The Power of Influence

5 Social Media Secrets for 2010

Social media took a wild ride in 2009. The mainstream press fell in love with Twitter, Facebook grew aggressively and a new wave of companies starting taking social media seriously as a business tool. Below are 5 secrets to staying on top of it all in 2010

1. Pay Attention to the Metrics
You can't manage what you can't measure. Chief Marketing Officers are going to pay more attention to metrics and tie in social media more directly to overall business goals, not just web-related goals. When starting up new project agree on what the metrics should be and what goals are appropriate.

2. Scale Good Habits
As you grow, make sure you match your structure, policy and guidelines to your organization size. What works with 2 people won't work with 20 people. All in all your structure should encourage good habits. Your entire team should be motivated to respond quickly, post consistently and talk like a human. Speaking of policies and rules...

3. Have Rules, But Trust People
As your social media strategy matures, you'll add in more rules and guidelines. However, you can't have a rule for every situation. You need to trust your team. Lead by example, don't manage with rulebook.

4. Creativity & Personality Trump Big Budget
Social media is definitely one of those areas in life where more money doesn't always win. Two of the most powerful ingredients in social media are creativity and personality. They are the key to having a viral message and to being a trusted resource. They are also essential to discovering useful strategies and tactics. You can't be afraid to try something new or go against the grain.

5. Listen Listen Listen
Don't focus so much on you and your message. Put that farther down on your To Do List. Focus first on your customers. Hear what they are saying, see what they're up to. Once you've been able to connect, and figure them out, then see how you can help.

Hat Tip to the SlideShare Team

Forbes cover a great case study on how Threadless built a community.  Interesting points made are that it is more about quality than quantity - and that quaity communities are grown organicaly, not by campaigns and media spends.

Need To Build A Community? Learn From Threadless

Threadless, a Chicago T-shirt company, sprang to life a decade ago with the idea that employees and customers don't have to be two distinct groups. The Internet-based company asks consumers to submit shirt designs they've created--it gets as many as 300 submissions a day--and allows its large fan base to vote on the ones they like best. It pays winners, more than 300 each year, $2,000 for their creations. The company picks the best of the most popular T-shirt designs, screens them for copyright violations and obscenities, and sells them on its site within three to eight weeks for $18. It aims to release seven new designs a week.

The business model works beautifully for this 50-person company, which brought in close to $30 million in revenue in 2009. Threadless, with 1.5 million followers on Twitter and 100,000 fans on Facebook, is also masterful at using social media to promote its designs and designers--and to keep its community engaged.

Cam Balzer, the vice president of marketing at Threadless, shares more on the company’s community-building strategy.

Forbes: You stress "community" over crowdsourcing. Why?

Balzer: Crowdsourcing is antithetical to what we're doing. That's because crowdsourcing involves random sets of people who suddenly have a say in how the business works, but that's not how Threadless operates. We've got a close-knit group of loyal customers and have worked hard to build that. The people who submit ideas to us, vote and buy our products aren't random people, and they aren't producing random work. We work closely with our consumers and give them a place on our site, the Threadless forum, where they can exchange ideas with one another--ideas that go beyond designing T-shirts. We have consumers who have voted on 150,000 designs, which means they've spent hours interacting on our site. People who do that aren't jumping into a random crowd. They're part of the community we've cultivated.

How does Threadless use social marketing to promote its business and to generate sales?

Like other businesses, Threadless launched before Twitter and Facebook. We've embraced both sites by injecting our personality into them. We send out news to people when new T-shirts are available and information on new sales when they start. We also tell customers about the music playing in our warehouse and about the interesting people stopping by our office. The investment in Twitter has bumped our traffic. Sales from Twitter alone are in the high six-figures.

What advice do you have for other companies looking to build their social media strategies?

The secret isn't growing a huge fan base. We have 100,000 Facebook fans, but those fans have all come to us organically. We believe the more organic the growth, the more loyal the fans, the more likely they will be repeat customers.

