10 tips for building brand communities

Excellent article. 10 Tips for Building Brand Communities. It really underscores how communications in marketing is no longer just top down — it’s a dialog. Twitter has taught us so much about this in a really short space of time, and it’s a truly exciting time for a brand to build a brand community and learn from their users. There has been no time when the tools have been so readily available to brands. The only thing standing between a brand and embracing this wave is their readiness — and their courage — to do so.

Social media marketing showing growth and optimism

According to this eMarketer article “Will Digital Marketing Prove Profitable,” the economy is driving marketers to show measurable ROI for their marketing efforts, and is also driving them online to social media marketing tactics. Marketers believe that social media marketing will show better ROI than more traditional tactics — outdoors, TV, radio, print. 22% of the marketers surveyed said they’d be moving dollars online.


See eMarketer for more information. (Subscription required for in depth reports.)

“I’ve heard of them” — the value of being well-known name

Reading Seth Godin’s blog post “On becoming a household name.” So much of what we try to do in marketing is to build brand awareness so that when a user comes to the decision-making point, they say “I’ll go with the one I’ve heard of.” I think the idea of running banner ad campaigns that are all about pushing your name, and not necessary about getting clicks, is intriguing and worth testing.

eMarketer: How people share online video

Just finished reading a report from eMarketer about future of sharing video online. You can find the full article here: http://www.emarketer.com. (Subscription required. (c) eMarketer Inc.)

The study cited statistics that indicate that online video in the US is now as big as network TV.

The study notes that the age of online video viewers trends younger: 82% of teens (16-to-17-year-olds) and young adults (18 to 24) streamed video, compared with 73% of Generation X (25 to 34) and 65% of older boomers (55 to 64) who said they watched.

Younger people will educate older generations how to watch, where to watch, and what’s worth watching online. The day is coming soon when my family will look at our television as merely a big screen monitor attached to our computer. We already use it that way a great deal.

“Only” 8% of teens watch TV online” Only?

Just finished reading this report from The Hollywood Reporter: a survey about teen TV watching habits you can read here. The report states that “only” 8% of teens say they watch TV online.” But I honestly think this summary of the report is weirdly skewed to send a “calm down, TV industry” message. TV watching online is an inevitable tsunami of behavior, and saying it’s going to happen slowly is flying in the face of everything we’ve all seen in Internet behavior over the past 10 years.

Here’s a quote:

About 8% of respondents who watch repurposed TV online (18% among teens) said they watch TV less often. Indeed, just 3% of adults (compared to 4% last year) said they would consider disconnecting their TV service to watch exclusively online.

It seems to me that’s a notably significant portion of this audience who is watching TV less often. I need to get my hands on the report, because this summary appears contradictory and confusing.

Update to this post: see my second post about how online TV just as big as network TV. Don’t bury your head in the sands, network TV. This is coming!

Need a seriously good belly laugh?

I just love podcasts. And the BBC, I think, has some of the best out there. A new one I just ‘discovered’ is Friday Night Comedy Night. You can discover it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/fricomedy.

Do yourself a favor and subscribe. You may miss some of the jokes in America, due to the references to such delightful political clowns as Boris Johnson and (better known) Gordon Brown. But nonetheless, it’s worth it. It’s the kind of show that the creakingly un-funny “Wait, wait … don’t tell me” on NPR tries to be, and fails hopelessly.

Last night as I drove home down 280, I seriously needed cheering up. I listened to the latest show and was actually roaring with laughter. Thank you Sandi Toksvig.

Are you tweeting too hard?

… then you may appear on this site: http://tweetingtoohard.com.

I spent an amused 15 minutes trolling the site. What a lot of self-important people there are out there. Can’t you hear yourselves?!

Note to self: humility is a good thing.

Trouble with the site is that even if you log in, you can’t enter your own tweets. I have a couple of Tweeters in mind that I’d dearly love to submit. Crushingly disappointed I can’t!

Seth Godin Rocks!

I was first introduced to Seth Godin’s work by one of my all-time-favorite people Guy Kawasaki. (I know. I’m not alone in that crowd.) I read his book Permission Marketing : Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers. He has many other books, and when I have time (yeah right) I’ll read others.

I read his blog when I can. Today I read a truly winning article that made me laugh and made me think. What a great combination. Called “Can You Change Anything?” it offers a list of 45 things you can do to get out of your rut. Awesome.

