly a novice. He was a Facebook executive and headed their Causes fund-raising function, which now operates separately. One can assume that he had a large network of Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections with whom to share his message. If you look at the list of contributors, though, most of the $14K has come from small donors. As you can see on the Causes page the largest donor is $1K and I only saw two of those. Reaching many small, often new, donors is the power of online fundraising. I look forward to the day when I see a case history of a NP who used traditional methods to grow social media small donors to traditional large donors and bequests. That should happen over time for NP organizations who harness the power of social media marketing.

There it is—a three market perspective on monetizing social media marketing. Questions, comments and links to other case studies welcome!


Article first published in condensed form as Social Media Marketing Isn't a Popularity Contest on Technorati.

BeKnown to Promote Your Career

Last night I had the pleasure—and fun—of being part of the Networking in the Social Age event hosted by Monster’s new BeKnown Network. It was moderated by Matt Cooney, Social Media Manager at Monster and, I’m happy to note, my former student. Joining me on the panel was a group of young, talented, social media pros: Ryan Paugh, Chief of Staff of the Young Entrepreneur Council, Brent Turner, CTO and VP Product Development at MIT’s Technology Review and Kristen Haley, Social Media Producer for Beantown Social. All of them are experienced in several aspects of the social media world and deeply engaged in it. The panel discussion was live-streamed on the BeKnown Network and I expect it to be archived there soon.


The discussion provided a lot of interesting insights. The most compelling one for me was the sense that, while the large social networks have their place, smaller and more intimate communities may be the wave of the future. Whether it’s a closed Facebook page, or a professional group on LinkedIn—open or closed—or whether it’s a community on any platform of people who are passionate about a subject, these smaller communities have a lot to offer both personally and professionally. @profstrahler Tweeted during the live stream and he pointed out some of the other high points. Thanks, Doug!


It was a good event, the first of many by this new network, I hope. I’ve always worked to help my students prepare for their job searches and career development; having a resource like BeKnown should be a real asset. Take a look at their mission statement on the sidebar of the event notice. Expanding the notion of job search to one of career management that helps people improve their lives is a great vision. The tight integration of the network with Facebook is going to provide a lot of opportunity. The BeKnown landing page has a great video introduction; it is an interesting perspective on merging your personal and professional communications and still controlling messages so they are directed to only the people you want to receive them. Of course they have a mobile app so you can do this on the go, and do it in many languages. Fascinating concept!

I look forward to watching this develop and seeing ways it can benefit today’s students and young professionals. Good going!

Do You Believe Zuckerberg's Law of Social Sharing?

It’s being equated to Moore’s Law of early Internet days; the now-validated prediction that computing power will double every two years as costs fall by half. I don’t know whether it meets that standard, but here’s what Zuckerberg originally said in 2008:

“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before,” he said. “That means that people are using Facebook, and the applications and the ecosystem, more and more.”

My attention was drawn to this by a recent infographic on a Bloomberg Business Week site—more about that in a minute. The infographic is too large to reproduce easily, but it has some interesting factoids. Of course, the growth numbers are based on the Z. prediction; it’s not clear whether they used actual Facebook numbers to validate them. Whether the sharing figures are accurate (and who could tell with precision anyway??) the phenomenon is real. I found some other interesting things while looking around.

Aol & Nielsen content sharing study

View more presentations from Mitya Voskresensky

The consumer behavior behind sharing is important. There is a recent study by Nielsen for AOL that is worth paging through. Among other things, it finds that email is still the most-used sharing tool although social networks, especially Facebook, are gaining fast. Most Internet users share but they share different content on different networks. That’s interesting and important to the marketer who wants to have her content shared.

The difficulty of doing that was brought home to me by this chart. It is the multichannel options for the ShareThis multichannel bar. I use the simple icon on this site and it’s reliable and it produces interesting analytics. They’ve also added a real-time widget that other bloggers or website owners might enjoy. There are a lot of options here: how does the marketer select the best ones? Start with any analytics you can get. You might want to test different options of a multichannel sharing bar, although you don’t want to confuse your visitors. Finally, you might resort to marketing research among key users or the most avid sharers on your site. You have to understand the behavior of your own target audience.

