Using Data to Build Individual Customer Engagement & Community

I spend a lot of time working with marketers who are obsessed with driving audience engagement. The conversation, which is becoming predictable, takes place most often in the context of a specific campaign that is not designed to deliver any long-term value for the audience (or for the brand for that matter).  “How can we get people to…?  I really want to have high engagement numbers on this one.”

It got me thinking about the ways audiences want to engage brands.  Sometimes we want to engage as a community, to be part of something bigger than ourselves, to participate in a movement and feel the power of the collective.  Other times, we want to interact as individuals.  We want to be treated as if we matter and our loyalty is important.  Of course, we also want to be able to change our minds on whether we engage at all at will.  That’s the prerogative of the customer.

In some cases creating tools that give us access to our personal data can allow us to act individually but benefit as a community.

If you knew that not running your lawn sprinklers during the next two days could save you $10 on your next water bill, would you opt not to turn them on? Possibly.  Yet, you have no way of knowing the dollar impact of a single action. You know every so often there are peak demands on the system but you have no insight into the specifics.  I wonder how much water we would save collectively by giving people access to their real-time data individually?  The water company could alert customers when there are high demands or restrictions on usage and therefore potentially lessen the impact for the entire community.

Think about it.  Brands who want to build community with their audience may only have opportunity to do so after providing value by engaging with their audience as individuals.

Pinterest’s Impact on Social Media is Worth So Much More Than 1,000 Words

Last week, Mashable’s Sarah Kessler authored an article about Pinterest clones which focused on sites that have copied the look, feel, and/or overall functionality of social media’s most recent phenom. What I haven’t seen though, are posts that put forth some higher order thinking around the act of curating content and what that means for individuals and for social media in general.

Before going any further, let’s agree on a definition. Content curation does not include generating content, but amassing content from a variety of sources, and delivering it in an organized fashion. Anyone interested in finding relevant content pertaining to a specific category and funneling this information to an audience (public or private) in a mash-up style is a content curator.

Let’s face it. Pinterest is beautiful. The images that we are pinning make it so. However, content curation is not only about collecting beautiful, funny, interesting images. It is about collecting information for future use, reference, enjoyment, etc. Pinterest has put a pretty face onto a very important concept and one that we should examine deeper.

What if you (or a loved one) recently received an unexpected medical diagnosis? I bet first thing you would run to Google and start searching for answers, reading everything you could to understand all you could. But then later, how could you share with your family what you have learned? A piece of content from WebMD, a snippet from the Mayo Clinic, an article from the New England Journal of Medicine. “Wait? Where did I read that? I wanted to be sure to ask my Doctor about that one thing…” Some content I might want to keep private and share only with select loved ones, while there are other scenarios where I might be willing to share my learnings with the world.

Imagine a student doing research on a topic from World History WWII to present. Instead of providing a bibliography at the end of his paper, he would provide the mash-up of sources used including news articles, official websites, pictures, music, and audio/video broadcasts. The student would spend more time interacting with the content instead of searching for it, and the class presentation would engage his peers at higher levels than ever before.

There are no limits when it comes to the types of content that can be curated. When you think about it, any piece of online digital content that can be shared can be curated.

Will there come a day when we replace the role of researcher or analyst with professional curators? Maybe. The more we flood the Internet with content (useful and otherwise), the more we need curators and the more we need to become curators ourselves.

Hats off to Pinterest for using the concept of pictures (each being worth 1000 words) to show us the importance of collecting and for sparking a whole new wave of thinking about content and the way we consume, create and share it.

Spotted Online

Checking in on foursquare and Facebook is no longer good enough for social media fanatics.  We now have to keep friends and family updated on what we are listening to wherever we are.

Can’t Get No Satisfaction: Apps Style

The battle of the app stores.

Apple currently has 350,000 different apps in its app store, with Android trailing behind at a steady 250,000.  The question is: will you ever be satisfied with your apps?

Jay Deragon, CEO of Social Flights, LLC recently published an article discussing the amount of satisfaction users gain from their use of social media.

Deragon divide’s users’ social media engagements into three categories, summarized as follows:

1. “Must be’s”: these are the apps and social media access that you have come to expect on a daily basis, strictly basic things like Facebook and Twitter.
2. “More is better”: a step above the basics, this is where things like yfrog.com come in.  You have Twitter, it works great, but you find that you like adding photos and videos to your posts.
3. “Delighters”: Nobody expected to be sucked into the world of social media, but now you can hardly leave your house without “checking in” to foursquare.  Maybe you even have a check-in at your house.  Stranger things have happened.

