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Archive for the ‘Social Media Strategy’ Category

Or just an evolution?

Either way I think the most recent change in Facebook’s homepage News Feed is going to force marketers to rethink the way they use Facebook.

As I explained earlier, Facebook developed an algorithm to display only the most “interesting” posts from your friends and fan pages in your news feed, presumably based on your previous “likes” and comments. Although this is the default view for most users, you can click to view the live stream, which shows everything. But unless you remember to do that, you’re going to see the filtered version.

Now that some time has passed, I want to revisit the topic and look at some of the fallout.

The major problem I see from a brand standpoint is that the new algorithm makes it almost impossible for a brand page to get featured on a user’s news feed. Since each news feed is tailored to the individual user, it doesn’t matter if you’re the most popular brand ever and used to get hundreds of comments on each post, you won’t get featured in a news feed unless that one user interacts with you regularly. I don’t know about you, but even for the brands I love I only “like” or comment on their updates once in a blue moon, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still want to see the information.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that it’s completely based on the history of activity. For example, I recently became a fan of Southwest Airlines (which is btw, a VERY popular brand in case you haven’t heard.) They’re running a promotion for fans to win a free flight, and as a loyal Southwest customer I was surprised to find out I wasn’t already a fan – I’d love to get updates from them since I use their service frequently. Anyways, flash forward a day or two and I checked their page to see how the contest was going – and realized I’d missed several updates from them. I checked my news feed (filtered) – not there. I checked my live feed (unfiltered) – and there they were, all my missed updates.

Not sure if you caught the significance of that. I had just become a fan. Facebook didn’t even give them a trial run in my main news feed to try to elicit some interaction – they went straight to the land of lost updates.

This is a huge barrier for most brands. If that’s the treatment that a popular brand, with a strong social footprint like Southwest, gets what about that new page you just helped your client build? How are you going to get any attention?

The only answer I can see is, by paying for it. Remember when Facebook came up with that targeting feature to send ads just to fans? Well, it may be the only way you can reach them now (yes you can send “updates” but those go into a subsection of the inbox and can be lost just like your published statuses.) And I think there will be more [paid] options coming for “increasing” visibility with your own fans. I’m a fan of Pink Ribbon (for Breast Cancer research) and they are somehow able to put messaging into my “notifications” bar. They’re also able to send me email messages to my inbox. I don’t know how they do it but I’m thinking they may be part of a trial run for new offerings (because who’s going to get mad at spam from a charity?) I hope I’m wrong about that last part, because both of those options are much more disruptive to me than simply seeing the updates in my news feed.

Personally, I’m bummed because it cuts down on that viral, discovery based aspect of Facebook. If one of my friends comments on a Fan page – I won’t see that unless the friend who said it is someone I interact with frequently. It’s creating a black hole of updates. As a user myself, it’s infinitely carving away at the amount of content I see. It gives me a whittled down list of updates, and since that’s all I see, it’s all I interact with. Then as I fail to comment on every single one of those posts, it will filter out some of the people on the smaller list, and so and so on. For myself I’ll choose the live feed option to counteract the issue, but unless everyone else remembers to do that as well I think the value of Facebook is going to be ultimately decreased.

What do you think? Anyone out there have some ideas for ways to gain back visibility for pages beyond paying for it? Leave a comment! Maybe together we can brainstorm a way around this roadblock…

Or, so says MediaPost News’ Joe Mandese in his post Social Media Fails To Manifest As Marketing Medium, Report Likens Twitter To TiVo: More Hype Than Reality.

I’ll summarize the basic points of the article for you. Mandese says that although social media has “reached critical mass with 83% of the Internet population now using it – and more than half doing so on a regular basis” it isn’t turning into the marketing medium that all it’s media proponents claim it to be. He uses the following research from Knowledge Networks to assert that less than 5% of users “turn to social media for purchase decisions.”

He goes on to use this information to say that TV advertising and WOM are far more effective ways for brands to market to their customers.

I was going to leave a comment with my thoughts on this, but alas, you cannot comment unless you login and since I felt I had so much to say to refute this, I decided to write my own post.

