Your brand is what your customers say it is

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Your customers have their own idea about your brand and with today’s social technologies they communicate with each other and decide what your brand is. Listen to what they say and:

  1. Find out what your brand stands for: Monitor the difference between the message you are trying to get across with what your customers or people and general are talking about.
  2. Understand how the conversation is shifting in time: Social media can give you better answers than surveys on a weekly or even daily basis. There is a growing evidence about the correlation between social media buzz and sales.
  3. Identify the influence sources: Find the people talking about your products, the so called influencers and cultivate them.
  4. Manage PR crises: Monitoring your brand is an early warning system allowing to respond to a crisis before it escalates.
  5. Generate new ideas: Listen and you can tap into the ideas your customers may have for new products or services

If listening to your customers is your current goal, expect at some point to be talking to them using social technologies– every fruitful conversation includes listening and talking.

Your social media plan in four steps

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You realized your company needs to get involved in Social Media, but don’t know how to implement it? Follow these four proven steps to create your Social Media plan:

  1. Define the engagement type of your customers
    It is crucial to know what your customers are already doing– your strategy should leverage this activity. Define whether they tend to be creators (of content), critics (posting ratings, reviews, etc.), collectors (of information), joiners (of networking sites), spectators (reading blogs, listening podcasts, etc) or are simply inactive. A helpful tool for this assessment can be found here.
  2. Define your Social Media goal
    Your company can pursue five basic goals with social media:

    • Listen: The use of Social Media for research and better understanding of your customers
    • Talk: The use of Social Media to extend the existing digital marketing spreading messages about your company
    • Energize: The use of Social Media to fuel viral marketing via your most engaged customers
    • Support: The use of Social Media to enable customers to support each other
    • Embrace: The use of Social Media to crowd-source your product/service development
  3. Define your Social Media strategy
    Basically the Social Media strategy should provide an answer to the questions: a) how will you engage your customers? and b) how will this engagement grow over time? Keep always in mind that the Social Media strategy should align the type of engagement of your customers with your company’s Social Media goal. For example you don’t want to build a social media strategy to enable customers to support each other (Support Goal) only to find out that your customers are more like to join social networks like Facebook (joiners group).
  4. Define your Social Media platform/technology
    Last but not least, it is relatively easy to decide on the appropriate technology (blogs, wikis, widgets, social networks, etc.) once you defined the engagement type of your customers, your social media goals and strategy.


Social technology growth marches on in 2009

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Josh Bernoff, co-author of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies (Harvard Business Press, 2008) and  Senior VP at Forrester Research released the latest analysis regarding the adoption of social media and its technologies: This year more than four out of five online Americans are active in either creating, participating in, or reading some form of social content at least once a month.

First of, a little background information. Forrester analyzes consumers’ participation in social technologies with a tool called the “Social Technographics Profile” (check my post and use the same tool of this analysis here). The profile puts online people into overlapping groups based on their participation.  Groups and  behaviors are graphically shown in a ladder (Figure 1):

The ladder categories are kept consistent to allow Forrester to make year-to-year comparisons, across ages and genders, and across geographies. Thus, more interesting than the results of 2009, is the trend over the last 3 years (Figure 2):

  • Trend of Creators, Critics and Collectors:
    In the US, social technology Creators and Collectors grew slowly, and Critics didn’t grow at all. Creator activity appeals only to those who like to create or upload content, and regardless of the ease of blogging and YouTube uploading, this doesn’t appeal everybody. As for Critics, those who react to content, this group hasn’t grown at all. According to Bernoff, this is a result of a small but actual decrease in the number of people contributing to discussion forums due to the fact that much of this activity has been sucked into social network sites like Facebook.
  • Trend of Joiners, Spectators and Inactives:
    Joiner activity exploded and Spectators became nearly universal. The explosion in Joiners from 35% to 51% of online Americans reflects the appeal of Facebook, as both press coverage and invitations from friends suck more of us into social networks. Spectators — those consuming social content — reached all the way to 73% of online Americans.
  • Trend by Age:
    Looking at the data by age, the participation among those under 35 is nearly universal (less than 10% Inactives) and even among those 55 and over, is about two-thirds.
  • International Trends:
    Europeans adopt these technologies more slowly than in the US, with about 40% Inactives in the countries where Forrester does surveys. The Netherlands and Sweden have the most participation, Italy has the most Creators, and social networks are most popular in the UK.

