Digital Influence Mapping Project

Social Shopping: Make My Philly Design Store, Please

Who really cares about fCommerce anyway? Social Shopping, sure. eCommerce, in general, of course. But all I am hearing about are storefronts that maybe connect to our social networks. Most ecommerce offerings have sharing functions or even Facebook open graph to allow buyers to broadcast their purchases or browsed products to their friends. I want something more.

There are some cool innovations. Even some innovative business models like Warby Parker’s disruptive approach to eyeglasses. But I was in Philly for the weekend and I wanted to buy local designers t-shirts, jewelry, messenger bags, unusual flotsam and/or prints. I love designers. Always have. When I travel, I like to find small design-focused businesses. I like to buy local and support the economy (great, high-minded view of shopping, don’t you think?)

So why don’t I have an app that collects designers in local markets wherever I travel? I am on to Vevey, Switzerland on business this week. I would love to just punch a button like I do on my weather app and collect a listing of local designers ready to connect with a sympathetic buyer. Why do I have to work so hard browsing dozens of Web sites to try and find my unknown friends out there? 

Make it Authentic

With Love from Brooklyn (thanks Springwise!)  kinda does it. While they curate mostly food products developed in Brooklyn, it is all for sale online. If I am in Brooklyn visiting, there is no storefront where I can go to stock up on Brooklyn authenticity. I guess I could go visit the various businesses individually but as you saw, food isn’t my thing. Philly has a few neighborhoods like any city but designers don’t clump up so nicely. So even though I can view all of these businesses in Old City on one web site, it’s about the neighborhood not about designers.  

I would have hoped that Design Philadelphia would have filled much of the role. Sadly, that remains more of an event website that gets relevant once a year and then goes stale (see all the content about the Design Week last October). Kind of a missed opportunity there. Etsy could also do this although it wouldn’t support their business model. They would need to adopt an affiliate marketing model if they started to give me my Philly Design map to let me visit artisans directly when I hit town. They could do it. They just won’t cause it’s not an important revenue stream for them. 

I have a set of persistent interests. Amazon knows this in a way. The recommendations I get fed are robotic suggestions derived from my shopping behavior. Clearly, they are not going to point me to storefronts in Philly even if they did sell what I am after in design. 

Reverse the Marketplace

I want a reverse marketplace model. I have some enduring interests - in this case local designer-made goods. I am a digital omnivore so, I want access on my mobile phone as I walk the streets, via my tablet as I sit on the couch and plot my trip and via my laptop as I take a “shopping mindful moment” at work. I should be able to express my interests (imagine me clicking on 20-30 Pinterest “pins” to teach my shopping agent what I like).  I need all ways to buy – online and when I am on the ground. I need every advocacy utility to post on Facebook, Twitter , FourSquare, etc… And I want to connect with designers who are keen to meet a potentially enthusiastic fan. 

Too much to ask? Perhaps, but its time to innovate.

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.

Are Social Media Ethics About Actions or Intentions?

What is your social strategy? Are you trying to increase the amount of positive consumer generated media (CGM) for your brand or are you trying to inspire and manage brand advocacy? The media mindset thinks in terms of CGM. How can they make more of that and put it in all the places where customers will find it. How they “make” that media happen is a means to a simple end. 

The social mindset thinks in terms of genuine brand advocacy. How can we give customers, employees, stakeholders a reason and a means to share a sincerely positive point of view about a brand with their friends, family and people ‘like them?’ How they make that advocacy happen is more than a means to an end, it is indivisible from the end. 

The VIP Deals Deal

It’s not just semantics. Look at the recently reported case of VIP Deals offering free iPad covers (their product) to customers who submitted a favorable review on Amazon. The NYTimes covered this recently and even posted the deal memo sent to customers here. Their goal was to generate overwhelmingly positive reviews. They offered the value of the product price ($30-$35 retail?), told the customer the action they wanted to take and insinuated the tone of that review. Can you split hairs and say that they did not require a favorable review? Perhaps. But there is no mistaking their intention. They wanted to “buy” favorable reviews, consumer generated media, to dominate a channel, Amazon reviews. 

