“Working a Room” Through Social Media

Social Media personality, Gary Vaynerchuk, created an excellent video about “giving a presentation versus working a room”.

My summary of the premise:
Old school brands that only use display ads are limiting themselves. Traditional advertising allows only one direction – from the advertiser to the consumer. It’s analogous to giving a presentation and then not allowing for questions, getting in your car and leaving. There is no opportunity for feedback. There is little recognition if your audience understood what you were talking about, and no ability to learn from the audience to further craft your message for the future.

Social media, however, encourages interaction. By leveraging multiple tools such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and many more, you can converse with your audience. It’s analogous to working a room. You can have intimate conversations with constituents, learn from them, and address questions. The point is to be available and engage.

Lastly, social media is inexpensive. Many of these tools are free, and it only requires passionate people to interact with the constituents.

But Don’t Act too Quickly!
While Gary discussed the concept of working a room, it is critical to not act too quickly. New messages often need to be absorbed. People may be confused at first, and that may be OK.

For instance: The first time I saw the Budweiser frogs commercial, I laughed, but was confused. Why are frogs in a swamp, hardly an appetizing thought, saying “bud” “weis” “er”? If I had access to social media in 1995, I may have commented about their poor choice of spokesmen. Many others may have commented as well – and if Budweiser reacted, they would have not created one of the most successful advertising campaigns in history.

How do brands achieve success?

• Join the communities and understand how they work. Each one is unique and each has its own utility.
• Develop a strategy on how to leverage the online world and how you will address your constituents
• Integrate your offline marketing with online efforts and track results
• Strive to achieve balance between experimenting and staying the course
• Lastly, start NOW. Your competitors are.

Earlier this morning, Microsoft unveiled Azure, their foray into the burgeoning cloud computing industry.  This, coming days after the announcement of Rackspace’s acquisition of virtual private server provider Slicehost (Disclosure: I’m a happy Slicehost customer) and online storage provider Jungledisk, means there will soon be some big league competition for the incumbent Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) for the estimated $42 BN this market will grow to by 2012.

This trend toward more affordable big-league server capacity for companies is a boon to start-ups and small companies who can’t finagle the cost of building and running their own server farms, but at the same time bodes poorly for those companies currently operating under the Software as a Service (SaaS) / Application Service Provider (ASP) model. These services we all know and love were, and still are in some circumstances, ideal for keeping technical infrastructure out of the way of creating complex solutions to elegantly address the business needs of all sized interests.

The biggest caveat (or best feature, depending on what side of the desk you’re sitting at) with the SaaS/ASP model was the overhead they introduced to terminating your contract; when all your eggs are in someone else’s basket, they’ve got some leverage when you need those eggs somewhere else. This new-ish wave of cloud computing (I love buzz words) has effectively established a middle ground: you can own your data without owning your hardware, albeit introducing a need for technical staff to pull all the cords and levers to get your blimp off the ground. 

What does this mean for agencies like Molecular? We fill that need for expertise in getting our clients’ dreams into the skies, and with a new slew of infrastructural options to build upon, we’re able to provide more choices and, ideally, better-fitting options to our clients, and to stay in the picture to meet their needs and steer their business forward as their enterprise floats in the cloud.

As marketing professionals, our main goal is to try to cut through the clutter and create time with our key constituency. Delivering key messages in terms and forums that are relevant to users allows these messages to have a far higher impact. Furthermore, uncovering white space in the media market that allows your message to be delivered without dilution gives the advertiser an unparalleled advantage.

An organization that has done this very successfully recently is the Obama campaign. A key part of Obama’s key target audience are young people. One can assume that the primary infotainment outlets that these individuals dwell on are online and television. Gaming and ‘wired’ gaming however, is a very interesting and in my opinion hugely effective channel to consider. The Obama campaign leveraged the gaming channel, by delivering its campaign message in the context of the Xbox 360 racing game Burnout Paradise.

This type of innovate advertising delivery requires that an organization very clearly understand their target audience, where they dwell, and where a marketing message can have a high impact. Gamers might spend multiple hours a week playing these games. If this advertising message (without relavant competition) appears to the user multiple times during this period, an organization may well be getting the marketing impact that they might be looking for.

