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8 ways to "social mediafy" marketing, PR campaigns

May 6, 2009 By 1 Comment

Creating marketing and public relations campaigns within a social media context requires some new steps– and greater attention to steps that hopefully have always been considered.

Here are eight ideas to “social mediafy” your campaigns.

1. Know what’s relevant and current: First, know what your audience cares about. What issues, topics, ideas are front of mind.  Not what your company wants to talk about, which is usually your own products and service features/functions (boring), but what people are already concerned about and interested in. Do this by analyzing the digital ecosystem for your category — blogs, tweets, news articles, YouTube videos,  Digg posts/rankings, Google searches, etc. What’s most popular, triggers the most responses?  If you have a corporate blog or a customer forum — what are the most popular topics?

2. What’s the business goal: Before doing anything, clearly understand the intention of the campaign. Is it to develop preference for your brand vs. another? Change a perception about your company? Make people more aware of the company’s expertise in a particular area? Help people understand an issue that is an obstacle to sales? Generate leads? Make your brand more likable?  The more specific you can be, the more effective your program will be — and the easier it will be to measure it.  I see far too little time spent on this important step. “General Awareness” is too superficial — nor does it guide how to execute.

3. Formulate a provocative point of view: What’s your take on a topic of current interest to your audience — and how does your point of view connect with your goal? Make the point of view is fresh, thought-provoking and even provocative.  As word of mouth author Emmanuel Rosen points out in an interview with Sean Moffit of BuzzCanuck, one of the worst practices in marketing is having nothing interesting to say. My research has found that there are nine themes that people like to talk about; here’s more on “The Nine Best Story Lines for Marketing” from Guy Kawasaki’s blog.  My favorite is taking a contrarian or counterintuitive view. Done right, this approach creates interest, debate and longevity — and can help address a number of goals.

4. Put that point of view together in a shareable form: Take your point of view and develop it in a form (or multiple forms) that people can easily share with other people — eBooks, videos, ChangeThis manifestos, blog posts, presentations, white papers. And put those not just on your own site but where people are browsing — YouTube, SlideShare, Delicious, etc.  Some recent examples of content easy to share: Disney Park’s “make your own personalized video,” which you can then share with friends. IBM’s “Art of the Sale” mainframe videos by Tim Washer. And a great white paper, “EMC/One: A Journey in Social Media” by Chuck Hollis. Having some thing makes it easier to share. Of course, it needs to be interesting enough that you want to share it with your colleagues and friends.

5. Get your views out into the ecosystem: Now stir things up and let people know about your point of view– and where they can go to learn more.  Use Twitter, Facebook, blogger outreach, Slideshare.net, YouTube, Digg, Sumbleupon and all the many, many other places out there.

6. Stay in the conversation: As people start talking about the topic, stay in the conversation, adding new perspectives, answering questions, providing other people/places about the issue. Set up Google alerts at a minimum to keep up with the conversation and post responses to what;s being said. The days of dropping a press release, talking to some media, and calling it a campaign are over.

7. Repackage: Take the highlights of what ensued and repackage them to further achieve your goals — use for customer newsletters, sales presentations, management reports, in employee communities/Intranets.

8. Measure what sticks: Lastly, learn from all the issues you initiate. Which garnered the most interest — and why? What fell flat? Was it the topic — or was it the execution. This execute-and-measure-and-learn is the only way to find what works for your audience — and is an ongoing education for you.

Filed Under: Communicating, Conversational Marketing, Marketing trends, Point of View & Messaging, Public Relations, Social media strategy, Word of mouth Tagged With: , , ,

Finding: 8 patterns in social media ecosystems

January 24, 2009 By 2 Comments

Many, including me, have talked about the value of listening to social media conversations.  I’m starting to think listening is too passive — and pays short shrift to what you can find when you really study your company or your industry’s social media ecosystem.

While immersing myself in some clients’ social media ecosystems last week I found eight  patterns with interesting business implications.