The review space has long been suspected of abuse. Employees giving their own hotel, restaurant, lawnmower a positive review. We imagine  pay-per-review farms in off shore locations and more incentive programs like VIP Deals than are ever revealed. It is not clear what most consumers think of product reviews. I would guess that there is a large amount of skepticism even while we all still look at them to make quick judgments (who wouldn’t download the 4 star weather app on iTunes over the 1.5 star – presuming similar price?) 

Media or Advocacy?

Brand marketers must decide what their intention is – media or advocacy. That choice will inherently guide their actions. Big, multi-national brands need to make this choice more than any small business. What they do in one market will quickly infect another. It’s not as simple as saying “when in China….” All local activity is now global.  The danger in a pure media mindset is the possibility of losing sight of what makes social media so powerful – its ability to earn people’s advocacy and share that at a large scale. 

Getting the right actions and intentions

• One of the best resources for brand and business leaders on practical social media ethics remains the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (disclosure: we are a governing member and I remain as a non-voting board member). Their ethics code and disclosure guidelines  are a foundation that any brand marketer can apply with confidence. 
• We have just updated our Ogilvy Social Media Engagement Code  which is being reviewed in draft form but I have shared here. We have had a social media-related  ethics code in place since 2005 and find it invaluable to rally our global network around. This is how we roll. 

Actionable 2012 Social Business Predictions: #1 Comprehensive Content Strategy

Timing is everything in business. Business leaders want to embrace innovations the moment before they become profitable business strategy or execution. That goes for most social media-based business solutions.

Most annual social media predictions are loose stabs at what may happen and often range from the obvious, “20-whatever is the year of mobile,” to the interesting, “2012 will/won’t be the year of Google+.”  

With hard-to-read economic indicators, business leaders don’t need broad meditations on what might happen but rather ways of more precisely anticipating change and what they might do to take advantage of that change.  For teh next few posts, I aim to deliver practical predictions complete with my suggestions on what brands ought to do. I have also narrowed my focus to quarters to help with understanding timing.  

The first in the series is a potentially big shift in marketing and communications. 

Comprehensive content marketing finds its value

With more than 30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook every month and the steady increase in Google searches, people are hungrily sharing content they find relevant. Still most major marketers do not have a big, grand approach to content marketing. Bright spot exceptions include American Express’ Small Business site, Open; Intel’s Free Press and General Mill’s Tablespoon.  

Many marketers predict that “content strategy” will eclipse or become the driver for advertising strategy. As the pressure continues to build on advertisers to deliver more and more relevant advertising (i.e. content) and marketers look to engage customers and stakeholders directly via social networks (i.e. content sharing platforms), we will see two efforts lead to the same result – brands adopting more sophisticated content strategies and practices to serve their customers.

There are two barriers in the way: a simple way to understand the business value of content marketing and organizational inertia. We just don’t have an easy formula to evaluate the business impact (sales + preference + brand/reputation + customer value) of great content programs. Yet everyday, we are learning about what content our customers value on Facebook. We post content. They post content. They like/comment/share on piece of content more than another and that tells what is valuable.

 

Combine the network effect of the average Facebook user (and their 130 friends) passing along content links with the “google-juice” of a great content reservoir like Open or the reach partnerships available with media companies like Vice Media (see The Creator's Project, their partnership with Intel here).

2012 will bring major marketers more usable value metrics to understand why they might shift spend from traditional marketing activities (e.g. traditional ad creative vs. new ad-as-content creative).

 

Do:The penalty for not aggressively developing a comprehensive content strategy that drives interactions with customers no matter where you meet them won’t be felt immediately. This is an innovators game and those marketers who want to rely on the reliable won’t lose their job over this one. For the marketing innovators, start by finding those topics that naturally intersect with your customers/stakeholders and the brand.

American Express helps its small business customers with content about running small business (not just how to leverage card services). General Mills goes beyond the benefits of Betty Crocker foods to offer a collection of highly shareable ‘quick recipes.’ What is that natural intersection between what customers need and the benefits of your brand or the solutions it makes possible? 

• Research what terms people use when they search for related topics
• Build content for your website, blog and social media calendar around those topics
• Connect these topics with your communications departments “message platform” so they are reinforced in their public relations efforts
• Feed the topics to the advertising team to either use in supporting copy or, gasp, to actually drive the creative concept

 

Resources:

• Content Marketing Institute - from the strategic to the mind-numbingly tactical, this content source has great suggestions for applying content marketing to business 
• Chief Content Officer group on LinkedIn – clearly a bunch of marketers have gotten the message for how important content’s role in business will be 

 

Timing: This is a marathon but one to get started in 1stQ 2012. There is a little of a first-mover advantage at stake here. I could easily argue that American Express did not own the attention of small businessmen/women, but their persistence with Open may have changed that. 