Point #1: Research Issues

Knowledge Networks’ research looked at how many people regularly or sometimes “turn to” social media to make purchase decisions. I would say that there are two major flaws with the question itself that bias the outcome:

1. Who “turns to” anything for purchase decisions? I don’t ”turn to” TV when I want to go on a trip. I don’t think, “Hey, I’d love to go to Hawaii this summer, maybe I should watch hours of TV in hopes that a commercial appears giving me information on that.”
2. Regular consumers don’t know what “social media” is. If you ask them if they use social media to make purchase decisions they think about whether or not they went on Facebook to find information. They don’t realize that if they went to TripAdvisor.com - they were using social media. If they went to Priceline.com and read reviews of the hotel they were considering – they were using social media. If they wanted to buy a new computer and read an article in TechCrunch about it – they were using social media. They just don’t categorize it as that anymore because it’s so natural.

Point #2: TV and Word of Mouth

Knowledge Networks considers social media to be below TV and Word of Mouth in terms of value. But they’re not comparing apples to apples. Their question was “How often do you refer to social media Web sites or features as a resource for information, reviews, or recommendations when in the market for [category]?” So we need to talk about whether people turn to TV and Word of Mouth as resources to make purchase decisions to determine value in this case.

1. Like I mentioned above, you’re not going to “turn to” TV to make a purchase decision, TV is a discovery mechanism. You don’t go there when you’re looking for specific information to make a purchase. If you compare TV as a promotional, awareness increasing marketing tactic to whether people purposefully use social media to make a purchase decision – that’s not a fair comparison. Compare their effectiveness based on reach and awareness driving goals. And I’d argue when you have a social media site with millions to hundreds of millions of users and the ability to hypertarget your message the value of those impressions is actually pretty high, especially when you consider cost.
2. Social media is word of mouth. If my friend posts that she’s headed to Hawaii this summer on her Facebook and links to the review page of the hotel she picked – that’s word of mouth. If my coworker twitters about how he just bought the cool new phone and it’s actually poorly made and already breaking – that’s word of mouth. If you go on your blog and talk about how your trying to decide between a Mac and a PC and your friends all comment back – that’s word of mouth. All of that is actually social media but people probably wouldn’t categorize that as “turning to social media” they would categorize that as asking their friends.

Point #3: You’re Missing the Forrest For the Trees

This whole article is based on the premise that advertising will work the same in social media as it does everywhere else: as ads interrupting people’s experience as they try to connect with their friends online. The questions are all directed towards the effectiveness of advertising in that sense on these sites. But what about actually participating here?

The point isn’t how many people use one service or another, the point is that the people are demanding personal relationships. They want to get advice from people they trust. What if the brand itself is part of that circle of trust? This isn’t a shift from TV ads to Facebook ads – it’s a shift from bullhorn one-to-many advertising to one-on-one relationships. And they’re right – social media doesn’t have the reach that TV has. Yet. But do you really want to be the brand that gets left behind? Do you want to watch while your competitors get comfortable here in the early days and reap the benefits in the future when you’re playing catch up?

I guess those are questions each business will have to answer for themselves. What do you all think? Please feel free to leave me a comment – my comments are open, no login required.

Targeting is critical for marketers. It costs money to get your message in front of potential customers, so the more certain you can be that they are in fact potential customers, the happier you are.

Right. We all know that. But what if I told you the traditional ways of targeting don’t work in social media?

Gasp!

But it’s true. Let’s review, there’s:

• Demographics – sex, age, ethnicity, etc
• Geographics – where you live, work, play
• Psychographics – generalized personalities based mainly on lifestyle ex: ’soccer moms,’ ‘c-suite execs,’ ‘vegan,’ etc
• Behavioral – you buy a cooking magazine so you’re likely to buy cookware and kitchen appliances
• Technographics - what kinds of activities you do online

All of these things make sense, and I don’t disagree that they can help you find the audience you’re looking for. But when you get into the social sphere, I think things can get a little more complicated. Right now, we’re talking about it the same way we always have been. Marketing Vox discussed the age demographics of Twitter, Facebook likes to point out that they’re not just for kids; everyone is still talking about the same classifications. Why?

