Influential Marketing Blog

The New Model That Could Reinvent Social Media Endorsements

There is a company called Brand Affinity Technologies (BAT) that is profiled in last month's issue of Wired magazine which is worth a look for anyone who is interested in how advertising and endorsements in particular in athletics work today, and how this could apply in the future. BAT focuses on what the article terms the "long tail of athlete endorsements." They connect brands not with the superstars who are almost household names, but the local stars. Through their database of 3500 athletes, they can connect smaller athletes to more local advertisers with a smaller budget.

Imagine for a moment if such a network existed in the world of social media. There are certainly more than a few enterprising efforts to do something similar through larger blog networks of specific niche groups, such as MomCentral, or even a model like Ad.ly that does something similar around helping people monetize their Twitter streams. The problem with most of these is that they remain insular to the online world. The power of BAT is not that they have brought all these athletes together, but that they do it under the umbrella of acting as an agent for these players to represent them in multiple types of marketing opportunities ... from showing up at the opening of a car dealership to using their image as part of an online banner campaign geotargeted to a particular region.

The premise that makes the whole system work is that every athlete is famous somewhere. And if a brand can use that athlete in the markets or areas where they are famous, and change them out for another athlete who is bigger elsewhere, then they can roll out a region by region marketing strategy in a way that can scale. For the most popular bloggers, chances are their audience spans across geographic regions - still you could imagine the value of using a popular tech blogger for a campaign for a new mobile phone targeting geeks based on benefits and changing the endorsement to a popular fashion blogger if the same phone were promoted based on design and style.

What do you think - could the BAT model help open a new world of opportunities for brand to connect with popular bloggers, or is it too different from athletics to work?

How Hanes & Dyson Are Winning By Naming The Problems They Solve

One of the most basic premises of marketing is that you need to be able to articulate the consumer need that you are solving. The problem is that sometimes this need and your solution for it is a complex story to tell. Where marketing fails is when the process of describing this need and your solution gets too complicated. When it wins, you have something that I call "getability."

Getability is simply how easy an idea is for someone to immediately understand without a whole lot of explanation needed. When your marketing has getability, it means that it is simple, clear and memorable. This matters for good reason. Marketing that is complex or confusing rarely works. To help their getability, two brands in particular are using a technique that may be worth considering when promoting your product or service ... they are giving an ownable name to the problem they solve.

The recent marketing from Dyson around their new Air Multiplier fan is one great example - it introduces the idea of "buffeting" and talks about how all fans except for the new Dyson buffet (or chop) the air before circulating it. I have no idea if buffeting is a real scientific thing or not. It sounds real enough, but that hardly matters. In an instant, as a consumer I understand not only what it is, but also how my life up until today might be less than optimal because of the buffeted air my fans are throwing on me. When I am ready to rid my life of unwanted buffeting, Dyson has the product for me.

Hanes is also using this technique as part of their new campaign for their line of logically named "Lay Flat Collar T-shirts." With Michael Jordan as their spokesperson, their TV ads show humorous situations where they point to a man who's undershirt collar is all bunched up like bacon and refer to the phenomenon as "baconing." I never heard the term before, and yet once again I understand immediately what it means. Baconing has getability and Hanes has solved the problem with their shirts. Now all I need them to do is find me a solution for the midbutton problem.

10 Insights From The Corporate Social Media Summit

For the past two days, I had the chance to interact with a brilliant group of professionals from some of the largest brands in the world on how they are using social media at the Corporate Social Media Summit in New York. This collection of communicators spent the last two days discussing some of the biggest questions they have and learning from one another. Unlike many other events, the event was remarkably free of self appointed social media gurus and the vast majority of attendees were from corporations themselves. As a result, there was a great willingness both to admit that no one knew everything and that many people at the event were struggling with similar challenges.