Marketers also struggle every day with issues of keeping up with their discipline, given the torrent of content. I ran into two interesting services. The infographic I referred to was created by Summify, a personal service that creates a daily summary of news from the user’s social networks and sends it by email, to the desktop, or by mobile. The infographic was posted on a BBW beta site called Business Exchange. It describes itself as a social sharing site, with items “filtered by like-minded professionals.” Those professionals can view, comment, and suggest new topics. I don’t see a distribution tool, but if there’s not one, it will probably come.

These services represent two different and interesting approaches to taming the torrent of social sharing. They fall short, however, of actual content curation, adding expert judgement to the equation, as practiced by Huffington Post and others.

It’s a big world, full of content. The job of marketers is to make their content entertaining, relevant, and worthy of social sharing. A big job indeed!

Social Media Welcomes a New Country

I intended to shut down the blog for the summer with a summary of some of the recent changes on Facebook. This is more important and it’s an interesting commentary on the power of the media for good.

If you missed the reporting in October when George Clooney and John Prendergrast of the Enough Project were lobbying in Washington, D.C., you need to watch this video. If you saw the reporting then, it is worth watching again to see that what they, and others, were trying to do apparently worked. Clooney’s comments about the prevention of suffering without spending money on an avoidable crisis are powerful.

Watch the video here.

The visible outcome is the establishment of the new country, South Sudan, this Saturday, July 9. There is a welcome ceremony planned on social media. You can like the Facebook page, or Tweet using the hashtag #Welcome193 (South Sudan will be the 193rd nation to join the United Nations). Or you are welcome to post a link or part or all of this blog post on your own blog. But do something, and as you do, think about the power of social media.

The blog will start up again sometime in September, roughly coinciding with the beginning of the Social Media Marketing course at Harvard Extension for the fall semester.

Have a wonderful summer!

A Real World Social Media Spin-Off

This post is from the Tweetstream of @mattrhodes from the UK agency Fresh Networks. He and his colleagues come up with things I would not be aware of otherwise, and I'm grateful!

I'm also an Anglophile and a huge fan of the National Trust and all they do, so their take off on Farmville definitely caught my attention.

What a clever concept! The idea of letting people become sort of virtual farmers and have control over this farm is fascinating. What a good way to get people involved in the production of their food and the protection of the land on which it's grown. This is also a different take on Community Sponsored Agriculture and a really engaging one. Plus who can resist a cow who looks this sweet?

All in all, it's something I'm going to enjoy following and hope some of my friends will get some good ideas.

Is This the Ultimate Local Marketing?

This email crossed my desk on Wednesday. I looked at it as possible spam, then I realized that the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce legitimately had my email address, so I read it. I had never heard of Try It Local, but it didn’t take me long to find it on the web.

It’s an interesting concept. This program is specifically designed for Chambers of Commerce who want to bring business to their towns. Local marketing programs are ideal for the small businesses that make up the core of chamber memberships around the country, so that seemed reasonable.

The deal of the week floated into my inbox today. It’s for a well-regarded local restaurant, although I must admit that I found the size of the deal underwhelming. Many of the features are similar to Groupon (Boston page), Gowalla and other location-based services. The main difference is that there does not seem to be a minimum number of purchasers to establish the deal. I’ve gone back to the offer several times while writing this and people are buying it in numbers that seem reasonable for this resort area in the off season.

So this platform may not be as social as some of the others, but that also seems to suit the small business environment. There are, however, social elements. The ad for what I think is a chamber of commerce publication shows “likes.” It has icons that link to the restaurant’s web page and Facebook page. It has no easy-to-use Share icons, which I think is an oversight.

