March 10th, 2010
by Brian Hobzek

Talking about social media and business often feels like trying to hit a moving target. At first MySpace was just for social connections and Facebook was a way to connect with college communities. LinkedIn became the de facto social networking tool for business and then Twitter for broadcasting brief thoughts. Now we find (etc.) on corporate websites, movie posters, and email signatures. These buttons have become ubiquitous for marketing campaigns and, more recently, customer service and customer feedback.

The influx of social networking into marketing practice has changed how we think about web analytics and business intelligence. For a long time, analytics were concerned primarily with visitors, pageviews, and stickiness (how long a visitor remained on a site). More recently, the focus is on click-throughs and conversion rates—and now behavior-based analytics track influencers and analyze how we interact with people in our social networks. Clearly, web communities allow each of us to influence other people through what we say, what we buy, and what we recommend. Companies are struggling to balance the importance of mining customer and social network data with the risk of jeopardizing the apparently organic experience that spawns the growth of social communities.

Just last week, web analytics giant Omniture (now owned by Adobe) announced an expanded partnership with Facebook that will help companies monitor their marketing return on investment while targeting communities within Facebook (especially notable as we see Google and Salesforce.com edging into social media spaces). It will be interesting to see how this impacts the online marketing space longer term. Does a marketing dollar spent to advertise in social networking have the same impact as a marketing dollar spent on search? I believe both search and social networking will stay important to marketers in the long run.

For my work, this announcement raises a couple of questions: Will it force other networks or platforms to align themselves with analytics tools? I would not be surprised to see an announcement between Twitter and perhaps Webtrends. How will this increased emphasis on advertising and marketing impact the users of Facebook? It will be exciting to see how the new deal plays out, both for web analytics and for Facebook as a network.

What do you think? What does this partnership mean for businesses marketing through social media? What does it mean to you the consumer of social media networks? Are you excited or apprehensive?

tags: business intelligence, social media

February 12th, 2010
by Corey Mahoney

Now that the initial duststorm has settled on Buzz, we (along with our clients) are starting to wonder: what will this mean for us? Will Buzz be a new channel for engaging with customers or a set of personal and semi-closed conversations? Will it be a boon for marketers or a disaster for privacy concerns?

Mostly, let’s try to answer one crucial question: if you’re an enterprise marketer, do you need to add another social media channel to your plate?

My answer, in several flavors:

• Not yet. Buzz is, like Facebook, set up for most interactions to happen between individuals (it’s linked to Gmail accounts for now) rather than between brands and individuals directly. Unlike Facebook, though, there is no separate entity (‘Pages’) for brands. Building your professional network on Buzz makes sense, but your brand may not need to jump in just yet. In all likelihood, Google intends for brands to participate by buying Google advertising real estate rather than behaving like users.
• No…but you need to pay attention to your other channels. Buzz aggregates RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, and photo sites. Shared Google Reader items will suddenly be easier to converse about and re-tweets by Buzz users may start semi-closed comment threads. Your content will—if it’s worth it—be able to reach your readers’ networks more effectively than before. If you’re going to work on getting up to speed in response to Buzz, focus that energy on your content: make it valuable, worth sharing, and well-done.
• Yes, for some things. By default, Buzz makes it publicly visible who you follow and who follows you. This has some major security and privacy implications (which have been covered elsewhere), but for marketers it means another way to discover circles of influence. Identifying the public profiles of major influencers could provide wonderful insights into who they’re engaging with on a more reciprocal level than Twitter offers.

But at this point, within a week of Buzz’s launch, it’s hard to say how this will affect the social media landscape. What do you think? Will this be an extension of email and RSS, a new way of seeing the old tweets, or a more fundamental shift? What do you hope to see happen as Buzz settles into people’s lives and inboxes?

tags: customer engagement, social media

January 29th, 2010
by Corey Mahoney

Every year much of the pre-Super Bowl buzz is about the ads, and this year is no different. Some weeks ago, Pepsi made a splash (at least on the marketing blogs) by announcing they’d be forgoing the big ad spots to invest $20 million in social media campaigns. Pepsi’s caused a stir just by making the announcement—which won’t be true for the second, third, and forth companies to forswear the Super Bowl. It’s entirely possible that this move is just as much a PR gesture as a genuine bet on social media.

