Simply Zesty » Brands – Simply Zesty

Envy among friends on Facebook presents an opportunity for brands

Lauren Fisher — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 18:06:50 +0000

A unique phenomenon is starting to develop among friends online and in social media, where envy is encouraging real life actions that in turn, are a huge benefit to brands. A recent survey published by Teletext Holidays in the UK shows how people are encouraged to book a holiday after seeing their friends’ holiday snaps on Facebook. A touch of the green eyed monster is hardly a new thing, but the way in which it’s transforming online and turning people into resellers without them even knowing it is interesting. It also represents a huge opportunity for brands, to approach social media a little bit differently, and look to your consumers to help you encourage new customers amongst their friends, instead of forcing the sale through your own social media activities specifically.

Photo Envy

The survey by Teletext Holidays provided fascinating results into the actions of people online and how this translates into sales. They surveyed 3,000 holidayers from the UK and found that a staggering 13% had booked their holiday after viewing their friends holiday photos on Facebook. They were so impressed with what they saw that they were compelled to book a similar holiday themselves, spurred on by jealousy. Compare this to the fact that in the same survey, nearly 50% of respondents claimed they had posted pictures of their own holiday, and the potential here is evident. With so many of us sharing content and inciting others, there is almost an entirely new group of customers created. Without Facebook, arguably, that 13% may never have gone on to book to that particular destination, through a certain travel provider, or even have gone on holiday at all.

Indeed, 10% claimed that they weren’t previously considering a holiday, before their friend’s photos spurred them on to do so. Interestingly, 10% also admitted to ‘stretching’ the truth about just how good their holiday was. With more of us creating an idealised version of our lives through social media, it’s not surprising that friends feel compelled to copy the lifestyle a friend is embodying. And with travel it seems, that is occurring in a very real way.

Would you monetise your content?

At the moment, this is happening organically. These consumers weren’t incentivised to share their holiday photos with their friends by travel companies in any way, the only motivator was sharing an experience and, of course, a bit of showing off. But imagine if you knew that you had encouraged a certain number of friends to book the very same holiday. Would you not feel deserving of a referral discount or even promotional fee? Celebrities get this all the time for product endorsements, so the same thinking could very well cross over into individuals online. While this may seem like complete commercialisation of a social experience among friends, it represents nonetheless a huge, largely untapped business opportunity for brands.

The outcome of an approach like this, is that it moves the social experience away from the brand itself, as it transfers over to the consumer completely. Instead of encouraging your fans to post content through your own Facebook page for example, you’re incentivising them to use their own social channels, developing a referral programme for the social content created. The only question is, how many people would really be comfortable doing this? It’s one thing to share something with your friends from a purely social motivation, but this becomes something completely different when a brand is commercialising this activity. And the risk the brand is taking here, is that by trying to encourage the sale, the individual’s friends see straight through this and are a lot more unlikely to go through to a purchase. It shows the need for a new type of commerce among friends, one that is much more social, without interfering with the ultimate aim of networking among friends online.

The reality of Facebook envy

Inducing envy in your customer is pretty much the oldest trick in the advertising handbook. Present your audience with a lifestyle that they would aspire to, make them question how they can achieve this, then present the perfect solution in the shape of your brand/product/service. And the benefit for advertisers now is that, evidently, many of us are feeling more envious, the more time we spend on social media. The more we become subjected to endless photos and updates of perfect lives, the more we question our own lives. We are effectively becoming advertisers of lifestyle, developing keenly the tricks of the advertising trade, though sometimes unkowingly. The intention of sharing your best moments of course, is to let your friends experience this with you, not directly to make them feel worse. Yet that’s happening more and more in social media.

A research paper looked at the idea of envy on Facebook and found an increase in the number of people feeling dejected after seeing their friends’ perfect lives. Of course, the reality is rarely reflected completely accurately online, making us masters of false advertising. This trend represents, in some way, a more worrying opportunity for brands. Trading in human emotion is what has kept good advertising going for years. Only now that’s crossing over online and consumers are beginning to do the job of the brands. How far would some brands go to caplitalise on this?

Brands could soon predict their next customers online.

Lauren Fisher — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 08:06:56 +0000

An interesting research project has been commissioned by Microsoft, to look at the connections between people on social networks and the hypothesis that the majority of your next friends on Facebook, Twitter etc.. can be predicted from a purely scientific standpoint. Jure Leskovec has received a grant from Microsoft to extend his research, already started, to examine the science of connections we make on social networks. The research project itself is fascinating, and early results prove the validity of the hypothesis. But this really starts to get interesting,when you look at the possibility of this being applied to brands, and the possibility to predict your customers of the future, before they even know they want you.

The research

Leskovec’s research is based on the idea that connections aren’t random and can largely be predicted by commonalities in behaviour such as commenting on a blog post, joining a group, or reading an article online. It is behaviour like this that Leskovec believes will lead to future connections between people on Facebook and this was proved by a project he ran at Facebook itself, looking at the connections between personal networks. His research extended into other areas of social network analysis, for example looking at the concept of six degrees of separation, and how it applies on Microsoft Messenger. The theory, he found, still rings true on the messenger platform, where the degree of separation is around 6.6 – meaning you’re only ever 6.6 steps between one person and another. This research comes among a growing number of projects commissioned to look at the science of social networks – including research into how location can help us predict who become our next friends. For now the research projects are largely focusing on connections between individuals, but what happens when we take the same hypotheses and apply them to brands?

Targeted marketing

Right now brands have more control than ever over the people they can reach on social networks, with the ability to target by demographics as well as personal interests and even content that’s shared by people. You can build up profiles of your different target markets and serve them increasingly relevant ads. But take this a step further – what if you could only market to those people that you knew were going to end up being your customers? The hypothesis put forward in the research above can easily be applied to brands, and in some ways already is.

By developing a more scientific approach to marketing (not that science has been lacking up to this point), there is a huge opportunity to look for commonalities between your existing customers, and apply those patterns to seek out new customers. If you’re able to access information about your customers such as patterns between the content they share, the groups they join, the sites they engage with, you can apply a formula to seek out other people whose patterns of behaviour mimc this and try and convert them into customers. What happens at that point of course, depends largely on the strength of your marketing, but the potential to get in front of exactly the right people who are likely to become your customers anyway shouldn’t be underestimated. It represents one of the most significant changes in targeted marketing that we’ve seen since the introduction of social advertising.

Who owns our decisions?

If the science of social media continues to evolve and be applied to brands, it brings up the question of who really owns our decisions? If the situation I’ve presented above is applied, it essentially takes out the element of choice by the user. Instead of allowing them to arrive more naturally and organically at the decision to try out your brand or product, you cut out this waiting time and get right in front of them straight away, pre-empting their decision to purchase. And of course, while you can’t physically force someone to purchase your product no matter how targeted your marketing is, the freedom of choice is largely removed. If this type of marketing continues, then you won’t be shown ads or marketing by other brands anyway, as they’ll have decided you don’t apply to them. Imagine if every single ad you saw – on your computer or on the street – was shown to you because you fell into the right demographic for the brand. How will you know what else is out there, or make educated decisions between one brand and the next?

For brands, this is largely a good thing. But there is a risk that this approach to advertising is misapplied. A customer that has chosen you naturally, after reviewing the competition and researching among friends, is going to be ultimately more valuable than one who uses you with little choice in the matter. It’s akin to having to go with one broadband provider because they’re the only one who serves your area. You’re likely to be annoyed that the element of choice has been removed. As consumers, we have to own our decisions, if any long term relationship between brand and consumer is to exist.

The science of online marketing

What’s interesting is that this research project comes amidst a string of other projects that want to examine further the connections between individuals in social media. And while this is valuable and necessary as social media becomes a vital form of communication between individuals, it’s likely that this type of research is being commissioned as brands or advertisers want to examine more deeply how to reach these individuals through social technologies and convert them into customers. Psychology has always played a huge, vital part in advertising as it affects the likelihood that you will make your ad relevant to someone and influence their decision. And now the same method is being applied to social media, though for some it may have been a while coming.