What does all this mean?

The average young adult will pick up a new Smartphone and update their Facebook status before they even leave the store.  Young adults these days have a good sense of what they expect out of Smartphones and the social media that comes with them – here are their “must be’s.”  This same age group will rapidly progress to Deragon’s second social media engagement of “more is better” with the greatest of ease, Tweeting pictures and uploading video streams.  Last but not least comes the “delighters.”  Whereas Facebook and Twitter were expected and yfrog.com was a seamless transition, the phenomenon that is social media takes its toll and people are “checking in” wherever they go.

Although not every app deals with social media it is easy to see that social media applications are the big ticket items.  Take Twitter for example: should you download Tweetdeck, or opt for Hootsuite?  People get all riled up about the best way to synchronize all of their accounts.  Upon entering the world of the almighty apps people may not expect to fall so far down the rabbit hole, but Jay Deragon’s research on the social media phenomenon breaks it down for consumers.

Whether or not users are satisfied with their social media outlets depends entirely on their expectations.  There is, therefore, a Catch-22: peoples’ expectations are continually rising.  Not very long ago camera phones were just gaining popularity, but now they are almost standard.  The thing about consumers is that they will never be fully satisfied if the bar keeps rising, and that lack of satisfaction keeps the social media engineers on their toes.

Have you visited your app store today?

References:

http://socialmediatoday.com/jderagon/277591/social-media-usage-satisfaction

http://www.businessinsider.com/charts-of-the-week-ipad-competition-is-toast-2011-3#google-is-closing-the-gap-on-apples-app-store-3

21st Century Graffiti

I am not the most tech-savvy person in the world, so it took me a while to catch on to these strange blocks popping up everywhere.  A friend of mine filled me in on the phenomenon that I was missing out on: QR codes.

QR (quick response) codes are little squares of code that can be scanned by smart phones and link users to all sorts of information.  In short: they are a marketer’s dream.  These codes can be found anywhere from the bottom of a perfume advertisement in a magazine to the bathroom stalls in a club, logging face time with smart phones all over the world.  Now that the iPhone and the Android system have exploded across the market people of all ages have the capability to scan these little codes wherever they go.  QR codes can be linked to web pages, display text, link to URLs – the options are nearly limitless.

Perhaps the greatest way to use QR codes as a marketing technique is to present them with little to no information at all.  Nearly anyone can create their own code using online generators, and what better way to log site visits by posting a code on a bathroom stall and leaving it at that?  The phrase “curiosity killed the cat” comes to mind when musing about the use of QR codes as marketing schemes.  Give consumers a code to something and tag it with a phrase like: “New club opening, check it out…” and you are guaranteed to get a solid number of hits if the QR is linked to a website.  (Granted, the number of scans is contingent upon where the codes are placed and how many are available.)

The rising popularity of QR codes is just one more way people are linking print media to electronic media.  Magazines, newspapers, fliers and billboards utilize QR codes to direct people to websites and media just as footnotes direct readers to additional information on a text.  QR codes are merely modern day footnotes linking the world of print media to the ever-changing world of multimedia.

Beyond their practicality as a marketing technique, QR codes have caught on in the art world.  If you look closely enough, you can see codes adapted by artists in every facet of life, from giant wallscapes to cow sculptures on the sides of streets.

Yes, QR codes are one of the greatest marketing techniques we have seen so far, but beyond that they are an artistic revolution.  Although there are plenty of kids preserving the fine medium of spray paint, what are QR codes but 21st Century graffiti?  Where gangs once marked their territory by tagging walls and subway stations, corporations are now marking theirs with neat little strategically placed squares.  The main difference?  Corporations probably spend millions of dollars on focus groups in order to determine the most profitable places to leave their mark.

A Decade of Chatter

The year 1997 marked the introduction of a tiny little instant messenger called AIM.  Ask anyone who came of age in America during the turn of the century: this was the beginning of an online generation.

Before the introduction of chat engines such as AIM, children would run home and pick up the phone to call their friends – online chatting changed this forever.  In my personal opinion it is the chat world that opened the doors for online interactions on mega-sites such as Myspace, Xanga, Facebook and Twitter.

From early on AIM allowed users to post brief profiles linked to their user names, places where they could describe themselves, post favorite quotes or write shout outs to friends.  These profiles were the first step toward an online culture that would take America by storm.  As soon as AIM took off, corporations such as Yahoo, MSN and Google followed suit, fully aware that online communication was the way of the future.  As soon as users could begin forming online identities, sites like Myspace, Friendster and Xanga began to take off.  As the years went by it didn’t take long for these sites to begin incorporating chats, photo albums and walls on which users could post.  These were all baby steps toward what we know as social media today.

