Digital Influence Mapping Project

The Planning Logic of Social Paths

We are rolling out our 2012 Social Strategy and Engagement Training across our global network. This is the expert-level training for our Social@Ogilvy teams around the world and is in its 7^th year. I have just come back from delivering this training in our Singapore and Hong Kong offices.  They are doing some awesome work and my favorite part of this responsibility is learning from our experts in-market.

This year, we have doubled-down on our discipline to create insights from social and other data. Insights strengthen any strategy and ultimately answer why people should care to engage in a program or with a brand via social and digital media. If you want more effective social programs – better short and long term results – then having genuine insight into the behavior of customers, the business and culture are key to knowing how to be relevant.

 

Insights drive effectiveness

We discover insights by combining 2 or more data points or observations to reveal something new and useful. A clinical but accurate description of what is often an inspiring discovery. We get insights from listening data, persona profiles of how users actually use social and digital media, ethnographies and more. One place we discover insights and practical knowledge that help us know how and where to engage people, are social paths. These are a type of customer journey that use research to understand all the relevant moments people interact with digital and social content along a decision-making journey like what shoulder bag to buy or which vaccines to get for their children. Social Paths help us understand where we can be of-use to people by delivering valuable content, tools or an experience along their way.

 

The Real Customer Journey

We have a model inside Ogilvy for understanding what will drive people’s behavior through the purchase cycle. Developed and championed by our planning leads – Ben Richards and Colin Mitchell – the Customer Journey is part of our integrated planning model called Fusion. 

I love this tool and framework. It really helps understand how we can be of-use to people and to drive actual behavior (vs. attitude). By articulating the desired response we hope to get from people at various moments in the cycle, we can map the barriers and the drivers to that response. 

That’s the customer journey writ large and can help drive any big programmatic strategy and idea in marketing. 

Why I Like Social Paths

In Google’s ZMOT research they find “The number of sources used by any shopper for any average shopping occasion has almost doubled, from 5.2 to 10.4 sources.” How we move from initial discovery through consideration, evaluation, purchase and on through the product experience and potential advocacy has certainty gotten more complex. Our examination clearly reveals a pattern of people reaching out through their social graph repeatedly through all phases of this cycle. Looking at just their social and digital touchpoints such as posting an image on Facebook for friend feedback, Googling to find customer reviews or following a brand on Facebook to receive valuable updates, is a somewhat artificial act. Ideally, we would look at a more holistic ‘customer path.’ Ok, we do that, but we also take a deep dive to look specifically at the social and digital moments. 

Each of these moments represents an opportunity for insight and for actual execution. We learn how people are starting to use mobile access to consumer reviews while standing in front of a display counter in-store. Readers take photos of book covers in Barnes and Noble to collect readable books they will buy later in batches on Amazon. Who wants to carry around a heavy book?   

Social Paths have a practical and tactical purpose, as well. Our Social Shopping colleague, Matt Gierhart sees that these moments can all be disrupted by the brand. Not in a bad way. We can learn where we can place content and what type will be most helpful or entertaining. We can see where the brand might make getting a task done a little (or a lot) easier. 

Just as listening to social conversations helps us understand what people are really thinking about brands and issues, Social Paths help us understand the process we all step through towards a goal. We find this a particularly helpful view on the customer journey.

(image of The Census Project, a large-scale public art project created by artist Anita Glesta for the United States General Services Administration’s Art in Architecture Program)

 

Just-in-time or Too-little-too-late in Social in Mexico? - The Agency Side

Agencies have their own too-soon and too-late conundrum. Almost all marketing and communications firms are paid to deliver business results today. Maybe, maybe they are working towards a 2-3 year horizon on a brand project. Too few are independently investing in the future but rather look to client initiatives and projects to justify a new solution in mobile, community marketing, employee advocacy or any of the other innovations that stand to radically change how we market.

The rapid growth of new behaviors like those in Mexico will not likely change, meaning, we are all ‘settling in’ for a bumpy ride of non-stop change for the foreseeable future.

