I'm 'Checking In' at WCG: As Head of Location Based Marketing (aka Truck Day)

UPDATED as of 8:15 AM CT
A good friend who is much smarter than me gracefully hinted at me moving the meat of my news further up. So I've created a few bullets at the top of the post for those of you that like to skim.


The News

• After 2 1/2 years, I'm leaving Powered/Dachis and headed to head up mobile/location based marketing and social strategy at WCG, a global agency offering integrated creative, interactive and marketing communications services to clients in healthcare, consumer products and technology.
• As you'll read below, I have nothing but mad respect for Jeff, Peter, Kate, Natanya and all my former teammates at Powered/Dachis. But this opportunity was too good to pass up.
• For any of you that don't know, I'm writing a book on location based marketing w/ Mike Schneider - more on that later.
• The full press release and a short video I did with my new friend and colleague, Paul Dyer, can be found here.

Powered Video: Zombies Be Damned!

To celebrate South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) and help spread the word about what the new iteration of my company, Powered, does, our creative team put together a tongue in cheek video to provide some color.



Let me reiterate that this is done with a heavy undercurrent of snark. All feedback welcome so let us know what you think!

Weekly Social Marketing Links: Week of 10/28

Cross-posted on Powered's blog

Yup. It's been a few week's since we last posted our team's weekly social marketing links. As some of you know, I try and do a weekly digest of the links that my team (marketing, sales and product) come up with for our recurring staff meeting. Unfortunately, (work) life just gets in the way sometimes. Here's what we've got for this week:

Beth Lopez (Marketing)

Found How to Do Social Marketing in Heavily Regulated Industries to be an interesting read on how regulated industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare and Pharma should tap into social marketing and how best to do it. The thinking is that since social marketing is a “pull” technique and not a “push” technique (where traditional regulations apply), advertisers and marketers in regulated industries should focus on…wait for it…wait for it…listening to consumers on social networks to gather research and insight (doesn’t everyone say that these days?). The author also goes on to state that for pharma (look in comments), marketers should be thinking about conversations around the disease versus the actual drugs (which is where they can get into trouble). All in all, an interesting perspective.


DP Rabalais (Marketing)

This article from Adweek, The Revolution Will Be Mobile, talks about how the worldwide adoption of mobile phones (61% of the world's population has access to a mobile phone) is influencing how marketers connect with consumers. Mobile Internet usage in the U.S. has more than doubled in barely two years, and mobile communities are emerging.

According to the article, "For a brand that would like to learn more about what its customers and potential customers want, social networks via mobile are the perfect platform with massive scale. The Japanese mobile community "Mobage Town," for example, includes 12 million people. Anyone who wants to can listen in or join discussions, and anyone who wants to sell a product or service is enabled to do so."


Bill Fanning (BizDev)

This week’s post was written by Francois Gossieaux titled, Why Brand Communities Don’t Exist. Notice he refers to “Brand” communities, not “Branded” communities. To be clear, when we say “Branded” communities we are referring to where the community is hosted (on the brands site as opposed to Facebook or other external communities) not to the Brand being the topic of the community.

Francois makes a very important point (one that we at Powered built a business on) that people don’t participate in branded communities simply because they like the brand and enjoy their products. They participate because they are passionate about the lifestyle associated with the brand. The community gives them a place to get valuable information, interact with other people with similar interests and engage with the company. He notes several examples like the communities hosted by Harley, Jeep, Mini Cooper and Fiskars….we could add several others as well.

Good post!

Doug Wick (BizDev)

[Okay, so Doug has been up to his eyeballs with RFP's, contracts and keeping his blogging hat on. So I'm going to include his most recent post on Powered as his entree of the week...]

Almost anyone who knows anything about interfacing with customers or prospective customers through the Networks (Facebook, Twitter, et al.) will tell you that you should start by listening.

So most marketers' first step is to set up a monitoring tool (maybe expensive, maybe as simple as a free keyword search on Twitter). Then, the first experience that almost every media marketer (or marketer, period) has after listening to the Networks for a bit is that the brand, product, or company they are representing will be mentioned. When this happens (“just bought a Honda at Carmax, great experience!”), it will make a positive and socially important impression on everyone who views it. This is exciting because it is essentially a free media placement, a nugget of gold dropped into people's news or Twitter feeds that didn’t cost you anything! This type of mention is often called “earned media,” earned because your company created a great customer experience that made someone tell their friends.


Jay MacIntosh (BizDev)

The Tribalization of Business Study (2009) by Deloitte and Beeline Labs.

Disclaimer: I don’t understand why anyone would refer to a group of people sharing an interest as tribes. I’ve always thought of tribes, similar to the clans of my Scottish background, as having to do with ancestry (i.e. people who came before us like forefathers/mothers). Do we really need to “dress-up” social media to get more people to pay attention to the significance of the online social phenomena? I guess so…

Anyhow, this recently released study from Deloitte paints a broad picture of where companies are at with their adoption of social media. As suspected, backed up by the conversations I’ve had with over 50 such companies the past several months, I’d say they’re at the preadolescent stage. Characterized by - beginning to care somewhat about if/how they fit in, have a rough idea of some goals, more focused on the future, beginning to care about how their appearance, etc.

