Convert check-in's into loyal customers

Last year I wrote a post "Hyper local. Thats where I'm at" which focused on the value of location based social networks to the user. With tools like Foursquare gaining traction the inevitable question is how do brands engage in real time and build loyal customers.

Pepsi used of Foursquare to build awareness to support its Refresh Everything community-giving push. For every point earned in New York, Pepsi donated 4 cents to inner-city youth center Camp Interactive. After one week, New Yorkers on Foursquare earned 225,000 points, and nearly $10,000 for the organization.

Another great example is what Intel did at CES. They created a branded Foursquare page, featuring locations where Intel had activity and tips for Las Vegas visitors. Intel also rewarded check-in’s to key events with branded badges, paired with the chance to win an Intel-powered netbook for all badge recipients.

As these platforms mature and brands have spent more time experimenting the next wave of opportunity is to convert "Check-ins" to loyal customers and create targeted offers based on location.

Converting check-ins into loyal customers can begin with aggregating influencers who check-in to any location into your Social CRM system. Ideally you would be able to leverage the API in order to help automate this process. Once you have the consumer data in system you can then set flags based on frequency of "Check-ins" or sentiment of their shout out.

For example, if you see a person has been designated a "Local" you could reach out via their preferred channel and make a discounted offer or simply thank them. Real time engagement based on location has always been the holy grail for marketers. But it does not come with out challenges.

Assuming there is critical mass on the social network and platforms are extensible, getting data into systems and changing business processes will be an initial barrier.The flip side to this that brands will also have to balance engagement and offers with consumers feeling like they are being spammed.

Target earned media based on user intent

Just finished Edelmans 10 idea for the new decade which was full of great ideas as you would imagine. The one I found most interesting was "The Data Decade". Steve Rubel describes browse and search paradigms are flawed because most people don't often know what they want.

But not to fear, Google is looking to help us surface high-value information before we even ask for it. They are building huge data warehouses based on what people are searching for, tweeting about and buying. Their goal is simple, to recognize patterns to increase information relevance.

Why wait for Google when there are several solutions available today for surfacing high value information based on patterns. Baynote and Loomia are a few that come to mind. These solutions are not mining the entire web but they do a great job at understanding visitor behavior on your site(s).

Using their own algorithms they surface recommendations and related information based on usage patterns such as as clicks, time spent on page and even hover activity of the mouse pointer. Baynote for example continues to learn from over 20 patterns to predict what a visitors intent is and make recommendations to drive deeper levels of engagement.

So how does social media fit into this?

These solutions treat every object regardless of type as a piece of information. This allows brands to move beyond simply serving content recommendations ala Amazon.com to targeting earned media based on users intent.

Aggregation and Content Curation
First you must aggregate mentions and put some rules in place to ensure they appear in proper context. A good practice for aggregating these mentions is to store them in your CMS and use the work-flow tools for the curation process. In the post "Provide context when aggregating brand conversations" I describe in more detail the value of adding more context to aggregated mentions.

Another reason for aggregating mentions into your own CMS is to ensure continuity of the site experience in the likely event a third-part API like Twitter goes down. To see the status of the most popular API's check out API-Status.com.

Surfacing social connections
Loomia has built a nice Facebook connect widget showing who in your social graph has viewed a piece of information. The Wall street journal has done this implementation, if no one in your network has read it you will see a list of "everyone". A twitter integration would be a nice option.

Once these are placed on the site you will be able to rely on the reporting interfaces from your analytic solutions to understand which pieces of earned media are driving the most value.

Add social media.But don’t forget to mix..

Last year we saw lots of activity from brands in the social web, dozens of new products were developed to better engage with customers and everyone was trying figure out how to measure their investments in social media. The traditional way of marketing seemed to have been hung out to dry.

We learned a tremendous amount about the pivotal role social media plays to support business objectives and to connect with customers. The most important lesson I learned is that social is a part of the overall marketing/communication mix and when planning a campaign or building a digital strategy it is essential think about an integrated approach.

The risk of going strictly social is missing the opportunity to connect with profitable and influential customers. This sounds completely remedial but I will say it anyways. It is essential to understand where your customers are, what methods of interaction they prefer and how will each of touch point work with and inform one another.

Recently I was working with a luxury auto brand whose customers preferred live events but would engage on mobile devices. Social media was a great place to support their goal of increasing awareness of the new cars and shaping perception of the brand. But when it came to what actually attributed to selling a car it was a high touch experience.

The opposite held true for a University client looking to increase alumni participation. They did very little segmentation and used the same methods of communicating to recent grads as they did with their oldest alumni and yet they wondered why they were having a difficult time reaching the “Facebook” crowd.