But all in all, it seems well done. It appears to me to be the ultimate local marketing (for now at least) because of the program sponsorl. Chambers of commerce know the small businesses in their area and should have the trust needed to get small businesses to participate. That may not be too much of an issue. At one promotion per week, I wonder if there will be a queue lining up to participate in what seems to be a business-friendly promotion , run by a local entity not an unknown firm somewhere. That seems likely!

And that may be the main downside. Are consumers becoming so accustomed to these deals that they won’t buy anything unless there is a promotion attached to it? It happened with cars. It could happen with local businesses also. And is that in any way different from the sales and promotions they currently offer? I’m not sure. What I am pretty sure of is that this email-based program costs them less than advertising in their local newspaper. The one that loses here is the newspaper.

Try It Local points out that the program offers benefits to the chambers also, so it appears to be a win-win for them and the local businesses. For the moment, it is the most truly local deal program that I know of. Do you know of others that have a similar model?

Why Leaders Must Engage with Social Media

Tomorrow I'm giving a presentation on social media at the Women & Power Conference Reunion at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. While I'm convinced that not all C-level executives need to be Twitter junkies, I am absolutely convinced that they need to be acquainted with social media.

There are two basic reasons:

1. There may be external events that are picked up on social media and require attention.
2. There may be internal activities that are good and need to be encouraged or potentially damaging and need to be restrained or monitored.

How does the relevant C-level executive know what to do (or not do) if she does not understand social media?

W&P Reunion.pptx

View more presentations from diy-marketing

This presentation was a lot of fun to develop. I hope you have equal fun reading it.

Even more, what are your thoughts on this important, but undercovered, subject?

Location-Based Marketing 2--Check-In Programs

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have both come and gone. Black Friday filled the stores—from midnight on!*!—with shoppers who often used Black Friday websites to locate deals before they braved the stores. Cyber Monday online sales were over $1 billion—the most ever for a single shopping day!

I want to focus in on just the check-in programs as a new and powerful shopper stimulant. There are the “old-fashioned” apps that let you compare prices in the retail store. Apps like TGI Black Friday (DealCatcher the other 364 days of the year!) aggregate coupons and deals from all over. Shoppers find them valuable, but the real action is in check-in campaigns run by individual retailers. Analytics by Mashable show Target far in the lead in terms of number of check-ins. I got there too late to check out the Black Friday tab, but the Weekly Ad page shows the variety of channels for accessing weekly specials and the opportunities for check-in promotions that include contests, give-aways and special deals.

One of the big winners this holiday season has been Sports Authority, mentioned in my earlier post as having a $500 gift card give-away on Black Friday. As this quote suggests, the company considered it a great success—and it didn’t even make the Mashable list of the top 10!

"We saw a lift anywhere from 5X to 20X for the number of check-ins," said Clay Cowan, VP of e-commerce for the Denver-based retail chain. "Every metric of engagement that we tracked went through the roof. Whether it was Twitter posting, Foursquare check-ins, Facebook friend adds and comments...we saw increases."
On Foursquare, the brand had around 400 followers before the campaign and now has almost 4,500. . .”

Three important points. First, Sports Authority has been testing Foursquare promotions since early this year. They had a process in place. Second, they’re not resting on their laurels. They now have a 21 Days of Deals promotion in place. The box from their home page shows strong integration with Facebook. It’s easy to guess that they may have other Foursquare promotions that will be promoted on their Facebook page. That’s the third issue; marketers need to use something timely like Facebook or Twitter (or both) to publicize these short-term deals beyond their mobile app subscribers. This material is too transient for web site promotion unless you’re running a big campaign announced far in advance.

That’s one strategic was of looking at location-based promotions—the specific campaign. There is another—the integration with long-term loyalty programs. According to Fast Company Safeway is testing a partnership program with Pepsi in its California Vons stores. It’s built on the existing loyalty card, the important difference from most of the campaign-type programs we are seeing. When the shopper checks in with her Vons card, she can receive instant rewards (coupons at check-out) on PepsiCo products. It’s possible to set the program up so swiping the card checks the shopper in and rewards are “shouted out” on Foursquare. It’s a bit hard to find the Foursquare page on the Vons site, suggesting local promotion of this test program.