I won’t go into the details (which you’ll get in the 10 minutes it takes you to look through the 28 slides), but here are a couple of the most interesting findings:

• It looks like only about 20% of these communities have members in the thousands.
• Approximately 60% of their company’s oldest community have been in existence for less than 1 year.
• Stated goals (i.e. what they want to achieve) and metrics (i.e. how they keep score) are out of whack.
• 45% plan to increase their investment in social media and online communities while only 6% plan to decrease investment.

Don Sedota (Product)

Good perspectives by Jeremiah Owyang on the Google/Twitter/Bing deal announced earlier last week. Basically Google and Bing will now start incorporating URL tweets/re-tweets and the influence/reach of corresponding tweeters into search rankings (i.e., consumers now have a direct impact on search rankings).

His key takeaways include:

• Companies must focus even more on listening to make sure PR flare ups and the like on Twitter are quickly extinguished
• It’s becoming increasingly important for companies offer easy social sharing (e.g., via Twitter) for site content. (Also of note is that Facebook will be offering public status updates to Bing so sharing via FB/FBC becomes more valuable to companies from a search results perspective)
• Companies must continue to develop in-house influencers on Twitter in order to juice the search rankings of corresponding tweets (URLs)

How about you? Any good articles/posts/research to share? We're always looking for fresh inspiration.

Weekly Social Marketing Links: Week of 9/21

Cross-posted on Powered's blog

Oh how quickly the time passes. As some of you know, I try and do a weekly digest of the links that my team (marketing, sales and product) come up with for our recurring staff meeting. A series of all day meetings and the usual travel have conspired against me. Fortunately for you, that doesn't change the quality of the content/links that the team found.

With that as a backdrop, let's see what we've got...


Beth Lopez (Marketing)

(9/16) My article submission for this week is called The Great Trust Offensive. It appears the top 100 brands (as ranked by Interbrand) have fallen out of the trust tree with consumers. Edelman conducted a phone survey and found that only 44% of Americans stated they trusted business, down from 58% in the fall of 2007. As a result, many of the top brands are now focusing their advertising and messaging on re-building this trust with consumers and joining the “conversation”. The article goes on to provide case examples of McDonald’s, Ford and American Express and has CMO’s of these companies quoted throughout.

You can also view the 100 Best Global Brands 2009 in a slideshow format which provides a snippet of their marketing strategies. I’ll see if I can download the full report and provide to everyone. Here’s the link to the slideshow.

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(9/4) Joe Marchese throws down the traditional vs. social marketing gauntlet in the blog post,
The $1 Million Social Media Marketing Challenge, which starts with “I think there is an inherent conflict in the following statement: "We can't measure social media ROI. But when we buy television in large amounts, we know it works." He goes on to state the problem with marketers comparing social media and TV and issues a challenge: If the ROI from social media is not equal to that from traditional media, his company will deliver free media until the difference is made up.

Interesting read to say the least.


DP Rabalais (Marketing)

(9/16) As I mentioned in our meeting, I thought it would be of value for all of us to become more familiar with Net Promoter Scores, since many companies place such a high value on them.

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(9/4) The title is Social Net Branding Fails to Sway Women and the article was published today on brandweek.com. A study by ad:tech Chicago and Q Interactive that analyzes how women engage online with brands finds that 75 percent of women reported that social networking sites have little bearing on their purchasing decisions.

Sites have "somewhat" of an influence over 21.9 percent and greatly influence only 3.3 percent of users.

Only 10 percent of women said that participating in brand-related activities, such as finding information (8.7 percent) and writing reviews (1 percent), was their most common social media activity. Sending private messages to peers (34.6 percent), sharing photos (13.4 percent) and chatting (12.8 percent) ranked as women's top-three social media activities.


Bill Fanning (BizDev)

(9/16) I actually have two articles to share. The first is post on Eyecube blog titled, Congratulations TGI Friday’s, Now the Work Begins and the second post was written by Greg Verdino and posted to his blog titled, Social Media Marketers are a Shallow Bunch. Both posts highlight the latest campaign by TGI Friday’s to drive Facebook fans but are curious about what’s next. Now that they’ve blown out the goal of reaching 500,000 fans (875,170 fans as of this morning) how do they plan to keep them engaged. They’ve got a real opportunity to drive ongoing lasting relationships with their consumers and, quite frankly, revitalize an otherwise stale brand. Will they capitalize on it? We’ll keep watching and hope for the best. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to my free burger… I think.

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(9/4) This week’s shared post is from Jason Falls’ blog Social Media Explorer, titled, Brands Are People. It’s short and simple but powerful. He refers to a message he received from a friend who worked in the Golden Age of the Advertising Industry and a WWII fighter pilot. He says “It seems we got into the idea that ads were a lot easier than relationships.” I’d agree and we’ve been saying this for a while, but it just seems more credible coming from someone who actually lived and worked during that time.

The rise of TV as a mass marketing media was certainly a major contributing factor that widened the relationship gap between consumers and companies. We live and work in an amazing time where the rise of the internet has provided consumers a media that will require companies to break down the walls that divided them and re-learn how to build real relationships with consumers. The companies who choose to embrace the new media and master it will have a leg up on those who don’t.

