Archive for the ‘Social Networking’ Category

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Crispin’s New Site Shows Smart Branding

Tuesday, September 8th, 2009

crispin beta site

My buddy and our agency’s President, Jay Woffington, is a master of comparing diverse data and figuring out how they add up to a common issue or opportunity. One of his favorite sayings is, “Two points make a line,” meaning that there can be a direct link between seemingly unrelated data or events. Well, it seems that we have another genuine trend on our hands, as now there are three prominent examples of companies that have turned over their websites to open social-media input by featuring unedited Twitter comments, Wikipedia entries, Facebook friends, and blog posts. First was Modernista!, an advertising agency, and next came the Skittles brand. Both experienced a mainly positive burst of buzz. The third example comes from another ad agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, which has a live beta site that is attracting attention. Although the trend seems real, the questions linger: Is it meaningful… and it is worth the risk?

On the first question, I increasingly believe that adopting social media into your home page can be a powerful positive for customers. I say “increasingly” because the social-media space is evolving with the new digital social norms that are still self-organizing before our eyes. It is clear that already people are using social networks to judge any brand that they come across, whether it is posting a question to friends on Facebook, reading a review on an e-commerce site, or using Google, which often draws from personal reviews on blogs and discussion boards. So at the same time that people are visiting your brand’s website, they have a few other open browser tabs with this information. For forward thinkers such as Modernista!, Skittles, and Crispin, the logic is that they might as well go ahead and showcase this social media on the home page. So in this basis alone the approach is meaningful marketing.

The biggest marketing benefit can come when the brand website visitor first arrives and sees several positive stories, tweets, and blog posts. People judge a website and brand within microseconds, and some trusted, impartial comments on the home page can make a big impact. Instead of cluttering this moment of truth with ad copy, why not defer to the more-trusted comments of other customers? That’s what a billion-dollar brand that I used to work on, Tide, figured when it recently launched a home page redesign featuring actual user reviews front and center. And Juicy Juice is testing a banner ad that presents live tweets from moms.

But what about the risk and bad stories and comments that might appear at this moment of truth? Well, Crispin saw just what that looks like last week. First, it lost the Volkswagen account, which led to a rash of negative tweets and stories. It’s never fun to lose a big client, and worse to see the news everywhere. Second, the company took a lot of heat for running a contest in which it invited designers to create a new logo for the electric motorcycle start-up Brammo for a $1,000 top prize. Many in the design industry felt that this was undermining and cheapening their craft. Again, another round of negatives has filled its beta home page. In fact, the very public space and open ability to add a negative comment likely invites a much more negative response than one would otherwise see. It’s the chance to hold a virtual picket sign on the company’s front lawn.

So Crispin would call this a failure, right? I don’t think so. They are smart enough to have anticipated the negatives that can happen and I believe they fully embrace the haters. Even negatives can end up being positive in this case. First, it shows that the company is in the center of the action and they matter. This falls under the age-old line that even bad publicity is better than no publicity. The second benefit is that this open acceptance of hate media actually helps them attract the right clients, those who want to take risks and want to build a brand with a little controversy. Jason Bender, one of our top Creative Directors and leader of the team that recently won a Gold Cyber Lion at Cannes for a Pringles banner ad (that was somewhat controversial), said it best in our conversation about the issue:

“This shows people that Crispin is not for everyone, and that they don’t mind alienating the tight-asses they don’t want as clients. This helps them weed out the bad prospects.”

With this open site, negatives and all, Crispin as a brand is living and breathing the kind of marketing that it does for its clients. Brands such as Burger King, MINI, and Microsoft hired the agency in order to stir up attention, and they’ve all gotten what they wanted. In fact, Volkswagen chose to look for a new agency because it felt it needed to broaden its marketing to a wider audience. This will likely mean more watered down creative and Crispin wouldn’t want to do it anyway.

Interestingly, this Crispin story comes just as we at Bridge Worldwide have started to dabble social media on our Web presence. You might have noticed that we just launched our new Marketing with Meaning site, and on the home page we decided to feature a live feed of Twitter posts that include anyone who uses my handle, @mktgwithmeaning. We actually got to this idea in a roundabout way. We asked Ryan, our Web developer, to try to increase interest in our Twitter account on the home page, and he wrote an Ajax widget that brought in live tweets. We loved the idea, but I hated seeing my picture 15 times running down the screen. Someone mentioned that we could bring in retweets and other @replies. I immediately loved the idea because it would show the new visitor at this moment of truth that this is a popular topic that others are talking about. Second, I knew that the people who followed the Marketing with Meaning cause would appreciate that we were giving them at least a few minutes of public attention on our home page. And this in turn would lead to more tweets.