Think about it. Here’s a sample persona:

Now, let’s say you’re a B2B service and you want to connect with Jeff via social media. You know that Facebook’s largest growing age population is 35+ and you know that Twitter’s got a very active older, techno-savvy, audience. Does either of those facts tell you which one you should use to connect with Jeff? I would say no.

It tells you that Jeff could be on Facebook and/or Twitter but what it doesn’t tell you is why he is on either network. I’d like to propose a new* way to target:

Purpose Based Targeting:

As it turns out, Jeff has a Facebook account and a Twitter account. He uses Facebook to get in touch with his old buddies from business school, keep up to date on his kids, and see pictures from family and friends. If those are the reasons why he uses Facebook, he probably isn’t looking to make connections with his B2B service provider in that space. On the other hand, he uses Twitter mainly from work and talks mostly about what’s going on in his industry and shares updates and news with his followers. This would be a great place to contact him with information about your B2B service because it’s aligned with his purpose in that space.

There’s been some research into this area – mainly in the B2B sector. The main designation is whether people are likely to use a network for business or personal purposes. I think this is a great starting point. But what about everybody else? We need more categories than just business vs. non-business. My personal theory is that younger people use social network sites to organize their whole lives, where older participants use it for limited updates on friends. I think there could be differences among people in different psychographic and technographic groups as well.

Until more research is done into those categorizations, each industry, or even every brand, needs to do its own research to know whether their customers are using social media (this is becoming more likely every day), where they are engaging, how they are using it and why they use the networks they do.

Thoughts? Let’s talk in the comments…

*Note: This is ‘new’ as in I haven’t heard it directly referenced and named. If you have, please share that in the comments because I’d love to read more on the subject.

Photo credit: cliff1066 (Flickr)

One of the things I learned at SXSWi that really resonated with me at the time (and has stuck with me) came from Kathy Sierra’s talk on breakthroughs. It was repeated throughout the panels on community building so this is more of a summary and not a direct quote:

Customers really suck at making breakthroughs

That’s right. You heard me. Your customers’ or community members’ ideas can be sub-par.

It makes sense when you think about it. It’s the classic dichotomy between writer/editor. Individuals have great ideas, they put those ideas into some sort of form, format, place, media, product, etc. Then the editor comes by and says things like, “You should spell check this” and “You should take out this part and add more explanation here.”

Customers are the same way. They buy your product/service or join your network, like it, then think up ways it could be better. It should be blue, it should go faster, it should have more memory, it should play music, it should be made of more durable materials. That is the crucial role that they play, and they do it well. They’ll take your product and do things with it that you never thought of, and in your next version you can adapt and add to it to make it better.

But when it comes to redesigning your whole service, or coming up with a brand new product – they’re not your best resource. As a collective they tend to think inside the box and, as people, they are naturally resistant to change. If you asked a group of cell phone users years ago how they would improve the phone they might’ve suggested “Add a camera and MP3 player,” “make it come in different colors,” but they wouldn’t have come up with the iPhone. This is why Alpha and Beta releases are so popular. You can put your revolutionary idea out there and let your customers do what they do best, suggest improvements.

This is crucial when it comes to social media and crowdsourcing. Using social monitoring tools to gather insights about your product and service from your consumers is a fantastic idea. And using them to make incremental improvements is a perfect application of that information. But beyond that, it’s up to YOU to internalize those insights and use them to make the breakthroughs your company needs to get ahead and reach the next level.

Agree? Disagree? Think I’m misinterpreting something? Leave me a comment -

Photo credit: Capture Queen (Flickr)

Careful not to seem robotic...

Imagine yourself at a party. You walk up to the host to say hello and thank them for having you:

You: “This is a great party. The food is delicious, thanks for having me.”

Host: “I’m hosting a party right now but I appreciate your comment and will respond to you soon.”

You: “Um great…”

OK, I admit that example is extreme, but I think automating your twitter account has the same effect. Twitter is a way to personalize your brand and make you seem more human to your customers. Automating that only takes you back to where you started. It’s like the invention of automated phone trees all over again, “Please hold, your tweet is very important to us. Your tweet will be responded to in the order it was received.”

I realize that last paragraph was pretty harsh and it sounds like I’m condemning all Twitter tools to the proverbial tool shed in the sky – but that’s really not the case. Tools in and of themselves aren’t bad – they’re simply tools that allow you to perform a certain function easier. It’s how you use the tools that counts.