Who knows…maybe in 30 years our kids will be watching a show like Mad Men where they act out the lives of today’s Social Media movers and shakers. If the characters are based on the folks I’ve seen speaking on Social Media panels over the last couple years, it’s bound to be funny but not nearly as classy!


Jay MacIntosh (BizDev)

(9/16) What Powered does is game-changing for marketing.

At the end of last year as I was becoming more familiar with social media marketing and our company, my intuition was that speaking with customers on their terms (i.e. things that they care about, when they’re interested and with people they trust) was the golden ticket for marketers. The disconnect for me was the lack of available data to support my intuition. What I had from our client programs, or third party sources, wasn’t quite complete or reliable enough so the results story often came up short. I think that’s recently begun to change due to a number of factors including our improved measurement & reporting capabilities as well as other practitioners publicly sharing their results.

Let’s look at one key marketing metric related to engagement – click through rate (CTR). This article from MediaPost Tuesday Super for Facebook Brand Pages talks about a study that found the average CTR on Facebook brand pages to be 6.76%. It goes on to say that certain days of the week perform multiple times better than other days of the week. Tuesday being the best and Friday being the worst. It’s encouraging to see that the Facebook 6.76% CTR kicks butt on other forms of marketing such as email (CTR 3.9%) and banner ads (CTR 0.2%). And what about Powered’s CTRs? For content our CTR is 50 friggin% - talk about kicking butt? For HP’s HHO site the CTR to their ecommerce is 7%. That’s kicking some serious booty.

And what about other ways marketing is measured like conversion, net promoter score (loyalty & advocacy), customer insight? What we deliver in these areas is also game-changing. So why aren’t more marketers going for the golden ticket? Is it lack of knowledge, understanding, familiarity, budget or something else they fear? I’d love to hear y’alls thoughts on this.


Don Sedota (Product)

(9/16) Although this probably isn’t groundbreaking insight to the team, I thought this article “When Facebook Fans Turn Ugly: Examining The Honda Accord Crosstour Page” was an interesting synopsis of a recent PR snafu that Honda had to deal with regarding their new FB page to promote the Accord Crosstour. After numerous comments from users about the ugliness of the car, a Honda rep (posing as a regular Joe) chimed in to give his support. Once he was outed, Honda had to do some quick damage control (some good, some not so good). The bad – removing the comments from the Honda rep which further enraged fans. Anyways, a good quick read that hits on some of the do’s and don’ts of containing a negative social media storm.

On a similar note, I have to feel kinda sorry for the Intuit reps that are trying to keep up with a hoard of unhappy Mint customers after Intuit acquired the financial site earlier this week. Ouch!

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(9/4) Here are a couple of pretty entertaining articles that I found this past week.

The first one from David Berkowitz’s blog called, When Augmented Reality Goes Social talks about a few applications of augmented reality (when digital is layered over real-world experiences to “augment” the experience) and social. My favorite example is a Yelp application for the Android platform which is apparently still pretty buggy but allows you to walk down a street and through your camera lens you can view Yelp overlays in the appropriate spots to show different restaurants and their ratings (really cool). Apparently more applications like this are coming down the pipe.

The second one is social related but entertaining more than anything else. It’s a blog post by Jonathon Fields called PR Gone Bad. How to Anger Bloggers and Hose Your Client. Jonathon details a back and forth exchange he had with a PR firm who was trying to get him to review a new book for their client. The PR tactics are extremely traditional and impersonal and the ensuing exchange of emails between Jonathon and the PR rep is a classic example of how certain people still don’t get the fact that social marketing is changing the way PR firms and the like have to conduct their business. Well worth the read if you have a few minutes.

May 19: Weekly Content/Social Marketing Links

Each week, the members of Powered's marketing, business development and product teams pick a news article, blog post or research report that “speaks” to them. With that article, they need to come to our weekly staff meeting prepared to give a 120 second update on what the article was about and why they found it useful. Links are below:

Beth Lopez (Marketing)
Kicking butt on next week's webcast and our new website this week - she gets a hall pass...

DP Rabalais (Marketing)

Two articles this week. One on how Retailers are Shifting Marketing Dollars. The other speaks for itself...

• Study: Retailers Shift Marketing Dollars Towards Social Media


• Forrester: Social Technology is Like Sex

Bill Fanning (Business Development)
The article I’d like to share was published in Tech Crunch and is titled, Jump Into The Stream. The author, Erick Schonefeld, discusses the evolving distribution of online information, from a collection of web pages to a real-time stream, and the impact on web business and consumers of information. The interesting part of this article is the idea of the new metaphor being “streams” instead of “pages”. Web business are transforming from being owners of content to providing a place to present the most relevant stream of information, i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Digg, Google Reader, and a bunch of others. Consequently, the way we consume information has been forever altered.After reading the article, I started thinking about how this applies to branded communities. I think it re-enforces the importance of being able to share your activity in a branded community with the “stream”. For example, the ability to publish a particular activity to your Facebook feed, or the ability to share an article through sites like digg or de.li.ci.ous. Participating in these types of distribution networks are, and will increasingly be important traffic drivers to the community. It also re-enforces the need to supply a steady stream of new and relevant content to keep the community engaged. The content could be professional, user generated or both, but it needs to constantly evolve.

