Digital Influence Mapping Project

Choosing Marketing Partners With "Social Juice"

Why do we ever choose marketing partners?

Why did Mars ink a deal with Nascar?

Why would SkiDoo partner with Burton snowboards?

Why did Duracell partner with the Children's Hospital at UCLA last winter?

Why did Kellogs partner with Feeding America?

Partners are either willing to fund marketing efforts or, more often, extend marketing reach via a new channel, affinity group or customer base. There are also the partnerships driven by endorsement. Celebrities and non-profits come quickly to mind here. The marketer needs the celebrity endorsement ususally to drive earned media attention. They need the non-profit to lend credibility to their drive to give $100K to charity (tied to selling more of their core product or driving up relevant awareness, of course)

Today, you should always choose a partner with strong social media marketing muscle. This is particularly true in the case of the non-profit endorsement partnership. Many brand marketers form partnerships with non-profits to earn some good will with customers or prospects for aligning their product with a 'social good.' Certainly, many brands have a deep commitment to social causes that are organic to their brand. Starbucks and fair trade coffee come to mind. Many more have a more transitory, campaign-long commitment.

Too many brand marketers select a non profit partner based upon simple relevancy to an issue - are they supporting clean drinking water in parts of the globe; are they supporting breast cancer research?

Beyond the relevancy and responsibility of a non profit partner, brands should look for non profits who understand social media marketing and have built an advocacy network that they will activate on behlf of the partner initiative. They shoudl think of these partners as the most modern of marketing partners.

Look for a partner with:

• A strong email list with whom they connect regularly

• A Facebook presence with a clear sense of mission and growing fanbase
• Experience activating their members to action via digital channels
• Growing use of Twitter to keep followers up to date and driven to deeper engagement
• A "social Web" site: one that is designed for action and sharing not self-aggrandizing Flash movies or simple brochureware

Brands partner with non-profits to support those causes and introduce their supporters to the brand. Brands want to market products on the backs of causes. That's a bit of a cold way to put it but still true. Beyond their authentic interest in supporting a cause, brands are using the partnership as a marketing hook. They are using the "borrowed interest" of the cause to generate interest in their product.

To be as successful as possible, brands needs to leverage the grassroots marketing infrastructure of the non-profit. Many non profits are savvy advocacy organizations. Brands need that social media muscle to connect with people who will care about their partnership and drive them to some meaningful action.

Facebook as a Complete Marcom Platform

With this weekend's sprint to capture vainity urls on Facebook behind us and a week of Twitter immersion thanks to Jeff Pulver and his 140 characters conference in NYC, I continue to see facebook as a strangely underutlized markting and communications platform. It's not quite as bad as SEO which remains the most underleveraged digital tactic today.

Let's face it, Facebook is complex. Not only that but the staff at Facebook have little patience for anyone without a six figure ad budget on the table. I actually don't blame them. Out of sheer self-preservation, they need to qualify the folks vying for their limited time and attention.

So, it is up to all of us to document the many ways that we can use Facebook to achieve some tangible marcom goal. I wanted to share a summary from a valuable blogger I follow periodically named John Keehler. He works at Click Here in Texas. I follow his Random Culture blog and, now, his Click Here blog. I think he did a great job summarizing a couple of ways that brands can be thinking of Facebook.

A Solution for Any Discipline

Blogging on Click Here, John calls Facebook, a "marketing microcosm where virtually any marketing objective will find a solution." He comments on how to use Facebook for:

• generate awareness
• engender loyalty
• increase online sales
• revela customer insights
• build a database
• And my favorite: drive offline sales -

"Run Event Ads: Having a special sale? Buy the “event” ad format on Facebook and users will RSVP to your event directly through the ad. Plus, you’ll get an extra viral push when their friends are notified."

In addition, John made a great point in his Random Culture blog about Facebook's recent redesign of brand pages to feature tabs. Are brands defaulting to brand microsite design tendencies by deafulting their Facebook page to a custom tab that has been heavily massaged by the agency design team? Like him, I see that as a small price to pay to get brands into Facebook and putting less emphasis on their microsite (which takes a ton of media to drive users to)

WOMMA: Geoff Donaker of Yelp Tells All at WOMM U.

Last week's WOMMA event for brand marketers - WOMM U. - featured the best of social media used strategically (that is 'word of mouth marketing'). One session featured Yelp founder, Geoff Donaker, sharing about the rocket ride that Yelp has been on lately.

There are 20 million folks who come to Yelp every month to hear what others are saying about brands, products and services. When I was in SF last month, I couldn't go by a store that didn't have the Yelp sticker in the window. And the woman at Giant Robot summed it up, "Yeah, this is a Yelp town..."