Taking a moderation role for two sessions, I had the great job of helping to bring out some of these insights and running a crowdsourced concluding session to the event where we recapped all the most significant ideas and concepts that people raised through the event. As I promised at the event, here is a summary of that recap with some interesting lessons learned and key themes that emerged from the event:

1. Listening. The importance of paying attention to conversations online as a first step was reiterated by many of the speakers and one of the most interesting points that emerged was that true listening means not just listening for mentions of your brand or setting up a Google Alert for that as many companies have done. Real listening involves also listening to conversation about your industry or related topics beyond just your brand name.
2. Social Media Strategy. One common complaint when it came to social media strategy was that it often seemed to center on the tools instead of looking more broadly at how it could impact the brand across multiple platforms. Having a social media strategy isn't about what you do on Facebook ... that's only one piece of it. Instead, having a real business objective in mind such as converting new leads, or building awareness is important to help you create a strategy that can transcend which tools you happen to use. The second point that arose was the importance of having a strategy that can be rolled out on a subbrand basis as well as a strategy for a master brand.
3. Metrics/ROI/KPIs. Understandably this was a hot topic at the event as several panelists shared their own versions of how they track success from looking at the volume and tone of conversations to counting fans, followers and friends. Regardless of the metrics, several people made the point that traditional ROI metrics may not be the best ones to use for social media. Instead, you could consider a combination of conversation analysis to demonstrate brand perception shift and harder online metrics like visits, time spent and content consumed. The other potential metric for much of social media could be an equivalency on the money that you might save by avoiding doing something that you replaced with social media.
4. Employee Engagement. Having clear guidelines is the place to start when it comes to encouraging employees to share their voices through social media. Beyond these guidelines which help to set the boundaries for employees, you also need to make clear to them what they ARE allowed to talk about. Several attendees shared that putting these guiderails in can actually help encourage people to share through social media because most employees are generally more afraid of sharing too much and unknowingly crossing an unspoken line. Setting the boundaries tells employees it is ok to use social media responsibly and opens the door for your organization to start better fostering your potential employee brand advocates.
5. Brand Ambassadors. Nearly every organization would love to have more consumers who are so passionate about their brand that they declare it widely and proudly online through social media. Finding and encouraging these people, however, can be quite challenging. Several brands at the summit were creating their own ambassador programs - something akin to an inside circle of influencers who are invited to have a deeper relationship with a brand typically through product trial, exclusive experiences or content creation. Noted as an ideal place to start was having a good process in place to identify these individuals and then reach out to them. In addition, having more remarkable products and telling their story better can also help to awaken the passions of and latent brand enthusiasts.
6. Conversation Management. When it comes to following the oft-quoted advice of having a two way dialogue with consumers, most brands are woefully unprepared to train the right staff and put the right resources behind managing this conversation. Having a good plan for conversation management can dramatically help. One suggestion was to create a Conversation Calendar that can help editorially plan out weeks and months of what the brand will aim to focus conversation on. Additional tips included being sure to talk about a topic related to your brand often, rather than just your brand and also to use trends or trending topics as part of your conversation to capitalize on existing conversations that are already happening online. At the bottom of these recommendations was the insight several people noted on how people tend to engage with content, not necessarily brands.
7. Content Creation. Often the place where brands start when it comes to thinking about social media, creating branded content is just one piece of a complex puzzle. Still, having content created by a brand can be a great way to get consumer engagement and done right can help to position a brand and have a broader impact on awareness, consideration and even purchase behaviour. The first idea mentioned in this category of content creation was along the lines of content curation - something I have written often about. Curation means taking content from across the web and bringing it together to position your brand as the one who sits above all of it. The second element of this content creation can be to amplify things your brand is already doing, such as an annual conferences or other gatherings.
8. Scaling Social Media. Perhaps the most complex question of the list, scaling social media was an important discussion that came up over and over again for large brands. Noted as being key in having any effort scale was getting top level buy-in. Attendees alternated between the time honored tactic of doing first and apologizing later - and the more systematic approach of proving the value through a combination of case studies and statistics. Also important for scaling was the important step of bringing multiple silos within an organization together. Two other models that attendees shared were the "Center of Excellence" model where a core group of professionals who focus on social media spread the word throughout an organization, and the "Inside Out" model where strategy is developed centrally within an organization and then spread to regional groups for local execution.
9. Innovative Ideas. The downside of having a crowdsourced conclusion session late in the afternoon on the second day of the event was that some things may have been difficult to remember. Our discussion of big innovative ideas was quickly cut short, but I did share one PR technique that I have written about in the past called mood tracking to point to the idea that influencers are now sharing how they feel in real time - which gives you insight into someone's emotional state of mind before you speak to them. This can have a big impact when it comes to tasks like sales calls or media relations.
10. Tools & Tips. Given the temptation to walk away with real tips from the conference around some very specific tools, one of our last points during the crowdsourced conclusions session was to share tips specifically on the four most frequently mentioned social media tools during the event: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and FourSquare. Below are a few tips that were shared on each:

Facebook:
- Integration this with all other social media properties  
- Using the "Like" button off Facebook and on all other sites to allow one-click opt-in
- Get beyond the newsfeed to other areas of Facebook
- Think carefully about whether to have a Page or a Group, both have some benefits.

Twitter:
- Use in a more personal way than other tools because there is often a real person behind it.
- Create Twitter lists as a way to organize relevant Twitter users together and promote them.
- A third party tool such at Hootsuite can help you manage searches and conversation effectively.

YouTube:
- Descriptive titles and tags matter to being found
- Ideal video length is 2-3 minutes, according to Johnson & Johnson
- Allowing embedding is an important standard practice to allow your videos to travel across the web and be reposted.

FourSquare:
- This and other location based services lend themselves far more than other challenges to real time contests, coupons, and giveaways. Working with FourSquare is possible to get custom badges created as part of a sponsorship as well. Offering event based information can also be a great idea.

Related Articles:

• Content Curation: The Next Big Job Of The Future?
• The 12 Types Of Social Media Experts
• 7 Essential Social Media Instincts Everyone Should Learn
  
• 10 Ways To Improve Your Social Media Karma

Is GM Trying To Be Unintentionally Brilliant By Killing Chevy?

On the front page of today's NY Times there is an article about the death of Chevy. Not Chevrolet as a brand, but a leaked memo from GM that directs employees to stop using "Chevy" as the brand shorthand for Chevrolet. Supposedly citing brand consistency as the key reason for the move, the article notes that the brand is moving counter to a trend for brands to be more casual in their names, from Federal Express being FedEx to Coca-Cola being Coke. Yet the brand still heavily uses the Chevy name across branded sites on the web and is still running keyword marketing against "Chevy" without changing the name.

More interesting is that the leaked memo has gotten the brand on the front page of the NY Times and has already awakened the emotions in consumers who have a connection to the brand through perhaps owning one in the past or to some of the pop culture references to the brand through songs such as American Pie. So, to recap - the memo that tells employees not to call the brand "Chevy" gets big media attention, focuses coverage on how much of an American icon the brand is and stirs up latent emotional connections among consumers to the brand ... and this is a bad thing?

My guess is that pretty soon we'll see another "leaked" memo from the brand bowing to "consumer passion" and embracing the Chevy name as shorthand for Chevrolet once again. As a campaign, it's a fairly brilliant idea - denounce an iconic pop culture reference to your brand so that public outcry and media attention will combine to demonstrate the passion that still exists for it. The only question is whether it was intentional or not.

UPDATE 06/11/10 - It looks like this was intentional and GM did turn around on this after all. The Wall Street Journal reports the brand making a U-turn on this internal memo and now giving the OK for people to use the "Chevy" brand abbreviation. Apparently this was indeed an effort to get a spike in buzz around the brand as I guessed ... it's just too bad they didn't follow it up with some bigger announcement or anything of significance to take advantage of the attention.

How Writing "Content Time Bombs" Can Double Your Blog Traffic

Over the last five years since I have been blogging, I have dispensed my fair share of blogging advice. Though I never describe myself as a "social media blogger" who solely talks about social media in terms of adoration, I do get asked often to help those who may be starting out or trying to build an audience with their blog. To answer, I have shared many different forms of advice on what to write about, how frequently to write and other techniques to help build a better blog. One technique that I realized I use all the time is also one that I have seldom written about: using "content time bombs."

Content Time Bombs are pieces of content that are written to remain online until someone needs to know about that specific topic, and then they "explode" as those people find them (usually through search engines). They are the social media equivalent of land mines, but in a good way. The reason I believe in them is because they are inherently valuable because they are always meant to be written for the long term. Not only that, but on any given day, nearly half of my blog traffic will come from older posts that are being found through search or passed along from person to person. These are not fleeting posts about how Facebook's latest privacy guidelines have people up in arms. They are not posts about how the iPad will save the world. Instead, they bring different pieces together to answer a common question that some people may ask.