While for many brands the primary concern is how to measure social media, there is a much bigger opportunity in how you actually use social media to reach your customers. And we are only at the very start of this and are just beginning to find out what’s possible. The opportunities represented by advertising in social technologies are vast, because of the unique nature of social technology being completely trackable. The data is all there online, and what’s next is to examine how this data can be used to develop increasingly targeted and relevant advertising. If this can be developed to the point that customers can predict down to the individual person, who will be their next customer, then the power of marketing becomes absolute and we look at quite a different relationship between brand and consumer than we currently have. When social media first emerged, the power was in the hands of the consumers, but the very technology that facilitated this could potentially turn it around and give the brand power once again.

To show that this is much more than just a hypothesis, and that the power of brands is rising once again, I wanted to look at findings on how brands interacted with consumers online during the holiday shopping period last year. Beyond looking at how customers are being targeted for purchase decisions, it shows how they’re being targeted to change their opinion, publicly. The graph below shows how customers were targeted that had posted something negative about a brand, with surprising results :

In 34% of the cases where a customer that had posted a negative comment about the brand/retailer, they actually deleted their comment, with a further 33% even then posting a positive review. This filtered down into 18% who became loyal customers. Without the social technologies and methods of tracking that we now have, this 18% would likely have been completely non-existent and would have represented a loss in customers due to a negative brand experience. But niche targeting and individual contact by brands shows the power that they have to change public opinion and turn a negative reaction into something completely positive – with the benefit of this extending beyond the customer themselves and into the word of mouth generated by their new positive comment. And as the research project above shows, we could be about to see this extend even further, with the ability to reach new customers before they’ve even started talking about you, purely by analysing patterns between connections. It’s powerful stuff, and just a little bit scary…

Red Bull’s Next Genius Marketing Startegy – Movies

Niall Harbison — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 10:14:33 +0000

Red Bull are one of the smartest brands in the world when it comes to social media, branded content and marketing in general. They have teams of people dedicated to producing content, they sponsor 2 formula 1 teams, they have their own football team in New York, their own magazines and even their own stunt flying series. Not happy with all that and keen to cement their brand in the edgy extreme sports and alternative lifestyle market they have been busy taking their first steps in to the movie business and in September of this year will be releasing…Art Of Flight. It’s a movie about snowboarding and the buzz online has been electric even though this is only the second trailer that has been released to date. It launches in September and by all accounts is going to change the way we think about extreme sports. If you told me that Coca Cola or Carlsberg were making a movie I would run a mile but Red Bull are so clued in and so on the ball in terms of marketing themselves that I’ll be queuing up for this one and you just know it is going to be a huge success. Who would have thought drinks companies would start marketing themselves through making entire feature length movies. Check it out, looks amazing…

Maybe it’s time to admit, social media can’t be measured

Lauren Fisher — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 18:01:41 +0000

Measuring social media is one of the most important things for brands and marketers to understand, yet it is one of the most difficult to effectively achieve. An issue with a lot of social media measurement tools is that they’ve focused on quantity rather than quality. We have the luxury of many free and paid tools that can tell us the reach through social media, but not so much what that means, or more importantly, the demographic makeup of people that you’re reaching. Comscore are hoping to change that, with their newly launched service ‘Social Essentials’. The tool aims to look beyond the primary factors of a social media campaign, such as the number of mentions or follower on a social platform, into metrics such as the behavioural impact on fans, and demographic comparison to competitors. But can any tool give us the answers we’re looking for through social media marketing?

The problems

Before looking at how effective Social Essentials can be for brands, it’s important to understand the current issues around social media monitoring. One of the biggest hurdles to measuring social media, has been a desire to make new technologies fit into old models. People look for more simple mechanics such as impressions, click throughs , advertising value equivalent in a bid to translate social media activity into a language brands or marketers will understand. In doing so however, the true value of social media activity is limited, as you risk ignoring the other factors that can tell you how your campaign is performing, such as social-specific metrics, influence, sentiment of the conversation and increased brand awareness. To an extent a certain amount can be determined by tools, but manual analysis will always be necessary with social media, as the media itself becomes people – not something that can be measured by a calculation or tool.

Further to this, a recent report by Hypatia Research, found that only 40% of companies surveyed were measuring their social media activity on a quarterly or annual basis, with a further 13% not measuring their activity at all. This shows the huge gap between carrying out social media activity, and understanding how it’s actually working for you. Without this understanding in place, social media activity will only ever do half the job for you, and it will be difficult to justify further spend to increase social media marketing efforts.

About Social Essentials

Social Essentials aims to address these problems, by providing an in-depth social media monitoring tool that goes beyond the numbers, and into real audience data and understanding. As well as looking at metrics such as the true size of the audience you’re reaching through social media, it also looks at the demographic breakdown of this audience and, importantly, the propensity to purchase. Social Essentials also goes one further though, by using analytics and insights to help shape your social media strategy, for example looking at how people are reacting with your content and how branded content can be better optimised on a Facebook Page or other social channel. You can preview the product through a download on the site, showing you how in-depth the insights can get, for example breaking down your targets by primary and secondary reach through social channels.

The only issue with Social Esssentials is that while it’s an in-depth tool and a good new solution, according to Comscore it’s only really suitable for companies with more than 500,000 fans on Facebook. This cuts off the vast majority of brands that use social media, and shows that while it looks promising, the answer for how to measure social media has still not arrived. If you need such a larger userbase for the tool to be relevant, it’s not a universal solution that can be carried across different brands.

Why the answer may never arrive

Though this may not be what marketers or brands are hoping to hear, true social media measurement may never actually arrive, because of the complexities of social media marketing. The difficulty comes with the term ‘media’ specifically, as we’re no longer dealing with ‘media’, rather people as mini publishers or content producers. While you could look at traditional media and assign a value such as total reach or AVE, you can never effectively do this through social media, as every single person you’re engaging with is unique. The platform is social, and herein lies the problem. It is incredibly difficult to design a social media metric or measurement strategy that is easily transferrable across individuals, or that will yield results that actually resemble the reality.

What you can measure

There are of course, metrics within social media that you can measure, and we’re becoming more sophisticated into how these can be applied. What’s becoming easier is to establish the social reach of a campagin, whereby we have tools that can automate this process somewhat, by telling us the primary and secondary reach of individuals and their followers. And within each campaign you can also measure the specific values, such as number of competition entries, video embeds, inbound links etc.. To a certain extent you can also measure the sentiment around a brand, which is an important factor in social media activity. But until the understanding around social media changes, the measurement will never arrive. Quantity is one thing, but the sentiment around the coverage you’re getting is quite another.

What still remains unclear is what these metrics actually mean. 10,000 Likes translates into what? 100,000 video views got me how many sales? 500 retweets resulted in how many clickthroughs? Questions like this are asked by brands every day – it is the ‘so what?’ of social media. The first result may be one thing, but what key business objective is this supporting? Unfortunately for brands, it’s the one metric they want, and the one metric they may never get. Social media has changed the way businesses are marketing, and it will eventually change the way they operate entirely. For companies that have an advanced understanding of social media, an uplift in earned media will be seen as just as important as a product sale, as long as you understand how that earned media fits in the complete consumer journey.

Social media can’t truly be measured, at least yet, because we haven’t sufficiently adapted our understanding of social technologies. Until companies do this, what we measure will continue to be affected by traditional methods, essentially trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole.

Hugo Boss launch an interactive video experience

Lauren Fisher — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 10:10:00 +0000

Hugo Boss have just launched a new interactive video campaign, and the first of its kind on Youtube. They’ve created an interactive story called ‘KINO’, where users control the storyline through subtle head movements. The Youtube video hooks up with your webcam to pick up the movements you make, to take you through 3 possible scenarios in the story. The movements you make, in real time, bring new elements into the film such as colour or new animation. The film is shot as a base in black and white and then the rest is left up to you. You can access the experience via the Hugo Boss Youtube channel :

The technology that Hugo Boss are using here is certainly innovative, providing a completely new real-time experience for the user. It’s also a powerful way to encourage people to engage with your brand on a whole new level, interacting with your content to become part of a complete brand experience. The actual film that Hugo Boss have created might not be to everyone’s taste, and the action you create as a result of the subtle head movements loses it’s initial gloss quite quickly, but it’s encouraging to see more luxury brands using social media and social technologies to reach their users.