Geoff shared about his own personal experiences sourcing services - using reviews and submitting them. He shared about a carpet cleaning small business guy who shared that he had taken the logos off his truck as he didn't want someone he may have cut off in traffic to go on Yelp and write a negative review.

Big Question
Will reviews drive massive responsible behavior (not driving like an a**hole vs. hiding your logo). The carpet cleaner went on to change his behavior and deliver stellar service principally to drive great reviews. I am guessing that that approach is driving business via word of mouth -  beyond just the Yelp reviews.

They have just begun work with major national brands. Geoff shared an experience with a vehemently negative review of a nichtclub at a W Hotel. He offered a few lessons. I wanted to call out a couple here as the negativ potential of reviews is often a barrier to brands getting more involved.

Lesson 5: The temptation to spam is strong
A revealing video interview captured how a businessman "faked" email accounts to get what he felt were legitimate reviews back up. Yelp has a spam filter that tries to catch wrongful posts. The owner tried to trump the system to get filtered reviews back up there. The result was that he was coached by Yelp on how to earn legitimate great reviews vs. gaming the system.

Lesson6: The manufactured reputation tends to backfire
A business that incented reviews from customers got slammed by "vigilante justice" who called the reviews out as shilling. Did the business offer coupons  for reviews or 'good reviews'? This is a thorny issue and one at the heart of WOMMA's Ethics Guidelines. The purest form of word of mouth (reviews in this case) are those that are self-motivated. Yet brands incent influencers and customers to talk all of the time. Clearly incenting for a postive review is wrong-headed. But is incenting to write whatever review the person deems appropriate - positive, negative, neutral, nothing -  is that ok?

Geoff shared about new features that allow brands to respond to bad reviews. they got a lot of heat for not doing that originally. Reviewers can hijack the system to pursue a vendetta. More likely, negative reviews are opportunities for brands to listen, take action to fix something and then let their customers know that hey heard them and took corrective action. The review system at Yelp now allows for more of that overall positive behavior. 

Reviews and search are often everlooked as cornerstones of a social strategy. And of course for many brands reviews are connected with search. What's your Yelp strategy? What's your review strategy?

WOMMA: Inside My Space and Facebook

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) just held our WOMM U. social media and word of mouth marketing training event for brand marketers (check out the hashtag #womma for a blow-by-blow). I was okay tweeting a bit during the show but am only now getting to some blog posts. Just as well, This forces me to consider only posting those stories that have more than documentary value.

There were terrific sessions from Disney, Lenovo, YouTube, NBC and more. They were webcast at WOMMA.org. The face-off between Facebook and MySpace was tremendous as the two participants shared more about how to 'work' their particular platforms than I have gotten from sales reps in the past.

Facebook vs. MySpace

Heidi Browning , SVP Insight & Planning at MySpace and Chris Pan, Head of Brand Solutions at Facebook, agreed to go head-to-head to show how marketers can completely leverage each of their two ecosystems.

Heidi shared how Bruno (i.e. Borat) is using My Space. Completely in character. He promotes his other social Web platforms including "Facebuch" and Twitter. This is probably a rare example where a brand (movie) is perfectly suited to playing in MySpace as an individual might. Some might say that entertainment brands have it easy in socnets.

Let's sell Water
Vitamin Water is also well placed in MySpace with their Sync campaign - bottle codes entitled users to downlogad free songs, celebrity Vitamin Water Sync playlists (e.g. 50cent). They marry Vitamin Water with what MySpace is known for - music. Vitamin Water is supporting through traditonal marketing as well and the cap codes are truly driving taffic. 

Chris Pan from Facebook shared how Vitamin Water has been using Facebook. The Great Debate features LeBron and Kobe in a popularity challenge. Chris challenged everyone to consider the value of the 350K fans of the Facebook experience with the approximately 20K UMVs to their brand Web site (a typical figure).

Engagement ads in the margin display video and have a click to become a fan.This is one of the unique values for brands inside Facebook - the ability to connect content with action. When personalized social data is attached to the ad (e.g. "my friend susan is a fan") they perform really well. You get that "friend endorsement." This is a perfect example of how brands can earn their way through the "Personal Message Shield."

Getting scale by using pages and ads in Facebook. Chris makes a really compelling case for the reach and engagement possible within Facebook. 

