Another Giveaway – You Might be a Zombie Book

I haven’t forgotten about all the giveaways I promised! You still have time to enter these giveaways – Flipboard T-Shirt, the Will it Blend? DVD, the Square device, the Delivering Happiness Book, and the Eyeballs Out book.  I will select the winners near the end of the month.

Now you have a chance to win You Might be a Zombie and Other Bad News from the editors of Cracked.com.  The book is rated 4.5 stars on Amazon.com, and appears to be a great book.  I just don’t have time to read it and wanted to give it away to one lucky reader of this blog.

To enter, simply click the comments link at the top of this post and make a comment.  Make sure to include your email address so I know how to contact you to send you the book.

Good luck and thanks for reading.  Keep an eye out for more giveaways to  come!

Outsource Social Media?

This wasn’t necessarily a presentation I attended at iMedia, the Social Business Summit, or SXSW, but among the many brand people I got to meet, it was an extremely hot topic of discussion.  The discussion was further fueled by something that happened the day before the Social Business Summit.  If you hadn’t seen the news, an employee from a company called New Media Strategies, accidentally dropped an f-bomb on behalf of their client, Chrysler’s twitter account.  As you can imagine, the employee was immediately fired and Chrysler let the agency go the following day.

Many of the brand people I met worked in various parts of the company, and something mentioned in the Ad Age article about the incident sparked a lot of discussion…

Turf battles over social media between marketing and communications have been an issue at the automaker — and other companies — for a few years. Early in the day after the tweet went out, Chrysler’s communications team was grappling to get hold of the details of the episode after bloggers and media began calling, in part because Chrysler’s marketing department controls Facebook and Twitter social-media accounts that are “consumer facing.” The communications department has separate Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr accounts that are meant to be “media facing.”

Many companies say the divide only serves turf and budget wars, not the brands. “All that has blurred, so it’s critical for communications and marketing to be coordinating and cooperating all the time,” said Stuart Schorr, VP-communications and public affairs at Jaguar-Land Rover North America. One of the issues creating the turf war, he noted, is which department gets the budget.

What I think we all discovered was social media is something that can’t be fit into a traditional box, as it has blurred the lines between paid and earned media, marketing and customer service, as well as transactional versus relational communications.  I’m not sure anyone has figured it out, but everyone expressed frustration about how this confusion was causing issues within their companies  (like the ones mentioned above).

The general perception is that social media is “cheap,” because sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube don’t necessarily charge you to be there.  However, in order to do it right, you have to invest first in listening to conversations about your brand and industry… which isn’t easy, when there are over 1 billion tweets per week, 1 billion Facebook messages posted per day, or the 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute.  Imagine the resources it takes just to do this… and if you want to respond to any of these messages, that takes more resources – and as pointed out above, multiple resources across functions/silos.

Hopefully you can agree, at the very least, it takes a large amount of time and organization.  Generally, brands are already heavily committed to traditional media – and spending money to outsource this work to traditional media agencies – because the “push my message through a one-to-many framework” has been in place for so long.  Even more important, leaders aren’t yet prepared to organize new internal communications structures to deal with a “new” media which requires one-to-one relationships.

In the meantime, there are certain to be many, many more ethical debates (like this one – Should You Outsource Social Media?) about whether or not you should hire someone to manage customer relationships in social media on your behalf.  Please tell us what your take in this debate is by commenting on this post.

Dachis Group Social Business Summit

At the iMedia Brand Summit, several of us were talking about whether or not we were going to be attending SXSW. A few of us are, and I found out that Robert Freeman, from Michaels was staying at the same hotel as well. As we got to talking, he mentioned that he and his boss were planning to attend the Dachis Group Social Business Summit. Well, as it turns out, Robert’s boss wasn’t able to make it into town in time for the Social Business Summit, and since they aren’t able to refund his fee, Robert invited me to attend.

I had seen this earlier, but after iMedia and SXSW, there was no way I was going to be able to talk to my boss about footing the tab for yet another conference on this trip. I’m really excited about being able to attend this, particularly because one of the speakers will be Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com, and I just finished his book Delivering Happiness.  There are some other tremendous speakers on the agenda, including Josh Bernoff of Forrester, Shiv Shingh of Pepsi (got to see him speak last year at work when he was with Razorfish), and Jesse Thomas of JESS3, a data visualization group.  I’m certain the other speakers will be great, and the topics on the agenda look awesome.  As you would expect, I’ll be tweeting and blogging from there as well.