There are a few versions of various Twitter tools out there (and some that even aggregate them into one massive account manager) so let’s talk about them as categories rather than specific sites.

Auto Reply: You could set this tool to respond to any @ message or D message with your preset reply. Kind of functions like an out of office but with the frequency of an away message. I understand the need for this if you’re going on vacation or an extended absence (could you just tweet your vacation schedule in the first place?) but other than that I don’t see the value. If you’ve simply stepped out for the day – don’t alert me, just respond to me tomorrow. I don’t expect my twitter friends to respond immediately. In my opinion this is the one that can sound most like an automated phone tree if misused.

Mainly  – as a Twitter user I see a huge possibly of these “away” messages beginning to clutter my feed and annoy me with alerts from my desktop/phone apps. Most of them are @ replies, so if I’m friends with both parties I’ll see the away message as well…multiply by number of friends in common and number of days you’ll be away and number of people who regularly write you messages, repeat for each friend using the service and add the totals together…depending on how popular this gets it could get hairy.

Auto Follow: I’m torn about auto follow. On one hand brands should follow most people who mentions their name, even if it’s negative. On the other hand – if you auto follow you’re kind of missing out on seeing what people are saying about you in the first place. And if someone just purely hates you, following them could set them off. I say use this feature with caution. Go ahead and set it up if you feel you really need it, but make sure to allot some time throughout your day/week/month to go explore who you’re following and what they’ve said about you. And unless your brand name is extremely well known – consider whether this feature would really save you that much time anyways.

Side note on auto follow: one of the big predicted trends for 2009 is cleaning out your follower list so I don’t think this will catch on except as a way for brands to build a following.

Blog Feed/RSS: This service will automatically tweet whenever you update your blog. OK sounds good – I normally tweet to update my followers when I’ve written new content because I realize they may not be checking daily (and they wouldn’t want to miss this one!) But something about this feels a little more spammy. I follow some great bloggers, @ChrisBrogan and @JasonFalls for starters, and every time they tweet with a link to their blog (which is relatively frequently) they write a unique message that summarizes the post, mostly with a witty comment and a link. It’s called a hook people. A preview. A snippet. Without it how would I know whether I really want to read it? Yes I know it will generally write the headline, at least up to the character limit cutoff, but it’s not the same as a personalized summary. If you just spent all that time writing a post, will it kill you to write an extra line and copy/paste the URL in? Again, there are exceptions. If you’re CNN, or the Huffington Post,  for example and you want to tweet an alert about every headline, of course that’s too overwhelming to do manually. Or if you have a blog with several contributors but only one Twitter account. But if you can count how many times you write a blog post per day on your fingers, this just seems lazy to me. Harsh? Maybe.

Auto Post: Is something really cool coming up that you want to tweet about but it’s not convenient to write about it at the time or you’re afraid you’ll forget? You can use auto post tools to schedule when a tweet you’ve pre-written should be twittered. I see some benefit for this for brands – set up the tweets around a huge product launch so it’s one less thing to worry about during launch time. Maybe you write tweets updating people on the schedule of a large event you’ve planned as it happens. Maybe you have a “joke of the week” or a “thought of the week” that you do as a regular segment and you don’t want to forget your great idea so you write it down earlier and set it to send at the regular time. Fun holiday idea: set a “Happy New Year” tweet to post right at midnight! Just don’t abuse it. Part of the fun of getting updates from an event is that you know what’s actually going on, not just what was planned (that’s available in the posted schedule anyways right?) Use this one when you need it but make sure to also post genuine “this second” information because that’s part of the appeal of Twitter.

Mass Message: This just sounds like spam. It makes me nervous. Everything you tweet is publicly visible to everyone you follow, so why use this feature to mass message them? Is it because the direct message will show up in your followers’ email inboxes? Is that so you can get around the spam filters they use? Reflect on these questions before you use this tool. I know I personally wouldn’t want a bunch of email messages from the brands I follow, especially after #TwitterSecret reveled that they can be over 900 characters long! If this happened to often I would unfollow. Harsh again? It’s all about permission marketing – don’t send me stuff I didn’t ask for – simple!

