Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Inside the headquarters of the National Republican Congressional Committee, 25-year-old Adam Conner — registered Facebook lobbyist, poster of multiple Obama attaboys and a guy whose Facebook photo is a grizzly bear wielding two chain saws — sits to teach a course. The subject: How to use Facebook better. His student: Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.).
“If we’re going to improve our presence on Facebook and really maximize it, what would you recommend as tangible steps?” Roskam asks, thumbing his BlackBerry.
“It looks like you’re very comfortable with your BlackBerry,” Conner replies earnestly. “Maybe commit to a status message a day? A photo a week? Dive deeper. You’ll be surprised at how things that seem routine to you as a congressman are so interesting and cool to constituents.”
Conner is Facebook’s evangelist in Washington, a social-networking pro summoned by elected officials and bureaucrats alike to teach them, free of charge, how to leverage Facebook — within strict government rules and security guidelines. The mere existence of Conner’s hand-holding lessons illustrates the cultural gulf between Washington and Silicon Valley, and spotlights the complex web of congressional rules that limit social networking among federal workers.
The old method of thought leadership was to create a white paper. A carefully crafted, highly edited, incredibly boring, 18-page tree killer that you provided for download on your Web site.
Guess what? In a 140-character world, a white paper feels like reading Moby Dick. Backwards. While covered in maple syrup.
Mmmmm. Info Snacks
Don’t put all your thought leadership eggs in that one, large basket. Like a salad at a fancy restaurant, deconstruct that white paper and instead create an array of info snacks that you can sprinkle across the Web.
Each of those snacks will be consumed by a slightly different audience, and perhaps more importantly each will be indexed by search engines, multiplying your inbound marketing opportunities geometrically.
Let’s think about how this might work in practice. Let’s say your core concept is that Blue Cross/Blue Shield in your state is helping improve the health of the citizenry through community health initiatives like immunization, exercise classes, and so forth.
While brands still try hard to “crack the Social Media code,” most seem to understand consumers no longer find the prospect of being friends with a brand more engaging than the single click it took to fan the brand page on Facebook. After all, what’s so novel about the thought of a friendship with my butter? Precisely, nothing.
The impact of social media at the heart of new media is shaking up how brands think of experience design and what consumers expect from brand experiences.
Let’s talk digital sociology. I’ll quote three impactful points of view from Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. In his series called “The machine is (Changing) Us: YouTube and the politics of Authenticity,” he describes the following (which I’ve roughly transcribed):
“Media defines us while we define media.”
“We’ve shifted from media to mediated relationships.”
“Connections were the constraint, we now have connections without constraint.”
How can these statements help us understand how to be better at building brand through social media and digital experiences in general? Here’s a set of guiding principles to help you get beyond tactical earned media generation and enable you to create richer and more successful “social movements” around brands.
You can shape the outcome, but can’t prescribe it. Leave predictable outcomes behind. Successful social experiences all have one thing in common: They relinquish control. Bring your consumers closer to action and let them take over. When insights are scarce, leverage the good old reward method to get them to play, then watch them play. If your brand has risk and readiness constraints, consumer control is not a pipe dream. Make it a priority.
From Communication to Connectivity. Your brand should no longer think of itself as an authority (even if it is one), but rather a facilitator or enabler. Its role is no longer to broadcast, but to connect. Understanding brand connectivity requires more than just digital listening and influence identification. Moving beyond single degree measures is crucial. Examining passions and motives within dynamic behavioral contexts is essential. Digital discovery (or anthropology) can help uncover motive “in action”. Social media is an unbound source of insights, allowing limitless exploration of digital personas and their behavior. Your brand can engage and build connectivity through behavioral contexts it can associate with.
Create mediated experiences. Focus on understanding the potential impact of various media interactions against consumer motives and apply that understanding to your experience strategy. Leverage YouTube as more than an outlet for brand video and search traffic. Instead, study how video sharing can promote the quality of the engagement and motives you seek to trigger. As you plan your experience, don’t limit yourself… Define the media while giving it the opportunity to define you. Create experiences that are engaging but unconfined. Experiences that impose less constraint (or more connection) lead to a greater ability to mine insights from engagement. Branded widgets and social network applications can surely help amplify brand messaging but are really little more than evolved direct media. UGC campaigns with very prescriptive requests cannot allow you to measure much more than response rates.
Listen to your experiences. Leverage digital listening to clearly understand how the media has shaped you. Extend your discovery efforts against your conversation to understand patterns of behavior, motives of engagement, audiences and other measures of how your brand is or can be more connective. Measure impact beyond response and conversion by putting your data to work across all sources to truly understand consumer behavior against key business metrics, both offline and online.
Keep Shaping & Being Shaped. Whether looking to sustain successful initiatives or creating new ones, brands need to understand how to play in a fully dynamic context. Focus too much on the media itself and your efforts won’t scale. Instead, focus on measuring and extending your “connectivity” step by step, creating a well balanced insights & experience machine.