 

Social Media Fatigue or Just Fatigue?

Attending LeWeb a couple of weeks ago, many of us saw Forrester CEO George Colony, as Mark Evans from Sysomos put it, “…he threw a bucket of cold water on social media by suggesting people have no more time for social media and, in particular social media services.”

The quote from George Colony read, “We believe social is running out of hours. Forrester believes we are reaching the limit of hours that people can give to social.” 

I am certain he is onto something. Even the Global Web Index report on US social media behavior reveals that social users are lightening up on the content creation,

“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”….We also see that there is a continual fall in most activities and forms of contribution on social networks. This indicates a growing passivity and a realization that social networks will not become the one stop shop for the total internet experience that they have often been hyped as delivering.”

Narrow definitions are confusing

Will people commit more time to the social distractions of reading and updating Facebook-like social networks? Probably not. Time is our premium resource. But that’s a narrow definition of “social.” Most digital experiences will be social in one way or another whether they be utilities like my Jetsetter iPad app, information tools like my new Flipboard iPhone app or entertainment experiences like some of the best YouTube videos (I love the Criminal Minds cast video “Wheels Up”). People will continue to shift time to those things that deliver perceived value.

While I would assume that some media buckets like TV watching are here to stay and are unlikely to be completely cannibalized by new digital activities, the fact that my son watches most of the little TV he likes on his PC may deliver bigger behavior changes down the road than even Forrester can predict. 

For brands considering how much to commit to social media as a platform for customer engagement, I would just say two things:

• Most brands are woefully behind the behaviors of their customers in digital and social. While some behaviors may be topping out or slowing growth are you using social media at the same level and with the same time commitment as your customer? Probably plenty of room for growth there. 
• If anything, the Forrester POV and The Global Web Index findings tell a story of consumer fatigue on those things that don’t provide enough value. The pressure is on every brand to work hard to deliver content and experiences to their customers that they would find valuable. Relevance will get harder going into 2012. 

 

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

6 Truths about Social Media and Social Business

I still use an RSS reader (in fact I use our version of NetVibes - TheDailyInfluence). I read lots of people who write about their experience in digital marketing and social media. I routinely check in on Olivier Blanchard who blogs/tweets under the brandbuilder handle and has a sharp POV. 

Recently, Olivier wrote a post titled "10 Truths about Social Media & Social Business you need to know." I have a bone to pick with him. Of his ten points, I disagree with 3 and agree with 3. The other 4 are indisputable. Okay, truth be told, Olivier has given us all a good list which I am merely using as foil to make my own points. You can see his full post here to understand his points. But here they are in headline form:

• “Social” is something you are, not something you do
• You cannot outsource customer relationships to an agency
• A blog is just a blog. It isn’t a magical trust and influence publishing converter for the web
• Marketing on social media channels isn’t “social.” It is just marketing
• Transparency isn’t just a word. If you don’t intend to practice it, don’t preach it
• Change management, not social media tools and platforms, is at the crux of social media program development
• People are more important than technology. Hire people who care about other people
• Social media should not be managed by Marketing anymore than your phones should be managed by Sales
• Shut up and listen
• Any consultant, “thought leader,” agency or partner who doesn’t tell you these things isn’t fit to be consulted on the subject

 

3 "Truths" I Disagree With
 

Social is a way to behave - Many companies do have cultures and ways of doing business that are conducive to "being social." And, in fact, there may be many companies who are not very customer-centric in their practices and find it difficult to embrace all of the marketing and communications behaviors that fall under the broad umbrella of social media (not every company can be Zappos). But social media marketing and communications and the broader category of social business are all about ways of behaving. Never before have organizations been judged so relentlessly on their behavior and actions as they are now in the vast bright light of the Internet. Many companies are trying to change and using social media as the catalyst. They are each doing this through new behaviors. Last week at our social business event at PivotCon, Christine Cea shared about her stewardship of the Unilever Social Engagement Playbook. That is a great example of a marketer with a particular culture changing with and because of the pressures of social media. 