More from Hugo Boss

This isn’t the first time that Hugo Boss has shown they can push the boundaries of interactive technology. In 2009 they launched an interactive window display in Sloane Square, that allowed Christmas shoppers to become part of a digital window display, through augmented reality (skip to 1 minute in) :

How social media can kill a brand in days – the PMS/Got Milk campaign.

Lauren Fisher — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 18:13:00 +0000

I was browsing through a few of the sites that I usually visit when I noticed something very interesting. On one site, I read about a new online campaign that had launched for the California Milk Processor Board, around the theme of playing on the effect PMS can have on men (to promote how milk can help with the effects on PMS). I glanced at it quickly before moving onto the New York Times, where I read that the same ad campaign had already been pulled, in just a matter of a few days, due to intense backlash in social media. I was amazed at how quickly I could discover a new online campaign, before then finding that the whole strategy had been reassessed, due to the effects of social media.

A social media storm

We have seen before the effects that social media can have on a brand in a crisis, but in this instance it seemed to move incredibly quickly with dramatic effect, including a completely new advertising strategy from the agency. The original ad campaign focused around a microsite – everythingidoiswrong.org – which provided humorous ways of looking at how men actually get affected by their partner’s PMS, such as ready made apologies men could roll out, in case they needed them with an irate girlfriend. Now however, because of the backlash on social media, that has been redesigned and redirected, to go to a site that offers more facts and advice around how milk can help with the negative effects of PMS. Rather than looking at it from the point of view of how the ad strategy was right/wrong (though as a woman, I can’t say I found the campaign in any way offensive), I wanted to look at the role that social media played, from a grass roots level, to influencing the executive’s decision to pull the ad.

What’s perhaps most interesting here, is that the PMS campaign was actually a relaunch of a fairly similar campaign that had run in 2005. In that instance, the ads drew some negative response and complaints, but crucially this was before the widespread penetration of social media that we have today. In essence, the reaction around both campaigns was the same, but because of social media, the ad campaign this time around had to be pulled, because the company had to be seen to react to everything that was so publicly visible. Was this necessarily the right decision to make though?

Balancing opinion

When your brand is caught in a social media s*%tstorm, it’s very easy to react in what you think is the best way possible : pulling the offensive material, apologising, and very publicy adjusting your strategy so people can see you’ve reacted. Yet it could be the case that the California Milk Board spent too much time listening to the negative backlash, which could hardly have come as a surprise, before looking at the effectiveness of the ad. Though the complaints you’ll receive will no doubt be ugly, this doesn’t always tell the whole truth. To put this into context, a poll published on MSNBC asks people their opinion of the campaign, and has already gathered over 2,000 votes :

Now while you of course can’t take this as a true indicator of the complete reaction to the ad campaign, the fact that such an overwhelming majority of respondents in this one particular survey saw the ad in the way it was intended to be received, is telling. It suggests that the California Milk Board may have jumped the gun a bit and instead of staying true to their brand strategy – which obviously works as they wouldn’t have rolled it out again 6 years later – they caved in to negative public opinion and pulled the entire thing, offering a watered down version that is a clear compromise.

A unique case study

With this particular campaign, we have quite a unique case study, due to the fact that the ad campaign had run with a similar theme before and remained untainted. But with social technologies enabling people to voice their opinion quickly and publicly, it had a stark effect on the campaign, which resulted in its ultimate demise. What’s more, is that public opinion influenced this campaign far more than the media reaction, which in some cases was extremely positive. Time magazine for example, ran an article claiming the campaign was audacious and funny :

While in one sense you could commend the advertiser here for listening to the opinion on the street as opposed to the mainstream news agenda, it shows a lack of strength in their own brand, that the ad was pulled and reworked so drastically. The decision they took to run the ad could hardly have been taken lightly, and the fact that it’s controversial is hardly something they would only have realised when the complaints rolled in. But what it looks like now is that the organisation that has one of the best and most famous ad campaigns ever (Got Milk – launched in 1993) let the social media conversation drown them out and dictate the strategy. It’s for this reason that social media killed the brand here – because it makes their initial strategy look half-baked and half-considered, as opposed to the fact that they launched a campaign that got complaints.

The future of social CRM has arrived

Lauren Fisher — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 17:43:51 +0000

For a while now there has been a real gap in the market for true social customer relationship management. While many companies are practising this through training up their customer service team in social media for example, there hasn’t been an accessible tool that allows companies to effectively run social CRM through apps. Salesforce showed some movement in this area, when they acquired Radian 6, but a new player on the market shows how b2c brands can effectively integrate social data from Facebook into their own applications that track customer data. Gateway for Facebook was just launched in full last week, and is already counting some great brands using the service, including Guess and Starwood Hotels.

For companies that really want to make the most of social tools available to learn more about their customers and change the way they interact with them, Gateway for Facebook is a great offering. Though it’s still early days for the app, with difficult features to get around such as the fact that you can only access the social graph of customers that have explicitly allowed the app ( a standard for Facebook), the future looks promising. Essentially through Gateway, you can combine your own customer data with the social data contained within Facebook, allowing you to build up entirely new profiles of your consumers.

Adapting real time

One of the biggest opportunities in social CRM is that companies can stay reactive and can change promotions or offers instantly, based on customer feedback or wider social trends. What Gateway allows you to do for example, is gain a new level of customer insight that is inherently social, reporting on data such as Likes and location. The power of this shouldn’t be underestimated by brands. We’ve seen social technologies affect marketing in this way to a certain extent. If a strategy isn’t working, you simply change it. No costly billboards that have already been printed, you simply adapt the strategy to more effectively meet the business needs. But now we can do this in a very real way, in the way businesses interact with their customers. Instead of something being determined from the start, through smart analysis of consumer interaction, that is affected through social channels, companies can more effectively meet consumer demands.

Of course, with an application like Gateway, it all depends on what you do with the data that will really bring your CRM to life. Through smart analytics you can access insights into your customers that have never been available before, and with this comes a new skillset required to really make the most of this data. You need someone that can read the data but also has an innate understanding of social media, to understand how these trends can affect your strategy or the way you’re interacting with customers. These ‘social analysts’ will become more and more important to companies in the future. if the full potential of social CRM is to be realised.

Is it what customers want?

As an overall industry, social CRM is progressing. The acquisition of Radian 6 by Salesforce showed that there was a real market for combining CRM/business lead tools with social data. What is still a relative unknown, is just how much customers want this approach. If they knew how much social data businesses already had on them, let alone what they could seen have, with the advent of tools like Gateway, they might not necessarily be very comfortable. This is where a certain amount of responsibility falls to the company. While you could use the social data combined with your CRM processes to go in for the hard sell or get overly familiar with your customers, you may be jumping the gun a bit and could risk putting your customers off. What consumers want at the moment is content and offers from brands that is relevant to them, but with a very real divide between ‘friends’ and ‘brands’. As social CRM develops, expectation will change and barriers will come down, but for now there is a certain amount of care needed in the approach by brands that practice social CRM.

Part of this strategy also includes an awareness that sometimes, social CRM might mean not saying or doing anything at all. With the more data that we gather on consumers, it’s tempting to jump in and start utilising this straight away. A large part of social CRM involves full analysis of the data, trends and conversation, before figuring out how your brand can effectively fit in. If you move to early, you risk executing a strategy that is based on half the information available to you and you could be making the wrong move. Building up intelligent profiles of your customers means spending time researching them and their social motivators online, before you then develop a strategy that makes the most of this.

