David Armano is Managing Director of Edelman Digital Chicago. This is his personal digital property where he shares insights, ideas and opinions on doing business in a connected age.
Brands that insert themselves into relevant cultural events is now becoming a norm in marketing. Did you know that May 4th is considered Star Wars Day? These brands did, and they inserted themselves in the conversation by producing content which reflected it. Here's a few that went to the dark side:
Pop Chips went the simple route and used an action figure to do the heavy lifting.
Harrods did some subtle and clever Photoshop to go over to the dark side of marketing.
PayPal traveled to a galaxy far far away and kept their branding intact
...while Red Bull played it safe and stayed closer to the Milky Way.
Oreo went old school (see original Star Wars for blue drink reference)
...and tide skipped Photoshop school altogether
If Motorola didn't do this, they would have gotten decimated by a death star.
USA Today made their audience do the work for them with a contest on Vine that asked people to make Wookie noises in the six second video format.
Marketing, content and cultural relevancy continue to merge together fueled by digital social and mobile channels. Now it's just part of how brands seek to remain relevant to their consumers, customers and in some cases audience. Have you seen any good Star Wars Day content produced by brands?
I'm in Lake Tahoe this week combining some business and down-time and recently spoke at "Snowcial"—billed as "SXSW for the snow sports and hospitality industry, it attracts a really cool cross section of people who span marketing, technology and even journalism. If you love skiing or snowboarding and marketing/technology, it's worth considering for your event calendar. I kicked off day one yesterday with a short talk about content, convergence and connectivity. Below are a few themes from my talk:
Content As Currency
There's a good reason everyone is talking about the role of *content these days but you have to understand the psychology of it all. Thanks to social networks, people share interesting, entertaining or even informative content because it makes them look good. There's a reason why the word "meme" has "me" in it. So it's not enough just to produce content—your content has to be designed for sharing. I like to think of content in today's hyper connected world as being "snackable"—sending out bits and bites of content which can be digested and shared rapidly. The reason why we're seeing a revolution in visual content which is designed for social newsfeeds and mobile is based on this core understanding of why people like, share and engage around content.
Everyone Can And Will Publish
I shared a recent experience I had with Jeep where I tweeted for help and was not only responded to but had my issue resolved through their customer care service which was facilitated through my initial interactions on Twitter. This is by no means a new model, but clearly Jeep had a process in place and was able to close the loop with me efficiently. This is an area brands will continue to grapple with as people move from traditional ways to initiate contact with brands and go directly to public forums. The obvious follow up question is how does this scale? My answer is figure it out because it's not going away. And yes, my car is working just fine now.
Insights > Influence
For all the hype around influence—we've still largely got it wrong. We should be looking at analyzing who and what are driving conversations in the same context as we might run a focus group. Technologies that allow us to analyze conversations and how they spread and who influences them can provide great insights if we know what we are looking for. For example in working with the association that represents US dairy farmers—we analyzed conversations in forums and found these emerging. As we audited the content the organization was producing—we identified opportunities make future content initiatives more relevant to what people were talking about. You Don't Not Need An App For That
There's no doubt that we are living in an App economy, but it's time to step back and ask ourselves if we need an app for every idea. Unless that idea involves significant functionality, it might not need to be developed as a stand alone app creating yet another format to maintain. My team has been developing content solutions using responsive design techniques so the design reacts to the format it's being viewed it. It's not a perfect solution for every development issue, but worth tapping where it makes sense.
It's All Converging
Lastly I talked about the convergence of media models and marketing tactics. First from a broad perspective inspired by Altimeter's model of converged media, but also ad it applies to new digital advertising formats which blur hard lines. Facebook sponsored posts are a perfect example of how paid, earned, and owned dynamics all come together. You can read more about that on the unofficial All Facebook blog who covered my talk.
Looking forward to hitting the slopes again before I leave!
Somewhere in the debate to define what was hot or not as a worthy "real-time marketing" example during the Oscars, we lost sight of the bigger picture. We're not really talking about the benefits of marketing in a timely fashion as much as we are talking about the birthright of an organization or brand to produce, circulate and curate conversations around valuable content.
I had to take a pause recently to remind myself of the bigger picture and consider other activations we have in play like working with the organization who represents the US Dairy industry. In this approach, we've gotten to point where we staff an onsite newsroom who is focused on producing content and engaging with the industry. Before any of this happend, we had to begin with a strategic approach—a content strategy.
Planned & Responsive Content
A good content strategy starts with the basics—which are built upon developing content narratives around planned activities which are either ongoing (like a drumbeat) or are responsive (in reaction to current events). Both have their place and they can and should work together. Content strategy often is the starting point before getting into the nuts and bolts activities which support it, like developing a content calendar, putting an editorial process in place or supporting content production with writers producers and creative talent. While newsrooms and war rooms can serve as places content activation happens in concentrated form—these tactics are not the strategy.
A war room setting enables teams to centralize content production and operations
These are still early days for organizations who are building their audiences directly via social channels, or partnering with media companies to circulate or co-produce their stories. There are some great examples where brands have already begun regularly producing their content (Intel IQ, Coke Journey, AMEX Open Forum). In each of these programs and the ones to come—whether it be formal or not, there is strategic thought being applied to content development and distribution.
I'm not surprised, but that doesn't mean I'm not concerned. I witnessed something sad last night, while the Oscars were going down. As I anticipated, there was a great deal of activity by brands and their partners who took a shot at producing content connected to the Academy Awards. Some of the content was just OK. Some wasn't. And to be honest, some of it was pretty good even if not earth shattering.
Because I had a feeling there would be a great deal of activity going on—I set up a simple hash tag, because I wanted a way to organize what brands would be doing. So, I set up #OscarsRTM (Real Time Marketing) on my own as a way to keep track. And I invited others to help. And perhaps discuss.
What happened next astounded me. First—the "marketing community" debated the term real-time marketing back and forth. At least this was somewhat intellectually stimulating. Then what came next was something not unexpected but still astounding in it's intensity. A constant stream of snark, dismissal, critique and a never ending barrage of "not impressed."
Really? When did it come to this? Take the below image posted on a Tumblr created for the sole purpose of trashing the efforts from brands last night.
It's the "newsroom" US Cellular set up and was using as their mission control for branded content which they published throughout the evening. I watched most of their content and I enjoyed a few of the posts. And frankly, my first thought was that this particular organization is ahead of many because they are TRYING to provide relevant content vs. just doing straightforward advertising. Does your company have a newsroom ready to go? Do you have staff and partners coordinating and working together to produce content? Are you experimenting AT ALL?
According to the genius who took liberties with the above picture, the team at US Cellular should be fearing for their jobs. And this—this is why I am so concerned. If the marketing "community" is successful at tearing itself down in the pursuit of building up the profiles of individuals too fickle to be bothered, then we all lose.
Nobody tries. Nobody fails. Nobody wins.
Yes, my team was working with a brand last night as well (Kellogg's), but even if we weren't and if I had created the hash tag just to perform objective research, I would still be concerned. And despite that, I have a prediction for you. Brands will eventually figure this stuff out. They will get better and it will become integrated (JC Penney did a nice job of that). It will just become part of how brands build equity (through content). And no level of sarcasm will be able to stop it.
This train has already left the station—so we now choose to get on and guide it to the right destination, or we can sit on the sidelines and wait for the next one, hoping it comes soon. I'll choose the former while others debate the latter. And trying will only make it better.
The above video documents some of our recent work with the Cars.com team where we planned (in advance) to support a new campaign that launched during the Superbowl. With the Oscars right around the corner—you can bet that the topic of real-time marketing is going to come up again as brands seek to remain relevant during periods of time where everyone seems to be talking about one thing. Recently, the Harvard Business Review featured an article stating that "advertisers should act more like newsrooms"—in it, this stood out for me:
"The traditional campaign model is rigid. Ad units are created at a point in time and don't generally adapt to emerging themes in culture. In contrast, the newsroom metaphor suggests that content has to be produced and delivered in a continuous stream rather than through a ponderous, slow-moving process of months of campaign development."
It makes a point salient point that's worth digesting—traditionally advertising has been planned well in advance and that planning doesn't often leave room for improvisation. But don't mistake improvisation for lack of planning. If you watch the video above, you see the team working together in the "command center" which required advanced planning. It was no easy feat to mobilize a centralized group working with multiple teams offsite to upload content, respond, track and measure results and engage in real-time. It is well planned improvisation. Below is a sample from the planning process that went on behind the scenes:
To pull it off requires forward thinking organization (we had this with Cars.com) and alignment with multiple partners (other agencies). It requires the ability (and permission) to improvise once the planning is in place. It requires both flexibility and a focus on staying on brand. While "Real-Time" and "Content Marketing" seem like buzzword overload, it is simply an evolution of marketing triggered by modern day behaviors. In other words, not a fad—In my opinion.
The real winner of this year's Super Bowl might just be real time marketing—or at minimum the ability for your marketing team to be nimble. The lights go out at the big game? Get creative about it as they are being fixed. Have a copywriter ready to craft a headline, a designer who can whip up a compelling visual, and don't let your media buying slow you down because you will need to promote that post on the spot—and in my opinion the best people who are in position to do this kind of media buying is the team working in the "newsroom" who have access to all the analytics. The future of marketing will move at the speed of now. Kudos to the Oreo team for once again nailing the execution.
We had our own team mobilized in a newsroom setting (our SICC) as we supported Cars.com who launched their new campaign with a spot that debuted during the game. More on that later, the pictures below capture the activity level as we monitored social mentions, sentiment and coordinated posts and responses:
We also addressed the power outage during the game as it unfolded (above)—working it into our evening, but the creativity shown in the Oreo example is something that should make you stop and think because it's not easy to pull off. But while the Oreo example is well executed, I still think this game is in it's infancy, and as if the real time creativity wasn't easy enough to pull off—as I mentioned earlier the media buying is really going to create headaches. Here's a simple illustration of the basic flow of the real-time marketing model.
It begs the question: Can you really do real time? Do you have a content team ready at a moment's notice? Can you promote a Facebook post as quickly as it takes to develop the content? Can you measure what's working and what's not as it unfolds?
Thinking about my own career path since the beginning, I realized there's a pattern. I've always been drawn to industries in the midst of change and disruption. I landed my first job as a graphic designer because I had entered the workforce with a valuable skill at the time—I had learned the essentials of desktop publishing and the company I went to work for was in the process of overhauling how they produced their marketing materials (migrating from traditional tools to digital). It was a huge change and for those who were resistant to converting their skills to digital desktop publishing—they faced early retirement.
Next, I spent about a year working in cable news—but it was an intense year as I worked with the Fox News Channel team helping launch the 24 hour cable news network. Fast forward over fifteen years later and that network is thriving, having tapped consumer demand in cable news and niche media coverage. I've worked at the Chicago Tribune in digital news media and witnessed first hand the differences in how the "digital" team and the veteran employees viewed their work. I spent nearly six years working for one of the original digital agencies which back then was expected to transform the agency space and now doesn't exist anymore (agency.com)—the remains have been swallowed up by corporate entities.
It was at the tail end of my experience there that I discovered "social", first through the blogosphere and then Twitter and Facebook and I did stints at other digital firms and even a start up—hoping these organizations would lead the way in the transformation from traditional digital to a more connected form of digital communications. Eventually in 2009, I found a home with Edelman because it seemed the culture prioritized and valued everything that was changing because of the emergence and disruptive nature of social media. Back then, it was the PR firms that seemed to understand best what was changing. Today, it's not the same story.