Here are a few recent examples:

• What All PR People Should Know About Journalists
• 5 Non-Obvious Marketing Trends To Watch In 2010
• The Rise Of Gaming In Healthcare
• 5 Things Customer Care Teams Wish Marketers Did Differently
• 5 Marketing Techniques Luxury Real Estate Agents Use

What do all of these posts have in common that makes them what I call "content time bombs?" Clearly I am a fan of the numbered list structure for blogging - but this alone is not what distinguishes them. Numbered lists may be a format that I choose because it fits my blogging style, but this is not required. Instead, these posts all have four features in common that make them ideal fits as content time bombs:

1. They target a specific audience or need. Each of the posts above either features a specific target audience, such as luxury real estate agents or PR people, or customer service people - or else they talk about a specific topic in broad terms, such as trends for 2010 or gaming and healthcare.
2. They use keywords frequently. A key for search engines is to title the posts correctly using keywords and then to repeat them throughout your post. This is a basic search marketing technique, but also helps from a reader's point of view to reinforce that what they are reading is truly giving them the information they were seeking.
3. They can remain "dormant" until needed. The problem with many blog posts is that the dated nature of each post and the format of having your newest posts at the top means that anyone who gets to your homepage may not always see the content most relevant to them, they will only see the content that was posted most recently. That works for world news where you care most about the news right now, but for a blog you want your older content to help drive engagement. By writing your posts in a format that is likely to be found, you can bring more incremental traffic to your blog by driving people to content you have already written rather than just to your latest post.
4. They engage a broader audience. I understand that the core audience for my blog are people who either work in marketing or are dealing with some type of marketing challenge. By writing posts focused on real estate agents or librarians or journalists, I can help bring a wider audience of people to my site, and also learn from the insights they share back in comments as they are reading.

So I'll continue to try and write these "content time bombs" and build an archive of hundreds of them. To me, that's the ultimate way to create a great blog because you are writing content that is not just interesting or current for the moment, but also something that will be useful and answer a need in a relevant way a year from now.

SBF: 7 Essential Social Media Instincts Everyone Should Learn

In life we expect outgoing people to be better at tasks like networking or sales. We use terms like "extrovert" and "Type-A personality" to describe what many of us believe to be true about many of the people we work with ... that seemingly natural parts of their personality make them ideal candidates to do certain types of jobs. Chances are as you have built your own small business, a part of any success you have had has come from your own natural abilities and skills.

The problem with how we think about our natural abilities (and those of others) is that it also forces us to consider that the exact opposite must be true as well. After all, if you can be naturally good at some things, surely you could be naturally bad at other things, right? And being naturally bad at something is a great excuse to just avoid doing something. If you're "not good with numbers" then you get someone else to handle that. Or if you're not a technology guy (or girl) then you can justify not investing in better systems to optimize your business.

This is just silly. Having an inherent ability certainly helps, but it is not a prerequisite - particularly when you consider social media. Many small business owners falsely believe that the more technical you are, the more readily you should be able to use social media. Actually, being good at using social media has very little to do with your technical ability. It does, however, require learning some basic principles and to some degree developing the right instincts. These are guiding principles that anyone who effectively uses social media already knows - but will dramatically help you to use social media like an expert, even if you still think Java is a kind of coffee ...