While butter brands of the world now have their work cut out for them, I’m hoping they’ll leverage Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, or their own media as mere interaction vehicles while devoting their attention to understanding the essence of consumer engagement within the media. Only then can they design experiences that shape conversation, to then understand how those conversations have shaped their brand.
This year was certainly significant in the world of online social media. Facebook surpassed 350 million users — more than the U.S. population — and Twitter’s short blogging service skyrocketed in popularity, led by celebs, tech lovers and top companies.
Here’s a look back at 2009’s biggest events in which social media played a major role.
10. “Word of Web.” As people spent more time chatting online and in public spaces like Twitter, buzz surrounding product and entertainment releases became instantly quantifiable. The elusive word-of-mouth promotion could now be measured, and “word of Web” became that new currency. (Marketers love to use the word “viral.”)
The movie “District 9″ played the game rather well. The low-budget sci-fi flick started the buzz train early with cryptic alien decals around major cities before its release. Despite relatively low advertising spending, the movie did extremely well. The fact that it was actually a good film certainly didn’t hurt.
9. Whopper Sacrifice. Facebook was quick to kill this marketing ploy, but Burger King had a picnic with this one. The Whopper Sacrifice game asked Facebook users to delete 10 friends in exchange for a free burger. In just a couple of weeks, 233,906 friends were dropped like a bad habit.
It proved to be a hilariously successful way to promote a brand that seemed to get only more controversial and creepy over the course of the year.
8. Google Wave. In Gmail-like fashion, the exclusive nature of Google’s newest product (people vied for a limited number of invitations from friends) made it the must-have free service of 2009. Of course, once people finally got hold of Wave, their lust died down.
The interface is still pretty confusing, and the team continues to struggle with growing pains in its mission to create a stable collaboration platform. However, it packs some intriguing technologies that could very well transform journalism in addition to a number of industries. But right now, e-mail replacement it is not.
7. Twitter and Facebook under hack attack. Just when it seemed like Twitter had finally outgrown its glitches and constant bandwidth overload at the beginning of the year, summertime rolled around and, poof!, Twitter was down. And Facebook. And LiveJournal. And YouTube. What’s going on?
It was the first major malicious attack that successfully targeted a number of massive social sites. It wouldn’t be the last. A source at Twitter tells us the denial-of-service attacks had been going on for months, and they were also aimed at Facebook, which was seeing increased downtime too.
In addition to the site-aimed missiles, users were increasingly targeted for phishing scams. They were showing up in practically everyone’s Facebook inbox and Twitter direct message list.
As Microsoft knows all too well with its Windows platform, along with majority market share comes an army of bad guys.
From Ann Handley (of MarketingProfs.com) for American Express Open Forum:
Dec 29, 2009 -
What do bacon, Bogota, yumberries and Foursquare have in common? They are all on the list of 100 Things to Watch in 2010 by the marketing communications company JWT.
Certain trends on the list suggest clear implications for businesses. JWT’s Ann Mack says that many items on it reflect broader shifts, like a growing action around health and wellness and environmental issues, to crazy-fast developments in the tech space.
There are also a number of trends tied to the so-called Great Recession (“trip bundling,” for example) and those that speak to various demographic, political and economic power shifts (“East Africa Wired,” and “TV for Tween Boys” among them). Interestingly for business, Mack says, the list “points to the way industries are redefining or reinventing themselves to survive or to fully leverage these power shifts.”
What trends might affect your small business in 2010? Here a subset you might find worth watching (as well as a few I found just plain interesting). The full list is in alphabetical order, below.
1. 3D at Home 3D is the new HD. Having successfully invaded the big screen, it’s on its way to the small screen: James Cameron, director of the new 3D film Avatar, will promote Panasonic’s 3D sets, out next year, which will compete with versions from Sony and Samsung.
During the past 18 to 24 months, senior executives at many companies have been forced to move away from long-term growth strategies to focus on short-term survival. These strategies have focused on making the numbers for each quarter, and, in many cases, have been funded by reallocating investments from brand-building activities. Chris Dickey from Barkley addressed this topic in his article on rethinking discounts and pricing strategy. While I agree with his assessment and pricing strategies, I’d like to take the discussion a step further and delve into exactly how marketers can execute these strategies by using analytics to balance both brand building and price promotion.
As the economy begins to strengthen and marketers chart their course for 2010, the discussion topic in many boardrooms will be about striking this balance between investments in long-term brand building and short-term price promotion. To do this, many companies will need to break some of the dirty habits they adopted and carefully wean customers off the “buy only on deal” mindset.
Consumer research demonstrates that shopper behavior has changed dramatically, with shoppers acting in a more deliberate and mindful manner. A recent IRI study, entitled “Competing in a Transforming Economy 4.0,” found that 64% of consumers say they are now making lists before they shop, while 51% consider coupons an important factor in their purchase decisions. And some consumers have even said they only go down the aisles that include the items that are on their list.