Achieving Scale
You can think of Facebook as offering 2 important step-changes to scale:

• 10s of thousands: the typical UMVs of brand microsites

• 100s of thousands: the fan postential of a well-designed brand page strategy in Facebook
• Millions: the power fo adding the right social engagement advertising inside Facebook to support the brand page activity

Tools
Chris suggested we all use the advertising link at the bottom of all pages to play with the targeting widget to understand who is on Facebook.

MySpace created MyAds for users to promote themselves via their "hypertargeting" use of the wealth of personal data people submit in their profiles. "My Insight" can help you in your planning of a campaign to better understand audience segments.

• Chris runs a "best-practice" page:Facebook.com/marketing

• Heidi shared a great resource: Myspace.com brandcommunityshowcase

Of course, there is no winner in this face-off. Most marketers overlook the power fo these two social networks. Personally, we add our Conversation Map insight and planning about what people are saying across the social Web to GSI's search intent modeling with either or both of MySpace and Facebook's profile segmentation to really understand what people are interested in and what they are talking about online. The value of the social networks is clearly in an integrated form of engagement and advertising for scale. Advertising alone won't do it. Engagement without letting more people know about it can be a lost opportunity for scale.

5% of Americans Use Twitter

Th elatest Harris Interactive Poll as reported via Media Post has a few interesting stats clouded in a few oddly misleading negative statements like  "..51% of Americans do not use Twitter or have a MySpace or Facebook account." That means that those platforms have penetrated 49% of the US in some combination or other. That is about as hockey stick-growth as you get.

Again framed as a somewhat diminutive stat in the article, this one is huge: "While the media may have found Twitter, only 5% of Americans are currently using it."

5% of Americans are using Twitter! And those are more highly educated and potentially more influenntial in a general sense if for no other reason than traditional media's embrace of Twitter....

The Skinny:

Online Social Network Usage - By Age & Gender (All Online Adults; % of Age Group)
		Age Group				Gender
Network Usage	Total	18-34	35-44	45-54	55+	Male	Female
Have a Facebook or MySpace account	48%	74	47	41	24	45	52
Update Facebook or MySpace account at least once a day	16	29	17	10	3	14	18
Use Twitter (Net)	5	8	7	4	1	5	5
Follow people on Twitter	5	8	6	4	1	5	5
Use Twitter to send messages	3	4	5	1	*	3	2
None of these	51	25	50	59	76	54	47'
Source: Harris Interactive, April 2009  Multiple responses allowed; * indicates less than 0.5%

Online Social Network Usage - By Education (All Online Adults; % of Group)
		Education
Network Usage	Total	HS or less	Some College	College Grad+
Have a Facebook or MySpace account	48%	40	55	52
Update Facebook or MySpace account at least once a day	16	14	18	16
Use Twitter (Net)	5	3	7	6
Follow people on Twitter	5	3	6	6
Use Twitter to send messages	3	1	4	4
None of these	51	59	43	47
Source: Harris Interactive, April 2009  Multiple responses allowed; * indicates less than 0.5%

For additional information from Harris Interactive, please visit here.

Why Brands Love Twitter (and don't understand Facebook)

The love affair with Twitter just keeps growing and growing. The fundamental benefits of Twitter for brands has not changed much since we published our workshop, Twitter for Business. We have seen a lot more brands experimenting and, of course, celebrities jumping on board. Last week, when @Oprah jumped in, I coudl feel the collective groan as the servers coped with the onslaught. And, of course, there was Ashton Kushter's 'million-follower-goal.' (see his Tweedeck demo here)

Ogilvy PR 360 DI Twitter Webinar

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Four Winning  Qualities of Twitter

There are four qualities to Twitter that make it appealing to brands to adopt in their social media mix. these same three qualities continue to postion Twitter against other platforms including Facebook:

It's simple - while there are many ways you can apply Twitter to your business from customer service to listening intelligence to extending offers to drive conversion, it is all built upon a dead simple model of followers, following and 140 character messages. You deliver something of value and you accrue followers. Followers retweet and act on messages.

It's open - Anyone can read my tweets. You only have to register or login to post your own or interact. Not only that but it is very easy to pump your feed anywhere you want. Many brands are now including their Twitter feed(s) as part of their Social Web presence in their corporate or brand "home" pages (there's a concept - "homepage" - that has been blown up over the past coupel of years). Also, the API of twitter is fairly available and many are creating some interesting visualizations and aggregations of data.

It's got a good ear to the ground - many brands have discovered the value of putting their brand in Tweetscan or just seraching Twitter, itself to find a lot of surprising mentions. Some clients are now using Twitter as a kind of proxy listening post, using it as a barometer of likely overall issues. All of our clients have added Twitter to their cgm listening posts. I knwo one client who did their social media ROI plan simply based on Twitter mentions alone. 