1. What makes people love your company — and hate it. Sounds basic, but “you suck/you’re amazing” make up a huge proportion of the conversations around most businesses.   Where to focus on your resources?  Leveraging the love and figuring out how to stop the hate are good places. (And not just in the social media environment.)

2. Help, I’m having a problem. A cousin to “you suck” are people who are having a problem with your products or company. They’re not haters yet, but they’re frustrated and screaming for help.  So many social media conversations are directly related to customer service. If you find this pattern, I’d suggest you get with customer service ASAP and create a plan for the customer service folks to directly monitor social media conversations — especially Tweets (Twitter) — and respond directly to people in pain.  In many ways social media is a natural extension of customer service.

3. Why campaigns and PR die fast: it’s also fascinating to find out why some campaigns gain traction and others die on the press release vine.  When you look at your ecosystem using a good analysis tool, you can see how ideas spread or never get off the ground. My conclusion after reading thousands of posts/tweets last week: most marketing and PR content hasn’t evolved for a social media world. There’s nothing to talk about. No reason you want to tweet it, blog about it, tag it, Digg it or Stumble it.  Those of you who know me know I’ve been like a broken record the last four years talking and writing about shift from messaging and bland content to provocative points of view that light up conversations.  But believe me, new approaches to content are really, really important today.

4. Twitter is the phenomenon: a huge majority of conversations about any company are happening on Twitter.  So for anyone who’s just getting into the social media mix, put aside those big blog plans and first focus on a Twitter strategy. For one client, approximately 85% of all relevant conversations were on Twitter. Yowza.

5. YouTube is a close second: Most of Fortune’s Most Admired Companies have a YouTube channel with great content.  Many small organizations are also doing amazing work in digitial storytelling. But beware schlock.  It can hurt your reputation and I found a lot of it.

6. Responding to people won’t cost a fortune: When you boil down the types of posts and tweets that would be valuable for a company to respond to, there usually aren’t all that many, unless you’re in some sort of crisis, of course.  For one company I reviewed approximately 5,000 conversations over a three week period and found that there were about 25 posts/tweets a week that it would make sense for them to respond to — and half of those should be handled by customer service. Before freaking out about what the costs of engagement might be, go exploring to see what’s really happening.

7.  Why are we invisible: what’s also interesting is finding no conversations around an issue or strategy that’s important to your company — or that you’ve been putting a lot of resources against.  Two things to ask: is there  an opportunity for your company to fill a void?  Why isn’t our strategy working?

8. Find direction from the data: Lastly, I found that mapping the social media ecoystem is invaluable in providing insights into an organization’s social media strategy. You see how much is happening — and where that’s relevant to your customers and business. You can target your audiences around different issues, and see how they feel about those issues.  You see all kinds of places where it might make sense to get involved. Based on the volume and relevancy of that volume, you can develop a business case and more accurately determine costs.

Especially helpful is that when you go armed with data and a rational business case, senior management is much more likely to pay attention.

PS — use a good visualization tool to help you find your way around your ecosystem. I like both TruCast and Radian6. They’re both good, providing different value for different types of organizations.

Filed Under: Conversational Marketing, Marketing trends, Social media strategy Tagged With: , , , , ,

Marketing News Radio

January 19, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Next Wed., Jan 28 at noon EST, I’ll be interviewed by David Kinard on Marketing News Radio, AMA’s online talk radio program.  I’m kind of tired of all the hype and buzz around social media so you won’t hear much of that.

But I do want to share observations about the big challenges people in companies are wrestling with in creating new types of marketing strategies, and offer pragmatic ideas on where to focus and what to forget about (for now.)  A big part of the radio show is call in questions, so fire away.