These other companies were merely testing the waters of what was to come in the 21st Century, but no one could have imagined the storm that Facebook would begin.

Once Facebook entered the scene all other interfaces quickly plateaued, and once Facebook added a chat function – well, the world was his (Zuckerberg’s, I mean).  The funny thing is how the culture of online chatting has remained steady.  Sure, the mode of doing so has changed, but think about what you’re doing every time you update your status: posting a statement and waiting for a reply.  Status updates became such a part of our online culture that Twitter emerged as one giant status site.  Now users are communicating in posts containing less than 140 characters, waiting patiently for someone to reply, re-post, or rebuff.  Are these brief posts much different from the tentative messages sent to seventh grade crushes via AIM?

Humans are social animals by nature, and with technology increasing on a daily basis we find ourselves with more and more outlets in which to be social.  Basic communication via chat services such as AIM lit a fire beneath Americans, a fire that raised demand for more and more social media.  Today clients such as Jabber and Tweetdeck profit because they consolidate some of the numerous ways in which we communicate with one another, ways that date back to the advent of instant messaging in the late nineties.

Beginning in 1997 and harpooning into 2011 social media has evolved from the early throws of instant messages.  We now get notifications instantly sent to our phones when someone comments on our Facebook wall, and we reply just as quickly.  Every Tweet is matched with a reply or a re-post, every upload warrants a comment.  We are a messaging nation that is constantly exploring new ways to communicate, I cannot even begin to imagine what will happen in the next ten years.

Will Facebook Places end up MIA?

Facebook doesn’t like to be outdone, so it’s about time founder Mark Zuckerberg introduced “Places,” a location-based application much like Gowalla and Foursquare.  Now Facebookers no longer have to divert their attention to applications like Twitter in order to tell their followers where they are every second of the day – with Places Facebook once again comes out on top of the social media ladder.

Each new application that emerges on the social media scene is usually met with scorn and pleasure in near equal parts.  The big allure of Facebook’s Places is the fact that it incorporates the same basic functions of Gowalla and Foursquare but with the greater influence of the Facebook name.  Although the emergence of sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn has jump started the growth of the social media community, Facebook continues to reign supreme in the world of social media (with an estimated following of 500 million users – and counting).  Critics of the new application will likely be skeptical of the security of posting your location online.  More and more Internet predators emerge on the scene everyday, and with teens and young adults flooding the Internet location-based networking opens doors for people to be exploited.  Mark Zuckerberg insists, however, that this new feature will only extend to people in your network, limiting the amount of information available to the general public.

After Twitter emerged on the scene Facebook incorporated the idea of tagging friends in status updates; this same tactic is now extended to the new Places application.  This sets the bar high for location-based social media, uniquely allowing friends to share information about their location.  This feature is what will draw teens and young adults to the application.  The whole point of social media is just that: to be social.  What’s the point of merely posting your location online?  It seems rather egotistical to me.  The advent of including friends in location-based social media is a natural progression in this socially-driven online world.

Facebook Places is a new breed of social media that will consume the lives of teenagers and young adults (at least for a while…).  Each new trend or application has its honeymoon period: those using it will love it, those not using it will be ridiculed and convinced to use it, and its creators will high-five each other for their creative genius until the cows come home.  Is Places the new Beanie Baby of the decade?  Maybe, but probably not.  Teenagers are a fickle breed, riddled with ADD when it comes to new technology.  Places will likely fizzle out as soon as the next big media gadget appears.

As far as marketing gurus are concerned, Facebook Places might as well be the Holy Grail of social media; with one post on Places the new place in town can become the only place in town.  Now when little Suzie goes to get pizza and updates her Facebook Places on where she is, Johnny can make his move and “conveniently” join her – bringing along a few friends, of course.  Now the previously mentioned pizza place has an onslaught of customers.  Groups of younger adults seldom travel solo, taking packs of friends with them everywhere, and Places only makes this herd mentality that much easier to maintain.