Does this predict that the future of the loyalty card is on our cell phones as suggested by the New York Times? It’s worth considering!

Before you get too excited, though, keep the recent Pew research in mind. A report published in early November says that only 4% of Americans use location-based services at this point. Ok, the target audience is relatively small at this point. The good news is that this market is in its early days and thoughtful marketers have time to test and refine strategies. This space is exploding, though; I’d recommend starting right away.

And as you do it consider an even more far-reaching possibility: The future of convergence may be the cell phone. That will stand conventional marketing on its head once again!

Can We Define Social Media Marketing?

There’s still a lot of confusion among marketers and managers in general about what social media marketing really involves. We all know that some businesses (and non-profits) are seeing great successes in social media while others are merely nibbling around the edges, and still others remain firmly skeptical.

With that in mind the other day, I searched for a definition of SMM. I didn’t find many and what I did find was a bit disturbing. It boils down to the fact that most of the definitions were platform oriented. Everyone who “gets” social media marketing strategy understands that platform should be the last decision when planning a campaign, not the first.

So, in my usual fearless fashion, I developed my own. Here it is. I’d welcome all comments and suggestions!

Social media marketing is business use of selected social media channels to understand customers and to engage them in communication and collaboration in ways that lead to the achievement of ultimate marketing and business goals.

Agree?

Give Members Their Own ROI

Isaac Hazard, Director of Strategic Consulting at Mzinga, talked about “Member ROI” in my class a couple of weeks ago. It’s an important concept. If people, customers or otherwise, are going to spend time on your Facebook page, a corporate blog—wherever you build your community—you’ve got to give them something of value. These members of your community are giving you their time—and hopefully their trust. What are you giving them in return for those two valuable, and scarce, commodities?

In some ways the concept of Member ROI is a basic tenant of advertising. Good advertisers don’t write headlines and copy about the product. They work to understand the benefits that people want from the product. That often takes marketing research, hopefully done so you can design the benefits into your product. If you do that, the task of your advertising staff is easy; they talk about the benefits your product delivers to the target customer, and your advertising works. Product-focused advertising doesn’t work; benefits-focused advertising does.

Fast forward to the age of the Internet and social media. Online display advertising follows exactly the same principle; focus on your target customer and the benefits he/she wants, not on your product. That’s a relatively easy transition.

The transition to social media isn’t so easy. All of a sudden marketing has become conversational and marketers aren’t very good at that. The headline in Smart Brief called them “lousy conversationalists.” According to Jason Fall, “A marketer, in the public’s eyes, is a salesman. Our audience is predisposed to not trust us.” That’s true, but it’s only part of the story.

Sage Lewis nails it with his headline, “No One Cares About Your Products.” His argument, and he has a great pizza story, is that what people really care about is what other people--not marketers--say about your pizza. There are a lot of good comments; the article is well worth reading.

The power of customer reviews is undeniable in the social media era. But it’s still not the entire story. Marketers have to listen, participate and even seed conversations as they build online communities. And to the extent that marketers are used to talking about their products, even the benefits of those products, that is the hard transition.

The conversational marketer cannot focus on product. She has to focus on what customers want to know, what they need to understand, in the product or service space. As the marketer becomes more knowledgeable and skilled, there will be opportunities to explain how the product meets needs. That, however, is on a subsequent date—definitely not the first one!

Download the Mzinga white paper, “Social Marketing & Online Communities: Getting Started” and explore other resources on the site. It’s a good role model, making a major effort to provide value in various media channels and to encourage conversation. However only the individual marketer, can develop the conversational perspective; it takes time and practice!

You have already recognized that this is largely talking about acquisition marketing. When you are talking about CRM, the focus changes to helping customers successfully use your product, your service. But the focus is still on customer needs, not on product bells and whistles!

Whether it’s acquisition or retention, the social environment is about talking to people you want to be your friend, fan, member, whatever. Keep them coming back. Your time to sell will come—or maybe your happy pizza customers will do it for you! It’s all about providing real value in the exchange; that’s the way to make them loyal friends!