Filed Under: Conversational Marketing, Marketing trends, Point of View & Messaging, Social media strategy Tagged With: , ,

Marketing 2009: free eBook

January 16, 2009 By 1 Comment

The wise, warm and generous Valeria Maltoni has compiled a free eBook about 2009 marketing directions from 12 marketers, including me and my Beeline Labs partner Francois Gossieaux.  Rather than predictions or talking about general trends, all the contributors provide helpful, pragmatic ideas on where to focus and how to execute.   You can download the ebook from Valeria’s Conversation Agent blog. Here are some of the highlights:

  • “Basic metrics you can initially use to match up before, during and after sales deltas are frequency, reach, and yield” – Olivier Blanchard, The Brand Builder, @thebrandbuilder
  • “There are three imperatives for execution programs in 2009 – start with measurement, create content for the open Web and for mobility” – Matt Dickman, Techno||Marketer, @MattDickman
  • “The foundation and core of what social media is, consists of the five C’s. Conversation, community, commenting, collaboration and contribution” – Mike Fruchter, My Thoughts on Social Media, @Fruchter
  • “With social media as a platform for participation, people can behave the way they were hardwired to behave in the first place – humanly, tribally” – Fancois Gossieaux, Emergence Marketing, @fgossieaux
  • “Companies with greater social intelligence have stronger bonds with employees and customers, and that translates into revenue” – Lois Kelly, Beeline Labs, @LoisKelly
  • “Change ensures our own livelihoods – new opportunities and trends to capitalize upon, unique products and profit centers that merit development, robust innovation to leverage”- Christina Kerley, CK Epiphany, @ckepiphany
  • “Social media interaction allows us to have… well, interaction with our customers. It lets us see them as people instead of statistics and it lets us hear their voices” – Jennifer Laycock, Search Engine Guide, @JenniferLaycock
  • “A proper social media education is more than just learning new tools. The most important lesson we can impart is the necessity to think ‘humans’”- Connie Reece, Every Dot Connects, @ConnieReece
  • “Social media isn’t causing problems, but it is revealing them. And the problems aren’t new; they’ve been around for a while” – Mike Wagner, Own Your Brand!, @bigwags
  • “The secret of success in social media is a product or a service that people actually like and use” – Alan Wolk, The Toad Stool, @awolk

Filed Under: Conversational Marketing, Marketing trends, Social media strategy Tagged With: , , ,

New creatives vs. old creatives

December 4, 2008 By 5 Comments

Last night I randomly opened the Age of Conversation/2 and landed on Ernie Mosteller’s “The New Creatives Get It” article. Wow.  Here’s his take on the two fundamental differences between new and old creative, which I think really gets to the heart of the creative sea change.

  1. Information first, entertainment second. It used to be that creative led with entertainment to get our attention, and then served up product information. Today people are looking for information, so effective creative leads with information people are looking — even if they’re looking for  entertainment.
  2. Elegant complexity vs. clever simplicity. Old advertising focused on simplicity. But, Ernie warns, “on the Web simplicity fails. Miserably.”  Today great creative is telling an intricate story, but in ways that are interesting, fun and compelling to prospects.

Is you organization in the new creative mindset — or the old?

(I love the line on Ernie’s blog: “The medium is the audience.”  Oh yeah.)

Filed Under: Advertising, Books, Marketing trends, Social media strategy Tagged With: , ,

Sales 2.0: Rethinking the sales presentation

November 12, 2008 By 3 Comments

One of the top three pressures on sales organizations, according to a new Aberdeen “Sales 2.0″ study: “the need to compete with increasing customer and prospect knowledge of products and competitive differentiators.”  Well, duh, of course. Prospects can do their homework very well today online.

What this means is that companies need to rethink the typical sales presentation and sales training. You can’t walk in and explain who you are, your clients, your product line and your competitors.  I sat next to a marketing exec of a big high tech company on a cross-country flight recently and watched him, for six hours, tweak a sales presentation that did exactly this — presenting the basics, most of which prospects could find on their own, in  85 slides.  Later in the flight I struck up a casual conversation  and he explained that he was going to California to train the sales force on a new sales strategy. Oh woe that that deck was it.

Sales presentaitons today have to provide VALUE to the prospect. Tell me something helpful that I don’t know. What trends do you see? What assumptions are misleading? What’s likely to change in 18 months, but stay the same for the next 24? What’s slightly different about my industry than others?

