Harry Gold, CEO of Overdrive Interactive, gave a great guest lecture in my SMM class last week. The wide-ranging presentation was based on his Advanced Social Media Marketing seminar. I can’t do justice to the entire presentation, but there was one part that particularly struck me.
I’ve seen the Facebook Like button on web pages and thought, “Isn’t that cute?” Well it turns out that it’s a lot more than cute; it essentially makes a Facebook fan page out of every product to which it’s attached.
A recent study of brand-related Facebook behavior for Constant Contact by Chadwick Martin Bailey has stunning data. Here are some key factoids:
• 78% of people who like brands like fewer than 10, so they are engaged with those brands.
• They mostly read brands’ posts and newsfeeds.
• 51% of fans are more likely to buy the brand
• 56% are more likely to recommend the brand to a friend after becoming a fan.
As you might expect, 59% don’t interact with brands on the big social nets but 56% of people under 35 do, and it’s primarily on Facebook. Don’t ignore older demographics; they may be more loyal and more likely to purchase. Check it out for yourself.
The Facebook Like button for web pages has been around since March 2010 but some quick research says that many sites like retailers who target teens and young adults aren’t yet taking advantage of it. Levis is a brand that gets it. Here’s what you need to know.
First, you don’t put the Like button on a home page or a page with multiple product thumbnails. I suppose you could, but it would be meaningless because there are multiple items of content and the “likes” would be meaningless. Encourage viewers to like your brand; that is valuable as the CMB data shows. In the case of individual Like buttons, you want them to like a single product like the skinny jeans pictured. Now that jean product has its own fan page!
When a visitor likes the product is when the action begins. As Harry’s illustration shows, the user activity shows up on the Facebook News Feed of her friends, with detailed information about the product and a link back to the product detail page. That’s already great visibility, but there’s more! Now the marketer can easily message the likers. That goes to their News Feeds, thereby reaching their friends. That is huge! Inside Facebook says,
Millions of websites and social games have implemented Facebook’s Like button social plugin, yet relatively few are taking advantage of the capability to publish news feed stories to users that click buttons that represent real-world objects. That creates a lot of capacity to reach fans and friends of fans that marketers like Levis are beginning to use.
Surprise, surprise—there’s a privacy issue also! The tool allows Facebook to collect web browsing data for its likers; this WSJ article has a link to all the articles in their What They Know series, which is excellent. The collection of user data has come to the attention of the authorities in Germany where it has been declared illegal in one German state. Wonder who will be right about privacy concerns about Facebook in the end—Zuckerberg or Germany?
In case you were wondering, Google is following a similar path with its +1 button. That adds another tool, which shows up in a number of places including search rankings for friends identified on the user’s Google profile. Apparently if you want to it to go to one of your Google+ circles, you have to share it manually—for now at least.
Marketers may need to exercise some caution in communicating with likers. In particular, all the data seems to agree that you shouldn’t overwhelm even your best friends with posts. Make them relevant and control the frequency.
This is fascinating stuff! Many thanks to Harry Gold for bringing it to my attention!
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Discovering the Facebook Like Button
Thursday, March 17, 2011
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:
- There may be external events that are picked up on social media and require attention.
- There may be internal activities that are good and need to be encouraged or potentially damaging and need to be restrained or monitored.
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?
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Stores are Popping Up on Facebook
I ran across the concept of pop-up stores not long ago while I was looking at the subject of viral events. The idea is to take a vacant retail location for a brief time and to create an immersive brand experience there. This shot is from an October event held by Proctor & Gamble in New York City as the first event in an ongoing campaign. Here’s a link to the full side show from the first one. These events are held in the real world, but they are reaching out to social media influentials like Andrea of the MommyPR blog and Patty of the NYC Girl at Heart blog for that event. Another great example of integrating social media into the marketing communications mix!
If that wasn’t interesting enough, I soon ran across the mention of pop-up stores on Facebook. E-commerce on Facebook is still quite exploratory, although if you do a search you might (or might not) be surprised at how many marketing services companies would like to help you. These articles (1, 2) from Mashable discuss some of the issues and opportunities.
Pop-up stores are only one way to explore, but since the concept implies something temporary, it might be a good one. So I went looking. Here are two shots, one from Rhino records, which makes clear that its store will be there only for awhile and another from Canadian retailer Roots, which has a Valentine theme, whatever that implies. Note that in the Rhino store you can just go in and shop; didn't try to purchase. In order to shop the Roots store, you have to Like them to shop or
to access the contest--probably why they have almost 35,000 fans!
By the time you follow the links, these stores may have gone away. You should find other examples if you search ‘facebook pop up store.’ They seem to be set up using one of several apps that are available for the purpose, not Facebook functionality.
I have no insights as to the success of either venture. However, it seems to be a use of Facebook that’s worth watching!
Monday, January 31, 2011
Social Media Lines Up for Super Bowl 2011
For those of us who live our lives in the world of social media, this Super Bowl stat is astonishing: E-Trade was the only advertiser among the 2009 and 2010 Super Bowl rosters to even add a tease to its Facebook or Twitter presence at the close of the ad, according to a study by Professors Chuck Tomkovick and Rama Yelkur quoted in Ad Age. Not so this year; in that article on Monday Ad Age headlines, “From Hashtags to Newsfeeds to Online Spots, Big Game Advertisers Tap Web 2.0 to Extend Buy.” (See also the Super Bowl coverage on their sidebar.)