I believe search, social and mobile are the three most disruptive forces in modern communications and they are working together to wreak havoc on organizations and their agency partners. Because I work for a public relations firm—I feel a sense of urgency to start here and lay out what must evolve. The people (stakeholders) we want to reach move effortlessly across a media landscape often times making no distinction. Increasingly they spend time on mobile devices skimming content in "streams or feeds". The average consumer of media has the attention span of a squirrel on ritalin and getting them to pause to read anything more than paragraph is becoming increasingly difficult. The media industry has been disrupted and thereby public relations is an industry in the midst of change. Here are a few areas I believe PR must aggressively embrace and do differently.
Creative Most PR firms will say they have creative talent, but we have to ask ourselves if it's the right creative talent. Can we produce apps that live in Facebook or mobile? Are we working on the next Nike Fuel or are we in position to just do the media outreach for it? My most recent hire is a digital veteran who has spent most of his career at advertising and digital agencies. We aren't going to just get people talking about things—we are going to create the things they talk about.
Analytics Analytics in Public Relations has to move beyond just counting "placements" similar to the act of pulling together traditional media clippings. Analytics in public relations has to integrate with the other measurement functions of an organization (like connecting earned to owned properties). It also needs to go beyond measuring and move into data collection and analysis. And analysis needs to evolve beyond merely analyzing into deriving core insights to inform decisions like how to spend media dollars and what the tone of messages should be. I'm currently hiring a senior analytics lead for my team and I describe the ideal candidate as part measurement wonk and part digital planner.
Converged Media Public relations was built on the notion of "earned media" which differentiated it from advertising. Today, it's all just content as part of the vast quantity we are able to digest on a given day thanks to the deluge we are subjected to. It was Google that began infusing ways to "pay" to help raise visibility with the search engine. It is Facebook that has introduced to the mainstream a convergence of media through things like the promoted post—and it is the media itself that is offering more ways than ever to make advertising feel like it's a part of the editorial universe. This convergence defies both traditional advertising, marketing and public relations constructs—yet poses great opportunity for any of the disciplines who are nimble enough to master.
This brings us to today and tomorrow. Here's what I am seeing in the industry: PR got a head start on social but it's been rapidly eroding. Companies who value customer service have moved beyond how many PR professionals think about social and are gradually evolving how they service customers. The advertising industry which has always held "creative" in high regard no longer sees social, digital or mobile as add ons but rather core to their business. They are bent on not just talking about the digital world but rather they want to help build it—and they also understand how to leverage creative communication to get people's attention. The partners who handle media transactions do so in bulk, but increasingly it will need to be done in real time. In short, it is the marketing and communications industry that is being disrupted and for those of us on the "PR" side—we must act quickly and decisively to re-invent ourselves in a way that looks more like the future and less like the past.
From a media perspective—marketers like to align strategies and tactics along the lines of how things are done at scale. The popular framework goes something like: Paid (advertising), Earned (Word of Mouth), Owned (Corporate) and everything else falls in a somewhat more grey area and from my perspective this is where the action will be for 2013 and beyond. As outlined above, Altimeter calls this area of overlap "converged media" because it's a convergence of different media dynamics coming together. If you ask me—from a marketing perspective this is the future of what, to this point we've called "social".
You see an image in your Facebook news-feed shared by a friend. The image was generated by a brand. You saw it because your friend shared it. They shared it because they liked it. They liked it because the content resonated (and they saw it). They saw it because the brand paid Facebook to promote it.
Paid? Earned? Owned?
All of the above. A social platform merely powers the engine and the above could have all been done in a mobile context. I'm doing a lot of thinking in this area as I build out my team because I don't believe that anyone has the "converged" part completely figured out yet. From a talent perspective I've already begun importing folks from the ad agency side of the house who get both social, digital and content. Mentally, I've been thinking about the dynamics of how different teams function:
Traditional:
A television centric marketing approach is still fueled primarily by the dynamic duo of a creative team composed of an art director and copywriter supported by an infrastructure of scale which fuels the teams with insights and has a small army of media service individuals who determine how the money gets spent so that the campaign oriented marketing message is seen and heard.
Digital
Similar to the traditional team but digital teams often "build" things (apps, sites, platforms) which add an experiential layer to the marketing initiative. Copy for the digital team is somewhat more complex as the things they build can often contain much more than what can translate through offline marketing tactics and so a comprehensive approach to content is required.
Social-Digital
The newcomer to the mix. Many brands are now taking the nuts and bolts of social in house—but the above model whether in house or agency side (or blended) is designed to merge the basics of good marketing (valuable content) with the more real time nature of social news-feeds (timely relevant bursts of communication supported with dialogue). Again, looking at teams from a media perspective—a core social-digital team that targets the converged media space must bring creative, community management and a newsroom-like sense of editorial savvy together.
I think 2013 is going to be the year that things feel like they are all blurring into each other more than ever and is going to create a lot of challenges for both brands and their agency partners as they work together to figure out how to address the overlaps. In addition to bolstering our creative, strategic and measurement capabilities—I've also put someone from my team in charge of thinking about the overlaps between paid, owned and earned and how this all evolves for our clients (a director of converged media services). I think that especially for digital, this is going to be where the action is.
If your company doesn’t have the above model in place a year from now, you may regret it.
You’ve probably felt it for some time, but now the roadmap is becoming clear—companies must build their own media empires. And if they don’t, they risk missing a window of opportunity that provides myriad benefits, whether it’s telling their own stories or becoming more efficient with the media dollars they spend.
Trends in media consumption point to the convergence of savvy marketing tactics combined with a real-time newsroom approach for brands to be seen and heard in a collectively social, digital and mobile world.
Facebook: Engagement Isn’t Enough
First, let’s start with Facebook which, thanks to an alleged algorithm change, has been at the center of controversy in the marketing world. Though it’s cited as the reason brands have noticed their content reaching a lower volume of Facebook users, the caveat is that there is much a company can do to increase the odds of being seen and heard on Facebook. But, it relies on a brand doing a few things really well.
For starters, it’s not enough to solely engage on Facebook. A company now has to provide a steady flow of high-quality content, which then relies not only on organic content sharing from Facebook users but also on subsequent media purchases with Facebook in order for that message to spread.
Sound familiar? It’s how advertising has been done in the past, only with a big difference. Much of the content that tends to do best is oftentimes associated with current news or highly relevant social issues. Take for example whatOreo has done with its Daily Twist initiative, where in honor of the cookie’s 100th anniversary, agency teams get together daily to decide how to riff off of relevant, often newsworthy, subjects that, by day’s end, produce a new piece of clever, highly shareable visual content that’s sent out into the digital ecosystem. This type of approach makes clear what most pundits miss when challenging the notion of “ROI” in social media—the reason a company wants to amass followers in social media is to build their own marketing/communications network, which bypasses the middle man and goes right to the source.
The end game in social media won’t be accumulation of fans but rather your ability to reach them and potentially inspire action.
Marketing Meets the Newsroom
The middleman in question could conceivably be media agencies. Why spend millions on media purchases when you can consolidate some of that spending with Facebook? This is where it’s going to get really interesting because most big companies like to clearly divide their needs with partners who handle tasks at scale. Creative agencies do creative and media agencies do media. The problem with this model is that a real-time newsroom-meets-marketing model requires community managers who understand not only how to manage a Facebook page but also know when to put a dollar behind high quality and timely content that will spread. This model jumbles up what was once a clear divide between content, media purchase and engagement.
Becoming media companies may not be optional for brands. Felix Baumgartner didn’t do his stratos jump alone—he had the backing of a major brand (Red Bull), a team of ex-NASA scientists and Red Bull’s media team who covered the event, creating an infinite amount of media coverage that generated a nonstop wave of publicity. I’m not even sure how to estimate the value of this type of coverage, but suffice it to say that it’s significant and leaves a mark on a Google-friendly Web.
And how does all this media spread? This is where players such as Pulse come in.
Whether you are mobile or on the Web, Pulse allows you to have all of the media you can digest and share at your fingertips, served in a usable experience. And much like other media models, some content is promoted organically due to popularity and some can be bought for featured placement.
It’s all going to come down to this: content, quality, frequency and relevancy. If companies are to become media, they must master the art and science of merging marketing with a real-time news cycle. The content a company produces must be compelling and built for an audience with an itchy “like” finger.
And it’s going to take time. Most companies don’t have full-time editors and newsrooms that work hand-in-hand with their marketing department and partners, but in a few years they might.
Now that some of the dust is settling around Facebook's massive acquisition of Instagram this past week, we can all take a step back and think about the bigger picture. Yes, Facebook understands the critical role mobile will play in how billions of people interact and communicate but they also understand that interactions, engagement, consumption or whatever you want to call it generates one thing.
Data.
Facebook wants it. Google wants it. And all businesses will want to understand it. There is huge, big business to be built around all kinds of data. Targeted marketing is the first salvo and it's a pretty big one. But that's likely the tip of a gargantuan iceburg. I had some fun recently chatting with Richard Quest from CNN on some of these issues. It's only a few minutes, but you get the idea. The Web is going social, mobile and local. All of this will generate a lot of data, and that's going to be valuable in a lot of ways. What do you think? Where is all of this going?
Klout has dialed up their marketing efforts, this time placing agency individuals in a March Madness bracket style competition they are calling "Agency Insanity". Critics will scoff at it as another attempt to get individuals to pump up scores, but in actuality the effort is a straight forward marketing initiative aimed at raising awareness, generating buzz and getting Klout to show up in people's social streams. A while back, Klout's founder Joe Fernandez and I discussed something like this as part of a brand initiative and it's interesting to see it in action under a different context.
I'm playing along as are my colleagues Steve Rubel and Michael Brito. Speaking for myself—if I end up winning, I'm going to figure out how to give the grand prize away (a Vegas get away) perhaps to a couple who could really use it. Our team will still get the free Pizza party. Don't like the tactic? Get used to it. Social marketing techniques are increasingly designed to get others to compete while leveraging their networks in the process (gamification leverging social currency). It's actually taking an old model and updating it for a social era.
What is Location-Based Marketing? While an official definition doesn't yet exist for location-based marketing, we (Mike and Aaron) like to explain it as the art of engaging your customers and prospects using services like foursquare, Yelp, SCVNGR and Gowalla to drive loyalty, word of mouth marketing and referrals. These services are mostly available on smart phones (mobile phones that are web and GPS enabled) and allow users to "check in" to a physical location such as a restaurant, bar, print shop or dentist's office. Some of these services allow the businesses to reward their customers for checking in with special discounts, prizes, experiences and recognition.
Because more and more people are starting to use smart phones, it's becoming easier for software and application developers to take advantage of knowing within a tight radius, where someone is assuming that "someone" doesn't mind revealing their current location. The key here is for marketers and small business owners to provide enough value (discounts, prizes, recognition etc.) for customers to want to check in so that customers will share their data with them. Over time, marketers and business owners can leverage this rich data (age, sex, past check-in behavior, frequency of checking in, etc.). Even better, if the location is cool enough or the offer compelling enough, marketers and business owners can count on their customers sharing their "check ins" with their networks on places like Facebook, Twitter and Google +.