It will be interesting to watch how Pepsi uses that $20 million, and whether it works for them. So far, they’re using it to launch the Refresh Project, which will crowdsource the question of where Pepsi should donate the cash. Of course, corporate philanthropy is worth cheering for, but it’ll also be interesting to see if it works to strengthen Pepsi’s brand—and sales.

This week Intel announced they’d be taking a different tack by sponsoring the CBS post-game show and debuting two new commercials during the game. This set of choices, at first glance, seems almost backwards—with consumer giant Pepsi moving away from broadcast advertising and technology supplier Intel looking to reach a broader general audience.

But Intel knows social media. Their social computing guidelines are often cited as an example of best-practices policy, and they have an active family of blogs and twitter presences that are generally well-regarded. Because Intel knows social media, Intel’s marketers know that one of the most successful uses of video-sharing tools like YouTube is to serve as another channel for distributing popular TV ads (especially if they’re funny, which Intel hopes they will be). Their Super Bowl presence may be a counter-intuitive social media move, if they’re hoping it will spur online discussion, sharing, and viewership.

Which move do you think will work better? Can social media and traditional advertising work together?

tags: advertising, social media

January 4th, 2010
by Corey Mahoney

Last weekend, as I wandered through the farmer’s market, I discovered a storefront I’d never been inside before. Just inside the door was a gorgeous display; of course, I pulled out my phone to take a picture. As soon as I got the picture, a man rushed over to me and asked me—brusquely, but politely—to please ask before taking pictures. “Of course!” I said, “I can delete it right away! So sorry.” He assured me that I needn’t delete it and explained they’d had trouble with people copying some of the designs for sale. I asked for a business card, apologized for my thoughtlessness, and left (with permission to post the picture).

The experience of being personally chided for the very possibility that I might steal designs without giving credit reminded me of the recent etiquette and culture debates I’ve seen on Tumblr, Twitter, and Delicious (the 3 networks I’m most active in personally). It feels like everyone is worried about attribution. As things get easier to pass around and pass along, our reputations (as organizations and individuals) depend on what we share as much as what we create.

Interestingly, this can also offer a new model of customer engagement. Newsweek, for instance, has a Tumblr blog that links to Newsweek and external content, provides an easy way for readers to share Newsweek articles, and—last but not least—enables Newsweek to reblog readers’ best content and suggestions. On websites and traditional blogs (like this one), user-generated content is often relegated to the wilds of comment sections or discussion boards. Newsweek’s Tumblr interacts with users as equals (while maintaining order through careful curation). Suddenly, an organization that seemed faceless and one-sided is a potential reader or partner in conversation; to me, this seems like the very heart of customer engagement.

Pop quiz:

• What kind of attribution do you expect from your network?
• What makes you trust re-tweets (RT), reblogs, or links? What makes something worth passing along?
• How do you think Twitter’s new RT feature (currently in limited rollout) will affect attribution and engagement?

tags: customer communities, customer engagement, social media

November 2nd, 2009
by Corey Mahoney

In about a month, the FTC’s new Guides for using endorsements and testimonials in advertising will go into effect (read the press release or the full text in PDF). It can be easy to get sidetracked by a narrow understanding of endorsements, but these guidelines have implications for all kinds of marketers.

So, what’s the big deal? How will this affect customer engagement marketers?

(Keep in mind: we’re not lawyers, and we’re not giving you legal advice.)

• The new Guides throw out the old loophole that let advertisers get away with putting a cursory disclaimer next to an exaggerated claim (i.e. “Results not typical”). They stress that one way to avoid implying typicality is by providing the details of the situation—we think the best way to do that is a thorough, detailed case study!
• The revisions explicitly address new and social media, stressing that “consumers’ willingness to trust social media depends on the ability of those media to retain their credibility as reliable sources of information” (see page 11). Arguing for transparency and honesty, they make clear that both advertisers and endorsers can be liable for obfuscation or dishonesty.
• The Guides expand potential liability to the endorser, which makes sense in the context of blogs and customer communities. The key to avoiding the pitfalls of consumer-generated endorsement-confusion? Clear policies and processes.

So, are the new guidelines good or bad?