In the post “Social media is A tactic, not THE tactic” I wrote how brands can improve the basics to create a more “personal” experience. For example, simply using what you know about an audience can help shape messaging, offers and the tactics you choose to engage. The same holds true when thinking about an integrated campaign, don't forget about what has worked in the past. Evolve it.

Use real time insights from active listening to refine what you are saying and where. While using traditional broadcast channels to drive people to places where they can interact. But keep in mind the audience you are trying to reach before deciding on the tactics on how to engage with them.

Guerilla Marketing or Performance?

Either way you look at this pop up event it is visually awesome! It is also a great demonstration of the opportunity to create branded entertainment and catch people on their way.

What brands should note about an event like this is that within a couple of minutes there are literally dozens of people who have stopped to see what is going on. We are seeing many clients starting to redefine what an event is. In this case the event is the ad-hoc formation of a group of people to experience something unique that was a totally unplanned, yet delightful.

JUMP | media facade | urban screening from urbanscreen on Vimeo.

Tweetup + Testdrive = Visits to dealers?

Cadillac has launched its new SRX crossover and is attempting to create a mashup of a tweetup and test drive event for its new vehicle.

Almost every car dealer will tell you a customers likelihood of purchasing goes up when you can get the proverbial "butt in a seat". For many dealer events simply getting people to take test drive is the ultimate goal.

Not sure if he has any involvement in this meetup but Chris Brogan has tweeted this event mentioning his possible attendance. Not sure he can influence a purchase decision but engaging with online influencers is a great way to get people into a dealer and to reach people who are not in the existing customer database.

Currently there are only 2 confirmed attendees, one is GM. Time will tell how well this idea worked but I suspect we will see a lot more of these popping up.

Slideshare: 3 ways to organize social media for results

Move beyond social media metrics

View more presentations from Dirk Shaw.

New Noise Santa Barbara engages event participants via mobile

One of the biggest challenges in attending larger events is figuring out how to make the most of your time. Usually this consists of some up front planning then carrying around the conference guide to figure out where to go. New Noise Santa Barbara is a music conference and festival who's iphone app from Mobile Roadie is a step in the right direction to enhance the experience for conference attendees.

Audi's configurator integrates digital experience with a live event

Audi's A4 car configuration is an excellent example of using digital media to engage event participants with a product. The ability to customize the vehicle and add accessories like a bike rack allow people to visualize themselves in this car.

What is did not see was a capability to schedule a test drive. If this was part of the solution it would be interesting to know how many people requested one. The video alone made me want to head to the dealer and drive the new A4 wagon.

Audi Car Configurator on Surface @ IAA 2009 from Neue Digitale / Razorfish on Vimeo.

Lego's in-store augmented reality

We are exploring new ways to integrate augmented reality applications with live events. Mobile augmented reality has lots of promise but a stand alone application like this would work great as a guide to find venue information, friends and schedules all by using your event ticket.

Segment twitter streams to increase relevance and reduce noise

Should we create one or multiple branded twitter accounts? What is the role of each?

This is a challenge many brands face with a large and diverse set of products. In a recent audit of a company’s stream that has dozens of products, catering to an extremely diverse customer base with minimal overlap the single account approach was very noisy.

For example. Lets put this in context of a brand like Nike. Nike has products that serve segments in a market – cycling, golf, tennis, footballs amongst a host of others. If Nike were to have a single stream where they engaged in dialog and shared content for about all segments they run the risk of being tuned out by those only interested in cycling or football.

If this sounds like your situation you may want to consider segmenting twitter streams to increase relevance and eliminate noise. Here are a few different ideas for segmenting streams.

@corporate: General company information across product portfolio and serves as the twitter equivalent to the 800 number for customer support and product information.

@market_served: In the Nike example they could create an account focused on one of the sports they design and sell products for like cycling. A market based approach lends itself to a group twitter account where you have product managers, athletes and others from the team sharing insights. This would also work well in a consultancy who has a particular vertical they serve like health care.

@products: Get the latest updates and have inside access to the person/team who can help solve problems specific to this product.

@events: Twitter is a great way to extend reach to people not able to attend an event and to connect those who are physically present. For brands who sponsor events or host their own creating a unique account is a great way to get people engaged.

@people these are the passionate brand advocates who enjoy engaging with customers and solving problems. @people are usually the most trusted because they are real people who have become part of the community on their own with no corporate agenda.

The flip side to simply segmenting in order to create a highly filtered stream is that each approach creates a very focused dialog. The micro market focus allows brands to gain tremendous insight and build relationships on very narrow topics.

Do you think there is value in segmenting streams? Or is this just me hoping companies will take notice to eliminate the noise in my stream.