How Does a Business Get Started with a Location-Based Marketing Campaign?Knowing that people like lists, we've put together a straightforward blueprint for companies to help them think about how they might go about building a location-based marketing campaign. This isn't everything you need to know, it's a good primer for getting started. If you're really interested in digging in, we hear there is a good book to help you get started (shameless plug, we know).
Set goals: Are you looking to drive foot traffic? Loyalty? Sales? Engagement? Think about how to measure this.
Claim your location: simply put, search for your business across the top LBS (foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla and SCVNGR) and put a "claim" in on your business's location(s). In most cases, this is a ten minute process. While you're at it, make sure you take a look at your location on Google Places.
Pick a service (or two) to support: Find 1-2 services to use (hint: if you’re in the travel and entertainment industry, Gowalla is a great choice). One way to decide which service(s) are right for you is to see how active your customers are across each service.
Reach out to your Influencers: Find out who your influencers are (the mayor, ambassador or the person at the top of your leader board is usually a good place to start) and get to know them. Heck, invite them in for coffee, lunch, a wine tasting.
Pick a great offer: Note that “great” doesn’t equal “expensive.” Sometimes, a sign in your store/venue honoring the “mayor” might be enough. My co-author, Mike Schneider, and I have what we call the “Ben & Jerry’s Rule” named after one of the first successful campaigns ever to roll out on foursquare. They offered 3 scoops of ice cream for $3 for everyone that checked in (cost for 3 scoops is normally $5.50). And even better, the mayor got a free extra scoop.
Measure, refine and optimize: This one is pretty straightforward. Have a plan and execute against it.
Gamification FTW: Don’t be afraid to leverage the “game dynamics” of some of these platforms as appropriate. For instance, on SCNVGR, you might give extra points for a picture with the store manager. Or if you sell coffee, a bonus for the best drink recommendation.
Let people know about your campaign: Remember to let people know about your program by putting up signs, telling them in your newsletter, including a mention on your “on hold” music, etc.
Operationalize, operationalize, operationalize: This means that if you are going to run a location based marketing campaign, train your employees. Train yourself. And make sure you have whatever it is that you’re promising. Not operationalizing is where many companies fall down.
Try out an API: If you are tech savvy (or have some tech savvy developers), try experimenting with some of the APIs these location based platform providers make available for free. You can jazz up your website or your mobile app.
Where is Location Based Marketing Headed?
We're seeing a lot of interesting developments in the space. The over exaggerated death of Facebook Places signals something that we have had our eyes on for a while. The audience that knows about and understands checking in its current form is a subset of highly technical (geeky) early adopters, gamers and social networking dynamos. These folks spend money, they're loud and they are worth activating, but that behavior on its own is not going to pay off the true value of location. Instead, there are other ways for consumers to use and express their location to get value.
Passive Checking In / Precision: Reward cards like Tasti-D-Lite's check people in automatically using the foursquare API, but companies like Shopkick are experimenting with sound wave emitters that can track people to specific aisles of a store and test whether they can get people to spend with targeted offers, but also see if they can get them to change behavior. I remember proposing similar technology to a pharma client which did the same using RFID trackers. They thought this was too icky, but Shopkick, according to some chats I've had with Forrester has 2.5 million users and 40% are active. That is huge and represents a seriously amazing opportunity to get to shoppers and interact with / influence them at decision point.
Intent / Future: Applications like Forecast, Plancast and Ditto have people telling where they are going to be. This represents a huge opportunity for merchants to use structured data to serve a group of people who need their services, or to attempt to change their intended behavior. The first ones into the pool get the advantage and I bet they get it at almost zero cost.
In a status or meta data: Facebook, like Google+ is using location as a feature and it's actually pretty brilliant because they are getting more than just a check in. They're getting personal and professional expressions wrapped around a location. The problem is that the data is still highly unstructured and difficult to analyze, but if anyone can figure it out, it's Google. Look for them to do cool things with the location data that you provide to Google+. I see recommendations based on what your friends or others like you like without you having to answer many questions.
Recommendation Engines:Bizzy and WHERE are the leaders in this category. Bizzy recently integrated with foursquare so they can pull in your locations and add places you have been to their recommendation technology. They also have a concept of "checking out" [BTW are the shenanigans at techcrunch wacky or what? start another blog Mike] where you rate your experience in a structured manner. They also just released a reminder notification that pings you 60 minutes after you check-in on foursquare to remind you to check out on Bizzy.
At Point of Sale: Screw checking in, just pay. Technologies like The LevelUp are capturing your location, but they aren't broadcasting it to anyone (yet). Instead they're quietly building a future-forward loyalty, cross merchant loyalty program that will have one of the most interesting sets of data anyone has seen. Look for them to possibly merge with SCVNGR at some point and connect the social aspects. For now, though, we'll take one step mobile payments and behind-the-scenes discounts on anything we want. You can leave your wallet at home!
Hopefully we've piqued your interest in location-based marketing. If you have any questions, please ask away in the comments and we'll do our best to answer them.
The following is a guest post from Joe Chernov. Joe is the Director of Content for Eloqua. Co-chair of WOMMA member ethics panel. You can read more about Joe here: http://www.jchernov.com
If you’ve ever suspected your social media followers are your best customers, your instinct was correct. The customers who choose to follow you on social channels are considerably more apt to promote your brand to others, at least, that’s what a recent internal study at Eloqua tells us.
Inspired by a conversation with SiriusDecisions VP Jonathan Block, we decided to shift our focus from the number of people following us and instead concentrate on the nature of our followers. Who exactly are these people who’d gone out of their way to “Like” us, tweet about us and join our online communities? What are they most apt to talk about? And, most importantly, are they good for our business?
We looked for patterns in the most recent 500 tweets mentioning Eloqua, the dialogue on our 1,500-member Facebook Fan page, and the chatter in our LinkedIn Groups. We uncovered some compelling statistics – data that supports the instincts of many social media marketers.
Those who engage with us on social channels have a much higher Net Promoter Score (NPS) – a popular, albeit controversial, measure of brand advocacy – than our “average” customer. Over all, the NPS for customers who engage with us on social channels is more than 450% higher than our total customer base. We had assumed the NPS for our Facebook Fans would be the highest – after all, the type of content our Fans prefer is more “personal” (staff photos, party updates, employee profiles) than what’s shared on Twitter or LinkedIn. But although Facebook Fans registered a staggering 700% higher NPS score than our total client base, it was Twitter that stole the show. A customer who tweets about Eloqua is nearly nine times as likely to be a brand promoter as our average user.
Before completing this post, I chatted with social media A-lister Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group. Owyang has blogged in the past about NPS and social media, so I figured he might have some insights to share. He certainly did. He told me, “NPS doesn't take into account that customers already are making referrals. To get a holistic view of customer sentiment, referrals and word-of-mouth, brands must also include measuring the organic opinions of customers happening every second of every day around the globe.”
In other words, NPS tells us if a person says they would promote a brand; social monitoring tells us if that person actually did promote a brand.
Yet having run communications at word-of-mouth marketing firm BzzAgent, I can tell you that most brand-related conversations still occur face-to-face, and no listening platform can (yet) monitor in-person discussions. So while I agree social media analysis should incorporate sentiment, I still believe the correlation between NPS and social engagement is valuable in that it speaks to the likelihood of brand endorsements in real world conversations as well online chatter.
Certainly, this study only begins to address the correlation between social media and brand advocacy. It doesn’t touch on causation. It’s unclear if our best customers engage with us on social channels because they like us, or if the act of engaging with us induced them to favor us. That’s a question we plan to tackle soon.
What else did we discover in the process of analyzing our social followers? Lots. Here are a few gems.
The company’s blog is the #1 trigger for customer tweets
Although social CRM and support are, justifiably, hot topics in the media, calls for support account for only 1% of all tweets
SMB clients are nearly 2.5 times as likely to create online content than enterprise clients
The more engaged the company is a particular social network, the higher the NPS of the customers who are active in that community
Does this analysis affect the way you will approach social media? Have you conducted any studies that advance or contradict these indicators? We’d love to hear your thoughts. In the meantime, the next time your CEO, CMO or Board asks if any of this social media stuff truly matters, you no longer have to trust your instinct. You’ve got data on your side.
Everyone is talking about influence, so I added my perspective (based on personal experience) in my latest contribution to the Harvard Business Review. In the article, I lay out six critical "pillars" (not to be confused with metrics) which I find are significant factors when analyzing influence from both a traditional and digital perspective. They are:
Reach: The most obvious, this relates to the size and potency of an individuals "social graph", or if you are looking at it from a traditional perspective it's the "platform" an individual has which helps them be heard.
Proximity: This is likely overlooked with the exception of those who study network dynamics. Proximity indicates the relationships between people and how they are connected. Close proximity or ties typically indicate friends relatives etc, while loose ties have less proximity. Both ties however can be effective in influencing behavior.
Expertise: Perceived expertise in topics or subject matter establishes influence as well though is difficulty to pin down and measure. There are correlations between reputation and authority here as well. But if an individual establishes themselves as having expertise (validated by trusted sources) this becomes a major factor.
Relevancy: The relevancy of influentials to their communities, networks or audiences is also a significant indicator which affects how much influence one has the potential to yield within that group or community.
Credibility: Established by the activities of individuals through their thoughts, actions and what they generate. Indicators of credibility are tied to reputation, word of mouth, referrals etc.
Trust: Often a result of several of the above factors but extremely critical in the effectiveness of influencing a thought, behavior or action. Friends and peers can be trusted sources in cases while in other cases, known or unknown entities with perceived expertise.
While there are likely other important factors—these are good indicators though some are difficult to quantify (such as credibility). However the amount of times an individual is mentioned by others on a specific topic and the link to how much visibility is generated are metrics which can be measured. So how are you thinking about influence these days?
While the current trend in all things social is demonstrating ROI (did Old Spice Increase sales etc?) There remains a lack of emphasis on actually executing well in social spaces with the assumption that this is simply where customers, consumers, employees etc. will go to seek information and interact. That's why I think Altimeter's recent report listing out 8 success criteria specific to marketing initiatives on Facebook is a breath of fresh air. I was fortunate to help inform the report as an ambassador for Edelman Digital, and was happy to see best practices featured from brands we work with such as AXE (client). That aside, the report is worth reviewing and digesting as it goes through the 8 criteria in depth backing it up with examples:
With the above criteria in place, Altimeter has drafted a simple framework for brands and organizations to keep in mind as they build out their digital embassies in the Facebook ecosystem. Using this criteria, Altimeter then selected a few brands to evaluate calling out specific best practices and areas for opportunity. Here's how the brands fared when compared with each other:
At minimum the report offers a few choice insights and examples of brands to look at and learn from while you are developing your strategies and tactics for this space. Specifics such as being inconsistent or not addressing angry comments serve as early indicators to learn from as companies develop their rules of engagement for Facebook and other digital embassies. While other studies focus on devising formulas that assign dollar values to Facebook connections, reports such as this offer a few high level guidelines for how to best navigate through social systems such as Facebook. Have a read and chime in. What are your best practices?
My colleague Steve Rubel and I wear many hats at Edelman. One of
those hats is keeping an eye on the trends unfolding in real time and
deriving meaning from them as they pertain to organizations and brands.
