Creating Brand Awareness on the Internet

In my last post I promised one more rant before I shut down for the summer—a continuation of my long-term campaign against awareness as an objective, on the Internet in general and in social media in particular.

I wrote about the issue two years ago in the context of metrics. At the time, it seemed quite reasonable to me that if you want to measure the accomplishments of Internet marketing programs you need to set behavioral objectives and collect the behavioral data to measure them. That still seems a perfectly logical argument to me, but it doesn’t make my point explicitly enough.

What I’ve seen in the interim is two-fold. First, endless students who tell me they want to create awareness (of their brand, presumably) in social media or on the web in general. I keep pointing out that it requires marketing research to measure awareness and that takes time and money. If people do something—register for your site, sign up for a newsletter, become a fan of your Facebook page, whatever—they are aware, aren’t they? Ok, the awareness and the behavior can be almost simultaneous, but the behavior is a manifestation of awareness. Not only that, any of the actions I suggested—and many others I can think of—put the marketer in a position to communicate further with the customer/prospect. That’s what I meant in the last post when I said that attitudinal awareness objectives on the Internet simply constitute leaving cards on the table. I like that phrase; it captures the foolishness of the way many marketers still approach the Internet.

The second think I’ve seen is practitioners setting awareness objectives even though I think they understand the argument for behavioral objectives. Behavioral objectives imply measurement. They know that the necessary marketing research to measure awareness objectives is unlikely to be done, hence no measurement. That constitutes hiding behind awareness as a hard-to-measure objective.

Actually, there is a third issue. Most of us have grown up practicing and teaching traditional mass media. That is still the mind set of most marketers. More so older ones, but also younger ones who should know better.

The lack of understanding of the fallacy of awareness on the Internet often leads to a major strategic error. It especially shows up in something like “we want to create awareness in social media.” The question is how do you get people to your social pages in the first place? They have to be aware before they initially visit the page and sign up to be your fan. How do you create the level of awareness and interest that gets them to your page or to your website? Oops, we hadn’t thought about that! Actually, what they often have not thought about is that it’s going to require some money to make this happen.

Yes, there is such a thing as social sharing and it can create awareness. A recent study from ShareThis and Starcom MediaVest suggests that social sharing can create substantial referral traffic. How many of the referrals are to customers who previously had no contact with the brand? That doesn’t seem to be a question the study, based on the ShareThis database, can answer. Actually, I’d like to see the entire study because I don’t understand some of the explanation in the blog. However, their data seems to make it clear that sharing is not likely to create viral content and that people only share in one or two content categories in which they are particularly interested or expert. The latter is what we’ve known about WOM in the physical world for a long time; the more things change, the more they stay the same!

I’d like to encourage you to think about this issue by doing some reading and listening. First, the Bain online branding study “In Search of a Premium Alternative” in which they point out the predominance of direct response ads on the Internet and decry the lack of online advertising alternatives that break through the clutter. Then you need to listen to Randall Rothenberg’s introductory speech to the “Future of Display Advertising” conference last week. He builds on the Bain study and recent announcement of new “Rising Stars” ad formats, designed to allow more creativity and impact in the online branding effort.

But don’t leave it at that. Take a look at the 6 new formats on the IAB site. Look at how many options they give for viewer behavior—from watch a video to download a mobile app—and everything in between. Again, the point is to encourage viewers to take action—action that can be measured. No need for awareness objectives here!!!

Farewell to Super Bowl 2011

I think most of the voting for Super Bowl ad favorites has closed now. That probably is wise; I’m not sure how many people still care. But I wanted to do a wrap-up to my pre-game post, which had a title that now seems remarkably inaccurate.

If you want a rehash, here are two good sites. Superbowl-ads.com has been doing this for a long time and has an incredible archive. Fanhouse has a nice Super Bowl page and you can compare the 2011 and 2010 winners. The Volkswagen Force ad was the winner on most of the sites I looked at. It was cute, and it had quite a bit of pre-game buzz.

Overall, I thought the ads were either bland and uninspired or technically deficient. Seems to me the fan-created ad contest has about run its course and I missed the A-B Clydesdales, but the Dog Party Ad was cute. The Eminem ad for Chrysler (an expensive 2 minutes worth) has gotten a lot of post-game buzz, and its intent was commendable. However, I watched it closely, wondering whether it was a Chrysler ad or a Detroit ad. Of the two, only Chrysler could afford to pay for it, so the answer was pretty obvious. It was, however, one of several ads that didn’t mention the sponsor until the last few seconds. Why do advertisers and agencies think it’s ok to spent $3m and not identify the source of the ad in the beginning so the viewer can connect the brand and the message? I know all the arguments about great creative to make an impact on the Super Bowl, but the basics of good advertising still apply. Finally, I thought the Groupon ad was in astonishingly bad taste. I think it was a last-minute buy, so they probably pulled something off the shelf, but if you can’t do it right, you shouldn’t do it at all.