Almost all products today are viewed as commodities. People buy based on relationships and trust. To earn that trust, provide more valuable insights from the get-go. All those other facts, case studies, awards — put them on your web site and make it easy for prospects to find them.

According to the 210 companies surveyed by Aberdeen in Sept., the top pressures are:

  • 63%: increase top line revenue growth
  • 60%: improve sales productivity
  • 32%: compete with increasing customer/prospect knowledge of products and competitive differentiators
  • 24%: reduce sales cycles
  • 13%: connect a disperse and/or global sales force

Filed Under: Marketing trends, Sales Tagged With: , ,

New model for news organizations — and customer communities

May 13, 2008 By Leave a Comment

[photopress:News_Ecology_Map.jpg,full,pp_image]

This is a new map of what the emerging news ecology looks like, based on a Value Network Mapping and Analysis tool developed by Verna Allee for the recent NewsTools2008 conference among 150 journalists, technologists and educators. Talk about change!

According to journalists and bloggers Chris Peck, Peggy Holman and Stephen Silha over at Journalism That Matters, here’s what’s emerging:

  • Some reporters become “beat bloggers” tapping into networks of bloggers to bring complex stories into focus.
  • “Community weavers” create a sense of community among the former audience and with formal news entities.
  • “Information architects” make intelligible the vast amounts of data and images now available.
  • While editors continue to be sense makers, connecting facts and making story lines visible, ultimately who filters news from noise, how it happens, and who pays for it is still unfolding.
  • Even the definition of “news” is up for grabs as memes — cultural units of information equivalent to genes in the body — replace an event orientation to story.

Fascinating model that can be applied to traditional media, online communities and social networks, or company communities for customers or employees.

Last week I had lunch with an editor of a major daily newspaper who is trying to innovate his paper. The question his execs keep asking: “How do we make money on a different kind of model?” As with this news ecology model, no one has figured out a magic money making model. In fact, if newspapers don’t downsize fixed operational costs like printing presses and distribution assets, they may never be able to make model in this new world.

What is clear is that if newspapers do nothing as they wait for the magic model, they will continue to lose their customers, many of whom are no longer just “readers” but active participants. Ditto for marketers and corporate communications execs.

Filed Under: Communities, Innovation, Marketing trends, Social media strategy Tagged With: , , , ,

Six facts to support marketing change

April 24, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Getting management to buy into innovative marketing approaches can be tough.

Here are six facts to support change, based on performance data that Copernicus Marketing Consulting has collected from more than 500 marketing programs (consumer and B2B products and services.)

  1. 84% of programs are resulting in declining brand equity and market share.
  2. Customer satisfaction averages just 74%.
  3. Most acquisition efforts fail to reach break even.
  4. No more than 10% of new products succeed.
  5. Most sales promotions are unprofitable.
  6. Advertising ROI is below 4%.

For more, see the Harvard Business Review article, “Don’t Blame the Metrics” by Kevin Clancy and Randy Stone.

Filed Under: Activating change, Advertising, Innovation, Marketing trends, Research Tagged With: ,

Katie Couric's Viagra problem

April 18, 2008 By Leave a Comment

 [photopress:Katie_Couric.jpg,thumb,pp_image]  The buzz is that CBS may “divorce” itself from anchor Katie Couric long before her contract expires in 2011. What went wrong?

Maybe it has nothing to do with Katie Couric or the fact that people are tuning out of  television for their news.   Maybe it comes down to a Viagra problem.

Watching the evening news — CBS or the other networks — we are bombarded with ads for one medical ailment ad after another. Penile erection, bladder control, constipation, bone loss, arthritis, diabetes. What kind of customer experience is this? Terrible. Erections and constipation happy messages while trying to make dinner, and maybe catch up on the news.

CBS, like most companies, has different silos responsible for different functions, and no one organization is looking at the customer’s experience. CBS News is responsible for Katie & Co., while the advertising group is bringing in the television dollars — and the Viagra ads.