Summary:

This data should end any skepticism about whether social media is real. The trend is clear: soon, if a person is online, it will almost certainly be consuming some sort of social technologies. With the level of social content being put out there, it will be virtually impossible for anyone online not to be a Spectator. And last but not least, social media is usually thought to be a way to engage younger generations, but the data shows that participation of older generations is considerable and growing at faster pace than that of the younger ones.

Today a successful digital marketing strategy should always include social media, either in the company’s own site, microsite, etc. or in a social a networking platform such as Facebook, Twitter and the like.

First video ad ever in print magazine

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An upcoming issue of Entertainment Weekly’s print edition will be embedded for the first time with a video player that will run ads for CBS shows and Pepsi.

The video player insert, made by a Los Angeles company called Americhip Inc., will be able to withstand the binding processes and mail delivery. The screen is 2.7 millimeters thick and has a 320×240 resolution. The battery lasts for about 65 to 70 minutes, and can be recharged with a mini USB cord via a jack on the back of it. The screen, which uses thin film transistor liquid crystal display (TFT LCD) technology, is enforced by protective polycarbonate. A speaker is embedded below it.

The cost is estimated at a several dollars per unit,  but the idea behind is to charge a premium for advertising that has potential to catch readers’ attention.

The ad comes in a heavy-paper package resembling the kind of novelty greeting cards that make noises. A roughly two-inch screen starts playing automatically as the page flips open:

This is an interesting development and if paired with other technologies such as RFID, maybe paves the road to the holy grail of all marketers: offline interactivity.

Five Years of the Long Tail

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Almost 5 years ago, Chris Anderson wrote an article in Wired magazine describing the niche strategy of digital businesses that sell a large number of unique items, each in relatively small quantities and elaborated the Long Tail concept in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (ISBN 1-4013-0237-8).

Many markets have historically been dominated by a small number of best-selling products. The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, describes this common pattern of sales concentration. However, by greatly lowering search costs, information technology in general and Internet markets in particular have the potential to substantially increase the collective share of niche products, thereby creating a longer tail in the distribution of sale (MIT working paper titled “Goodbye Pareto Principle, Hello Long Tail” by Erik Brynjolfsson, Yu Hu, and Duncan Simester).

After 5 years not much has changed of course and when designing a successful digital business strategy, the following forces should be taken into account:

  1. The democratization of the tools of production: the universe of available content is growing faster than ever. Almost everybody can become a producer of content with the available tools. Talent is not universal but is widely spread– give enough people the capacity to create and gems may emerge.
  2. The democratization of distribution: the Internet makes it cheaper to reach more people increasing the supply at the tail. That in turn translates in more consumption and sales, though prices tend to zero (free).
  3. The connection between supply and demand: the technologies that connect consumers (like search, blogs, twitter, etc) is what drives demand from the head (popular products) to the tail.

To harness the power of these forces consider to:

  1. Make everything available: Use mass/popular products (head) to attract mainstream consumers, but almost anything is worth offering on the off chance it will find a buyer (tail).
  2. Lower your price at the head (mass market) and charge at the tail (niche).
  3. Help consumers find the tail: Provide the tools such as recommendations etc. to give tail products visibility to consumers.

Want to profile your customers?

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Companies often approach Social Media as a list of technologies to be deployed as needed — a blog here, a community there — to achieve a marketing goal. But a more coherent approach is to start with your target audience and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them, based on what they are ready for.

Forrester developed this tool that allows you to classify consumers into six overlapping levels of participation in various markets. Try it, the results are very interesting!

