All posts by alicelankester

Marketing best practices, Social marketing

Content that rocks for millennials

Thanks to Ryan Donegan for prompting some excellent ideas on the subject of marketing to millennials.  Been spending a lot of time recently considering what content ‘works’ and what doesn’t.  On social, consumers “own” the brand, but what’s more important is that they own the conversation. 

The team at PooPourri.com delivered content that is not only highly shareable, but one can only imagine that it starts conversations, both online and offline. That works! The conversation doesn’t end with a Like.

Good stuff.

 

 

Marketing best practices, Social marketing

Content marketing and social — putting fans and followers to work!

Content marketing is one of the biggest challenges and opportunities for both business and consumer brands today. As brands look to expand their reach online and engage audiences beyond ‘interruptive’ advertising, they’re increasingly looking to cultivate shareable content that is informative, entertaining and interesting.

See the latest article written and placed for Roger Katz of Friend2Friend on ClickZ.

Social marketing

TacoBell and SnapChat? Should be worth a look

Given the TV ads showing overtly stoned kids gazing at the clock and watching time pass before they go out to fix munchies the TacoBell, watching their SnapChat feed should be interesting… I guess that TB is just embracing the only real purpose of drive-thru garbage food late at night.

But on a more serious note, we’re only going to see more of brands getting ‘braver’ on social — Karmaloop has gone on the record saying they’ll accept butts, boobs and nudity — while dropping our jaws at how blatantly tone deaf some brands can be — Kenneth Cole and Syria, American Apparel and Hurricane Sandy. Let’s hope lessons continue to be learned, while brands pioneer in social marketing. And while we’re about it, let’s call for some adult supervision in this industry, please!

Marketing best practices, Startups

Startup postmortems — they’re all the rage right now

I have been involved in many startups. The same problems come up time and again. But it seems that teams often just want to go out and learn lessons the hard way, just because they believe that’s the only way to learn.

Here are a couple of recent postmortems that are worth reading, with a summary of key learnings. As I find more, I’m going to add them…

Flud — social newsreader (just for the record, what a depressing name! Flud sounds like Dud. But that’s apparently not why they failed. Or so they say. However, the name does offer opportunities for cheap cracks in headlines… Flud’s a Dud comes to mind. But I digress.)

Here’s what the co-founder Bobby Ghoshal says he learned in this Techcrunch article:

  • Don’t chase the press; let them come to you.
    In Flud’s case, press caused numbers of users that Ghoshal the product wasn’t ready for.My take: this is true for a consumer product that needs huge numbers; less true for a B2B product which may look for smaller, higher quality numbers. A better way to grow numbers in a less spiky manner — word of mouth.The important thing to remember here is timing: do not, under any circumstances, start seeking press approval until you are ready to take it. PR is not for the faint-hearted. It can go spectacularly wrong.  Timing is everything.
  • Don’t worry about competitors if you truly believe your vision is superior, stay calm.
    Ghosal warns that competitors get inside your head and freak you out.My take: but don’t let that allow you not to look and learn; figure out what you can learn from competitors and then add your own spin. Take their best ideas, and leapfrog them.
  • Test, test, and test again.My take: what can I say? I can’t count the number of times I ask “what’s the test plan here, guys?” and I’m met with the answer “the programmer has tested it.”

    Don’t forget this: programmer/developers/engineers should never, ever be on the front lines to test their own code. They are the worst people do be asked to do that. Don’t miss the step of quality testing! Bugs stick to me like burs on a dog. Probably because I do things that the engineers never think of.

  • Stress test. Load test.My take: again, never miss this step. A stress/load test is a special form of testing, so get an expert. If you don’t know how to do it, find someone who does and get them to help — even if it’s an afternoon’s chalk talk. You’ll regret it if you don’t.
  • Know your customers and what they want.My take: but careful not to let your customers design your product. Guy Kawasaki wisely advised me once, years and years ago, “if you let customers design your product, we’d never have got Macintosh from DOS.” I know you’ll probably not old enough to remember what that means, but it’s true.

    Your customers can guide you, inspire you, help your vision … but you need to know where you’re going next. Your customers tell you your next two or three features; they aren’t there to give you even your 6-month vision, let alone your 1-year or 2-year vision.

  • Growth or engagement? Growth wins.My take: this is true; you need to to focus on bringing in the users.

    However, if every user visits once and never comes back, that’s a lousy user. Your product has to be basically useful and sticky, and has to have hooks of some sort that encourage users to come back again.

Social marketing

Is Facebook doomed?

Vivek Wadhwa, Fellow at Stanford University, considers Facebook doomed, because:

“Google is exploring uncharted territory and staking its claims to the next trillion-dollar market opportunities. Facebook is mired in the past and squeezing every penny it can out of its customers to justify its inflated stock price. Unless it happens to luck out by buying the right company, it seems to me, Facebook is doomed.”