It's Not HAVING Platforms; It's USING Them Well!

Robert Collins retweeted the link to the 2010 Global Social Media Check-Up survey by Burton-Marsteller. Thanks, Bob! It has interesting data on how companies in the Fortune Global 100 are using social media. I took the data from the short version of the report.


Many of them do have Twitter (notice it’s first!) as well as Facebook, YouTube and their own corporate blogs. When they break it down by geography, it’s not surprising that US firms have more of everything (my sense is that the US is far ahead in the business use of social media) except YouTube. About as many European companies have YouTube accounts as US companies—interesting!



There’s interesting activity data on all 4 platforms, but the one on corporate blogs really caught my attention. The data from Europe and Asia seems reasonable. If you make posts, you generally get some comments, especially if your blogs provide information of value to your customers. Why so few posts in the US and so many comments? It has to do with the labeling in the chart. Here’s what Burton-Marsteller says:

For example, only 11% of U.S. corporate blogs had posts in the past month, but 90% of the blogs with posts had comments from stakeholders (Graph 7). So, while some corporate blogs have fallen into attrition, corporate blogs that are active and have a strong purpose and following provide a useful two-way dialogue for organizations and their stakeholders.

Ok, that makes sense. For me, actually it makes excellent sense. It’s about the maturity of the social media effort in the US and in the user corporations. Today’s eMarketer headline makes the same point: Longtime Twitter Users Most Vocal.

There’s also the issue of using any of the platforms well. Take blogging. I was recently asked why a corporate blog wasn’t getting much traffic. They were hoping to use it for acquisition as well as for customer support and retention, although I’m not sure they had stated it that precisely. So I asked if they had registered the blog on Technorati, at least. Not sure—he’d check. Do they use good tags? “No, we don’t take time to tag.” I tried to politely say that’s a BIG DUH! How can you take time to write a blog post and not take a few extra seconds to tag??? I also suggested that they use alt tags on their images. It’s a product-oriented blog, and having the search engines able to search images would be a big help.

As I’ve said so many times before, just having a corporate platform isn’t the answer. You have to use it, to monitor it, and to respond to deserving entries.

One more thing about the report. The short version has sidebars on social media activity in various countries. That’s a must read if you operate in any of these countries! Check it out; here’s the link to the full report.

Let me end with their 9-step checkup. None of this is new to readers of this blog, but it’s a good reminder. The check-up list is:

1. Monitor Your Own — And Competitors — Social Media Presence.
2. Get Top Management “Buy In.”
3. Develop a Social Media Strategy
4. Define and Publish a Social Media Policy.
5. Develop Internal Structure.
6. Contribute to the Community.
7. Participate in Good Times and in Bad. That’s worth some extra commentary. Here’s some of what the report says:

There will always be some situations where it is advisable to avoid participating, but generally speaking, negative content provides an opportunity for a company to share their point of view or set the record straight. Organizations must develop a process in advance that defines how and when they will respond to negative content or misinformation posted in social media.

8. Be Prepared to Respond in Real Time.
9. Measure the Impact of Social Media Engagement.

Good advice all!!!

Keeping Up With Your Social Networks

It’s an issue that faces even those of us who are only active in a few social networks. I can’t really imagine how difficult it must be for people who seriously use multiple networks, especially if it’s for business purposes.

One of my students saw the post about Yoono on CNET. She, of course, posted the link in our class community--good going, Zoe! I haven’t found a good Twitter app for my Yahoo! page that displays exactly the way I want it, so I was interested.

I finally got around to checking it out. I downloaded the Firefox app and it happily showed up, on my Yahoo! opening page (image 1), my Gmail page (image 2), and wherever I go from them (image 3)--which is essentially everywhere! It has a good search bar; that’s how I found the Washington Post article. I’d be perfectly happy with just having it on my opening page but I can’t find any settings that let me control the placement. It does let me control which social networks I include, and I choose just Facebook and Twitter. I actually would like to include two Facebook and two Twitter accounts; don’t know whether I can do that.