For me the biggest disappointment was that the social media aspect I was looking for was not in evidence. I’m sure there was a lot of Tweeting going on, but in terms of obvious advertising tie-in, it just wasn’t there. What was I expecting? I don’t really know either! Is it possible that social media has a huge role in building pre-game and post-game buzz, but relatively little during the game itself. A firm called ymarketing did a report on the ads and their impact on social media that came out a couple of weeks after the game; here's the link. A similar study by PRLog says that all advertisers benefitted from social media traffic and that Motorola, Doritos, Hyundai, and Dove benefitted most. That’s interesting, because those four don’t tend to show up or at least show up high, in the best ads rankings. What does that mean??

Fast Company has an interesting take on Super Bowl ad metrics and some interesting additional coverage. Ad Age columnist Ian Schafer was also disappointed in the social media connections and has some pithy things to say about the ads themselves. The usual excellent SB coverage can be accessed on the sidebar.

So it’s clear we still have a lot to learn. Back to work!

Nokia's Vision for Social Media Marketing

Nokia generally shows up on lists of the top global brands. This year it was 8th on Interbrand’s annual survey. The report describes today’s consumer as “skeptical, social and savvy” and has good content on branding in that environment. Nokia’s response on their Conversations blog is also worthy of note by social media marketers.
It’s Nokia’s vision for what’s really their integrated marketing communications strategy, not just their social media strategy, that I find compelling. Their emphasis on getting away from isolated campaigns (“big bangs”) in favor of continuous engagement in earned media represents clear understanding of communications in a global, connected world. Forrester defines “earned media” as customers becoming the channel as a result of a sustained and well executed social media strategy in paid and owned (branded) media.

But even if you are a big brand with a lot of resources things will sometimes go wrong as they recently did for Nokia. However, they managed to turn a distinct negative into something reasonably positive.

It’s a story of a sports blogger being approached by Nokia’s PR agency with incentives for participating in one of a set of sports events as part of an outdoor-themed campaign. There’s more to it and you should read it for yourself, but the bottom line is that the promises to the blogger were simply not kept. Is that more likely when the campaign was outsourced? You can decide that for yourself.

The story was published on the British Econsultancy blog on October 12. Nokia’s response wasn’t fast (see the October 20 comment), but when it came social media director Mark Squires took responsibility for the fiasco and made it clear that Nokia tried to make up for the failure. When you screw up, that’s about the best you can do.

The good news is that it seems to be a relatively rare screw-up by a company that generally does its social media marketing well. In fact, the early October interchange with Econsultancy appears to have resulted in a late October interview with Mark Squires that’s worth reading for insights into how Nokia’s strategy has evolved within the organization.

While researching this post, I came across an interesting conference presentation by Molly Schonthan who was then head of social media for Nokia in North America. The section on their complex and apparently effective program at SXSW2010 is especially interesting. If you don’t have time for the 30-minute video, page through her presentation for more interesting insight into a company that takes social media marketing seriously.

Ways to Engage Your Customers

I recently ran across a video that’s too good not to share. In fact, it’s so good that it got me thinking about ways in which businesses are engaging their customers. Just thinking didn’t do me much good; all I came up with was the usual suspects, from uploading photos and videos to running contests.

First I took a look at Super Bowl 2011. Not ready to hear about the Super Bowl yet? Neither am I, really, but if you are going to do a social media promotion you have to start early. What I found was a list of contests:

• Doritos is back with what appears to be the 5th year of “Crash the Super Bowl” video contest according to a good post on how these things are run.
• Pepsi concluded its not-for-profit effort from last year and is running a video contest off the same “crash” site; good leverage
• Go Daddy, famous for over-the-top ads, is running a contest this year. Wonder what kind of entries they will get??
• This one is worth including for Troy Polamalu’s hair alone, although the sweepstakes appears to be more tied to the NFL season than to the Super Bowl.

• GM is giving weekly winners tickets to the Super Bowl and one Sierra Denali pickup. Seems to me they would have gotten more brand buzz if they had reversed that, but I guess even Super Bowl tickets are cheaper than a truck, even if you are GM!

