January 25, 2011

Facebook’s New Ad Source

This morning, Facebook unveiled a new way of reaching and marketing to customers through a product called Sponsored Stories. Basically, it allows companies to turn likes, check-ins, page posts and certain actions within apps into ads that appear on friend’s pages. So rather than just showing up in a news feed, ads are going to be generated using the same language as the post or check-in, and these ads will appear on the right hand side as a “sponsored story”. This example of a sponsored story below is driven by a check-in:

As Ben Parr noted in Mashable today: “Facebook’s roster of launch partners includes Coke, Levi’s, Anheuser Busch and Playfish. Also, the social network is partnering with a slew of nonprofits for Sponsored Stories, including Donors Choose, Girl Up!, Malaria No More, Amnesty International, Women for Women, Autism Speaks, (RED), Alzheimer’s Association and UNICEF. However, anybody will be able to bid on Sponsored Story slots (by a per-impression and/or a per-click basis) starting January 25.”

From a revenue generation perspective, this is going to be a huge win for Facebook. It’s a great way to make money off of publicly available information, and maintain the authentic voice of its users within those ads. For companies, however, there is surely a bit of danger here. While “likes” are generally good bets on positive feedback, there is a risk that negative comments as sponsored ads could lead to embarassing PR situations.

In our client work, we tend to see many negative comments, not only on page posts, but also with check-ins. While it is important to be open to negative feedback, the possibility of accidently turning complaints into ads may be inevitable… and yet avoidable.

Imagine a CVS ad that reads: “Stuck in line at CVS again” or an ad that reads: “Good coffee, but I hate the people at Starbucks”. What type of reaction would that drive? This type of “mistake” is a lot harder to recover from than a Tweet or Facebook message that a community manager can react to, and the reach of such an ad could have the potential to go viral.

With this in mind, it may be safer to use “Sponsored Stories” when individuals “like” a product rather than some of the other user actions that drive these new ads. It will be interesting to see the volume in revenue of these ads over the upcoming months, as well as the types of actions that companies buy to deliver the ads.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Product Marketing

Tagged as ,

January 24, 2011

Insights that are Bigger than 140 Characters.

A fundamental part of the strategies that we implement for clients include a listening analysis or audit that takes a baseline of all the social media conversations that are taking place across over half a billion sources of user generated content. While many of our clients agree that Facebook and Twitter are not the de-facto social media outlets, there is a tendency to consider these two channels as the ones that drive social media strategy.

From a consumer engagement perspective, this is probably not a bad idea. We typically see about 10% of all conversations for social media monitoring come through Facebook and Twitter. Outside of some outliers, the conversations tend to focus on two things: complaints and broadcasting.

A complaint typically sounds like the following: “Been waiting on the phone with Company X for over 40 minutes. Arggghh!!!”. No question that this can help customer service improve and understand perceptions in their consumer base. In addition, a community manager could also reach out to this individual to ask if they can help out. Based on experience, individuals who are just complaining typically are not looking for help, and just venting steam. But it is unquestionably a good reflection on the company to respond to individuals on Twitter and Facebook in real time. As an aside, the usual suspects for monitoring tools are not always the best way to engage on Twitter and Facebook.

A broadcast is typically a retweet or statement of something that your company has done well or poorly: “Company X is helping to make the world a better place by supplying products to poor countries in Africa – http://bit.ly/234″. People who message about your brand probably send similar micro-messages about other companies. Again, these are great individuals to look to as influencers or evangelists, and we recommend following and reaching out to them to help with future messages. But besides knowing what resonates with customers, it is unlikely that any innovative new ideas are going to come through micro-media.

User engagement is a part of governance, and micro-media messages like those on Facebook and Twitter should fall into such a governance strategy. On the other hand, overall strategy on how to utilize social media for insights should be aligned with the conversations that are coming from the other 90% of conversations. These are the blogs, forums and message boards that talk in more detail about your company, your competitors and your industry. They may not necessarily be the place for direct engagement, but they can tell you a lot more about strategic direction than a complaint or a broadcast message.