The other key is that we act like humans on our own site and social networking sites. We act like we're interacting with our friends, posting videos of our employees talking about their favorite bands. It's not all direct promotion; it's human.

How do you keep your consumers engaged?

For us, the idea of fostering creativity is a key one. We offer design challenges. A timely example of that is that we ran a design contest around the Las Vegas consumer electronics convention, CES. The challenge we posed was to get consumers to submit designs that highlighted innovation. We looked for a theme that we knew our consumer base, who tends to be interested in tech and the Web, would love. We've done other challenges asking people for ideas on zombies and monsters, because we've seen from the forums and other popular T-shirts that our customers are interested in monsters.

The takeaway: Know what interests your consumers and build on it.

What are limitations for the business?

The community anchors us to a certain extent. They've got perceptions of who we are and how we'll act. They determine our future. With that said, they are receptive to seeing Threadless grow. We've been exploring retail distribution and we've asked our designers (who are the employees and customers) where they would feel comfortable selling and buying the T-shirts. We thought the options would be limited based on their answers, but we've found a sincerely open-minded group that is eager to see growth.

We've also learned that an important part of expanding is giving credit to our community members. We started selling specially designed iPhone cases last year and were very deliberate about our packaging. Each case gave descriptions of the product and its designer.

What was your best-selling T-shirt design last year?

It was a design called "The Communist Party" that featured Communist leaders, including Fidel Castro, in party mode. The designer was Tom Burns of Murfreesboro, Tenn.

Brands are moving budget to social media marketing at the expense of traditional media such as print and TV

Chances are your overall marketing budget was hit hard by the economy in 2009 and the prospect of recovering a substantial portion of these funds in 2010 is not very likely. Still, there is good news for social media marketers.

This chart shows that social marketing will benefit from significant budget increases in the year ahead, regardless of what industry your organization is in. What this chart doesn’t show is where these increases will come from.

As a relatively new and rapidly emerging tactic, social media is generally funded by either increasing the overall budget or, more often than not in the current economic climate, by shifting funds from other marketing line items to social media.

Social marketing budgets are growing at the expense of other tactics and a deeper dive into our 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report will show you which ones and to what extent.

Download SocialMediaMarketing2010 exec summary

The human factor will account for nearly 60% of social marketing expenditures next year including staff salaries for blogging, content development, social monitoring, etc. Another 20% of the budget will go outside the organization to agencies, consultancies and other social marketing service providers.

For additional research data and insights about social marketing, download and read the free Executive Summary from MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report.

A Good List of 10 ... "How Social Media Changed Our Thinking"

Of the many lists done at this time of year  - thought this was one of the best ....

 

Ten Ways Social Media Changed Our Thinking in 2009
by David Berkowitz , Tuesday, December 22, 2009 From the MediPost Blog

All the top trend lists this year have been a blur. There's lots of talk of Twitter and Michael Jackson, but I wanted to dive deeper and think about what we really learned. In many ways social media managed to change our thinking about what happened, what's going on, and how the world's changing.

I'll focus on 10 ways in particular. Not all are exclusive to the past year, but many of the milestones from the past 12 months may well shape how we perceive the road ahead.

Democracy: The Green Revolution, Iran's populist attempt to reject the summer's election results, was a global eye-opener for how a tool like Twitter -- so easily dismissed as frivolous -- could change the world. The result may have been underwhelming, with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad maintaining power -- but for those who saw the tweets from Iranians, often retweeted wildly, it will leave its mark. Contrast this with other movements, such as when Philippines voters used text messages to mobilize and oust President Joseph Estrada in 2001. The Philippines revolution followed a peer-to-peer model. In Iran, though, the tweets were largely public, and instant commentary on those tweets was publicized further, shattering the barriers between those who were taking part and the spectators hanging on every character.