But what about the negatives of our modest effort? Jay and I actually had a long conversation about what could go wrong. Our agency recently got dinged a bit on something we shared publicly, so we felt the need to be cautious. We thought about the worst that could happen: Someone could, say, protest our work for a client and flood the site with negative tweets. If a client CEO with no social-media understanding (rare, I know) visited the site and saw this on our own home page it could be a huge negative. However unlikely, it is possible, so we made some plans to deal with it, but launched the tool regardless.

Bridge Worldwide is no Crispin Porter + Bogusky. We don’t believe that we need to embrace controversy to build brands. However we do have a very defined point of view on the kind of work we want to do for clients: Marketing with Meaning. This blog, the Twitter feed, the upcoming book, and more all are tools that we use to put ourselves out there for client consideration. When I speak with clients and prospects about this concept I say that sometimes our work will be interruptive and less meaningful if that is what is called for; after all, we exist first and foremost to serve our clients’ needs. But I quickly follow that this is our starting point for all recommendations, and that we’re going to challenge them continuously to move in this direction.

Just as Crispin has successfully attracted clients that follow its brand belief, I hope that our focus on Marketing with Meaning will attract more of the clients we want: brands that buy into our concept and are ready to buy meaningful ideas. The more public we are with this statement, the more likely we are to succeed.

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Posted in Agency Marketing, book, Social Networking, Twitter | 1 Comment »

MoMA Matches Facebook Interests

Monday, August 31st, 2009

Many, many brands and their agencies are asking themselves the same question: “What is my social-media strategy?” This is absolutely the wrong question to ask. The problem is that social media is not a strategy; rather it represents a group of tactics that can be creatively used to solve business problems and deliver on a marketing strategy. To further explain this point, let me use the example of a summer trip planner from the New York City Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Not only is this a great case study in the right process of utilizing social media, it helps prove my point that social fits under Marketing with Meaning.

In my upcoming book I spend the entire second half of its 300-plus pages walking through a simple framework that brands both small and large can use to deliver meaningful marketing. Sometimes that process yields a compelling opportunity to use one or more social-media tactics. Let me offer a crash course in the process here by providing my assumptions on what drove MoMA’s killer idea:

Business Objective

Summer is an important time for any kind of tourism-based business, including museums. Each year MoMA must put together permanent and temporary exhibits and events to draw its fair share of visitors to New York City. I believe “share of visitors” is actually a key business objective for the organization. It is unlikely to convince people to come to NYC just for a visit to MoMA, but it can set a goal of getting X% of people who are already planning to spend vacation time in the city. This becomes that business objective that kicks off the strategy process.

Customer Insight

With this clear focus on vacation visitors, MoMA marketers can begin to learn about how this target audience makes its decisions about where to visit, and any issues or barriers that are keeping them from putting MoMA on the list. I believe a little thinking and likely not a lot of new research could uncover the following: First, people are spending a lot of time online in the weeks and months ahead of a trip, looking at the websites of places they might visit. Second, I believe a key barrier for MoMA is that the average visitor might be intimidated by modern art, which means this option might drop down on the priority list. Third, when looking at direct competitors, MoMA lacks some of the history and must-see art that other museums benefit from.

Strategy/Creative

Put this objective and these customer insights together and you can start to see a strategic opportunity: MoMA can gain incremental visitor share by providing online tools that help people learn more about why a visit to this museum is right for them. With a strong online research experience that helps people discover what fits their specific interests (down to the best day to go), MoMA can rise higher on the list of to-do’s for tourists. I believe this represents a simple, direct strategy that could then be the focus of a briefing for the creative team.

In turn, the creative team in this case likely thought about how people use the Web and social media. The brainstorming process might have gone something like this: People are doing research at MoMA.com, and there is an opportunity to learn about their interests and when they are visiting so that we can offer up some valuable personal recommendations. But instead of hoping they fill out a preference form, what if we just read their Facebook profiles to automatically generate recommendations? This would make it easier for visitors, and add a bit of fun and buzz to the tool. Plus, it would encourage people to share this with their friends. As you can see, this doesn’t come from “What do we do on Facebook?” but rather Facebook becomes a tool that makes the personalization strategy best come to life.

And so a great idea is born: Summer at MoMA. It’s a mini-site that simply asks you for the dates that you are in the city and permission to connect to your Facebook profile. A slick Flash interface returns with what I found to be very accurate recommendations that you can browse by day. The tool allows you to build a plan, and explore other options that were not specifically recommended. To drive word of mouth and encourage families and friends to get in on the planning together, the tool allows users to post to Facebook and Twitter.

This idea not only helps deliver on the immediate desire to secure visits, but because it increases the chance for a great experience when people visit, it can drive repeat visits when people return to NYC in the months or years ahead.

Measure and Adjust

We’re big believers in watching new launches closely and using early data to gauge success and make adjustments. A tool such as this offers many ways to track engagement with users. Overall site traffic can be compared to the previous year, and the specific tool can spin out numbers such as total users, time on site, and amount of sharing via Facebook. Users of the tool can be pinged later to ask if they actually visited the museum. And because MoMA gets direct customer interaction through visits, it can also survey entering or exiting visitors about whether they used the tool, whether it drove their decision to stop by, and if it made their experience better.