10 case studies that prove the ROI of social media

Lauren Fisher — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 13:28:21 +0000

The question of whether or not social media drives ROI still plagues many marketers and brands. The issue is not always as straightforward as it seems, as there are multiple ways to measure the benefits of social media and it isn’t as simple as looking for a direct sales return at one end, with the social media imput at the other. Smart tracking and measuring is needed to fully capture the benefit of a social media campaign and while looking for direct ROI is one way to do it, there are other values to be measure from social media marketing. I’ve put together a list of case studies that prove the ROI of social media, both through direct monetary return, customer loyalty, repeat traffic and more. Viewing social media holistically to gain a better understanding of how it can work for you is more beneficial to any brand than looking for one single return. Remember that social media marketing is not the same as online advertising ; it’s not necessarily something that can be switched on and off to directly produce revenue.

Social media outperforms banner ads

An excellent way of ascertaining the value of social media is to look at how it performs compared to more established channels or advertising methods, such as banner ads. While you can’t compare this like-for-like on a purely cost basis, you can look at how both are actually performing for you in terms of the quality of traffic they drive to your site. In this case study from Ignite Social Media, they take one of their (unnamed) clients and compare a banner ad campaign firstly to a social competition, then a social game involving a sweepstake. In both cases the banner ad and social mechanic were driving traffic to the same website. In the case of the social contest, traffic driven to the site by the social game was 6.5x more effective in terms of cost per visitor than banner ads and drove 5.67x more visitors. More detailed findings can be accessed on the site. Importantly with this case study, the quality of traffic from the social media campaigns was found to be more effective than banner ads. So while it might seem like a good solution to buy in traffic via ads, it’s not necessarily going to provide long-lasting value for your brand.

Social media saved Cisco $100,000

Providing an alternative way of viewing the ROI from social media, this case study from Cisco shows how social technologies saved them over $100,000 on a product launch. Instead of looking at their traditional method for launching a product, which would have been a costly activity, they looked to social media instead, to do things in a slightly different way. While normally their product launches would involve flying in high profile execs alongside methods such as costly newspaper ads, for their new router they ran a launch that took place entirely online. They even turned to Second Life, staging a pre-launch concert in there. And while their online launch saved them money, it also allowed them to reach a wider audience, further extending the value of the campaign. In total, the online launch cost a sixth of their traditional product launches and produced better results. A great example to show how social media can be used to change the way a business typically operates, driving ROI where you might not expect it.

Old Spice put their money where their mouth is

To really see the value of a social media campaign and how it can drive ROI, it’s worthwhile taking a look at one of the most famous and successful social media campaigns so far : Old Spice. Through their campaign, which included sending personalised video messages to social media fans and celebrities, they’ve managed to gather some pretty impressive stats that show the money where the buzz is. The reach of the Old Spice campaign is not in doubt, but did it actually impact sales? According to the marketing agency behind the campaign, it did. Since the original campaign launched with ‘Mustafa’, sales increased by 27% year on year. But in the 3 months after the height of the campaign, sales were up by 55%, reaching 107% in the final month of the social media campaign. And of course, Old Spice is now the number 1 body wash brand for men. However you choose to look at the campaign, these figures stand up to show that a social media campaign, well executed, can drive significant ROI for your business.

Restaurant chooses closed social network

To show that social media can also drive ROI for small businesses, this restaurant is showing that social technologies can be used in different ways to drive customers. Houlihan’s is a restaurant chain in the U.S. which has around 100 restaurants, compared to their main competitor Applebees, which has over 2,000. With a small marketing budget but a lot of common sense, their marketing manager managed to drive sales directly from a private social network, run via Ning. The network was called ‘HQ’ and was launched in early 2008. By combining their social media campaign with email marketing, they managed to quickly build up 10,000 members of the network, allowing them to send exclusive discounts and promotions to customers. In one campaign that they ran for a Sex and the City promotion, they tracked, the restaurant estimated that “7,000 to 13,000 people heard about our newest promotion BECAUSE of an HQ member”. This shows the strength in running your own social network and how sometimes a private network may be the way to go, to offer people exclusivity and also encourage word of mouth.

Social media keeps the creme Brulee Man travelling

If you’re looking for a good example of social media ROI, then the Creme Brulee Man is a good place to look! The Creme Brulee Man is a food truck in the U.S. that keeps people up to date about its next location via Twitter. In this case, social media is actually keeping the business going, as it allows the owner to reach a new audience and alert people as to where he’s going to roll up next. This is a pretty good example of proving the value of social media, showing that it can actually support an entire business. In just over a year the truck’s Twitter account has gathered over 12,000 followers, which is an impressive number for such a small business with a relatively small geographic target.

Social media customers are more valuable

As well as looking at the direct revenue driven from social media channels, smart companies will be looking at the longer term impact of social media activity and just how valuable these customers are after the initial sale or contact point. A case study from CareOne is useful here. They introduced a new social customer care team, to use social technologies to reach out to current and prospective consumers. What they found was that customers that had come through one of these social touchpoints, filled out the customer consultation form at a higher rate than other customers, at 179%. They also completed their first payment through the company, at a higher rate of 732%. What this shows is that using social technologies can help you to qualify leads, but also drive more engaged traffic. The outcome of a personal contact through social media is that the customer will ultimately trust you more and will also be more invested in the company by the time they come to complete the sale, leading to an increased likelihood they will convert.

ROI from Facebook ads

Proving that ROI from paid social media activity also performs well, this case study looks specifically at the value driven from Facebook Ads. Vamplets is a small business that makes baby vampire dolls and they introduced Facebook ads as a new channel for driving revenue. Despite a fairly small Facebook ad budget of $250 per month, they’re generating an additional $1,000 in revenue, directly tracked to the ads themselves. This gives them a positive ROI of 300% and shows how cost-effective Facebook ads can be, particularly when you’re going out to a more unique or targeted audience.

Subway Slim Down Challenge

In another good example comparing social media to traditional forms of marketing, the Subway Slim Down Challenge has some impressive ROI figures. The case study released by Say It Social, shows how they used social technologies to raise awareness of the Slim Down Challenge and recruit speakers. The strategy included a social competition launched via the customised Facebook Page. This was part of a full marketing strategy for the campaign, but despite being active across a range of channels, they found that 71% of site traffic that went to the registration page, came directly from Facebook. This is an impressive case study in showing how social activity can stand up and outperform even established marketing channels such as TV and Newspaper ads, and marketing via websites within the network.

Reviews drive sales

it’s been widely discussed that opening up your products to reviews and even inviting negative reviews don’t necessarily impact negatively on your brand. By displaying both the good and the bad reviews you can help qualify out people that may not be suitable for your product but you also show that yours is a brand that can be trusted, as any issues people do have are clearly displayed, demystifying the purchasing process for brand new customers. An interesting case study from Cars.com shows that pages that had ratings and reviews introduced onto them had a 16% higher rate of conversion, and a 100% higher rate of traffic through to dealer’s sites. This shows the positive impact that social technologies can have when introduced onto your own site, to improve the purchase cycle.

Reducing customer service costs

Our final case study might be viewed somewhat negatively by some, as it looks at ROI from social media being directly driven by saving on staff costs. As more brands open up through social media however, they find the communities they nurture often begin to answer each other’s queries with regards to product questions etc.. In the case of InfusionSoft, they used social technologies to better inform their customers and keep them up to date. Whereas they previously would have had one customer service agent to 72 customers, through social media they were able to reduce this to 1 agent per 172 customers. Along with this the satisfaction rating also increased by 10%, which would no doubt lead to more repeat business for the company and more customer referrals. Though this might be a slightly alternative way of viewing ROI, it shows that social technologies can make real business savings, allowing money to be invested elsewhere, or in developing these technologies themselves.

5 brands using gamification well

Lauren Fisher — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 11:00:21 +0000

With all the buzz around gamification and how it will/should evolve for brands and users, I wanted to take a look at the brands that are using gamification mechanics to market their products and engage users, to good effect. Quite how gamification will work for brands is still largely unknown and we’re yet to see if it will really take off as they new social media strategy for brands, or whether it is more of a quirky gimmick that will ultimately lose its shine or risk annoying users. These brands show how gamification can be done well, as part of a full strategy to attract and keep consumers.

