Category Archives: Social marketing

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
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.

Articles & content, Marketing best practices, Social marketing

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.” .

Articles & content, Marketing best practices, Social marketing

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.

Articles & content, Social marketing

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.”