“The worst financial crisis since the great depression” seems to be the headlines these days. What should financial services companies do? Communicate, communicate, communicate!

Many of the top financial services sites still have no mention, nor even a link, to their thoughts about the crisis. The media is consistently peppering the public about the state of the economy, yet clients are finding that the place that they entrust their money to, is silent!

Hey financial services companies: Clients and investors want to know what YOU think! They want to understand your company’s views of the markets, your investments, and what you think is going to happen. Even if there is no news, or bad news, keep people informed.
Don’t wait for the whitepaper to come out, or the official press release. Start the conversation early. Here are some ways this can be accomplished:

• Place some content on your home page: optionsXpress has a short paragraph with the title “A Safe Haven” to help bring confidence as clients log in
• Provide a link that builds confidence: Wells Fargo has a link to a CEO letter saying that they are “staying the course”.
• Start utilizing your corporate blog:
  • Allow an output for your experts to talk about the market – it allows clients to perceive they have access to the experts
  • Highlight discussions your executives are having with policy makers – it shows that you are in control and helping guide the US and the world
• Start monitoring twitter: it’s a great way to see how a segment of the market is talking about your brand

Overall, show empathy. People are nervous, frustrated, and annoyed. Being quiet only increases frustration. Start utilizing the tools that you have already invested in, and start communicating with your constituents.

What is your financial services company doing? What should they do to help you feel more informed, or confident?

It’s exciting to see how much information is readily available on the Internet, especially on a topic like social media.  I am delighted to have the opportunity to analyze and synthesize data from so many sources. However, as often happens when data are simplified for presentation to the public, some of the numbers are presented without enough context, which makes it difficult to interpret them. As I compared across web sites, I started to notice places where the numbers didn’t line up. This reflects the fact that usage and trends in the digital world change constantly, while research reports stay online, trapped in the moment when they were most recently uploaded. Social media usage world-wide is growing rapidly. So numbers from March of this year are significantly lower than numbers from September of this year. I have encountered sites reporting that MySpace has more members than any other social networking site, and sites reporting that Facebook has this honor. This is because Facebook’s growth skyrocketed, and they passed MySpace globally in April of this year (MySpace still has more members in the US).

Another issue is that differences in methodology can lead to different results. In academia, research reports generally include detailed accounts of their methodology, the sample they use, the wording of the questions asked. This is great for hard core researchers who want to know every detail of how the data were gathered (and use those details to gain a better understanding of what the data really mean), but is unlikely to hold the interest of the average blog-surfer. So write-ups for the digital audience tend to be more concise, and generally skim over much, if not all, of the specific information about methodology (sample, data collection, etc).

Yesterday I read Universal McCann’s Wave.3 report on social media, which asserts that 58% of Internet users globally have created a profile on a social network. So I decided I should check some of the Social Media posts on our own Molecular Voices. I quickly found Yuval Zukerman’s recent post on lack of awareness of social networks. He cites a well-designed study by Molecular’s sister company Synovate, which reports that 58% of global users don’t know what a social network is.

What’s going on here? These are both large-scale studies (Universal McCann surveyed 17,000 users world-wide; Synovate surveyed 13,000), from well-respected companies with a history of doing quality research. So how do we get to a situation in which 58% of users have created profiles on social networks, while only 42% even know what social networks are?

I can think of two reasons off the top of my head why this might be so.

1) They may be defining “user” differently: Wave.3 explicitly states that they surveyed only people who use the Internet every day or every other day. Neither Yuval’s report, nor the summary posted by Synovate articulate who their “users” are. If Synovate is using less stringent criteria (e.g., they count as users anyone who’s logged on in the past month, or anyone who has an email address), they’re looking at a larger population than Universal McCann.  Synovate’s entire population could be so much larger than Universal McCann’s that 42% of the Synovate population includes more people than 58% of Universal McCann’s population.