Listen to the entire conversation about a certain topic area, and see if there’s anything that your company can do to improve the way things are done. This is not a day-to-day process, but rather a dedicated effort to analyze and set the path for business strategy that is driven through social media technologies. The insights that you will gain from these channels have a tendency to be lot more valuable than anything that 140 characters can offer.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Corporate Social Media

Tagged as , ,

January 22, 2011

What Topics Drive Conversations?

For the last three posts, we looked mainly at influencers, who they are, and how companies can think about finding them outside of the traditional conversation topic areas. This may inevitably bring up the question that asks what individuals are generally talking about on the web. Not all industries and companies generate equivalent levels of buzz, and as a communication tool, social media is not always the best way to reach out to the customer.

In November 2010, Technorati released it’s 2010 State of the Blogosphere which analyzed trends and topics across the web, specifically in the blogosphere. Granted that this is not the entire social web, the graphic below can help guide our clients to have a clearer understanding of what topics drive the greatest volumes of conversation.

Yesterday, we advocated building a community site for your consumers to help engage and market to your target demographic while reaching out to them in forums that are not directly correlated with your brand or service. Using the graphic above, we advise our clients to try to think about creating these types of social media assets along the lines of the topics listed on the left:

  1. Technology
  2. Business
  3. Computers
  4. Music
  5. Spirituality
  6. Travel
  7. Family
  8. Health

With ManOfTheHouse.com as a test case for this theory, we notice that while P&G products may not necessarily fall into any of these topic areas, the site is a set of articles and forums that discuss technology, business, computers, family and health issues (with a little of the other topics sprinkled in, as well). Given that many people blog about these topics and spend time creating content about them, it is perhaps not a complete surprise that ManOfTheHouse has gained such a consistent level of traffic after only a few months.

A couple steps to get started on how to build a community site (this is obviously a bit more complex, but can help get the ideas flowing):

  1. Listen for conversations that are slightly outside the realm of your product and competitors’ products, but focused on your target demographic.
  2. Match up those conversations with the topics listed above.
  3. Determine which topics have the highest volumes.
  4. Think about ways that your products or services can fit in with those topics, and then work to build social media assets/communities that can connect with your target demographic in a meaninful way.

Building a community is difficult, but by focusing on what people are already talking about, you can avoid having to build interest from nothing.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Corporate Social Media, PR and Communications

Tagged as , ,

January 19, 2011

Finding the Target Audience away from the Target Conversation

After our clients have spent the time listening for what customers are saying about them and their brands, the next question is how to find others who may be interested in their products or services… but maybe just do not know it yet. As companies look to reach this additional set of customers, they will need to step outside of their comfort zone to identify influencers in channels and domains that do not seem obvious at first. They may even have to think about groups that they can create that resonate with their target demographic.

Yesterday, the Pew Institute’s Pew Internet & American Life Project released a study yesterday called the Social Side of the Internet which focused on understanding the role of groups on the Internet. The study notes that “80% of Internet users are active in groups [which] amounts to 62% of all Americans”. Of the top types of groups that people are involved with online in a social media context, the first five are: consumer groups, sports groups, charitable organizations, professional associations and community groups. Thinking about most of our clients, those types of groups may actually be a more viable way to reach customers for many organizations.

Procter & Gamble has often been used as a case study example for building community sites to give their target demographic a place to aggregate, learn, discuss, and be lightly exposed to some marketing. Most recently, the company launched ManofTheHouse to reach a new marketing demographic consisting of family men by offering advice and taking in comments on date nights, tech products and fashion. All of the ads are focused around P&G products, but the company neither pushes brands or hides the fact that the company is the creator of the site. Having launched in June 2010, the site was already seeing over half a million users a month by December.

