I’ve heard the advantages of shifting from traditional marketing to social media marketing strategies articulated many different ways, but Jeffrey Hayzlett, Chief Marketing Officer at Eastman Kodak Company, does it best in this short video. His Four Es – Engagement, Education, Excitement and Evangelism – are spot on. It’s a smart, pithy way to articulate the big picture and what the shift in strategy is all about. The second video highlights another key advantage to marketing on the web – the ability to be agile, and to respond quickly to feedback.
Foursquare’s thinking outside the box. They’ve teamed up with BART to spice up the ride for commuters. This is the first example I’ve seen of a transit agency using social media.
Erik Qualman has produced a few good videos like this in tandem with the release of his book Socialnomics. This one focuses on interesting facts and figures that show how human behavior on the web is shifting (which is the whole point, right?). I particularly appreciated (A.) the insight that: “Successful companies in social media act more like planners, aggregators and content providers than traditional advertising companies,” and (B.) the fact that Erik quoted himself in the video. Brassy move, Erik. :)
I’ve been an Flip Camera owner for about a year now. I’m actually on my second one. I started with a 60 minute Flip Mino and then sold it and upgraded to a 120 minute Ultra HD a few months ago. The great thing about The Flip cameras is the simplicity. Fits in your pocket, simple interface, drag and drop video files, easy upload to the web. The simplicity in a few minor areas, though, is also a pain. The 2x zoom is limiting and when you hold it at arms length (which is exactlywhat you want to do when you want to be in the shot) and it crops tight on your mug. There’s no Flip Camera yet that allows you to attach a wide angle lens. Fortunately, people on the web are quickly finding their own solutions to the problem and helping each other out by uploading YouTube videos and writing blog posts etc about how to make the camera do what they want. Do a quick Google search for “Flip Wide Angle Lens” to see what I mean. There are tons of people out there who are happily duct taping and super gluing wide angle lenses on their cameras to get what they want.
Brian Shaler‘s come up with a particularly elegant solution using a cheap magnetic lens converter…
What strikes me as odd here is that Cisco hasn’t seemed to have caught on. They might be listening, but they certainly haven’t made changes to their product based on the huge volume of “hack your flip” YouTube videos out there that tell a consistent story about what people want from their cameras. Why the hell wouldn’t you just slap a cheap lens adapter attachment on the front of one of the higher priced models and sell cheap wide-angle lenses on your site?
There’s a great lesson here about listening to the web and building community around products the right way. Connecting with your customers and building strong, loyal communities starts with understanding how people are actually using your product, not about getting them to conform to the way you want them to use it. If people want your product to do something that it doesn’t already, they will find work-arounds and share them on the web, which expose the short comings of your design AND connect your users in places where you can’t control the conversation. If I were Cisco, I’d seriously consider creating social spaces online for their hacker community to share their content. There’s obviously a large segment of people who are so happy with their Flips that they’re willing to SUPER GLUE bits and pieces on the front and keep on shooting away. If you give those individuals a place to find each other, they all find the best hack, and they’ll be happier customers for it. And guess what…if Cisco joined in the conversation in these spaces and reached out to their hackers, empathized and told them that they’re working on the issue, they could direct those individuals to sign up for a free email notification list where they could find out about new product releases and Cisco would suddenly have a hyper targeted group of loyal customers to tap on launch days that they could easily please with special launch day offers etc etc.
Smart companies treat feedback groups (like the Flip Hackers) as an asset that can be nurtured, developed and used to their advantage. Strong, loyal communities don’t have to start out as die hard fans.
Two weeks ago, Gunn/Jerkens, a Marketing Communications company I do social media consulting for, hosted it’s first-ever Social Media Mingle event. Clients and associates joined us for a day-long seminar that started out with a 4 hour presentation, co-delivered by myself and Katie Wynne (I am the one excitedly waving my arms around in the beginning of the video below). At the event, we covered the trends, benefits and best practices of some of the most widely used social platforms. It was a fun, engaging experience and I was delighted at how much the attendees participated and how vibrant and deep the conversations in the seminar were. Here’s a little taste of the event…
If you would like to view the presentation, a trimmed-down SlideShare version has been posted below for your convenience. If you have any questions about any of the content, please feel free to discuss in the comments here, or on the Gunn/Jerkens post.
This slide deck by Oliver Blanchard on Social Media ROI is a hoot. It provides a witty introduction to measuring social media campaign ROI. Importantly, it highlights the fact that social media is an investment that requires people, time and resources, and if you’re not measuring impact in terms of things that matter to your business, you’re going to crash land. If you’re confused about how to measure ROI in your social media campaigns check out his presentation. It’s a good primer.