Auto Message: This is just a simple message that you set up to say hello to a person when they follow you. For a large brand I don’t think this is tragic – you do want to say hello to people and sometimes it’s unrealistic to be able to handle the volume of followers. Make sure to spell check the message and go for it. For smaller brands I don’t think this is necessary. Part of the appeal of a smaller brand is the personal touch, take a second to at least notice their name and read their short bio. Write one way to customers and another to employees and yet another to industry peers. This just lets them know you really noticed them and are genuinely wanting to hear from them. I would argue for larger brands that level of personal attention is possible with dedication and will you get you a considerable amount of goodwill. However I realize that even if you do take the time, what you end up writing can sound canned anyways. Sometimes after you read their profile the best thing to say is still simply, “Hello, thanks for the follow!”

So that’s my summary of the benefits and pitfalls of various types of automated Twitter tools. The most dangerous of all though is a combination of the above. I would hate to see a brand think, “Oh we need to get into this Twitter thing,” sign up for an account and then set up an automated manager to take care of the account while they continue to ignore what their customers are trying to tell them. That scenario completely bypasses the social nature of Twitter and turns it into a mere billboard on the information highway.

Keep in mind that your goal, always, is to connect and communicate (both ways!) with your customers. Using these tools to further the reach of that connection is great, using these tools to fake that connection is not. In fact it may lead to a backlash that causes more damage to your current customer relationship rather than strengthening it.

Did I miss anything? Skip something? Am I just plain wrong? Tell me what you think in the comments.

* image found at http://justlooking.recursion.org/2004/May/21#madison-rules

Ok I know it sounds like a stretch at first, but stay with me on this one.

As social media continues to grow as our industry’s biggest buzz word I’ve seen an increasing number of client requests for blogs, twitter accounts, or facebook pages. Without fail the request goes something like this:

          “Please put together a strategy for client XYZ to have a Twitter account.”

          ”….?”

What will a Twitter account accomplish in a scenerio like that? What about all the unaswered questions? Like, “Why do you want a Twitter account in the first place?” ”What is your plan for handling customer concerns, suggestions and ideas internally once they’re brought up?”  And it’s not just Twitter. These questions need to be answered before a starting a blog, creating a network or joining a forum. No social media technology should be adopted lightly.

Just like you can’t adopt a puppy without thinking about it first. Sure it’s cute, sure everyone loves puppies. But you can’t just buy it and then forget about it. You have to feed it, you have to pet it, you have to walk it, you have to give it water, you have to have it groomed and taken to the vet for checkups, and you have to listen and respond to its complaints about your products. Ok maybe the last part is really only applicable to social media, but you get the idea.

The hardest thing to explain about social media is that it’s not a “thing” that you can just “have.” It’s a complete change in your business the same way a puppy is a complete change of lifestyle. You have to be prepared for the fundamental shift in the way you relate to your customers. Twitter isn’t just another platform for your advertising bursts, it should be the gateway to a deeper communication with the people who purchase your products. And a blog isn’t an island – it should be a traffic center where you put out information, bring in information and respond to it.

So do you still want a puppy? Think hard before you decide, because once you buy one it’s nearly impossible to go back. Think back to the last commercial you saw featuring the sad puppy dog eyes of the dogs at the humane society – can you handle how bad you would feel if you had to give your new puppy up to that fate? Same thing with social media – it might sound like all fun and games to start now but if it doesn’t go the way you expect you can’t just ditch the effort. Your customers will be twice as angry that you asked for their opinion and then ignored it when you didn’t like it. They’ll feel abandoned, just like that puppy. Social media is a commitment to your customers that you will take care of them for life, from here on out.

If you’re not ready for that relationship with your customer, then you’re not ready for social media in any form, no matter how trendy it is. Because trends come and go, today it’s Twitter, tomorrow it might be something new. If you understand the fundamentals of social media you can simply adapt to any new platform your customers adopt, you grow with them the same way pet owners switch dog food for different stages of their puppy’s life, if you don’t then you just have an irrelevant account on yesterday’s cool new site. And a sad puppy.

And so, social media is like a puppy. Agree? Disagree? Have another metaphor? Share in the comments section!