While these activity measures can be important, if you don’t measure success against your original Business Objective there is no way of understanding if your effort paid off. If we go back to a Business Objective of “share of NYC visitors,” I am sure that there are survey services that MoMA and other area tourist destinations can use to nail down this number, hopefully over many years.

Conclusion

If you and your team are sitting in endless meetings wondering about your social-media strategy (or mobile strategy or in-game advertising strategy, etc.) you should now have the knowledge to be able to raise your hand and suggest that the group is considering the wrong question. Turn it around and come back to the key businesses objectives and challenges that you have been struggling with for years. Then take the time to consider where new developments in social media (or mobile, or gaming, etc.) might be able to help address the objective or challenge. That clarity will drive your success in old and new media alike.

(Thanks to Adverblog for finding this example.)

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Posted in Entertainment, non-profit, Social Networking | 5 Comments »

Local Sandwich Shop Scores on Facebook

Friday, August 28th, 2009

There have been many of the same, tired stories circulating in marketing-guru circles about small businesses that are using social media. There’s the bakery in London that installed a special device that tweets when fresh bread is baked, and there’s the Kogi Korean BBQ truck in L.A. that people chase around at 2 a.m. through Twitter and Facebook for killer tacos. These cases are great, and show the power of social media to impact small businesses, but do you really need special devices and a whole new business model to win in this new medium? Nope. Any small business can get on the bandwagon, including a local sandwich shop near our office. All it takes is some courage and a little personality.

I have spent many, many meals at La Tea Room Cafe over the past five years that I have been working at Bridge Worldwide; it’s a solid but not special lunch spot a few blocks away from our office in downtown Cincinnati. It offers a good range of salads and sandwiches and plenty of room to sit down and chat. The staff is friendly and conversational. A few weeks ago I was wasting a couple of minutes on Facebook in the morning and saw a recommendation that I become friends with La Tea Room, based on the fact that others in my network were connected to it. I checked it out and decided to give it a try. Right away I got a message that the daily lunch special would be the Buffalo Chicken Wrap. I’m a sucker for just about anything that’s been “Buffaloed” and I had no specific lunch plans, so I grabbed a friend and headed over for lunch and an experiment in social-media marketing.

I walked in the door, and immediately said I was there for the special that I had read about on Facebook. The usual counter guy informed me that actually this was going to be tomorrow’s special, and they had made a mistake. He apologized, but I was disappointed that my social-media experience had ended poorly. I got another sandwich and placed a comment on La Tea Room’s daily special announcement to the effect that I was let down.

When I returned to my desk I saw a direct message reply from La Tea Room on Facebook. It read, “WE’RE SORRY!” and went on to offer me a free sandwich and drink the following day. I had already forgiven them at the store, but this was a very nice touch.

This little story, my friends, can teach just about all you need to know about how to succeed with social media for your brand, whether you’re a small business or a giant national airline. First, provide useful information that your audience appreciates. Seeing the daily special is a good piece of info, and it tends to come in the late morning when you start to think about lunch plans. Other offers and promotions also make sense, but note in my screen grab above that La Tea Room doesn’t abuse the friendship; it only sends an update about once per day.

Second, be human. That means you have to write with some personality and show who you are. It’s even OK to screw up once in a while; just apologize, offer something to make up for the error, and move on. In this case the only flaw I see with La Tea Room is that the account does not identify an actual named person.

The benefits here are very obvious: In just a few short weeks this sandwich place has gotten more than 50 nearby diners to accept daily marketing messages. These people are leaving positive comments on the food and showing their friends that they are following. Each one is a key influencer surrounded by other working stiffs who make daily lunch decisions. And the cost? Well, it takes one person probably 10 minutes a day to craft a single post and monitor responses. If one more sandwich a day is sold this effort pays out.

But this is more powerful than just selling an extra sandwich. Social media such as this helps establish a true, human relationship between the company and its customers. This generates loyalty beyond reason and begins to court “regulars” who like to give their business to people who work hard and seem to care. And once again I ask: If the local sandwich shop can succeed with social media, why isn’t your giant brand making an effort?

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Posted in Restaurants, small business, Social Networking, Solution, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Shopping: The Next Killer Social Media App

Friday, May 1st, 2009

If your brand or your client sells anything using the Internet, you need to put down the BlackBerry and start working on a recommendation to build social media tools into the purchase process. I can’t overwhelm you with case studies and ROI models yet, but the forces of e-commerce and human habits are combining to make digital/social shopping a killer app. Act now before your competitor steals the spotlight and market shares.