Attached to this post is a slideshow where we identify what these trends are and at a high level how your organization needs to plan accordingly for them. They are:
Marketing in the age of streams
Your customers, consumers and employees are no longer only visiting
static Web pages but participating in conversations which increasingly
occur off domain in “streams” flowing from Facebook, Twitter and even
apps. In order to catch them, you must be highly relevant in their
streams.
The Googleization of media
Quality Content and potent social connections in addition to
traditional keywords are influencing how visible you are to the search
engines. Everyone is media.
The data decade
Data is increasingly becoming available to anyone and everyone. From
it we can derive insights into behaviors. We must become “data junkies”
to fully harness this trend.
Business becomes social
Moving from designated spokesperson to employee engagement at
scale—business itself is beginning to look more social as organizations
start to engage all stakeholders in open and mutually beneficial ways.
Location, location, location
Where you are is becoming the new what are you doing as multiple
platforms begin to adopt the new geolocation status update generating
new kinds of data.
Private becomes public
Despite privacy concerns, applications and behaviors which support
social sharing are still going strong as what is considered private
becomes re-defined as we continue engaging in networks.
We believe these trends are not future gazing but what’s happening
at this very moment and that they will cause organizations to adapt to
change, adopt new practices and innovate accordingly. For more industry
insights, ideas and perspectives you can visit our newly created “branded channel” on Slideshare.
When Aaron Strout approached me about participating in Movember (through the Movember foundation which facilitates donations for Mens health issues such as testicular cancer), I was a bit apprehensive. I mean, I do a lot of talks/work with clients and it's hard to be taken seriously with a 'stash that came out of nowhere. I also thought about how much work it would take to hit up my network and raise funds for a great cause. It's never easy to ask people for money.
Then the "marketer" in me started thinking. Wouldn't there be a brand out there who would want to get involved with this? What does a traditional sponsorship get you? A few banner ads? Those don't work—everyone in the industry wants to figure out how to get in the social streams in a meaningful way.
I typically don't do what's known as "sponsored conversations"—but this is a conversation worth sponsoring. So I dialed up my friends at P&G. And they dialed up their friends at relevant brands. And The Art of Shaving, stepped up and said:
Yeah, we will donate $5000.00 to Team Austin (who by the way is going to decimate team Boston). Well, in the spirit of full disclosure—they said this exactly:
1) The Art of Shaving will donate $5,000 to Team SocMed Austin’s fundraising efforts for the Prostate Cancer Foundation, Livestrong, & Movember Foundations.
2) The Art of Shaving will provide you and 9 of your teammates a gift pack of our products for you to use as you shave throughout the month. The pack will also include a DVD & a brochure with information on our brand and products.
3) In any subsequent communications, you & Team SocMed Austin will be sure to acknowledge the Art of Shaving donation of money & products transparently to your readers & followers.
And just like that—the folks at The Art of Shaving are now part of this conversation as they should be. I mean, it's all about growing and trimming facial hair for a good cause. So thank you to the folks at The Art of Shaving for your support of Team Austin. Will I reference the products they send me? Of course I will. They helped me and I want to help them back. It's a "sponsored conversation" but I'll also be honest about the products, though at first glance they do look fairly high quality. And instead of a few dollars going toward a media purchase, it goes somewhere better. If you feel moved to help as well, you can donate to Team Austin here. Thanks for even considering.
Originally posted at Experience Matters We've been thinking about the current economic climate and the pressure, not to mention scrutiny digital (if not all) initiatives are currently under. Digital by definition is highly measurable, which can increase the focus of ROI (return on investment) for project before it ever gets off the ground. The challenge however is that there is so much to learn from initiatives that launch—insights can be applied directly to that project, or indirectly to something else. In addition to launching our own initiatives as organizations, we realize that companies may not see the advantages they can have simply by listening and potentially participating in what we like to think of as "The Collective". Every day, millions of people are talking about what they care about, and your products and services are most likely part of that story. Download our POV
on "The Collective Is The Focus Group" and let us know what you think about what we have to say about tapping the collective for insights. Is this something that can yield a real return? You can also see a version of this article on BusinessWeek.
Content: Quality content is a great way to attract the people who are needed to form the elusive community that your brand is hoping will to help build. When considering community initiatives, there are three questions to ask yourself. 1. Where will the content come from? 2. Does it provide indisputable value? Can a regular flow of quality content be maintained? Even pre Web 2.0 initiatives such as beinggirl.com, another P&G powered community for female teens grappling with relevant topics have to focus on keeping the content itself fresh and relevant.
Context: Context means understanding how to meet people where they are up and serving up the right experience at the right time. Well designed applications and functionality have great opportunities to deliver on context. For example, Facebook’s recently updated iPhone example is perfectly designed for contextual usage in the go. It’s my favorite way to stay in touch with my Facebook community which I prefer to do while away from the PC. Context means investing time in knowing how your users will want to engage with their community—then enabling them to do so.
Connectivity Communities thrive on squishy, hard to measure activities that are relationship based at the root. It’s not about a mass communications but more about the micro-interactions which I’ve talked about at great length. Designing experiences which support thousands of micro-interactions means you are making a commitment vs. trying to produce a one-hit wonder. Communities can in theory be the new CRM (Customer Relationship Management), but require people to be minding it. Community software platforms such as Liveworld software offer moderation services. This should tell you that if you’ve invested in building a community framework, you need to play host if you’re lucky enough for guests to arrive.
Continuity Communities which thrive often evolve over time to meet the evolving needs of users. As mentioned earlier, we launched Pampers Village which includes functionality such as a baby name finder, parent blogs, forums and a non-traditional navigation design which tags topics and references relevant products. Communities such as this and others need to be flexible to evolve over time while still providing a valuable and consistent user experience which can be sustained over time. Read the full article
Updates: -As of 8:00 CST, Motrin.com has been down for nearly 1/2 a day. -Motrin.com is back up and has been updated with the below message in an image format (should have been text you can copy and paste) -A "cosmetic surgery" parody of the original ad is now is now on YouTube
I am literally in the middle of watching what Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff call a "Groundswell". As far as I can tell, Motrin posted an ad on their Website (see above) which ignited a community of mothers who were insulted by it. Specifically it seems that many of the mothers use baby slings and objected to the tone of the ad which describes them as "in fashion".
Full disclaimer, I am not interested in taking sides, but I am interested in events like this and how they unfold, specifically as it relates to power consumers, online communities, brands and the digital trail all of this type activity leaves. Here's a few considerations for any business, brand or even individual to consider in similar situations: Motrin.com Website Unable To Respond Rapidly As of 9:30 CST on a Sunday night, Motrin.com is down for the count. Motrin customers have already reported that an e-mail went out apologizing for the tone of the ad and took it off their site. The big takeaway here for me is that e-mail was the default vessel for communication because it can be utilized rapidly, but the Website can't. It's possible that the site went down due to server traffic, but friends in the field tell me this is unlikely. In the not-so-distant future, business and brands will need Websites that are as easy to update as blogs. You can quote me on this one.
Google Results Immediately Influenced If you were to Google the words "Motrin + Mom" you will get results which look like the screen grab I took. Google has immediately picked up blogs and Twitters and organically placed them in spots from #2 down. It's possibly that it will go to #1 shortly. In the meantime, Motrin's purchased ads on the side make for an interesting comparison. The Community Organizes No, it's not slick, it's not marketing and ad people can poke fun at the music as much as they want—it's a real response. Direct and genuine, whether you agree with it or not. And it was put up more quickly than most marketers could ever dream to produce content. The unofficial "motrin moms" took matters into their own hands, and they were heard by the community, outside the community, the search engines and by Motrin itself. The Motrin Brand On Twitter The Motrin brand seems to have an official presence on Twitter. Ironically called "Motrin Moms" (can anyone confirm/deny that this is Motrin)?. Here's what the last few Tweets look like as the PR situation unfolds:
There's no mention of the upset moms, and in fairness to the Motrin brand, it's probably designed to handle marketing vs. PR. But of course those lines are increasingly blurring and presents an interesting dilemma for brands using Twitter which is how to leverage the presence in a communications crisis.
In Summary As I mentioned at the beginning, I'm not interested in taking sides, but rather I'm interested in studying the dynamics of case studies like this. I have a few recommendations for organizations if faced with a similar issue. They are:
1. Design Your Website For Rapid Response If your site has to be taken down in order to respond to a crisis, re-design it so that it can be updated quickly and easily without having to throw your organization and agencies into a panic. Worry about your response strategy, not the design of your site.
2. Think Like A Blogger, Tweeter, Community & Citizen Journalist Look at how quickly the mommy community organized and produced an authentic video. It's because they don't have legal guidelines holding them back. You probably do—but of you can figure a way around them, you can fight authenticity with authenticity, which looks less like a fight and more like a conversation anyway.
3. Have A Google Strategy In Place Aside from perhaps smoothing things over with the offended, the real incentive for any organization to engage in situations like this is to influence the search results and digital trail so that your organization presents well on them. The best way to do this is to have people saying good things about you which means you have to give them something good to say and can't force it. The end goal needs to be helping people. The ROI will be a much more positive long tail.
My 2 cents, for what's it's worth. Hope it's helpful.
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Above is a video recording from the panel I participated in at the WOMMA Summit in Las Vegas. My fellow panelists included Linda Saindon of Kraft, Kevin Dando of PBS, moderated by John Bell of the Ogilvy Digital Influence Group. All official WOMMA recorded videos from the event can be found here, but I really recommend the session which Featured Frank Elison the man behind Comcast Cares on Twitter, as well as Pete Blackshaw (recorded using the Critical Mass "beta cam"). It's really worth the watch as they both discuss the role of customer service in marketing and how it influences how positive and negative word of mouth spreads. Enjoy the videos and I'll have more thoughts on WOMMA 2008 in the days to come.
I'm off to participate at the WOMMA Summit (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) and it's got me thinking about what word of mouth is in the first place. In a simplistic kind of way, I like to think that word of mouth is essentially something that makes us want to tell others about it. Here's a few I can remember followed by what the first thought was that popped into my head:
Mini Cooper "cool"
Google "this makes finding stuff so easy"
Subservient Chicken 'how did they do that"?
YouTube "makes watching video online fun"
Dove Real Beauty "that was clever"
Craigslist "I'll never pay for classifieds again"
Twitter "not sure exactly, but can't stop using it"
Facebook "so convenient to stay in touch"
IPhone "i'll never go back to a regular phone"
Of course word of mouth can also be bad. AOL, Comcast, Microsoft (Vista), and others have experienced the wrath of customers who put considerable energy into saying things about the products or services that weren't flattering. To me the current state of marketing revolves this idea of "viral"—producing something that spreads organically from person to person. Not unlike some of the examples I've provided in the list. But we call videos "viral" before they ever have a chance to be. Is that putting the cart in front of the horse or is has the word viral become so overused that it's actually meaningless?
Maybe it's as simple as asking ourselves, would you recommend this to a friend? And if that's the case, we'll have our work cut out for us because there are so few things in this world that actually are. So what's on your WOM list? And why?
I recently recorded a fairly interesting podcast—really it's a three way conversation between myself, Gary Cohen and Jay Ehret. In it I elaborate a bit on what I call the "marketing spiral":
"Each time we act as evangelists for products, brands or services—then it becomes less about a purchase at the bottom of the funnel and more about perpetuating a constant state of “loops”. “Accidental marketers” have always existed, it’s just that the Web has given us more effective ways to influence our own consumer behavior—which makes things a little more challenging for those “professional marketers”.