Of course, there are some tricky things about the Guides. You’ll want to make sure you have someone monitoring or managing your social media presence, blogs about your products, and customer communities. You’ll need to double-check that you have solid processes in place for reviewing and approving consumer-generated content. You’ll have to make sure that final editorial pass has legal and ethical issues in mind.

But ultimately, we think the revisions are pretty great. Social media, testimonials, and customer stories are only as powerful as the trust between companies and their clients. The FTC’s choice to weigh in (relatively) early, rather than in a few years, is only a good thing for those of us who know the real value of customers’ trust.

tags: customer communities, customer evidence, editing, ftc, social media, testimonials

October 1st, 2009
by Projectline

Projectliner Elliott Lemenager is at San Francisco’s West Coast Green conference this week to present on social media’s role in sustainable business. If you’re there, check out his presentation tomorrow (Friday) at 12:30—and enjoy the conference!

tags: social media, vlog

July 15th, 2009
by Eric Larson

According to the AdAge article “What’s your Brand’s Social Score?,” Razorfish is soon to introduce a social influence marketing (SIM) score to reflect the total share of consumer conversations and the degree to which consumers like or dislike the brand.

Related tools have been around for a while (see HubSpot’s wildly popular grader.com family), and they’re tempting because they seem to quantify something that can be overwhelming. But social media’s value is really in listening and conversations on an individual level. It’s most important to have a listening and engagement strategy that prepares you to listen to customers and let them know you’re listening by taking action on customer feedback. Customer support is a better paradigm for social media than PR. Each mention through social media outlets is an opportunity—and an obligation—to help a customer and learn from them. Over time, what you learn from those interactions will help you get better at the things that should move a score like a SIM in the right direction.

So think of this “social score” as another tool in your social media toolbox to help meet your objectives for engaging with customers and marketing effectively. You’ll need a complete listening and engagement strategy to know what to do with your score once you’ve got it.

tags: customer engagement, feedback, social media

July 6th, 2009
by Corey Mahoney

Whether or not Twitter made an impact on the outcomes of the Iranian protests—something we may not know for a while yet—the protests certainly made an impact on Twitter. As the election news and its aftermath unfolded in tweets and trending topics, people jumped at what looked like real chances to help: changing profile location settings, attempting to overload Iranian government websites, and even setting up proxy servers for Iranian users to maintain internet access. Some of it may have been good new-fashioned “slacktivism,” but it at least hinted at the possibility of more serious engagement with the events unfolding halfway around the world.

What didn’t show any engagement with those events, though, was Habitat UK’s tonedeaf marketing. (more…)

tags: customer engagement, marketing, social media, twitter

March 20th, 2009
by Corey Mahoney

Social Media Marketing can be an enormous opportunity for businesses and marketers, but it tends to get a bad rap these days. Though it’s working daily on all the sites we depend on, companies wonder who should be taking care of it, the internet literati complain about clutter, and everyone else scrambles to figure out how to use it carefully without getting left in the dust.

There are some good reasons for skepticism when it comes to Social Media Marketing: as a new field, no one agrees on the rules, let alone what makes an expert. A few things, however, are clear: (more…)

tags: audience perception, Facebook, marketing, social media, twitter

March 17th, 2009
by Lena Moses

Do you pride yourself of being ahead of the game in social networking?  Does ‘digital life’ mean something to you?  Does your expertise go beyond the already well know sites such as Facebook and Twitter?  Is your ultimate goal to find new ways to get in and influence various communities and conversations?  Do you like to track the success of your efforts?  Are you the person that everyone goes to when wanting to learn how to use the tools of social networking sites?  Do you like being given a direction or task and then over achieving on execution?  If so, then keep reading.

Projectline is hiring a contract online community manager to work with talented strategist that values continuous evolution and innovation.   Join a fun team in a fast-paced, creative environment that is utilizing social media to execute social marketing programs.  To assist in both the launching of new businesses and helping improve campaigns by the collecting and reporting on customer/community chatter.  Your dream job should be researching and finding new communities to influence online conversations by understanding the community’s needs, where to find them and the roles they will play with each marketing strategy.  [read more]

tags: blogging, marketing, online communities, social media, social networking, user generated content