2) Language about online phenomena is ephemeral, and not universally adopted. Many people who use networking sites may not know they are using “social media,” not unlike M. Jourdain in Moliere’s The Bourgeoise Gentilhomme, who is surprised to learn at age 70 that he has been speaking prose all his life. Neither report gives full wording of the question, but it’s possible that the wave.3 report’s question was along the lines of “Have you ever created a profile on a social networking site, such as Facebook or MySpace?” while Synovate’s respondents were merely asked “Are you familiar with social networking sites?”

This problem becomes more intense as you begin to look at third party reporting of research (such as blog posts or e-news articles describing someone else’s work). Last week a large number of news and blogging sites discussed Bill Tancer’s new book, Click, largely focusing on one finding: social networking sites have surpassed porn sites in popularity. This is an intriguing finding, but I can’t find in any of the articles the specifics about how popularity was measured. Did Tancer compare the number of unique visitors to each site? The amount of time each visitor spends on the site? The number of links to each site? Without this information, it is difficult to tell what the statistics mean. Many of the articles talk in detail about search, suggesting that more people are searching for social media sites than for pornography. None of the articles indicate whether the data is from click streams or self-report. If it’s self-reported, I have difficulty accepting it: people are more apt to report engaging socially acceptable behaviors. I could probably find the answers to these questions in Tancer’s book. However, I suspect that far more people will encounter this information on line than will read Click.

Thanks to the Internet, we have access to more numbers, graphs, and trends than ever before. The proliferation of information available to all of us now requires that we be thoughtful consumers of such information. Numbers take on different meanings in different contexts. In situations where we can’t learn the context, we should take care in interpreting the data. And in situations where we can take the time to provide context, we should do so. This enables us to develop a richer, more complex understanding of the phenomena the data represent.

The Obama campaign launched an Obama ‘08 iPhone application that is compelling, easy to use, and effective in strengthening his “brand.”  See the following link for Gizmodo’s take.  Having downloaded and played with the application, it is clear that a great deal of thought and planning went into the application’s development.  From features such as the ability to call friends based on battleground states (and keeping track of whether you had in fact called them or not), to the use of LBS features to pinpoint the local Obama HQ near you and provide information on upcoming events, and to have quick access to Obama’s stands on key issues, this application is very much a “must have” for the iPhone wielding Obama supporter.

What I believe is more exciting is that this application gives us a glimpse into things to come.  Imagine a brand-centric application, be it for a luxury brand like Louis Vuitton or a more mainstream brand like Adidas, where avid brand followers can be alerted to the presence of like-minded people in their vicinity, receive members-only invitations to special events happening nearby, and get advance notice on upcoming products.  Add to this the intimacy that is inherent with a person’s relationship with their mobile phone, and what you nurture and foster for the consumer is very strong attachment and affinity to your brand.  THIS is how brand loyalists of the future will be found as people equipped with these applications on their mobile devices become your brand ambassadors and advertise on your behalf.  Microsites may come and go, but a downloaded application could potentially live forever on a user’s mobile device.

For these applications to succeed, the time and resource investment should be treated with equal importance to a full martketing/messaging campaign.  If you try to cut corners on the investment, time, and resources required to execute successfully, the end result could be a decrease in brand affinity and ultimately, brand abandonment.  For every great Obama ‘08 application, there are many examples of “frustrationware.”  A perfect example of what NOT to emulate is Audi’s A4 driving challenge, which was created to help promote the launch of the redesigned Audi A4.  However, the application was so poorly executed and thoroughly lackluster that the vast majority of reviews on both iTunes and in the blogosphere (such as this link to Autoblog.com) have panned it as not even being worth the time to download it.

As brands continue to investigate pursuing applications as ways to enhance their brand image, they must be willing to make serious investments to be successful.  Hopefully, the Obama ‘08 application is a beacon that will usher in the “change we need” for brand-related applications.

Recently, I conducted a web search for online digital marketing strategy communities.  I had a vision for what I was looking for, a free-form online outpost where marketing professionals could converge to discuss topics of their choosing.  Things like marketing ROI, digital strategy, performance measurement, search optimization, hiring and firing agencies, lead generation, you name it.  Disappointed in my initial search, I fired off a LinkedIN question and got a number of recommendations.  Next, I checked out the recommendations.  Here, I include a brief summary of each of the communities to help you decide which ones might be appropriate to you:

iMedia Connection:  a number of people recommended this site as a source of information on various aspects of digital marketing.  Industry experts write and submit articles that community members can then comment on.  I’ve written a couple of pieces for the community, which got me an automatic free pass.  Authors are automatically members once they publish, so after some scrambling around I found that I was already a member of this community.  Members can also invite other people (just let me know in comments below and I’ll send you an invite).  Members can also create a public profile page.

