More marketers use social networking to reach customers

This recent USA Today article provides an excellent glimpse into why marketers can’t afford to ignore millions of potential customers who are consuming media in new ways. As Shel Israel says at the end of the article, “Companies have no choice. This is where their customers are going.”

Social Media Revolution

Here is a great video on Social Media but the the stats are a little off.  A study just released showed that 65% of twitter usage is still occurring through twitter.com and the video says 80% mobile. It doesn’t really matter though as the general case is clear.  It’s worth viewing.  http://bit.ly/RTzPe

Role with the Times

The Internet has forever changed print media. While it seems most social media experts are anxious to call the time of death on the newspaper, we still have a few things to learn from the “old man”.

For several decades now, news delivery has depended on several people, all working toward the goal of distribution of content. Publishers, syndicators, writers, and editors are some of the more important roles in the process. These roles also exist in online news channels.  However, the accessibility of social media by the masses has caused these roles to blur; which is not necessarily a good thing.

To me, print media is like a McDonald’s hamburger – it’s not my favorite, but at least I know what to expect time and again. I’m not so sure what to expect from most social channels. Frankly, I sometimes get tired of sampling dog food while in search of steak. I doubt I’m unusual in this regard.

Does this mean that social media is flawed? To the contrary, social has the potential to be something that print or even traditional online media could never achieve. But social has some growing up to do – beginning with the realization that a cacophony of solo artists does not make for a spectacular show. Great social requires a process where different people come together to fulfill various roles including writing, editing, filtering, distribution, funding and more.

Success in social media is an orchestrated effort. Which role you are best suited to play? Here are some actions to consider:

1. The promise of social media is a personalised experience for the recipient, not a personal soapbox for the messenger. Define the ideal personalized experience for your target audience, and then decide how you best contribute to the experience.
2. Invite and involve others. For example, if you manufacture a great product but are not known as a trusted advisor, instead of trying to become the advisor, invite experts your customers trust to work with you to achieve a common goal.
3. Consider content intermediaries vs. direct communications. Especially if you’re new to social media, leveraging an existing channel may have greater value than attempting to create a new one.
4. If you own a channel, find content partners that can engage your audience and add value to bolster your “ratings”.
5. If you go the content route, consider multiple channels for distribution. Social media channels are smaller and more targeted than most traditional channels. Don’t rely strictly on viral messaging.

Although social media is informal and conversational, end users still have high expectations of businesses and professionals who participate in the space. Make sure your approach delivers the right message in the right place on a consistent basis.

Is your brand swimming upstream or downstream?

If you’re contemplating whether your brand should be participating in the social media space, think no more.  Instead, consider what you already know to be two of the most common marketing and sales adages: “location, location, location“ and “fish where the fish are.”

Your brand’s existing and prospective consumers can be found all over the place, not just where you think they should be or where they were last time you looked. No longer can you rely solely on effectively reaching them while they sit in front of the TV, listen to the radio, read the newspaper, view billboards on their way to work, or even by having your own branded website on the web.  And, even if you do reach them via those media channels, you are missing out on a huge opportunity to participate in engaging conversations, gather insightful learnings,  and build a relationship with your most valuable consumers.

 A common trap is to fish in the same pond over and over until it is pretty much drained because it is comfortable and we know what to expect. We sit with our same old fishing pole, or in this case, same old marketing and advertising plans. Most likely we even reflect back on the good old days and execute our marketing strategies with the hope that more fish magically appear, rather than exploring new venues full of fish just waiting to be caught!

 Participating in social media provides a unique and exciting new opportunity for your brand to proactively create a strong presence where existing and prospective consumers are choosing to spend their time.  You’ll be able to  converse with them in highly relevant ways, at a time and place where they will be most receptive to engaging with your brand.

 So get out there and find consumers wherever they might be hanging out. Whether it is on Facebook or Twitter or You Tube, explore these fresh new venues where your target audience is comfortably gathering and communicating with their friends and fans to discuss their interests, hobbies, and preferences. Of course, these dialogues just might include your brand’s category. Clearly, this is a perfect time and place to engage them in a conversation about your brand, in an authentic, trustworthy way. For helpful tips as to how to ensure your brand is personable and prepared for these conversations, please see my earlier blog, “Would you want to be friends with your brand?”.

 Fish where the fish are. And you will master Social Media swimmingly.

A Bird of a Different Color

Twitter has landed in our backyard and no one is really sure about this strange bird. To some it is a phoenix rising from the ashes of first- and second-generation network communications. Others may compare it to a noisy yardbird that is about to become the victim of a pouncing cat or well-cleaned sliding glass door. Whatever the claim, everyone agrees this bird is different.

