All posts by alicelankester

3 Critical investment opportunities for brands

Now that the dust has settled over Facebook’s Q2 earnings results and the resulting share price changes, let’s look at what the latest results mean for brand marketers. No, not whether brand owners should speculate in Facebook stock, but instead what user behavior trends and which successful Facebook products should brands be investing in over the next six months?

Read some thoughts in an article written and placed in ClickZ this month.

I’m glad Google Reader has gone…

I have been lazily using Google Reader for years … probably since it first came out, though I’m not sure. But it wasn’t until I was forced to abandon the tool that I realized what I’d been putting up with. The experience was just as unpleasant as the Google GMail experience (solved recently with Postbox — excellent). I’ve now transitioned to Feedly and what a joy it is. So I’m going to ignore all the griping and whingeing and applaud Google for letting me go.

No more B2C Marketing Envy

I love being in the consumer marketing business. I spent 6 months at BEA Systems once back in the early 90s, helping with the worldwide launch of a middleware product. When I asked “can I get a demo?” the team looked at me blankly. “A demo? No. It’s middleware.” That was when I finally decided I’d never work on marketing something I couldn’t use, play with, get the feel of and have fun with. And consumer tech marketing was where I could do all that. But it’s changing. B2B marketing is getting more entertaining. B2B marketing is definitely getting the zing of B2C. And content marketing will be the way it happens. Instead of blasting out one-to-many messages to consumers, businesses are forced consider what they can offer to help those consumers do their job better. Content creation is a challenge, but a good one. It forces businesses to think about their consumers — to focus on what’s important to them, and what they can offer that helps. Read this recent article written for, and placed last week in ClickZ “No More B2C Marketing Envy.” .

B2C marketing on social gets more complex every day — what social fragmentation means

Recent article written and promoted through the ClickZ network — What Social Fragmentation Means for Marketers — speaks to the increasingly fragmented story for brands for marketing on social. We have had considerable success encouraging our brand clients to bring multiple B2C social channel content efforts into a single space on Facebook, where content can be promoted and aggregated through the largest audience network.  Fanalog from SmartWool is a great example of work here.

Moving on from clicks to community

Working with large global consumer brands on Facebook I am reminded daily that success on social is all about community, not about clicks. This is particularly true when it comes to a successful advertising strategy on social.

Here’s an excerpt:

Every single fan has the potential of helping a brand create authentic content, and Facebook’s engagement-driven advertising products are designed to amplify great content. It’s that powerful triumvirate of owned media (the page) encouraging the content to be created; to earned media (the fans responding, sharing, participating); to paid media (the brand amplifying those conversations and interactions to a wider audience). Without the first two, the third is just a one-to-many, reach-oriented broadcast message. And it will resonate less authentically on social platforms.

 Article written and placed for ClickZ: “Advertising on Facebook Is About Community, Not Clicks.”

It’s time to mobilize your social fans

With Cyber Monday in the rear view mirror, here are some thoughts on the importance of capturing the mobile follower. Since joining Friend2Friend, we have ensured that every social branded experience is fully mobile-ready.  It’s been great to put all that Loopt experience to work!

Read the recent article at Direct Marketing News:http://www.dmnews.com/its-time-to-mobilize-your-social-fans/article/273864/