We all know what the marketing game is. A 30-second Super Bowl ad has hovered around $3m for the past several years. That’s a lot for even the usual suspects like Anheuser-Busch, Pepsi, and Intel. The companies go all out to “create buzz,” with increasing intensity during this, the week before the big game. They prolong it as much as possible with post-game critiques that rival that of the sports programming itself. Getting the most mileage out of those expensive TV ads by leveraging other media made sense in years past. It still does; it’s just that social media has been added to the mix.
Coors Light is using mobile to hype its advertising using a Snap Tag on its in-store packaging. They’ve been testing this technology since spring and find it ready for the big game. It’s all about a mobile phone, a special icon, text messaging—and, of course, the ability to enter a contest and win a big prize. This article gives a good overview of how it works.
On the other hand, some brands are using the event to their advantage without actually buying an ad.
Papa John’s, who advertised last year, is taking a different
approach this year. It’s giving away pizzas on game day. Of course, you have to register on their Facebook page to be eligible! But if what they told CNBC holds true and they spend about half a million dollars to put pizzas into 100,000 homes, is that a better expenditure than $3m for a TV ad? You call that one! And very important, how many fans will they add to the 1,501,026 they have now?Bing is running a National Tailgating Championship that will culminate in Dallas this week. The first prize is “the coveted Golden Grill.” Oh, yeh? Actually, the whole thing is great fun with lots of snarky commentary like a set of contest guidelines (linked to the main contest site) full of legalese that essentially says that the judges will decide on the winner. Good for Microsoft and the Bing marketers for not taking themselves too seriously!
And most of all that master of Internet buzz The Old Spice Guy. He’s back and he’s watching the buzz about it on the web. One Super Fan will receive an early copy of the ad to be debuted the day after the Super Bowl. Oh, wow! That’s so delightfully arrogant that I’m watching for it. Stay tuned!
And I’m sure I’ve missed some other interesting or creative—or not—approaches. What else should we look for on Sunday?
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Stronger Evidence that Facebook Ads Work
I’ve commented before that my post last February about Facebook advertising effectiveness, “Do Facebook Ads Work?,” is by far the most visited post on this blog and it continues to draw traffic. I followed with one on targeting that I think is important, though it hasn’t been as popular. Every time I do some research on Facebook ads I find something that I didn’t previously understand. This time it’s “social context.” I had seen it, but I didn’t really understand its source or its value.
What started me thinking about it was recent articles on the growth in Facebook advertising. Tuesday’s eMarketer newsletter pointed to huge growth in Facebook ad revenue.
Commentary in AdAge that pointed out that, “what is surprising is the majority of revenue, 60% or $1.12 billion, was earned from smaller companies in 2010, those more likely to be using self-serve tools rather than work through a media agency. That's greater than the $740 million coming from major marketers like Coke, P&G or Match.com.” In November, ComScore figures had revealed that Facebook was now the largest online display advertising publisher, with over 23% share.
This chart from the same study shows that both types of ads with social content are more effective in recall, awareness and intent. Personally, that doesn’t surprise me because I tend to find myself paying attention to the names first and only secondarily to what they liked! Isn’t it human nature that when we see names of people we know, we pay attention? The study is brief, so page through it if you need more detail.So how do you get more people to like your brand so they can appear in these ads? (Facebook’s privacy policy seems to give implicit permission for your name to be used when you like the brand. There is supposed to be a way to disable this feature, but I don’t know anyone who knows how to do it.) That makes the strategy issue for marketers getting more people to like their brand in the first place. And the best advice seems to be the simplest—just ask them! That’s what Virgin America is doing on the ads above. Going a step further, you can create something called a “reveal tab.” That allows you to make a members-only offer—to ask people to like your brand in order to get an incentive of some kind. These are two simple strategies that can add to your fan numbers.
And the point of all this is that the more fans you have, the more likely they are to show up as social context in your ads and as items on their friends news feed pages. That gives your ads the aura of being recommended by a friend of the viewer. And it has a high probability of making your ad more effective!
And so it goes in the wonderful world of Facebook!
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Things to Watch for in Social Media Marketing in 2011
I’ve been watching prognostications about social media in 2011 and, since 2010 is almost over, I’m going to weigh in now. One of the best things I’ve seen is this discussion of interactive from eMarketer. It’s broader than social and well worth paging through . I’ve adapted the first three of their trends and added a perspective of my own. So here goes—and your comments and opinions are welcome!
If you need proof of the wisespread use of apps, consider these two recent eMarketer charts. Retail shoppers (Dec. 15) use them to find bargains. B2B purchasers (Dec. 29) are using them to find information, with only the oldest group being a real hold-out. The same report says that 27% of this sample feels comfortable making a business purchase on a mobile device.
Footnote: a lot of us talked about 2010 being “the year of mobile.” In a sense it was, but that’s not because of the devices themselves. It’s because apps made them so useful to so many people in so many places.
• 2011 will be about content, not advertising. We’re coming to call it “content marketing” and its aim is to engage and entertain as well as to inform. The writer adds that we need “curation” to help customers separate the signals from the noise. Lee Rainey of the Pew Foundation says that all this content has “created a Bermuda Triangle: Markets are fractured, the marketplace is roiled, metrics haven't kept pace, and there's too much noise, so it's easier for things to get lost in the shuffle.” He has more interesting things to say about the megaphone that is the Internet in this report of a recent speech. Content curation can provide powerful assistance to customers in an era in which we’re all inundated with information.