5 things I’ve learned leading social media initiatives

Recently Opentext acquired my former company Vignette. The role of social media strategy is one many companies talk about but have a difficult time justifying.

It was a pleasant surprise to hear the commitment to formalize social media as way of doing business. This can be attributed to all of the people from Opentext who have been out there promoting the brand and laying the foundation for change.

Part of my transition into the new organization is to share lessons learned over the last year. Here are the key lessons learned while integrating social media into our business processes.

Activity alone does not yield results. You get what your measure.
When trying to prove the value of the social media things like retweets, followers and fans don’t mean much to executive management. When demonstrating value make to sure to show how you had an impact on business goals that were around long before social media.

Think of social media as part of the marketing mix. It is not a silo
When planning product launches or outreach programs don’t “bolt on” social media to a traditional approach. Plan an integrated cross channel experience and know the role of each touch with the customer and how they work together. Each tactic in the mix can move people thru the infamous funnel. But they must work together.

It’s not the job of one person.
For large brands simply assigning a single person to “own” social media is not scalable. This is akin to saying one person can sell, market, support and build new products. Social media cuts across the organization and in many cases interactions started on social networks may require internal collaboration to act on. Brands need to formalize processes for responding, collecting insights and measuring.

The power of the influencer.
Social media allows word to spread farther and faster to an even greater number of people than ever before. It is essential to first identify who is influencing the purchases and then nurturing these relationships thru interactions and sharing of company direction. What I learned was how little many of the influential’s actually knew about what we were doing, simply because we had never reached out and shared it.

The need for an attribution model to assign value social media.
This is one of the tougher lessons as it implies a certain level of sophistication measuring digital marketing activities. In the more complex sale such as enterprise software it is not as easy to simply track a click from a tweet thru purchase. There are several steps that happen in between ranging from viewing website, product demos and on site meetings. But supposing the initiation of the lead came from a social channel how does it get “credit”. Creating an attribution model for social activity will help when justifying additional investments.

Hopefully these insights will help you avoid some of the mistakes we made over the last year.

How do you report social media success?

Thanks to everyone who shared comments on the last post about measurement. As I mentioned a key learning to increase executive commitment to social media was the need to move beyond reporting just social media metrics. We need to show how our activity is impacting business outcomes that matter to executives.

The chart below is an overview to show the tools we will use, types of activities we perform and ultimately why this all matters to the business.



For the monthly report I show dashboards for each business outcome. On these dashboards I track key metrics, insights and next steps. Some business outcomes like “Increase Brand Awareness” will have their own dashboard as we track awareness within key solution markets.

Example Dashboard “Increase Brand Awareness”


How do you report social media success to executives and how often?

Earn, Aggregate And Re-Use

Marketers are being challenged to leverage existing social networks to effectively reach audiences. The question many ask is, "How do we make the most of word of mouth marketing, especially when it resides on third-party sites in the form of tweets, comments and status updates?" One way is to aggregate this earned media and re-use it in the context of a purchase path.

First, I want to note that earned media is not always positive. Customer sentiment is shaped as a result of experiences with your products and services, and this is an essential part of the evolution of the corporate website. Simply creating a broadcast of product information with nothing but glowing reviews does not build the trust and credibility that is required to succeed in a world where transparency has become expected.

This is important to keep in mind as you begin to aggregate and re-use this media in a new context. A natural tendency would be to filter out negative comments and only display the positive ones. However, social media has created levels of transparency and immediacy that we have not had in the past. Within seconds of a customer experience, they can share it across hundreds of places with thousands of people.

For many brands, this negative feedback is a huge sticking point when considering how and where to integrate customer created content. A common fear is that a sales deal will be lost if a customer reads something other than a glowing review. Let's face it, the reviews are out there and everything can be found via search.

Instead of fearing negative comments, embrace them. Brands have the opportunity to build credibility by interacting with customers on tough issues and helping to solve problems. Establishing trust can begin by creating a blended experience of sponsored communities with what is happening on social networks. Rather than filtering the conversation, the goal is to facilitate conversations with your customers and the market as a whole.

Showing that you care goes a long way, and can even help increase the quantity and quality of earned media. Then, as if earning media is not challenging enough, the task of aggregating it can be just as difficult. Social media has created a proliferation of places where earned media resides. Literally dozens of formats have emerged, ranging from tweets, comments, status updates and reviews.

But there are solutions to help you manage this dispersed content. Emerging standards like Facebook Connect, OpenId and open programming interfaces are making it possible. Also, most companies already have invested in a content management system (CMS) to create and publish corporate content, and these tools usually have the capability to consume content from third party sources via RSS and XML. If you are tagging favorite tweets or bookmarking earned media, hooking this feed to your CMS is a good way to centralize comments while allowing marketers to re-purpose this media across several touch points.