This article is loosely based on a blog post by John Borthwick, CEO of Betaworks (Twitter, bit.ly, Tweedeck, etc.) titled, Distribution ...Now, which he references several times. Also, well worth the read!

Jay McIntosh (Business Development)
My article this week presents a perspective on the challenges of seller vs. buyer interactions. It’s written by an experienced marketer who has been on both sides of the “fence” at different times in her career. I too have spent several years on both sides and completely understand where the author is coming from when she points out the all-too-common salesy approach taken with potential buyers. A salesy approach is when the sales person thinks, talks and acts as if it’s about them, their product, their company. This is the way the majority of salespeople (and companies) approach buyers even today. They want to tell their market all about themselves and why they’re the best…blah, blah, blah.

Anyhow, I switched over from the buy side to the sales side about 12 years ago. At that time, the promises of the Internet and all the new technologies and tools made it okay to sell/push products. Actually, it was more about just taking the customer’s orders and getting the contract/PO in place. That doesn’t, won’t and can’t work today or any time in the foreseeable future. It is all about the buyer and what the seller can do to grow their business. Start with this as the foundation of developing a business relationship. This foundation based on the seller delivering the goods, provides an ongoing compelling reason for the buyer to buy…it really is that simple!

Doug Wick (Business Development)
This week's article is taken from Business Week’s Executive Guide to Social Media, How CEOs use Twitter. The individual stories are interesting, but the common story is that these CEOs need to be able to hear individual voices, and to choose whose voices are important to listen to at any given time. The power of social is just that, to introduce not only the voices of peers, but the voices of individuals inside companies and inside brands. Within brand communities, the consumer can listen to all of these voices and decide which ones are important given their needs and where they are in the customer life cycle.

Don Sedota (Product Management)
On vacation this week - he gets a hall pass...

Cross-posted on http://blog.powered.com

Content Marketing Webinar FTW

Wow! Really looking forward to moderating next week's content marketing webinar with rock stars, Lionel Menchaca of Dell, Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 and our very own, Natanya Anderson of Powered. Based on the dry run we did (with Simon Salt filling the roll that Joe will play on this webinar), we're going to cover some exciting territory.

Here is the write up:

In an age where more and more consumers are taking a “search and click” approach to buying new products, it’s becoming harder for brands to differentiate themselves from the pack.  As continued pricing pressures continue to mount, companies are turning to great content as a way to drive ongoing, active engagement with their brands and products, which can ultimately create deeper loyalty with their customers.  Creating user-centric content that puts the customer’s needs first instead of focusing on brand and product messaging requires a paradigm shift and development of new ways of communicating. 

Here what three content and community experts have to say about:

• How to bootstrap your online community with professional content
• The best practices and case studies of companies that are seeing measurable results
• Content that spans the brand content continuum: lifestyle, category and productHow to turn prospects into buyers with great content

Register to attend!

April 10: Weekly Content/Social Marketing Links

As I mentioned in my last Weekly Content/Social Marketing Links post, I've asked the Powered marketing, business development and product teams to pick one news article, blog post or research report a week that "speaks" to them. With that article, they need to come to our weekly staff meeting prepared to give a 120 second update on what the article was about and why they found it useful.

My goal is to share this content on a weekly basis. Here's what our second week netted:

DP Rabalais (marketing):

My article from the Marketing Leadership Council talks about how several mega brands are incorporating social media into their overall marketing strategy.
Topics included in the article are:

• Growth of Social Networks
• Demographics of Social Networking Site Users
• Implications of Social Networking Sites for Marketing

Key Objectives Companies had for integrating social media site into their marketing mix are:

1. Improve Customer Understanding
2. Promote Issues of Social Concern
3. Promote Products and Services
4. Facilitate Internal Knowledge Sharing
5. Increase Brand Awareness

Note: this is from a PDF downloaded from the Marketing Leadership Council's site. If you're really interested in the article and don't have a subscription, e-mail me and I might be able to send you a copy. [aaron DOT strout AT powered DOT com]

Jay MacIntosh (business development):

This week's article titled, Social Media vs. Email  written by the CEO of an email service provider proposes that email doesn’t/won’t work with the under 35 crowd....perhaps he’s right? However, his theory got me wondering why is it that when a new medium comes on the scene people diminish the use/importance of the previous one(s)? Whether the medium is stylus and paper, Gutenberg’s printing press, radio, telephone, television, instant messaging, social networks, etc. aren’t all of these just different ways in which people communicate?

The core issue isn’t so much print vs. digital or broadcast vs. direct response, or face-to-face vs. video conferencing, etc. Rather it’s given the target audience and objectives, what’s the most cost-effective medium (or combination of mediums…aka integrated marketing) to increase the “signal-to-noise” ratio? This is what marketers care about (or at least should) and why managed online communities are an extremely cost-effective medium with a very high “signal-to-noise” ratio.