Five years ago, if someone from your marketing department said “Let’s market to our existing customers!” they would have risked losing their job. Why would any organization spend time or effort on customers who’ve already bought the product? Backwards you say? Not anymore. This is a winning strategy on the social web.
Social media changes the game by giving brands and organizations an unprecedented ability to target and energize their existing fans. 5 to 10 years ago, brands didn’t know who their biggest fans were or where to find and engage them. Now individuals come to you and they bring their entire social graph of trusted relationships with them. When the stars align and they start to come in droves, it’s word of mouth on fire – that’s the real power of the social web. Recognizing that, smart organizations that have a connected fan base shift their spending away from recruiting and start focusing on their existing community’s happiness and let the fans do the marketing for them.
BMW has had amazing success with it’s strategy of targeting existing Mini Cooper Owners because they understand how critical their passionate customers are for spreading ideas that promote the brand. Mini Ownership for many isn’t just about the car – it’s about being part of a subculture that has it’s own fashion, events and lifestyle. BMW made a smart move by focusing on treating their best customers as special insiders who love to be in the know and talk about the product. There’s a key lesson here for any brand with an existing community. People haven’t fundamentally changed, but the technology does change their ability to market for you so significantly that it changes where the dollars should be spent.
One of the hardest questions to answer definitively when it comes to social media is “How do we measure ROI when it comes to conversation?” Starting a blog and getting on Twitter and Facebook is a good start, but, even if you’re producing great content at a good clip, it’s hard to measure the value of the conversations that you generating. This is especially true in the beginning when you’re building a new community from scratch. Common questions I’ve heard are…
What’s relevant and what kinds of interaction should I be focusing on?
Which kinds of people should I be focusing my attention on?
What types of people are important to recruit to sustain interaction and keep my community vibrant?
How do we focus on the signals and block out the noise?
What are the most useful social metrics?
Measuring conversation is tough, but it’s not impossible and there are a few people out there who are thinking about it deeply and coming up with useful solutions. This 45 minute talk I recorded on my Flip at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo given by Katie Niederhoffer and Marc Smith is, to date, the best resource I’ve found for getting a deeper understanding of interaction patterns that matter and what types of people make communities tick. To my knowledge, it’s the only video taken of the event, so please forgive the ahem…less than HD quality of the recording. Katie and Marc share rich data on what the interaction patterns look like for the types of people that you want to recruit for your community. Hint: It’s always a very special few that produce the majority of the interactions that sustain communities – being able to recognize them when you see them so that you can focus on building relationships with them and keep them around is a key success factor.
Thanks again to Katie and Marc for allowing me to record their talk. I hope that those of you who love this stuff as much as I do get a lot out of this. These guys did a great job in such a short period of time. The talk is a great primer for understanding the social science and dynamics behind what makes communities tick.
What is the most meaningful way to understand and measure a dialogue? As marketing transforms from a broadcast model to a conversational one, which constructs should be captured and how do you measure them? Is it necessary to make a distinction between the metrics used to tap into the value of a conversation per se and the ROI of a social media marketing campaign?
This presentation offers new strategies to think about and tap into the depth of interactions and emotional connections people have online. Beyond buzz levels, sentiment, and other core metrics typically provided by brand monitoring solutions, the presentation will offer methods to understand a conversation: how emotional is it, how in sync are the constituents, how intimately do they relate to the brand or product? How much trust do the constituents reveal?
Marketing efforts that take advantage of technology to enable community and collaboration render traditional metrics limiting, at best. Traditional metrics have been optimized for more passive exposure to a specific message, frequency of exposure is considered a proxy for relevance; and, the premium is on reach over quality.
Primarily due to its more participative dynamic, a conversation engages constituents unlike static messaging. As many in the industry have noted, a natural development is to measure engagement. However, there is little consensus on what engagement means and how it can be measured. Often it is calculated by merely adding traditional metrics, assuming more is better.
The presentation will introduce new constructs and present case studies with empirical research demonstrating more valuable, still measurable constructs than the core metrics currently in use.
*** Note: This was recorded by Steffan Antonas (@steffanantonas on Twitter) at the Web 2.0 Expo On 04/01/2009. Special Thanks to Katie and Marc who allowed me to record this session. The slide deck for this presentation can be found here: http://bit.ly/gNwC1
Five years ago, if someone from your marketing department said “Let’s market to our existing customers!” they would have risked losing their job. Why would any organization spend time or effort on customers who’ve already bought the product? Backwards you say? Not anymore. This is a winning strategy on the social web.