Let me break down why this gets me excited enough to push a recommendation at you: First, people love to shop together. Many female friends, couples, and even a few bromances get together regularly to hit the stores to find deals and get second opinions together in the physical world. Second, more and more shopping is done online, but people lose the chance to have fun and get help from friends in this way. But digital social media tools are bringing friends together virtually, and people are using them to keep in touch with more people more often. Digital + Social Shopping (needing a better buzz word, btw) puts it all together. And when marketers get into the act of encouraging these meaningful connections, they have a high chance of closing the sale.

I’ve heard this trend called “social commerce,” a blend of social media and e-commerce, but so far this phrase has been used mainly by companies such as Bazaarvoice that enable product reviews. What I’m talking about is deeper than just getting help from people; it’s specifically around enrolling your trusted friends in the live-ish shopping process itself.

Case studies: Of course, you need case studies to buy into this new world of buying. Check out these three:

Sears Prom Dresses + Facebook

I would argue that a very modest Facebook application for Sears last March was the best marketing use of this social networking service yet. The idea was pretty simple: Allow girls on Sears.com to share pictures of their favorite prom dresses out of 70 available on the site, and ask for feedback from their friends on Facebook. The beauty of this application is that it put the social network to work for the customer, creating a fun conversation and getting real help to a girl in need of a second, third, or 10th opinion. For Sears, this tool provided a meaningful way to attract customers to its stores, and it benefitted from the viral aspect of a girl virtually bringing several friends into the shopping process.

Vans Sneakers

Three Minds on Digital at Organic alerted me to a great example at Vans.com. The site is a custom shoe creation tool that includes a very simple option to email or SMS a photo of your proposed shoe with a short message to friends. For something “artsy” such as self-designed Vans shoes, a quick peek from a buddy can really help make sure your fashion statement doesn’t produce laughter.

Bob Gilbreath’s New Shoes

Yep, that’s me, your friendly blog writer, with a case study that’s actually an example how people will use these tools whether marketers are involved or not. Two weeks ago I was looking for some shoes to go with some new agency-wear summer shirts from Lucky Jeans that I bought online. In the office I was walking by three female friends in our Client Service organization who I know have good eyes for fashion. I was wearing one of my new shirts and stopped to ask for shoe advice. Within an hour Amanda emailed me four choices from Piperlime.com, with some comments. She cc’ed Andi and Tiffany, who added some comments on their preferences. That evening I took a look and clicked to buy a nice pair of brown Steve Madden shoes. Of course I had to upload a photo to my Facebook account (above) and share with my fashion outfitters, as well as the rest of my friend network. I’m now looking a little sharper, and everyone who was involved in the process had fun.

If fashion victims like me are going to use digital/social tools for shopping anyway, why isn’t your brand part of the solution? There is absolutely no reason for any e-commerce provider to ignore this opportunity to build social shopping and sharing into their existing e-stores. Tools such as ShareThis already make it easy, and if a customer is wavering, this could be an easy way to prevent shopping carts from being left idle. Meanwhile, the chance to essentially place a free ad in front of trusted friends is simply wonderful.

What’s next is that these digital social networks will come into the store, thanks to better smart phones and mobile access. Take a quick picture of yourself in the dressing-room mirror and upload it to a handful of trusted consultants or even millions of strangers. Smart stores will find ways to make this more fun and useful.

So, e-marketers, please embrace social media to aid the shopping process. We customers need the help, and you surely could use the extra sales.

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Posted in Connection, ecommerce, Social Networking | 3 Comments »

Testing a Twitter Business Model

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

A few weeks ago I shared in a post here that I was working with a small group at Bridge Worldwide to develop a business model for Twitter. Quite a challenge, of course, but we came up with a very compelling idea that fits with our belief in meaningful marketing. At worst, it is giving us a nice strategy-plus-technology learning exercise. Since we started this R&D project a few weeks ago, I’ve been paying more attention to other developers’ attempts to wring cash out of the mighty growth of Twitter. Over the weekend I discovered a service called “Featured Users” and wanted to share my experience here. Overall, it looks compelling at first glance, but my results suggest this is not a big idea for marketers or investors.

Featured Users is an advertising network for Twitter application developers. The home pages of services such as Friend or Follow and Twibes.com agree to place a Featured Users ad unit prominently in their pages. The general idea and hope is that users of these free and valuable services feel compelled to repay them by visiting their sponsors. I decided to test the service because of the lost cost of trial ($10) and the chance to learn something for our work and this blog.

Setting up an account and program takes just minutes. For $10 on PayPal, I was able to buy 1,000 impressions. In the screenshot above you can see what that unit looks like. It is automatically generated by your current Twitter account, and thus includes your regular icon, Twitter address, account description, and the three most recent tweets. The results-tracking interface is basic but effective, showing the number of impressions, which sites they appeared on, and information on clicks (who clicked, when, and from which site).