However, simply aggregating and re-purposing earned media is not enough. Brands should go the extra step and become facilitators of conversations. Consider the placement of earned media that support learning or buying so that, when a customer is ready to engage, you have provided the opportunity for them to interact with the people who made these mentions.

There are several places it makes sense to repurpose earned media. If you are wondering where, think of the paths a customer takes on your site. Is a customer looking to learn about the experiences of others, seeking answers on a product they own or simply wanting to become part of a community?

If you have not clearly defined the various scenarios on your site, look at your web analytics application. This data will not only give you insight into click streams, but it will also indicate which pages are less sticky. Placing earned media on these pages can be a good way to keep them engaged.

The end result of this process is that you will have taken the first steps toward turning earned media into a managed asset that you can re-use and re-brand in many contexts. The inclusion of user-generated content into your corporate Web site harnesses the activities taking place all over the Web, creating a much more dynamic site for your visitors. In turn, your corporate Web site will be a more effective tool to help your organization serve its customers and build brand awareness in new markets.

This post was originally submitted as a guest contribution for Mediapost and is republished here.

Spam has never been good

Chris Brogan wrote a post this morning that struck a chord, " Twitter MUST Stop the Spam Use of APIs Now". I could not agree more. Spam has never been good, not in a can, not in an email, not in a direct mail and certainly not in twitter.

Perhaps when spammers arrive means that Twitter has reached critical mass. Whatever the case this pollutes the experience. The variety of spammers that come into my stream range from those who can help you makes millions to someone who is lonley.

Twitter is ultimately a communications service provider and should follow suit of the email providers and work to eliminate the spam.

While we are on the topic of Spam, I will also lump all you people who seek to get 2k followers in a minute as part of the spamming problem. Earn your followers.

How much is sentiment analysis “Worth”?

In a recent post I asked the question “How much sentiment analysis is good enough?”.This sparked a great dialog with an insightful question from Adam Cohen “What is sentiment analysis “worth” and do companies gain more value if they tag 100% of mentions versus 80%.

The worth or value question is a really good one. Here are some ideas for thinking about its worth and how sentiment analysis should evolve.

The current model of tagging mentions with some attribute of sentiment is great for gaining insight across a variety of customer segments. Historically this might have been done thru a series of focus groups or surveys. You could potentially realize a cost savings from not have to conduct these as often.

Looking forward these tools need to open up and allow curated brand mentions to be pushed out into new context. Creating a two way pipe would give brands the opportunity to target mentions thru the entire purchase process.

According to the recent “Fluent” report published by Razorfish, close friends and family have heavy influence at each stage of the buying lifecycle. Brands should take a step beyond simple placement of a brand mention in the purchase path to using the social graph as a filter. This makes recommendations much more influential as they are coming from a trusted source which will increase the likely hood of purchase.

Tagging any less than 100% of brand mentions once the social graph is connected might result in a missing the linkage between a brand mention and an influencer. These missed connections could leave money on the table.

In summary I think today's sentiment analysis can save money by replacing traditional methods of research. The larger opportunity exists when the results from sentiment analysis can be used to influence a consumer’s decision to buy.

How do you place a value on sentiment analysis?

What’s the “I” in social media ROI

This week I was on a great panel hosted by Red Door Interactive. The topic, you guessed it social media. As with most discussion the conversations it started with what tools are being used.

However the most interesting part of the conversation happened when the topic of ROI came up. A person in the audience asked the question “If social media is free then what is the I in the ROI”. My response was that social media is not free. While many of tools are “free” it requires a person(s) to actively monitor and engage. Cost will grow once brands start integrating content from social web with corporate site and building application to engage in social networks.

The “R” or return of social media is dependent upon how it supports your business goals. This will vary brand to brand. What will be similar across brand’s is the “I” or investment. The table below is a snapshot of ways companies will have to invest when building a social media capability or using it to support campaigns.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of all the cost associated with social media, rather it is meant to get you thinking about various components that will require investment. As you can see there is no such thing as “free” when it comes to integrating social media.

















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What are some additional areas of investment brands need to make to be successful with social media?

Sentiment analysis, How much is good enough?

There is tremendous value knowing if mentions of your brand are positive or negative and how many there are of each. The Conversation Impact(TM) measurement model by OgilvyPR uses a sentiment index (% positive - % negative) as a measure of brand preference. However understanding sentiment is not just a matter of selecting a listening platform.