His list reminded me of a very interesting management team exercise I experienced a few years back. The company I worked for a few years back was in something of a mental rut. We felt we needed to rethink how we were approaching the market for our product. So we embarked on a day-long exercise with small group breakouts, large wall post-its and lots of healthy debate.

Two exercises stick in my mind:

  1. What strategies and tactics would you employ if you had unlimited budget? Sometimes you find that released from the burden of thinking about what it’ll cost, great ideas that actually don’t cost much show up unexpectedly.
  2. Turn everything upside down. (e.g., global vs. local; or older demographics vs. younger demographics) So whatever you’re doing now, consider the polar opposite approach.

Both exercises yielded worthwhile results.

Effective versus Measurable: Evaluating Marketing Tactics

I work in very budget constrained times. I am constantly looking for new ways to get the word out that are low cost, but remain effective. But sometimes the easy, cheap methods of getting the word out are really hard to measure. And the ones that cost money are measurable. Tricky situation. But just because something is hard to measure, it should not be a reason to devalue its effectiveness and thus ignore it. Sometimes you just have to do it.

In the ‘old days’ marketing was much more ‘top down.’ You used direct mail, paid advertising, email marketing and later paid search to get the word out. But life isn’t top down any more. Thankfully. It’s much more fun being a marketer now! Everyone is an influencer. You need to give them the tools to get your message out there.

But before you embark on any of these tactics, ensure that your strategy is totally solid. Now is not the time to experiment in the dark. Segment your audience so you understand the most valuable and profitable targets. Use the data you have available to understand what’s worked in the past, and what hasn’t. Study your competition and learn from their weaknesses and mistakes. In all your tactics, be completely clear of your goal, your audience, your message. Be consistent and stick with it until you can clearly measure results. Then, tweak and adjust to fine-tune.

1. Advertising
Clearly this is highly measurable and target-able. But network advertising doesn’t offer the creativity and effectiveness that we’re looking for. It’s not inviting your audience to be a part of your conversation. However, see another post here about ideas for using advertising not to build clicks, but to build brand recognition.

2. Press releases
These aren’t exactly cheap. Well, I guess that depends on your budget perspective. But you obviously have to pay an agency/writer, get the release on the wire, and target your follow up. It’s not easy to measure results, but you can certainly measure the hits you get on the various search engines, and thus calculate potential readers. Don’t, however, be lured into the ‘spray and pray’ method of press outreach. Target the writers who speak to the audience you are reaching. Use your press release merely as your news hook. The real value is in the conversation you’ll have with that writer one-on-one.

3. Social network profiles
You can measure your friends, the visits to your social network profiles, the numbers of discussions and comments. If you’re clever with your parameter tracking in something like Google Analytics you can measure clicks from specific posts or articles. But the real measurements are hard to quantify. Regardless, having a lively, personal, interesting and regularly updating social network profile on MySpace and Facebook is vitally important to ensuring your brand is effectively represented. Ensure that anyone who goes to your social network profile will learn something new about you and your brand. Something they’ll want to share.

4. SEO campaigns
Both measurable and effective. Measurable in the sense that you should clearly be able to see changes in your traffic to your site if you have decent tracking at your end of the clickstream. Effective because if you do a good job of ensuring your site content is well indexed and follows all the plethora of SEO rules, then someone looking for what you offer should be easily able to find you. During our recent campaign with the wondrous Lady GaGa, searching for “lady gaga photos” during the campaign resulted in Photobucket as the #2 result in Google, right after Google’s own image search (which was also full of Photobucket images). Great traffic spikes resulted.

5. Corporate blog
A well documented corporate blog is highly effective: the press find you, and read backgrounds on you and your stories. The terms in your blog should be well indexed through SEO. However, if it’s hard to measure effectiveness. Even if you only get a few thousand visitors to your corporate blog a day, those are still a few thousand people who are getting a back story, and who can potentially pass along what they have found.

6. Schmoozing the blogosphere and twitosphere
In an ideal world, you have a full time community manager whose job it is to continually engage bloggers and tweeters who may be interested in your proposition. Each tweeter or blogger who tells their audience about you and your product has a huge multiple effect. Even if it’s hard to measure it is a highly effective way to get the word out at low cost.