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Posts from Web 2.0 & Social Media

How will your conversation with customers change in the world of Web 2.0 and beyond?

April 1

Content matters; where it lives does not.

Social media is upon us.
It is a fact of life and consumers have made it part of their daily lives.
In other news, brands are still investing small and not so small fortunes creating amazing content for their websites and nobody cares to visit them. On paper, one great solution for this problem is search marketing. You buy keywords, optimize the content on your site for organic search placement, things get better.

Social media can boost a brand even further. And here’s the kicker: it has little to do with the brand website.

The root of the issue is in the following fact: The brand has a website; search marketing looks to drive traffic to that website. If the brand places content in social media, it takes content from brand site and actually puts it, well, away from your website. While you can still link to the brand site, isn’t social media harmful in actually reducing the need to visit that site? If you can get the content on Facebook, where you hang out with your near, far but always dear friends – is it really necessary to go to the brand’s site to get what you are looking for? While intriguing, the answer lies in thinking about what really matters. Skittles, for example, gave up on its website altogether. But three years later, can anyone point out measurable sales increases as a result? What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) a brand would care about? While I personally want the website to be stellar, is it as relevant or important as it was, say, four years ago?

Branding is about searing the name, message or logo of a product or manufacturer deep into your head. Whether the brand achieves consumer impressions on its owned web property or not is immaterial. It is even more important to be able to measure if the brand placement, and the consumer impression it caused, increased the likelihood of a transaction or a purchase. While a brand site can help inform about and portray products really well, social media trumps it on this account. Consumers today trust each other more than they trust their brands. Reviews matter, ratings influence, and if a brand does not track them, it may lose the initiative in controlling its message (Toyota, anyone?). I can probably think up a variety of KPIs but overall the bottom line is this: if you can get the brand online, anywhere, it’s a good thing – and if you get it anywhere other than your own brand website, it’s a very good thing.

So where does search marketing figure out into this? Search marketing at its finest does not just drive traffic to a website, it increases brand impressions. It also reinforces positive brand messages and matches the terms a brand looks to associate itself with, to search keywords. Search engines do not care about your brand website if it has no redeeming quality; it must have content to be interesting and useful to the search engine’s users. Social media has value and content, both searchable and private. Search engines want in and try to extract as much as possible out of social media. If your brand is engaged, search engines will find your content. And by connecting users to the relevant content coming from your brand, marketers get the impressions they so desire.

By now you should be sold. Social media is great. Search marketing helps no matter where your brand is. But how do you measure performance for assets distributed far and wide across social media? One big strength of a brand site comes from the control a marketer has on obtaining performance data about it. Social media sites have no interest in letting you shove Omniture tags into their code. You’re a guest. And in reality, the jury is still deliberating. Snake oil merchants and real scientists claim to have the answer for this need for proof and measurement (eMarketer proves this point). We are getting close to definitive solutions. Due to the resources necessary to successfully measure and track vast amounts of traffic and content, marketers may have to patiently wait or accept less definitive conclusions and research. Until then, there’s always the brand website.

posted to: Digital Marketing, Digital Strategy, Industry Trends, Web 2.0 & Social Media | No Comments »

March 30

Microblogging inside the Firewall

by Craig Andrews

Little strings of text are big business – both publicly and inside the corporate firewall. As we all know, Twitter is pretty big – TV and radio ads for major companies mention their Twitter sites and even business cards reference Twitter URLs nowadays. But Twitter cannot be used with internal information, so there’s a lot of collaborative power waiting to be unleashed by microblogging inside the corporate firewall. Consider how much more productive everyday workers could be if they shared a few quick bits of knowledge.

For example, consider this timeline:

Alice: Client loved the sales pitch - we won! #sales
Brion: Vending machine has been re-stocked
Charles: #CSS reminds me of aspect oriented programming #aop
Darleen: Project is progressing according to schedule #project3
Evan: Fellow #project3 members: Is this front end policy useful for us? http://ur1.ca/shyu
Fred: @evan Possibly - let's discuss this with @brion over lunch
Zach: @fred @evan we used those guidelines on #project5 and it worked out well
ITBot: Email server test failed. IT has been contacted.

These examples show that:

The barrier to entry is incredibly low (Alice posted immediately after a sales pitch, probably from a plane)
Useful business information is exchanged, as well as team-building (Brion provided non-business information about the vending machine that others will likely appreciate)
Because discussion is open to a broader audience than email, others participate in unexpected and beneficial ways (see how Zach, who isn’t even on project 3, helped the project 3 team)
Bots can publicize information gathered automatically. For example, IT could set up a bot to monitor servers and automatically publish status updates. Bots can also subscribe to RSS feeds bridging wiki and blogs with the microblogging world.

There are many other benefits once metadata is considered.

People choose who to follow. If Alice isn’t interested in the state of IT systems, she doesn’t subscribe to the ITBot.
Users can mark a message as a favorite. Messages that are favorited many times show up in a “favorites” list, which is a great source of useful information.
By clicking on a #project3, Brion can find all posts about his project, providing a powerful search option.
Messages may have optionally location data attached. Users can tell if the person they’re talking to is in the same office as they are, on vacation, working from home, at a client office, or at another branch of their company. This data allows users to make fast decisions about how to further communicate (phone, email, or walk).