5 Key Ingredients for Digital Display Marketing

This presentation was put on by PointRoll, a company which makes interactive banner advertising.  Here were their 5 ingredients for digital display marketing:

1. Audience
– Research your audience and know what they’re looking for
– Consider more than just demographics, think about context and how they use the web

2. Data
– Using your audience data and knowledge to determine who and how to target ads
– Come up with at least 3 Key Performance Indicators to evaluate success

3. Creative
– The Meijer case study included circular ads within the banner ad
– They are now trying to port viewer data out to billboard.  For example, if people are looking at snow shovels on the ad, they’ll use snow shovels on a digital billboard.
– Dynamically generated ads based on user data, which give them a reason to engage

4. Distribution
– Deliver messages across media
– More retail outlets are creating a social shopping experience

5. Performance
– Measure success and give proper credit to display and search – track if people see display ads and then search for item.

iMedia Brand Summit Wrap Up

Beyond Reach: Aligning with a Changing Consumer Decision Journey

Presenter: David Edelman, Partner & Co-Leader, Global Digital Marketing Strategy Practice, McKinsey & Company

It starts with a complete story across the Customer Decision Journey.  I know the chart here is hard to see, but it involves the following customer decisions: Consider – Evaluate – Bond (middle) – buy – experience – advocate.

In the course of McKinsey’s research across across brands in the consumer electronics, financial services, and telcom industries, they found that 75% of their budgets focused only on the “consider” and “buy” portion of the journey.

He used a McKinsey case study from electronics maker LG to illustrate why businesses need to look at other parts of the consumer decision journey.  LG believed that Amazon.com was simply an sales channel.  Research indicated that Amazon.com actually influenced 64% of sales made in physical stores as well.  It was actually its most important marketing touchpoint.

Adapting to this took a serious supply chain redesign, as they had to get all content regarding all their different TVs into a consistent format across all potential media – in store and online.  They had to quickly mobilize for content development rather than “traditional marketing” and, it required more focus on media and content development as well as alignment across silos.  New customers were immediately drawn into ongoing dialogue about the brand, fostering engagement, and ultimately a huge sales increase.

A case study from Progressive Insurance illustrated the potential to use your own data as content.  They aggregate competitor quotes both as a service to customers and potential customers, as well as making a strategic decision driver.  However, they’ve flipped the process around and have the ability evaluate the data on how consumers adjust their rates to impact the price.  Thousands of times an hour, they can see exactly what tradeoffs people are making to get the prices they want.  This knowledge has given them more insights to target certain types of consumers, bringing them a lower cost per acquisition than GEICO.

A final case study focused on how Comcast is turning service issues into advocacy content.  They receive 40-50 PR threats posted on blogs each day.  They reply via phone or email, spurring new posts with positive comments.  This often leads to the removal of posts and sites bashing the brand.  In addition, they monitor about 1000 tweets per day.  It turns out that 80% of service issues are resolved by other customers, and then becomes content for Comcast’s own bulletins.  Their sentiment scores have risen and they are in a better position to fend off growing competition from telcos.

The key is to reconstruct the Consumer Decision Journey for your advantage – distribute your presence, integrate the core, and activate the engaged.  In summary, ask yourself these questions:

1. Are your marketing plans focused on push, or on shaping the customer decision journey?

2. Do you have plans and budget for new roles, such as content, software, and product meta-data management?

3. Do you know which battlegrounds to co-opt?

4. Are you building the virtuous loops to fuel data and content?

5. Does your marketing organization reflect new roles and goals?

 

Data Driven Buying

This was a really hard presentation to take notes on, since a lot of it included charts and graphs.  Fortunately, iMedia put a recap online, so here you go…

Maintaining Connections Across Platforms

Doug Chavez, @dougchavez, from Del Monte discussed a couple of digital media case studies. Obviously, the most important thing is to start with a solid strategy that matches brand objectives along the path to purchase. Online efforts cannot be an afterthought and must be part of the planning process from the beginning. Their planning involves interweaving offline and online efforts via emotion, experience, and relationship, all to drive brand loyalty.

Kibbles ‘n Bits case study
They recently developed a campaign to drive awareness and trial of the product and needed a solution at the point of purchase. Therefore, mobile was identified as a great opportunity, and they have partnered with Whrrl to create the “I love my dog” society.  They developed the campaign to drive traffic to the Whrrl society.  It kicked off with ads in USA Weekend Magazine, and when they joined the Kibbles ‘N Bits society, a follow up was sent by email.  They utilized pet owner bloggers and their Facebook page to connect users and drive traffic to Whrrl page.  The Whrrl society is fairly new, but has generated over 4,500 members and is growing rapidly.

Milk Bone case study
Milk Bone supports Canine Assistants, which trains dogs to help the disabled, with a campaign called, “It’s Good to Give.”  They donate a portion of sales to the cause.  They extending this partnership by utilizing a Facebook page to document the work that the organization does.  They followed a puppy being born to growing up, being trained, and eventually being adopted.  The trainer regularly updates the site with photos and video of the puppy.  They have seen strong growth trends – their page traffic is above norms and industry averages.  With the social media integration, consumers spend 3-4 times more time on the brand sites, and it’s helping organic search results.