It's free - One could argue that you don't have to pay to use Facebook either yet clearly the value of facebook is only realized with some crafty and stategic use of advertising around brand pages or applications to make your needle stand out in the haystack. (Conspiracy theory #1: Does Facebook resist improving inside-Facebook search to increase teh importance of paid advertising to discover anything in there?). Twitter won't always be free but I suspect that whatever business model they adopt will make it easy for brands to pay 'X' to use such a simple system.

So What About Facebook?

It's complex - from Brand pages to Facebook Connect to applications to social ads, there's a lot you can do with Facebook. This complexity is a hurdle to some brands while it also promises more power for those who do get involved in really using Facebook.You can see that power - hopefully simplified - in our recentFacebook Bootcamp preso here.

Facebook Bootcamp for PR

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It's not so open - exporting data from Facebook is pretty much not possible. They want to control that. Imagine crafting a cool visualization of the biggest brand communities by using the Facebook API. I just don't think it could happen.

It's hard to detect what people are saying inside Facebook. At 200m users, everyone wants to extend their Listening Post into Facebook (yes, in a a way that is not eavesdroppy). What do we get? Facebook Lexicon which is like BlogPulse was years ago. I hope that someone inside Facebook is making listening tools a priority. One of the benefits of the type of critical mass and reach they have is the ability to knwo what's going on in there.

It ain't really free - the most impactful cases of brands using Facebook involes paid ad campaigns within Facebook. That's how they earn their revenue but it's also how you boost awareness fo whatever it is that you are doing in there. Still, to create eficient ad programs, you need to plan in a more complex way - what is your engagement and conversion model; how will you target? what is the balance of paid vs. "earned" WOM inside Facebook. Early advertisers inside teh social networks may have approached it as a simple channel and been disappointed with the results. Truth is - advertising helps social media scale - IF IT IS DONE IN SERVICE OF THE COMMUNITY AND CONVERSATION.

I am guessing that the most sophisticated marketers will continue to leverage Twitter while at the same time dive deeper into their use of Facebook with all it's complexity.

Facebook Bootcamp for PR: This Wednesday

Nicole Landguth from our team and I are delivering a comprehensive look at using Facebook strategically for marcom. It's been billed by the good folks at Bulldog Reporter - our hosts - as a session that will do just about everything including send your kid to college. Our goal was a bit humbler - offer a thorough survey of Facebook's current features and how marketing and communications professionals are using the social network to meet their communications goals. It's meant as a "get real" session for marketers who need more than a "Facebook strategy" - they need results.

We won't get through all of the material in our session and the presentation should make a great reference guide to share within your organization. And while we did our homework - pulling from our own experiences and those of major brands, this will serve as a living guidebook - one that we will add to - of practical ways to apply Facebook today.

Join us this Wednesday at 1pm EST.

(and don't miss the smackdown between Facebook and MySpace at this May's WOMM U 2009 from WOMMA.

Helping Me Get Green Simply & Socially

A lot of brands are jumping on the bandwagon by embracing issues surrounding green, sustainability, and good-fo-the-environment. Agencies (including Ogilvy with the Greenery ) are setting up prcatices to better communicate 'greenness'. Some brands are sincere and have changed business practices to provide a more "green" approach and impact. Others just want the credit.

One thing many could explore is to help all of us citizens improve our personal impact on the environment. That means giving us tools or information that we can use. I doubt anyone believes this is anyone's job but rather will succed when we all do our part. Together we can win. And that is good news for most brands who want to build stronger bonds with their customers. By being of-use to us (customers) in terms of helping us to reduce our carbon footprint, for example, brands help us achieve something we find valuable. That's a brand-bonding opportunity.

Climate Culture Makes it Easy

Climate Culture is a Web2.0 social network-enhanced tool to help me reduce my family carbon footprint. It was developed by a group of Ivy League-plus grads and it's board of advisores is dominated by Yalie profs (oh, and Ed Begley - who apparently dropped the "Jr." from hsi name a while back).

On the surface, Climate Culture's main attraction appears to be a virtual representation of your world as an island. That's not the best thing it has going for it. In fact, that "virtual space" visual was one reason I was sure that I would hate it. 3D interfaces that mimic the space we breathe in are not good interfaces for most utility computing. When we were developing some of the earliest interactive TV shopping mall interfaces in 1991, we tried these 3D replicas of malls that were just horrible user experiences. Imagine if Amazon required you to walk down a hallway, open a door, "talk" to an avatar....you get the picture.