Writing in the eMarketer newsletter Geoff Ramsey ( December 2, 2010) has 5 useful questions for those of us who create content:
• Is the content unique?
• Is the content useful?
• Is the content well executed?
• Is the content fun?
• Does the content make good use of the channel in which it appears (e.g., social, mobile, video)?
I would add, “Can the content be repurposed for other brand channels?” There’s never enough good content! The eMarketer webinar points out that “Consumers engage seamlessly with content across multiple platforms.” That’s a huge challenge for marketers—the right content in all the places the target audience would like to find it.
• 2011 will also be about location, which I’ve recently written about (1, 2). Venture capitalist Summet Jain belives that location and social commerce will be the driving forces in the year to come and Foresquare will be the driving platform. Take a minute to understand this quote:
Part of the new evolution of mobile commerce will be new developments in near field communications, which involves the use of proximity sensors to guide mobile users through stores and malls. These proximity sensors, said Jain, will be deployed more widely among small businesses in the coming year to allow users to locate specific items down to the very aisle and shelf.
That sounds good, but I wonder if small businesses will be that quick to mimic deployment of this technology in large malls. Small businesses have a lot to cope with just keeping up with their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts!
My Perspective – Converging Trends
When two powerful trends converge, the impact changes the marketing landscape. Here are my two nominations for that powerful force.
• The Ubiquity of Mobile and Use of Social Media. That goes back to apps everywhere on all sorts of mobile devices. When marketers combine that with the growing—almost complete—reliance of younger adults on digital media it creates a phenomenon that cannot be ignored. This is a good presentation on upscale younger adults. Their use of digital, even for content like newspapers, is fascinating and predictive, I think.
This is only my selection of the issues I see as being most important in social media marketing in 2011. It's not comprehensive, but I hope it’s thought provoking!
Monday, November 15, 2010
Targeting Your Facebook Ads
Far and away the most popular post on this blog in recent weeks has been one written back in February, “Do Facebook Ads Work?” The answer was a strong “yes,” and research since then, including interesting findings on ad formats by Nielsen, continue to confirm that. A recent article in Bloomberg Business Week recounts the interesting story of the Nike “Write the Future” ad that was huge during the World Cup and goes on to talk about the importance of Facebook friends and the “like” function to Facebook advertisers.
To demonstrate, I wrote a hypothetical ad on Facebook; that’s Step 1. Step 2 shows the main aspects of the targeting process. The advertiser can target by location (essential; no one needs to reach all 500 million Facebook fans!) and by demographics—age and gender only. So far, not different from traditional media advertising, and it works like Google AdWords as far as the setup is concerned.
Then comes the difference! On Facebook, the advertiser can target by “Likes & Interests.” This shows Facebook’s own description of a user profile. The implication seems to be that this is all data that the user has provided on the profile page. Not exactly. Every time the user “Likes” a friend’s post new data is created. What else? It’s not entirely clear exactly what/how other data provided by users like location data is collected and used. Prof. Eben Moglen of Columbia University Law
School says Facebook is “spying for free all the time.” You can read a summary of a recent speech in which he lays out the privacy concerns, but that still begs the question of exactly where the marketing data comes from.
The richness of the data is not in question, however. Nor is the usefulness of the Estimated Reach tool. Each time the potential advertiser adjusts any one of the targeting filters, the ER changes, so the exact effect of each descriptor is known. That data alone can tell you a lot about potential market size in a given region—no cost except expenditure of your time. Farther down on the targeting page, not captured in the graphic above, is the ability to target to your page (or groups) own members and, separately to their friends. Using the ER tool on your own page can give you fascinating insights into the composition of your fan base. Do you see a new market segment representing an opportunity you were not even aware of? Or do you see that you don’t have as many people from your target segment as you wish and need to run a campaign to get more friends.
All this creates a rich stew of research and advertising opportunities. You can access all this information from the Advertising text link at the bottom of your Facebook page, whether you are an individual user or have a business page.
The final piece of good news is that you don’t even have to buy an ad to experiment with the options. Why don’t you give it a spin???
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Add to Your Circle of Friends!
My friends at Overdrive Interactive have a new white paper that details ways of making connections in social media. They have 100 suggestions; I’ve picked out what I consider the Top Ten Ways to Make Friends—all free; all things even the smallest business can do. Here’s the list with some commentary and some combinations:
1.BE VAIN. Facebook now allows vanity URL’s. If you don’t have one yet, set one. It’s a lot easier to promote your page if you have a short, relevant URL that people can remember.
2.FACEBOOK TAB IT. Add an “Invite Friends” tab on your Facebook page that allows your friends to invite their own friends to become a friend of your Facebook page. Add the tab, then draw attention to it through status updates and tweets.
3.TXT 2 B FRIENDZ: Create a campaign that encourages people to join your Facebook page or Twitter profile by text messaging. If possible, respond back to messages with a coupon code or information about your company. Text “like overdriveinteractive” to 32665 to check it out. Give people an incentive to become your friend, then continue to reward them for loyalty.
4.USE CROSS-PROMOTIONS. Promote your Facebook profile on Twitter and promote your Twitter profile on your Facebook page. Tweet about your Facebook page and use status updates to talk about your Twitter page. Cross promote all your social networks, in fact! When you post something on YouTube or SlideShare, post a notice on your Facebook page and Tweet it. Be sure your company blog has chiclets or other call-outs to all your social channels!