In the Forrester book, Groundswell, another P&G example of BeingGirl.com (focused on teenage girls and addressing health issues that they might be facing) is analyzed. The research in the book suggests that of the 2 million visitors per month the site saw in 2008, P&G would only need to convince 6,250 girls to use its products to break-even on the cost of running the site. This coupled with the other non-direct financial results seems to indicate a real reason to think about building these communities.

With the data mining capabilities of today’s monitoring and analytics tools, there are methodical ways to understand what topics and ideas will resonate with future consumers. Consider analyzing for influencers and domains who may not be talking about your product, but are talking to your customers. As we noted yesterday, this is a bit harder to do, but the benefits can be well worth the effort.

1 Comment

Filed under Corporate Social Media, PR and Communications

Tagged as , ,

January 18, 2011

Who Follows Who?

Continuing the discussion from last week around influence, we looked a little more deeply into some of the social behavior work being done at HP to see if there were any other insights that we could glean. Last August, Social Computing Research at HP put together a study focused on analyzing who people follow in closed online social networks. The team acknowledges that there is a difference between a network within an organization and the social networks that we advise our clients on, but there are some pieces of the data that can help anyone trying to build a following.

The analysis broke down “follow” recommendations into three major categories: Behavioral, Network and Similarity. The basic premise of the study was to understand if people were more likely to follow others based on Behavioral reasons (they read or replied to individuals often), Network reasons (they knew someone in common), or Similarity reasons (they had similar interests).

What is interesting here is that people found the most useful individuals to follow to be those that they followed based on Behavioral or Similarity reasons. The least useful posts (to the reader) were from those individuals that they followed based on Network reasons. And, as may be obvious, the most recognizable individuals were those who were followed for Behavioral and Network reasons with only a small percentage of those in the Similarity category being recognized.

For organizations looking for new influencers in social media channels, this means that finding those in the Similarity category is difficult, however actually very valuable both to the organization and the influencer. It is pretty straightforward to see who talks about your company or knows the company well, but it is a lot more difficult to find those who should know about your company. Using listening tools like Radian6 or SM2 can help to uncover new forums, blogs and influencers across the industry that are not specifically talking about the brand, product or company.

A final insight from the HP study demonstrated that individuals follow people who “post interesting things” and “have similar interests”. As companies look to increase their list of “followers” on Twitter and Facebook, there is a great opportunity here to reach out to those who have similar interests but are not yet devoted fans talking about the organization.

Define your target demographics and industry and take a methodical approach to analysis. Search not only for products and services that your company produces, but also for similar topics that may have individuals who would be interested in your company. It can take a little bit of effort to weed through non-relevant posts and noise, but the resulting list of new domains and influencers is well worth the time and resources invested.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Corporate Social Media, PR and Communications

Tagged as , ,

January 11, 2011

Harnessing Influence

With the recent addition of $8.5M to Klout’s coffers, influence has become a prized commodity in social media engagement and monitoring. As we talk to our clients, there’s a real disconnect between the idealized form of harnessing the power of influence and a practical approach to disseminate marketing messages and affect the overall discussions occurring across the web. How can an organization discover influencers when influence for an individual brand or industry is not just about followers, tweets or reposts?

During the fall of 2010, HP Labs conducted a study that analyzed the factors which determine influence on Twitter. It’s a pretty interesting read, and one of the conclusions that jumps out is that the correlation between influence and popularity is relatively weak. Dr. Huberman and the HP team also note that influence depends on both the size of the influenced audience and its passivity.

In short, an individual must have a large audience as well as a following that actively passes along messages to be influential. The HP study also noted that an average Twitter user retweets 1 in 318 URLs. That means that posts are either being read passively or they are simply disappearing into the vast noise of social media chatter. To be honest, it is probably a little bit of both.

As social media goes from being a buzz word to a requirement in marketing, our clients are looking for individuals or domains who are already influential and can help spread messages. Brian Solis and Vocus conducted a study (September 2010) in which they polled about 700 business leaders about social media influence. Among the many nuggets of data, it is interesting that 57% of individuals polled were willing to pay an influencer to drive actions. Of these individuals willing to pay for influence, C-level executives made up the majority. This may help to explain a growing need in the market for better influence data as well as the growing success of startups like Klout and PeerIndex.