One thing that I find amusing. It shoves my Gmail box over so far that the AdWords ads are lost. When I’m composing, I see links to the AdWords ads, but not the ads themselves. I have to guess that Google won’t put up with this if Yoono becomes widely used!

I agree with some of the issues in the Washington Post article; especially about the amount of real estate it occupies on a page. You can minimize it easily (that minimizes it everywhere, not just on the one page) or you can drag to make the space smaller. In that case, it only shows one or two posts, and I don’t like that. So it does take up space; otherwise it seems to work fine. I searched, made a Tweet, checked out my Facebook page—all worked fine. It’s very busy this morning. Many of the people I follow are at South by Southwest and they are socializing away!

The only other thing I’d point out is that Yoono comes from a firm that appears to be French, with a cosmopolitan management team. Occasionally you run into information you might like to read, but it’s in French (and my French is not up to it!). I see their blog in English, so I don’t have any complaints about the amount of support they provide. And, oh yes, it’s a free app.

This is a good example of the social media space maturing. I’ve tried other aggregation sites, and I like this better than others because I can get what I want on my existing home page. I don’t want to lose the news feeds that are there.

My personal suggestions would be choice of formats. I’d like to be able to open a page that shows a half-dozen or so social networks in essentially the same format that my news and blog feeds show up on the Yahoo! opening page. Maybe that’s just familiarity speaking. Yoonoo works, and I think it’s something I’m going to keep around.

Pepsi's Initial Foray Into Cause-Related Social Media

One of my social media students wrote a post about the Pepsi Refresh program a few days ago. It’s on our (closed) Ning community, an interesting story itself. Mark’s post gave me an additional perspective on the program that Pepsi announced in lieu of Super Bowl advertising this year. Thanks, Mark!

It turns out there was a precursor to the Refresh program. It was a $100,000 Green Effect contest which appears to have been a partnership between Sun Chips and National Geographic.

One of the winners was Hingham High School, where Mark’s son is a student. They received $20,000 to build a greenhouse to support a multidisciplinary program at the school. I can’t embed the entry video, but you can see that they’ve got a great ‘spokesperson.’ Both the entry video and the finalist video are linked on this page. The producer is a high school student—watch them both to see what kids can accomplish and the wonderful adults behind this idea.

The marketing point is that Pepsi did a trial program on a much smaller scale before launching the $20,000,000 Pepsi Refresh program. I can’t see any major differences in the two, but I’m willing to bet that Pepsi learned things from the Sun Chips program that made them more confident in dumping Super Bowl TV advertising and launching the social media effort. Is there any way that doesn’t make sense? The program is currently active and appears to be enjoying success. There are over 1 thousand project submissions in just the ecology section this month. You still have time to vote on your choice in any one of the six categories.

Congratulations to Hingham High School (they have a vibrant web site—figures!) for having this idea and the energy to see it through. They have great teachers, great high school kids, and I’m sure they’re going to have a great greenhouse and a lot of worthwhile programs. Be sure you watch the two videos.

I think Mark summed it up well:

So, what do you think about buying your way into the social media conversation? Had you heard about either project? So far, I've not purchased a Sunchip and a Pepsi -- but then again -- I did just send a message to 40 people about it!

You can argue about how Pepsi is going to measure the success of the program. But then, we’ve been arguing for years about how to measure the success of branding efforts in traditional media! Can a program like this—a program that gets consumers actively engaged in supporting an idea for branded funding—can it be any less successful?





P.S. Here are the happy winners on the green house site.

Marketers Prep for Super Bowl XLIV

The Friday before THE BIG GAME always brings bloggers out in force. Just as in the game itself, there are two opposing forces. One is the group who care about the football game; the other is the group who care about the ads. I count myself a member of the latter!