Then fast forward to today. Just as I was beginning this post I saw an article on Subway’s new Facebook based-promotion. It is described as “a new crowd-sourced entertainment program… dubbed Subway High School Heroes.” At its heart it is a contest to nominate people who have been influential in the lives of teens—a worthy endeavor—but it has entertainment elements beyond the usual contest. Check it out.

Back to my starting point. The Tipp Experience video has been achieved viral status this fall. While that’s difficult to do, if you’ll just take a minute and play (with) this video, you’ll see the heights consumer engagement can reach!

Brand Attitudes and Behavior ARE Affected by Social Media!

The headline in the IAB newsletter says that “product chatter is getting louder on social media.” The article in MediaPost quotes data from a study by Performics that includes:
• 30% of their respondents had learned about a product, service or brand on a social site.
• 25% go directly to the site after hearing about it on a social site.
• 44% of respondents have recommended and 39% have discussed a product on Twitter.
• 46% have talked about or recommended a product, service or brand on Facebook.



Ok, so consumers are talking. Does it make a difference? The 2009 Razorfish FEED report says it does. That’s a big majority who say they are influenced!




How? The Razorfish data confirms that brand activity on the web can influence all stages of the consideration process. Attending events is powerful. Participating in a brand-sponsored contest or contest is even more so. These data also give support to the argument that social media have differential impact at different stages in the consideration process. Contests and sweepstakes have more impact on awareness; brand events have more impact on actual purchase. Wonder why the purchase impact. . .is it that brand events provide more content/information? Perhaps, but for sure the implication is that different types of promotion, even on the same platforms, may have impact at different stages. That’s important!





A study from Cone, recently reported by eMarketer, emphasizes the positive impact on brand attitudes that comes from brand interaction.

Razorfish says that the bottom line is: “Digital brand experiences create customers” (p. 11). Can you look at these data and doubt the truth of that statement?

Kraft Celebrates Football Season with Social Media

When I wrote about the Kraft iFoodAssistant widget recently, I realized that Kraft had more going on in social media and resolved to look into it. When you look, you find all the usual blogs pointing out coupon availability, which is ongoing for most CPG brands. It certainly is a new way of distribution though; and therein lies one social media impact.

What you also quickly see is two seasonal promotions for Velveeta cheese. Tis the season for tailgating or football on TV, and snacks made with Velveeta cheese are a seasonal item. The Kitchenistas blogger promotion has been going on since September; here's the microsite. In fact, today is the last day of activity for the five compensated “Mommy bloggers” who have participated in the promotion.
How does this kind of promotion affect sales? Velveeta brand manager Sherina Smith admits they don’t really know:

“It’s hard to say,” Smith says. “What we do know is that this consumer is online looking for ideas for meals. We know she blogs a lot and looks to other bloggers for tips and ideas. The more that we can be where she’s looking for ideas, the more we can be top of mind when she’s grocery shopping.”

All this context seems to create warm fuzzies for the brand, and that may be all we can say at present. I’d love to know the ROI of a low-cost promotion like this, incorporating real people, compared with the ROI of, say a traditional television commercial. Yes, I’d like to know, but what is the dependent variable—brand awareness, favorable brand attitudes, what? We’re back to the difficulties of measuring attitudes and their impact on behavior. Marketers have operated on faith that positive brand associations do matter for a long time, and I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon.

Enter the Big 10 promotion, also for Velveeta and also tied in with football season. Here’s the Big 10 Conference home page for today. Note a banner ad at the top by Rotel with a dish of cheese dip beside it. You probably won’t be surprised when you click through and find that most of the featured recipes feature Velveeta cheese. Rotel is a ConAgra brand with a non-corporate-looking website that pushes recipes and attitude.
Note that on the Big 10 home page there’s a square box pushing a contest for bowl tickets, again featuring Rotel. At the bottom of the page there is another banner that makes the Rotel Velveeta partnership more explicit. It’s all quite integrated—and hard to miss!

Kraft’s website, the iFood Assistant, and one guesses its relationships with bloggers will go on. Promotions for various brands, many of them seasonal, can also be expected to continue. What do you suppose they have on tap for Thanksgiving and Christmas? Stay tuned!

Engagement Lessons from Successful Brands

An interesting customer engagement study has been sitting on my desktop since late summer and it’s long since time to pay attention. The study, by Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group ranks the top 100 brands in terms of customer engagement. You can see the ranking and download the full report here.