  • For an explanation of these groups (Creators, Critics, etc.) and in depth analysis of the latest data, read this post.
  • Bars indicate the percentage of the selected demographic that are in each Social Technographics group.
  • The white marks indicate the same percentages for the whole population of the country selected.
  • The index indicates how the demographic compares to the population — a score of 100 means the demographic is the same as the population average.

    • Branding with Facebook’s vanity URLs

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    Starting Sunday, June 28 at 12:01am EST, Facebook has allowed all page owners to register a so called vanity URL.

    With a vanity URL, brands can improve their presence on the web. These URLs can be easily recognized anywhere (i.e. http://www.facebook.com/audi for Audi), and they can help a profile page appear more prominently in search results. There’s another incentive to get a vanity URL: preventing someone else to use a vanity URL with your brand.

    Vanity URLs come when FB is rolling out a number of other public-facing features useful to brands. FB’s new “Everything is Public by Default” setting allows to send out status updates and other information that are publicly available. This is excellent for brands, as a public-facing profile can be viewed by anyone. Companies can now have their social media presence established as a true extension of their brands, products and services.

    FB is also making ads more interactive. For example, you might see an ad for a brand’s page, see a “become a fan” button, and officially become a fan without having going to the page itself. Vanity URLs facilitate consistency with the ad message or title.

    Summary: FB is blending advertising with content users are sharing. The URLs make the brand more transmittable and accessible, while the ads invite users to create and disseminate co-created content. This branded content then becomes increasingly public and relevant.

    Create Traffic with Twitter

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    twitterAgainst common knowledge, one of the most common ways people use Twitter is as a social information filter and link distributor. In many cases, Twitter is also replacing people’s RSS readers (which is also my experience).

    The case of TechCrunch is very interesting: One of the ways TC uses Twitter is to Tweet out links to their stories, which then spread virally as followers retweet those links. TC is a big believer in retweets (in fact, there is now a retweet button at the bottom of every post)

    Over the past few months, TC has experienced the power of Twitter firsthand as the percentage of traffic has grown to the point that it is now their second largest source of outside traffic after Google. In the past 30 days, Twitter accounted for 9.7 percent of all traffic to Techcrunch.com, up from 1.8 percent six months ago. This is out of millions of visits.

    Summary: TechCrunch is not typical of most Websites, but this data certainly shows the potential of Twitter to generate traffic.

    LinkedIn translators not in it for the money

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    pic_logo_119x32 When LinkedIn asked thousands of its translator members to complete a survey last month asking whether they would consider volunteering to translate the site, many said no and gathered together in a group called “Translators against Crowdsourcing by Commercial Businesses“.

    Linkedin and the product manager who circulated the survey is answering those annoyed by the survey on LinkedIn’s corporate blog.

    This case highlights:

    1) things to consider when crowdsoucing (I think the error here was asking professional translators that do this for a living, specially considering that LinkedIn is a network created to help out professionals)
    2) the use of blogs and other social media to mitigate the backlash
    view source of this post via digg

    How Intuit Makes a Social Network Pay

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    By limiting its online community to diehard users, the software maker has marshaled a volunteer army of expert customer service reps.

    Unlike many other companies, however, Intuit seems to have figured out a way to benefit from social media. Its insight: Rather than inviting the whole world, the accounting software maker funnels only diehard users of QuickBooks to a site where they can exchange truly helpful information. For customers, that means quicker answers to problems. For the company, this volunteer army means less need for paid technicians.

    Customers were not only asking technical questions, they were often outshining Intuit’s own tech support staff by answering 40% of the queries themselves.

    Since the latest edition of QuickBooks went on sale last October, traffic on its channel has tripled. At any time, 70% of customer service questions are answered by other QuickBooks owners.

    Summary: The social aspect of the program seems to have helped sales. The company has sold 1 million units of QuickBooks at $200 apiece, boosting the software’s market share by 4 points, to 94%. All that free tech support is saving Intuit money as well.

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