Death: We now mourn in public. Michael Jackson inspired millions -- billions? -- to grieve openly. Myself, I stayed silent on Jackson but had to express public disbelief over Billy Mays' passing. As I write this, friends and strangers are opening up about Brittany Murphy. The self-expression becomes more problematic when it gets personal, as a Floridian mom learned when she tweeted about her son drowning. This led to the headline " Twitter played no role in drowning of military_mom's son Bryson." We don't yet know how to grieve publicly, and many such as military_mom will learn that others aren't ready for it. But in time, perhaps even by this time next year, stories like this won't be newsworthy.

Sales: Dell has tracked over $6.5 million in revenue to Twitter. There are several  morals to the story: 1) It's possible to track sales from Twitter. 2) It's still in its infancy; Dell earned $61 billion last year, so its Twitter sales will barely cover the Post-it notes used at the 75,000+ employee company. 3) Those are only the direct sales, and every time the press reports on Dell's model, some consumers will go to Dell's outlet site without bothering to check what's happening on Twitter. Bottom line, though, social media is making an impact on sales, and this year we finally started to measure that effect in earnest.

Searching: Google, Yahoo, and Bing committed to giving real-time search valuable real estate in their results pages. Sometimes it will be higher up and sometimes further down, and it will surely be much bigger than Twitter, but now it's here. Most people aren't going to think to search Twitter or Facebook or Foursquare, but they will visit Google or Yahoo or Bing, and they'll access the real-time links if they're relevant. We're still learning when it's relevant, but there's little doubt now that it matters.

Local marketing: So, how did you find out about that restaurant? Did you see a special for mayors on Foursquare? Did a friend check in via Gowalla and share it as their Facebook status? Were you walking down the street with your iPhone out while you augmented reality with Yelp's Monocle or Urbanspoon's Scope? Okay, augmented reality may be more gimmicky, but the social services are starting to help people find each other -- and help people find local hot spots. The fusion of mobile, social and local started to create real opportunities to change consumer behavior. What was true for early adopters in 2009 will apply to the fast followers in the year ahead.

Celebrity Access: In January, Ashton Kutcher joined Twitter. He was followed by Ellen DeGeneres in March and Oprah in April. We got to see what they saw, from Chris Brown's view of 90,000 fans in Manila to Chad Ochocinco's view of his opponents' football field. Vin Diesel posts a couple of times a month on his Facebook page, where he has over 7 million fans. And after Kanye West started a new Internet meme by grabbing the microphone from Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards, he apologized on his blog. Yes, we have ghost tweeters and plenty of opacity, but now that fans have this direct, personal, and occasionally even unfiltered access, it's not going away.

Fan participation: This summer, two amazing events happened in the arts world simultaneously. Here in the U.S., the rock band Of A Revolution (O.A.R.) crowd-sourced song lyrics on Twitter, crediting fans for their contributions to the song that became "Light Switch Sky." Meanwhile, London's Royal Opera crowd-sourced lyrics to an opera through Twitter. In the process, Twitter became a curation tool, and both curators here used other forms of digital media such as blogs and online video to further engage fans. Want to hook your fans? Give them a stake in the content.

Gift giving: Thought you were doing something special for a Facebook friend by giving them one of those little icons as a gift? How about giving them something they'd be really excited about, like an MP3, a charitable donation, or a "gourmet feast" gift basket? Yeah, that last one runs $85, but they are your friends, right? Today, those goods are provided through the Real Gifts application. Tomorrow, it may well be Amazon. What I'd really love to see is gift recommendations tailored to recipients' profile interests right when you're sending something virtual or physical.

News-sourcing: Journalists were among the first to embrace Twitter. Will they similarly lead the charge with Google Wave? They're starting to, anecdotally at least. Mashable loves covering these stories, from the Seattle Times posting a Wave to find a suspected cop killer to town squares hosted by the Austin American-Statesman. Google Wave itself may or may not be the platform of the future, but it's opened the door to news ways for the media to interact with their audience.