LinkedIN Groups: there are thousands of groups on LinkedIN on a wide range of topics, a reflection of the millions of users.  Joining many of them is a simple matter of sending a request to join to the moderator who decides whether to include you.  One of the challenges with the LinkedIN groups is that there are almost too many to choose from.  Searching across all group types with the term Marketing, for instance, yields 3,665 groups (at last count).  Once you are approved, you can view discussion topics in reverse chronological order.  The quality of the topics and the activity on the comments depends entirely on the group and its participants.  The hottest groups have over 10,000 members.  A few of them have a membership requirement that is external to LinkedIN, but the vast majorities are open to any LinkedIN member and are easy to join.

Facebook Groups: like LinkedIN, Facebook boasts hundreds and thousands of professional groups (and even more millions of users).  Groups that are open to the public can be joined in one click.  Also like LinkedIN, the topics aren’t really topics per se; they’re posts that people can comment on.  The result is a flat, rolling stream of reverse-chronological posts that drift from one subject to the next.  If you’re willing to spend some time parsing through random noise you can find some gems, including people with similar professional interests to connect with.  Unfortunately, many of the more popular groups can become victims of their own success and get overrun by spammers – a bigger problem on Facebook than on LinkedIN.  There seems to be less spam in LinkedIN groups than on Facebook groups, perhaps a reflection of the desire for LinkedIN users to manage their professional reputation.

MarketingProfs: this marketing knowledge service has good reach (they claim 324,000 members).  While some of their premium content requires a subscription, their Marketing Know-How Exchange is available to “freemium” registrants.  The exchange is organized into high-level marketing topics, the questions are well-moderated, and the people asking the questions can elect to accept or reject responses.  An interesting points system helps to automatically control and moderate the discussions.  You earn 5 points per day starting from the first day you post a question or an answer, and you are awarded points for answering questions.  You attract respondents by awarding points for answers to your question.  So the redemption value is tied to the speed, rigor and volume of answers you desire.  The system helps bond participants and participation to ensure that they are serious and committed, something totally lacking from Facebook groups.

Forrester Research Discussion Board:  Forrester has jumped into the community space with its own community for Interactive Marketing professionals.  The community is in its alpha version with only a few participants at the time of this post.  It’s open to anyone with a Forrester user ID and password.  If you are not a client, you can still register for free.  It’s just starting out so activity is limited.  It will be interesting to see how it grows.  Right now, it still shows the global navigation for the main Forrester site – which is a little confusing and a constant reminder that the community is, after all, a Forrester property.  Also, it is not yet included in the site global navigation.  Right now there is only one main discussion board, but hopefully it will grow and there will be separate discussion boards on different subjects organized by the moderator.  Forrester’s industry reach is promising for the community, should the company elect to back it in a significant way.

ThinkBalm: Transitioning from Forrester, the final community I’ll mention is the ThinkBalm Innovation Community, which by the way, was started by a former Forrester analyst.  The community is implemented on Spigit [insert link http://www.spigit.com/index.html].  ThinkBalm provides project workspaces that various people can contribute to.  It also has a type of community currency or fiat that is similar to the points system used in MarketingProfs and other communities that acknowledge “power members,” but it is far more elaborate.  Thinkbalm includes a points system where people can earn points by getting positive feedback on their ideas (thumbs-ups or “spigs”), or conversely, lose points when people “scrap” them.  The points are more than fiat.  You can actually redeem them for goodies (an interesting real-world virtual world tie-in).  Speaking of virtual worlds, that’s the focus of ThinkBalm. Although it’s not a pure interactive marketing community per se, I include it here because there are marketing aspects of virtual worlds and also, to point out a more robust community solution for creating new work collaboratively across organization boundaries.  Something I believe the interactive marketing community should do more of.