Agencies have to choose if it’s their role to lead clients towards change or simply be responsive when the client comes around to changing. There are advantages to each choice. My bias is to be the agency thinking ahead and thoughtfully advising clients how to lean forward and do things that will help them for years to come. 

I have heard too many agency marketers around the world say, “our clients aren’t ready to innovate via social media; they aren’t asking for it.” We need to be stronger business people clearly distinguishing between innovation with its benefits to the business and efficiency with its role to improving the bottom line today. 

 

Will you be Just-in-time or Too-little-too-late in Social in Mexico?

Marketers around the world are trying to figure out when to divert resources to use social media behaviors and technology in their marketing, communications and customer service. Too early and the best conceived plans on Facebook or customer communities will not produce enough results to survive the next budget season. Too late and an organization can find itself chasing after consumer behavior and losing reputation, if not business, to competitors. 

We have big multinational clients who are deploying Facebook community management as quickly as possible in 50+ markets. Many of these countries don’t come close to having even critical mass adoption of internet access never mind consumers flocking to engage with brands via social networks. Still, the brands have no question that the velocity of social media adoption around the world will be faster than we have all been used to. 

Mexico is a Real-Fast Growth Market

And there’s good reason for this. Just look at Global Web Index’s summary of the real growth markets in social network usage. Mexico outpaces the US and that isn’t just because the US is saturated. A lot of behaviors in Mexico outpace other markets. Smartphone (45%) and tablet (16%) adoption in Mexico also outpaces the US.  Habits are shifting now.

According to Forester, “Brazilian and Mexican (connected + urban) consumers spend more time online than they do watching TV.” Where people spend their time, what they are trying to accomplish and where they focus their attention should matter to marketers. 

As for internet usage, “By 2016, Forrester expects online adoption to increase in Brazil to 57% and in Mexico to 48% – vs. the current 47% and 38%.” Half the population online. 

The Biggest Change for Marketers

As people like you and I adopt apps, adapt to being always connected and discover new ways to combine communications and content, how we form opinions and make decisions (including purchase decisions) is getting more complex. When buying a new bed, I am likely to reach out to my social graph throughout the buyer journey to get recommendations, check my decision with friends and post-justify my purchase with celebratory image via Instagram. Sure, I will visit retailers and manufacturers Web sites and pay attention to targeted and even non-targeted advertising.  

But two things the customer journey is not is neat nor linear. Attribution is a beast. It is likely more important to gain an understating how social works in combination with other owned and paid media choices to help consumers towards their decision and willingness to advocate. 

The biggest change is learning how to use social media as part of a strategy to drive business not simply add it to the channel mix. As a channel, social disappoints. As a powerful, new set of consumer behaviors it will continue to change how we market for years to come. That new learning will take some time for big brands. We see this everyday as major global marketers try to scale the learnings in social from one market to many, embrace new digital measurement models and provoke “old dogs” in charge of marketing around the world to try out the new tricks. 

Innovation Not ROI

Brands in Mexico should be aggressively deploying social media strategies and increasing their spend. Consumers are changing fast and organizational change takes years. It is time to innovate and accrue an understanding of how a brand’s use of social media behaviors and platforms can drive customer advocacy, raise meaningful awareness and discovery and, yes, even drive sales. Set aside our well-intended focus on ROI for now. We will get there. Not its time to innovate.  

 

(image: thanks to Upper Playground for their image from the Mexico Contemprary Art Fair (MACO)

What is your social value formula?

 Executives understand that social media has value for their business and a far greater potential then how they are using it today. Most of the multinational brands we work with are in their third year of committed effort introducing social to marketing, communications and customer service efforts. What were once unconnected experiments in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or blogs, are now efforts to enforce some interpretation of ‘best practice’ customer engagement across Facebook fans in 40 countries, for example. 

According to the new McKinsey paper, Making Sense of Social Media, from partners David Court, Roxane Divol, and David Edelman, 

“Despite offering numerous opportunities to influence consumers, social media still accounts for less than 1 percent of an average marketing budget, in our experience. Many chief marketing officers say that they want to increase that share to 5 percent.” 

And I would stick to the, now, three year goal of 18% of total marcom spend put forth in the Fuqua School of Business research from 2010. Either way, we need to expand our use of social media – especially in marketing, communications and customer service. 