Buffalo Wild Wings & SVNGR

SVNGRS is an interesting player on the gamification scene, as it seems to be one of the most accessible platforms for brands that want to execute a gaming strategy to entertain their users. SVNGR works as a location service with a difference, where instead of simply checking in somewhere, you are presented with a challenge set by the business owner. This could be anything from ‘take a picture with our cup of coffee’ to ‘write the best joke on our wall’ – pretty much anything you decide that will be entertaining to your customers. The idea is that in return for completing challenges, customers are rewarded with a unique offer or discount. It hasn’t really hit the mainstream yet, at least outside of the U.S. , but a case study from Buffalo Wild Wings shows how it can be used to directly benefit your business.

They partnered up with SVNGR in January this year in what was the company’s first nation-wide promotion. They signed up all 730 of their restaurants to take part in the campaign with SCVNGR. The promotion lasted for 12 weeks and focused on ‘March Madness’, with challenges including taking a photo of someone in the opposing team’s jersey. Within 3 weeks of the campaign launching they had attracted 30,000 active players, reaching 184,000 by the end of the 12 week campaign. Crucially this campaign worked because the restaurant heavily involved their staff in the promotion, making sure they had played with SCVNGR themselves before the campaign started. It’s not unusual to hear stories of businesses running location-based promotions, only for the person serving you to have no idea what you’re talking about. BWW also kept it simple, using the gaming mechanics provided by SVNGR without trying to add too many additional metrics. In this case the numbers certainly speak for themselves and prove that adding a gaming layer doesn’t dissuade customers, but encourages active engagement.

Playboy Miss Social

When Playboy wanted to attract more young subscribers to the magazine, they decided to launch a gamification strategy alongside the service ‘Bunchball’, which integrates gaming features onto sites. They ran a promotion for ‘Miss Social’ which added a gaming layers onto the competition, centered around fans submitting their photo for the chance to be Miss Social, in a voting competition. The voting worked by being concentrated on a particular day, so instead of getting the most votes overall, the winner was determined as the one with the most votes overall. Now while voting competitions themselves may not be that revolutionary, Playboy were smart here by partnering with an organisaiton that knew gamification inside and out, to get the best results for the brand. Through the promotion. Playboy reported receiving a 60% improvement rate on revenues and they also grew their active users to 80,000 by the end of the promotion. They effectively doubled their consumer base, through gamification concepts that encouraged their users to be social and bring their own friends and followers to the site.

Green Giant & Farmville

Last year Green Giant showed an earlier example of how gamification can work for a brand, when they teamed up with Farmville. The promotion was interesting as it combined offline and online through Green Giant packaged goods. They selected certain Green Giant products to feature in the promotion, where you could peel off a special sticker that contained a unique code. You could then enter this code into Farmville to receive up to 15 Farm Cash, with a branded online voucher. This works slightly differently to other promotions we’ve seen within Farmville, as the incentive started off with purchasing the real-life product, instead of keeping the experience completely within Farmville. It’s a well targeted promotion as the Green Giant products so closely relate to the Farmville concept of growing produce and a great example of using offline tactics to drive online engagement, again through partnering with another company that knows gaming best.

Krave Krusader

Krave first experimented with gamification last year, when they launched a microsite where you could bid for certain prizes, building up points for social actions. Now they’re back and stepping up their gamification concept with the launch of a Facebook game and mobile app, backed by a £1.6 million ad campaign spanning online and offline. The Facebook game and soon to be launched mobile game revolves around a simple concept of playing against friends or on your own to catch the chocolate cereal. But they have also integrated this with on-pack promotions, featuring special codes that are linked to bonuses and hidden extras. The game also features rewards based on game play, for example unlocking new outfits to accessorise your Krave character in return for building up points. The Krave gaming concept is perfectly linked to their target audience, who will require quick entertainment online and a way to integrate the experience with friends. The game works well because it’s easily accessible to everyone, but Krave fans and loyal gamers get even more out of the experience, encouraging more investment with the brand.

Nike gamify running

Showing how gamification can integrated seamlessy with the real world and stay completely focused on your brand, Nike offer a good example with their Nike+ tag running app. Here they link running directly with social gaming as users who have downloaded the app are then entered into a game of tag, where you have to tag other users and keep on running to avoid being ‘it’. If you run the shortest distance among the people in your game, then you’re it. So the incentive of course is to keep on running! The app comes amidst a longer term strategy of gaming for Nike, as they have developed other apps and sites that link running directly to gamification. What they’ve done that works so well is take something that people can find challenging or hard to get motivated for, and offered a direct incentive, whether this is social or through building up rewards and trophies in return for challenges met. Nike is an excellent company to look to for how gamification can be used to directly reward consumers with a more tangible concept, as opposed to randomly attributing points and rewards that aren’t seen as something to strive for.

Monetising social media – what’s here and what’s coming

Lauren Fisher — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 07:53:32 +0000

If there’s one thing that every single brand asks when they run a social media campaign, it’s ‘how can I generate ROI?’ While in the earlier days of social media, users were very closed off to the idea of being sold to, this is beginning to change. At the start we were busy getting our own heads around how social networks could benefit us, without brands interfering and trying to sell to us. Now however, the brands have grown up and know how to use social media to entertain their customers, and users are becoming accustomed to the fact that there are advantages to following brands online, directly linked to commerce. With this shift in behaviour from both parties, there are some huge opportunities for brands to monetize their social media efforts, beyond simply adding a shopping cart to their Facebook Page.

Referral-Based Social Commerce

While Groupon has successfully introduced the idea of group buying, the referral system currently only works for promotions and discounts, which remain ‘locked’ until enough people have registered. But the next stage for this is in referral-based commerce, where the user is directly rewarded for referring people through to the purchase points. BE Broadband In the UK experimented with this earlier in the year with their ‘spread the Love campaign’. Here they introduced a one-off Twitter promotion that allowed people to get discounts off their broadband based on how many people they referred to the site through Twitter :

This isn’t really something that brands are introducing on a wider scale yet, but it’s an exciting opportunity that will begin to be utilized, that more importantly can be integrated into your website or Facebook Page. At either of these points, the user is just one click away from accessing their entire online community that could be important potential customers that are even more valuable as they can be driven by trusted user recommendations. Brands can capitalize on this by integrating the option to refer products to friends, building up a social currency on the site that can be redeemed against offers.

Just as social media has lead to everyone becoming mini-publishers in their own right, constantly creating and sharing content, the same can apply for commerce with the idea of everyone becoming ‘social sellers’. The difficulty comes of course in how this impacts on the social experience for users, and this is where I believe the brand has a level of responsibility in how the social referral system can be run. For example this could only allow the user to share the product with friends that have certain interests, so they know the content will be relevant, or it can be limited to a certain number of friends per product, to reduce spamming.

Mobile Apps

Now while mobile apps may not sound that revolutionary when it comes to monetizing social media activity, this is an area that many brands continue to ignore, in spite of the significant user demand. Smartphone usage is on the up, and this means more people spending time on their phones while in queues, on the train, and passing the time when you would have had nothing to do otherwise. Essentially this means that brands have a chance to use what would previously have been ‘dead’ time – a point at which you had no contact with your consumers and the only chance you had to sell to them may have been through one of a hundred generic posters.

But now people want to use this time on their mobiles, and more importantly, they want to use it to buy things. A recent report from Demandware shows that while 23% of consumers have downloaded a shopping app, with 50% planning on downloading one, only 12% of retailers are actually offering this. This is a huge gap in the supply and demand of mobile-based commerce that brands should be taking advantage of. But as well as simply offering a mobile app in the same vein as the experience of buying on your site, there are ways that brands can begin to change the mobile shopping experience overall, in reflection of the fact that while a transaction may be completed within a mobile app, that might not necessarily be the place that the user journey started. Often you will find that the user first saw the product in store, but might complete the purchase within an app.

Brands can start to make this really clever, by introducing scanning of products in store that can make up your mobile shopping cart in a new way. Imagine if you could go around scanning everything you saw in a store that you liked, and then access this information retrospectively to see the latest prices and availability, and also products that are similar to this. Here brands can extend the store experience even after you’ve left the store itself and use this as a continual point of engagement with the consumer, to encourage them back or to complete the purchase through the app. When looking at how to maximise mobile, or app-based commerce, brands should look at ways to utilise the actual device itself to make the experience more social and use new functionality within the device to transform the consumer experience.