5.SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. Optimize your Facebook and Twitter pages for SEO. Make a list of high value key words to use opportunistically in your content. Yes the engines are indexing sourced content. Yes, Facebook and Twitter get indexed. It’s hard to overestimate the contribution of high value key words in all your social channels! Study your referrals data, use keyword tools, and see what words are drawing traffic to the sites of your competitors on Compete.com.
6.REACH OUT TO BLOGGERS. The blogosphere is great place to promote your Facebook and Twitter communities. Find key bloggers that talk about your brand, company, or product category and then reach out to them to become your friend. Tell them the value of your content and tell them to send things to you to tweet and post.
7.WRAP IT. If you sell packaged goods, make sure your packaging promotes your social channels. If people like you enough to buy your product, give them the chance to connect with you in the places where they want to connect. Shopping bags provide great display space. And be sure your main channels—blog, Facebook and Twitter, probably—are on your business card and your email template!
8.MORE THAN JUST DISCOUNTS. If you send [mail] out coupons, include your Facebook and Twitter addresses on them. For more encouragement, include a statement about how social connections will receive more exclusive discounts on the social channels. Do the same in your email newsletters.
9.FOR FRIENDS ONLY. Have friends-only content on your Facebook page. If users want to access the content, they need to become your friend. Give them incentives by including coupons, discounts or sweepstakes entries. List your job openings there; why should anyone apply for a job who isn’t your friend?
10.Above All: SILENCE IS NOT GOLDEN. In social media, you never want to be quiet. Keep sharing information that your friends want to hear: tips, resources, contests, discounts, information, etc. The more you share content they care about, the more they will share your content and brand with their friends.
Among many other useful tips, the white paper points out that you should never waste friends. Don’t just close down a campaign-specific Facebook page. “Reskin” it. That one is likely to require professional programming assistance, but it’s worth it to recycle friends instead of having to reacquire them!
Notice that this is all about integrating your channels to get the maximum value out of your social media efforts. How are you doing on that score? There’s a new app, a Social Page Evaluator from Vitrue, discussed on Smart Blog and in more detail on Vitrue’s company blog that will put a value on your Facebook and Twitter pages.
So find out how well you’re doing in social media at the moment, think about where you need to go, and read the entire Overdrive white paper to get more valuable suggestions!
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Do Your Community Members Deserve a Badge?
Social media badges are not a brand-new phenomenon. I have an impressively interactive badge on the right sidebar from the Pickens Plan community. I downloaded it because I like the community and I like the message of the badge, not because it does me any particular good. I was interested to see a new application by the Huffington Post over the weekend.
In doing research, however, I came across careless use of the 
term. There are quite a few writers and sites that use “badge” to identify the “this site is a member of Facebook” app like this one that you can get from many social networks. The purpose of these apps is to link you through to your page on the social network. That makes them a chiclet (note proper spelling!), not a badge as HuffPost, the Pickens Plan and others are using the term.
According to my friends at Overdrive Interactive, who have an excellent white paper on the use of chiclets, “Chiclets enable a user to quickly share web content by automatically posting articles, photos, video, and other content to their blog (WordPress, Blogger, TypePad), public bookmark page (Digg, Delicious), or social profile (Facebook, Twitter).” You can download the white paper from the Overdrive home page.
Badges have a different, and perhaps a more personal, use. CNET likens them to the efforts many of us made in Boy or Girl Scouts to collect merit badges for various accomplishments.
According to CNET, the current craze for badges started with Foresquare and the competition of its users to earn status in the community. The HuffPost application rewards its most engaged users by making their comments more visible. There are various levels of activity, which they outline on a FAQs page. For example, a member can become “Moderator” by flagging objectionable commentary on the site. As Bryan Person pointed out last week, sites are either overlooking or falling behind in the important activity of moderation. Encouraging help from their members is an excellent approach. Rewarding them in a visible way for their help seems equally desirable.
Not incidentally, the application for a badge results in the applicant linking their Facebook or Twitter account to HuffPost. The publication is cagey about how they will or won’t use that info, but the FAQs do point out that “the shift in privacy is very minimal.” Not sure exactly what that means, but it worries me about as much as people who complain that their privacy has been violated on other social networks. Social networks aren’t a place for those who zealously guard their privacy!
HuffPost is clear that its current effort is intended to increase member engagement with the site. Why can’t the concept be extended in a way that rewards members for desired behavior. That makes it like a CRM loyalty program. Why is that not a good idea? The Tesco Clubcard is the classic example of a vibrant online loyalty program, but I don’t know any firm that’s using a “proud member of” type badge as a tie-in with its loyalty program.
Maybe we’re thinking too much about social media as an acquisition tool and not enough about its potential value as a CRM tool. What are your thoughts?
Thursday, April 29, 2010
How to Make Your Inbound Marketing Work
Ed Note: We've had many great speakers in this spring's Social Media Marketing course. I've blogged about some of their messages. Jeff Dunn, who in his other life is the Web Coordinator at Harvard Law School, did such a good job with this one I asked permission to post a shortened version. You can see the full post on his blog.