Organizations must align all partners to build strong customer relationships - brands outsource services all of the time. This biggest example is customer service - the front line of customer relationships. We manage tons of customer relationships for brands via Facebook walls and Twitter handles and more. We can do this because we live and breathe 'customer-centricity." At our best, we become fully integrated partners with clients where our brand knowledge and understanding of the business is indistinguishable from a brand staffer. The notion that a partner like an agency consultant is driven by different priorities is over-played and just plain wrong. We will when we accelerate our client's business, period. That being said, I do believe that our work on the front lines of conversation management is a training wheels moment for brands. We give clients the chance to quickly implement community management programs such that they can then budget for staff in year 2 or 3. 

Transparency isn't black and white - we all wave the flag of transparency around a bit too indiscriminately. Transparency in business is a strategic choice and there a thousand choices to make about when to be transparent, somewhat transparent and purposely opaque. We tend to confuse the simple principle that "transparency is good" with the practices of business which gets messy. Most folks are "for" transparency. Smart business people must make decisions about employee privacy, intellectual property protection, liability and risk, competitive advantage and more. All of these things can limit a company's ability to act transparently and should. Alternatively, proponents of transparency say the company's supply chain should be transparent, for example, and reveal poor practices like hiring suppliers who exploit workers. Supply chain transparency is inevitable. Anyone can discover almost anything with enough digging. I would prefer if companies focused more on their commitment to character which would eradicate choosing suppliers who behave unethically then worry about how transparent they ought to be.  

3 "Truths" I Agree With

Marketing on social media platforms isn't inherently 'social' - I call it the practice of just "being there" - being on Facebook, being on YouTube. Just launching a cool application on Facebook or series of videos on YouTube isn't inherently social in that it is not designed to build a two-way relationship over the long haul. To this day, there are heated debates about what defines social media - what is its true nature. That is a false argument (IMHO). I believe brands can reap the biggest benefit from social media when they design programs to earn the attention, advocacy and action from their customers, influencers and stakeholders.  That doesn't mean that programs that stop short of this are bad. they are simply something else....marketing. 

Social media is changing organizations - few companies talk in terms of "change management" around their marketing teams or partners. But, whether they are conscious of it or not, the practice of trying to master the benefits of social media is driving big FMCGs and mainframe companies to really change how they are organized, how they do business, how they treat employees and how they measure success. If that isn't change management then I don't know what is. Look at IBM. They launched an internal and external focus on "social business" where they productize what they have found valuable to their own organization. Big consumer goods companies like P&G, Unilever and Nestle are changing how they market and how they manage customer relationships. Unlike the Deming principles of Top Quality Management or other models to guide change management which often champion starting at the top, social media has been provoking change form the middle or even the bottom but certainly around the edges.  

Social media should not be managed by marketing nor any other single discipline - we have spent a ton of time building a social media expertise that spans all of Ogilvy's disciplines from marketing to CRM to communications to customer care. Social media is as much about new  behaviors as tools and platforms and it certainly isn't as simple as a new channel. No one group within the marcom mix can take full responsibility for it. Olivier makes a point that the most complete use of social media can best happen in the consumer/customer relations discipline. They do play a key and under-represented role. But every part of the business needs to embrace social media. Not just marketing and communications but product development, legal affairs, HR and more.  

"10 Truths..." is a good post and Olivier makes important points we must all keep in mind, challenge and add our take to. 

Think in Terms of Addressable Customers, Prospects and Influencers

Managing Relationships

The divide between public relations and customer relationship management (CRM) is shrinking. I have literally been in meetings with multidisciplinary teams (brand advertising + public relations + CRM) where PR and CRM will face off about whether managing the conversation in a Facebook wall is more about communications (PR's other name) or more about customer relationship management. This is the annoying beauty of social media. It forces integration or at least discussion within established marketing and communications organizations. 

Postive Effect of the Disciplines

Looking at CRM and PR alone for a moment, each is in the process of teaching the other a thing or two about managing profitable relationships. The CRM discipline is used to managing data to understand the profitability of customers. As a very data-heavy discipline, CRM generally has a more rigorous performance measurement model than most public relations professionals. It's hard to diagnose where the lack of measurement discipline in some PR circles comes from. Conversely, some of the smartest measurement people I know are in PR, there just aren't as many of them amidst all of the other  sub-specialties like media relations, event marketing, public affairs, etc...CRM ninjas are bringing more data-driven measurement practices to the PR folks as each play a role in social media-based relationship marketing. 