The social media monitoring tools I've used fall into 2 camps for sentiment analysis. Manual sentiment analysis, where you view each mention and apply the appropriate sentiment tag. This is the approach that Radian6 currently uses. Automated sentiment analysis, which uses a semantic processing engine to assign some level of sentiment based on key words. TechrigySM2 automates sentiment analysis.

Each approach has their pro’s and cons. The argument against automated sentiment analysis is the lack of accuracy while manually tagging ensures 100% accuracy but it subjective and requires a significant amount of time.

At the moment both approaches require a person(s) to review each mention and either tag or verify the automated tags for accuracy. I can tell you from my own experience manual tagging can take a significant amount of time to initially setup and then requires ongoing tuning to keep reports up to date. The time it takes to manually classify or refine automated tags should be factored in to understand the total cost for a corporate listening program.

To get an idea of the time required for sentiment analysis. Assuming each mention is reviewed and you have 5k mentions over a 30 day period. If it takes you an average of 30 seconds per record then you will need to factor in about 42 hours to tag each mention.

Given where technology is today and the lack of resources companies have to assign full time people as curators of brand sentiment. Is there a certain number of mentions that can be tagged to be statistically sound representation of brand sentiment? Or is there value in weeding thru and tagging every mention?

Social media is A tactic, not THE tactic.

As with anything new, much of conversation about social media has been focused on "how do I use it" more than "why do I need it". Brands have been flocking to social media in an effort to figure out how they can engage with and influence customers.

There is always a learning curve with new techniques but has this curve made us loose focus on what worked? And, if you did not execute and measure "traditional" marketing well then why would social media be different. It is not the proverbial silver bullet.

A recent Forrester report said that CMO’s were Cutting Ad Budgets: 67% Reduce Traditional while Increasing Social Media Spend by 47%. Does this imply that everything we have been doing up to this point has not worked?

What about simply doing some of the basics better.

Better targeting of offers based on behavior. The last three years as a season pass holder to a certain resort company I have received emails that are completely irrelevant to any of my patterns. It gets worse when you actually log in to the site, there nothing relevant.The lack of targeting creates a missed opportunity to drive incremental revenue from an existing customer.

Answering questions in a timely manner. A broadcast mentality can easily carry over to social media outlets. Another business I get useless emails from takes the same approach with Twitter. They tweeted a new product that "Just Arrived". Just so happens I had the previous model and needed some spare part for it. I replied to their tweet over a week ago and still nothing. There is nothing new about customer service. If you set up an account on Twitter be prepared to reply to customers questions.

Another interesting stat from this research was of those who responded, 51% said marketing has a key role in enhancing revenue while 41% agreed that marketing’s efforts are being watched at all levels of the company. This implies marketing spend must show measurable results. The irony is many organizations are still figuring out exactly how does social media impact revenue.

Does this mean CMO's feel more confident social media's ability to impact the top and bottom line or simply jumping on the bandwagon.

One positive sign is that we are finally getting around to asking the harder questions besides how do I use twitter or should I have a blog. The emphasis is now about how these places and tools can deliver measurable results. Brands are looking to do more than just experiment; they want results from their efforts.

It is great to see an increased investment in Social media, I do believe that when done well it can drive positive business outcomes. But it is only part of the overall marketing mix and before you ditch "traditional" tactics take a look at how well you are executing.

Provide context when aggregating conversations

There was a great discussion on how brands should effectively aggregate conversations from the social web and placing it on a corporate website. The recent launch of Crispin Porter’s Beta.cpggroup.com is a good example of purely aggregating conversations around a topic.

Aggregating conversations or mentions is a great first step towards evolving corporate websites however it can quickly become a stream of irrelevant content. Bryan Person made an excellent point when he said “Aggregating and displaying content that mentions your brand is the first step; giving some context to it and discussing/highlighting that content on the corporate website also needs to happen” I could not agree more.

Crispin Porter has taken a great step to aggregate conversations about their clients brands while demonstrating a new type of experience. However I am not sure how an experience like this help’s to simplify a customer experience to make a decision (Assuming this is a goal). The risk of aggregating without providing context is that is can be overwhelming. People who don't spend their time "in the stream" might not get what is going on and see this as a bunch of useless content. This is where content curation can help.

Curating does not mean only displaying positive mentions, rather as Bryan states curating means to provide better context about the conversation. If you have designed your site around certain key scenarios like checkout, share this or register now you might consider how to place a relevant twitter stream on that page. Planning how and where curated conversations are placed can help increase the usefulness to your customers.