But Climate Culture's virtual island makes sense and, more importantly, doesn't suck. That's mostly because it's not the main interface. They use very simple and smart Web 2.0 menus. As you calculate your initial carbon footprint, you get to walk through a terrific list of tactics to reduce it. This list is magic. They are helping me think of ways to take actions - from big to small - and then giving me an idea of the impact. I earn points for answering questions and can reduce my footprint by acknowledging those things I already do or are willing to commit to doing.  (Not sure I can realistically 'reduce my Internet use' but that's only good for 51 lbs of CO2 a year whereas using a solar-powered lawnmower is good for 63).

What else could they do:

• Make the list more portable. I want to access in Facebook and on my Blackberry.

• Give me a way to challenge someone within the community or, more importantly, someone from the social Web to meet goals (e.g. "I bet I can earn 100o points by Friday...")
• Let me advocate for Climate Culture. Give me badges or apps to embed in my blogs et al.
• Create a sponsorable application for brands. Allow Brand X to show their support for Climate Culture and the mission of helping us all reduce our footprint while highlighting what they or their product contributes. 

The New Social Media & WOMM Ethics Challenges #2 - Comment Spam

This post is part of a series exploring new issues of Word of Mouth Marketing ethics driven by WOMMA's Living Ethics Project stewarded by Paul Rand. The goal is to end up with the best, most up-to-date ethics guidelines for word of mouth marketers - the next iteration of WOMMA's Ethics Code.

As social media-based word of mouth marketing grows due to its efficiency and the trifecta of the recession economy, trends in trust, and new ways to measure WOMM, there are new "opportunities" for marketers to mess up on ethics. If you think of the three conditions that make WOMM particularly relevant, one should not be undervalued - trust. We all look for POVs and opinions from sources we can trust. Increasingly peers, people-like-us, and "strangers with expertise" (people we don't know such as bloggers who seem to have valuable information) rise to the top.

As a marketer, if you do anything to put that trust at risk, you are at best neutralizing the value of your word of mouth programs and at worst, you are putting your brand and the discipline of WOMM at risk.

Comment Spam

Which brings us to comment spam. On my own blog, I get plenty of one-line comments on posts with either a blatant sales pitch for some ridiculous medical product or a pointless "this is interesting" comment from spammers trying to fulfill on their linking strategy for some near-criminal client. Wikipedia describes the motive as:

"Adding links that point to the spammer's web site artificially increases the site's search engine ranking. An increased ranking often results in the spammer's commercial site being listed ahead of other sites for certain searches, increasing the number of potential visitors and paying customers"

That is unethical. Period.

This is an actual image grab of a shady marketers site. I will not give them the satisfaction of a link.

When are comments "spam?"
Most descriptions of blog or comment spam describe some form of automation where shady marketers use software to place comments and links indescriminantly on blogs, YouTube videos, message boards and more. Comments are meant to be our opportuntiy to start or become part of a topical conversation around a social object - blog post, video, image. Anything that isn't meant to productively further that conversation is unwelcome.

Is large-scale commenting - by people, not machines - where the behavior is to post comments that are similar across those topically relevant social media sites, ethical? The intent is apparently to introduce a product or brand mention in many places, not genuinely join the conversation for the benefit of the participants.  The goal is not to drive links per se. The behavior seems to be to place a product mention in a place where it may be relevant to the audience. Let's assume that all of the comments are clearly disclosed as coming from the brand or an agent of the brand. Disclosure is an easy red flag. (except in some cases - next post). Does this meet the ethical mark?

When does commenting become spam or unethical? Is automation the true benchmark? Is it when the motive is to "product place" or link farm? And how do you absolutely demonstrate "motive?" 

What do you think about these issues? Join in here or at the WOMMA Ethics blog. By the end of January, WOMMA plans to review all conversations about the issues and update the WOMMA ethics policies for today's marketing challenges. This will give brands a firm foundation for their own ethics guidelines in 2009.

For the Guy/Gal Who Has Everything: Web Trends 3.0

I love great visualizations. This is going to be a year for more of them, no doubt. Oliver and his folks at IA Japan have released another version of their mashup of the Web 2.0 landscape and the Tokyo subway map. It is but one group's view on cataloguing many of the significant brands and businesses online. It is done so well that it is worth having. You can buy a poster at their site. You can also download jpegs and even a full pdf.

The best part if their interactive start page which makes all of the "destinations" on the route clickable - not sure what Badongo is? Just click on it to go there.

Buy a map for someone you care about in social media. And tag their site, they do great work.