So here’s an update to what I wrote earlier about Super Bowl ads and Pepsi substituting a social media program. Coke has 3 ads; I thought one of them was going to be pushing their Expedition 206 program. Apparently not; it appears they are trying to get more fans on their Facebook page—as if they need them. There is apparently going to be a Living Positively theme to the ads and the charitable tie-in. Read about Coke's social media program (including the video about how Coke’s top-ranking page came about) on another recent post.

Animals seem to be big again this year. What’s even more interesting is the number of teaser ads that have been released (see some of them here)—that’s part of the traditional practice of building buzz before the game itself. Ads themselves will certainly be posted on YouTube and other sites during and after the game.

Read all about it in Ad Age’s special section. The one that interested me most was the article about marketers moving to ‘platforms’ and Garrick Schmitt describes some interesting ones. I prefer the explanation that Harry Gold of Overdrive Interactive gave in my class last night. It’s all the channels marketers are using to reach out to audiences—and more. Your blog has to integrate with your Facebook which has to interact with your Twitter—and on and on. These interconnected channels are the ways marketers “broadcast” these days; they are just on the web, not on the tube. Except maybe on Super Bowl day!

Not a football fan? I’m sure you’ll find counter programming. Ad Age had an article about the Puppy Bowl on Animal Planet. I checked some of the other usual suspects and didn’t find anything interesting—perhaps they don’t have a schedule that’s as easily searchable as Animal Planet’s! Note that the Subaru ad for the Puppy Bowl also has a charitable tie in. That’s social media in action also!

In other words, it’s a BIG DAY—for football, and also for social media. Enjoy!

Designing Customer Experience for Social Media

Having recently written a post about the Forrester Customer Experience rankings it’s no surprise that I paid attention when I noticed an article about Deborah Schultz of the Altimeter Group and her recent presentation on social media experience. It’s embedded below and it’s worth paging through. Her carton from the final slide represents the essence of the message.

There’s not a huge body of writing about customer experience on social networks like there is on designing for good experience on websites. Some of it is transferable, but most of it is not. Website usability is more about the mechanics; social media is about communication and human experience.

With that in mind, I found one recurring piece of advice; social media is about telling your story. For social media marketers that means it’s about telling the story of the brand. Actually, it’s even more about getting your customers to tell their stories; that helps to create a strong emotional tie with the brand.

Writing on the HBS blog, Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path has four useful rules. He says:

1. Only hire people who embody your brand. That’s the basic rule for customer service and it applies here. Further, it means you will have to do less policing of what your employees say in social media because they will have the brand story straight.
2. If you do need policies, keep them lightweight and human. Merholz admits that not all companies can be a Zappos and allow employees to participate in social media without restraint. He points to Intel’s social media guidelines as a good example. I also like Fresh Networks guidelines for writing a social media policy.
3. Experiment, prototype, pilot — try stuff out. There aren’t a lot of tactical guidelines when you get right down to the nitty gritty holding a conversation with your own customers. You must experiment, track and understand what works and what does not.
4. It's a conversation, which means you both listen and take part. Amen!

Good customer experience is like the facetious definition of pornography: “you know it when you see it.” That’s important; it’s part of the humanity of social media. Take your own good customer experiences and translate them into interaction with your customers. It’s also the Golden Rule; treat them as you want to be treated.

Understanding good customer experience is important because we certainly don’t know how to measure it. It is more than customer satisfaction, so don’t let that well-understood metric get in the way of trying to understand the experience of your customers at each of your brand touchpoints. That will take qualitative understanding as well as wise choice of metrics.

I’ll fall back on my long-time favorite and suggest you read Bruce Tempkin’s 6 Laws of Customer Experience.The bad news is that designing good customer experience is more art than science. The good news is that each one of us has potential to be an artist—we are, after all—all customers!

It's the People Stupid

View more presentations from deb schultz.

Does Search or Social Media Have More Impact?

Of course there’s a secondary question—impact on what? For several days I’ve been thinking about two specific questions:

1. Does search marketing or social media drive more traffic to websites? I’m going to limit it to PPC and not include SE0.
2. Does PPC or social media have more impact on sales?

