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.

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

Developing a Metric for Engagement

For several years the topic of measuring engagement has been important to marketers and still is, according to the recent study quoted in eMarketer (newsletter, January 26, 2010). The most desirable metrics can be interpreted as engagement—with your website or with your ads. As the chart suggests, the state of the art is still single metrics. Here’s another example that's interesting both for content and for metrics; the level of engagement with social media in various countries by comScore late last year. They use time on site and number of pages as the key—and separate—metrics. It seems to me there’s a need for a multivariate measure of engagement. I’ve looked around and have found two different approaches.

Business Week has taken a variety of steps to increase engagement with its readers, including hiring an engagement editor. Here’s an interesting summary of what they have done; I don’t find an update so far in 2010. Most germane to my point, they have developed a proprietary User Engagement Index. Here’s how they describe it:

We developed a proprietary set of metrics to help us both track, and make us accountable for, our goal of being the business and financial site with the deepest and most meaningful engagement of its users. The index is the ratio of our outputs to the world (the stories and blog posts we publish) to the world's inputs to us (perspectives on stories and blog posts from readers as well as their guest columns.)

It makes sense to me and it is an approach any business could sit down, think about, and adapt to its own product category and situation.

If you want a ready-made solution, I found that also. Dutch metrics supplier Nedstat has an engagement solution that’s based on basic website metrics. Web Metrics Demystified recently did a good post, which included this graphic. There are two basic components to the Nedstat approach. First, the user develops her own engagement algorithm; that follows the Business Week example. Engagement is not the same for every product category, every website. Perhaps even more important, it’s going to differ on the basis of your own communications strategy—what you are doing to try to encourage customer engagement.
Second, Nedstat has a solution they call Live Segmentation that allows you to choose a customer segment and calculate the engagement index for that segment. Both the engagement algorithm and the segmentation choice are said to be easily varied as the marketer considers better metrics or strategy options. Aurelie Pols’ post rightly points out that you can do this with traditional web metrics, but it may be easier to work with a metrics company that can guide you through the process.

What it comes down to is interesting. If you are serious about measuring engagement, you need to construct your own multivariate metric. You can DIY or you can engage a consultancy. Either way, it’s going to take some thinking, some work.

Another object lesson reinforcing the fact that none of this is easy!

Does Your Brand Need a Platform?

Writing about the SuperBowl, I mentioned the term ‘platform.’ I recognized it as the multiple communications channels I’ve been talking about for a long time. It seems crystal clear to me that various segments of customers rely on various (also multiple) communications chanels. It’s also obvious that we miss a lot of the communications that marketers target toward us; doesn’t matter whether the channel is direct mail or Twitter!

What I realized is that a platform is more than just multiple channels. Harry Gold’s slide captures it perfectly; it’s the complete set of channels that reach your target audience, yes. But the channels are connected, with a lot of the connections (integration?) being automated.

It would really be nice to know for specific target audiences, which and how many social networks they belong too. Most of us would say we belong to several; how many is that and which specific ones? That’s hard to answer even for generic segments. I did find a 2008 study of wealthy consumers who said they belonged to 2.8 networks each. Given that they are probably older than the population average, that may be a surprise to some. It shouldn’t be. According to a study of Google AdPlanner data by Pingdom, “A full 25% of the users on these sites (19 by my count) are aged 35 to 44, which in other words is the age group that dominates the social media sphere.” Interesting, but doesn’t answer my basic question.

There are two issues, though, that I think can be generally accepted:

• There are multiple networks that appeal to a specific target audience; Twitter and LinkedIn for business people, for example.
• A lot of users don’t see all the communications that pass through any given network. If you use Twitter, think about it; in a given 24-hour period, how many of the Tweets that are sent to your account do you actually see?

Point is, we have to get our message out through multiple channels multiple times to have a fighting chance to have it seen, much less acted on.

So as you look at Harry’s chart, ask yourself:

• Which channels are important to our target audience?
• What kind of content is most relevant to each? Videos for YouTube, content-heavy posts for blogs, and 140 character Tweets are some of the obvious.
• How should we connect the relevant channels? Even better, how can we automate the connections between them (this post goes automatically to Twitter, for example) to save the mindless and error-prone activity of reposting?

Connect them and you have a platform!

Two things I’ve learned:

• It’s not always as easy as it sounds; some of the feeds that make the connections automatic are easy. Others will require help from IT.
• Connecting the various networks doesn’t eliminate the necessity of an acquisition strategy—for fans, followers, whatever you think is the best entry point.