As an individual, this blog is one of the most effective manifestations of "marketing" I could have produced for myself. I have a respectable audience that comes back as opposed to visiting it once, never to return again. People participate in through comments and the content is distributable. But imagine if I started it the same way many large organizations launch conventional marketing initiatives. What would that have looked like?
First I would have had to do several hundred pages of strategy documentation, including target audiences, marketing segments, competitive analysis—you name it. Then I would put some concepts together and test them in focus groups to see if representatives in a lab like A, B, or C, better. Next, I would take that feedback, make a few adjustments and plan a multichannel campaign—launching the blog with all sorts of advertising pointing to it. And since I painstakingly outlined the ROI in the in-depth strategy, I'd go about measuring the effectiveness against the ROI that was outlined prior to launch.
Of course, this blog like millions or other forms of "social media" followed a path that looked nothing like that. In fact, it looked much more like the second flow. Sure, I put some initial thought into it before ever touching a pixel, but once I launched the blog it became a never-ending cycle of content development, template design tweaks, and learning curves based off of what was going on each time I did something.
For example, when I started posting visuals, I would check my stats and could see that people from all sorts of other sites and blogs began referencing them and linking back—so I realized that the visuals were providing something people wanted, and if I wanted to continue to build an audience, this was a good way to do it. Secondly, I had thought that my primary audience would be designers, when in fact the blog started attracting an eclectic audience of planners, marketers, librarians, even evangelists. After each cycle of launching content or even functionality in the sidebars, I was learning about who my audience was and why they were coming. This required me to periodically have more frequent checkpoints of "little strategy" where I would plan the direction of where I wanted to go and make the appropriate adjustments to get there. And it felt less like a straight path and more like a meandering one, because the "focus group" was happening in real time after the initial launch.
I've been thinking about this for a while because after having some exposure to large organizations, it occurred to me that there is a desire to do more "unconventional marketing" but the machine which is in place is actually "conventional"—all the things that have been done in the past. For example, it's common and understandable for the "what's the ROI?" question to be raised during an unconventional marketing initiative, but that question could derail the entire effort before it has a chance to ever get off the ground. Sometimes the ROI is simply insights and learnings that are gleamed from actually doing the initiative. Other times, the direction of the initiative changes midway through in in unexpected ways that could not have been predicted. Many times for the better—let's not forget that Twitter was never meant to be what it ended up being today.
Speaking from personal experience, I could not have predicted many of the outcomes I have had since launching this blog, but I believe following a much more "unconventional" path is a core reason behind everything that I've learned from it. For a couple of hundred dollars a year and a lot of dedication and effort it's priceless to me. And so as I think about how times are becoming more unconventional—with unpredictable financial markets and political change in the air, I can't help but think that it's more important than ever to get serious about what it takes to do these types of initiatives right. It just doesn't look like conventional marketing—it's different. And unconventional times call for unconventional tactics.
If there’s one type of headline that gets attention—it’s about claiming the death of something. Well, I’d like to proclaim the “un-dead” nature of a format which I think has the potential to become something more powerful than we are currently seeing today. The Micro-site first became adopted by the marketing community as a tool of convenience. It simply became too unwieldy to continue adding sections to our large company/product Websites every time we wanted to promote a new product, feature or service. And specifically for advertisers—well, they needed an online extension for their campaigns to live in the digital space.
And so the formula had begun. Launch a campaign, build a micro-site, buy online media to drive traffic to it. Everything was in it’s place—advertisers now had a presence on the Web, clients were happy about it and the big money was still being pumped into the traditional channels because that’s how it’s always been done. In the past year lots of us have had a grand ol time proclaiming the death of the micro-site, and with some validity. Fact is that the internet is littered with thousands of them, and the majority are either promotional in nature, designed to win awards vs. serving up value or simply provide no incentive to ever return to them. On top of that, most of the micro-sites I come across are difficult to use, take WAY too much time to load, crash my browser or use contrived marketing language written by professionals who have spent years perfecting their craft.
The reason micro-sites have come under fire is because the “amateurs” have provided more compelling experiences in many ways. Sorry, it’s true. If you Google a product name, it’s not uncommon to come across a blog which has reviewed that product and is ranked higher than the professionally produced micro-site. How do you think Engadget became so wildly popular? Still, I think the micro-site format has legs. Here’s why and here’s what we can do differently. Analyze Digital Behavior Where I see the opportunity for micro-sites lies behind simple human behavior in the digital space. Think about how the typical person interacts with digital media. My friends and family outside of the industry still send me links via e-mail. Simple copy and paste—the lowest barrier there is. Most “regular” people I know still bookmark WEB PAGES. They aren’t managing multiple feeds, readers and social bookmarks like I do. I am not a representative of mainstream digital behavior. I don’t have numbers to back this up, but going on intuition and personal experience, I’m fairly confident that this is the case. Think about how you use the Web. For all the talk about mobility, widgets and portability my guess is that you still spend a lot of time on simple, good old fashioned hypertext WEB PAGES. Micro-sites have lost some luster not because of the format, but because marketers and everyday people don’t often think alike. We the people are looking for something we can use, and instead get a lot of bells and whistles which don’t reward us for our time.
Offer Content, Context, Connections Next we have to ask ourselves why formats like blogs, social networks and other manifestations of emerging digital media have become so popular. Blogs look nothing like micro-sites. BUT, what they have in common is the delivery. Web pages—pages that can be bookmarked and e-mailed among other things. And they offer niche content, lots of links and of course the ability for people to talk back. Long form content is the new design language—I have become a convert. Debating the above-the-fold argument is a moot point—we should start channeling our energy into debating how we can provide VALUE to users who are clearly getting it elsewhere. I propose that we breathe new life into the micro-site format by fundamentally re-thinking it. Look at the visual above this post. What if micro-sites evolved into content heavy, long form Web Pages that aggregated not only your own content, but content from any place you could think of? Instead of being concerned about linking away from the “site”—that would be one of the primary objectives. I’ve found through my own experience in social networks that if you link to others and do the legwork of curating relevant content that people remember this, and guess what? They actually come back for more! Micro-sites can deliver this, simply because the format consists of Web pages and links. We’ve just over-engineered the whole enchilada.
Develop A Content Strategy of Distribution + Aggregation Take a look at Lenovo’s Voices of the Olympic Games. The content actually lives across multiple platforms—and it’s all about content. Producing it quickly, updating it, uploading it via the popular networks which fuel the long tail. It looks nothing like a micro-site but if you break down the components, it’s still a Web Page, or at least that’s one of the main components. The core difference is content and distribution, Traditional micro-site thinking has marketers writing the copy, designers and developers building the site and a launch date followed by a maintenance plan. But if micro-sites begin to evolve into more “blog-like” experiences, they can quickly be launched, edited, refreshed, and have all the flexibility in the world to pull in the open source 3rd party applications which are pervasive on the Web. Events can be live streamed, photo galleries can live on Flickr, video galleries, on You Tube. And there’s a tremendous opportunity to actually embrace users who are generating their own content about your products. You can make them the star—and they’ll probably link back to you in return. The difference isn’t in the technology as much as it is in the mindset. In order to pull this off, we’ll need to think more like bloggers, uploaders, journalists and mash-up artists than marketers, copywriters and designers. Take a look at what 37 Signals does when they live stream video—it take very little production value to achieve this and the result is a sort of direct engagement which users on the Web are craving. Ask "What’s Next"? Like anything else, what I’m proposing isn’t a silver bullet, and it would take big mindset shift for many organizations to pull this off. But, it’s worth looking into. I recently came across a micro-site for HP featuring Shaun White, and not being the demographic I really can’t judge if the site experience makes sense, but I did notice one thing. The site had clearly embraced a more “2.0” approach by offering multiple social bookmarks. But if you actually bookmarked a video, returned to your link, it took you to the first page of the micro-site where you are greeted by Shaun’s talking/dancing avatar. You have to dig up the video all over again. I’m not a 20-something but I have a hunch this would piss them off. But I don’t blame the format—if that video was worth sharing, a simple URL could have sufficed. Better yet, getting involved in the comments about it would take things a step further. It’s probably a good time to re-think what the experience of a Web page can be—I think the simple format has a lot of potential, if we just look at things with fresh, new eyes.
From my recent contribution to Ad Age, Digital Next:
"Old habits die hard. While consumers are out there spending countless
hours on social networks, file sharing applications, chat, community
sites, buying stuff, selling stuff and using multiple devices, some of
us tradigital old fogies are still reaching for our beloved toolbox of
the past in the hopes of getting their attention. While online user
behavior tells us that people respond well to simplicity, we labor to
create complexity in the form of experimental navigation and sites that
take forever
to load. When YouTube arrived on the scene, we responded by putting our
TV spots on them or -- better yet -- creating spots that looked like
they were made by amateurs. Little did we know that the real action
happens in the comments. Have we thought about talking back to people
or are we really just interested in telling our stories?" Read the full story
Here's a sneak preview from my next contribution to Ad Age, Digital Next:
"The problem with marketing is that it often times doesn’t allow marketers to go deep, to gain an intimate understanding of human behavior. We’re strapped for time, spread thin and torn between making our clients or bosses happy while trying to do what we think is right. We’ve got access to the latest trend reports, market segments, personas and metrics. We’re surrounded by smart, capable people who, like William Hurt’s character—know what they are doing. But there’s a question we need to ask ourselves. Are we making the time to walk in the shoes of the people we market to? Are we willing to swim in the deep end?"
One of the ways I have "monetized" this blog and other efforts in the social space has been the privilege of getting out and speaking to folks in the marketing field from a variety of perspectives. The refreshing part for me is that many marketers who I talk to are expressing the desire to move away from gimmicks, and traditional campaign thinking to solutions that offer more long term value and builds relationships.
BUT
There are a great deal of hurdles that marketers who want to do less subservient chickens and more Nike+'s will face. This post isn't meant to be negative—it's a reality check. If marketers on both the client and agency side really want to extend their influence, we'll need to ween ourselves from the impulse to spin the "Wheel of Marketing Misfortune". It won't be as easy as it sounds. So here's where we need to get to work: Microsite Madness The Microsite is actually a great thing. It allows us to quickly launch an initiative that can link out to and be linked to from other sources and allows marketers to bypass slower moving large scale site efforts. But increasingly, microsites are being cranked out by the thousands. Many of them are sold as "high-engagement" vehicles when in reality they become souless, glossy artifacts that come off as traditional promotions in a digital shell. Microsites as a format are not inherently bad, but we really need to think about why users will want to spend some time there, and even more importantly, why they would come back.
Viral Addiction Let's be honest with ourselves. Marketers are severely addicted to the idea of "viral", and will do whatever it takes to make something reach this level of marketing nirvana. The problem with viral is that it's a crap shoot and all of the time spent chasing the "viral dragon" could be invested in improving the customer experience, which ironically is what creates authentic word of mouth in the first place. Again, viral is not a bad thing—but it's tricky business and marketers need to clearly identify the need for buzz before pursuing it at all costs
Flashturbation We need to think of Flash the same we think about incredibly powerful mediums such as television and radio. When done well, television can inspire and motivate us—when done awfully it comes off as annoying and makes us want to flip channels. I think Flash is a wonderful technology and tool, but like any powerful tool it gets abused way too much, often times at the expense of the end user. I've written about Flashturbation before and urge designers and marketers to use the technology responsibly. Think about what happened to airbrush artists who spent all of their time pushing that technology to it's limit. Where are they now?