The community choices you make depend on your objectives: quick answers to thorny questions, showcasing your knowledge and expertise, networking, or just keeping up with trends.  My dream community would combine the participation of a Facebook group, participant bonding like MarketingProfs, a workspace innovation area like ThinkBalm and professional moderation like Forrester, oh, and having profiles like in LinkedIN and the ability to interconnect would be great too.  Mash-up anyone?

A big thank you to all those who answered my LinkedIN question and got me off to the races.  What a great use of a community!  Feel free to chime in below with your thoughts, comments, or favorite communities.

Measuring Digital ROI with Website Data; The Link Between Strategy and Design
Measuring the business benefit of a non-eCommerce website can be quite challenging. Basic “out of the box” metrics like unique visitors, visited pages, site visit duration and number of leads provide useful top-line data, but they don’t generate insights into how well a website is performing against strategic objectives.  For several years, the interactive marketing industry has been hitching its collective hopes on “engagement” as the ROI savior of Internet marketing measurement.  The concept elicits reactions ranging from evangelism to skepticism.  A recent whitepaper by Web Analytics Demystified called Measuring the Immeasurable: Visitor Engagement goes to great lengths to provide an in-depth explanation of how to create general top-line measures of engagement, so I won’t belabor the concept further.  Instead, let’s shift the focus to key performance indicators for strategy execution.

A solid digital strategy identifies the ways the digital channel can be used to achieve broader strategic business objectives and outlines the criteria for measuring success.  In recent years, the interactive industry has placed much of its design focus on user centric design.  However, end user experience is not the only consideration that needs to be taken into account.  Detailed design decisions have a big impact on what metrics can be collected.  You need to design the site to produce the right metrics, a point that is lost on many interactive designers and design agencies.  A good design team will not proceed without a detailed understanding of business objectives.  An effective design team will design ROI measurement into a site.  Here are some typical business objectives, their design implications and some measurement recommendations for tracking and optimizing strategy execution.

While the nuances of each firm’s digital strategy will vary according to its industry, business model, competitive posture and customers, what follows is a framework for typical strategic objectives and their implications on site design:

1. Targeting Key Market Segments.  Best practices in effective website design call for personas as a design tool to represent targeted segments.  A good design team uses the personas to build scenarios for how the personas will interact with the site, then designs accordingly.  But what happens to personas after a website is built?  Often, the personas lie fallow and the question of how the new site is performing in reaching the targeted segments goes unanswered.  A better idea is to use personas as an ongoing performance management tool by documenting key persona scenarios then conducting visitor path analysis to analyze persona traffic.  One caveat is that real world visitors may not follow the exact paths the design team anticipated.  A second caveat is that detail path traffic trends can be very fragmented.  Instead of getting bogged down in complexity, keep it simple.  Create content with specific segments in mind then analyze visitors based on the type of content they access during their visits, not the sequence in which they access it.  The design implication is that content should be highly differentiated between personas.

2. Driving Purchase Consideration.  Most websites share the common goal of driving revenue, but what does this mean from a design perspective?  How can sites be optimized to drive more revenue?  The measurement starting point is identifying key user actions and events (i.e. outcomes) that can serve as proxy metrics for purchase consideration include accessing:
* a store locator (provides geographic insight as well)
* product or service comparison charts
* data sheets and detailed product or service information.
Visitor path analysis that backtracks from these successful outcomes will provide insight into the behaviors leading up to the purchase consideration event.  The insights can be used to create a predictive model that identifies key site paths to streamline and highlight so you can design to encourage purchase consideration.

3. Creating Customer Loyalty.  The immediate and obvious site loyalty metric is the distribution of the number of visits by visitor for a set timeframe.  If a high percentage of visitors access the site multiple times then that indicates site loyalty.  This should be a familiar table for users of Google Analytics, but it is a site focused metric not a product-centric metric.  A good way to foster customer loyalty is to provide content that helps people easily access your service on a recurring basis or to provide information that helps them increase the benefits they receive from something they already own.  Similarly, excessive activity related to troubleshooting and problem-solving can be an indicator that people are having difficulty with a product.  Visits to information about accessories or add-ons can also be interpreted as relevant to share of wallet.  Measuring and tracking these will help create a loyalty index.  Most sites skew toward customer acquisition, not product success or service use.  Consider the needs and interests of current customers in your design and think through how the designs will support measuring their activity.