Gaming: In November 2009, over 6 million gamers (and their loved ones) bought the blockbuster "Modern Warfare 2." That same month, about 70 million gamers played "Farmville." I know I'm stretching comparisons here, but the notion of what a blockbuster game is continues to shift. Is it a game that millions of people pay $50 for right when it comes out, or a free game played by tens of millions of people, where a small percentage pay small sums over time for in-game upgrades? There's room for both models, and there's room for new thinking on what a successful game is.

That's just a taste of how our thinking changed this year, and it only leaves me hungrier for the new perspectives ahead in 2010.

How Saatchi & Saatchi’s Toyota social media disaster unfolded

Here (from Australia's Mumbrella) is a great case study of the dangers of letting your tradditional agency (in this case Saatchi & Saatchi) design and run a Social Media campaign.

This comes back to the point I blogged about before - earned media requires a differnt mindset from bought media .... Toyota and Saatchi & Saatchi  lerned this in public.

"......Toyota’s now disastrous foray into social media offers a demonstration of what skills an agency needs to play in that space.  

It’s now obvious that PR expertise is not an optional extra that ad agencies having a bit of a dabble in social media can do without. Although advertising has always had the potential to be controversial, for social media that possibility grows exponentially and that risk needs to be controlled.

And as Saatchi & Saatchi has demonstrated, it now goes without saying that you actually need to understand social media before you start. You can’t start learning on the client’s time.

For Toyota, I still think that running a live social media pitch with the five competing campaigns was a good thing. Even without this week’s events, it will have learned a lot. And by doing it in the public arena, the entire marketing industry got to learn too.

Where it went wrong was in giving too much leeway to an agency with little apparent social media experience and seemingly too little risk control to accompany that.

As an aside, it was interesting to note that another agency on the shortlist was Oddfellows, a long term partner of Toyota. A traditionally based agency, Oddfellows didn’t have the hubris to claim to be able to understand social media on its own. It partnered with social media agency The Population.

Saatchi & Saatchi apparently decided it could fly solo. Rather like many media planners think they’d make a good creative, I wonder if Saatchis thought social media was easier than it was.

It began to go wrong for Saatchis very early in the process. For starters, a film competition is such a tired idea. There was no twist. The brief was simply: make a film featuring a Yaris, and win a relatively small amount of money.

The accompanying Facebook page felt that it was being moderated by somebody who had just discovered the internet, and was catching up on the last few years’ memes. It posted links to the likes of the OK Go treadmill music video, the Johnnie Walker Robert Carlyle ad and “Guy catches glasses with face”. All great virals, but also familiar to anyone who’d spent much time online in the last year like the target audience. It didn’t position the Facebook group as somewhere to go to catch the latest and hottest.

No wonder then that as rival agencies’ Yaris campaigns began to get up stream, the Clever Film Comp got stuck on the grid. Facing the embarrassing prospect of no entries, the agency abandoned the idea of genuine user generated content, and with it what many would consider social media authenticity.

It forwarded this email to production house contacts:

From: Rob

Subject: Clever Comp

Hey creative people

I’ve got something that you’ll (or your housemates, brothers, sisters, artistic friends etc will) be interested in.

It’s a film comp in aide of promoting Toyota Yaris.

“A film comp? I don’t have the time!” you may say, but listen up. So far, NO ONE has entered and it has been open for more than 10 days and closes 1st December. Voting is done on hits and comments so if you’re in first you have a huge advantage. And you don’t have to make an ad, just put a Yaris in somewhere a la the ‘number 8′ or ’spring’ in Tropfest or something

First prize is $7,000. $3,000 for second and $1,000 for 3rd. At this stage, you could enter a picture of your cat playing in his kitty litter and win 7 grand.

Details are in the attachments. If you win, I’d love an all carbon fibre road bicycle for Christmas.

Cheers y’all.

-Rob

As a result, this skewed the entries. If you promote the competition as an ad agency to your production house contacts then what you’re going to get back are slick would-be commercials, rather than short films. This was, as we now know, to prove important.