Additionally, this study organizes respondents into three emerging categories of shoppers — optimists, maintainers and pessimists — based on a diverse array of consumer demographics, psychographics, values and beliefs. IRI discovered that pessimists exemplify many of the attitudes that are driving behavioral change across channels and categories, such as searching for sale prices (87% vs. 82% for all households), making personal-care products last longer (62% vs. 55% for all households) and buying fewer prepared meals at grocery stores (61% vs. 55% for all households). Each of these emerging segments views fiscal responsibility from a different perspective. And, importantly, each group professes a different appetite for the “right” cost to pay in order to integrate or not integrate frugality into day-to-day life.
But these trends don’t all represent doom and gloom for marketers. In fact, they create new opportunities. One of the most telling findings of what’s most important to consumers is familiarity with the brand and price. The good news is marketers and sales teams can pull both levers. But the big questions are: Which levers to pull? When to pull them? How to balance them as consumer attitudes and behaviors continue to transform? Read Rest of Article
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The latest Facebook breakthrough is coming not from a software developer but from an agency.
Resource Interactive, an Ohio-based digital agency with offices in Columbus and Cincinnati, this month launched “Off the Wall,” a platform that allows consumers to purchase a product directly from a retailer’s wall or their own feed on Facebook without leaving the popular social-networking site.
The product was developed by the agency’s in-house research and development lab, which keeps the company up to speed on new developments in the digital space, while also coming up with prototypes and concepts for a “digital future.”
“We needed a group of people that could take the time and have the focus to look out a little bit ahead,” said Dan Shust, director-emerging media, who heads up the 18-month-old group. “We get caught up in project work occurring right now.”
As marketers look to reign in costs in a tough economy, agencies have felt the squeeze, so ad shops are looking to new revenue streams from product development that have included everything from clothing to widgets to books.
Mr. Shust said he believes product development will become a bigger piece of what the agency does. He said Resource Interactive has determined it made more sense to begin building its own platforms and products that could be used by both clients and others, rather than building customized solutions from the ground up for each client or project.
Opening its products up to non-clients is proving beneficial for the agency, which is adding new clients as a result and has received some interest from international agencies looking to become the exclusive provider of Off the Wall in other countries.
CHICAGO (AdAge.com) — Kraft Singles is pulling an April Fool’s Day joke in December, armed with the insight that the product’s dairy-based recipe gives it a boost with Hispanic consumers.
Kraft timed today’s launch of a 39-week partnership with Univision to the Dia de los Santos Inocentes, the Hispanic April Fool’s Day that falls on Dec. 28 and features a long tradition of pranks and jokes in Latin America and Spain. In that spirit, Singles is coordinating a fake celebrity news story on Univision.com that diverts consumers to Kraft’s “Don’t Be Fooled” website.
Working with Lopez Negrete Communications, the independent Hispanic shop that won the Singles business in 2009, Kraft discovered that the real milk in its artificial cheese product gives the brand a leg up over low-priced rivals, which make their products with oil and water.
Why some iPhone apps become must-haves while others languish is still a mystery to many marketers. But AutoWeek, a 51-year-old magazine breaking into the app market for the first time this winter, has learned that promoting one properly plays a pretty important role.
For its first iPhone app, AutoWeek stuck to the basics: it would stream news, photo galleries, and auto show highlights from the magazine’s Web site. The challenge was getting the word out to the target audience: auto hobbyists as well as consumers in the market for a new car.
To reach its existing audience, AutoWeek put prominent ads for the new app, which was available free, in its magazine and on its Web site. But to reach car enthusiasts on their cell phones, they enlisted AdMob, the mobile ad network that Google recently agreed to purchase for $750 million.
“Even while we were working through the design phase of the app we worked directly with AdMob, took a lot of their input up front about what kind of app would play best in the market,” Marc Mathies, interactive operations director at AutoWeek, said. “And then when we went to market they helped us very rapidly get an adoption of the app and downloaded the app more rapidly than we could have done on our own.”
The app, which was created in conjunction with a third-party developer, launched on November 2nd, and did fairly well in its first week, reaching number 37 on the list of news apps. The AdMob mobile display campaign in the U.S. launched November 10 and ran for only two days, with simple text ads appearing on mobile sites popular with car enthusiasts directing them toward the AutoWeek download.
By the end of the brief U.S. campaign, the AutoWeek app had reached number 10 in the news category and had broken into the top 25 list of iPhone apps overall. The app experienced four times the number of downloads during the week after the campaign than the one before it.
An international mobile campaign followed, again lasting just two days. Afterwards, the AutoWeek app climbed from number 18 to number 5 in the U.K. news category, from number 37 to number 8 in Canada’s, and most notably, from number 90 to number two in Australia’s.
AutoWeek, which is based in Detroit, did not track which downloads came directly through the AdMob ads. But Mathies is confident that the app wouldn’t have performed nearly as well without the mobile promotion.
“Generally we see very small growth from promotions on our own media, so I would attribute 90 percent or greater to the AdMob effort,” he said.
More than a month after the end of the campaign, Mathies said the app continues to move briskly. “Since the promotion has finished we still are maintaining several hundred downloads a day, so I would say even though the marketing efforts are finished, the residual effects keep going.”