At Molecular, we wanted to take advantage of what “firewalled” microblogging has to offer, so we evaluated a few private microblogging tools, looking for software that provides a familiar interface, allows customization of the look and feel, and has clients for different devices (like Twitter has). In the end, we chose StatusNet. (In the interest of full disclosure, I’m a contributing developer to the StatusNet project.)

StatusNet Logo The StatusNet software (which also runs the ~200k user identi.ca site) is Free and Open Source so anyone can feel free to install, evaluate, and use it without worrying about contracts or licensing fees. However, StatusNet, Inc (the company that supports the StatusNet software) offers professional services if you chose to run the software on site, or hosting if you prefer it to be hosted elsewhere. If the “go it yourself” route is selected, installation is pretty straightforward as it runs on the popular LAMP stack and has a vibrant community willing to answer questions.

StatusNet can integrate with LDAP/Active Directory and even some Single Sign On solutions. No worrying about managing accounts as employees come and go, so private information stays private.

The software also supports a variety of clients on a number of platforms, from Windows, Mac, and Linux to iPhones and Androids.

After developing a custom skin, selecting which plugins to enable, and testing with a small group, we officially launched “IsoBuzz” to the entire organization last week. We’re already seeing some interesting conversations. Over time, we hope to see IsoBuzz became a powerful tool for knowledge sharing and collaboration, especially among distant offices and between departments.

posted to: Digital Strategy, Technology, Web 2.0 & Social Media | No Comments »

December 3

4 Online Brand Gimmicks that Failed

by Bryan Maleszyk

By now, marketers know that brands cannot fully control their own message anymore. Consumers now have a diverse set of channels through which they can interact with their digital world, and they’ve taken rightful ownership of their own destiny when interacting with brands through those channels.

In an effort to be heard and to increase engagement, brands are turning to new, innovative ways to approach the digital marketing landscape, from social environments such as Twitter and Facebook, to blogger outreach and global alternate reality games. Like anything else new and innovative, the risk of failure in these approaches runs high, and the payoff is unknown.

But failure, if done early and often, can be more instructive than success. Let’s look at four new and innovative ways that brands attempted to engage with their consumers through digital, and see what lessons we can learn.

Lesson 1. Tell a story, but make it your story
In February 2008, 50 bloggers and gamers received mysterious packages in the mail containing clues to an online alternate reality game (ARG) with a clear call to action: Find “The Lost Ring.” These packages kicked off a six-month effort across the globe by more than 150,000 players in seven languages to uncover a lost Olympic game. The game officially ended at the Beijing Olympics, and it generated more than its share of accolades in marketing circles.

But that’s only half of the story. The game is a classic example of what’s known as “dark marketing” — a viral campaign in which the sponsoring brand (in this case, McDonald’s) is barely, if ever, acknowledged. The theory is that mentioning the brand would turn potential gameplayers off when they realize that they’re simply playing a part in a larger marketing campaign. In this case, it wasn’t revealed that McDonald’s was participating until months after the game began.

091203_img1_mcdonalds

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posted to: Creative, Mobile, Web 2.0 & Social Media | 1 Comment »

November 9

How to Protect Your URL in a Social Media World

by Emile Daigle

Co-authored by Yuval Zukerman, Sr. Consultant, Emerging Interactions, Molecular

Social media has come to play a key role in brand messaging, with the strong two-year climb of microblogging service Twitter adding a new twist: a 140-character limit. This restriction has pushed adoption of a few common ways to cram more message into less space. Apart from heavily leveraging the new language of texting shorthand born of the mobile SMS, the biggest trend in use is employing short URLs to save space while linking to other online content.

Short URLs are hinged on service providers like tr.im and TinyURL that allow people to generate unique links, usually formed of a small domain name followed by a hash and a series of apparently random characters that the service provider responds to with a redirect to the longer target link. For example, the provider tr.im may provide a link of the form http://tr.im/zpBD that points visitors to http://molecularvoices.molecular.com/category/data-and-analytics/, saving us 48 characters to talk about how insightful the latest blog post is.

The advantages to end users are clear enough, but the disadvantages to content providers are not. Cautionary tales of short URL service collapse have been floating around for years, but the message doesn’t mean much to the people socializing those millions of YouTube videos and Flickr photos. The people contributing all that traffic to your site aren’t as concerned as the marketing department with how long the link stays around; the internet zeitgeist waits for no one. As marketing professionals, here are a few things you should know to help you better understand short URLs and why you should consider owning your own short URLs to power your brand.

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posted to: Data & Analytics, Industry Trends, Web 2.0 & Social Media | No Comments »

November 5

The Social Media Golden Rule

by Mark Badger

Just when you think you’ve got this whole brand experience thing figured out, along comes another form of social media that threatens to shake your grasp on the status quo. Over the past year, Twitter has taken the spanner-in-the-works title from Facebook, which took it from YouTube, which took it from Flickr, and so on. While it can seem daunting to consider managing your company’s image over so many forms of new media, this phenomenon can benefit your company — you have more opportunities than ever to generate positive brand experiences with your customers. Of course, this means there are more chances to make a mess of things as well. So how do you make sure you do more of the former and less of the latter?

Be generous
Drop the facade
Follow through

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posted to: Digital Marketing, Web 2.0 & Social Media | No Comments »