So how do we recommend that our clients find influential individuals across the social web?

1. Monitor for Volume – While many would tell you that volume is a poor judge of influence (or even popularity), we find that monitoring across keywords specific to your company, competitors and industry will help lead to those individuals who have the potential for being influential. You have to start somewhere, so rather than pontificate on what influence really means, go find the people who are talking a lot about the topics that matter to your organization.

2. Listen to Potential Influencers - Once you have a set of 30 or 40 influencers, take the time to understand who they are, what they typically write about, and what they are trying accomplish with their online persona. Figure out quickly which individuals are useless to what you and your business are trying to accomplish, and try to not to waste time on them.

3. Cross Reference Influencers - This is when sites like Klout can become helpful. You have paired down your list of 30 to 40 influencers to people and domains that could affect your brand in a substantial way. Now take the individuals and cross reference them with their online rating. In addition to seeing the number of followers, these ratings can give a more holistic view of an individual’s online presence.

Influence is a hard thing to gauge in both the physical and the online world, but it is getting a little easier by the day. Determining the activity (or lack thereof) of an individual’s audience is another thing all together. But when certain individuals propagate more relevant conversations than others, it is a good sign that they are potentially a valuable influencer. As additional money is invested into making the tools and technology more accurate, we will continue to have better insight into an individual’s overall online influence.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Corporate Social Media, PR and Communications

Tagged as , , ,

September 2, 2010

To Advertise or To Engage?

When it comes to social networks and social media channels in general, a lot of social media champions are using words like “enagagement” and “influence” to describe best practices.  While these are certainly areas that a brand should aspire to become better at, I think businesses outside of the Fortune 100 need to start looking at the low hanging fruit: advertising.  A recent eMarketer report expects global spending on social networks to grow to $4.3 billion by 2011… and this is only on social networks.

With that level of investment for social network advertising alone, brands need to also start thinking about areas outside of Facebook and MySpace in which they can buy ad space.  Understanding where the bulk of conversation is coming from can help uncover new places to put up digital billboards.

For some clients, the thought of having to “engage” with customers on new channels outside of the comfort zone is scary.  It’s sometimes easier to focus on Facebook advertising and maybe some occassional Twitter engagement.  While this is an important first step, I think companies need to start marketing and advertising on mediums other than the usual suspects in order to have simple and easy access to their target audiences.   Finding the next tier of social media channels focused on your industry, products or services will be crucial to the next step in social media marketing.  And who knows, advertising on these channels may even provide better ROI!

Leave a Comment

Filed under Business Development, Corporate Social Media, PR and Communications

Tagged as ,

September 2, 2010

Location Based Social Networks – Who Needs Them?

You know that something is becoming huge when both the New York Times and the Economist are writing stories about a relatively new technology during the same week.  Include that with the huge sums of money and hype being dumped on Foursqare and other location based social networks, and you really have to wonder if this is the real deal.  And then of course, Facebook unveils “Places” on US mobile applications, and the pundits are talking as if this will be an unstoppable new marketing channel.  But then you tie that in with the Forrester Report which says that only 4% of Americans have tried a similar service and only 1% are using the service at least once a week, and you have to start wondering if it’s all just hype.

When I talk to clients these days, everyone who is new, cool and innovative wants to talk about creating Foursqare badges, and super engaging ways to get people excited about their companies.  It’s like the whole mantra of using social media to help enhance what you already do to drive business and revenue is thrown out of the window. 

This is the next wave, people will tell you.  This is when you think outside of the box.  Of course, ask around that corporate office, and the only people who are using location based social networks are the social media people.  Who’s in the box?

Money has been and will continue to be made on these networks.  This is why Facebook is getting in on the game.  There is a value in having this physical/virtual world tie-in for some businesses.  But this, out of all of the other social media channels, is not for every business.  In fact, it’s probably not for the masses either, and I think Facebook will soon find that out. 

