Marketers Could---but Should They?

Marketers are faced with an overabundance of options for all types of strategic decisions. This is especially true of channels choices. By that, I’m mostly referring to communications channels, but the same principles may be true of e-commerce channels.

The current atmosphere reminds me of the mid-1990s when companies were waking up to the Internet and asking, “Should we have a website?” It quickly became, “We must have a website because everyone else does.” It was bad reasoning then; it’s bad reasoning now. Only now it’s, “We must have a Facebook page because everyone else does.”

Now every business or non-profit organization has a website. Many of them aren’t very good. They don’t fulfill the business mission and they don’t provide good customer experience. So sadly, before marketers have fully comprehended the issues of ‘traditional’ online marketing, they are faced with the explosion of social networks. And they are FREE! Clearly, we’ve got to do that!!!

I’ve been pointing out for quite some time that social media marketing is not free. It takes skilled people who are committing time to it. So nix the free argument.

We’re back to square one. There are a lot of channels to choose from. Marketers COULD use any or all of them. The real question is which ones they SHOULD use. And notice the consistent use of plural. You do not reach any target audience today with meaningful impact in a single channel. Multiple channels must be assumed.

That makes the real question how to choose the correct combination of channels to accomplish marketing and business objective. I’ll make my recommendations; your additions are solicited.

First, there is your target audience. We know the general outlines. Younger people are more likely to use social networks; older segments are slower to go online, but according to Pew, once they are there they eagerly search for information and engage in gaming, for example. It is important to remember that these are generalizations and the specifics of both demographics and use behavior can change from one product category to another.

Second, there is your position in the value chain. Are you a manufacturer? If so, is your Internet objective to support your retailers and distributors or it is to open another channel to reach customers directly? Are you a dealer or distributor who needs to communicate with and develop loyalty among B2B customers? Are you a small retailer who wants to participate in the frenzy of local marketing? In these cases, channels have been defined and the different channels imply vastly different marketing strategies.

Third, there are your specific marketing objectives. Do you want to sell things? Do you want to generate sales leads? Do you want to grow your social media followers—which is nice, but not enough. What is your PURPOSE (potential marketing uses) for having social media followers? This is about marketing effectiveness, not about bragging rights. Please don’t tell me you want to generate awareness. I’ve written about that before and plan to update my campaign against awareness objectives for Internet marketing soon. The Internet is about generating desired behaviors among targeted audiences. Leaving it at awareness is simply leaving cards on the table.See the video on the McKinsey Quarterly (free registration required)>

The pressing strategic issue is, “Which of the 4Ps comes first?” Ok, I’ll accept that you usually have to have an offering first. But then what? Does your choice of channels (multiple but integrated) determine the outlines of your promotion, including creative as well as the service and tech infrastructure you have to put into place? Take a look at the section of this Eric Schmidt video in which he talks about ‘designing for mobile first.’ He’s talking about disruptive business models, but it also has a strategic lesson for marketers.

As I write this, I realize that we marketers have a semantics problem that we must be clear about in order to make wise strategic channels choices. There are channels of distribution from the traditional Manufacturer > Wholesaler > Retailer to Manufacturer Direct via E-Commerce. Those are choices that, once made, are difficult to change for reasons of both infrastructure and relationships.

Then there are communications channels choices. There are a myriad of those from television ads to a Facebook page. Some of those can be specific to a particular marketing campaign—television advertising, for example. Others, like a Facebook page, need to be maintained once they are established, with involvement in marketing campaigns as required. The point is that the communications channels choices are more temporal than the distribution channels choices, although they have their own elements of stickiness.

My point is that the choice of communications channels sets the direction for a lot of the marketing work that must follow. What do you think?

Marketers Aren't Listening to the Voice of the Customer?*!

I find this data from today’s Center for Media Research newsletter so stunning that I’ll just quote it verbatim:

A new study by MarketTools revealed that 94% of companies do not yet use social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter to gather customer feedback, despite consumers' growing engagement with these mediums. The study found that the most common ways companies gather customer feedback are email/online surveys (51%), formal phone surveys (28%), and informal phone calls (28%).

As someone (and I doubt that I’m unique) who just refused to answer the email survey from the car manufacturer because I had already answered the one from the dealer and who uses ANI to select the phone calls I answer, I’m pretty sure these 94% of companies are missing the mark. While I’m engaging in self-revelation, I’ll also add that I don’t usually respond to emails for reviews of products I’ve just purchased. I do occasionally, and I would have done so for the car, had they asked me because it has one noticeable improvement over the model I previously owned. The car companies really have overdone the satisfaction surveys—especially since the sales and service people have been trained to ask customers not to say anything bad about them!!!—see #3 below and ponder. The rest of the data from the newsletter is also quoted verbatim:

1. 39% of executives surveyed said that their companies increased focus on customer satisfaction in 2010 versus 2009, with 21% stating that they invested more in customer satisfaction-related products and services in 2010 versus 2009
2. Despite the importance given to customer satisfaction, 14% of executives surveyed said their companies don't solicit customer feedback at all
3. 46% of the executives surveyed rate their company's performance on customer satisfaction in the top 10% when compared to their peer companies, and 93% rate themselves in the top 50% of peer companies.
4. Still, 56% of all respondents said their companies do not have, or are not sure if their companies have, a formal voice of the customer (VOC) program
5. Nearly one out of every four executives said that they seldom or never use customer feedback to change a business process.