Both sound pretty simple and straightforward, right? If we believe that, we’ve forgotten all we know about the interconnectedness of media. Nevertheless, starting out with two specific questions led me to some interesting data.

Going backwards, we also know that question two is not as simple as phrased; there is immediate impact on sales and delayed impact. From early studies we know that web exposure, which was mostly display advertising at that time, had some immediate conversion impact but also had longer-term impact. In other words, it often took more than one visit for a consumer to decide to make a purchase. Think about your own behavior—does that make sense? We also learned that conversions occurred offline in retail stores after consumers had visited websites. That was a pretty common phenomenon in the early days, “research on line buy offline.” Again, we’ve all probably done that. Are we more likely to just go ahead and buy online today; probably depends on a number of things.

The same is true of the online vs. offline conversion issue. These 2005 data seem pretty straightforward. More people convert offline. comScore went on to say that they “analyzed the time lag between consumers’ initial searches and subsequent purchases made in the same categories during November and December of 2005. . .more than half (56%) of consumers’ online holiday buying actually happened in subsequent internet sessions, clearly demonstrating the strong latent impact of search.”

I’ve been looking for a replication of this study ever since. I’ve never found one. Does that mean that the latent impact of search has become part of Internet marketing conventional wisdom and no one sees the need? I did find a marketer’s analysis of a single campaign in 2009. He found that initial Google results were faster to come in than Yahoo’s, but that 31% of all results came in after his (approximately 1 month) campaign was over. I’ll take that as confirmation until someone shows me otherwise.

Ok, so here’s what I found in terms of traffic. The answer to question 1 looks pretty simple, right? Search is the winner by a huge margin. But look at what else eMarketer said (newsletter, October 22, 2009):

According to research by ad network Chitika, social sites Facebook and Digg are more likely to send returning traffic your way than search engines such as Yahoo!, Google and Bing. More than one-fifth of users referred to a site by Facebook visited at least four times in the course of a week. Less than 12% of Google-referred visitors were as loyal.

It doesn’t say that the loyal users were more likely to buy, but would you agree that the likelihood of a purchase goes up with repeat visits? It does seem likely; how much is unanswered, at least in any recent research I could find.
The most interesting data I found is this 2007 study of the influence of newspaper advertising on web traffic. 44% of people who saw an ad did additional research; 67% of them did their research online; and 31% went to a search engine first.

But strong brands matter; in 2009 Nielsen found that 61% of the holiday traffic of retail web sites came from direct visits, not search. A Nielsen spokesman said:

the fact that such a high percentage of people go directly to retail sites and even those that search generally have a pretty clear intent as to which website they'd like to go to -- it makes a compelling argument that brand and past experiences [with a marketer] matter an awful lot and will be far more significant determinants of success than any customer acquisition strategy that they're going to engage in."

That’s really interesting. Two things strike me. First, that’s holiday shopping data for retailers and it may be different for purchases during the rest of the year. Second, all marketers have to do customer acquisition, so the question as to whether social media or search is best for acquisition still matters. Each and every marketer has to answer that by looking at quality vs. quality of initial referrals and the persistence of customers who were acquired in various channels—in other words by Customer Lifetime Value. At the same time, it’s unlikely that one acquisition channel will ever be enough; the question is allocation of resources.

Question 2 one more time--does search or social media have more impact on sales? Here’s data from the current Razorfish Fluent Report. Offline friends are most trusted when making a purchase—WOM again and always. TV was also trusted by these respondents, then “online” activities of several types appear. Search is down at the bottom as far as trust when making a purchase is concerned.

The issue is not straightforward in the sense that either search or social media is “best.” However, there seems to be a pretty clear picture in these data. Search brings more people to your site; social media gives them more trusted information on which to base their purchases. It’s not either/or.

Several times while I was looking for data I came across a good piece of advice. Marketers must measure the impact of various media at each stage in the conversion funnel. It changes from “just looking for information” to “deciding to buy something” and in between. That’s the real message; marketers must use all the tools in their arsenal—wisely!