If you’re looking for inspiration in this are, Best Buy is a great example of a company utisiling mobile commerce apps, beyond simple catalogue models. The recent rollout of the shopkick app , which includes Best Buy as a retailer, integrates location features including rewards for consumers for entering into stores. Best Buy are getting in on this earlier, but it represents a much wider opportunity for businesses, as Shopkick are currently looking for 1,000 business across 10 cities to take part in the initiative :

The Gamification of Commerce

Gamification is one of the next big things in social media, as brands find ways to introduce points, levels, badges and more to entertain their followers and create more time spent with the brand itself. But at the moment, this concept is being misunderstood by many brands, who introduce gamification into their site or social profiles, with no real consideration as to what motivates the user to play in the first place. To really engage with gaming concepts, the user has to have something to strive for, there has to be a reason for playing, beyond just putting a badge there for the sake of it. And this is where commerce can come in. I’d like to see brands start using gaming concepts, where relevant, to unlock certain products on the site that can’t be attained anywhere else.

This has to be carried out carefully of course. Bring people to a site where they have to play a game or complete a challenge to buy any of your products and you’ll probably find they’ll leave pretty quickly. But this can be made part of the wider social experience. Say for example you’re announcing a new t-shirt design to the fans on your Facebook Page. Instead of making this available to all, this can be made into a limited edition that can only be accessed by completing a task that actually relates to the product itself. For example you can add a treasure hunt element. Suddenly the user has something to obtain and strive for. You’re engaging your existing fans so you know you’re talking to the right audience and not putting off first-time visitors to your site and you’re also creating an additional level of engagement with your brand, all within the context of playing a game and a positive user experience.

And the good news for brands is that the demand for gamification is there. A recent study has just been released that shows half of the online population in the U.S. are already playing social games during the working day, with discounts being cited as the most compelling reason for completing a social challenge. This shows gamification moving in the same direction as social media overall. While it initially may not have been a space for brands, people are opening up to corporate presence in social gaming and social challenges, provided there is a very real reason for doing this. This is exciting news for those interested in monetising their activity in social media and using new social technologies to turn a fan into a customer.

Of course one of the biggest barriers to gamification for brands, is the technology needed to implement it on your site. This is where services such as Badgeville come in handy. They offer a gamification service for sites, and an endorsement of the future of gamification comes perhaps in the form of a recent round of funding Badgeville completed, to the tune of $2.5 million

Socialise the Customer Experience

It won’t be long until the idea of the same homepage being displayed for everyone seems completely archaic. While brands can certainly choose to show the same products to all of their users, they risk ignoring the huge amount of information and data available on their customers that will enable them to personalise the experience and increase the likelihood of a site visit turning into a sale. It’s all about socializing the experience someone has with your brand, whether this is on your site or your social profile.

At the moment the biggest opportunity here is Facebook Connect, which many brands are already using on their site to change the information that’s shown, for example showing you products that friends have Liked, or those that are relevant to you based on the information within your profile. The most impressive use of Facebook Connect within a retail site surely comes from Levis, who have developed a sophisticated shopping experience that allows you to bring friends into the purchasing journey in an impressive way, for example showing products that they also Like :

But there is a huge opportunity for brands to take this to another level. Our entire social activity isn’t contained within a Facebook profile alone, and there’s an entire social make-up of consumers that can be used to change the way you do business. In any given day I will check out my Facebook profile, tweet, blog, share photos on Instagram and probably check in on Facebook. All of this information is invaluable to brands and can be used to tell me about products I didn’t even know I wanted. Imagine if I can land on a site and see a suggestion of tickets I should buy to a concert near me because I checked into a certain location and shared a link to a similar song on Twitter. This completely personalises the experience in a whole new way.

The opportunity for brands here is to take the information I’m sharing it and present it back to me in a way that actually saves me a job. I obviously don’t want to hear about a concert before it’s too late, or spend time endlessly searching for the exact thing I want or need. So if a brand can tell me what I want before I know it myself, I’m more likely to convert and become a loyal follower of them online. Now of course this may be a long way off because it relies on users giving access to that information, but the technology can begin to be introduced by brands on an opt-in basis. ‘Do you want to shop with us the normal way, or the really, really cool way?’

Brands turn to local social media marketing for success

Lauren Fisher — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 08:29:22 +0000

We previously wrote about Facebook’s assertion that localised marketing was the way to success for brands, and it seems like that trend is continuing. More brands are focusing on local content, local audiences and localised platforms to execute their social media strategy. The ability for brands to choose local platforms is expanding as social technologies develop to include niche targeting options, allowing you to reach smaller audiences with more targeted and relevant content. The payoff for brands is significant – though you have to invest time in localised strategies that differ for each market, the end result is that you build a more engaged audience and community for your brand, and you create cut-through for your audience that can relate to the content in a real way.

Large brands want local ads

According to a recent survey of large ad agencies, 90% had clients that had asked for ads which are geographically targeted. This shows that local advertising isn’t just in the domain of small brands, but that larger brands are interested in breaking down their overall ad strategy to suit the needs of individual audiences that have particular geographical needs :

What’s even more telling, perhaps, is the rate at which this increase in geographically targeted ads is growing. Of the 10 agencies in the survey, over half said that the request for geographically targeted ads had risen by double digits based on the previous year. Localised marketing and advertising is growing quickly as a market, and the good news for brands is that the technologies are there to meet the growing need amongst consumers.

Learn from Ben and Jerrys

Showing the importance of a localised strategy on Facebook for a national brand, Ben and Jerrys are providing an excellent ‘how-to’ for brands. A quick look at their search results on Facebook shows consistent Facebook Pages across different markets, as opposed to one main Page that is set up to serve all markets :

Going into their Pages shows that the content is also localised, and executed in a good way. They recently ran a ‘deserted flavours’ promotion, where you could vote for which flavour you wanted back. Though the promotion was run across the separate Pages for UK & Ireland, the updates on the Irish Page kept this targeted for the Irish market :

This shows how individual markets can form part of an overall marketing strategy, while keeping it targeted for their local market. Ben and Jerrys kept the same promotion running across both pages, but the content (arguably the thing that matters most) is localised and relevant, not just a case of cutting out the word ‘England’ and replacing with ‘Ireland’. This shows an example of how a global brand can operate at a national level, but this is now being taken even further by brands that want to target hyperlocal markets.

Opportunities in mobile

For brands that really want to execute a local, or hyperlocal social media strategy, the answer lies in mobile. The opportunities in mobile social networking are huge, with many brands using Instagram for example, to connect with local audiences and upload localised content. To put this into context, local advertising via mobile is expected to make up 70% of overall mobile ad spend in 2011, showing the importance of this for brands. Though there are excellent niche targeting options available via social networks, such as geotargeting Facebook Page updates, mobile needs to factor into the local strategy for brands more. The nature of mobile or smartphone usage is that you can be much more reactive to localised content, such as offers in your local restaurant. The redemption method is also simple, with many promotions simply requiring you to present your mobile at a store to avail of an offer.

The fact is that the more content we consume online, the more we want niche, targeted content. Though this may prove to be a more lengthy strategy for brands, as it means creating entirely new content for markets, whether on a national or regional basis, the end result will be worth it. As much as we live our lives online, we still walk past shops, meet up with friends, read local news. A brand’s content or social media strategy should be a reflection of this, using increasingly sophisticated social technologies to reach these consumers in new ways.