Death By Big Idea "The Big Idea" is still very much alive and well—but it's less relevant than it's ever been. Especially big ideas that start with a top down broadcast messages first. This is campaign thinking in it's finest and does not translate directly in a fragmented 2.0 world. Bud.TV for example was a "big idea" fueled by traditional thinking—what followed was a "big bang" launch, but not the engagement. Marketers are going to need to diversify how we think, which means supporting both big ideas and lots of "big-little ideas" that can thrive in the niches. That's one of the biggest challenges marketers now face. Thinking in niche—the internet thrives on it.
Award Infatuation Let's get this straight. Peer recognition is important and we should celebrate when one of our own does something remarkable. But the awards industry is here to make money too—and many of us are all too happy to forget about putting customers first in the pursuit of praise. Agencies especially have to come to terms with this and should all talke a cue from what's arguably the #1 brand in existence right now. Google. We really need to think hard about how compatible awards are with being "Googly". Actually, they are—but one needs to come before the other.
Social Media Goldrush The "social revolution" is real, transformational and not going away. However, we need to proceed with a little caution. Not every tactic requires "conversation". Marketers need an intimate understanding of how social networks actually function and what is has to do with their business and brands. Then, we need to try a few things and learn by doing. But there's gold in them thar hills—which means that everyone right now who is claiming to be an expert in this area could potentially steer you wrong. I am way more active than most when it comes to the social space and I would NOT consider myself an expert. Let's be smart about how we can take advantage of the behavioral shift in this area. We'll need to be better at establishing credibility before we can guide, and the last thing we need is snake oil salesman.
Churn-n-Burn Because much of marketing is deeply rooted in quick hits that demonstrate short term spikes, we've gotten used to an intense industry to work in that risks burning many of us out. The industry is fast paced and more than happy to put fresh meat to work. This is something that is not sustainable, especially in the digital space where there is a shortage of talent who truly knows what they are doing. We'll need to overcome this somehow and it will take some time.
Shiny Object Syndrome I've talked about BSOS (Bright and Shiney Object Syndrome), and most marketers are guilty of it. It stems from the addiction to always looking for the "next big thing" without gaining a deep understanding of what's on our plate at the moment. The result is a loss of credibility both in and outside of the industry. We'll need to do a better job balancing what's next with what's already here. The real risk here is creating initiatives that bomb because we missed the mark on where the customer's head was actually at in order to satisfy where our heads may be at. Banner-Palooza We're turning the internet into Times Square. While we digital marketers claim to be cutting edge, we're not willing to turn down the lucrative ad banner business. Again, there's nothing wrong with it—but for aspiring designers who work in marketing and someday want to design the next You Tube, banner ads will most likely not help you get there.
Campaign-Itis If we're truly living in an "application economy", then marketing/ad campaigns are not the end all be all though they are still important. But the biggest shift powered by digital is that the average Joe/Jane has become the new storyteller and digital experiences are becoming more important to an empowered consumer who frankly has more options than ever before. Point in case, I recently ordered a replacement keyboard for my family's HP computer and was severely disappointed to see that HP had downgraded their industrial design. The original keyboard was stylish, finished with metalic silver and felt right to the touch. The new keyboard only comes in back and feels like plastic. HP's campaign "The Computer is personal again" now feels like a lie to me. If we get another PC, it will probably not be an HP—and no campaign can influence that. It's time for marketers to bring the product, the experience and the marketing together because the average consumer is no longer making distinctions between them. The future of marketing will take both storytellers + experience people to pull it off.
So that's the "Wheel of Marketing Misfortune" in a nutshell. There's no reason to sugercoat it. We're all smart people who want to make what we do better. Whether you're on the client or agency side—it's time to get to work.
Last week I had the opportunity to get outside of the office, go out
into the real world and interact with peers and industry colleagues in
New York city (and Brooklyn too!). Sharing/exchanging ideas with smart
people from diverse backgrounds is one of the best parts of my job and
this last recent opportunity was no exception. On Monday, I moderated a
panel at Widget Web Expo
featuring (from left to right) Steph Agresta of Internet Geek Girl
fame, Ian Schafer from media agency Deep Focus, Steve Rubel of Edelman,
Matt Dickman of Fleishman-Hillard and David Malouf from Motorola. I was
also able to present my evolving POV on Micro-Interactions to about 50+ Interaction Designers at IXDA’s NYC chapter. And lastly I got to those same thoughts at Icon Nicholson. Here’s a few thoughts from my experience over these two days: Read the full post at Experience Matters
That's the title for my contribution to the "Age of Conversation 2" which is currently being pieced together by editors Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton as I write this. My contribution will include the above visual—here's a brief snippet:
"The traditional marketing funnel is dead. Who killed it? You and I did with a little help from this thing we call the Web. Well, OK—we really didn’t kill it, we just traded the linear funnel metaphor for something more organic and cyclical. I like to call this “The Marketing Spiral”.
Matt Dickman (AKA the techno marketer) is currently the Director, Digital Marketing at Fleishman-Hillard—but in his spare time, he produces very insightful video reviews of new technologies that span the worlds of marketing, social networks and everything in between. His newest series is called "Launched"—it's an effort to break away from the theory and look at real case studies of efforts being done in this space—in short, efforts that have actually "launched".
Matt recently did one of his famous reviews (in partnership with Marketing Profs) for the My Vegas social application—an effort done out of our Chicago office working with R&R Partners and the Las Vegas Visitors & Convention Authority. It's a short video, but Matt created a profile and did his homework on the application, so check it out if you have a few minutes to spare.
So let's say you know someone who could use a little help with diagnosing their B.S.O.S (Bright and Shiny Object Syndrome). Print this out and leave it by their desk. When they aren't looking of course. ;-)
When I originally wrote about the Marketing Spiral, I said this:
"Often times our first interaction with a brand is through a digital
touch point like a site. Maybe we heard about it from a friend or
somewhere else. We interact with it—we give it a try. If we like
it—that leads to deeper levels of engagement. Maybe this repeats
itself adding more "cycles" to the spiral. We continue to engage.
Some of us even begin to participate. We transition from downloading
to uploading our media. We talk about how great the experience is. To
our peers, to each other. We become evangelists—the spiral actually
expands as we engage with multiple touchpoints—not only the digital
ones."
And now I'm wondering if the disappearance in of the funnel in traditional marketing will lead to the emergence of another kind of funnel—"fuzzy funnels" that blur together vastly difference disciplines, backgrounds and services that come together to result in how we think and feel about brands, products and services.
It hit me at MIX 08. Like a brick actually. Sure there were different tracks. A "UX" track, a "Business" track and everything else seemed like it was for developers, both software and Web. But aside from the tracks—it was clear that MIX was primarily about technology. That was the gig. Now some gatherings may be focused on marketing. Others on the intersection of technology and marketing and yet others on design, or business or both.
But the reality is that we're still taking different languages. At MIX 08 the vernacular was about "platforms", code and the latest break through in technology . When the word "brand" was mentioned, it seemed almost unnaturally out of place. On Madison Ave. it's the opposite—brand leads the way while technology is often an afterthought.
But what the "fuzzy funnel" shows us is that we're all going to get mixed up in a blender whether we like it or not. Because it's the convergence of all these things which lead to how we think and feel about brands, products and services that really matters. It's why media companies want to act like technology companies and vice-versa.
And that giant blender is where it's going to get really interesting. So, will we see more people "talking in brand" at MIX 09? Possibly. Will we see more geeks and developers at Cannes? That's possible too. And when it happens—when you're at an event where you feel like your surrounded by people who look like the multiple ingredients of the fuzzy funnel and then some—then you know on to something really interesting. We're all heading toward the same destination, even though we're speaking different languages and living in complimentary cultures.
"1. Old-school design methods are failing. The pace of change among consumers and competitors has grown so fast that using a conventional process to hatch a marketing campaign, a Web site, or a new product virtually dooms it to being obsolete by the time it’s complete.
2. Innovation is the new currency. The days of a whopping marketing budget or a pretty design equaling success are over, as Blendtec has so well proved. If you’re not creating something that’s genuinely new—as well as useful and delightful—you are screwed.
3. Everyone is a creative. Your next-door neighbor can make a YouTube video or design a MySpace page that sits on an equal media playing field with anything we produce here at Avenue A | Razorfish.
4. Narrative is the experience. As the Web becomes the preferred destination for brand exploration, digital experiences must become richer, deeper, and more able to tell compelling stories. If your brand experience depends entirely on pages and clicks, it’s time to wonder, “What is my story?”
Over at Forrester's Groundswell blog, Josh Bernoff recently wrote this in the context of social applications doing well in a recession:
"I say social applications and not social media for a reason. People
will want to boost word of mouth in a recession. This is great news if
you're selling community apps to companies. It's also good news for
Facebook community applications and groups. You're a company and you want to charge up your citizen marketers about your product -- you can build your own application or climb on board an existing network and work within it."
I think he's right. But I want to take a step back even further—I don't think it's just about social applications doing well in a recession as much as it is that useful online applications (not just social) could really be the biggest threat to both traditional advertising and what I like to call traditional digital advertising. I owe this post to my wife, who's online behavior inspired it. As a stay at home mom and "middle of the road" internet user, here's how she typically spends a day online:
Morning: Check e-mail on Hotmail Searches on Google Spend time responding to and e-mailing friends + family Checks out links from friends (recommendations) Browses real estate sites (it's a hobby)
Afternoon Checks e-mail Searches on Google Watches a video on YouTube Browses Ebay Browses travel deals on Expedia Books flights for parents on Southwest Browses Craigslist
Late Afternoon Plays with kids on Webkinz, Noggin etc. Checks e-mail Searches on Google Browses real-estate sites
Evening Checks e-mail Browses Ebay/Checks status Watches TV on DVR
It's The Application Economy, Stupid. My wife never clicks on an Ad banner. She gets annoyed by talking people who pop up on her screen and she only watches shows on our DVR and skips commercials. While she doesn't use Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Myspace or other social applications—she does spend the majority of her time on sites, or "web applications". For advertisers, the enemy isn't social media as much as it is that she chooses to spend her time on applications she finds useful. Everything else is noise. Everything else is something to be ignored.
The biggest threat to advertising is useful. It's that simple. Useful is a time and attention grabber. It takes away from most forms of marketing. Useful as Webkinz shows us can also entertain—but to my wife, it's useful because it's quality time spent with the boys.
It's truly the application economy. Social applications included—but as my wife's scenario indicates, it's the application part that really matters as many internet users are still not active participants in social media. So marketers are indeed faced with a challenge. Continue to cram Ads (noise) into multiple digital platforms (phones, web, GPS—anything with a screen)—or they can try to figure out how to be useful. Right now—the marketing industry is at war with the people who create useful experiences. These experiences "distract" us—more accurately, they reward us. The application economy is as "un-sexy" as it sounds—and that's exactly why advertising needs to take it seriously.
"…Journalists and PR professionals, the influence brokers of traditional
media, have lost a huge degree of influence on the web in large part
because they don’t link to anything. While traditional media brands are
still powerful channels on the web, they are losing influence everyday
to the link-driven web network — journalists and PR professionals can
no longer depend on controlling these former monopoly channels to exert
influence online." ~The New Influentials (PSFK)
Good point. It's true.