I also have a personal perspective on #5. I made an online Christmas order for 9 items, none of which showed being out of stock. However, only 5 were shipped and the invoice listed 4 as out of stock (inventory failure). I was, however, billed for the total amount of the order (billing failure). I tried the call center several times to always find a lengthy wait. So I tried email—every day for one week plus some miscellaneous. I got 2 autoresponses for each email (marketing automation failure), but never a real response. My credit card took my word for it and refunded the difference. I wrote the above in considerably more detail to the operations VP. In the meantime, the company started refunding my money, one item at a time (another marketing automation failure)! The VP simply passed my email onto the call center manager, who has no responsibility for any of these things except possibly the wait time, although that’s probably a budget issue. But the VP got it off his desk, apparently happily ignoring the fact that it was business processes at fault, not customer service.

The opposite end of the spectrum is the social media mission control centers recently established by Pepsi’s Gatorade (video here) and by Dell. This 3-minute video is from the opening of Dell’s center with commentary by several industry experts.

Smaller companies/brands should not let the size of these “mission control” operations put them off. It’s a matter of scale and the listening issue of small brands is not the listening issue of Dell. Smaller brands, smaller companies need to think about their own processes, which I’ll lump under the Voice of the Customer rubric.

My recent personal experience says:

1. I would have done a customer review on the car because there was something (in this case favorable, though that’s not the issue) I’d like to point out to potential purchasers. I don’t care to waste my time checking Excellent on a mind-numbing set of Likert scales.
2. Even a VP can take a few seconds to acknowledge a customer email—even better to show that the real nature of the customer problem is recognized. This company is out about $25 in an undeserved refund—more important it permanently lost this customer!

How can you scale Dell’s and Gatorade’s listening activities to your brand? That’s the real issue and it can—and should be—dealt with! While they’re at it, corporate executives should come out of their protected cocoons and actually listen to the voice of the customer!!

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.

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!

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!

The Importance of Social Media Policies

One of the annoyances of writing a blog is how often you see content the very next day that adds to what you just posted. Usually I just hope people will see it. But this one is so timely and so important it deserves its own post.

This Marketing Charts post from yesterday was in my inbox today. It headlines two important issues:

1. Formal social network policies are important for employers
2. 75% of the employers recently surveyed by Manpower do not have a social network policy

The Manpower report quotes statistics that attribute lost productivity to employee use of social networks at work. True, some of it is undoubtedly totally frivolous. But employee participation in social nets can also be a brand building activity—think Zappos as only one example of many. I gave links to guidelines from ESPN and Cisco yesterday.

The Manpower report acknowledges that workplace use of social nets can add value in the following areas:
• Productivity
• Collaboration
• Knowledge Management
• Innovation
• Employee Alignment and Engagement
• Recruitment
• Reputation Management.

This seems to be especially true if the firm has a substantial number of relatively young employees who are comfortable with social nets (or wants to be attractive to younger workers). I would argue that all companies need, as suggested yesterday, a crisis management plan that includes social nets. Toyota is the cause célèbre at the moment. I heard strategy guru Jeffry Sonnenfeld critize Toyota’s total lack of engagement with the auto blogosphere on CNBC this morning. Newsweek agrees and has recommendations.

This isn’t really a new thought, is it? If companies have thoughtful strategies and policies to implement them, they often navigate choppy waters reasonably well. If they don’t, something always jumps up to bite them. It may be customer complaints, it may be a product quality problem, it may be an environmental crisis, and many more. But stuff happens, and being prepared with employees who have social media skills and policies to guide them is one step in the right direction.

Listening for Customer Understanding

I’ve expended a lot of energy trying to get marketers to really grasp the difference between marketing research and the analysis of behavioral data as avenues to customer insight. Sometimes I despair. We academics are partly at fault. Most marketing courses, especially the introductory ones, teach marketing research as the way (read that the only way) to learn about customers. We forget that there is behavioral data of many types, from many sources, that should be mined before enterprises spend time and money on marketing research.

Senior marketers have the same hang-up. Marketing research is what they were taught. They may feel comfortable with how it is done and the results it produces (or they don’t use it at all). But I thought an Ad Age headline (subscription required) earlier in the month captured the essence of the problem. When I used this slide in class last night, I got a lot of puzzled (disbelieving?) frowns. Let me see if I can restate the issue in terms of why companies need to listen as their first step in understanding customers in a way that leads to viable marketing and business strategies.

The ARF held another conference on listening yesterday and I looked this morning to see if any material had yet been posted. Not yet; I’ll keep looking but I did find a great quote in a blog post from ARF president Joel Rubinson. He says:

Listening is about hearing what people [say] rather than the marketer wants to talk about, (emphasis mine) and hearing it in people’s own words. It’s a window in the mind, heart and emotions of people, one you need to have your nose pressed up against continuously. Because things change…really fast…giving agile marketers great opportunities leaving traditional marketers wearing the WTF happened look on their faces.