The next phase in social media : real life gamification

Lauren Fisher — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 12:11:02 +0000

Fresh out of Brazil comes a new Facebook App that turns your relationship status into a game. The app has been developed by the toothpaste brand ‘Close Up Toothpaste’ and is part of a series of campaigns to encourage people to get up close in new ways. For the first app they’ve turned their attention to the growing concept of gamification, which many brands are starting to explore. To celebrate people getting up close and personal on Facebook, they’ve developed the ‘Get Closer’ app, which reveals surprise badges to people that take part who are in relationships. Badges are rewarded based on tasks such as tagging each other in photos, or different badges being awarded based on how long you’ve been in a relationship for :

The app can be accessed via the Get Closer app link, or through the Close Up fanpage

Real life gamification

What this app shows us is perhaps the next step in gamification – combining your real life with social rewards. It’s an interesting concept by Close Up, as it suggests that your real life actions will be influenced in a way that they wouldn’t before. The rewards in the Get Closer app are surprises, so in this instance you’re not incentivised to do things differently, as the rewards are unlocked through actions you naturally take. I.e. the app doesn’t say ‘tag both of you in 10 photos for your chance to get x’. But we have seen gamification slowly moving into this real life concept, and away from actions you take purely online. But the real life gamification concept is starting to emerge more, with specialist apps such as SCVNGR, rewarding people in shops, restaurants and local businesses, based on challenges set by the owner. As their tagline says, it is ‘a game about doing challenges at places’. The app may not have hit the mainstream just yet, but it has a loyal following, with fans completing tasks such as making a piece of art out the tinfoil on their lunch :

Coca Cola’s summer of challenges

Showing that this concept is starting to emerge, Coca-Cola have recently partnered up with SCVNGR to offer their fans branded gifts and goodies based on certain tasks they complete. The campaign is primarily targeted at teens, which up until now have been a small market for location services. The launch of Facebook Places helped to change that of course, but this campaign will be a test of just how far people are willing to go in order to get something free. The ‘happiness in numbers’ campaign helps to socialise gamification, as the challenges are based around getting groups of friends together and posting pictures. An example challenge is shown below

This is an area that’s really likely to explode for brands, as they look to get in on the gamification concept, but link this very much to real life, as opposed to arbitrary actions taken online, that seem to be points-based for the sake of it. Real-life challenges such as Coca Cola’s actually provide something extra for you and your friends to do – it socialises the experience and the benefit for the brand is huge, as you have people engaging with you on a completely new level. The question is of course, how happy are we for our lives to be ‘gamed’ ? Though it’s something we have control over, this concept can likely only be taken so far, unless there is a significant reward in place, or the challenges actually relate in some way to the brand or product in question.

The clickthrough still matters most. We’re all screwed.

Lauren Fisher — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 21:00:41 +0000

When I found an article on emarketer about ‘The Seven Performance Metrics That Matter Most’, I was interested to look at which are the current metrics that are most important to brands, and how they might have changed over the months or years. I was slightly disappointed when I found that, among the seven measurement metrics that brands use the most, clickthroughs was at number 1 with a huge 58.7% -more than all the other metrics combined. For context this article wasn’t looking specifically at social media metrics, but digital marketing overall, yet I was still surprised that clickthroughs ranked so highly when it comes to measuring the success of campaigns. The problem with the clickthrough is that it’s a carryover from an era of digital marketing when that was pretty much all we could measure – in the same way that unique visits is the default web measurement. The graph below shows the total 7 metrics brand use when measuring digital campaigns :

Way down the bottom of the chart is ‘brand lift or awareness’, even alongside metrics such as ‘requests for information’. Something has surely gone wrong when you consider measuring a click, more important than measuring people that are actually interested in finding out more about your brand and services. The temptation of course, lies in the fact that clickthroughs are so easy to measure and so much more easy to manipulate. If you’re not getting quite enough clickthroughs, throw some more money at banner ads or Google ads. Get more clickthroughs, and get a higher (perceived) success.

An outdated metric

The problem with the clickthrough rate is that while it may have been an accepted metric when it was pretty much the only thing we had to go on, now it falls way short of what we’re actually capable of reporting on for campaign success. It also ignores the way in which user behaviour has developed online. While our online activity consisted of clicking from site to site to get the next bit of information or distraction, now we have our more permanent online homes, in the shape of social networks. And while we may be clicking within them, we’re not necessarily clicking out of them. If the measure of your success is defined by the click, then everything you do within your campaign will be designed with achieving this. You’ll focus on how to get people to click out of what they’re doing and onto your site, without looking at how you can engage with them within that platform.

Coca Cola look to fans

Looking at the conundrum of how valuable fans are as a form of measurement, Coca Cola claim that fans provide the answer in determining social media success. When studying the purchase intent of Facebook fans vs non-fans, they found that fans were ten times more likely to purchase or consume the product. Coca Cola are known for their sophisticated use of social media and measurement, and this provides an interesting case study for brands who are looking at alternative ways of measuring the success of campaigns and social media engagement. In their measurement of activity they also look at the impact that sharing has, which is why they dedicate time and money on creating content that will engage their fans and encourage them to share. Here the focus is not on the click through at all. It’s not about encouraging fans to come to their site or even their Facebook Page. They have their eyes on the larger prize – the community of their fans. As they state, their 30 million fans are networked to 585 million people. This is a bigger aim for them than a single clickthrough.

The other issue with the clickthrough is that it ignores the benefits of social media, and what can happen when you decide to keep people within that platform. When you take someone through to your site, they are out of the social circle. They’re less likely to share content with their friends, which means you’re immediately saying goodbye to that extended community you could reach, if you had focused on keeping people within the place they’re started, and where their friends are hanging out.

It works both ways

As I mentioned at the start, this survey was not just carried out in the context of social media, so you can look at some of these clickthrough metrics as applying to banner ads for example, where you could argue the clickthrough to be a likely indicator of success. But it also applies to wider digital marketing, and also to your own website. Looking at a clickthrough at all, ignores the function of the internet as it is now. It’s not all about getting from one destination to another destination, but getting to the place where we want to hang out, where we can be guaranteed good content. Think how much time you spend on one site for example, clicking through similar articles, or browsing through endless videos as you can’t deny yourself just one more video before you switch off. If you’ve focused your strategy on creating content, then you’re going to increase the chances of being found. It might not be a clickthrough, but a view is more valuable than this and ultimately more beneficial to your brand. If you’re applying the same principle to your own site – creating and housing valuable content, then you can ignore any clickthroughs to your social profiles for example, and turn your attention to the other 6, more important metrics such as the ROI of your activity and uplift in brand awareness.

The survey by emarketer may have been predominantly concerned with online advertisers, but this still presents a skewed thinking. The fact is that people are clicking on ads less and less. They are by no means redundant, but they are competing for our time more than ever among content shared by friends. Even though clickthrough may seem like the only available metric for online advertising, it’s not necessarily the right one. Your ad doesn’t even need to be about getting people to click at all, but can be about contributing to more important factors such as brand awareness or sentiment towards the brand. Online advertising has evolved to become more social, therefore the metrics that accompany it should grow too.

If we keep looking to the clickthrough as the ultimate measure of success, then we’re all screwed. It’s going to result in fruitless campaigns that keep focusing on how to get people out of one place and into another, in a frantic effort to ‘keep’ the user. But when you have so many other ways of engaging them or even creating repeat contact points, such as subscriptions on Youtube, look to these to shape your campaign and create lasting value. What you’re looking for doesn’t necessarily lie in the click.

Intel launches the most interactive Youtube experience ever

Lauren Fisher — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 17:20:23 +0000

We previously wrote about Intel’s cool video called ‘The Chase’, which used different well known websites to make up the story. Well now they’re back with something even better, with an interactive Youtube video experience called ‘The Escape’. It works by bringing the user completely into the story, with the option to connect with Facebook to further personalise the video and bring your friends in to help you save the femme fatale. You can access the full video experience here, or check out the trailer below :

This is a Youtube experience quite unlike any other, as they have turned the takeover into a complete gaming experience, adding in user interaction along the way such as firing at assailants, combining keys to unlock a door and tonnes of other cool content that we’ll let you discover for yourself. This is certainly the most complex Youtube takeover I’ve come across, and the most engaging, interactive experience offered to the user. One downside is that the channel is incredibly slow to load and seems to buffer quite a lot during gameplay. This is to be expected with something of this scale and as it’s so newly launched you would expect them to iron out these few bugs over the next few days. Commenting on the campaign, Stephanie Gan from advertising and digital at Intel Asia Pacific says “We wanted to connect with consumers in a personal, engaging and interactive way while demonstrating the visual capabilities of the 2nd Generation Intel Core processor family. While YouTube offered the perfect stage for creating this experience, it was important to make some of the interactions social with Facebook integration. Just as Intel’s 2nd Generation Core processors transform your computing experience, this campaign will transform the way you look at the YouTube platform. You’ve never seen YouTube quite like this,” she added.