My going-in assumption was that I would get something like a 2% click rate, or 20 clicks. This is far higher than the industry average for banners, which is about .1% and falling, and the rate on Facebook ads, which I have found to be as low as .02%. My rationale for believing in better results was that: (1) the ad placement is front and center; (2) Twitter users tend to be very interested in finding new people to follow (and getting followers in return); (3) this type of ad unit is novel, which means people haven’t learned to fully tune it out of their visual fields yet; and (4) I felt that there would be some “karma power” as people felt compelled to pay attention to sponsors for this free service. I believed that my Twitter account description, above, was fairly interesting. While my guess was higher than most ad units, I also went in believing that the results could be a lot worse. As a marketing investment, $10 for 20 new followers, or $.50 each, “felt” like a pretty good result.

The Results

My 1,000 ad impressions were exhausted within about 24 hours. This is the first lesson: It takes a while to burn through a very modest media buy. This suggests that the traffic on these affiliate app sites is fairly low. According to Featured Users, I received 6 total clicks on my ad. That’s a click rate of .60%, which falls below the service’s total average of .87%. That means the cost to me is $1.67 per click. That’s far less than my gut opinion.

Now, what I don’t know for sure is how many of these clicks resulted in followers. But if I look at my email account for messages about new followers, and compare them to the time on the clock that people clicked on my ad, then it looks as though I recorded zero new followers among my 6 clicks. Again, I might be wrong, but the evidence I have does not look good.

There are many reasons why results are so poor. First and foremost is the fact that people are just not interested in clicking ads—period. They are on the sites for a very direct purpose, and cruising off to a sponsor’s page is not on the agenda. Second, the ad units are completely untargeted. My marketing-related Twitter ad goes out to every single user, and I am guessing that click results would be better if I could, say, choose to show it only to people who have “marketing” or “social media” in their profiles. This would actually be simple for Featured Users to do, but it would mean far fewer opportunities to show my ad. This, in a nutshell, is the main reason we don’t see much hyper-targeting on the Web.

Now, there are probably a few things I could have done to improve my results slightly, of course. Featured Users suggested a few things such as ”include the words ‘if you follow me, I’ll follow you’” and “original and odd bios tend to fare better.” Yes, yes—this might help a little bit, but these “tips” are fairly gimmicky, and a slight improvement in the click rate would not have helped my total results much.

My Take

Featured Users is difficult to justify as a marketing investment. I love the fact that I can see clearly the cost of each new click at $1.67, but I likely gained zero new followers for my money. And even if I picked up a few followers, it is difficult to put a dollar value on the type of person Featured Users sent my way. We all still have a difficult time estimating the benefit of a subscriber. For me, the goal is to attract people who may be interested in buying the services of my company (Fortune 500 marketing employees), or those who buy my book when it comes out in October. It is certainly possible that new followers will somehow drive revenue, but it’s not clear enough to keep investing confidently.

The best way to attract Twitter followers is to create great content and work with your social network to spread the word, and this is a microcosmic example of what’s going on in the marketing world today. I attract dozens of followers on Twitter, for free, when I share a thought-provoking comment that my existing followers choose to “re-tweet” to their own networks. I received 18 new followers yesterday alone because people discovered my blog (more content) or found me through other search and recommendation services. People don’t see, want, or trust traditional “telling and selling” ads, but they will heap attention on those that provide valuable content—in other words, Marketing with Meaning.

Finally, I believe Featured Users is not a big idea as a business model for Twitter, either. On paper it’s a great way to bring a service to marketers and a business model to many app developers. Like Google AdWords or Amazon affiliate programs, it attracts some money for sites that have zero today, but the traffic isn’t high enough and results are not strong enough to attract a critical mass of opportunity.

So we’ll keep our Skunk Works R&D project on a meaningful business model for Twitter going—and I’ll keep creating content here and on Twitter to earn your attention and word of mouth.

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Posted in Banners, Social Networking | 3 Comments »

The Marketing Power of a Red Cap

Monday, April 13th, 2009

Perhaps one of the best case studies in social networking and meaningful marketing comes from a brand that has been around at least since 1703. This brand creates incredible followers in a true community of shared passions. And it does it without blogs, Facebook, or Twitter. Welcome to the story of red caps from Mount Gay Rum.

More than two years ago in an offsite with the executives of Bridge Worldwide, I first introduced my draft thinking on this Marketing with Meaning concept. I had assigned our small group to bring in examples of marketing that had a personally positive impact on their lives. My idea was for this to help spark the conversation around marketing that people choose to engage with, marketing that itself improves people’s lives. I best remember the example brought by our Chief Operating Officer, Michael Graham. Michael brought in a red hat branded with Mount Gay Rum, and he couldn’t wait to tell me its story.

Michael told us about how Mount Gay Rum has a long history with sailors. The brand was first launched in Barbados when a trip to the island was challenging, and ship captains would bring back barrels of Mount Gay as proud proof that they had successfully landed at the island. Since then, Mount Gay has continued to be closely associated with sailing events. It is a sponsor of more than 100 regattas each year. What’s special is that at these regattas, Mount Gay distributes its iconic red hats with the specific regatta name sewn under the logo. Only regatta participants get the hats, so it is a modern-day proof of sailors’ skills. Instead of another piece of marketing swag, these hats are prized trophies from a very special event. And they become collectors’ items for the recipients.