As I looked, I found something else really good. I don’t know whether the ARF is happy having this report, clearly marked ‘confidential’ posted on the web, but for now at least, it’s there, so I’ll link to it. As all good researchers do, they start with an operational definition of listening:

“The study of naturally occurring conversations, behaviors, and signals, that may or may not be guided, that brings the voice of people’s lives in to the brand” (p 11)

They parse the definition in a useful fashion and go on to say a lot of important things about developing a listening strategy. You should read it for yourself. It’s long, but the main concepts take up only about 20 pages, followed by an incredible number of good short case studies, and ended with a discussion of technology and platforms. Let me leave it with the brand-related objectives that can be realized, in full or in part, by a well-crafted listening strategy. Their list is:

• Discover New Customers
• New Product Development and Innovation
• Improve Existing Products
• Maintain Sales Momentum
• Drive Brand Growth
• Re-brand or Re-position
• Tackle Public Policy Issues
• Manage Reputation
• Manage Brand Health
• Customer Care
• Increase Loyalty and Customer Value (pp 13-14)

I don’t think any of us can disagree with the desirability of any one of these objectives. That still begs the question of how to produce the best data to meet the selected objective(s). Try this conceptualization.



We have to listen to conversations that relate to our brand. That’s one kind of qualitative data. Behavioral data from everything to site visits to transactions is one type of quantitative data. Each of those types of data quickly becomes gigantic. Together they are mega-gigantic. For a brand of any size or reach, they have to be thoughtfully mined to come up with actionable insights.

Then the question is whether there is anything missing. In researchers’ terms, not just something interesting that we’d like to know, but data from which we can draw actionable insights. If the answer is ‘yes,’ we may need to do marketing research. It could be anything from a poll (or a series of them) on our website to a custom marketing research project. If it’s really important to a full picture of the customer, then do the marketing research. All the while behavioral and conversational data floods in. Also, the world moves on, which is another problem with pausing to do conventional marketing research.

That’s the nature of the challenge and it’s formidable. In the process of this investigation I’ve learned more about useful platforms that can help meet the challenge. More about that next week!

The Importance of Integration

I've been aware for quite some time that IBM was exploring the use of social media in various contexts. Today I listened to a webcast by Sandy Carter, Social Media Evangelist at IBM. The webcast has strategy, case histories, and advice on how to make social media initiatives work in an organization.













View the webcast here.

All those are very important subjects to the social media marketer. And the title makes the key point; marketers have to integrate social media into their overall marketing mix! Sandy Carter makes a strong argument for better results for existing marketing programs with the inclusion of social media component.

It's well worth the 40 minute duration of the webcast, now archived on BrightTalk.

Now It's "Inbound Marketing?"

I’ve found myself several times lately explaining (with an exaggerated air of patience) that now many people are referring to “Inbound Marketing.” I hear the term frequently, although Hubspot whose blog has that title, might like to lay claim to inventing it. In any event; they have a good post that gives their definition. Mine is simple. It’s necessary to get your message OUT to your target audience—wherever they are these days, and use those messages to bring people to your website to do whatever you want them to do there.

Is Inbound Marketing the new marketing paradigm? It well may be. Take a look at this chart from Hubspot. They characterize the outbound side as a sledge hammer, the inbound side as a magnet, and that a great communications metaphor. Look at that chart from a business perspective. Everything until you get to email (the only digital entry, you’ll notice) is expensive — some of it terribly expensive. On the inbound side, much is low in direct costs, although not low in expenditure of time. The exception on the inbound side is SEO. A lot of visibility is free—think tagging your blog posts. Some is relatively low cost; with PPC ads you only pay for the clicks you get. Website (and maybe blog) optimization can be quite expensive, primarily because it takes a professional to do real SEO. But note that there are other routes to visibility, a broader term. And in terms of email, it’s really outbound/inbound. Email links bring people to your site to take action.

I was also struck by Jeremiah Owyang’s recent post on organizing for social media. His hub-and-spoke concept was reminiscent of my metrics conceptualization, although in a different content.

So put these concepts together and what do you get? My concept of inbound marketing!

The spokes are meant to be categorizations, not a complete description of what’s out there. Take social networks, for example. I didn’t have room for MySpace, LinkedIn and many other popular socnets, so I just settled for “etc.” There are a lot of “etcs” in other categories also.

The strategy imperative is clear. No business can sit back and wait for customers to come. Without at least search visibility, they won’t. Firms have to get their message out to where potential customers are—remember the quote about teens and newspapers yesterday? These short messages have to be appealing enough to entice people to the website (or a blog can be a hub also) for additional information that will incite them to the desired action.

All of that shouts STRATEGY!!! None of this is going to happen by accident. If you’re still at the “we should have a Facebook page” stage, back off and develop an Inbound Marketing strategy that fits your target audience and your marketing objectives.

It will be time well spent!

Is Your Strategic Lens Clear?

I saw an article yesterday in MediaPost by David Berkowitz that led me to the 360i Social Marketing Playbook. I was attracted by the strategic approach David described and immediately downloaded it.

The chapter on the “strategic lens” alone was worth it. The 56-page report (download from this page) is well worth reading. It covers the strategic waterfront from preparing to engage in social media marketing to metrics for measuring success and includes an introduction by Randall Rothenberg and another interesting perspective on the future of marketing by Jeremiah Owyang.