Finding your value

A few years ago, a global financial services company was exploring how social media could further their goals or at the very least , how they might anticipate new threats from social media. Internal evangelists butted heads with “traditionals” who needed proof before endorsing any real investment in social media. One of those evangelists came up with a simple value formula. 

Since they were a service brand, they had already established a simple value for a public customer complaint. When someone declared a serious service complaint, it cost them “$X” in terms of referral or direct business. They then mined Twitter and a specific travel forum which featured a concentration of brand experience comments from customers. By tallying up the negatives and ranking them in severity, they were able to demonstrate that a month’s worth of unchecked negativity had put almost half a billion dollars of business at risk.  That became a motivating ‘social value formula’ for decision-making executives. 

The McKinsey paper cites another example:

“…to ensure that the company was doing a quality job designing and executing its social presence, it benchmarked its efforts against approaches used by other companies known to be successful in social media. It then advanced the following hypotheses:

• If all of these social-media activities improve general service perceptions about the brand, that improvement should be reflected in a higher volume of positive online posts.
• If social sharing is effective, added clicks and traffic should result in higher search placements.
• If both of these assumptions hold true, social-media activity should help drive sales—ideally, at a rate even higher than the company could achieve with its average gross rating point (GRP) of advertising expenditures.

The company then tested its options. At various times, it spent less money on conventional advertising, especially as social-media activity ramped up, and it modeled the rising positive sentiment and higher search positions just as it would using traditional metrics.

The company concluded that social-media activity not only boosted sales but also had higher ROIs than traditional marketing did. Thus, while the company took a risk by shifting emphasis toward social-media efforts before it had data confirming that this was the correct course, the bet paid off. What’s more, the analytic baseline now in place has given the company confidence to continue exploring a growing role for social media.”

Find your value

In the McKinsey example, I am struck by the simplicity of the brand shifting budget to prove their hypothesis valid. Too many brands are cautiously going at half-steam in social media hoping that the killer data point, the mythical social “GRP” or value of a fan, will reveal itself from some third party. The social value formula should be bespoke to your business. And, it’s available today if you are simply willing to prove it valid. What is your social value formula?  

Bald Barbie Not Invented Here

Why do brands find it hard to respond to community requests? Recently, a grassroots effort started by Jane Bingham and Rebecca Sypin, each who lost daughters to cancer, manifested in the Facebook Page, Beautiful and Bald Barbie. They have earned 158K fans to date all rallied around the idea of motivating Mattel to create a bald Barbie for girls struggling from hair loss associated from cancer treatments and other situations. 

Four months later, Mattel has signaled that they will create and give away “a bald friend” of Barbie in 2012. This is after the Bratz doll line announced they are delivering a series of bald dolls this June. 

Deborah Weinstein over at the SocialCMO summarized the “we were going to do this anyhow” tone response from Mattel when they finally pulled the trigger, 

“This week – some four months later – Mattel finally stepped up to the plate and announced the creation of a Bald Barbie Friend of Barbie for distribution to children’s hospitals and charities in 2013. Company spokesman Alan Hilowitz was quick to point out that Mattel did NOT create the doll in response to the Facebook page, but rather because “they helped us realize how important this was for us to do.”

Hard to Surrender to the Community

As much as I share Deb Weinstein’s POV that Mattel missed a bigger opportunity to acknowledge the community discussion immediately, respond and finally pull the trigger to meet the clear demand, the fact that they did at all is probably progress for a traditional business like Mattel.  When companies like Threadless have an entire business model around crowdsourced and voted-on t-shirts, why is it so much harder for the Mattel’s of the world to just say, “wow, you guys are bringing up an awesome idea and we really want to make this happen…?”

The problem of ownership

Can you say legal, intellectual property(IP), and post-war industrial enterprise? Threadless is different. They are soliciting designs under a clear terms of service that protects all parties. They also weren’t born out of the culture of the fifties.  As much as Mattel may have wanted to rush with a positive response, their whole infrastructure has been designed to protect IP. An idea from an outside source suddenly puts them at risk. Who would own the doll suggested by two moms behind a Facebook page? Should they manufacture and sell it, are they at risk for ownership? Does that risk dilute the protections on the golden goose core Barbie line? 