Doug Wick: (business development):

My choice for this week's post is from Adam Cohen’s blog. The title of the post is Social Media Impacts the Purchase Path. I liked this post because it’s relevant to our ROI discussion as well as the "ecommerce" focus that many of our prospects and customers take when it comes to "social."

One area where I disagree slightly with Adam is on his argument that purchase consideration is the easiest way to measure performance of social media on third party sites. While I agree that it might be the "easiest," my belief is that most third party sites aren’t optimized to capture people in buying mode, whereas other online spends like search placements are. So if you measure social media the way you measure other media you are setting yourself up for failure. 

Of course, social media on third party sites is very different from social media on branded sites. I describe this a bit in the comments.

Bill Fanning:  (business development):
My post for this week from Mediapost is titled Critics Of Influencer Model are Missing The Boat . It’s an interesting look at the definition of market “influencers”. It does a good job of categorizing and defining the 5 different types of influencers. Because of the internet and the ability of everyday people to give their opinions, the masses have become the most important influencer category. While the traditional influencers are still important, companies no longer need to rely on them to get the word out. Word of mouth from the masses of everyday people have become the most important “influencer” category.

This certainly validates our Facebook connect integration with our platform. If used properly, this will serve as a major traffic driver to the communities we build in the future. It also validates our own marketing efforts. While it’s important to reach out to the major analyst influencers like Gartner and Forrester, we are doing a good job of reaching out our own group of influencers to get them talking, growing our webinar participation with everyday influencers exponentially, and focusing on getting involved with the smaller social media and marketing groups regionally. This will take time, but we’ve come a long way over the last several months.

Beth Lopez:
My submission this week is not a blog article but a Forrester report called Social Brand Strategy by Lisa Bradner. The premise of this report (will be available on Powered.com soon) revolves around how to create a successful brand-centric social media strategy and what companies and CMO's must do to engage consumers with their brands.  While the report discusses in context of social media, it does contain validating points that we talk of in sales situations:

1. Think strategically about social media and social marketing
2. Understand who your target is, how that target seeks to engage, and the role that distinct social media channels play in their brand experience.
3. Turn off the reach and frequency blinders - marketers need to spend more time thinking about preference and loyalty than awareness.
4. Give brand advocates tools to evangelize and reasons to get involved!
   

Trey Anderson: (product management):

Forbes carried an article from the CMO council titled Turning Customer Pain into Customer Gain. While I like the article a lot, the title is a bit misleading as the majority of the article covers the increasing need to manage customer experience (being custom centric) and the affinity this creates.  The premise is that CMO’s should take ownership of the customer experience.  It goes on to explain that customer experience should be leveraged to develop affinity and that affinity is the key to driving business performance through word-of-mouth (referring customers) and loyalty (additional customer purchases).  It continues to discuss the challenge’s CMO face:

• Regardless of the fact that 59% of companies have a CEO driven customer centric culture, actions display a lack of execution
• Lack of accountability
• The difficulties associated with implementing the necessary lines of communication across all business units, partners, and channels

 It paints a nice picture for our business:

• Affinity, brand perception, retention, and Net Promoter scopes are critical metrics for driving business objectives through word-of-mouth and brand loyalty
• It is difficult and expensive for brands to implement across all business units, partners, and channels
• We can impact these same metrics in a fraction of the time and cost

Don Sedota (product management):

My post comes from ReadWriteWeb and is entitled Community Building 101 for the Bootstrapped Startup.  The post focuses on a four month old financial news community called Tip’d that has risen to success in a very short period of time. The secret to their success... "There really isn't any secret to our success. In fact, it's community building 101 in the truest sense. Instead of focusing on ourselves, we're focusing on what the financial blogosphere (i.e. the content creators) wants, and what the financial news readership (i.e. the content consumers) wants."

The article goes on to talk about some of the compelling features they’ve implemented. This may be an obvious strategy (focus on customer needs) but one that is commonly overlooked for the sake of implementing the latest and greatest technologies that might not be in the best interest of the customer. Definitely advice that we can all take to heart and especially interesting to me as a product manager in that customer feedback/needs should always be first and foremost when formulating product strategy. 

March 31: Weekly Content/Social Marketing Links

I recently asked my team (marketing, sales and product) to start coming to our weekly staff meeting with one article/blog post that spoke to them. It could be on anything but they needed to be prepared to give a 120 second update on what the article was about. The goal is to share these on a weekly basis. Here's what week one netted:

DP Rabalais:
Interesting post by DirJournal on how airlines are using social media as part of their marketing strategy. The article looks at how four airlines are using social tools such as Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Blogs, etc, and what kind of results they’re getting. The airlines covered are: Southwest, JetBlue, Delta and Virgin.

Jay MacIntosh:
This MediaPost article is really strong in describing the importance of content (i.e. people sharing content is the fuel of social…) and how data and insight can/should drive ongoing improvement 

Doug Wick:

My article for today’s meeting is a post from Lenovo’s VP of Consumer Marketing, David Churbuck, on his personal blog, someone who is decidedly outside the social media echo chamber (not to discount the value of thoughts from within the chamber!).