Starbucks and Dell are number 1 and 2—no surprise there. They interviewed some other high-ranking sites, SAP at 9 Toyota at 21—about best practices, presumably to get a perspective from different industry sectors. Each of the highly engaging brands has several best practices to suggest and they are worth reading the full report. I picked out one from each that struck me as universally applicable:

Starbucks identifies people throughout the organization to be the liaison with the social media program—to monitor and to take action on customer issues and ideas. At the same time, they maintain tight central control over content and the engagement of individual baristas in their many outlets.

Toyota says you have to be in it for the long haul. No surprise there; social media is an investment of time and energy that will only pay off over time. That’s a disappointment to many who are looking for immediate returns.

SAP makes a practice of engaging in new channels where people already are. That makes it easier to listen and understand; they also encourage employees who are already active on newer channels like Twitter.

Dell points out that you have to be conversational from the start. Again—not a surprise, just really hard to do, especially for newbie brand practitioner.





























The Wetpaint/Altimeter group links customer engagement to financial performance and argues that it is a more powerful driver that traditional measures of customer satisfaction. Gallup consulting agrees, and has their own measures of engagement that allow them to group firms by level of engagement. You can read their full report here.

While researching this post, I also ran across a recent article in Forbes that argues for the importance of engaging customers while admitting that engagement is hard to measure. None of this content could be judged as totally unbiased because all the marketing services/consulting firms represented have a stake in creating or measuring engagement.

For me, it’s hard to refute the arguments. You should make your own judgment!

Direct Response and Brand Marketing in the New Media

I picked up the link to David Carter’s blog post from Twitter yesterday. Truth to tell, I followed it because it mentioned NEMOA, the New England Mail Order Association which numbers among its members some of the best catalogers on the planet, also a lot of old friends. I was interested to see what was going on, and David’s slideshow focuses on what he learned from them; you’ll find it interesting.

I had a major “wish I’d said that” moment when I saw this graphic. David is a hard-headed social media marketer, and his “not a replacement strategy” warning is a good one. But what really struck me is that this says it all. Social media is a creature of the web, although it simply enables some physical world phenomena like Word of Mouth. Direct response, the province of the people at NEMOA, has been around for quite awhile. So has branding. What’s fascinating is that direct marketing and brand marketing take place, in similar ways, on and off the web. This is what marketers do—it really does say it all!

This morning’s article by Augustine Fou in ClickZ takes it a step further. Dr. Fou is proposing a new definition of digital that blurs the nice neat lines in David’s graphic. It’s a broad definition; "the collection of habits and expectations of modern users." Here is a summary of his major points:

Branding Is Dead
However, consumer habits have also evolved. Many people actively search for things online. And the moment they type in a search term or phrase, we know exactly what they're looking for at that exact moment in time.

While it’s true that traditional brand marketing in mass media has decreasing relevance on an almost day-by-day basis, brand development is still hugely relevant. It’s just done differently

Targeting Is Dying
As consumer habits change to "pulling" for information when they want or need it, marketers' tactics must also change. Tactics that fall under the umbrella of "push" marketing become less relevant because fewer modern users will tolerate being beaten over the head with ad messages.

Dr. Fou’s point is that people almost always start with search when they’re looking for information on the web, and that’s absolutely true. However, think about the post about McKinsey content last week; they are using Web 2.0 techniques for distributing content. Is that push? I’d say it is, but it’s either permission-based or very polite or both. No beating over the head here!

Social Media Isn't Media
. . .trying to use social networks and social actions as media won't work. Conversations can't be bought. And if they are bought, the community will find out and retaliate.

He concludes that marketers who get it “will gravitate toward techniques that cultivate genuine and open dialogue with customers, where brands humbly listen and learn, and then respond with new features and innovations.”

I totally agree. But I’d add that marketers still need to understand, and properly use, the three disciplines of marketing in David’s bubble chart. Direct response, often PPC these days, can be used to bring people to your site—which had better give them the information they are looking for and allow them to efficiently conclude a transaction (direct response) if they desire. Brand marketing still has great relevance—think all the “who do you trust” discussions. People you know and other consumers come first on the trust list. Brands (I’d include the adjective “trusted”) follow closely. Creating a trusted brand should be the overriding goal of brand marketing these days.

Where the lines really blur is between brand marketing, still a necessity, and social media marketing—more and more the way savvy marketers are doing brand marketing—as Dr. Fou said.

The disciplines are still there; the way marketers execute has undergone a huge shift.