It certainly suggests that by this point the agency’s aim was to avoid the embarrassment of having very few entries for its contest, rather than to run an authentic, engaging competition.

.... "  more

Tom Fishburne of BrandCamp Nails it Again

Bought Media will never become Earned Media

It sounds so perfect: you put a "share this" button in a banner ad and suddenly even stodgy, old display media becomes social media. Pay for the impressions and get the viral effect as a bonus. It's the future of advertising!

There are just two catches to this: it's been done before, and it's not the future of anything. It's a bell, a whistle, or maybe a bell and a whistle if executed well. But it's not going to fundamentally change advertising, social media, or anything else.

The latest entry in the space is TweetMeme's Adtweets, announced in late November. TweetMeme, which has become the go-to Twitter aggregator and the most prominent source of "retweet this" buttons around the Web, is allowing advertisers to add a retweet button to standard ad units. You can't blame TweetMeme for overselling it: "The Adtweets are a way of putting pressure on advertisers to improve the standard of adverts..."

 While it sounds rather charming with the British accent, it's not going to improve ad quality. Instead, it might put more pressure on advertisers to attempt to create humorous or captivating ads that may do nothing to help their brand. Evian's "Rollerbabies" ad just earned a Guinness World Recordby becoming the most viewed online ad ever, with over 45 million views, yet I have yet to see any coverage of the record that mentions Evian's market share or any other success metric from the brand's perspective. Maybe a needle moved, maybe nothing happened, but it's hardly a clear-cut case that a viral ad means it's successful.

The concept of sharing ads through social media isn't new. Google Gadget Ads launched in September 2007, and I don't know if I've ever seen one in the thousands of hours I've spent online since then. Clearspring and Gigya have also offered such functionality, and Spongecell makes it easy to "share with friends, or the world - without leaving the ad." I love that this functionality exists, but most of the time it's not necessary.

Here are four reasons why this isn't a game-changer:

1) Most ads aren't worth sharing. There are always exceptions to this rule -- the DVR-proof ads on TV you'll look for on YouTube and the newspaper and magazine ads you'll rip out and save. The same applies to banner ads, but that's relatively rare.

2) Sharing often isn't the best call to action. Are you trying to get a consumer to buy something? Request more information? Go to a store? Watch a TV show or movie on a certain date? Learn more about a new product? Get exposed to a new brand name? Think more positively about a brand? In any of these cases, sharing competes with the primary call to action. And if the primary call to action is to share the ad, what's the purpose?

3) Network-specific ads work best within those networks. Consider Facebook's Engagement Ads and Digg Ads that can be voted up or down. Each of those advertising experiences is customized to the publisher. Yet a Facebook ad wouldn't work the same way on the homepage of Forbes.com, and visitors to WebMD would generally be thrown off by Digg buttons on ads running there. As for tweetable ads, targeting can help -- a tweetable ad on TweetMeme.com or TechCrunch will find a more receptive audience than if it ran on a mainstream publisher. But such ads will still need to clearly illustrate why such sharable functionality makes sense in that context. I'm skeptically inclined to think advertisers will slap a "tweet this" or "share this" button on less discriminately, and then call it a social media campaign.

4) Most marketers and agencies don't plan earned and paid media together. That makes the value proposition a harder sell. Consider a marketer running display ads to drive traffic to its site, and (generously) 1%  of consumers click the ad. Say that marketer adds sharing functionality, the click-through rate (CTR) drops to 0.8%, but another 0.7% of consumers share the ad with their friends. In the latter scenario, that can be lumped together as a 1.5% engagement rate, but instead the marketer will be held accountable for the 20% drop in CTR from 1% to 0.8%. If you're still with me, let's take it one step further. The shared version of that ad (shared 0.7% of the time) would need a 29% CTR to generate enough clicks for those marketing strategists to keep their jobs. Then they have two choices in this admittedly oversimplified scenario: they have to demonstrate the value of the ad's pass-along rate, or they have to go back to generating clicks as efficiently as they can.