The strategic lens is especially relevant because it focuses the organization on its strategic needs and abilities. That’s important, because I believe many firms are still in the early “we’ve got to have a Facebook page” absence of objectives and overarching strategy. In his article David points out that 360i already had considerable expertise in the social arena and used the Social Marketing Playbook to advance their corporate strategy. That’s walking the walk! That would also mean that they had learned the particular etiquette of the social media. And finally, the importance of providing value to customers can’t be overstated, given the number of choices customers have today.
This publication should be required reading for all social marketers. Their ending checklist is good, and gives a sense of the topics covered, but the entire publication should be a “read and heed” for all of us!

Compensating Mommy Bloggers--The Virtue of Transparency

This post was originally published in the ReachingWomenDaily blog.


As I recounted in the first post in this series, I originally became fascinated with mommy blogs by watching my daughter, a new mother at the time. I gradually became aware of their potential as marketing media, although in those early days, I was thinking mostly about their value for targeted online advertising.

I was also intrigued by the number of blogs that were busily distributing coupons.I should have realized sooner that there was more to the coupon activity than meets the eye. It began to dawn on me when I saw this press release and visited the Jessica Knows blog. Her right nav bar has clear indications that she is affiliated with various brands. She also has a clear disclosure statement.

This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. This blog does accept forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, or paid topic insertions. We will and do accept and keep free products, services, travel, event tickets, and other forms of compensation from companies and organizations. The compensation received will never influence the content, topics or posts made in this blog. The owner(s) of this blog is sometimes compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. Even though the owner(s) of this blog receives compensation for some of our posts or advertisements, we always give our honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences on those topics or products. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the bloggers’ own. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider or party in question. This blog may contain content which might present a conflict of interest. This content may not always be identified. To get your own policy, go to http://www.disclosurepolicy.org/

For several months there has been a lot of buzz about compensating bloggers (WSJ, subscription required) but most of it hasn’t focused specifically on the mommy blogosphere. Here’s a good example; this post explains the controversy surrounding Chris Brogan’s Kmart posts and links to Chris’s reply. The controversy raged for awhile even though Chris’ posts were clearly labeled as being sponsored. The mommy blogosphere is so active there are now various lists of top ten mom blogs. This one focuses on the coupon blogs. I took a look at all 10 and found the following:

• Only one had a disclosure statement and it seems word-for-word the same as the one above. It probably came from the same place. Good for these 2 bloggers!
• Most of the others give clear evidence of monetization. I’m basing that on the blogs being hosted and design and navigation suggesting the use of a professional programmer.

My sample size of 11 blogs wouldn’t pass the “representative” test, but I think the results are compelling. Mommy bloggers are being compensated in various ways and they aren’t bothering to disclose it.What should marketers do? I think it’s obvious that they should require a reasonable level of disclosure. The disclosure statement in use seems to cover the waterfront and it would make sense to require it of affiliates. Perhaps what the business is supplying to bloggers makes a difference, so I’d further suggest:

• Coupons. The mere distribution of coupons through blogs doesn’t seem to create a huge issue. Do users care where coupons come from? I don’t think so! Is there sometimes paid travel or other compensation for the couponing affiliates? It appears so, and disclosure of that would be desirable.
• Product descriptions and ratings. Full disclosure is required when products are being discussed. Consumers have come to rely heavily on peer ratings, and they want to know if the recommenders are truly peers or whether they are compensated endorsers.
• Content. Be sure to brand any content that is made available for use in the blogosphere. That protects both sides.

Wal-Mart seems to have gotten it right with their Elevenmoms blog. It’s linked to the Wal-Mart site and the bloggers and nature of their activities are disclosed. From there, it’s a matter of how well done and useful the blog is. If consumers find value, they will use it. And Wal-Mart, apparently having learned its lesson a couple of years ago, isn’t letting itself in for brand-damaging disclosures.

Transparency Rules!

Author Notes: The second post in this series can be found on RWD. Soon after this post was written the FTC began an investigation of compensated blogging.

The Importance of Community Monitoring

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb sent me a copy of his recent Guide to Online Community Management. It’s a comprehensive, well-done guide that is recommended for anyone serious about the new position of community manager—either hiring one or being one.

I was on their distribution list because they picked up on a post of several months ago about monitoring community. In it I said that even with the help of a consultant it would take 3 to 6 months of serious effort to build a meaningful community. The report says that’s actually a short time, even with help, and in retrospect I couldn’t agree more. I also find interesting the comment that the more cost-effective long-term solution is an internal community manager.

It’s a 75-page guide, and I can’t cover all the issues they discuss, but I’d like to hit a few high points. Social media is not advertising, is it even marketing? Maybe. Is it more public relations and customer service? Quite possibly.

They do touch on the universal questions, “Should we have/do. . .?” In terms of corporate blogs, they see them as valuable for all except the businesses that refuse to devote sufficient time to them, especially in the midst of a crisis. I think that’s right on. Twitter they also see as invaluable. I’m a Twitter convert and absolutely see its uses. I follow a number of marketers who consistently provide good info in their Tweets and I greatly appreciate them. I also brutally unfollow people who are self-serving or fatuous (that’s a nice old-fashioned word that fits a lot of what I see). I don’t see Twitter as very useful for personal communication, but it’s a great professional asset and “value” is the point. The guide suggests being cautious about spending a lot of time on a corporate Facebook page because returns are hard to achieve. I’d also agree with that.