The PR discipline knows about the value of advocacy. Getting people - customers and influencers - talking positively about products and services is probably the most powerful sales-related communication goal one can have. The CRM folks are only used to 'optimizing the spend' of customers. Often that leads to annoying "stimulation" tactics like email blasts intended to drive purchase or re-purchase. The PR pros are teaching the CRM folks of the value of advocacy and just how to earn that action. 

If humility can prevail within the ranks of both groups, this should be a win-win situation - more disciplined metrics within PR and a greater proficiency at 'earning' people's attention, advocacy and spend among CRM experts. It is likely that through the influence of CRM marketers, social media marketers will get closer to ROI marketing modeling sooner.  


Addressable Channels

Authors can now, address personal messages to readers via the channel established with ebooks. Kindlegraph now lets authors do just that. This is another form of addressable channel where authors (literary brands?) can interact with their customer directly and can use data to try and get the most relevant message to the right person.

Add this to all of the other addressable channels we are all working with on behalf of ourselves and other brands:

• Facebook fans
• Twitter followers
• LinkedIn group members
• Instagram followers
• Google+ Circles
• Vkontakte fans (Russia)
• Orkut followers (Brazil)
• Email lists (yes, let's not throw the baby out with the bath water)

Each allows us to maintain a direct, ongoing relationship with customers, prospects and influencers. Each has different ways to use data to better target our message or deliver value and earn people's attention, advocacy and 'spend.'

Addressable Customers, Prospects and Influencers

With so many channels or platforms where we can now talk directly to groups of (or individuals) customers, prospects and influencers (our 'publics?'),  it would seem that brands must start to structure their realtionship-building activities around segments of their stakeholder groups that transcend specific platforms. Rather than have a view of different levels of fan types on Facebook* and a different model for their email subscriber base, can a brand create one framework of their customers, prospects and influencers who choose to have a relationship with a brand by one or more of these channels?  

*fan segmentation models

• RadicalTrust's simple three tier model - enthusiasts, advocates, and influencers
• Scott Meldrum's three-tier model - causal, casual and  committed fans

What Comes After Facebook (for Brands)

Someone noticed that Facebook had 155 million active users in the United States in the beginning of May (people who checked in at least once) and only 149 million by the end of the month for a net loss of 6 million active users.

Is Facebook sliding into oblivion? It's laughable to look at the slowing growth of the behemoth as some precursor to a MySpace-like death spiral, brands are always asking what's next. I would argue that many do this as they feel late to the party on platform F (i.e. Facebook) and feel if they could just forecast the next Facebook, they could enter into the fray early and forever be known as an innovator. 

Wrong Question

It's the wrong question, especially for brands.The more relevant and immediate question for marketers is how should they change how they use Facebook and social media. If the name of the game is not acquiring fans, then what is it? Facebook is still growing strong albeit that growth is faster in some emerging markets. Farhad Manjoo from Slate has a great POV on what is happening with Facebook growth in his Slate article: 

"...why is Facebook losing customers in America? Because there's no one left to go after. As Inside Facebook's Eric Eldon points out, Facebook's growth always stalls when it hits 50 percent market penetration within a country. Facebook is now experiencing something unprecedented in the short history of social networking—it has captured every plausible user in several countries, and the only people who are left are folks without Internet access, people who do have access but don't spend a lot of leisure time online, and the few lonely die-hards..."

And on the next phase of growth for Facebook:

"Instead of growth, then, what we should consider, now, is what Web stats nerds call "engagement"—how much time people are spending on Facebook, and how they're using it. Inside Facebook's Eldon points out that this is a tricky number for third-party traffic researchers to glean (Facebook itself says only that half of its users check in at least once a day). But he suspects that in established markets like the United States, engagement isn't declining. "Every person has a reason to come back to Facebook pretty often," he says."

If finding the next Facebook is not the right question and if asking how to sustain limitless growth is not the right question, then what is? 

 

How Should Brands Be Using Facebook Next? 