Finally, Doug says that consumer engagement must be completely integrated into the development of any campaign or marketing.  Search, display, social, and shopper marketing must all be considered, which often requires working across silos and including marketing, legal, consumer affairs, ir/pr, c-suite, etc.

What Marketers Can Learn from Bing Case Study

The second speaker of the day was Natalie Bowman of MSN to discuss what Bing has done as a “challenger brand” to try to attract users.  She indicated that they were looking to “Break the habit of people using Google.”  In order to do so, they knew they had to do 4 things:

Be disruptive
They started with a big advertising campaign to grab people’ attention, attempting to make it disruptive and capture people’s attention.

Be different
They attempted to do this, not only through their disruptive and different advertising, but also through unique online features, such as their travel, restaurant, Q&A, and Map features.

Be data driven
They utilize metrics and measurement to see how they were doing.  She said, “We’re an engineering organization, so Microsoft doesn’t do anything unless we can track or measure it.”

Be dangerous
They had key sponsorship activations around the Sundance film festival and Jay Z’s new book launch.  They used some celebrities at Sundance and decisions they had to make, to show how their “decision engine could help.”  They took a risk with Jay Z’s book launch, turning every page of his book into something physical and symbolic that could be found somewhere around the globe.   Fans had to use Bing to decode and find the items in the real world.  If they were the first person to find it in the real world, they would get a signed copy of the book.  They had over a half million people participate.  It provided a lot of out of home opportunities for co-promotion.

Personally, I think the Bing advertising was very disrupting and gained a pretty good amount of traction.  I also believe they did a pretty good job of trying to develop some unique offerings in travel, dinning, etc. to differentiate themselves… and, no doubt track and measured the heck out of it.  However, I can’t say that sponsorships with celebrities is all that “risky” as the speaker claimed, or “dangerous.”  All in all, it was an interesting perspective on how Bing tried to gain some traction.

iMedia Opening

The summit opened with a quick introduction from Dave Morgan of Simulmedia. Since the theme of the conference is storytelling beyond advertising, he briefly discussed the importance of thinking beyond the computer. He touched on Bill Joy’s Six Webs. He envisioned:

• Far web – the typical TV viewer experience
• Near web – desktop computing
• Here web – mobile devices with personal information one carried all the time
• Weird web – voice recognition systems
• B2B web – business computers dealing exclusively with each other
• D2D web – intelligent buildings and cities

Joy sees these as the foundation for how the internet will continue to change. He predicted the “here” web would be most prominent due to its portability. Morgan points out that despite the fact that Facebook represents 25 percent of all page views on the internet, if its audience size were compared directly to a TV network, it would be equivalent to being PBS. He showed numbers to illustrate that Facebook’s “viewership” paled in comparison to that of CBS. So there’s a long way to go to get to the “here” web, but conferences like this help to bring to light the importance of designing content for the evolution we are in the midst of.

Following Morgan was a presentation by Claudia Batten, the COO of Victors & Spoils, an ad agency that uses crowdsourced production. Your brand is whatever consumers say it is, so you might as well engage them in helping you to establish what the brand is and stands for. Her agency worked with WD-40 to generate ideas for innovating the brand. Here’s what they got: 336 ideas submitted, 26 investigated, 10 validated, 5 awarded, 1new ownable platform. This outside perspective gave the brand some freshing thinking, and provide for endless stimuli for internal ideation. Similarly, Starbucks idea submission campaign had 70,000 ideas submitted in its first year with over 100,000 total submitted. A team of 40 people reviewed the ideas, and they implemented about 100 of them.

Her advice was to engage these fans and audiences who want to contribute to your brand, but you must be prepared for it. To do so, you must be prepared for the worst, not everything goes perfectly; you must be a collaborator, and not an intruder in these discussions and brainstorming; you must be transparent and willing to share your problems/challenges; you must spread the word and promote it, targeting key influencers and advocates. If you’re able to do this, you’ll get solutions to some of your biggest challenges, as well as a way to connect with consumers and tell your brand story.

 

iMedia Brand Summit – Austin, TX

A short video of my trip to Austin, and the Lost Pines Resport and Spa where the iMedia Brand summit is being held.

iMedia Brand Summit and SXSWi

I found out that I will also be attending the iMedia Brand Summit in Lost Pines, Texas (just outside of Austin), right before SXSW. This will take place March 5-9, and I will head downtown for SXSW from March 10-16. Since this conference will be part of the same trip for me, and the content still relates to topics covered at SXSW, I’m planning to cover it here as well.

The conference will cover “Corporate Storytelling Beyond Advertising,” and will feature speakers from Victors & Spoils, McKinsey & Company, Microsoft, and IBM. The materials say, “As consumers look for experiences through whatever channel is most convenient, marketers must find a way to deliver our stories across a variety of devices and create the kinds of content our targets want to consume.”

Here’s more on the iMedia Brand Summit – Corporate Storytelling Beyond Advertising if you’re interested.