In many retail companies, marketing is responsible for branding while operations oversees the stores, and never the two shall collaborate, often creating a mixed message and uneven customer experience.  Similarly, customer service isn’t usually part of marketing, yet the customer service group often has more influence on customers than advertising, promotions, or pricing.

I hope CBS doesn’t put the blame for poor ratings on Katie Couric, a fine journalist. CBS has bigger issues; the customer’s experience matters more than the ad revenue. If the first is bad, the second will become disastrous.

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Filed Under: Advertising, Dumb company stories, Marketing trends Tagged With: , ,

Perceived value: the best way to measure marketing ROI?

April 18, 2008 By Leave a Comment

[photopress:mind_the_gap_london12.jpg,full,pp_image] I feel both exhausted and encouraged from this week’s Conference Board conference on Measuring Marketing Effectiveness. Exhausted because the data shows that despite so much talk for so many years about the need for measures and ROI , we marketers have made very little progress over the past 10 years.

A 2007 ANA study found that just 11 percent surveyed said they are very satisfied or satisfied with their ability to determine marketing ROI. A soon-to-be released Conference Board study found that none of the companies surveyed feel as though they’ve “arrived” at figuring out a good way to measure marketing.

Exhausting, too, because creating approaches that provide insights and guide planning – vs. simply measuring tactics — is hard, scientific work. Companies with successful measurement systems, like Eli Lilly, Unilever, MetLife, said it takes at least three to four years to begin making real progress.

The only measure that may matter?

What was encouraging, however, is that marketing measurement innovators believe one approach is particularly valuable: measuring customer preference or perceived value, which are leading indicators of revenue, profits, and cash flow. (In other words, a measure that helps you manage and satisfy the CEO and CFO AND see glean insights to help manage vs. simply measure marketing.)

Don Sexton, professor of marketing at Columbia University believes that this is the most effective measure, yet is missing from nearly every list of marketing measures. (FYI: Don is releasing a book on the topic this fall.)

Other takeaways:

Relationship preference matters as much as product preference

Mark Kershisnik of Eli Lilly believes (and has the data to back it up) that equity can provide a measurement of both investment and performance, and the way to measure equity is by assessing product brand preference AND relationship preference.

I found this especially interesting as so many marketers focus exclusively on product preference, yet customers make decisions, particularly in the B2B landscape, on relationship factors like trust, likability, innovation.

Most common measures are meaningless: lagging indicators vs. leading indicators

Most of the common marketing metrics are, well, useless. Awareness, mind share, perception, recognition, recall, share of market, loyalty, purchase intention, cost per click, etc. may be easy to measure, but they don’t connect to business value nor do they provide indicators of what to do differently to improve performance. They are lagging indicators measuring past performance rather than leading indicators that can help diagnose where to improve brand and relationship preferences and how to monitor progress of achieving marketing objectives.

Focus on just a few things

Many marketers try to measure too many things – 30 or 40 factors. It’s impossible to properly assess that many factors – or have the resources to work on improving that many factors. Many of the speakers recommended focusing on just 3 – 4 product preference factors and 1 -2 relationship preference factors.

Getting on the same page crucial to success

All of those firms with successful measurement strategies have educated their entire leadership team so that everyone has a shared definition of marketing, marketing value, measures and metrics.

The CFO’s mantra

Kamal Sen, director of business analytics and strategic planning for Unilever in Asia, Africa, Middle East and Turkey, offered what the CFO really cares about:

  • Sales is vanity.
  • Profits are sanity.
  • Cash is reality.

Filed Under: Innovation, Marketing trends, Research Tagged With: , ,

Mute slaves no more

March 21, 2008 By Leave a Comment

During a recent call with Rob Kozinets, a marketing professor at York University in Toronto and a leading mind on online communities, we talked about the changes in marketing and Rob remarked that consumers use to be like mute slaves to businesses, listening passively while the one-way messages came at them.

As a follow up to our call, Rob reflected more about the mute slave metaphor — and its relationship to the character Nova from Planet of the Apes on his blog.

(The wild slave character Nova eventually gets her voice, much as people have today through social media, creating new relationships with businesses, new business models, and social change. Go Nova, go!)