I still love the idea of sharable ads. It will become more common, and I'm sure a lot of marketers and agencies will use it in ways that achieve their goals. But it isn't going to make advertising better, any more than YouTube has made TV advertising better. It's just one more option marketers have online, where some pioneers will get great PR for it, some followers will ride the hype coattails, and most others will consider it -- if and when sharable ads make sense for them.

Me being interviewed on ADOI TV

A little while ago I spoke at the MMC09 - here is an interview done by the team just after the conference.

In the interview I cover the relationship between WoM and Social Media and how my company (Vocanic) approaches the planning of a campaign with its Groundswell(tm) methodology.

Here is a post by Andy Sernovitz, the ex head of WOMMA, who is now off doing his own thing called Gaspedal  and authoring books  and writing his Dam, I Wish blog

What I loved ( and got his permission to repost, thanks Andy) was the simple way he got rid of lots of the confustation (new word ...like it?) that is being weaved around WoM and Social Media.

To put Andy's sentiment into our own (Vocanic's) parlance .... its all about earning the recommendation.

Big Hairy Idea #1:  It's Not ALL About Social Media

Social media is an incredible tool.  It enables fast conversations, it enables widespread conversations, and it connects people who would rarely see each other.  It gives speed and scale to word of mouth.

But social media is not word of mouth marketing.  It's a tool we can use for the online portion of word of mouth.  But it's not even the main tool there. I would argue that more recommendations go by plain old-fashioned email than all the social networks combined.

On top of that, offline word of mouth is so much bigger than online word of mouth.  A tweet still doesn't beat a personal recommendation from a close friend.

So why are we talking about social media so much?  

1.  Because real word of mouth is hard.  It requires big ideas, long-term commitment, and an honest dedication by a company to earn the respect and recommendation of its customers.  You can't just call your agency and order up some WOM.

2.  Because social media gives us an action step.  It's fairly straightforward to do a campaign on Facebook or Twitter.  You can call your agency and order up a social media campaign.  And your agency, who is totally freaked out by this WOM stuff, can deliver a pretty good campaign.
Then you can show the results to your happy boss.  Everyone feels good and gets paid.

Except...  we completely miss the point.

The point of word of mouth isn't ecommerce; it isn't to count clicks and CPAs.

The point of word of mouth is to be a brand worth talking about.  To be a company that people are proud to tell their friends about.  It's to replace paid marketing with personal connections.  To replace cash with love.  To be fantastic.

Internet overtakes TV in the UK to be the biggest advertising medium

UK INTERNET AD SPEND GREW 4.6% TO £1.75 BILLION IN H1 2009 Online advertising expenditure overtakes TV for the first time IAB figures show ad expenditure online up £82m to record market share of 23.5% www.iabuk.net

In the first half of 2009 internet advertising weathered the recession and grew by 4.6% to £1,752.1m, despite the entire advertising sector contracting by 16.6% during the same period.

According to the bi-annual online advertising expenditure study from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) - the trade body for digital marketing - in partnership with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and the World Advertising Research Centre (WARC) - , the internet has now overtaken TV advertising to become the UK's biggest advertising medium.

The UK remains the world leader in terms of market share for online, with the medium accounting for 23.5% in the first half of 2009. The results signal a significant restructure of marketing budgets as advertisers follow their audiences online and look to the internet for even more measureable and accountable methods.

Technology, telecoms and finance leading the way

 The study breaks down the online display market by industry category, to identify the top spenders and how investment is increasing or decreasing across sectors.  The results show that Technology is the biggest spender, accounting for 19.1% of the market, followed by Telecoms (13.3% rising from 9.7% the previous year) and Finance (13.2% up from 11.9).  Entertainment and Media was fourth with 11.8%, while Consumer Goods saw significant growth up from 6.2% in H1 2008 to 8.1% in 2009 as FMCG marketers steadily increased digital budgets.