Michael also described how these hats become a kind of social networking trigger as well. Fellow sailors use the hats as a way to broadcast their common interest in public places. Sailors who see someone wearing one at the airport, beach, or baseball game will just walk up and start a conversation.

What’s interesting is that every sailor knows and repeats the story of Mount Gay Rum, so not only does this core group of high-income, passionate people stay incredibly loyal to the brand, but they become walking, talking ambassadors to the general population, many of whom are attracted to the story. A quick Google search brought me to a blog (captured above) where an identical story is told. And when I shared this story with a marketing class at Miami University last week, one of the students talked about how a friend she went with on spring break wore her Mount Gay hat and ended up meeting a dozen fellow sailors on the trip.

I believe these are the keys to take from Mount Gay Rum’s success:

1. Embrace your brand’s history and backstory – or create a brand with a story at its core.

2. Focus on a very specific, core customer group that shares a common passion.

3. Go beyond focus; be selective and exclusive.

4. Do something to encourage social connections among your target customers.

5. Don’t just sponsor; add some unique value to the event itself.

My final takeaways from Mount Gay are that this kind of marketing doesn’t take a giant ad budget or rely on the spread of new digital technology. Instead, it comes from standing for something and creating meaning in people’s lives. And don’t you dare buy one of those hats on eBay!

UPDATE: I got a great email from one of our readers, John Irving, who shared the following story:

This weekend, our community had a picnic to celebrate the return of Captain Richard Phillips from his ordeal with the pirates off Somalia.  (He lives about 2 miles from me in Vermont).  When I went up to shake his hand and congratulate him, I was wearing my red Mt Gay hat from a race from Havana years ago.  He looked up with a big smile and said ‘Nice hat, that’s my rum’.”

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Posted in Achievement, Connection, Experience, Social Networking | 5 Comments »

‘The Future Is Here; It Just Needs a Business Model’

Monday, March 30th, 2009

A few of my close friends know that I have a habit of working on new product and business ideas in my spare time. It usually happens when I’m on a long flight from one end of the coast to another. Just as I lean back and close my eyes, inspiration hits and I am literally forced to pull out a notepad and start outlining the idea in great detail. In my past few flights, I have been inspired to work on a business model for Twitter. Sure, it might be a quixotic quest, but it’s an incredible mental challenge and just might help make money for our company and clients while making the world a better place.

I’ve always been a big fan of sci-fi author William Gibson, and see myself continually using his famous quote: “The future is here. It’s just unevenly distributed.” I find this quote useful when I think about the companies that we work with every day. Each is at a different comfort level with digital marketing; some are still learning about email and websites, while others are challenging us to bring them the next cutting-edge technology. Our job is to adjust to their “base” comfort and keep stretching them a bit with each interaction or idea.

One of the reasons that we and our clients are not fully living the future today is that we don’t always see how the next digital bell or whistle can grow our business. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are all great services for consumers on their own, but where’s the opportunity for advertisers? There are many creative ways to win on a case-by-case basis, but there is no one easy solution (certainly not banners, which are virtually invisible to visitors’ eyes).

And so the following quote came onto a PowerPoint slide over the weekend:

The future is here; it just needs a business model.

I’m sure a quote alone is not going to bring millions of visitors to this blog, but when I threw it out on Twitter this past Sunday afternoon, a few followers re-Tweeted me (gotta love the instant feedback)!

On Sunday I sat down at my laptop and created a presentation about a way to monetize Twitter and Facebook. A daunting task to be sure, but the idea rolling around in my head just seems too good to drop into the wastebasket. In fact, the couple of people I have verbally shared the idea with loved it. And I’m going to have a more serious discussion with my Tech team on the feasibility of it tomorrow.

In case you’re wondering what it is, I’m sorry but I’m going to have to keep it under my hat for now. But rest assured that it is completely grounded on the idea of Marketing with Meaning, and when I share something with the world you’ll hear it here first. For now, wish me luck that my fellow board members don’t laugh me out of the room.

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Takeaways from the iMedia Breakthrough Summit #imediasummit

Friday, March 27th, 2009

After learning a lot at the Economist Marketing Forum in San Francisco last week, I had a chance to head in the complete opposite direction for the iMedia Breakthrough Summit in Fort Myers, Florida. As usual, the iMedia folks hosted a great event that brought together people from the brand, agency, and media sides of digital marketing. Once again my notebook was full of some great insights and ideas that only seem to result from being there. Of course, my goal is to provide you, dear readers, with as many of those insights and ideas as possible in this blog—with a meaningful marketing spin, of course.