 

The problem of management

And then there is the curse of the industrial age, creative company. Toy companies are creative businesses who are designed to deliver valuable ideas. Agencies are the same way. If it wasn’t created at Mattel then what the heck are all those employees doing in the design department? I know it’s not logical and we really aren’t talking about a creative breakthrough here (just look at the photo mock-ups people have made of Barbie with no hair – pretty simple, right). Still post-war, industrial-scale companies are where management became king. And management is meant to control and manage. Creative is meant to create. The impulse to reject outside thinking is pretty strong because that’s the way they roll. 

 

The problem of dialogue

Some companies have a hard time talking to people in anything but that highly-protected tone of the PR department. If there is one lesson that social media has taught brands it must be that learning how to have a conversation like a human being actually does matter to customers. Barbie’s Facebook page is largely about the character’s voice. Mattel’s page, on the other hand, is about engaging and natural as the accountants who come out at every Oscar Awards show to explain the judging procedures. 

It’s also where you see a doozy of “protect the IP at all costs” statement in their Info tab:

“As the world’s largest toy company, we receive thousands of product suggestions every year. Given this volume, it’s likely yours is the same or substantially similar to concepts we’ve already received or developed. While we appreciate hearing from our consumers, we rely on our large staff of designers for product ideas. Therefore, it’s our policy to not review any unsolicited concepts and we cannot retain your submission. We don’t assume any obligation in connection with your unsolicited concept. If you’d like to learn more about how to get into the toy business, you may wish to contact the Toy Industry Association at http://www.Toy-Tia.org.”

Part of the problem with Mattel’s response was how long it took. Four months is about 3 months and 29 days too long. They needn’t have assented right away. A simple “we hear you” and “we appreciate what you are all going through with your children and your love for Barbie…” would have started the ball rolling in the right direction. Part of the problem is the established tone of voice.

Perhaps Mattel still believes there is only one way to protect their position - the cardboard statement. So many other brands have found ways to talk like human beings without losing their commercial advantage. Could Mattel have done better? Certainly. I only hope they examine this situation with enough candor to see what the true opportunities for change are. 

Does Facebook Timeline Drive Up Engagement?

According to Simply Measured the answer is a clear “yes”. Their report shows strong Engagement-per-post gains for fifteen of the first-movers since the new feature set launched. Pages like Toyota, Red Bull, Macy’s, Ben & Jerry’s were amongst the top 10 or so in their limited review that gained anywhere from 38% to 156%. A small number of first-movers did not show gains. 

Pinned Posts and Multimedia

I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the two most impactful changes within the Timeline feature-set are pinned posts and the design demand for multimedia content. A third, the new ability for sponsored stories to appear in the wall (vs. the sidebar) will likely prove a big winner not just on acquisition but on engagement (people liking, commenting, clicking through to content). 

Pinned posts are great. They can keep more valuable content at the top of the page for those who visit. Facebook would like to increase the value of the brand page and the actual “visit.” This does a pretty good job. Community Managers can tell when a pinned post is starting to lose steam by the fall off of interactions.  Toyota kept their post on the Women in the World Summit sponsorship up for at least 10 days. That might be an easy choice on a corporate page where the CSR and CSR-like efforts of the company are one of the biggest draws (Toyota has model-specific brand pages which is the norm in that category). 

Clearly it is no news that pictures and video earn more attention and interaction. It took a “Timeline” design change that just begs for big pictures and embedded videos for brands to put the effort (and resources) behind it. 

Social Media Influence summarized the performance of multimedia: 

“Examining the figures in more detail, the study shows that, while engagement with status updates is down, Timeline has yielded a 65 percent increase in multimedia engagement (through videos and photos) and overall fan engagement is up by 14 percent.”