This illustrates the mindset of many marketing folks out there who are focused on consumer marketing, and his advice hints directionally at what Powered does. But most people don’t connect this idea with social – it’s still a long walk from this first bit of advice. Anyhow, thought it might spark some interesting discussion for us. Also note the sole comment from Jim Forbes . . . yeah that Forbes.

Bill Fanning:
The iMediaConnection article that I’d like to share is titled “Rules of Engagement Marketing” at . This article discusses the benefits of having a two way dialogue with your customers as opposed to old marketing tactics of shouting at prospects in an interruptive manner and expecting them to listen.

Beth Lopez:
This ClickZ article discusses a new trend that is starting to take shape - Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr are driving more traffic to sites than Google. Also states that social media is poised to become possibly the only growth sector in advertising in 2009. It will be interesting to see this play out in the coming year and how the social networks/platforms will monetize their platform w/o being serving intrusive display ads - particularly in light of Gen Y psychographics towards marketing. Another question that I will pose to our team (this article had me thinking on this) - Will Google and search become irrelevant in the future (or severely minimized) and lose out to social media sites? Only time will tell. But I will say that I, personally, am using Google less and less as I connect with friends and colleagues on twitter, yammer, Facebook and email to find out where to go on the Web. In fact, for the March newsletter, the majority of content was crowdsourced on yammer and our blog instead of me going to Google to search for relevant articles. Food for thought.

Trey Anderson:

This post from the Creating Passionate Users blog does a good job of discussing the types of strategies that might be employed to help cultivate a community.

Don Sedota:

This ReadWriteWeb post reinforces the impact that strong relationships and information flow have on achieving business goals within the organization.

Social Marketing: This ROI is Too Good to be True

Yesterday, Powered hosted a webcast titled "Social Marketing: This ROI is Too Good to be True (archive coming shortly). The presentation consisted of 20+ slides focused on:

• Branded Online Community Measurement - Kathy Warren, Powered
• Results of the 2008 ROI Benchmark Study for Social Marketing Programs - Bill Harvey, TRA
• Social Media: Why it Makes Sense and How I Prove it to Myself - Brian Halligan, Hubspot

Social Marketing: This ROI is Too Good to be True

View more presentations from astrout.

An archive of this webcast will be available shortly.

Cross-posted on http://blog.powered.com

Experts in the Industry: Natanya Anderson (52 of 45)

Every day that goes by makes me appreciate my colleague and fellow exec-team member, Natanya Anderson, that much more. For one, her understanding of how to create engaging content that drives customer loyalty is second to none. Many times, I find myself being "fan boy" as I sit and listen to her talk about things like "learning modalities," and the DNA of great content.

But that's not the only reason I love working with Natanya. She's also incredibly smart, funny and shares my passion for the NFL. Natanya is also a Foodie blogger and avid twitterer which many of you who are reading this post know is always a plus in my book!

With that as a background, let's see how Natanya answered today's Experts in the Industry questions:

In one sentence, please describe what you do and why you’re good at it.
I work with a team of smart, creative people to make thousands of other people smarter every day while helping our clients meet their business objectives in new and interesting ways using content marketing and branded communities; I'm good at this because it combines my passions for teaching, learning, marketing, technology, and teamwork into one wonderful job.

How did you get into the world of online community, social media or social marketing?
I've been at Powered for over nine years and my career path has evolved in many of the same ways as Powered has. By its very nature, education is a social activity and learning is most successful when it's supported by a community. As the web and related infrastructures have evolved to offer unprecedented access to information and connections among people online, my work (and Powered's offerings) in online learning and marketing began to leverage newly available social technologies and networks. Where we are today seems to be the most logical next step for what we've been doing for these many years. Two years ago I couldn't have told you I would be working in social marketing, but looking back I can't imagine that I would have ended up in any other place.

If you had $10 million to invest in one company and one company only based on their use of “social,” which company would it be and why?

It would be dishonest to say anything but Powered in answer to this question. It's taken us a while to get here, but we have all of the right pieces in place to really help brands make a true connection with their customers that benefits everyone in the equation and creates a true bond between the two. We enable brands to have a giving-based relationship with their customers that will be more strongly rooted than any they've had in the past, and customers benefit by gaining access to information and tools that can truly improve their overall quality of life. Also, I'm lucky enough to work with some of the smartest people I've ever met and I can only imagine what amazing things we would do with $10 million.

Which business leader, politician or public figure do you most respect?
I am a hug fan of Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, because he represents what I believe is the best approach to leadership in business. He is smart, savvy, and humble all at the same time. Around the holidays he worked in the Zappos call center, not as a stunt but because help was needed and he wasn't afraid to roll up his sleeves. He can talk policy with the White House and build bread critters at a fine dining restaurant in Las Vegas and not think twice about either. I believe if more companies were run by people like Tony that we would have more stable businesses with happier workers and more satisfied customers.

Would you join a toothpaste community? Why?
Nope - there's just not enough about toothpaste or even good oral hygiene to keep me interested. My time is precious and I try to get more bang for my buck. I would absolutely join a community that includes resources for living a happier, healthier life that included information on toothpaste. If any toothpaste manufacturer is interested, give us a holler, have I got a content strategy for you!