1. Be conversational. The first and most important instinct to develop when it comes to social media can be surprisingly difficult for some, and that is to speak, write, and share content in your own real voice. This means using conversational language and writing as you would speak. Social media is rarely a place for marketing or legal type of language - so leave those for your important documents and get as real as you can whenever you post anything.
2. Listen and respond consistently. It is often said that the basis of social media comes from listening. You insert any cliché here that you like about having twice as many ears as mouths ... but the point is that through listening to what people are saying you will know what you need to respond to - particularly if someone posts a message about your business or industry and is seeking a response. The more often you respond, the more social credibility you can build for your organization as one that is listening and cares about the sentiment of the group.
3. Proactively comment and share. Responding to questions that involve you or your business is the relatively easy part. More difficult is to consistently find reasons to proactively share a comment on a blog post or share content that you find relevant or interesting (particularly when it has nothing to do with your business).
4. Use questions instead of statements. Open ended questions are a boon in social media, because they invite interaction. So instead of just posting statements of your thoughts or beliefs, how about turning them into questions and seeing who might have an interesting point of view to share. You'll find this one shift makes a big difference in your level of engagement in the long term.
5. Participate with those who share your passion. There are hundreds of thousands of niche groups on sites like Facebook and also independently created through blogs and sites like Ning.com. There are bound to be groups of people who are in your industry or perhaps even just share the same passions as you. Now there are ways to find them, and doing so can give you an instant community to belong to.
6. Support online relationships with offline interactions. It would be a sad life if we could get everything we needed just from the web. Despite our advances in technology, there remains no substitute for knowing people in person, so whenever you can support anything you do with social media by going to a local event or meeting people, that would go a long way towards that.
7. Invest in karma. The last piece of advice is around karma - or the idea that "what goes around comes around." It has been talked about often when it comes to social media, but what most power users of social tools online know is that doing things to help people, sharing knowledge and generally being open to those who connect with you are all good things that pay off in an uncertain way at some point in the future.

There are likely other tips from social media power users on how to build your ability to succeed, but these 7 essentials should help you to get a good start.

NOTE: This post is part of Small Business Friday (SBF) - a featured section on this blog to share marketing ideas for small businesses and was originally published on the American Express Open Forum site.

Silly Bandz: Could The Perfect Toy Save America?

UPDATE 06/15/10 - Listen to my radio interview on NPR's All Things Considered about the Silly Bandz fad.

They are for boys or girls, you wear them on your wrist or elsewhere and just about every kid has to have an arm full of them, prompting many schools to ban them. Welcome to the world of Silly Bandz. Like most toy sensations to hit the market, there are no shortage of gushing morning shows, and idolatry newspaper articles declaring the little silicone/rubber bands in various shapes the must have kids toy of the moment. Stores sell out in hours and brands are getting in on the action by creating licensed versions of these bands. Though this probably fits the textbook definition of what any marketer would call a fad - it does stand apart from many other toy fads for a few key reasons that might just make this one of the most interesting product marketing examples to come along in several years. Before you dismiss this as just another blog post jumping on the bandwagon (um, pun intended), here are a few reasons I think this fad may be worth a deeper look:

1. Collectible, tradeable, visible and talkable. Just like the Olympic pins phenomenon that happens every four years, the bands not only have an appeal as something visible that you can wear - but also are being shared and traded as a kind of social currency. Get a band that no one else has, and you have something worth trading and talking about. It's a part of many trends, but an important reason that a product catches on.
2. Almost anyone can make them and sell them. While Silly Bandz claims to be the original maker of these bands with the trademark to prove it, there are plenty of other makers of these bands who are actively promoting their own offering. With a simple idea like this, the barriers to manufacturing and marketing are so low that anyone can make them and sell them - almost overnight. Not to mention that the margins should be great as these bands can't cost much to produce. This means that the benefit of the trend goes beyond one lucky company - and spreads out to others in the market.
3. They help drive people to retail stores. Any product that can get people to go into a store more frequently is like a gold mine for most retailers, and these bands have the added benefit of generally selling for between $3 for a pack of 12 to $5 for a pack of 24 - which means most consumers will have some money left over for other incidental purchases. Not to say that the bands can single handedly help turn around retail sales that have generally been shrinking, but according to some reports, these bands are the #1 selling product in America, so if any one product could do it, this would be it.
4. Lack of marketing is (and has been) a benefit. Though it may not be what many marketers want to hear, there are some products that manage to become popular without significant marketing efforts behind them. Every report on these bands talks about how they have been steadily growing in popularity organically through word of mouth. Some evidence of how this has been happening is traceable online - before all the recent hype, a comment on an Amazon listing for one of these packs from a mom talks about how this was the hottest product in her daughter's fourth grade class back in February of this year. While the product is getting media attention now, it's growth was through the passion of elementary school kids who first discovered it and spread it around.

What do all of these points add up to? These bands may last no longer than most other product fads, but the lessons from their rise to popularity are ones that we can all learn something from.