Dharmesh Shah (@dharmesh, VentureBeat, LinkedIn, Amazon) is a whirlwind speaker with an obvious love for what he does. Despite Dharmesh’s claim that he is not a gifted speaker or marketer, his presentation in our social media marketing class was fantastic. His body language may have shown that he was a bit uncomfortable (holding an arm behind his back while staring at the ground) but his language and presentation zoomed along at a frenetic pace. I found myself scribbling keywords and shorthand notes just to keep up with the great wisdom that was being imparted upon me and the rest of the class. A self-proclaimed “hackpreneur,” Dharmesh (I use his first name because I feel comfortable doing so after his friendly presentation) says he has earned this title because he stays up late at night (often until 2am or so) writing code and wearing his Chief Technology Officer hat for HubSpot. He is also the co-founder of HubSpot, thus the entrepreneur part of his “hackpreneur” title.
“Everyone and every business should blog.”
Dharmesh had some great nuggets of information that rang true as I thought about them after the presentation. I was far too busy trying to scribble down these gems and didn’t have enough time to digest them. When discussing who should blog, it was clear who Dharmesh thinks should take part. I agree with the caveat that everyone should be willing to put in the effort to have a relatively steady stream of useful content. Thanks to the latest web technologies, you can start a blog and have it filled with gossip and pictures in under a few minutes. (Visit wordpress.com to see how!)
“Talk about the industry’s issues, not your solution.”
I really love this one. There are too many websites out there devoted to their own personal fix for their specific industry’s problems. If you want to really have a site that gets traction by engaging your audience in something they can also participate in. You’re not going to get a very engaged audience if you offer your solution for something without giving others a chance to offer their solution as well.
“Non-profits should be benefiting from causes, not for-profits!”
This is a sad-but-true quote we really enjoyed. It’s hard to deny that companies like Starbucks have really had a bigger impact on raising funds for charities and causes. I understand that this is because companies typically have more infrastructure (financial and personnel) to make these types of campaigns actually work, but the Internet is supposedly leveling the playing field for everyone. Let’s hope causes and charities can come up with some more interactive and viral (we hate that term viral but it applies here) campaigns that generate some real interest.
“Measure what works, what doesn’t, then double down.”
This one’s pretty self-explanatory and deserves to be put in super duper bold letters here. Being successful in marketing, especially social media marketing, is all about taking risks and figuring out what works. When you don’t do both of these things, you’re destined for failure. While it’s very hard to measure what works, there are ways. In fact, HubSpot has so many Graders like TwitterGrader and WebsiteGrader, they’re already on the bleeding edge of figuring out how to measure what works and what does not.
“Remove the friction in marketing.”
Making it easy for someone to actually purchase stuff, sign up for something, or just take part in any way is something that would seem like a no brainer. Sadly, it’s not. Many places spend all their time and effort raising interest in their website…only to find users get confused and leave the site, never to return.
“Kittens always work.”
Dharmesh’s presentation featured slides with interesting images and very little text on the screen. This is my favorite style of creating presentations since it allows the audience to focus on what you’re saying, not reading tiny print on a screen. No one remembers the fine print anyway. Dharmesh’s presentation had a picture of a kitten and it got a bit of laughter…to which Dharmesh replied that kittens always work. Everyone seems to love them and have the same reaction to them.
“Even normal people use Twitter now.”
In its infancy (just a couple years ago), Twitter was a way for a small number of people to micro-blog. It has slowly been able to begin shedding this reputation after it got embraced by celebrities and Facebook users. Facebook went through a similar reputation issue but has now actually been embraced by middle-aged women (another point brought up by Dharmesh). So when asked if its worth using Twitter, you can simply reply using Dharmesh’s words: even normal people use Twitter. He even has the proof over at HubSpot. Dharmesh says that Twitter has been delivering “real dollars into the door.”
“It’s not about the number of followers. It’s about having people who listen. I’d rather have 50 active people than 5,000 deaf followers.”
I absolutely agree. A couple years ago, I started the @Harvard_Law Twitter account (it has a 99.8 Twitter Grader ranking) with a very small but attentive audience. The non-academic world seemed to be clamoring for any news about what’s happening inside the walls of Harvard. The follower count for the account was not enormous, still isn’t, but it’s obtained a very attentive and vocal following who are happy to @mention, DM, or retweet any question or update posted on the account. Dharmesh has a great point and it’s not an easy task to cultivate a high quality following. It happens over time. It took nearly a year and a half to develop a devoted fan base for me.
“Tweet and retweet from 1pm to 5pm”
HubSpot is all about data. They have examined the best times to tweet something and have it noticed. That time period is any weekday from 1pm to 5pm. That’s why this post was published around 2pm on a Monday, one of the busiest times on the Internet. People seem to be bored at work or just back from lunch, not ready to embrace the week.
“The more you tweet about yourself, the less others will.”
If Ashton Kutcher weren’t a celebrity, would anyone be following him? Dharmesh makes a great point that, from a marketing perspective, it’s all about engaging the audience. It’s hard to feel engaged when someone is tweeting about something you can’t relate to. If, instead, that person were writing about their passion for a broader subject, it’s more likely to engage followers. I personally think people need to stick with their preferred style of tweeting since followers will notice if your style has changed. Just ask @ComcastCares, the account who people revolted against when the main administrator went on vacation and put someone else in charge!
“When you’re getting star talent, you’re renting not buying.”