Timeline was a decent investment by the early-adopters. They had to pay for more images and video. They require expanded storytelling capabilities. Brands hungry to get the largest word of mouth impact (people sharing their content or “Talking about” in Facebook vernacular) will staff their pages with editors/community managers equipped to tell these more visual stories.   The Timeline changes are inevitable. That they actually seem to deliver some better levels of engagement when leveraged well, is encouraging. Brands are leaping in right and left and learning the level of investment necessary to make the most of these new features. You can get more here: 

The Hidden Implications of Facebook Timeline for Brands

Facebook Timeline Goes Live For All Brands — Are You Ready?

Pinterest: Essential or Beguiling?

Almost everything you need to know about Pinterest is conveniently wedged into this infographic from lemon.ly. It reaches women like no other social platform. It delivers more traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LInkedIN combined (kind of like saying a country is bigger than Iran, Turkey and Pakistan combined – sounds like a lot but less than Russia, Australia and Brazil combined). Pinterest is growing very fast. 

Many brands are jumping on board. This raises the obvious question as to whether Pinterest is worth the energy and effort now or whether brands should wait. Is it essential to your business? Or is it an innovative platform for you and therefore worth some resources? Or is it simply beguiling – waiting to charm or enchant you and divert you from more meaningful programs? This last risk is a big one.

In Altimeter’s latest report on Content: The New Marketing Equation, Rebecca Lieb cautions,

“Bright, shiny objects, i.e. a fixation on newer channels and technologies, can distract from foundational channels, e.g. search, written content, such as blogs, and educational content.”  

Certainly many marketers are skeptical and even disgusted with the amount of attention Pinterest has earned. As a marketer, I don’t worry about that. None of us really know whether Pinterest will become a significant platform or become the next Empire Avenue (hey, even MySpace is making a comeback!)It’s more important to evaluate this platform and the others vying for attention and resources based upon how it can help your business today.

It’s Essential

If you are an ecommerce offering catering to women, you should jump on board now. Many retailers are doing just that. The number one ecommerce retailer in this space is Etsy. The haystack nature of that marketplace seems ideally suited for the visual curation that Pinterest delivers. The most remarkable Pinterest quality is really the women. While Instagram is also big with women, it doesn’t have the same referral traffic as Pinterest. If you have a product collection well-suited to this curation, have a storefront/product page to point people to and sell to women, then Pinterest is an easier choice. While you are figuring out the value of the “engagement” metrics (pin-ing and sharing, essentially), you can still look to count the referral traffic which is already a valuable KPI for online stores. 

A Worthy Innovation   

I certainly know plenty of big brands who are going all in on Facebook. Anything else – even Twitter – is a distraction. That may be a dangerous single-mindedness. We are all pushing our organization’s ability to adapt to new customer and stakeholder behaviors. We need to learn. We need to learn how to cope with the flood of choices available to people out there. Should you be on Google+? I think that one is a good bet. It may take another six months to understand its business impact but experimentation via limited investment is the only way to figure it out. 

If you want to specifically engage women who are energized by fashion, food, home design, graphic design or hobby, then it may be worth some effort and investment. These categories do seem to dominate and you can see it in the most followed users.

If you have a collection of visual images to share that are of natural interest to people or if your brand intersects with a theme/meme already gaining traction, then that gives you one more good reason to engage. It doesn’t make sense to take this platform on if you don’t already have the picture content or the theme that lends itself to pinning (bookmarking) images.

Give yourself a time constraint like 2-3 hours a week. Pick out the likely KPIs that might show progress from click-throughs to followers and likes. Benchmark yourself against other similar brands or against ones you aspire to being compared to. Every brand should have some tolerance for innovating on new platforms. With a logical decision tree and quarterly evaluations, it’s possible to keep the level of effort reasonable. 

Just Plain Beguiling

The simplest filter is women. If you are trying to engage C-suite decision makers (let’s face it - predominantly men) you are pretty far off your target. If you have no picture assets (e.g. catalogs) or objects that capture people’s interest, then the level of effort to create them and hope they are of intrinsic interest to people just isn’t worth it. The reason we are intrigued by Pinterest is the natural growth of the platform. Our job must be to understand it and make use of it, not try and game it.