If you’re unable to view the video, check out a sample screen below that shows this in action :

How to manage social media in a crisis

Lauren Fisher — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 13:39:23 +0000

As more and more case studies and ‘how not to do’s’ emerge, more companies are beginning to realise the importance of social media in a crisis. I recently spoke at a seminar on crisis communications, and every single presenter, whether from a traditional background, b2c brand, state body, ended by stating the importance of using social media when your company faces a crisis. It’s certainly encouraging that so many practitioners are advocating the use of social media beforehand, instead of waiting to figure it out when the crisis hits, but there still seems to be confusion over how you can effectively use social media tools and platforms to effectively communicate, or control a crisis. Based on first hand experience and an awareness of other case studies in this space, I wanted to provide some best practice guidelines for using social media in a crisis.

Own your front Page

What I mean here, is owning your own front Page in Google, as this is steadily going to become your single biggest asset during a crisis. While a large portion of people will go straight to a company’s Facebook Page or Twitter account to find out more information during a crisis, or level their criticism, Google will still be the main destination for people looking for more information in a crisis. You want to help ensure that when people search for your brand name, it’s your results they’re finding on the homepage, which can take them directly through to the correct source of information. This can be done in 2 ways. Firstly, you need to ensure you have built up a good social media-SEO practice beforehand, so that when you type in your brand term into Google, you’re likely to see results for your company blog, Facebook Page, Youtube videos etc.. as well as your own site. This of course is something that has to be implemented before the crisis itself, and represents a good example of pre-empting a crisis.

The second way that you can do this, is by reaching out to your network and ensuring the right information is spread. So if you have a press release, make sure you’re sending it out to online newswires, bloggers etc.. and that you have community representatives that are putting information in the right place. In the midst of a crisis, you want to make sure people get to the right information quickly, and Google is the place to do that.

Who’s managing your social media?

This might sound fairly simple, but whether you’re a small or a large organisation, you need to have a clear plan in place for who is managing your social media channels during a crisis. This is the time when you’re going to be at your most frantic and all the practices you’ve put into place up until now might be thrown out the window. So you may have put the latest update on your Facebook Page and blog, but has your Twitter account been left empty because everyone thought someone else was managing it? It’s also incredibly important that you give the ownership of social media preferably to one person during this time, or a team of people who are in close communication (preferably in the same room). If you’re in the midst of a large crisis, you could face a large amount of content and conversations online. You want to make sure that people know the history of what’s been discussed earlier that morning or the day before, so you’re not repeating yourself or talking to people that were engaging yesterday, as if you’ve never spoken to them before. You could then find yourself with a whole other crisis on your hands if you get this wrong!

Streamlined Communications

You might find that the dissemination of information during your organisation follows a good process, with a press statement and release being issued quickly and uploaded to your site, so people can access the latest information. But you may not have considered how the information within a press release can fit into different social channels, with very practical problems such as the fact that you only have 140 characters within a tweet to get the information across. The person in charge of this channel may have been sent the presss release, but have they been told the most important line, or what mustn’t be lifted on its own so as to appear out of context? Have they even been provided with a link that they include, to send people to the information online? You’d be surprised at how difficult this can be to get sometimes.

Consistency of information is absolutely paramount during a crisis and the communications team that’s responsible for getting the information into the public must also be sitting next to the person in charge of the social channels, advising on what information to include, and even how the content can be reworked to fit into a more personal, approachable tone on Facebook. People will want a little bit more than a headline lifted from a press release. The followup questions must also be considered. Have you told them what they can/can’t say and how to handle responses to the latest update shared?

Spread the information among employees

When you’re in the middle of a crisis you could discover that the most important online representative for your company might not necessarily sit where you’d expect them to in your organisation. Far too often the way that communication is spread to employees during an organisation is too slow, with many finding out the latest update at the same time as everyone else, through the news or front page headlines. What companies often don’t consider is the fact that they could have someone that sits on the bottom floor of the building, that is incredibly influential through their own social media channels, and could be facing questions of their own from their own followers, that they’re not able to answer. This can reflect incredibly poorly on a company, as it shows you haven’t kept your employees informed, so they’re forced to say nothing or give a generic answer. During a crisis, the information the organisation has is the most important currency and you should ensure you have a system in place to get everyone the information that they need. I know an example of a community manager who found out about a particular company crisis on the Facebook Page he was managing, while he was in the middle of a normal working day. How can they keep their community informed when they’re not even informed themselves?

When to say nothing

Many companies are put into a difficult position when they’re facing a crisis, in that they could find a huge amount of commments or tweets to deal with, many of which are likely to be factually incorrect, could implicate innocent people or are purely trying to stir it up a little bit more. It’s important to remember that you don’t always have to reply to every single comment. If someone has left a comment with an incorrect fact, I would always recommend that you correct them, nicely and quickly, so that it doesn’t start to spread around even more. But there are certainly cases when you don’t have to say anything at all. If you’re engaging with someone that is purely there to make trouble, with nonsensical comments, you could find yourself on an endless trail of back and forth that leads nowhere.

You’re never going to have the last say, so you should focus your attention on the comments that are genuinely related to the crisis at hand. The worst thing of course is saying nothing at all, so if you’re putting up regular updates, you will probably find that your own community will begin to answer others and engage with users they might not even know, which is a much more preferable situation than getting dragged into endless debates that detract from the original issue (a la Nestle of course).

Know the influencers

If you’re good at getting your information out quickly, you will hopefully find that the blog coverage around the crisis contains the right information. But you will also see that many bloggers are excellent at finding alternative sources and facts that could corroborate your statement. This coverage is often what people will pay attention to most, as if an influential blogger is covering it for example, they’re going to have an instant community that will begin spreading their story. While you should of course try and make contact with relevant bloggers to give them the information they deserve, you may find it’s too little too late. Regardless of whether you’re in a crisis or not, you should build up relationships with bloggers, tweeters, active community members that are influential within their area, as you could find these relationships invaluable when you’re in a crisis. You’re going to find it a lot easier to get the right information to the right people in a crisis, if you have invested time with them beforehand. This information should also be tailored. Instead of just sending them the standard press release, why not send them an introductory paragraph that tells them the key facts you’d know they want, if they have a slant towards business, lifestyle etc.. Of course you can’t control this, but you can help ensure the right information is being circulated and you’re giving the assets to people that deserve them.

Monitor

This is perhaps the most important thing to remember when acting in a crisis, as well as beforehand. If you’re just endlessly issuing press statements without reacting to the conversation that’s happening online, you risk ignoring the key issues and exacerbating the issue even further, if you keep ignoring what people actually want to know. By using free or paid measurement tools (check out our handy list here) you should monitor the online conversation throughout and importantly react to this. You might assume for example that people want to know how your site was hacked (for example), when actually the online conversation could factor more around something like how they can backup their information. You can access all this information instantly online, and smart companies will be reactive to this and tailor their communications to ensure they’re getting to the issues that people actually want to know about.

Co-ordinate local channels

If you’re a large organisation, you might assume that the criticism or questions surrounding the crisis are going to happen purely on your own Facebook Page. But you will find that people will go to any source they can to discuss the issue or try and find out more information, so you need to have streamlined communication with all the Pages, accounts, blogs within your business. As well as reaching out to localised Pages, who might be in no way involved in the crisis happening locally to you, but will no doubt be implicated and will face some questions they need to answer. You need to think about all the online assets you have and have planned a communication process beforehand, to ensure the information is getting to the right people, with clear instructions on how to handle certain issues, or where to send people to find out more. Consider this for your sister brands as well. They might have nothing to do with the crisis, but if they share a brand name, they will almost definitely have their own crisis management to handle. Again, it’s about the information that you have and making this widely available.