Marketers are still going to have to work at it, but a platform makes both strategic and practical sense!

Collaborating with Customers - B2C and B2B

Step 1 - Listen
Step 2 - Respond
Step 3 - Engage

I’m ready to write a post about the 4th step in the revised social media strategy development model. The old model called it CoCreate. This one uses the term Collaborate. Collaborate maybe sounds a little less formidable, a little easier to do. The more I’ve thought about that, the more I’ve realized it’s just not so. It’s really hard. Sometimes it seems impossible. I’m going to explain why by using recent data on Forrester’s Social Technographics data and add some insights I’ve derived, virtually all from mistakes I’ve made.

I’ve written about the Technographics ladder before, because it’s a real asset to understanding what’s going on in this space. With the 2009 data, they’ve added a new rung on the ladder. It’s called “Conversationalists” and it primarily reflects the influence of Twitter on the social media scene. Obviously these categories are not mutually exclusive; most of us fall into one category at some point, or in connection with some brand, and into another category in a different situation. That’s life. But what is key to understanding the difficulty of encouraging collaboration--of getting customers to create content-- is the size of the Spectators segment; 70% of consumers fall into that segment at least part of the time. Add to that the next step on the ladder. Joiners aren’t cocreators; they have a profile, but beyond that they are consumers, just like Spectators. In fact, it’s not until you get up to the Critics and the new Conversationalists that you get content creation, from ratings to status updates to Tweets. Those are fine and increasingly important to marketers. However, it’s only a small part of the online population that creates content that generally goes beyond 140 characters!

Looking at the total population is, of course, useful. But it’s not your target market. I found a good example in the B2B space. I used Forrester’s profile tool (which doesn’t yet have the Conversationalists), just set for the entire B2B market. I got a profile that’s not hugely different from the consumer population profile, which isn’t particularly surprising because these activities carry over from our private lives to our business lives—and vice versa.

Josh Berman fortunately published a more detailed example in early 09, also based on their survey of business buyers. I’m including the chart with his commentary, which just deals with the “overall” and “for business purposes” categories on the right. Virtually everyone in the B2B space falls into the Spectator category—that’s a critical insight. 69% of them are doing so for business purposes, and in the blue bars you’ll notice that is not really different for IT managers and managers in a line of business who make technology decisions. A few more of these business decision makers fall into the active categories of Critics and Creators. That gives them an opportunity to be influentials in their business discipline.

And that begins to get to my points. I would suggest that:
• It’s really hard for a brand to get people to contribute if they already do not. You can—and should work on it—invite people to write reviews, for example. In the consumer space, it’s relatively easy to reward people for doing it; loyalty points are an interesting consideration. Incentives are always useful, and you may be able to find useful incentives in B2B as well as B2C.
• Once you identify customers who are taking the “baby steps” of, say, writing reviews, can you encourage them to do more? Whether it’s a blog comment or a wiki contribution, it’s a good step. Business customers love to give their opinions and ideas as sites like Dell’s IdeaStorm demonstrate, so it may be easier to give them an opportunity and let them go to it.
• All the chicklets that are encouraging us to Tweet or Digg content items are trying to get people to be more active in the conversation arena, and it’s worth making it easy to do. I’m not sure how much it contributes to a feeling of collaboration, but it’s great additional visibility. It might even create a customer perception of supporting the brand over time.
• Can you encourage customers to become Creators? All the B2C video contests like “Help Flo” are an example that you can. And those will probably continue to work well in the B2C space as long as you have a creative campaign.
B2B seems to offer a lot of opportunities to help customers become thought leaders. It’s the standard “speak at the conference” appeal. Now that can be expanded to blogs and other content repositories. That clearly leads to a feeling of being valued and I don’t see how it can do anything but strengthen the relationship between brand and customer.

I see two key take-aways in this. First, you can’t easily get people to participate in activities they aren’t already familiar with. If you have a target audience that’s pretty much Spectator-only, don’t try to make them Creators overnight. It’s just not going to happen.

Second, the marketing practice of trying to locate the opinion leaders (influentials) has come into its own. Customers are self-identifying by their blogs and other online creations. Find them and reach out to them. The case of the Coke fan page has become the classic case of doing just that. Your outreach may not always have such spectacular results, but it will be worthwhile. It just takes the patience and persistence that’s mandatory in the social media space!