There’s a lot of focus on the importance of community managers in start-ups. They argue that a CM can be one of the early hires and one of the most cost effective. If you believe in the power of community , that makes sense. The alternative is traditional marketing with a sizeable budget. Community may make more sense for the start-up, but what about the established business? Deborah Ng provides a perspective from an established web business:

Do all businesses need a CM? I’m not sure. I think any company with a heavy Web presence would do well to have someone to spread the word and find out what makes its audience or client base happy. CM’s establish personal relationships and are more invested in the product or service than your usual publicist for hire. Plus, we know the social networks, we know the Web, and we know the bloggers. BlogTalkRadio wouldn’t have hired me if I was just Joe off the street. Being a pro blogger and being able to speak with other bloggers put me ahead of the other candidates. p. 21

What does it take to make a community successful? In a nutshell, a lot of hard work! But it has to be hard work that understands the nature of community. According to Justin Thorp from ClearSpring:

“Your users are the lifeblood of your community. You want to treat them like you’d treat guests in your house. Otherwise, like me, they’re going to make their way to the exits and not come back. One of the benefits of the Web 2.0 era we live in is that there are lots of places I could spend my time.” That’s the kind of plain-spoken, utility-based approach that all parties could probably agree with. That’s language that other people in a company could likely hear from a community manager and agree with (emphasis mine). p. 43

It’s an important part of the job of community manager to do the internal marketing that supports the community effort. That includes, but is not limited to, the importance of good metrics. Isn’t it interesting that efforts like lead generation are easily measured in social media and others like brand development are hard to track—just like in traditional marketing media! They also point to the 90/9/1 rule—it can be hard for a new community manager to remember that only 1% are likely to become “hardcore contributors.”

There’s a lot more, but I’d like to end with Heidi Miller’s tounge-in-cheek warings about using social media:

Treat people in your new social networks as prospects, not friends. Make sure that you constantly bombard them with one-way messages about how great your product is.

Be in a hurry to show “results.” Forget that “Connections over time equal trust” (--Tara Hunt); insist on showing immediate sales, hits, and click-throughs from your blog, podcast, Twitter, or Facebook page with no concern for building relationships with your friends and participants.

Keep it impersonal; sounds like a corporation. Avoid speaking in a human voice; always “regret any inconvenience we may have caused you,” instead of saying “sorry we messed up.” People love to interact with stale, sterile impersonal corporations, right?

Be the same. Never change. Keep on doing what you’re doing. Don’t bother to differentiate yourself from your competition; just stick with what you know. Never reach out.

Be afraid. Let your fear of loss of control of the conversation cause you to treat social media like traditional media. p. 45

As I said, there’s a lot more. The report is probably a bit pricey for a casual read, but for community managers—or those who need to have one—it’s must reading!

Social Media Experts On the Client and Agency Side

Thanks to Tom Martin’s Tweet, I read this morning's article in Ad Age and his comment, along with the writer’s response and another interesting comment. I found something to agree with in all of them. I was also reminded of the buzz a couple of weeks ago about the NYT hiring a “social media expert.” Finally, what seems like an eon ago, I wrote about looking within your own organization for (young) people who understood social media.

I found the most compelling commentary on the NYT issue to be from Hubspot. They said the NYT needed to do 3 things. I’m paraphrasing, because I think their three recommendations apply to all organizations:

1. Train all marketers on the basics of SEO. Sites need to be designed for optimization and all content needs to be written for search. Marketers must demand that, even if they are not designing sites and creating content themselves. Hubspot is entirely correct that going back and reworking for search is costly and often less effective.
2. Train all marketers on social media. Rather than having one person alone responsible for social media, train the entire company on it, and get everyone involved. . .
3. Provide an ongoing inbound marketing training program for everyone. This will allow for continued learning and development as the tools and technologies change, and it can be a forum for sharing best practices and case studies of things that have worked well.

Amen to all of that! Social media is not the technology. It’s an attitude of transparency and inclusion that has to permeate the entire organization. (Does that remind anyone of the marketing concept as studied in Marketing 101?)

The agency issue is even more challenging. For me also, it brings back earlier attempts to bring, first direct marketing and later, digital marketing into the agency skill set. Both proved problematic.

Agency people who have specific media expertise are essential to carrying out campaigns. Whether media experts are in the best position to integrate social media into strategies and convince clients of their (long term) usefulness is questionable. It’s for sure that most businesses don’t understand how to integrate social media into marketing. Are account managers well enough versed in the new media to explain and persuade? I wonder.

On the client side, I’m convinced that making effective use of social media requires a careful process of organizational change management. The Hubspot recommendations pick up on some of that. They don’t highlight the need for a champion at a senior organizational level.

Social media personnel in agencies (I can’t say that without assuming some dedicated expertise!) have to redouble their efforts to demonstrate the value of their work, as I suggested in the metrics post last week. In time, they have to show a clear ROI. That’s relatively easy to do in areas like lead generation and hard to do in brand development. We should not let the difficulty of measuring brand efforts skew our efforts toward tactical uses at the expense of long-term brand building.