Aggregation does not improve relevance but curating conversations and thinking about placement can.

photo credit:Eric Shiner, the first Milton Fine Curator of Art at The Andy Warhol Museum, stands in front of Warhol's "Skulls" at the museum. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm"

Don’t tell my boss but appointing a strategist to create a “social” company is not a sustainable model. It takes the entire community. Henrik Ibsen says "A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm"

The social media maturity model proposed by Destination CRM does a great job at showing all the customer touches companies have. But the way the chart is visualized reinforces organizational silos – the very principle that social media combats. Instead, as Michael Idinopulos asserted, I believe that businesses will begin to organize around capabilities like thought leadership, technical expertise and relationship management.

In order for this to happen, businesses must rely on organization-wide teams and skills to own and support these functions. This is the community that promotes social media maturity. From my own experience in trying to make social media a capability not a campaign, I can tell you that this is not easy.

Social media maturity happens when we no longer need a social media specialist, when social media becomes a part of everyone’s DNA – not just a job owned by appointed individuals.

Here are some lessons learned from my journey in trying to build a “social” business to generate new leads, manage reputation, support customers and build brand awareness’ in new markets.

• Listening To The Conversation Is As Important As Participating
• It’s More Than Just Launching A Page
• A Participation strategy should be informed by what you learn from listening
• Only Success That Can Be Repeated Is Really Success

Social media has only accelerated the idea that companies need to shift behavior to be more transparent, communicative and responsive. This is not the job of one person, it is the responsibility of everyone. We will know when organizations have matured when being “social” becomes part of everyone’s job and a way companies do business. It is not the job of a specialist.

Optimize earned media in branded experiences

In some previous post I explored concepts on ways marketers can aggregate earned media and re-use in the context of a purchase path or branded experience. The question this brings up for me is which pieces of earned media are the most effective.

Everyone talks about the power of word of mouth and there is plenty of research to prove positive comments or reviews affect people’s purchase. However there's not much research showing how blog post, tweets or user generated content from third party sites influence user behavior when integrated into a purchase path.

One way to test the impact earned media can have on behavior is to use it a test element in a multivariate or A/B test. Assuming you have enough content from different social sources (tweets, flickr, facebook connections etc) you could begin to asses which source(s) of earned media influence behavior by customer segment. This would help you answer questions like "Will people who don’t use twitter be influenced by tweets?" If not then you can make sure to filter their experience.

Knowing which sources of social media are the most influential to customers is also tremendous insight for refining how and where you engage in social media.



Is anyone doing this? If so what kinds of results if any are you seeing.

Whitepaper: Making Social Media a Capability Not a Campaign

Because social media is such a new concept for businesses, many companies are entering into it in an uncoordinated manner. This makes it hard to replicate success, which means predicting the future value is almost impossible. This white paper explores a framework for making social media a capability within your enterprise and not just a one hit wonder.
WP Making Social Media a Capability Not a Campaign

What would you do if Twitter closed?

According to Techcrunch “Facebook’s systematic attack on Twitter is scheduled for beta testing: the Everyone Button.“ There have been several comments floating around on whether or not Twitter can survive. If a business is not making money and does not have a clear path to profitability then I would not be surprised. Perhaps a little saddened.

The most valuable parts of Twitter is not the technology, it is in the connections and conversations it manages. Many of us have spent countless hours cultivating our networks, sharing ideas and even making new friends. The insights for market research are endless. Perhaps Twitter could have monetized by making research available on consumer trends.

Regardless if Twitter goes away it has shifted the way information is shared in real time, how people connect with one another and the way brands must listen and respond. This way of using updates has already become a key feature of many packaged community and enterprise 2.0 applications.

The idea Twitter could shut down makes me realize how quickly we need solutions for social network and data portability. Loosing my contacts on Twitter would be like going to summer camp when I was little and not being able to stay in touch with the people I had shared the experience with. There are tools available that allow you to download your contact names and backup your tweets. This data would likely not be very useful for reconnected since it does not share any of the real contact information.

The risk of investing time and energy in social network only to have them go away is not just an issue for Twitter but any social network. How would you re-connect with your Twitter network if it shut down tomorrow? Would losing your data be an issue? Would you even care?

Are the fish taking the bait?

Jeremiah Owyang put together a great presentation where he describes the importance for brands to scan the landscape and understand the fish they are trying to catch. For most marketers doing this sort of customer research and segmentation has always been part of our approach for reaching the right audience.

Social media however has changed the landscape when it comes to reaching customer segments. Which is perhaps this is why we have seen such an emphasis on things like influencer marketing and word of mouth recently. These ideas are not new, however it has never been easier to identify who is talking about your products, make an assessment of their ability to influence others and engage directly in a conversation with them.

Marketers are trying to dip their bait in the middle of Facebook and Twitter streams with the assumption that if one "fish" in the school takes the bait others will follow. Therefore increasing things like sales, leads or brand engagement.

