Category Archives: Social marketing

Marketing best practices, Social marketing

Is this really a reason not to crowd-source?

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Interesting article here in Mashable about Pepsi’s attempts to crowd-source their Superbowl commercial. Just because Pepsi chose to feature in some way (I don’t know how prominently) the Doritos/Communion Wafer submission — a submission that offended Catholic groups — doesn’t mean we should throw the crowd-sourcing baby out with the bathwater. The outcome should not be a judgement on the value of crowd-sourcing.

When a large, savvy, and well-funded brand such as Pepsi chooses to walk on the wild side, and undertake crowd-sourcing, or social media “stunts” of any sort — they have to take responsibility for their actions. Perhaps “someone” should have thought this through. “Hmm, I love this commercial. It’s fun. Irreverent. But, well, might offend some. Should we feature it?”
Crowd-sourcing is exciting. It helps brands think in a new way about their brand. They get to see how people out there in the real world think about them. It shakes things up. I say, bring it on! But be judicial. Know that there will be submissions and content that may not reflect your brand’s values. In which case, it’s “thanks, love it, but no thanks.”
Marketing best practices, Social marketing

Top 5 mobile advertising trends to watch

Life at Loopt is a blast. For those of you that know me, mobile is the only thing I talk about these days. Interesting article in Mashable today — top 5 advertising trends to watch:

  1. SMS continues to grow and be important
  2. Experimentation with rich media
  3. Mobile sites vs mobile apps (personally I think these will merge to some extent in interesting ways; Apps will incorporate more and more HTML pages that look like App pages; just need to solve performance issues and you can bypass the whole App submission tango when you want to release new stuff). I remain amazed at how many sites stink on even the fancy iPhone and Android devices I used. Estimates state that by 2014 25% of Internet traffic will be on a mobile device. 25%! So for heaven’s sake don’t wait until then to get your Web site mobile-optimized.
  4. Interest in geo-location (no duh!)
  5. Growth of mobile video

Love it all. For someone whose mobile life started lugging around an Apple II, it’s never been so fun to be in high tech.

Marketing best practices, Social marketing

Don’t build an App just because you think you should…

Those of you that know me well know that I’m the market for my retirement flat in London. I’m nowhere NEAR retiring, but at some point in the next twenty years, I’m putting my feet up in my flat with a view of the River Thames and I’m going to love it.

So I patrol www.primelocation.co.uk when I have nothing else going on. It aggregates all sorts of delicious places and I mentally move into most of them, deciding where I’ll put my brand new furniture that I need to buy along with my flat.

Imagine my delight when I saw they had an iPad App now? Quick! Download it! Perfect casual browsing opportunity as I half-watch TV on the sofa.

What a disaster. That’s all I’m saying. Primelocation. Remove that App. It’s a ridiculous waste of time and doesn’t do you any justice.

Lesson? Don’t make an App just because you think you have to. You may have a great site — and Primelocation does — but unless the App really does a useful job on the go, don’t bother. Waste of time and resources, and doesn’t do your brand any justice.

(And a better use of time? Fixing the iPad experience of your core site. Much more useful way to go.)

Social marketing, Technology use

The curious potential of Chatroulette

Despite all the waving body parts of Chatroulette, I keep thinking how unbelievably great this platform could be for fostering interesting interactions between strangers. Check out this video:

Edgier brands are already finding ways to market their brand on chatroulette.

I can see all sorts of ideas around games in chatroulette space, spreading the word on a cause one person at a time, brainstorming with like minded groups if you could just chat with people who are tagged with an interest, like “Dr Who” or “The Monster Raving Loony Party.” Imagine chatting with people at a conference. Demo’ing products. Providing crowdsourced customer support. Think about Good Samaritans — help strangers who are feeling down.

And want to get really scary? How about live TV that includes “let’s hear what random people think about XYZ?” A whole new spin on reality TV. Could be ads you run with the results. How about customer surveys? “Hey, I’m with such and such brand, what do you think about …?”

Interesting. Can’t wait to see what happens.

Social marketing

Developing a social media strategy

Millions of bytes of information already exist out there covering how to approach building a social media strategy. Few come with the street cred of Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang.

Check out this excellent article “Developing a Social Strategy.” Step through the slides. Key takeaways:

  • First listen and learn
  • Engage, but focus on sharing and watching
  • Look at ways to support your customers and help them solve their problems
  • Engage your customers in your innovation — what are their ideas?
  • Start small, focusing on one business goal where social media can have an impact — and gauge success by how well you reached the business goal
  • Practice and preach openness — this takes courage!

Their follow on “Understand Your Customers’ Social Behaviors” is also worth a look. Their report focuses on how it’s important to conduct research to identify the social behaviors of your customers before you do anything. For example, identify:

  • Where customers are online (use surveys, brand monitoring)
  • Who customers trust (surveys)
  • Who customers influence (surveys, brand monitoring)
  • How customers use social tools in the context of your products

Once you understand, the plan can be built.

Social marketing

Who’s making money on Facebook? And how?

In the early days of the Facebook application platform release, I was seriously underwhelmed by the applications on display. They were, and in many cases continue to be, dumb, spammy and boring. No, I really don’t particularly care if your pigs are running, well hog wild in Farmville. But it’s OK that you do.

In many cases, none of these apps were making a cent. They may have been popular, but where was the money to support them? Just as regular Web sites have had to start diversifying beyond purely ad-based models, apps couldn’t just rely on ads on canvas pages to sustain their development.