There are major challenges and roadblocks on both the agency and the client side. There’s a lot of internal marketing needed in both environments! Change management again!

Social Media Metrics Worth Noting

I’ve writer before about the pressing need for integrated metrics systems for social media. All the platforms provide metrics, but tracking them individually quickly becomes an impossibly large and complex task. Last week I was interested to receive an email announcing that Andiamo Systems, a provider of social media metrics, had been acquired by Techrigy. I took a quick look and was interested enough to set up a free account and take it for a trial run. I entered my five free keywords--the local wildlife sanctuary with which I work and keywords related to one of our current projects and created my trial account.

I first ran a search for roughly the last ten months, expecting to see results of more active blogging during that time. What I found was a tremendous amount of conversation on Trip Advisor and other local and travel sites. The general tenor was “great place to visit,” but I gleaned one useful nugget on Trip Advisor. There’s free local bus service that goes right by the sanctuary. It was recommended as much better than riding a bicycle on a busy two-lane highway. That’s a useful piece of information to add to our web page! Since then I’ve been getting daily reports by email. That’s not desirable for any high volume use; focusing on the dashboard that gives the most pertinent reports would be much better.

A word about the service. Techrigy has a huge database compiled by daily monitoring of social media including blogs, wikis, discussion forums, video and photo sites, mainstream media sites, microblogs and social networks. Searches are run on this database, not on the web itself.

Their demos page gives the best overview of the kinds of reports available. As you can see, the categories are numerous and each provides multiple reports and opportunities to drill down. Their professional plans page lists programs beginning at $600 a month.

There are lots of interesting ways to filter search data, but I found two to be of particular interest. One is a rating of the popularity of the source. I’ve searched the website for a definition but can’t find it. However, I also find the word “authority” used in the same context, and it seems to me that the meaning is the same. Wikipedia gets a 10. What I see when I look at a report for the same post is a popularity rating of 0 for our member-oriented blog (few links is my guess) and a 7 for Cape Cod Today, a major online local medium. That makes sense, so the popularity rating would be useful if you want to reach out to authors.

Another thing I found particularly interesting was the sentiment analysis. According to their fact sheet, “Using natural-language processing and Bayesian analysis, SM2 discovers the sentiments around each discussion and aggregates these to provide a top-level view of social media.” The products of that analysis are brand references (on a positive/negative scale), content tone, and content emotions. Here’s a content tone chart and a snapshot of the items included in the analysis. A lot of these mentions are from our own material, so of course they’re positive! I didn’t take time to filter out our own posts, but it looks pretty easy. Then we’d know what others are saying about us. That’s key. The sentiment analysis also catalogs 16 emotions expressed in the items. Not surprisingly the wildlife sanctuary scored highest on “social” followed by “bio,” “achieve,”and “leisure.” I looked at some of the highest “achieve” scores: the sanctuary had received a grant, rescued three dolphins, and recounted the story of children finding an intact whale skeleton during a long-ago summer camp. Makes sense to me!
That’s the key to good metrics—once you learn to use the platforms. A good dashboard with graphic reports and the opportunity to drill down to the numbers and the data behind them. Oh, yes—and integrated!

The need is great. Expect social media metrics to be an active space. This morning Bob Collins Tweeted a post on ReadWriteWeb about Sysmos. The post has a lot of good information and already one good comment. This startup doesn’t yet have a free version, but that’s said to be coming and will be worth watching for.

Marketers have been asking for integrated social media metrics—followed by integration of all Internet metrics—followed by integration of all metrics. Clearly the request has been heard!

Survival of the Fittest--Marketers, Media, Agencies

I saw the Digital Darwinism article in Booz & Co’s online Strategy+Business magazine a few weeks ago. I read it, thought it summarized important ideas, then pushed it to the side of my desktop where it languished until a couple of days ago. When I received an email that it had been republished as a Resilience report I reread it and was again impressed with its insights.

Part of the reason is some good case studies; author Christopher Vollmer talks about HP and there are sidebars written by Carolyn Everson of MTV Networks and Ajaz Ahmed of digital agency AKQA. That represents their three key players in this struggle for survival; businesses, media and agencies.

The report identifies 5 behaviors that the fittest will use to survive:

1. Getting close to consumers. Hardly a surprise! The point is to “activate” consumers, making them “prosumers.” I think we used to call that brand advocates, but whatever we call it, it’s hard to do.
2. Stimulating conversation. Again, not a surprise. Advertising is out; listening and dialog are in.
3. Recognizing that content and context are inextricably intertwined. This puts a premium on careful media choice and integration.
4. Making better use of customer data and insight. In this fragmented media environment we lack integrated metrics to measure the progress of our efforts.
5. Building new, more collaborative relationships. This is where marketers have to work in close collaboration with their agencies and media to create the kind of meaningful, two-way dialog that will “activate” customers.

This report is essentially analysis of the fall Marketing and Media Ecosystem 2010 report, which I've written about a couple of times previously. While there is nothing startlingly new in the analysis, it is cogent, focused and a good reminder.