A couple of questions come to mind with all this talk of marketers fighting to get in to the stream. Will the "fish" begin to ignore the bait? or Will dipping your line into the stream catch only the fish you want?

I am interested to hear thoughts on how word of mouth marketing will evolve beyond simply appearing in a Facebook or twitter stream?

Checkout abandonment issues? Add a concierge.

According to MarketLive research cart abandonment rate was up 2.1% year over year to 56.8%, consumers exiting a site after viewing just one page went up 2.6% to 34.7% and the percentage of visitors making it to the shopping cart declined 3.0% to 9.6%.

Online marketers can reduce these numbers by using video, user generated content and multivariate testing to drive higher levels of engagement and move customers thru the purchase path. In a recent post "How to inspire & engage consumers in down times" these ideas are discussed these in greater detail.

There will be one more tactic added to this list after checking out upgrade prices on the new iPhone for existing AT&T customers. I started on the Apple site and selected the option to reserve a phone. They started me thru a fairly straight forward check out process, once reaching the pricing page (and being disappointed) I abandoned. Later that day an email was sent to me from concierge@apple.com saying "Your on your way to your new iPhone". It showed where I was in the process and provided a direct link to continue my checkout.

There have been many times when I was actually interested in buying something but after filling my cart I either walked away or the browser crashed and the transaction was never completed. This was a great way to keep a customer engaged in the check out process and seems like it should be a common practice for online retailers.

Has anyone used tactics like this? Is so what percentage of customers who abandoned completed purchase.

Litter in the stream

A recent post from Brian Morrissey on how marketers are trying to get into peoples social stream via promotions like #squarespace, a daily giveaway of iPhones if you add the hashtag #squarespace to your tweet.

His post got me thinking about the right ways for brand to earn media. Clearly this is about as earned as filling out a register to win ballot for a new motorcycle while walking thru the airport. The problem with a quick fix like this hashtag or any facebook app is that it quickly becomes viral junk mail.

We all know word of mouth is a powerful forms of marketing. According to a recent study done by Facebook it determined that an average Facebook user with 500 friends actively follows the news on only 40 of them, communicates with 20, and keeps in close touch with about 10. This shows that people don’t pay that much attention to the majority of their “friends” online.

Why does this study matter for marketers?

It matters because it shows that getting into the stream is not enough. Brands still need to cultivate “real”ationships by engaging with customer’s and delivering amazing experiences. If you do this people will talk in authentically in their streams. As Brian points out these approaches are a fast way into the stream but not a sustainable one.

It is not sustainable because peoples motivation to share has very little to do with the product you are offering. This reminds me of how peoples place so much value on getting to the home page of Digg. Just because you make it to the homepage does not mean you are reaching people who are actually interested in what you are offering.

While Square space has certainly increased the awareness of its offering. I wonder how many people have converted to new customers since the launch of this promotion.

Concept: Integrating earned media in the b2b purchase path

In my previous post I shared a concept for integrating earned media in the purchase for a b2c transaction. For most of us b2c is a fairly straightforward concept to understand and as Michael Leis points out “we'll be looking on this concept as passe in a few short years.”

Jeremiah Owyang also commented that he gets the question from some of his clients that aren't as cool as high-end road bikes "What do we do if our product isn't cool?" This is likely to challenge for many in the b2b space. Most don’t think of things like enterprise software, construction or even health care as cool.

No matter how cool your product is or isn’t, you still have customers or else you would not be in business. As I have pointed out in previous post listening and identifying where your customers are is the first step when getting started with social media.

If you find there are not many conversations happening across social networks, perhaps you build your own. A place for your customers to interact with one another, share ideas and get support from your company. Mike Slone made a great comment when he said “Facilitating access to discussions and conversations about a product seem much more relevant in the future than aggregating positive comments that could be outdated.”

He is absolutely right, especially for a large transaction like enterprise software. In this concept I blended the experience to bring together a hosted brand community with what is happening in public social networks. This allows prospect to interact with your customers and the market as a whole.

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Concept: Integrating earned media into b2c purchase path

One of the challenges marketers are faced with is tapping into existing social networks to leverage the power of word of mouth. How do you leverage word of mouth when it does not reside on your site but in places like tweets, comments and status updates? One way to leverage earned media is to aggregate and re-use in the context of a customers purchase path.

I have started to write a white paper on how to integrate earned media (eg: tweets with brand mentions) in the context of a branded experience. My plan is to work backwards from the user experience to the mechanics of how it might happen and how to "earn" media thru conversational marketing.