Dharmesh understands the world of obtaining the best and brightest for his business. There are so many options in the world of technology that it is very hard to make someone’s job everything they could ever want. Dharmesh elaborated on this point, saying that “nothing is forever” and that it’s important to keep in mind who owns what when it comes to employees. For example, does HubSpot own an employee’s personal Twitter account? Of course not. Was it used to promote HubSpot? Probably. It’s a tricky situation and not something to ignore.
“Google Buzz was a data play to head off Facebook.”
It really doesn’t matter if Google Buzz overtakes Facebook. It will probably never happen. The reason Google introduced Buzz was so they could get at the tremendous amount of data currently hidden behind Facebook’s server walls. This way, Google can get a taste of what their users are doing socially and not just on GMail, Docs, etc.
Conclusion
I enjoyed Dharmesh’s presentation and was so amped afterwards that I posted a job listing I would have loved to apply to. I am happily employed and doing this blog in my spare time (not much these days!). If you’re interested in working for someone like Dharmesh, check out the posting. In the meantime, there is a lot of info out there about Dharmesh, HubSpot, and social media. Happy surfing!
Monday, April 5, 2010
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!!!
Monday, March 15, 2010
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.
Friday, March 5, 2010
Using Facebook to Drive Traffic
My firm assumption is that marketers are using Facebook to accomplish something, and hopefully they are clear about precisely what that is—good objectives! I’ve had several questions lately that have caused me to think about how marketers are using their Facebook Wall pages (assuming the wall is the most trafficked) and what they are using for landing pages.
So I did a small and totally unscientific survey of some of the sites I follow. Some of it is food for thought; all is interesting. In the interest of disclosure, all my entry points came from searching ‘name facebook.’ Am I the only one who can’t find anything on Facebook itself?
I’ve written about Coke’s social media strategy.
Wall Page. Their main link leads me to a big happy Coke logo; when I click through it invites me to be a fan. No thank you; closing that out leads me to the main Coke page. Easy to get from there to wall page. Took me several clicks but interesting, so I’m not annoyed. Wall is completely fan posts; see nothing from Coke at the moment. You might find it worth reading their House Rules.
Landing Page. None on wall at the moment because they are fan posts. Feeds page has lots of Twitter from the UK at the moment that take you to an offer page on the Diet Coke UK website. The Coke page seems to be the main page for corporate links; see for example their recycling page on the Living Positively site. There’s much going on here; all seems to be well thought out.
I’ve also written about the Pepsi Refresh program, which seems to be Pepsi’s sole communications focus at the moment.
Wall Page. The main link takes you to the Pepsi Refresh Project page. This is a marketing campaign, not a corporate site per se. On the Wall page(s) they have covered all the bases; Pepsi Only, Fans Only, Pepsi + Fans. I’m a bit slow to catch on; I’ve looked several times before understanding this option for corporate fan pages. Try it out and see what I mean. Interesting!
Landing Page. On the Pepsi Only Wall page, most of the current posts go to either to an update message on the Refresh Everything site or to a YouTube video. Some link back to the Pepsi Refresh Project page on Facebook—think about that!
Intuit has a lot of web savvy.
Wall Page. Actually, they have several Facebook pages. I choose the Small Business Spot because I like what they’re doing with it. They have a small business grants program—interesting. When I looked at that wall page it was a mix of Intuit posts, a warning from a user about incompatibility with Chrome, and some user questions. Interestingly enough, the same coffee-drinking user who warned about Chrome compatibility is answering other user question(s). Nice! Lots of questions about taxes; Intuit seems to be responding. One frustrated user says customer service on Facebook is better than in the telephone call center. All in all, a lot that Intuit can learn here and people seem to be getting their issues resolved.
Landing Page. Links from Intuit posts go to their blog, their community, their Kiva page and probably more, depending on the message. This was the first corporate page where I saw wall posts all post linking to the corporate Facebook page, in this case the Small Business Spot page on Facebook. Offers and links there take visitors to the Intuit small business website.
I’ve written about Legal Zoom also.
Wall Page. Can a bunch of lawyers carry on a good conversation? This site says they can! The main link takes me to their Notes page. I find that uninspiring, but they have a reason; pushing Start-A-Business month. Their wall page is a nice mix of LegalZoom and fan posts. Many fan posts are quite complimentary—amazing! Also some cute lawyer-related stuff like a link to a Hollywood Reporter article about the lawyer stationed backstage at the Oscars. Great content strategy!
Landing Page. As you might guess, their content strategy results in links to many sites. Some, like Inc magazine, appear to be partners in support of small business. Let’s hear is for these lawyers—they are being positive, supportive and interesting!
The San Diego Zoo is one of my all-time favorites in many ways. Its website ranks up there with the best of corporate sites.
Wall Page. The main link takes you to their wall pages. They use the same Zoo Only, Zoo + Fans and Fans Only set of pages.They have a lot of happy visitors and lots of adorable baby animals to talk about. What's not to like? The Zoo uses a polar bear as their icon for administrator posts. Wonder if they are thinking about that after SeaWorld?
Landing Pages. Their links go everywhere—pages, blogs, live webcams; they have great content. How can fans not like a baby panda or a little tapir? Their website is engaging and using Facebook the way they do creates more engagement as well as driving a great deal of traffic to the website. The zoo has had a family of blogs for quite awhile. They are, of course, on Twitter, Tweeting away with happy visitors and about zoo animals. There is a link on the Twitter page to the Live Panda Cam. They have a platform and are making excellent use of it. Look at how they cross post on blogs.