4. Fostering Advocacy.  Social media tagging tools provide a way for website owners to facilitate advocacy in cyberspace.  Some bloggers have done an excellent job of making their sites readily accessible to sites like del.icio.us and digg by including the relevant widgets.  Interestingly, most branded websites totally omit these simple additions.  Adding them enables you to track activity.  You can also track the number of tags for your website at these sites using functions they provide like the delicious url lookup and tools like the Greasemonkey digg counter.

5. Reducing Cost to Serve.  Self-help is a good thing if self-help sessions are successful.  Success is in the eye of the user, so include a “did this solve your problem?” question at the end of every support listing.  Track and report on the responses to identify the types of content that help and where you need to overhaul.  Also track search activity to identify new support listings that need to be added.  Some companies are going so far as to make capacity decisions for their call centers by using their online help activity as an indicator of self-service adoption.  They are decreasing headcount as online volume increases – a direct contributor to the bottom line and ROI.

6. Accelerating Revenue.  New product introductions create a golden opportunity to track how quickly and effectively your company is creating awareness.  Measure traction and uptake by collecting metrics on new product or service views in a launch date + format (i.e. Day 1, 2, 3, etc.).   Building and tracking separate landing pages for new products and key marketing campaigns also create an opportunity to measure contribution from both digital and non-digital PR and marketing efforts.  Finally, integrating PR tracking (i.e. “earned media” or mentions) with site activity can provide a view of the contribution that PR and digital promotion is making.

Strategy creation, strategy execution, and measurement and analysis are all disciplines, they don’t happen by accident.  Having all three disciplines aligned and pointed in the same direction will go a long way toward answering the question: “Where’s my ROI?”

Lehman Brothers filing for chapter 11. Merrill Lynch sold. AIG receives a lifeline from the Fed. Washington Mutual having issues. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under government control. Bear Sterns sold.

In any radically changing market, opportunities can be found. While bad credit policies and poor oversight are the common blames for the current financial crisis, the Internet will help foster and grow innovation.

Major financial institutions, which previously only focused on the end retail customer, are now broadening their online profile to include the entire buy-side and sell-side supply chains. Spending on increasing communication, building relationships, and creating conviction are common themes.

Conviction is the confidence necessary to convert a prospective client into an actual client, and the critical assurance to keep clients from defecting. Personal relationships between asset managers and prospects (from institutional gatekeepers to broker/dealer producers) are the main conduit to creating this conviction.

Without this perceived relationship, prospects cannot “bet” on the portfolio manager. But personal relationships can’t scale. With over 650,000 registered securities representatives in the US alone, asset managers need additional tools.

How are companies augmenting relationships and creating conviction in financial services? The internet is assisting by providing content and managing perceptions. The following rules are being followed:

• Deliver Results: This is the most important aspect, and the web can only help display and explain performance. During times of unexpected results, however, communication is essential. Are you fostering a conversation effectively?
• Provide Information: Speed and inclusivity of information is essential. Without it, decision makers can’t perform their job. The faster the information is delivered, the greater the opportunity to create conviction. How are you informing your constituency? How are you shaping their knowledge? Who else is shaping their knowledge before you?
• Supply Education: We are all looking to excel and become better at what we do. We need people to inform us, show us alternative views, and stimulate us intellectually. How are you helping your clients get better at their jobs and partnering with them for success?
• Allow Access: Decision makers need to know they can get information from accountable and informed people. Whether this is in person, phone, email, or indirect, decision makers need to know why decision were made. How are you enabling access, without overwhelming your staff?
• Exhibit Transparency: Without it, trust is in jeopardy. Given compliance and corporate scandals, people are naturally cynical and assume the whole story is not being told. Are you exhibiting transparency or creating a veil of secrecy?

Over the next few weeks, I will be touching on each one of these points. I welcome your comments, insights, and additions at eric.karofsky@molecular.com.