What I would love to hear from you all is: Who is doing a good job delivering experiences like this? What are some challenges you see in evolving corporate sites?

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"Real"ationships are the new outbound

As I mentioned in my last post, replicating social media success is essential for scaling across your organization. One hypothesis @gerardodada and I formed when beginning to experiment with social media is that we could generate new leads.

We proved this hypothesis with the launch of our social media product. By actively listening for certain phrases and engaging with people who made mention of the new offering we were able to register 5 new leads. Now that we proved social media could generate leads it is time to transfer this knowledge to our lead generation team.

Just registering the leads is not enough; they must be nurtured and not only in an automated fashion, Dear "Customer name". Insides sales teams who have primarily been an outbound channel must shift their mindset to work on building relationships thru social media.

We just started training our lead gen team on using social media. One of the questions that popped up was around geography and who gets credit if a lead generated from social media is converted. To address in the short term we will assign the manager of the group with responsibility for doing the listening and interacting. Once a lead moves into an offline state it can then be handled by the person in the geo.

The long-term vision once we refine the process and get more of the team connected is to use the work flow function in radian6 to assign people to respond. The challenge is that geo is not always obvious. What really needs to happen is re-thinking comp models for these teams, perhaps once success is shown that will be a possibility. If you have the flexibility to do this I would encourage you to think about how you can eliminate any barriers.

Assigning a single person is not the best long-term solution, but avoiding overlap is the main goal. Recently I made mention of a brand and within an hour received two email from sales people asking me if I was taken care of. There clearly was a lack of orchestration and it felt very spammy. This is an experience I do not want our prospect to have.

If anyone else has started doing this I would love to hear some of the concerns from your teams.

Following is passive, listening is active

Had a great conversation via Twitter that was spawned by Christian Knapp from Keystone Mountain. He asked, “what do you think of reciprocating all followers or just following key industry opinion leaders?” My response was the philosophy we apply to the @vignettecorp account. We follow customers, media/analyst, bloggers and people who have interesting things to say about the market we serve. We find new followers who usually end up being existing customers based on listening for key search phrases relative to the markets we serve.

Mike Slone chimed in with a great point that customer centric brands should follow back because it does not send the right message back. He took it one step farther and said that customer centricity starts with understanding who your customers are and then demonstrating that you care.

Does reciprocating make you more customer centric?

For large brands who have tens of thousands of customers reciprocating is a gesture that you may be listening. Following alone does not imply you are listening. Listening means you are proactive by reaching out to those who make mention as well as reactive to complaints or questions. Following is passive, listening is active.

Take JetBlue for example, they are following 119k people. It is more than a full time job to monitor each and every tweet hoping something relevant for you to act on. Unless you are conducting research to gain insight from followers it is not an efficient use of time to read what would be 10’s of thousands tweets per day. This is where monitoring solutions like Radian6 come in.

You can set up search phrases to monitor several social networking and user generated content sites. These search phrases can be set to trigger alerts for follow up. In the case of a travel company you might want to know when someone has tweeted "On my way to Keystone". This would allow you to personalize their trip in real time and follow up with them after to make sure everything went well. The possibilities here are endless.

When deciding on who to follow it is important to go back to the purpose of the account and what business goals it supports. The other important consideration is the amount of time you can dedicate to taking action on the request that will come from Twitter.

We all agreed that no matter who you choose to follow, customers are a must.

Turn earned media into a managed asset

Earn, Aggregate and Re-Use
Earned media resides in dozens of formats ranging from tweets, comments, status updates and reviews. With emerging standards like Facebook connect and OpenId it is possible to aggregate and make these interactions available in many contexts.

This is not to say you completely turn your site over to social media like Skittles.com. Rather, think about the placement of earned media to support learning, buying or seeking help. This is how the corporate websites should evolve.The challenge in doing this is the number of places earned media exist. Each time you would want to re-purpose this content into a new experience like a display ad, micro site or email requires a small development effort.

Most companies already have invested in a content management system for the creating and publishing corporate content. These tools usually have the capability of consuming content from third party source via RSS and XML. If you are tagging favorite tweets or bookmarking earned media, why not hook this feed to your CMS.

Turning earned media into a managed asset allows you to re-use and re brand this content in many contexts. This is another benefit that can be claimed for dedicating resources to listening, learning and earning.

I am curious to know others are doing to repurpose earned media in different context. What are the best examples you have seen?

Make social media a capability not a campaign

This is a first pass at some ideas on creating a sustainable social media program. The premise is simple. If you can not replicate success then it is impossible to predict what kind of value can be achieved from your investments in social media. This inability to predict value is the challenge many companies face when developing a business case to formalize a social media program.
Make social media a capability not a campaign:

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