PS — Rob’s book is Consumer Tribes.

Filed Under: Conversational Marketing, Marketing trends, Social media strategy Tagged With: ,

Marketing analytics: sinkhole or strategy?

March 11, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I just finished a research project about marketing analytics with Dave Bond of Sapient that you can download here. Highlights of our findings:

Overall takeaway

Analytics isn’t about measuring and reporting. It’s about aligning marketing with corporate goals and generating meaning from the data to guide decisions.

Former Nissan CMO and Hyundai Motor America chief operating officer Steve Wilhite summed up the issue well when he explained to us:

“People are spending a tremendous amount of money to generate data, much of which is useless. At the end of the day the metrics you choose to measure should be part and parcel of strategy development. Being able to measure what you’re trying to accomplish is what becomes important in business planning and obviously it becomes important in justifying the particular execution that you choose.”

Six major obstacles

  1. Lack of agreement and support from senior executives
  2. Gap between corporate goals and tactical analytics
  3. The tyranny of metrics, aka the ROI black hole
  4. Misleading insights from measuring silos
  5. Alignment requires change management heavy lifting and patience
  6. Confusion about fundamental types of analytics and measures

Five guiding principles for creating a marketing analytics strategy

1. Get on the same page about the measures that matter the most
2. Adopt just a few measures
3. Use a portfolio approach
4. Build analytics into marketing strategy
5. Know the devil is in the data: collaborate with IT

Filed Under: Marketing trends Tagged With: ,

Ogilvy's Mike Hemingway on brand communications

February 10, 2008 By Leave a Comment

[photopress:Mike_Hemingway_Ogilvy_1.jpg,full,centered]

Speaking at the BRITE 08? branding/innovation/technology conference last Friday Mike Hemingway, global managing director, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, offered these insights:

  • Everything a brand communicates to its customers should be personal and important.
  • The future of marketing is not just offering value to customers, but offering values.
  • The Web is today’s mass media. Advertising and public relations are the accelerators to use to get people to the Web.
  • A brand is like a country. Make it a place where people want to be and go to.

Filed Under: Marketing trends Tagged With: ,

Influencers not so influential, trends out of our control

January 22, 2008 By Leave a Comment

You can’t jump start a trend by trying to influence highly social people, aka “the influentials,” according to Duncan Watts, a Columbia University network theory scientist currently working for Yahoo Labs. Nor can anyone predict or engineer trends, he says. The complex network effects on society mean that trends occur randomly.

In an article in this month’s Fast Company (“is the Tipping Point Toast?”) Watts also says,” If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one — and if it isn’t then almost no one can.”

Talk about challenging word of mouth and influencer marketing assumptions with scientific data

If Watts’ research is right, what does it mean to marketers? A few thoughts…

1. How do we become better at quickly yet deeply understanding our markets and the head set of customers to see if our ideas and products fit within their context and their “readiness” to embrace a trend, a new way of doing business, a message? I’ve seen so many companies try to push a “transformational” product to a customer base that wasn’t interested or ready to be transformed. It reminds me something the late producer Louis Mayer once allegedly said, ” If people don’t want to come, there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” By the time traditional market research identifies a trend, the trend may be waning or over. Maybe online communities are the best way to spot changes. Or new unstructured data analysis of online conversations.

2. What are the best way to understand the life cycle of trends and tap into them to help our brands and businesses? How can we use new tools to spot trends early? At what point in the trend cycle does it make sense to invest money and ride the trend? At what point is the trend waning and we’d be better off not riding the final wave of a trend?

3. How do we redefine success? The goal of leading the next blockbuster trend, as Watts points out, is unrealistic; the world is too complex to even be able to predict how trends occur never mind think our company can consciously lead the wave. Having the biggest social network doesn’t mean your social network is meaningful and successful. Having a gazillion hits to your blog doesn’t mean the blog is achieving your goals.

And so aiming to be a big part of the next big thing may just be foolish,

Filed Under: Marketing trends, Research, Social media strategy
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