SEO Blogger is skeptical of Pinterest's value today. He outlines a scenario to evaluate its potential based upon a crude ROI model. As a solo-practitioner, his criteria makes sense. For brands considering the platform, we are way off any ROI that matters. Simply know the platform, judge whether it is essential, innovative or merely beguiling and go from there. 

Great Pinterest pages:

• Etsy - probabaly the top page, how else can you find these must-have rings 
• West Elm - I love their collections. If I was currently shopping for furniture, thsi woudl definitely make it easier and more enjoyable
• Michael's Stores - how else can you make sense of all the craft supplies these guys sell? 

Welcome to Social@Ogilvy!

(this post is also found in s similar form on our new Social@Ogilvy site)

The Social Imperative

Brands will spend between 17-18% of their total marcom spend on social media within 4 years. They will spend more on social business solutions. They are seeing value and expecting more every year. 

The key reason? 90% of us look to friends and family for the most trusted recommendations on products, service and issues. 70% of us count on consumer opinions online above traditional media. And it’s only going to grow. Millennials are three times more likely than Boomers to look for a social opinion on choices they make. 

The future is brand advocacy. And it cannot be faked, gamed, or outright ‘bought.’

There are only three ways to connect with and build a strong relationship with customers and stakeholders these days. 

1. Deliver highly relevant content or service. This could be advertising, media relations or what we call ‘owned’ content (including valuable services). Now it’s all highly targeted and tailored. No more 360 degree ‘onslaughts’ of interruptive advertising. Now our messages must be deemed highly relevant to our targets to earn their attention. Lets use the ‘10 degrees’ that matter. Useful content to run a sustainable business from DuPont. Better ways to use member ‘points’ from American Express. 
2. Be discoverable in search. When people search Google, Baidu or Yandex, brands need to be there for all the topics that intersect between a person’s intent and where the brand can add some value. Ford on fuel efficiency. Hellmann’s on Real Food recipes. 
3. Earn our way into their ‘social graph.’  To succeed in social media, we must become genuinely valuable to the people we serve and earn their attention, their advocacy and their business.   Inviting people as VIPs into the launch of the new Ford Explorer in Facebook. Sparking a social conversation about the dreams of the next generation of Chinese from Johnnie Walker. Helping Hong Kong parents celebrate their baby pictures in a much bigger way from Huggies.

How we form opinions about products, services and issues is constantly changing. It’s imperative that we make social a new way we do everything.

What is Social@Ogilvy? 

Social@Ogilvy is the global, cross-discipline team of social experts from across all of Ogilvy’s businesses delivering social solutions to all parts of our clients’ business. This is new. This is bigger than before. We have been designing and executing social media marketing and communications programs for 7+ years as 360 Digital Influence – a specialty practice born out of Ogilvy Public Relations. We quickly grew to deliver social solutions for all sorts of marketing and communications clients. 

Now we have grown into Social@Ogilvy. We are a true global network with a common approach. 

Integrated Social Media Matters More 

The whole PR vs. marketing battle is moot. Social media will inform every discipline and deliver business value for the foreseeable future. Social media as a standalone specialty doesn’t make sense. All the power and potential in social based solutions comes to life when you integrate it into marcom and other functions. 

We design integrated social solutions that combine deep disciplines like crm, public relations and shopper marketing and rooted in what drives behavior.  We plan around owned, earned and paid media working together for a compound effect and at its heart our work is ‘social by design’ – phrase used now by Facebook but that captures what we do quite well. 

A Global Shift

We do believe there’s a new customer and stakeholder journey defined by the increasing impact our networks have on purchase decision and our behaviors. How we buy, vote, and form opinions has changed. We tap into our 130 friends (the Facebook average) to discover, consider, compare, decide and rave about products, services and issues.

This shift is happening in one way or another all over the world. Growth markets like China, Indonesia, Brazil and Turkey will define the next episode of social media use. They are all growing their social network use and outpacing western markets including the US. That’s why we have grown the world’s largest global team delivering solutions relevant in each local market.  

And it’s more than just marketing, we design social business solutions that use the collaboration and advocacy strengths of social media to drive value internally and in customer relationships while at the same time managing risk. 