Now think about what happens after the click. After someone has used Google to search for something and clicked on a high ranking link thinking, it had the relevant content they were looking for. Instead, they find themselves on a site loaded with links and "keywords" offering no value whatsoever. Turns out that the only reason the site exists is not to provide value, or content, or information—but in fact to show up in the search engines. It was carefully engineered for that sole purpose.
It's how some marketers will choose to combat the power of the link. They'll fight fire with artificially produced flames. Of course what they don't realize is that they are doing exactly what their marketing forefathers have taught them.
They are fooling the "customer".
Or are they? What happened to tried and true marketing techniques? We began to resent them. Avoid them. Tolaerate them—but just barely. Marketing became noise and so we bought DVR's and iPods to tune it out. So the marketers shouted, became more clever, put marketing in places we never expected.
And some, though not all really only care about what happens before the click. If you click—they've done their job. Or have they? What happens after the click is just as important as what happens before. Maybe even more. It's an opportunity to inform, inspire, engage, and enable. In the best case scenarios—it can bring a brand to life and take relationships to the next level.
Or, it can cause suspicion, mistrust and frustration. All because the metric of the click meant more than anything else. So yes, there are ways to compete with the "new influentials". There are tricks, gimmicks, shortcuts and clever work-arounds. You can measure the success of it all. What's harder to measure is the long term impact it has on your reputation—especially if you underestimated how resourceful your customers can really be.
What happens after the click can be a moment of truth for any business. It's an opportunity to do something something most others don't—to do something meaningful. Or you can take the easy way out—and just be happy they clicked. A short term strategy if I ever heard one.
Today, I find myself featured in the pages of Adweek. I say life's full of surprises not because of that fact—but because of the irony. When Brian Morrissey approached me about doing the Q+A, to be honest with you—this thought ran through my mind:
"Do I really wanted to be associated that closely with the Ad industry?"
But just as quickly—that thought was replaced with this one: "How many opportunities do you get to evangelize your beliefs"?
See—though I talk a good good game about the industry we call "advertising"—the reality is that I've never considered myself a product of it. Go through my resume and you'll find that the bulk of my personal experience lies in Web design, graphic design—even broadcast design mixed with 3+ years spent as a information designer embedded in the newsroom. If course I've worn many hats—interaction design as one of them and have done my share of conceptual wireframes, flows and the like.
But Ad Guy?
I never touched an Ad in my life. Which is precisely the irony behind the feature. Consider the interviewer—Brian Morrissey from Adweek is one of the few industry journalists who is genuinely active on multiple social platforms including Facebook and Twitter.
In fact—that's how we met and it's mostly where we interact. Brian also blogs about running. He's one of us. Or at least—I consider him to be. So maybe the best way to look at all of this is to realize that traditional "Ad Guys" no longer exist. Nor do "traditional journalists". Well—they still do, but in a world moving at light speed—it's getting more difficult to draw firm lines between what's considered Advertising, marketing, or just good business. Maybe we're all accidental "Ad Guys and Gals"
The question isn’t if we’re heading into a recession. It’s how bad will it be—and what we learn from it?
As marketing budgets feel the squeeze of the housing crisis and a
slowing U.S. Economy, now is a good time to think about opportunities.
That’s right. Opportunities. It just happens that the digital
medium could be your best friend in a time when belts tighten. Here’s a
few though starters for how digital can help your business or brand
thrive in a recession:
1. Live by the rules of The Beta Economy
No other medium allows you to launch, test, relaunch, test, measure,
tweak, re-tweak, evolve, relaunch, quite like the Web. Folks like Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin preach about this all the time. Guy launched his Truemors
service on a shoestring budget and uses Twitter to promote it. When
budgets get cut—look to digital for new ways of testing out ideas vs.
big bang and big budget initiatives (think Bud.TV)
2. Leverage Existing Platforms
Why build from scratch when you can use Wordpress as a CMS, Basecamp as
a collaboration tool and Concept Share as a way to co-create. Now is a
great time to dig into the already existing platforms (in addition to
existing social networks). While building from scratch has it’s place,
there are more options than ever to tap into a service that just might
do the job.
3. Switch Tubes
Consider skipping mass TV all together. It worked for BMW films
and with YouTube firmly in place—it can even work with less production
values and high priced talent. Consider ways to make the participant
the star. TV has kind of sucked lately anyway since the writers went on
strike. Don’t know about you—but my TV consumption has gone from slim
to nearly none.
I'm going to be surrounded by marketers. Wait a minute—am I a marketer? Marketing is a broad term and it encapsulates a lot of things. Much of what I do falls under that category. In fact, many of you who read this blog probably deal with budgets that fall under either Marketing or IT departments.
So, what am I gonna talk about? Well, I thought a good place would be what I believe in. I believe that marketers—especially the "professionals" that call themselves marketers have a fundamental issue we need to confront.
B.S.O.S. (Bright And Shiny Object Syndrome)
It affects all of us. You're kidding yourself if you think it doesn't. There's so much pressure to stay up to speed, things change so quickly—that we've become obsessed with the new, newer, latest, greatest, shiny, sparkly, dangling thing. But don't be fooled—It's just as bad to dismiss a trend that we may know very little about just because we're sick and tired of hearing about it.
You don't get brighter or shinier than "2.0". There are so many possibilities—so many opportunities that it's intoxicating. Hence the addiction to it. So what do we do? Do we ignore how advances in technology are changing the face of marketing? Do we embrace every new trend with unbridled enthusiasm? Do we sit on the sidelines, skeptical and wary? Do we experiment? I'm proposing a "prescription" for the ailment—it comes in 3 4 parts:
1. Quantitative Research (3rd party research, reports etc.)
2. Qualitative Research (Ethnography, Interviews etc,)
3. Personal Experience (Experimentation, usage, adoption)
1. Doing our homework (3rd party research, reports etc.)
2. Talking and walking with people (ethnography, observation etc.)
3. Learning by doing (experimentation, usage, adoption etc.)
4. Sharing what we know (connectivity, shared experiences + knowledge)
I believe a combination of all three will result in Empathy, Understanding and maybe even a little Experience more openness (or what marketers like to call transparency). These three four things will help provide an informed perspective so we can pursue the best strategies and experiment in productive ways. This will help us as we work with clients and/or partners—and it will make for better marketers, marketing and less B.S.O.S. all around.
What else would you add? I've only got a little over 10 minutes, but if something good comes out of a comment—I'll try to add it to the deck.
A little bit of Friday fun for those of you who can't decide which presidential hopeful you want to vote for. Vote for Pineapple instead. Full disclosure, Selection 07 isn't a real election—It's a spoof featured in local Albertsons stores, created by some of the folks here in our Chicago office. And yes, you can really vote for your favorite food item. Oh, and speaking of the Chicago office, I just came across this "making of" video. Apparently, it was all about the "Holy Shit" moment.
CM Comrade Scott Weisbrod points us to a Forrester report that proclaims the death of the traditional marketing funnel. OK, I buy that—the proliferation of interactive technologies had altered consumer behavior. The funnel may not be as relevant as it once was. The report suggests that engagement is becoming an increasingly important metric to measure:
"Engagement goes beyond reach and frequency to measure people’s real
feelings about brands. It starts with their own brand relationship and
continues as they extend that relationship to other customers. As a
customer’s participation with a brand deepens from site use and
purchases (involvement and interaction) to affinity and championing
(intimacy and influence), measuring and acting on engagement becomes
more critical to understanding customers’ intentions. The four parts of
engagement build on each other to make a holistic picture."
You can take a look at how they propose to measure engagement in four parts here.
But it's this visual above—the maze like funnel that I don't entirely get. I think it's supposed to show that unlike the traditional funnel, digital technologies have made what was once a linear path—well, less linear.
But what if it wasn't a path at all—nor a funnel that begins wide and ends narrow. What if consumer behavior is more like a spiral that begins with an interaction as opposed to a communication. And what if the spiral amplifies the more the consumer engages. From interaction, to engagement, to participation, to conversation to affinity to community? What would that look like?
Messing with the traditional funnel is like treading on sacred ground. But I don't think the "Spiral" is that far off. Think about it: Often times our first interaction with a brand is through a digital touch point like a site. Maybe we heard about it from a friend or somewhere else. We interact with it—we give it a try. If we like it—that leads to deeper levels of engagement. Maybe this repeats itself adding more "cycles" to the spiral. We continue to engage. Some of us even begin to participate. We transition from downloading to uploading our media. We talk about how great the experience is. To our peers, to each other. We become evangelists—the spiral actually expands as we engage with multiple touchpoints—not only the digital ones.
All of this adds up to a positive associations with whoever is responsible for providing the excellent experience. We come together with others who feel the same way. We instantly bond with them over our shared interests and experiences. Community forms. Then one day, someone who's never tried brand or service X hears about it from a friend. A member of some community. They fire up their digital device of choice and the interaction begins once again—a new spiral is formed.
This post came together rather quickly—so the marketing spiral could be way off. But I thought it would be worth a shot.
It started as a Venn diagram—then I took a step back. Last week I attended a meeting with the leadership team at CM, and as each member of the team got up and talked about the things they were responsible for, I started to think about how experience design fits into the bigger picture within the agency setting.
Of course it has to intersect and overlap with insights, research and planning. It also needs to be carried through to execution—the final experience, whatever that is. But that's where I left the Venn approach behind. Who knows? Maybe Dad's advice about "digging deeper" stuck with me.
So I thought about more intersection and overlap with things like development (front and back end) and media of course which is where it all gets served up—even if it's social. And a "clover" was formed.
A clover cannot sustain itself.
It needs to be fed, fueled. It needs to be connected to something. Technology is the stem. The thought of technology isn't sexy. Neither is a stem. But—it's essential—it's the lifeline. Agencies everywhere are grappling with how technology has influenced rocked their worlds, especially in the past 5 years.
But what is technology without something to ground it. All of it—the clover, the stem—it all needs to be deeply rooted in things that will make it flourish. Business, Brand, and User needs. Nothing new here—but how often are we really successful in building from this foundation? How often are our strategies and executions rooted in these objectives vs. being self-serving?
Each part is co-dependent. Each part serves a vital function. Take out one piece and the organism will either struggle on—incomplete or wither away and eventually die.
So, thinking holistically (and visually) this helps me understand the role of experience design in the broader agency. It needs to play it's part—a clover that helps feed the organization which in turn serves and guides clients. One that is co-dependent on many other things. But at that intersection—where insights, design, development, media, and technology meet—that is where ideas come to life. That is where pollination starts. And maybe new life cycles begin.
Mack Collier over at The Viral Garden has updated his famous list of Marketing focused blogs to reflect Technorati rank vs. Alexa. Non-geek translation: the blogs are ranked by the number of sites that link back to them. Here's how it looks:
Interesting. Kathy Sierra's blog squeeks past Seth even though her blog has been inactive and is most likely done. The Long Tail in action? A blog, site can cease to exist—but it's shelf life goes on even after it becomes inactive. This will probably change over time as Technorati updates but interesting nevertheless. What do you think of the list?