With the explosion of virtual goods, application developers are finding new ways to help themselves to a little of your money at a time.

Virtual goods have a long way to go in the United States. They are a mature market in Asia. According to Virtual Goods News, Asia’s total annual virtual goods economy might be worth more than $4 billion, which is about 25 times larger than the market in the United States, currently purportedly valued at $200 million.

Facebook Virtual Goods Games

Take the games from the Chinese developer Reeko for example. (Tagline: “play with friends.”) According to an interview with their CEO Patrick Liu, monetization on Facebook has been higher than on other Reeko platforms. Their game Sunshine Ranch has 1,162,511 active monthly users as of today. You can play Sunshine Ranch for free, or buy coins for a range of $5 to $50 or more using Visa, Paypal, MasterCard or Amex. Coins let you buy carrots, pumpkins, fertilizers and more.

A similar game, Farmville, is at the #2 spot on the hot games list at Inside Facebook. You buy coins to let you plow more fields and, well, do other farmy things.

In fact, the majority of the games on this list are monetized through a free to play virtual goods model. You can play for free, but if you want to really pimp up the game, you need to buy stuff. If you don’t want to buy using real money, you can participate in advertiser-financed offers through companies like Super Rewards and Trial Pay.

Facebook Celebrity Virtual Goods

Lots of news about the Britney Spears gifts now available on her page. She has 2 million fans, and presumably she believes that at least some of them will spend $1 to $2 to send a little itty bitty pic of her to their friends.

Other celebrities, Harry Potter for example, allow you to share branded gifts for free. Hoping of course that it spreads the word about Harry’s latest movie offering.

Getting Real: Real Life Facebook Gifts

Also new, developers can now integrate real gifts into the Facebook Gift Shop, alongside virtual gifts. So you could actually physically arrange to have red roses sent to the one you admire, instead of just an icon. When users select a physical gift, they’ll be asked to enter a delivery address just like a traditional online shopping experience. You can already see Britney Spears gifts on offer, and other branded gifts. I don’t know how much of a slice Facebook gets from these gifts, but it’s all good for them.

The Pay with Facebook Option

Facebook itself wants to get into the stream of money moving around, with their new “Pay with Facebook” option. It remains to be seen whether this new feature will become a ubiquitious method of payment. But regardless of that, virtual goods apparently represent a minority but decent chunk of Facebook’s revenue. Social Media Today provides these (unsubstantiated) estimates:

  • $125 million from brand ads
  • $150 million from the ad deal with Microsoft
  • $75 million from virtual goods
  • $200 million from self-service ads

Total: $550 million

To read more about Facebook Virtual Goods, go to that section of the mighty fine Inside Facebook site.

Social marketing

What social media sites should you take a look at?

Just reading “50 Social Sites That Every Business Needs a Presence On.” Just in case there’s any doubt that you really need full-time staff — even if you are small — to manage your social presence, this article should convince you that yes, it is a very full-time job. This article offers a great check-list of places to check out. But you don’t need them all initially. Pick the big ones, measure and understand, and then keep adding. And wherever you can, use aggregators like PixelPipe to help update multiple sites simultaneously.

Social marketing, Technology use

Social conversations — the shock of the new

I have learned more from being the official Photobucket tweeter (http://twitter.com/photobucket) in the past few months, then over two years of watching customer service reports, following Yahoo Answers, searching blogs for our brand and more. The immediacy of reply, and the “stalker appeal” of just searching for my brand’s name is captivating and not just a little bit addictive.

But when I come to report back to colleagues and management the results of what I’ve found in listening to the Internet pulse, I find it very hard to quantify the data I found. Where’s the formality in my approach to collecting, analyzing and reporting on what I hear? What can I judge it against?

The Dizzying Speed of Social Conversations
The volumes of customer conversation is so huge, and so fast, it can be a bewildering task to uncover the trends and commonalities in customer sentiment. Some are easy to spot and shoot up over night — look at the Motrin debacle. But some are much harder because the come and go, or might not be spotted immediately. Plus, marketers have to combine and analyze those more subtle responses and trends in social conversations and measure them against the data they are collecting from site visits, site behaviors, transactional data and other sources into a meaningful analysis that can be relied upon.

The Shock of the New
When I was a history student in 1980, I studied Robert Hughes “The Shock of the New” — a series and book that changed the way people think about modern art, its relationship to speed and change in modern society, and the worship of anything that’s “new” for the sake of being new.

Sound familiar? I feel parallels to that story today as a marketer in a social media world, with all kinds of shiny new tools and widgets at my disposal every day. Will these shiny new toys hold up to the cruel light of history? Will they be considered worthy and important 6 months, a year, or even 5 years from now?

One of the problems I see is that the new social media marketing platforms are so new that there are few touchstones we can use to judge the quality of the results we see. If I see 5 tweets a day on the same topic about a brand and 10 posts on Facebook a month on the same topic, is that a lot, or not? I need to compare it over at least a year. And I need to be able to measure it as I go along. Do I count them up as I go?!

As I said. Bewildering.

But not hopeless. The tools will catch up. The benchmarks will form as social networking matures and brands build some historical data online. New job roles are already forming, with expertise in the measurement of social conversations and brand tracking. It cannot be ignored, or sub-contracted off to an agency. The best marketing groups will have this expertise in-house, and their results should be watched, respected and acted upon.

Marketing best practices, Social marketing

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.)