 

Join Us

We will be participating or hosting 23 events in and outside of Social Media Week this week in NYC, London and Hong Kong not to mention a dozen other markets. Join us as we launch this new ambitious business. It's been a wild ride to get to this point and we would love to see you. You can find out more at our new Social@Ogilvy site.

Two Trends in US Social Media – Saturation and Segmentation

Social Media usage is getting more complex. While social platforms continue to expand in markets like India, Brazil and Russia, certain parts of the social Web may be cresting in the US. If you take a look at Global Web Index data (GWI) for October 2011 in the US there are two important insights that immediately pop out:

Saturation and the Importance of Content

Twitter and blog publishing seems to be staying flat and niche. The complexion of Twitter users, while niche, do represent influencers from journalists to marketers. Expecting to significantly expand consumer conversations (beyond customer service triage) may not be realistic. Brands will get more by providing content worth sharing via Twitter. GWI  puts it, “Future engagement on micro-blogging will be less about conversations and more about content”  

As for Facebook, membership in the US seems to be reaching saturation point, and people are dropping some of their more involved behaviors like creating content in favor of sharing existing content

“Social Networking is saturated in the US and behaviour is shifting into a more passive usage. Visitation remains high, but users are doing less”

The big exceptions seem to be an increase in posting images and even video to profiles. Historically creating and publishing video even in the era of Flip Video camera (sadly, the era continues without that particular camera) has been a niche activity with a high barrier to entry. Is that changing?

Even a year ago, 30 billion pieces of content (links, notes, photos, etc.) were shared on Facebook per month. With people less likely to create all of that, they are on the lookout for great stuff to pass along.

“One consequence of real-time social is a move from creating content to sharing other peoples content. We call this the rise of the “transmitter ecosystem””

The opportunity for brands as creators of remarkable and relevant content will grow. How many brands will embrace a content marketing strategy as their way to engage customers and stakeholders? 

 

Creating a Segmented Strategy

Age, income, region, interests and more are showing up as differentiators in terms of how people are using social media. US social network users lag behind the globe in terms of using Facebook to express themselves or networking for work. My Space continues to serve a predominantly less educated audience with less income. And Twitter grew the greatest amongst a younger user base – 16-24 year olds during this last period while still catering to a smaller influencer crowd. 

Combine these distinctions with what people seem to be doing on platforms and differences per country and it is more important than ever to create a social strategy that is segmented and informed by this research.  Looking to use Facebook globally and with a single approach across 30 or 50 markets as a new, “one-strategy,” channel may not be realistic. Marketers will have to pay close attention as they roll out acquisition and engagement programs in diverse markets like the US, South Africa, Indonesia or Mexico. 

4 Ways to Get Integrated Social Media Programs to Work

Go to any social media conference now and every other speaker will be touting the benefits of “owned, earned and paid media” as if they discovered fire. But few know how to actually make this work within big consumer and B2B brands.

There are two barriers that I see keeping us from living the dream. 

Multi-agency friction

The way that brands task their multi-agency rosters with bits and bobs of particular programs works against integration. Big organizations have diverse business owners each contributing to revenue outcomes like increased sales of products and services. Many of them hire specialist firms to extend their team’s ability to design strategy or execute marcom programs. There’s a certain belief that brand marketers need to pick “best-of-breed” specialists and constantly pit them against each other to leverage the best commitment or price. It’s all quite logical in a way. It also produces far too much friction to really overcome some of the barriers to truly getting all of your disciplines working in a complimentary fashion. The best that most brands ever achieve is a campaign success where 2-3 disciplines (out of 5-6) are aligned enough for a time to produce remarkable results for a short period of time(think Old Spice).

Big teams vs. small teams 

Brand + Agency teams have become large. Whenever something isn't quite going right, the answer is to add someone new to the team. It's crazy. The type of innovation we are looking for (“imagine a program where all disciplines were aligned to inspire as much sustained positive word of mouth for a new product – all measured by a common, focused dashboard…”) comes easiest from small, tight teams with common motivations. Either brand managers need to become the team leader of these small teams featuring a few members of different tribes and agencies or brands are going to have to take a chance on a single agency/partner who has enough of the right disciplines within their camp to pull it off.  