A friend commented to me recently that a brand of our acquaintance didn’t seem to have the basics in place. Good point. These are the basics. If your company/your brand doesn’t have them in place your chances of survival in a challenging environment are seriously diminished!

Carz II - Land Rover Tweets; Other Autos Far Behind?

Unlike the long-term Ford campaign that I wrote about last week, Land Rover used a Twitter campaign around the recent New York Auto Show. They were introducing new models, so it can be assumed that they were looking for awareness and trying to generate buzz.

According to Ad Age (subscription required) the campaign was executed by:

seeding so-called hashtags (words used in tweets that make it easier to follow an ongoing conversation via online searches) on billboards, taxi TVs and other out-of-home venues; spreading word of the Twitter effort through auto-obsessed blogs and online publications eager for a peek at its latest bells and whistles; and paying a fledgling Twitter ad network to spread the word among its army of compensated, heavily followed Twitter users, all of whom wallpapered their Twitter profiles with Land Rover branding. (In case you haven’t yet become a fan of hash tags, they are so popular there’s now a search engine for them.)

According to Land Rover’s agency, the campaign “cost virtually nothing.” Important note: that is media costs. I’ll bet Wunderman was well compensated for its services, and given the visible results, it deserved to be.

There was a big spike in Tweets during the period of the campaign and the sentiment was generally positive. What’s fascinating is that comments about the brand the new models looked to be positive. The negative comments were about the “sponsored Tweets.” Check it out; there’s no lack of transparency. I understand why some Twitter users don’t like it, but is it any worse than online ads, which they don’t like either. As far as I’m concerned, transparency rules!

There’s no doubt that we have a lot to learn about how to use social media in general and Twitter specifically. OneUpWeb has good advice: Brands are expected to have an authentic voice in Twitter. How to best manage and conduct those conversations, to meet both their needs and the demands of the Twitterati, is still up in the air. This chart from eMarketer (newsletter, April 20, 2009) supports that view. Internet users are negative about online advertising. If you read this chart from the bottom up, the story is that the more obvious the commercial content, the less likely users are to respond.

Are other car brands interested in pursuing social media? It seems so. Volvo recently used YouTube to introduce a new brand and it’s focusing budget on social media and search. Audi is taking a somewhat more “traditional” approach. Just this morning I got an email promoting the Audi experience and a slick new website featuring their A6 model.

Remember when online advertising was the big new thing? Now, if you believe the eMarketer chart, online advertising has been superseded by social media.

I believe the data in the chart, but not because of media channels per se. Internet users—all types, all ages—are looking for authenticity. Brands that provide an authentic voice and content of value will prevail. That’s easier said than done, but it is the challenge for marketers in all industry sectors!

Social Media Marketing Myths

My first semester teaching social media marketing is drawing to a close. I hope my students at Harvard Extension School have learned a lot. I know I have, both about social media itself and how to teach it. This week I took the opportunity to summarize what I’ve learned—see the entire slideshow at the end of the post.

The myths I’ve been collecting all semester long sum up a lot of it. Here they are—agreement and disagreement encouraged. These are the myths:

1. It’s easy. It’s not easy to understand what the social platforms can do, especially when platforms and apps are changing on a daily basis. It’s even harder to understand how social media can fit into marketing strategy.
2. It’s free. True, a lot of the platforms are free. Executing them well, however, is a labor-intensive process that has to be factored into the equation.
3. It’s about technology. Of course it’s not. It’s about people and their behaviors, their likes and dislikes, and especially about their desire to communicate with people they like and/or respect about topics of mutual interest.
4. Social media reaches mass audiences. Sure it does. But if marketers wanted to reach mass audiences, they could use network TV (if they could afford it). Part of strategy (see #1) is segmentation and targeting.
5. Marketers can talk about their products. See #3. People aren’t on social networks to talk to marketers about their products, unless marketers given them a good (beneficial) reason to do so. People are on social networks to talk about things they care about.
6. All Internet users will participate. Don’t we wish! See the 90-¬9-1 rule. And, as you do, think segmentation again.
7. Management will understand the potential. Let me ask you a question. Does the person who approves your budget have a Facebook page? Does that person Twitter? If the answer to even one of those is “yes,” good luck with your social media marketing campaign. If the answer to both is “no,” good luck convincing that person to approve a social media campaign!
8. We’ll see results right away. Boone Pickens built an active community quickly—with at least $58 million of his own money! Even the large corporations (think Johnson's®, Ford) who are using social media effectively don’t seem to be budgeting huge amounts for it. If they did, it would become a big traditional advertising program. Boone Pickens made that succeed because it was for a cause. Corporations have to be careful about making it look like “just another advertising campaign.” They are better off to plant the seeds and let the program grow--organically, if you will.
9.We’ll put it up and it will take care of itself. See #2. It takes careful planning, executing and monitoring. All of that takes effort; some of it takes serious marketing expertise.

If you have another one, we could make this a top ten list!

Social Media Final Overview

View more presentations from mlr.

Take a look at the slideshow and see if that helps you identify something I’ve missed!

Carz I - Can Ford Make the Fiesta Cool?

One of the car sites called it “the ultimate social media experiment.” Basically, it’s giving 100 lucky people the opportunity to take a six-month long test drive. The car won’t be available in the US until 2010, so 100 German-built cars are being used for in the Fiesta Movement campaign.