Look into your business from a marketing, PR and sales perspective.  Can you really add to the experience that your customer has by adding a new level of engagement on mobile?  If it is, then by all means, get to work.  On the other hand, if you are a tanning salon, and you want to create a confusing game where people collect badges from Walmart, Target and Jamba Juice to win a free month of tanning, it’s time to walk away from the hype.

1 Comment

Filed under Corporate Social Media, PR and Communications

Tagged as , ,

August 27, 2010

Building a New Business with Social

Recently, I have been talking to a number of start-ups about building a business from the ground up marketed through social channels.  There is no question that it is easier to make two-way communications a part of the lifeblood of your organization if you are starting from scratch.  It is probably one of the reasons that we are seeing larger organizations who are having such a hard time figuring out governance and structure when it comes to utilizing social.

If you are looking to build a company that embraces social, and you do not have a current client set, I think there are a few steps that you can take to make the process of “going viral” a realistic possibility.

1. Listen to what people in your target pool are saying – Most new companies have identified a pretty large set of individuals who can use their products or services.  Understand who is actually using social channels first, and then figure out what resonates with that target audience. 

If you are a service that provides access to ”green” products, find out the largest set of people who are engaged on social media discussing similar topic areas.  Let’s say that there a lot of people in many different demographics discussing “green”.  Great, that’s an opportunity for future growth.  But maybe mothers with young children take up over 60% of the conversation related to “green”.  Well, start there, and see what they are looking for.  When they talk about products, are the products for themselves or their children?  Let’s say that they are talking about personal products for themselves (services, personal care, etc.)

2. Develop relationships/partnerships with companies who provide these items – If you want to reach mothers who are looking for “green” personal products, you want to have products and partnerships with your service that resonate with this group.  Perhaps, you go after local businesses in your region that provide these products.  Build up a portfolio of as many companies in perhaps Ohio who provide green products.  Most businesses are happy to be included as part of new channels to get their product to market, so work on creating this first.

3. Engage with your target audience - Once you have set up adequate relationships to make it worth the while of mothers to start talking about your product and how you can provide local “green” personal products to mothers, get the word out.  Tell bloggers that your service provides access to over X different companies in the Ohio area who deliver the products that their audience is looking for.  If you are providing value, these individuals will help to spread awareness of your service.

I think a lot of new businesses are thinking about social in the back of their minds, but they are not thinking about how they can build their business to strategically utilize social and current discussions.  In this example, if you simply build partnerships with all “green” businesses without focus (personal hygiene, solar equipment, restaurants, etc.), you may just not resonate with any specific group.  And then it can be a long hard road to readjusting your vision, as you subsequently see where the interest is coming from.

1 Comment

Filed under Business Development, Product Marketing

Tagged as , ,

August 26, 2010

Make News and Post Volume will Follow

Having  monitored social media across hundreds of different industries and businesses, I think there is a definitive trend with respect to post volume.  It’s actually pretty simple, and often when you’re in analysis paralysis, it’s also pretty easy to overlook.

Release as many press releases and content heavy stories as possible. 

Make them available to social media channels, try to keep the branding to a minimum, and develop interesting content that people want to share. 

Everyone wants to drive traffic back to the business, and there is no better way to do this than filling up a search engine with thousands of posts about your company.  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a complicated business, but if you let other people tweet, blog and repost information about things you are doing, you will definitely get noticed by search engines.

And that’s really the main point.  Everytime some types in something about your industry, product line, etc., you want to make sure that your company shows up near the top of the list.  Search engines love social media because it’s current, and if you can make content that people share, then you can continue to stay near the top. 

As as example, if you are a lawyer who focuses on distressed real estate, then distribute as much content about the topic that you can.  It is amazing how just a little effort can help push your rankings to the top.

9 Comments

Filed under PR and Communications

Tagged as , ,