I started this with a misperception, and I just left it there. It’s not necessarily a wall page; it can be a series of wall pages. It is not a landing page. A vibrant content strategy leads to many links to many kinds of content both on the corporate site and to related content on other sites. All keep the fan base growing and engaged.
The major take away is that there is no one right way of using a Facebook fan page. It depends on your strategy and the way you want to interact with fans and visitors. Whether it’s baby animals or lawyers being amiable, it’s all about 2-way communication and dealing with customer questions and issues. The five above have all gotten the message!
Friday, February 26, 2010
Does Your Conference Need a Twitter Backchannel?
The headline in AdWeek yesterday said “Big Biz Embracing Twitter.” Seems reasonable to assume that people who work for big businesses, and small also, are Tweeting on behalf of themselves, their products and their companies—right? That makes Twitter a way of reaching B2B customers and prospects about subjects that are directly relevant to them and to their work.
That’s especially important in a world where trade show and conference attendance has become expensive and hard to justify in many companies. People who do attend want to get the most from it—both from the presentations themselves and from the networking that goes on before and after hours.
Enter the Twitter backchannel. I wrote some time ago about creating a Twitter archive, essentially for notes taken at a conference. Multiply that by all the conference attendees and you have a Twitter backchannel. According to a study by European academics, that’s a good thing not a distraction. Positive aspects include encouraging participation, community building and better sharing of information. Read the study for yourself; it’s interesting.
There are several stakeholders here; the audience certainly, the conference organizers, and the speakers. The latter are going to have to learn to present in a different environment!
First conference organizers:
• In order to use social media to promote your conference, you have to start early. It’s important to stimulate and organize conversation. Helpful activities at this point include posting questions and starting discussions on the corporate or conference LinkedIn and Facebook pages. This helps conference planners understand the expectations of attendees and better meet their needs.
• A hashtag is essential. It is the key organizing tool for the Tweeting. Tweeting also needs to begin early. It should be the product of an identifiable individual, perhaps the conference organizer.
• Be sure your conference venue has the necessary infrastructure to support live Tweeting from the event. Maybe that should be the first step!
• Encourage attendees to Tweet during the conference, including presentations. That will drive unprepared presenters nuts; more about that in a minute.
• Follow all the rules of the social media world, being personable, open and transparent, and correcting any mistakes honestly and quickly. This is an imperfect world of human beings after all.
(1, 2, 3)
Conference presenters must be prepared for the live Tweet environment:
• Obviously you start with a well-crafted presentation that fits your audience. All the rules of good presentation—and much more—apply.
• Be prepared for both negative and positive Tweets. That’s life in the social media world.
• Understand whether there will be a live Twitterstream and how much control you have. Can you turn it off while you’re talking and just turn it back on for Q&A, for example?
• A moderator to keep up with the Twitterstream for you may be a good idea. Some speakers take a “Twitter break” and check the stream themselves.
• Respond to Tweets during the Q&A and learn from them after the event.
A disaster that’s quickly become a classic happened at last fall’s Web 2.0 Expo. Here’s a brief description of what happened and the speaker’s response. There’s a lot more, but you get the point. In order to avoid your own personal debacle, read a good set of tips or a detailed post by Olivia Mitchell; she covers preparation and management issues beautifully.
Let’s come full circle to the audience again. First, I can just hear conference organizers worrying that a Twitter backchannel will cut down on conference attendance. Nonsense. If a person has time and can afford it, he or she will attend the conference in person. But if the customer can’t attend, second-hand is better than nothing—much better if it’s well done. You are sharing the time and effort of the conference—and the expertise of your speakers—far beyond the physical auditorium. That has to be good for your brand—maybe even for your sales!
So engage your audience early and often. Make them active participants, not passive bystanders. Here are two great examples:
The South by Southwest Music & Media Conference is in high gear well in advance of its March 12 kickoff.
Since their beginning about a year ago, Twestivals have taken place around the globe. Twestival Global 2010 is building buzz and will soon announce the nonprofit beneficiary of this year’s event.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Do Facebook Ads Work?
I’ve always understood the conventional wisdom to be that ads on social networking sites like Facebook don’t work well. The reason given is that people go to social networks to network—communicate—and don’t pay attention to ads. Harry Gold of Overdrive Interactive mentioned in my class recently that they had purchased an ad on Facebook’s home page for Harley-Davidson, which has had great success on Facebook. That started me thinking. This chart makes the point that Facebook is now the third-largest site for display ads, so something is going on!
Facebook ads (except for major placements like the home page) work like Google’s AdWords. The advertiser creates ad content; selects targeting options; and sets budget, scheduling and payment parameters. The mechanics are the same; the targeting is completely different. The AdWords targeting that most of us are familiar with is by keyword (content). The basic targeting options on Facebook are demographic; everything from gender to birthday. There is a keyword filter that is based on items from the profiles of Facebook users. That’s different from the search-based keywords of Google but it’s an interesting possibility if you’re looking for, say, fans of a particular rock band. It’s self-service, so there’s a strong help page associated with the main advertising page.
Ok, it’s easy to set up a Facebook ad. Question is, do they work? The answer, of course, is partly dependent on your objectives.
It’s not arguable that a lot of people would have an opportunity to see an ad on Facebook. According to Inside Facebook’s analysis of site data for January 2010, “More than 108 million people are now using the site every month, up from nearly 103 million people before.” The absolute numbers can be disputed, but the trend has been relentlessly upward for a long time. The post has more information about the composition of the Facebook audience and growth segments. The stats are fascinating, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that Facebook is a broadcast network. The real possibility is microtargeting of ads.