Freeform – here’s where you can riff on anyone or anything – good or bad. Or just share a pearl of wisdom.
I try to apply this filter to as many areas of my life as I can: "Just because you can do something, doesn't necessarily mean that you should". As a parent I can protect my child from ever getting hurt, but that doesn't mean I should because then she might not learn valuable life lessons she'll need when she's out on her own. As a marketing partner I can suggest old school tactics to my clients because that's what they are comfortable with, but that doesn’t mean I should because then they'll risk limiting their possible business growth. As a professional I can do what I'm comfortable with but that doesn't mean I should because then I'll stunt my own growth. Sometimes you can choose what is easy, but you really should choose what is right.

Experts in the Industry: Kathy Warren (33 of 45)

How lucky am I? In one day, I get to post interviews about two of my favorite women in the world (my wife, mother and sister excepted of course). Minutes ago, I just put up an inteview with Ann Handley of MarketingProfs. Now I have the chance to highlight my colleague and good friend, Kathy Warren.

When I met Kathy five or six months ago, I knew immediately that I liked her AND was going to like Powered. She ran the gamut of being funny, smart, sassy and innovative -- all traits that I would look for in any of my co-workers. Over the last four months, my appreciation for Kathy's skills -- she's our VP of Account Planning & Management -- have grown exponentially. That's not to say that I didn't understand her value out of the gate, but rather that in many ways she's like an onion. The more I learn about her strategy, analytics and overall online community building skills, the more I appreciate what she does.

Before Kathy gets TOO big of a head, here are the answers to her Experts in the Industry questions:

In one sentence, please describe what you do and why you’re good at it.

I help brands drive business results by building marketing strategies that lead with consumer needs vs. marketing messages and I’m good at this because I use data to avoid subjectivity like the plague.

How did you get into the world of online community, social media or social marketing?

Multiple client-side marketing roles and an obsession with the potential for relationship marketing I found could be realized when I arrived at Powered. Creating a value exchange between a brand and its audience is the real challenge – community will follow if there’s real value there.  

If you had $10 million to invest in one company and one company only based on their use of “social,” which company would it be and why?

Aside from Powered, I’d say Netflix because they make the best use of my behavioral data and that of my network to drive my loyalty & high volume video consumption. But seriously, Powered, because if brands don’t start seeing measurable ROI, we’re all in trouble.

Which business leader, politician or public figure do you most respect?

Ann Richards for her candor, her wit, her intelligence and a leadership style that uncompromisingly leveraged it all.

Would you join a toothpaste community? Why?

No, because toothpaste is a transactional purchase in my household. A health and beauty community sponsored by a toothpaste brand on the other hand…..

Freeform – here’s where you can riff on anyone or anything – good or bad. Or just share a pearl of wisdom.

I don’t think it’s particularly difficult to measure social marketing programs or branded communities. If those communities are not based on audience needs and/or are not delivering value however, it can most certainly be an unpleasant experience. Marketing practitioners should think through social marketing initiatives as they would any other marketing program and in fact should analyze the contribution of their online communities against other online marketing efforts. Desired business outcomes should drive data strategy (behavioral and attitudinal) which will establish benchmarks for effectiveness and efficiency metrics throughout the life of the initiative.

Aaron Strout's Bio

Aaron is the chief marketing officer at Austin-based social media agency, Powered Inc. At Powered, Aaron not only focuses on the day to day marketing activities but also provides a social voice for the company. In this role, Aaron continues with his speaking, blogging (recently syndicated on socialmediainformer.com), podcasting and social networking activities with an eye toward creating awareness and lead generation for the company.

Prior to joining Powered, Aaron was the Vice President of Social Media at  Mzinga, a Boston-based provider of online communities for businesses. In his role, Aaron focused on tapping into the power of social media for business. In addition to his knowledge of the interactive and new media landscape, Aaron has more than 17 years of online marketing and advertising experience, with a strong background in integrated and online marketing.

Before joining Mzinga, Aaron worked at  Fidelity Investments in their retail division, with a focus on online and acquisition marketing. Aaron's work at Fidelity revolved around Web strategy and marketing, as well as the development of interactive and print campaigns, including direct mail, e-mail, online ads, and event marketing.

Aaron is also a founding member and former president of ( BIMA) and a member and former board member of the Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange (MITX). Aaron is also on the advisory board member of the prestigious Social Media Club.

Last but not least, Aaron and his podcast partner, Kyle Flaherty, host a weekly podcast called the Quick-n-Dirty every week on Thursday at 3 PM ET.


You can reach Aaron via e-mail at stroutmeister AT gmail DOT com.