Twitter’s rise has been followed by high drop-off rates. Has a fad taken flight? I don’t think so. I’m hesitant to predict the fate of the current Twitter application, but suffice it to say that its foundation is part of the future of communications. Its evolution will bring it into the mainstream. What is that foundation? According to Twitter, it is announcing what you are doing.

I started out a Twitter skeptic.  The first tweets I received were all mindless announcements like: “Ate too much Mexican for lunch… ready for a nap”. However, my experience has slowly evolved. As I became more critical of whom I chose to follow – people who shared my business interests or lifestyle – the quality of tweets improved. Even some of the people I originally chose to follow have graduated from noisy twits to more interesting tweeters. Subtle changes to tweet style can make a difference, such as: “Ate lunch at Frontera…their chicken tortilla soup is awesome.” This observation has led me to conclude that the best tweets are pronouncements, not personal announcements. Twitter is the official record of these pronouncements.

Despite my “aha” moment, in its current form, Twitter might have a hard time moving beyond the grand social experiment we have made it. Twitter is a disruptive technology, but not unlike the web in the mid-1990s. Back then companies with thousands of customers had a difficult time justifying the expense for a few pageviews each day. Then Google came along and gave the search engine to the masses. It became the killer app that made Internet content accessible. Twitter is still waiting for its killer app. Many developers seek the Holy Grail, and while none has found it yet, the proliferation of Twitter value-add applications is at least moving us in the right direction.

If you’re a marketer you’re probably asking: So what does this mean to me? Well frankly, a lot. To understand Twitter’s potential is to begin to use it effectively. Here are six tips for marketers using Twitter:

1. Twitter is a social record. Check your record, participate in it, respond to criticism, promote positive opinion, and accept transparency. Pay special attention to personalities that broadcast information about your industry or topics of particular interest to your customers.
2. Twitter is a rich data mine which will only become more valuable. Use Twitter data mining tools to assess actions, moods, trends, and influencers.
3. With Twitter, the same rules apply as with posting to other social networks: people prefer information from those they trust – starting with friends and expanding outward (e.g., friends of friends). There is a caveat: follower ≠ friend in the Facebook sense. The followship model is based on perceived value of the broadcaster. In this context, the information tweeted defines the value and trustworthiness of the broadcaster. Personal relationships still trump unknowns. Using individuals who are accessible to represent your brand is a nice alternative.
4. Social networks are perceived as more valuable when the broadcaster considers the receiver or more generally the audience segment as he/she writes. For this reason, a well-defined purpose or mission statement to guide tweeting is important to keeping your audience intact and growing.
5. If you create an account for your business, be ready for questions and requests. As a nice touch Zappos includes contact information in the background to reroute a variety of inquiries to the right channel. However, this does not negate people from commenting to @zappos without viewing their wallpaper. Be prepared to avoid customer service slip-ups by having a response plan.
6. While Twitter is designed as a synchronous tool, think about it as an asynchronous platform too.  Although a vast majority of tweets lose their value on delivery, more people are learning how to qualify web content by republishing links and retweeting. This content is often scanned using search filters after publication, much like custom newspaper headlines. Publish keeping this in mind.

Finally, experiment with Twitter to see what works. For example, test to see if articles or promotions are more likely to get retweeted in your business? Twitter is a low cost sandbox. Now is the time to learn what works for your business, so that when Twitter soars, you do too.

A closer look at the Facebook/FriendFeed deal

Facebook announced today that it acquired FriendFeed for about $47.5 million ($15 million cash / $32.5 million stock) in a deal that values Facebook at $6.5 billion.  While this is down from the $10 billion or $15 billion valuations that have been talked about in recent months, it still represents a rough valuation of 13x revenue, which the company expects will be around $500 million for 2009.  FriendFeed had no revenue, but it had lots of good ideas:  Facebook has been implementing several FriendFeed innovations  on its own site this year, and the founders of FriendFeed were the guys responsible for G-mail and Google Maps.

This was a preventative acquisition.  Facebook perceived a hole in its offering and moved to patch it up before someone else exploited the problem.  FriendFeed has no real revenue, but it offered something that Facebook didn’t, and Facebook didn’t want anyone else to buy it first.  The FriendFeed team didn’t waste any time transitioning, because apparently they had vacated their old office and were set up in Facebook’s space before the end of the day.  If the technology is good, and you don’t have it, you better get it quickly.

