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

April 15: Weekly Content/Social Marketing Links

As I mentioned in our first 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 third week netted:

DP Rabalais (marketing):

I’ve decided that since I like to travel and have an upcoming vacation on my mind, that I’d stick with that industry for the entire month of April. Today’s article is titled, Travel Brands Lacking in Social Media Activity – it is the result of a an article written by Peter Kim titled A List of Social Media Marketing Examples.

Both articles take a look at brands that are using social marketing and to what degree: the Peter Kim article could be of interest to Sales since it outlines the Social activities of over 300 brands.
 

Jay MacIntosh (business development):

I’m sharing the highest of highlights from Web 2.0 (i.e. phrases I highlighted from my written notes):

• Session titled “Why Social Media Marketing Fails” led by Owyang, Charlene Li and Peter Kim. For a thorough review go here.  That said, here are the sound bites that stood out for me: “Don’t think of SM as a campaign, it’s about building relationships…what kind of relationship do I have today, what kind of relationship do I want to build?” “Understand your purpose with metrics…either activity which is analytics or biz metrics which are outcomes” “One large financial services firm decided they weren’t going to allow employees to engage in conversations with customers, therefore, Charlene’s recommendation was don’t do community/social.” “The most common reason for not doing community/social is executives don’t trust employees to engage in customer conversations!” “Does SM matter today? No. Will it? Yes, it will matter a whole lot because humans are and always will be social beings…we’re just having trouble adapting to these new tools/technologies.”
• Session on measurement. “½ -2 % of people in social networking sites are “answer people” which you gotta have if you want discussions taking place on your community. Find ways to identify, recognize and encourage these people.” “Social media is about collective action…and why does this matter for businesses? Businesses are effectively conversations and measuring conversations is about measuring the context in which the conversations arise.” “If discussion is important to your community make sure you design it for at least audiences 1) the ½-2 % answer people and 2) everyone else. And make sure you validate people’s roles in the community because they value it (i.e. validation).”
• Session on Ford’s use of content in SM. “Ford wanted to make storytelling for the consumer easy and they did this by enabling them with content to help them tell stories…Monty used the term “democratize the content” “Overall approach to SM at Ford is that it’s not a campaign, it’s about ongoing engagement.” “When asked how measure the ROI…sometimes answer with the question of how do you measure the ROI of phones, email, wearing pants to the office…hard to measure but he guarantees that all have a positive impact on your business!” “Fords vision for SM is to be one of the world’s leading social brands.” “We use the Sharepoint platform from Microsoft for our technology.”
• Guy from Digg discussing how publishers can integrate with social networks. “Some interesting stats on Facebook…the average user has 120 friends. Of those approx 1/3 will see a Newsfeed item with anywhere from 0.8 – 2 clicking through to the item of interest. TechCrunch experienced a 100% growth in registrations when they implemented Facebook connect. Others like Telegraph, The Onion, Time, etc. saw registrations rise at least 30% with Facebook Connect.”
• John Maeda the president of Rhode Island School of Design. “Electrons travel at lightspeed…people don’t”
• Head of Microsoft Business Software unit. “Sharepoint is a social computing platform for within the enterprise…”
• CTO of Bluestatedigital (the tech company behind the Obama social campaign). “ They sent 71B emails, had 200k offline events planned via the site, 14.5M YouTube viewing HOURS, $770M raised of which 65% occurred online.” “They accomplished this by driving ACTION. Email was the thing that had the biggest impact in terms of opt-ins and donations. The way to get advocacy is to create ownership. For example, as opposed to just having donors ask others to donate, they allowed individuals to create a personal fundraising page with goal, personal commentary, etc. along with tools to then easily contact friends and family to “support” their cause.” “Email is still king…1) There’s not too much email, just too much unwanted email 2) Nobody reads newsletters (give soundbites with links to more) 3) Give more than you ask 4) Your list isn’t an ATM machine, but if you deliver good/relevant content it can be very effective.” “70% of all actions on the site came from 10% of the members. Segment user/member types by pyramid and develop ways to get people to move up the pyramid.” “#1 fundraiser for the campaign was Sarah Palin’s speech at the Republican convention. Within a 24 hour period they had anticipated how their users would react to her and via the site and email rallied people with content and calls-to-action which generated $11M” “Measure everything and test what works good, better, best…for example they had a few different email concepts on one topic…the good email achieved a 30% open rate the lesser had an open rate of 15%. Try and test different content and see what works!” “Biggest unexpected lesson learned is that it’s important not to underestimate what people will do if you provide them with info and tools.”

Doug Wick: (business development):

This is a great article by Chris Kenton (originally published in the CMO Council’s “Marketing Magnified”) that describes at a strategic level the drivers behind marketing measurability, and settles on the biggest impact social marketing has – the effect on intangible assets like goodwill and brand equity. This article shows that path that connects the value of social marketing to the executive suite.  

Bill Fanning: (business development):

This article was written by Adam Weinroth, product manager at Pluck, last week.  The title is “How to craft a social media plan that connects.”  The article emphasizes the fact that there is no “one size fits all” social media plan for all brands.  To demonstrate the point, he outlines 5 tips for strengthening online growth through social media and references examples for each.  The high level points and examples are (check out the article for the details).

1.       Know your audience

a.       Scotts

2.       Get real

a.       Kodak

                                                                i.      A Thousand Words

                                                               ii.      Plugged In

3.       Provide relevant content

a.       Whole Foods

4.       Drive community back to you

a.       Dunkin’ Donuts

5.       Leverage social syndication

a.       eHow 

It’s important to note that before you begin thinking about the technology and content needed to connect with a particular segment, you must first understand why you want to connect with them.  Are you trying to drive customer acquisition, build brand loyalty, listen to the community or some combination of the three?  Answering these questions first will start you on the right path to building a comprehensive strategy that not only addresses how to connect with your segment (as outlined above) but also how to achieve your business / marketing objectives once you have them engaged (intelligent merchandising or driving specific calls to action etc.) and how to measure the success of the program in order to continually optimize effectiveness.  This is the difference between a Social Media Plan and a Social Marketing Strategy.

Beth Lopez (marketing):
On vacation this week. 

Don Sedota (product management):

This is another product management related article but I thought it was timely given PM’s recent effort to make product strategy a more collaborative effort and to enhance the level of documentation available per product releases. The article, entitled How to Turn Sales Engineers into Your Biggest Fans, is geared towards the information flow between PM and Sales but the article can easily be applied to AM, Content, Ops, Tech Services, etc. as well.

The author offers the following (selected) advice for PMs in making key business groups more a part of product strategy and release processes and enabling them to do their jobs better:

• Transparency (builds trust)
  o Clear feature selection process for each release
  o Provide the “why” behind features
  o Share the roadmap
  o Solicit customer/prospect input and involve business groups in product direction
• Formal Process (sets expectations and provides consistency)
  o Involve key business groups in release cycle
  o Clear and transparent enhancement request process
• Transference
  o Provide sufficient documentation so that business groups can be self-sufficient in certain situations
  o Provide performance data via efficacy reports, case studies, etc.
  o Competitive data
  o Training

It will obviously take a while before we are hitting on all cylinders for all of this, but I’m excited that we’ve recently started improvement initiatives across many of these facets and that we seem to be heading in the right direction.

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.