Overall, the two main focus area of the event were Twitter and mobile. It seems that the consensus from all was that mobile is close to going mainstream, while Twitter was the exciting new tool that promises to explode. Here are some of the specific takeaways that I collected from the guest speakers:

Christi Day, Emerging Media Manager, Southwest Airlines

I don’t think I have seen anyone who has a brand personality that better matches the brand she works on than Christi Day. Her goal was to make us smile as well as learn as she described how she got Southwest into the world of Twitter. She and her team in media relations first tried out Twitter on a lark in July 2007 and quickly gained a following. Eventually it became so successful and followed that Christi brought in people from both media relations and customer service. Instead of outsourcing Twitter responses to an agency or team, Christi takes the responsibility for herself, 24-7. Her tips for other brands joining the Twitterati: (1) Be Fun—connect to events, stories from real flights, and viral videos; (2) Be Real—show your personality and what’s going on in your real life; and (3) Be Relevant—provide information and notices, and promote fare sales. I was a little surprised to hear that Southwest is not tracking how the Twitter account leads to actual sales, but that is in the works. You can follow Christi at twitter.com/southwestair.

Ed Kaczmarek, Director of Innovation, Kraft

Ed is the newest marketing rock star in my mind after hearing his story of the launch of the Kraft iFood app for the iPhone. It is already a huge success according to Kraft’s expectations, with downloads in a few weeks that met its three-year objective, and PR coverage valued in the millions of dollars. Ed talked about how the iFood app “brings us closer to becoming an indispensable food resource for consumers’ meal planning, preparation, and shopping needs.” This is a perfect example of how a great brand purpose leads to marketing with meaning.

I loved hearing some inside lessons about how Ed’s team got this remarkable innovation through the company by “keeping it under the radar,” and that a big key to success was leveraging Kraft’s database of 15 million consumers to drive initial awareness (another benefit of a decade of meaningful relationship marketing). Another huge help was Apple’s decision to feature the app on its App Store front page, which drove traffic “better than any paid marketing.” The tool is catching hold with new consumer targets including Gen-Y and Men (35 percent of users, “far above” the percentage in the Kraft database).

This is just the beginning for iFood. Ed alluded to upgrades on the way and said that it was built to be a platform for retail customers and even external marketers. Even working with competitors is possible, as Ed said that, “If we really want to fulfill our goal, we have to allow others in.”

Lara Green, Digital Marketing Manager, CoverGirl and Max Factor (P&G)

Perhaps the quote of the event was Lara’s claim that “mobile is no longer innovation” for her brands at P&G. In other words, it’s just the best way to reach the young girls and women that her brands target—and they have done enough experimentation to feel comfortable with this space. Another key to success is the fact that mobile has gotten a strong read in marketing mix modeling, which is the single best way to compare ROI across media alternatives. As evidence of the mainstream nature of mobile for CoverGirl, the brand actually has four mobile focus areas: (1) a strong WAP site; (2) a text-to-sample program; (3) a mobile CRM program; and (4) integration with other marketing activities. I was a little surprised to hear that a beauty product can “look good” in the small space of mobile screens, but its banners are getting 1 percent to 2 percent click rates, and when text-to-sample offers appear in print magazines, the supplies are exhausted in days. Another great example of meaningful marketing from CoverGirl in mobile is a ColorMatch tool that helps people make the right choice on the go and at the retail point-of-purchase.

Dr. Spencer Wells, Genographic Project Director, National Geographic

iMedia consistently mixes in pure digital marketing presentations with diverse speakers such as Nolan Bushnell, the father of video games. I specifically enjoyed the presentation by Dr. Wells, who is in the middle of a long-term project to categorize and glean human migration insights by sampling the DNA of thousands of men and women around the world. The Genographic Project is a long-term investment by National Geographic and partner brands such as IBM. It began way back in 2005 and is now starting to spin off insights. I loved the fact that National Geographic is funding the project and building personal connections by selling a $100 kit that allows anyone to submit his or her DNA and receive insights into family history. According to Dr. Wells, his management worried that no one would buy the kits, and hoped to sell 10,000; but more than 297,000 have been ordered so far.

So, another great collection of insights, some of which will make their way to my upcoming book. For more, check out the Twitter stream here. I hope to see you there next year.

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Posted in Conferences, mobile, Social Networking, Twitter, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Twittering Away

Monday, December 8th, 2008

Only a little more than 30 days ago my team at Bridge Worldwide and I entered the “Twittersphere” by creating an account in this fast-growing social networking tool. As I wrote previously, the main rationale for Twittering was to provide additional, meaningful content related to our Marketing with Meaning concept.  Instead of just two to three blog posts a week, I figured that believers in our mission would appreciate more, shorter examples. Little did I know that it would provide us with a great deal of benefits as well.