According to Ad Age, about 4,000 people applied online to take part in the program. The cars weren’t scheduled to be delivered until the first week in May, but the happy recipients are already blogging, Twittering, posting videos to YouTube—in other words, doing exactly what Ford wants them to do!
The home page of the Fiesta Movement site is a live feed of photos, Tweets, blog posts, whatever! It’s fun, and the users provide a spirit totally absent from the typical corporate site. Each “agent” has his or her own page to display all their content. There’s also a page for monthly “missions” starting in May. Road rallys, other events? It will be worth watching what they do to keep the interest up and the buzz alive! Of course, there are opportunities to share any/all of this content and a registration page if you want to be kept informed (lead generation, anyone?).

It will also be interesting to see what Ford does in 2010 when the Fiesta is introduced in the US. Will they have a large, traditional TV advertising campaign? Or will they continue to feed off the social media foundation they are laying?

The auto brands that aren’t busy just surviving are doing interesting things to reach people in more direct, personal ways. They have long known how to generate and nurture sales leads through the conversion cycle. They are learning how to generate leads in social media. I’m willing to bet that the ROI on the social media investment (cars included) would compare favorably with that of traditional mass media advertising. Ford won’t tell, but time will. If we see more social media campaigns as the focal point of marketing strategy, we’ll know it’s not only working but that it’s cost effective.

The message seems to be getting around the industry—more to come!

Charting the Evolution of Social Media Marketing

I’m indebted to Tom Martin for his morning Tweet with the link to Jerimiah Owyang’s article on the future of the social web. I’m working on my final summary for the social media class, and this article and the chart it includes really hit the mark. My own odyssey over this semester has highlighted how badly we need to understand the strategy aspects of social media marketing and how hard it is to do in the midst of constant change in the media themselves and how customers use them.

According to Owyang’s analysis we are now in the era of social functionality, moving into social colonization. I see as especially relevant his comment on consumers in the era of social context—that consumers will opt in to share information in return for relevance. I’m reminded of my exhortation last week to “Ask Them!”

He identifies five contexts:
• The community
• Location
• Social
• Behavioral
• Preferences.

Note that consumers control all of these contexts, from the communities with which they affiliate to the information they choose to reveal to marketers (in return for value). Many behaviors can be observed online and mined for their implications. Marketers will have to continue to do that until they can make direct, personal connections with customers and potential customers and engage in dialog with them.

At that point “Ask Them!” still seems to be the most accurate and straightforward way of finding out what customers really want—and that may usher in the era of social commerce!

Where Does Social Media Fit?

I joined the Pro Marketer group on Linked In several weeks ago at the suggestion of a colleague. I’ve enjoyed following it and answering some questions. One has recurred several times, and I thought I’d give it a more detailed response. The generic question is “where does social media fit into my marketing/communications plan?”

Long ago I wrote a brief document about corporate planning being a hierarchy and posted it for my students. It’s woefully out of date, so this updates it for the social media age.

Somewhat parenthetically, I find that a surprising (disturbing?) number of young marketers don’t know how to put together a formal marketing plan. On the same page you’ll find a generic outline. On the direct marketing page you’ll find a (free) chapter on planning direct marketing programs. It too massively predates the Internet, but the process hasn’t changed, and if you want an extended example, please take a look.

View a full-sized copy here.

The concept of a hierarchy has made sense to colleagues who are experts in strategic planning. They are working at the top two levels and haven’t thought much about what goes on when you get to the “annual” level. Program planning has rarely been addressed in a comprehensive manner. There are sites and books on marketing planning and some of them are good. Others are just trying to sell their software, so beware. I believe in the kind of outline shown on my site for overall guidance. I don’t really believe in templates. A template tends to give you a cookie-cutter result. Just follow a basic outline and do the hard work of thinking strategically, whether you are at the annual or the program level(s).

While the concept of the hierarchy seems to make sense, it’s not unreasonable to look at this graphic and shout “planning paralysis!!!” I disagree. I’d suggest that the strategic marketing plan (a multiyear document) and the annual marketing plan need to be written documents. The strategic marketing plan is a written document that needs to be reviewed/updated annually because it provides guidance across a broad group of people and activities. The annual marketing plan needs to be put in writing because it is generally going to be your budget request.

Below that, get creative. Renay Picard, who gave a great guest lecture in my social media class last night, crystallized my thinking on that subject. We agreed that each social media channel in the mix (bottom level of the hierarchy) needs its own plan. She uses a spreadsheet; I use a table. Whichever way you choose to do it, some sort of timeline with responsibilities assigned gets the program across to the multiple parties involved.

Go back up to the program level. A program plan doesn’t have to be a massive document--probably shouldn’t be, given how little your colleagues would prefer to read. I often use a creative brief. There are examples on the web. This one gets most of the elements well, but I’d have to add a section for a media plan. That’s the point. Take a good basic approach, think about what you need to do, and develop a way to communicate objectives and tasks (that should remind you of advertising planning/budgeting) to the people who are going to be working with you.

Don’t forget to update it as you go along. Things will change, evolve, new opportunities will emerge. That’s the beauty of the social media space!