Squeezing the money, yes. The inflated IPO expectations forced Facebook to look at every opportunity to sell pixels. And they are innovating in how they sell pixels. Sponsored updates, sponsored posts, social ads are all infinitely superior to one-to-many media advertising and are influencing marketers everywhere.

And I would agree with Mr Wadhwa that they are not innovating like Google is innovating. I love that Google has labs that experiment in all kinds of crazy things that may never to come fruition. Hard to compete with Google’s level of innovation. It’s their DNA.

So what should Facebook be doing? Facebook is that it’s where people spend (and waste) time. Not invest time. LinkedIn, by comparison, is asking me to invest time more and more. I like that. There’s a real value to it. It benefits my career. It meets my goals of personal growth, retirement, taking care of my kids’ college funds.

I can’t leave LinkedIn. Because my professional identity would suffer. That hits me right in my wallet. LinkedIn is investing in not only the professional graph, but the content in that graph. I learn something when I go to LinkedIn. On Facebook? Well, I learn things that are significantly less worthy.

I can leave Facebook. Will my social identity suffer? Maybe a bit. But I’ll get over it. I know where to find the people I care about, and they know where to find me.  I’ll be a little less informed about the minutiae of their lives, but I can live with that.

Where LinkedIn is investing in my professional identity, Facebook should be investing in my personal and social identity. Can Facebook can figure out how to invest in my social identity in a way that makes it impossible for me to leave without social repercussions? I haven’t seen that.  And what I have seen is the younger generation hanging out on Facebook just for the messaging, but actively participating elsewhere — Tumblr, What’s App, SnapChat.

Social marketing

The Content Marketing Landscape: how brands are owning breaking news

I hadn’t heard David Shing speak before now, but I’m glad I have now. His brief, but energetic, talk linked below reminds me why this is a great time to be a digital marketer. We’ve moved from the traditional one-to-many form of advertising and marketing to one-to-one-to-many. Social isn’t a place you go. It’s a thing you do. And in marketing, it’s all social.

Here are some key points that David made, but don’t use this to avoid watching him speak. He’s worth the time.

The Content Marketing Landscape from NewsCred on FORA.tv

  • Content in the right context is the new black
  • Brands are starting to ‘own’ breaking news
  • The land grab for ‘likes’ is over; attention is the new currency; mindshare=marketshare; you can like my shoes, my hat, my bag before and instead of liking ME
  • Agencies are still talking ‘rates’; brands are talking in terms of consumer identity — there’s a disconnect!
  • Brands are still spending 78% of their budget on broadcast, TV and print — that’s all wrong!
  • Content does not compete with advertising, it competes with popular culture
  • The future is NOW — think about mobile local alerts; crowd payments; augmented reality games; distributed social networks; wearable tech; screenless devices; nano; personal transport
  • The new form of entertainment is personal expression — that’s what brands are competing with today
  • Utility is critical — be useful at the same time as entertaining and informing — how can you be useful today as a brand?
  • Stop thinking about mobile as the ‘second’ or ‘third’ screen; it’s the first screen!
  • If you think, as a brand, that if you build an app ‘they will come.’ They won’t. People have an average of 40 some apps on their smart phone, but use only 4 or 5 of them.
  • Mobile is no longer about SoLoMo. It’s about HoMo. (Home Mobile)! 68% of mobile minutes are used up at home. (I need to source this stat.)
  • People buy emotionally, and then rationalize; in retail people love wait lists, short supply, continuous updates — what does this mean for your retail brand?
  • People’s behaviors are influenced by their peers — how can you have an experience as a brand? If you make good content, it will be passed around. And don’t think that individuals create viral videos — most are professionally produced now!
  • What’s your KPI? Will it be passed along! That’s how you judge if it worked!
  • Where can you embed your brand in places where you can’t even buy media?
  • What’s the harmonious story you can tell across sites?
  • What’s reactive, remarkable, relevant about your brand?
  • Screens that talk to each other is coming — TV, tablet, smartphone
Articles & content

Forbes Magazine covers Friend2Friend’s Outside Magazine engagement

Delighted to have secured a great article in Forbes Magazine, ‘Creating Scalable, Engaging Editorial Content with MaaS — ‘Media as a Service.’

Forbes Magazine has published a review of how Friend2Friend’s Best Town Ever 2013 Social Voting Contest for Outside Magazine contributed editorial content for their September 2013 issue. The article outlines why Outside Magazine chose a Friend2Friend social engagement app and how the app worked.

Social marketing

Mastering content marketing on LinkedIn

Social strategies and content marketing strategies must be closely coupled in order to work. This is where LinkedIn has emerged as a huge business marketing opportunity. Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, talked recently of his plans for LinkedIn to become “the definitive professional publishing platform, where professionals come to consume relevant content and publishers come to share it.” One out of every three professionals on the planet is now on LinkedIn. As a place where businesses and professionals connect, LinkedIn is uniquely positioned to support professional communication, and it is building the hooks and systems to cultivate the sharing of content organically based on communities’ specific interests. Read more in this article written and placed in iMedia.