Oh BTW, don't read into BL Ochman's rank (666) she may be tough—but she's no prince of darkness. :)
Today I had the pleasure of meeting Jackie Huba in person. Jackie of course is co-author of Citizen Marketers and Creating Customer Evangelists not to mention co-owner of Church of the Customer along with Ben McConnell. OK, now that I got all the formalities out of the way--here is what you really need to know. Jackie and I had a really nice, relaxed conversation at a local Starbucks in north Chicago. Obviously we chatted about our respective blogs, Jackie and Ben's books and our personal experiences in the space, but mostly we just talked about what was going on in our lives. I even got to see a picture of "Mini", possible the cutest toy poodle pup around (having owned a Boxer in the past, I'm more of a big dog guy--so this is a huge compliment).
But here's the thing. I've been fortunate enough to meet lots of folks lately at conferences and stuff. Designers, bloggers, designers who blog, journalists, businesspeople, city representatives etc. I've been "networking" as they say. But there is one thing I've discovered through all of this.
There is no substitute for one-on-one conversation.
What do think my biggest take away from our afternoon was? Did I "pick Jackie's brain"? Did I find out the secret to writing a successful business book?
Nah. Not really.
My favorite part of the afternoon was that Jackie and I unplugged for a bit and talked about whatever was on our minds at that moment. Well, there was a very brief demo of Twitter mobile performed by yours truly--but that was the only time either of us looked at a screen. Today I found out that Jackie loves her Mini (both car and canine), Ben loves the color Silver (Jackie likes Red) and one thing that we have in common aside from blogs and time spent at interactive agencies is that we're not the most effective self promoters. But that's where the idea of citizen marketers comes in. Create something that is worth talking about and you don't have to market yourself. Your community will do it for you.
Well, I'm not telling you anything that you don't already know. But the nice thing about having your community do your marketing is this:
When you don't have to market yourself, it frees you up for the things that actually matter more. Like sitting down and enjoying a cup of iced coffee over some casual conversation in good company. I'll take that over marketing any day.
1. A passionate community is the lifeblood of your brand. Without it—a brand is hollow. 2. People want to interact with your brand—to be a part of it somehow, to make it their own. 3. Your community can make your brand better, stronger and smarter. 4. Inviting your community to become an active part of your brand stimulates ideas, creativity and potentially innovation.
In my last post I asked "What is the story" behind this simple visual. What happened? You told the story—each in your own unique ways. You became the story. You took the idea and poked, prodded and narrated. Some of you translated it in a very logical fashion. Others created tall tales around what it meant to you. Some of you created your own visuals like the three-eyed-monster (which I absolutely love) And I'll be honest with you—these are some of the best comments I've ever had here. So what can brands learn from social experiments?
Well, for starters—brands can learn to experiment. I usually narrate my own visuals—and of course feedback is always welcome. But this time I felt you could tell the story even better than I could. And you didn't let me down. Sometimes we mistake these invitations as not having a strong sense of self-identity. If brands let their communities define them—are they strong brands in the first place? The answer is yes. My voice is my voice. It will not change—I am who I am. But my thoughts and actions can be influenced by what you say and do. Are brands willing to do the same? Does this make them weak or strong?
My original intent was to call out some of the comments which "nailed" the visual. But the truth is that you've all nailed it in your own ways—so now I'll have to re-think what to do with these thoughts. I'll probably pull them together in some type format for easy distribution—maybe a PDF. It's more work for me, but in the end I know it will be worth it because it's worth sharing and proves a point. The point is that a healthy brand does not live in isolation—just like healthy people.
Last Friday I wrote about our speaking engagement at Loyola University. The post generated what I think is some of the most interesting discussion on this blog. I'd like to share some of the thoughts as they deserve to exist outside of the comments area, but before doing so—here's a question (and answer):
What if we all live in our own bubbles? Each and every last one of us. We're not omnipotent beings—we are restricted by the boundaries of our own humanity. In short, we can only know as much as we can absorb. And in this age of information, there is a lot to absorb. Too much actually.
BUT
Our bubbles reflect what we know, don't know and what we need to know. If we claim to be marketers, advertisers, designers, public relations or communications professionals—we must take it upon ourselves to fully comprehend the significance of a lone consumer who takes on a huge company with nothing more than a blog and tape recorder. We must make the effort to search out these stories on a daily basis, especially when they are reported by mainstream media (or not). We must study, and learn from them. We must learn from each other.
WE ARE ALL STUDENTS
Teachers, professors, authors, managers, thought leaders, bloggers etc. can all help us learn. But making sure your personal bubble is where it needs to be is up to you, the individual.
[Stepping down from Soapbox now]
Enjoy the comments.
"School is, was and--unless the teaching profession wakes up and starts
embracing change even if it threatens their jobs--will always be
insular and inward looking. Theory, over practice." gabby
"I'm so surprised that a bunch of college students are better versed in
theory and buzzwords than in real world examples. On the other hand,
these kids are at (or at least near) the epicenter of the content
creation movement, so maybe it is surprising after all - not because
they should be learning about it in their marketing course but because
they should be living it." Greg Verdino
"It was not till I got outside and graduated that my eyes were opened to this whole new world.
" Matt Haverkamp
"Do you believe we are victims of our own myopia?" Cam Beck
"I can't tell you how many times I talk to agency marketers who have never heard of these 'classic' power consumer moments." jessica
"Professors need to get beyond the security of their assigned
readings and add new books and articles to their selections for every
new class. And then discussions need to center on what is happening in
today's marketing world." Lewis Green
"As I speak to other marketers, and even clients at big-name companies,
they are so busy with their own plans they are really not aware of
social media. It seems like a no-brainer to many of us because we spend
time tracking (or engaging in) it. My typical clients still don't even
have it on their radar screen." Becky Carroll
"When I was teaching business courses on the undergrad level, every
student had to go out and locate a busines, and it's owner, or manager,
or C-level person, to link up with once a week, every week" peter vajda
"Personally, I have learned a lot more practical knowledge through
blogs, social media, open source sharing, etc. than I have from most of
my courses. The classes provide a foundation, but unless you actively
engage in building upon that foundation, it all seems somewhat useless.
It’s like pouring concrete to start a house and then never returning to
continue construction." Ryan Karpeles
"Schools must change. Embrace Non-textbooks as a reliable learning
tools. Create "new-marketing" classes. Have classes dedicated to blogs.
Have marketing speakers on a weekly basis." Jonathan Chamberlin
"I think professors aught to
have a list of at least 10-20 marketing/biz blogs that students should
be reading daily. If the concern on reading a blog is too much, start
them off with Seth's "Small Is The New Big." Let them think out of the
box with Wozniak's book about design." Nathan
"My students are given reading lists equivalent to 'No one got fired for
recommending Microsoft': the dead hand of academe looms large, and
there is more emphasis on correct bibliographic referencing than on
imagination or even relevance." Vee
"Remember how at your Digitas NY prez only like 3 people (in interactive) knew who Seth Godin is? Yep, we live in a bubble." CK
"I've met with many high-profile marketing executives over the past few
months and I can assure you that you would be surprised by their narrow
marketing - and marketplace - knowledge, and hence, perspectives. They
are simply way too busy with their own "marketing bubbles" to care." Tom Asacker
"I did a presentation to an
advertising class at a large university last November...In a show of hands no one in the class knew who lonelygirl15 was and
when I stated talking about Second Life the looks I got were priceless." daniel9223
"I just started regularly reading several trend-watching, news-sharing,
marketing, and advertising blogs this year and it's really helped me to
think more creatively. I only wish I would have started sooner..." Amitha Raman
"I think this whole issue isn't about: "I can't believe you haven't heard of X." It's all about: "I can't believe you haven't TRIED to hear about X." Ryan Karpeles
Digitas colleague Dave Marsey and I just wrapped up a joint presentation at Chicago’s Loyola University. It was great to get the invite and we had a blast presenting to an energetic group of well dressed grad students who gobbled up the information as quickly as we could spit it out. There were lots of excellent questions about how marketing is being impacted by empowered consumers and how social media is affecting our behavior. In short, we were pleased to be interacting with such a bright group of people.
But there were a few surprises, at least for me. With the exception of the Jet Blue YouTube apology, I brought up a couple of noteworthy events/names that symbolize some of the changes we see in our industry. And was surprisingly met with with a few blank stares. Here are some examples:
It is to me. I can see not knowing about Agency.com/Subway, but to not have a clue about Jeff Jarvis or Dell Hell? I was really impressed by the professionalism of the students and especially their enthusiasm. Most seemed interested and asked great questions. I only have one to ask them back. Are you mentally getting outside of your School walls on a regular basis? I ask this question respectfully and sincerely.
Students out there, hear me out. If you can come across as smart, professional, enthusiastic and optimistic—all these things will help you career wise. But also know what’s happening (in detail) both inside and outside of our industry, and have an opinion about them. We are witnessing seismic shifts in terms of how we define marketing, advertising, and PR. It’s not good enough to know that the shift is happening—you need to know about the everyday milestones which serve as telltale signs.
If you’re a student reading this and you find yourself relating, I’ll give you the same advice I gave them. Go out and read Citizen Marketers for starters (we included a slide with the book on it). Basically, keep up with what’s going on in marketing-related spaces in addition to what’s on your curriculum. And to the school and organizers, thank you for having us, it was an honor!
Handy little article on Marketing Profs today regarding who influencers are, and how you can start a dialogue with one. Here are some of my favorite thoughts:
"These alpha influencers are the key to other customers' awareness, consideration, preference, and purchase. They advocate, rank, sort, evaluate, and ultimately create marketplace adoption. They come in the form of users, developers, channel partners, and press people."
"...general guidelines: they are well-traveled, almost always have a religious life, are often leaders (civic, business, nonprofit), and generally hold an activist approach to life. Almost always, they have a general sense of optimism because they believe in the power of good, they like people, love to orchestrate ideas, and they tend to be (but not always) great at building relationships.
Interesting statistic: four in ten have a connection to a professional association. This is a sign of their restless intellectual interests. Influencers continuously take input from what they see, hear, read, and keep turning it over in their mind for new insights and ideas. They are sometimes entrepreneurs."
"Influencers and alpha consumers are people who place importance on values: enduring love, knowledge, authenticity, stable personal relationships, learning, and freedom. When you can get them to pay attention to your offer/product/solution, you have the opportunity to shape the market."
The piece then goes on to outline in step by step fashion some guidelines on how to select and engage the right influencers:
1. Selection/sort matters 2. Size matters 3. Two-way flow is critical 4. Without listening, you're dead already 5. Spread the word using a calculated set of steps
I found the article to be pretty interesting—it's certainly worth the read. BTW, if you're thinking about approaching me now that I'm a "level 2 influencer" (if you go by my fancy visual) ;-)—here are a few pointers:
1. If you're pitching—be honest and open about it. Tell me you are pitching and don't lather me up with praise. Tell me why what your pitching is great. Better yet—prove it.
2. Know something about me—find some common ground and strike up a conversation. Just like in life, chances are I'll be receptive and we'll end up talking.
3. Make sure there is a fit. If I don't see an obvious connection, I'll think you are approaching everyone else the same way and get turned off in the process.
4. *Comment here. I'm very loyal to the folks who take time to comment, participate and say something of value here. I read and take to heart every comment on this blog even if I don't respond to it. Commenting is actually a way of communicating with me. I consider it a form of dialogue. (* this gets flagged because it's a big deal with me)
5. Be yourself. Nobody likes a fake—not in marketing, business or life. Just be who you are—I'll appreciate it because I'm trying to do the same thing here.