1. Integrating Facebook as part of an overall customer/fan relationship management solution

Laurence Buchanan who works for Capgemini had a simple post on what comes after the mad rush of growth on Facebook. I would call it getting back to the new fundamentals. These are not quite the way we thought of our business pre-social network yet they do represent business fundamentals freshly illuminated by the constant state of change we now exist in. Here are some of the questions that he thinks we ough to pivot to:

• "How can we build stronger customer relationships based on true value co-creation that will be less susceptible to cannibalisation by passing fads?
• How can we keep track of where our customers are currently engaging with our brand and with each other? How can we spot changes?
• How can we cut through vast quantities of customer data with accuracy and drive insight into action faster than the competition?
• How quickly can we embrace change within our organisation?"

These are very marketer-centric questions. Lest I come off siding with the marketers in the ongoing communications (PR) vs. marketer debate, you could easily rephrase each as communications-centric questions - e.g. how can I build a large base of advocates who will support the brand in good and, more importantly, in bad times.

Either way, we are better off re-examining our use of Facebook, Twitter and the rest to meet these business goals. Too many executives settle for a Facebook fan number as a end onto itself. Think of all the email lists with millions of names being squandered by companies around the world. Many marketers grew those lists and under-leverage them to this day.  It's what you do with these followers that matters.   

2. Figure out how to make social commerce work for your brand

Social shopping or social commerce is the next frothy frontier. Everyone remembers P&G putting the stake in the ground by saying that 39 of their brands will end up selling product on Facebook. Who else is selling via Facebook? 

According to the 2011 Social Commerce Study from Shop.org, purchase behavior fueled by social media is on the rise: 

• "42% of US online adults follow a retailer via Facebook, Twitter or blog
• Average US adult follows 6 retailers; and does do primarily for special deals (58%) – other top reasons were for new product news (49%) and to participate in promotional contest and events (39%)
• 28% of Facebook users have purchased something online via a Facebook link"

It all makes sense, of course. We all should be able to purchase products and services in the same stream where we recommend them (or warn people off). Or put another way, if recommendations from family and friends are amongst the most trusted sources for purchase decision then putting those recommendations right on the store shelf makes sense.

We will be defining what social commerce and social shopping is for some time (here are some trends from The Next Web that are helpful). Inevitably, Facebook will play a significant role either by embedding storefronts in the social network or by connecting Facebook to every sell-point available.

How Will Facebook Drive More Value to Brands? 

If limitless growth is out of the question, how will Facebook deliver more value to advertisers and business partners beyond better ad targeting solutions? What may be next from them? 

1. Unlock more data: We have only begun to see what is possible using aggregate data from Facebook as most remains behind lock and key in the vault. Facebook will enhance the value they can deliver to brand marketers by unlocking data and using it to target and actually be predictive.  

2. Constantly deliver new ways to engage a fan base: Between facebook, itself, and the broad developer community building solutions on their platform, we will see a coming together of the options to deliver more value to fans (i.e. thus earning their attention and engagement) and the tools to monitor the effectiveness of our real-time efforts. The net result is more ways to engage fans to deliver and derive value. 

3. B2B services to integrate Facebook social graph data to legacy CRM systems: the emergent efforts to connect social data from Facebook with customer databases are intuitively exciting. Most are happening with social CRM start-ups like  What will happen when Facebook gets in the game by providing IBM-like integration services between FB data and corporate CRM systems?   

A Marketer's Look at Social Media in Vietnam circa 2011

I met up with Thu An Nguyen Ha at our Hong Kong Summit.  She leads strategy for clients out of from our Vietnam 360 Digital Influence team. I was struck from her by how fast social media is being adopted in Vietnam. Combine that with the economic enthusiasm in the country and I would guess we will see big leaps forward there. 

I asked her about what is hot and happening there now in relation to brands and social media.

 

Q: What would you say are 1-2 defining characteristics of the social media world in Vietnam today? 

A:  The social media world in Vietnam today is going through an experimental phrase for all those who embrace it: users, developers, and brands.  Adaptation from successful global entities kicks off with some interesting platforms like social network ZingMe (facebook inspired), linkhay microblog equivalent of twitter, two.vn answer to foursquare, and recently in the last 6 months we saw an aggressive development of group buying sites such as nhommua (similar to groupon).  