Deals like this are going to happen more and more frequently over the next 24-36 months in the social media space.  There is a land grab opportunity, plain and simple.  He who gets there first and establishes a position early on tends to have an excellent chance of being snapped up by a bigger player in a neighboring area.  Eventually the universe is fully populated and developed further, but the rewards typically go to those who had a clear vision of where technology was going very early on, and were able to move quickly to establish a position with a viable offering that people need.  Facebook is a mighty powerful force right now, but it certainly hasn’t cornered the market on good ideas, and buying the good ideas is a lot easier than trying to create them.

So how can we predict these deals over the next 2-3 years?  Start with where the people are now and where they will likely be in the not so distant future.  Then look at all the cool things that niche players are doing that aren’t happening yet at the bigger sites.  The only way to remain relevant is to keep improving content, improving user interaction, and improving stickiness.  The companies that provide these things are buyout candidates.

Next, look at big businesses, which have largely remained on the sidelines as they grapple with understanding how fully they will have to retool their marketing efforts.  Their early efforts in the space have largely been weak and ineffective, but they know where they have to go to meet the consumers on the new turf.  Companies that are able to bridge the gap between big brands and social media are also excellent targets.  These are the players who are going to put big businesses on Facebook, MySpace, and 20 other social networks.  They will develop apps to engage the consumers and have them interact with the brands. And the deals that happen will be a lot bigger than $47.5 million.

Should be interesting!  There will be plenty more deals like this before the end of 2009.

OMMA Global in NYC

Social networks, social media applications, microblogging services and other communications platforms become our central means of engaging online. Of course, anyone wanting access to this world of private and proprietary information needs to be invited, presenting a massive conundrum for marketers, who desperately want to reach the hundreds of millions of users who volunteer personal information on sites like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter every day.

Nevertheless, many industry watchers believe the answer to online advertising’s oldest problem lies inside social media’s walled gardens: that is, how to bring the estimated $500 billion spent annually on offline brand advertising to the Web. Others would argue that an even larger question looms: in ceding the means of content production to the masses, have social media services created marketing’s greatest opportunity, or do they represent the final nail in the coffin of big media as we know it?

Join us in NYC September 21-22 as we discuss these topics and more.

Join Us at Social Fresh in Charlotte, NC

Social Fresh is kicking things off with a Social Media Marketing conference in Charlotte, August 2009.  The mission is to provide great social media content for brands and companies looking to advance their marketing efforts.

MegaPlayer will be there as a Silver Sponsor so be sure to stop by and say hello.

1-800-FLOWERS.COM(R) Debuts Online Store on Its Facebook Page; Leading Floral Retailer to Host First Store within a Facebook Page

This article in USA Today caught my eye as it really shows how brands are looking for ways to convert sales where their consumers are online vs. simply driving them back to their branded website. Facebook may just be on the verge of becoming a portal with one stop shopping!

Would you want to be friends with your brand?

Is your brand engaging in interesting conversations? A good listener? An active participant in dialogues, not monologues? Is your brand trustworthy and act in a manner that not only motivates consumers to associate with it, but inspires them to truly want to become influential advocates and contribute to its success?

If not, it’s time to teach your brand some social skills.

Prepare your brand for the social marketing circuit. Be sure it personable, credible, authentic, transparent and a pleasure to be around, to talk with, and to talk about.  Then, let your brand speak for itself, make friends, and interact with consumers in everyday conversations.

Utilize the power of conversation and engagement that social media offers. Create unique and valuable reasons for consumers to build a special connection with your brand and reap the emotional and tangible benefits that inherently come with being in an “equal relationship”:  trust, loyalty, valuable input, a genuine listener, shared fun in the form of conversations, games, interactive activities, and the list goes on and on.

By displaying a friendly approach, a helpful attitude, unquestionable integrity, and a sincere desire to interact and share with others, your brand can play a key role in enabling, inspiring and influencing meaningful interactions – whether its communication between consumers and brands, brand facilitated consumer to consumer conversations, or organic dialogue among consumers.

In return, your brand will enjoy enhanced relevance and value in the eyes of the consumer, resulting in deeper consumer loyalty and advocacy.

Social media marketing provides an exciting new opportunity and relevant touchpoint for brands to show off who they really are. Be friendly, be helpful, be giving, be informative. Don’t be loud and obnoxious. Don’t force yourself on others. Be sure your brand has good manners and is enjoyable to be around.

Do that, and you’ll be sure to be invited back over and over!