Frankly, I have to admit that I had purposely avoided Twitter for a while. In this business there are so many new technologies out there that you could waste a lot of time following failed ideas. In my brief look-sees at the technology, I also saw too many examples of posts like “just ate pancakes.” But the chance to provide meaningful marketing for our readers was too tempting to ignore.

Overall, I can definitely say that I’m loving Twitter and I think some version of it is here to stay. Over the past week especially, I feel like I felt back in the days when I first started reading blogs, or when I first found RSS feeds, or even when I first got on email. In the early days of such technologies, there is a common feeling that you have discovered something amazingly useful and interesting – something that will improve the quality of your life.

In terms of an assessment of Twitter, I really like Forrester’s take in the book Groundswell, where the company uses a tool to evaluate new digital marketing tools, and gives this service a thumbs-up.  Here’s my take:

What Works

  • Accelerates the spread of knowledge (both ways) – There is a very rich stream of news and links that members share with each other. I’ve discovered some great data and case studies that I would not have found otherwise. It is also a powerful way for me to share Marketing with Meaning examples, which is helping to drive record traffic to this blog.
  • Reaches the most advanced digital thinkers – In marketing this concept and the book, our general target is anyone who is responsible for marketing or agencies who work for marketers. But there is a more core group of digital influencers who will do the most to spread the word. They are the ones who the mass of marketers (and media) look to for suggestions on what’s new and important.  And they are all over Twitter. I really like the Twitter social etiquette that people should always give credit, and almost always follow whomever follows you.
  • Creates new opportunities for partnership – I have just dipped my toe into the water of actually using Twitter to ask for specific help, but the community is often sending notes asking for examples, facts, or people connections. Just the other day someone in my network saw an exchange between a friend of mine and me about a specific marketing program, and out of the blue a person related to the company offered to arrange an interview for our book!
  • Add-ons keep the service improving – There are countless tools that you can use to make Twitter more effective, which will keep advancing the usefulness of the service. I really like TweetDeck (better interface), SocialOne (allows auto-messaging for new followers), Twitter Search (find people easily), and Mr. Tweet (helps you find people with similar interests).  Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for great guidance on these.

Improvement Needed

  • It’s marketing to the choir – The biggest downside for me is that everyone I tend to see is a fellow social/digital maven of some kind. So this is not where I’m going to be able to reach the general  marketer we need to connect with. I know of only two of my agency clients on Twitter, Kevin and Dave.
  • Still lots of junk out there – Some Twits are interesting, and a lot are not. I think the community is still feeling out what is appropriate to share and what isn’t. But I’d like the signal-to-noise factor to be a lot better. And with all the noise coming through I know that I’m missing lots of really good links and comments.
  • Huge time suck if you let it be - In the week since getting TweetDeck, a tool that makes your feeds much easier to follow, I have felt myself spending far too much time on this thing. It is addictive to “surf the community” with Twitter, similar to how some people find Facebook.

I am very, very excited about how Twitter will help us bring our Marketing with Meaning concept and upcoming book into the market successfully. We have more than 200 followers now and people keep finding us every hour or two. I can tell that this audience believes in the concept, and that they will use their network to share it with others. I am even more excited by the chance to recruit true believers who will take on the challenge of making the marketing they work on more meaningful.

Whether you’re new to Twitter or a seasoned veteran, check us out at: https://twitter.com/mktgwithmeaning.

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Facebook Talks “Meaning”

Monday, August 25th, 2008

I’ve been pretty rough on Facebook in the past. A few months ago I shared my horrible experience with Facebook ads on my Challenge Dividend blog, in which a targeted ad got .02% click-through. My overall view is that Facebook itself is a very meaningful service, but the company is having problems figuring out how to make money by selling space to marketers. Unfortunately for Facebook and its advertisers, consumers usually don’t find interruptive ads meaningful.

But Facebook seems to get it and is doing some interesting things to improve. A few weeks ago I wrote here about a new system that allows members to rate and comment on the advertising that is served to them. While the ads people are served still might not be meaningful, there is a value for consumers in having a say. This is an idea that is gaining ground on a wider basis as well. For example, Avenue A/Razorfish has teamed with Pluck to create new standard ad units that allow consumer feedback.

Now the company is making a further move by promoting independent applications that are judged to be more valuable for Facebook members. Here’s what the New York Times said:

Facebook announced a series of new incentives for developers to write what it characterized as “meaningful” tools for the service. It said it would pick certain applications that meet a set of Facebook principles to be part of a new “Great Apps” program.”

First, I find it interesting that our use of the word “meaningful” is starting to spread. People are beginning to understand this very basic starting point of deciding how to approach consumer communication.

Second, for businesses this could help create a “market” in added-value applications. One of the biggest challenges we have seen with some early Facebook application work for our clients is the issue of driving awareness of our applications. By promoting the best tools, we have a better chance of breaking through the clutter. I expect Facebook will eventually charge marketers for this privilege (like iTunes does), but as long as members do find value it’s a win-win-win.

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