Speaking Events:

UPCOMING

• PubCon - March 8, Austin, TX - Social Business panel
• SXSW - March 13, Austin, TX - Road Rules for Mentorship
• ITSG Conference - April 28, Scottsdale, AZ -  Geolocation-Based Services (Mobile) panel
• Location Based Innovations to Enhance Social Media Marketing Conference - May 2-3, Las Vegas, NV - Insights from the Authors Who “Wrote the Book” on Location-Based Marketing!
• WOMMA’s School of WOM Conference, May 9-11, Chicago, IL (Swissotel) - Joint panel w/ Location Based Marketing for Dummies co-author, Mike Schneider
• Measure Up Conference - June 6-8, Boston, MA - LBM: How Can We Use the Data Here to Optimize Offers and Drive Incremental Revenue

PAST

• MarketingProfs Digital Forum, February 2-4, 2011, Austin, TX
  Why Facebook Should Be and Essential Ingredient in Your Marketing Mix
• Location-based Marketing Summit: September 29-30, 2010, New York, NY
  Location Based Marketing Consumer Behaviors and The Evolution of Social Networking - How to Plan for it.
• GeoM: October 4, 2010, Boston, MA
  Making Money from LBS
• BlogWorld Expo: October 14, 2010, Las Vegas, NV
  Location! Location! Location!
• Mass Comm Week, October 25, 2010, San Marcos, TX
  Location Based Services Panel
• Innotech: October 28, 2010, Austin, TX
  Social Media: 12 Months from Today
• Corporate Social Media Summit: June 15, 2010, New York, NYIntegrate social media into your marketing mix - and fully leverage social's power

• Wine Industry Technology Symposium, July 13-14, Napa, CAAchieving ROI through SMO and Location Based Marketing
• Boston Social Media Breakfast, May 6, 2010, Boston, MA
• Social Media Strategies and Community 2.0 Conference, May 3-5, Boston, MA
• SXSW: March 12, 2010 Austin, TX

• AMA CMO Panel: February 17, 2010 Austin, TX
• Social Media Club: February 18, 2010 Dallas, TX
• DMA's NCDM Conference: December 9, 2009 Las Vegas, NV
• IHAF Conference: October 8, 2009 Norwood, MA
• Driving Sales: October 14, 2009, Las Vegas, NV
• Social Media: Where it Works in Business and Does it Fit in Automotive?
• Blog World Expo: October 16, 2009, Las Vegas, NV
• The Twitter Game - How to "Play" Social Networking and Why it's a Bad Idea
• AMA New Jersey - September 17, 2009Climbing the Social Ladder
• 140 Character Conference - June 16-17, 2009Twitter as the GPS for the Greater Social Media Mesh
• New Marketing Summit, Dallas - May 27-28 2009I'm Your Customer and I Can't Hear You!
• The Conference Board: Marketing & Technology Summit - May 15, 2009Shaping Perceptions of Your Organization Using Web 2.0
• AV Marketing Roundtable - April 30, 2009Creative Ideas to Stretch Your Marketing Budget, Austin, TX
• New Marketing Summit, San Francisco - April 28-29, 2009I'm Your Customer and I Can't Hear You!
• AMA's M-planet Conference - January 27, 2009Competing in a World of Networked Organizations: Implications for Marketing.
• Gilbane Conference - December 4, 2008Collaboration and Social Computing for Publishing Professionals
• MITX Event - July 15, 2008 (video)Social Media: Lead Generation: The Business of Using Blogs, Podcasts, Message Boards and Facebook
• Enterprise 2.0 Conference - June 11, 2008Social Network Shootout
• IMC USA - May 22, 2008Social Networking and Web 2.0
• ACORD/LOMA - May 14, 2008 (video - click on "Social Media Panel Discussion)We are Smarter Than Me: How to Unleash the Power of Crowds in Your Business
• Community 2.0 Conference – May 13, 2008Marketing of, to, and through Online Communities
• Social Media Breakfast, Boston - May 1, 2008 (video)Hiring in a 2.0 World
• Milken Institute Global Conference, April 29, 2008Social Networking for Companies: A Hands On Guide (Conducted w/ Mzinga Chairman, Barry Libert)
• ForumOne Communications Online Business Community Forum - April 15, 2008Community Value and Revenue Techniques
• United Nations Meets Web 2.0 – March 24, 2008Social Networks and ICT Entrepreneurs
• MarketingProfs B2B Virtual Conference – March, 2007What data can we now collect on customers, and what does that mean for evolving security and privacy issues?
• Web Guild Web 2.0 Conference – January 29, 2008- Understanding the Social Graph
  - The Power of Crowdsourcing
• June 21, 2007Making the Business Case for Social Media – Measuring the ROI of Social Media Programs
• NetFinance Forum – May, 2006E-mail best practices roundtable
• Forrester Finance Forum – June, 2005Designing a Great Web Experience

Aaron’s Areas of Expertise

• Location-based Services/Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• The New Agency: Picking the Right Partner to Support your Social Media Efforts
• Social Media for Business
• Enterprise Twitter Strategies
  
• Location-based Services for Business
  
• Building Business Communities
  
• Blogging/podcasting Best Practices

Keeping up with the Joneses

Just a quick note here to let folks that read this blog regularly (all 9 of you) that I am starting to post some unique content on my work blog. I only mention this because in the past I've tended to cross-post most content.

In this particularly case, a post I co-wrote with colleague, Bill Fanning, Would you Join a Toothpaste Community became more interesting because of the 25 comments that resulted from the post. My follow up post, Ball Bearings, Men’s Underwear and Drano Oh My! is predicated on the fact that you read the Toothpaste Community post. Clear as mud?

Sorry to jump you through hoops, especially if you're reading this via an RSS reader. Dare I ask that you consider adding my other blog to your feed? Yeah, I didn't think so.