Vietnamese social media users are loyal to their platforms. This might sound obvious as we’re community creatures but this basically means individual blogs, bloggers and influencers don’t exist or stand out without being attached to a mass and popular community.  And yes it’s true, to be fair, Facebook has replaced the Yahoo!360 phenomenon and 'facebookers,' anyone really, who has more than 2,000 fans can be considered an influencer. 

Social media in the eyes of brands and marketers in Vietnam today is starting to be ‘noticed’ – with the same mentality of discovering what platforms can bring to their integrated digital communication plan. There’s a feeling of almost ‘testing the water’ and trying out different ways to engage in social media effectively.

The majority of social media ‘pro’ brands are the FMCGs or consumer goods companies such as Unilever, Dell (technology & communication industry), Coca-cola, etc. All the development seem to be in-sync together: platforms are setting up while brands are also still figuring out which are the best and where audiences and users are also choosing to base their own social graphs. Although I must admit Facebook in most cases still wins over the mentality of the current ‘best’ preferable platform. If we didn’t suffer the limited access, I have total confidence that Facebook would have grown well beyond the current limited 1.4mill users. 

Q: More and more brands are experimenting with social media for marcom purposes. For a typical B2C marketer what would your top three recommendations be? 

A: I can't stress enough the importance of developing a strategic approach to social media. Some brands consider it’s just production, an add on to their digital communication plan. Most don’t have a clue what the role of their Facebook page should be, while others can't think of anything else but creating a Facebook page.  The normal pattern we see would be brands jumping straight onto the social media wave without understanding the nature of it. So I would say think hard on a strategy and the objectives that would help a brand drive their total brand goals or communication goals. 

Secondly, content. Brands, by large, are still thinking of one-way communication and not really thinking from a consumer perspective. The standard behavior of wanting to push out messages, campaign and programs without having a good story or asking the basic questions like how can I involve my audiences, what value do I bring to them, and how can I be a part of my consumers' conversations.  Conversations in social media require solid, interesting, relevant and almost unique type of communication where content is at the core of everything. Develop a social media conversation/content plan to tie in with your audience's behavior and preferences and then marry these with your branded content. Alternatively, create content uniquely for social media as those are actually quite cost effective.

Be Brave – I would say. Brands should at least start to realize and take up the belief that social media is changing the way they’re operating, do business and communicate with their audiences and customers.  Companies who are already doing digital work, especially great work, need to move fast into the area of social media, get a good advisor/agency and embark on the social media path. 

Typically PR managers – who would normally view digital as a brand manager or marketer job, should have the courage to do ‘social’. The ‘social’ territory might seem vague and mysterious, probably due to the fact that PR managers are not familiar with the possibility of having proper, effective measurement for social media programs. In addition, brand managers can start to venture into the area of applying social media to drive business impact that goes beyond brand awareness. 

 

Q: Which brand(s) is doing something interesting in social media in Vietnam and why? 

A: I would say Coca-cola (Coke). Instead of using the globally aligned Facebook platform, Coke in Vietnam has identified its target audience locally: targeting a younger crowd, focus on a teen to the first-jobbers market that is also the biggest internet users segment in Vietnam. 

Coke connected with the young spirit of online users and most of the population who loved to be entertained, via the most popular SNS platform ZingMe. Using the already massive user database and network, Coke built a site that sits within the community. With the new direction of ZingMe going less gaming and moving into more communication, it would be interesting to see how the Coke community within ZingMe grows. 

A few international brands in Vietnam have started to plug-in their global/regional program of establishing Facebook counts despite the difficulty in access. We see Dell, Adidas, HTC, Ford, Vietnam Airlines etc… operating here. Hence the question very soon would be which brands have the successful Facebook cases and doing great things in this platform.

Q: Any new technology/platform  that excites you?

A: To be fair, ZingMe development kinda excites me a bit as they will be growing more towards the direction of communication rather than just games. ZingMe has a perceived perception as a very young, teen-like platform where nothing serious is going on there, this will soon change. We already see a few big brands taking the interest in building brand presence within the community and I would be keen to see. 

Geo-location based is another one that I keep my eyes on. Since Foursquare we now see services that mimic this global trend being adopted here. Brands have not been ‘brave’ enough to invest in this, but Vietnamese users favor location & activities sharing and the mobile communications, and this will push these platforms forward. I do hope to see great mobile campaigns!