Data from comScore, accessed on the Inspire Media blog, give some insights into the effectiveness question. All users were asked where they would be likely to notice advertising and User Generated Content sites ranked below both news and content sites and corporate sites. Another question, presented for the 18-34 age group, is very revealing. The type of sites that score highest by a large margin is music/ movies/ entertainment. Makes sense, doesn’t it? These 
Millennials want the opinions of their peers when it comes to use of their leisure time, something they find on the social networking sites, including Facebook. That should make them more receptive to advertising there for leisure activities. Note that consumer electronics, travel, and apparel also score relatively high on the “likely to notice” metric; I hypothesize that the reason is the same.
Noticing is nice—do they take action? Click Through Rates (CTR) are not high anywhere. One well-known marketer gives the average for Facebook as 0.01 – 0.05%. Search ‘Facebook CTR’ for a lot of anecdotal evidence that CTRs are low but can be impacted by strategy.
You also see the occasional story about finding motivated buyers on Facebook. Those are super-anecdotal, but you might find this case history on the Facebook advertising page instructive. Think about the product category and the ability to target, both by age and relationship. Again, it makes sense, but it’s also clear the Facebook ad was supported by an active lead management program.
So I’m back to my point about microtargeting. In a lead generation campaign (and that’s one of the obvious marketing objectives), the quality of the leads is more important than the quantity.
Reaching the right people with the right message is always important. Does Facebook advertising make sense for your product/service? Here are some links that may help you think about that question for businesses (1, 2), for small businesses, or for non-profits.
More recent posts on Facebook ad effectiveness:
Targeting Your Facebook Ads
Stronger Evidence that Facebook Ads Work
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Engaging With Customers
So far we’ve talked about how to listen to our customers and how (and whether) to respond. The next step I suggested in an abbreviated strategy development process is to engage. This is hardly a new subject; I found some good case examples not long ago.
Since I believe it’s important to have a common understanding of what we’re talking about, I searched “definition of customer engagement.” I got 150,000 hits, pretty much what I was expecting. The Advertising Research Foundation’s 2006 definition is widely accepted; here is a good article with an elaboration of the definition. The common thread in the subset of the 150,000 definitions I read is that we want to encourage interaction with our customers—real give and take that adds value to the customer’s brand-related experience.
A recent publication from Alterian quotes some statistics. Note particularly the second one. Customer service experts have long known that resolving a problem for a customer can make that person more loyal than the person who has never experienced a problem. It also supports my hypothesis that the customer experience concept--if it did not grow out of what we know about customer service management--is at least a first cousin. Contemplate the steps recommended by the Opinion Research Corporation. They say the goal is a differentiated customer experience. The strategic questions are:
1. How well do our employees deliver on our brand promise?
2. What are our customer’s expectations of experiences with our organization?
3. What is the gap between our brand promise and the customer experience/customer expectations?
4. How consistent is the delivery of our brand promise across all channels of customer interaction?
5. What are we doing to deliver a differentiated experience from that of our competition, and/or in comparison to other non-competitive organizations?
6. How is all of this information utilized by our organization to close the gap between the promise and the experience to ultimately enhance the overall customer experience?
The focus on brand promise is the unifying theme—the one marketers want to embed in all communications channels, at all customer touchpoints. While this makes sense to me, it’s more operations focused than interaction focused. Getting customers to interact with us seems to be the goal; it’s not enough that they just go away satisfied.
Let me give you two quick examples. I went shopping over the weekend. I had a few staples to pick up at Macy’s; of course that led to browsing other departments and, of course, that led to 
buying some stuff that I only needed marginally, if at all. But I was having fun. Sales associates were being nice to me; two of them stretched the definition of “red” to give me the discount for the “Go Red” AHA promotion (note more cause-related marketing here). One associate wrote her name on the register receipt and encouraged me to evaluate my experience. I got good service everywhere I went, so I did write a review when I got home. I thought that would be the end of it, but a couple of days later I got a thank-you email from Macy’s. It’s nice to be thanked and I was interested to see my review was being forwarded to the local store. Too bad they had to spoil it with a lame subject line! But overall good try.
The second is what’s becoming the ubiquitous video contest. This one does seem to tie in well with the brand promise. You probably know Flo, the terminally perky sales rep who sells insurance “packages” for Progressive on TV. Now, apparently, Flo needs help! You can send in a video in a contest for a live tryout, presumably for a lucrative ad contract. You can watch the “tryouts” but I don’t see that viewers get a vote. They certainly are encouraged to “share.” Progressive is clearly serious about it; there have been two days of tryouts in New York already and they are taking the road show to Miami next week. The program, of course, has a Facebook page and is being promoted by Tweets from the Progressive account. As I said, these contests are becoming ubiquitous, but when the campaign needs refreshing can you think of anything better???
Macy’s tried, and I did appreciate being thanked. However, there was no real encouragement to try to get me to interact further. I do expect to get more emails though! Progressive will probably come up with another cute spokesperson—is “young” part of the strategy, I wonder? And what will they do to ensure that all the contestants go away happy, if not richer? And will they use the entries to build any kind of relationship? Keep an eye out.
And if you ever believed in “build it and they will come” forget that now. It all takes persistent effort. That’s what builds a social media strategy!