 

4 Ways to Get Integrated Social Media Programs to Work

• Behavior-driving Planning Model

It is so hard within a multi-agency team to have a single planning methodology prevail. I am a fan of Ogilvy’s Fusion model not because it’s ours but because it’s designed around driving behavior. Rather than have every discipline chasing its own planning approach measured by impressions, click-to-actions, GRP’s or whatever, focus on a collaborative planning approach that is designed to get people to take an action or actually change behavior. Do you want people to try a new product? Buy more at one time? Exercise every day?  And just where are they on the proverbial customer journey? A behavior-driving model can take advantage of the most useful research in behavioral economics. It's a more sympathetic approach to our customer and more effective.  

The planning model should also tell the team what they find important. As more brands use contests and promotions to lure consumers to interact on Facebook, some marketers are swearing off contest incentives preferring to generate engagement and word of mouth through "ideas." This is an example of a belief that ought to be shared by the core planning team (I am neither endorsing this particular notion or bashing it - merely using it as an example).  

• Unified Story and Content Strategy

Different brand organizations use different tools to align work across their marketing and communications. “Brand Keys,” “Brand Creative Ideas,” “Brand Platforms,” are all models for distilling what a brand stands for and what the most contemporary messages are during a particular season. But few brands develop a holistic approach to content no matter whether delivered via the Facebook wall, television or online display advertising, or in the stories pitched to traditional media. Customers, consumers , people-like-us are losing track of what they ought to expect from different channels. They just want relevant content – if they actually want anything at all beyond a good product that delivers on a promise. Marketers can make better use of the mix of touchpoints with customers if they take care to form clear story(ies) and then manage content cohesively across the different ways and places customers make use of it. 

 

• A Blended Measurement Framework

Instead of having a different metric for each discipline, have a limited number of KPIs - each of which reflects desired behavior and is shared by all efforts. Perhaps, brand marketers feel like they already have this or that sales data is the bottom line. What I see again and again is teams tracking and reporting 10-20 data points and often becoming lost as to which are most important. They count Facebook fans, comments on wall posts, wall postings, individual ‘likes,’ tab interactions, retweets in Twitter, Twitter follower acquisition, blog mentions, “impressions,” and so much more. Some are trying to roll up all types of interactions like commenting and ‘likes’ into a single engagement metric. That certainly helps marketers get focused back on driving engagement (e.g. time-spent or interactions believed to be steps along the way to persuasion and product-related behavior change).  Like our planning model – what do we want people to actually do? Let’s count that.

If we need proxy metrics to help optimize an effort, let’s make the effort to confirm that they are the ones indicative of behavior change. 

• Prioritize Key Operational Changes 

We have to do things differently to expect different results. Brand marketers are used to commissioning one of the agency partners to come up with the creative big idea that all other disciplines will interpret. It's time to evolve beyond the creative idea as the only binding principle. Now we need a small team who will work together to optimize the relationship the brand has with the customer and make certain it delivers great value to both brand and customer.  

Since marketing has become more ‘always-on’ and less purely campaign-focused, it makes sense to designate a small strategy team that guides all disciplines through their ongoing and iterative execution. A small team can look at the overall effort and make a call that the paid advertising online is not leading to the level of active fan acquisition, for example, or that the volume of peer recommended trial is not all that was hoped and that 2-3 disciplines might work together to incent more customer sharing and trial. Designating this small strategic team at the helm would be a big shift from the large group model so often put in place. 

What other operational changes: 

• Run brand program reviews like editorial meetings - look at the data and decide what is working and what is not. Make changes on the fly and try that
• Embrace the pilot - in the race to get immediate results, some brands avoid pilots as they seem like lengthy trials with little business impact beyond learning. As Facebook says, "Fail fast." We can get better results quicker by conditioning ourselves to run quick pilots that can easily be scaled. 
• Let the word of mouth guys run the core strategy team - as more brands embrace the importance of brand advocacy and word of mouth, it makes sense that the experts at driving valuable word of mouth be at the front of the bus