In summary, here’s my take:
Places is great for promoting events and locations within your Facebook network, but how many more applications do we really need?  At the end of the day Facebook Places will fizzle into the background, losing its momentum just as quickly as it started…but has it even started?  Asking around, few people have even heard of the application.  Is it possible that Zuckerberg has as of yet failed to create a following for his new brainchild?  Only time will tell…

This entry adapted from a review of Reggie Bradford’s article found on: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=13583

Brands Use Location-Based Marketing to Drive Engagement

Currently, there are 1.2 million users on FourSquare and it is gaining momentum.  The number of check-ins has almost doubled to 600,000 per day in the last two months and is up 5x since it boasted a million check-ins per week in February.  http://bit.ly/cX6MkX I definitely wouldn’t call it mainstream yet but it’s moving in the right direction.

Now, Foursquare has done a deal with Starbucks.  Mayors of each location get $1 off of a Frappuccino.  For me, the interesting part is not the discount.  It is the ability to message people nearby that there is a deal or event in the area.  http://bit.ly/bB5vBK For example, when I check in at my kid’s school, I am notified that there is a deal nearby.  When I click on it, it tells me about the Starbucks deal across the street.  Thing is, I’m not a Mayor and not qualified to receive the discount – but I’ve been made aware.

The platform is new and there’s a lot of talk about Facebook acquiring Foursquare or Facebook creating competing services that put them out of business.  Then there’s Gowalla, a smaller competitor and a whole host of ways the business side of things could shake out.  Regardless, the platform offers fantastic opportunities that marketers should not ignore.

Diesel did an experiment and published the results:  http://bit.ly/bCERSl

Pepsi also seems to think it is cool: http://bit.ly/clbIDP

Want to talk about how your brand use location-based mobile services to drive engagement?

10 Essential Rules for Brands in Social Media

Taddy Hall, former Chief Strategist for the Advertising Research Institute, shares his thoughts on Social Media:

These days everyone seems to have advice about how to run your social media marketing program. There are so many tips floating around, it’s hard to know what truly essential strategies you should follow to effectively use social media to build your business. Questions abound: Do Facebook fans drive sales?  Why should I fund forums for consumers to pillory my products, ridicule my service and tout the competition?  And, whatever I decide to do, how I will I know if it’s working?

In the search for truth, sometimes social media is its own worst enemy. With a self-credentialed guru waiting at every click, finding actionable, fact-based insight is tricky.

So, in a modest attempt to bring a dose of sanity to this intellectual frat party, I’ve reined my impulse to lob more “personal picks” into the fray.  Instead, I’ll follow the wisdom of an august data mining colleague to just “let the data speak.”

Our process was to query data from hundreds of our brand clients to see what testable truths emerged — and here’s what we found: 10 rules that hold up across category and time.

1. The 1% Rule

In category after category, our data show that a small fraction of site visitors are responsible for a substantial portion of total site traffic. On average, the percentage of influential users (defined for our purposes simply as a visitor who’s subsequent sharing actions result in at least one additional site visitor) on a given site is 0.6% and rarely above 4%.  However, these influencers regularly generate 20%-50% of total site traffic and an even higher share of conversion (defined however a site owner so decides). To make social media marketing effective, marketers have to identify and engage — and better recognize and reward — these super-influentials.

2. The 2-4X Rule

When it comes to conversion, visitors driven to a site by influencers are to to four times more likely to convert compared to visitors from other sources, such as display advertisements or paid search. That means your landing pages for people coming from shared links and social sites should reflect these visitors’ interests and offer enticing deals that will encourage them not only to convert but to share the deals with others.

3. The New Media/New Pipes Rule

In today’s socially driven internet, it matters far more what consumers do with your content than what you
do with your content. What they say about your brand means more than what you say about your brand. Our data shows that content spread from consumer to consumer through word-of-mouth is far more powerful at driving brand preference and purchase intent than content distributed by the brand itself. This has profound implications in social media. To illustrate, if a brand puts content on its Facebook fan page, it is far less likely to go viral than if an influential consumer puts that very same piece of content on his or her page or posts it to a relevant community of enthusiasts.

4. The Martha Stewart Rule

Throw your own party; don’t just cater someone else’s!  If you base your social campaigns in venues you don’t control — such as Facebook or YouTube — you may get great “attendance,” but data show it’s hard to convert and retain these party-goers. If your goals are anything beyond building brand awareness, it’s better to have a house of your own where friends can find you — such as your own branded social site, contest site, or customer forum.

5. The Power of “Weak Links” Rule

Influentials generally do have many direct “friends” and “followers,” but what makes them truly valuable is the number and relevance of their extended or indirect connections. As Albert-Laszlo Barabasi illustrated in “Linked,” you are far more likely to find your next job through a friend-of-a-friend than through an intimate contact. These “weak links” matter in the “real world,” and they matter even more online. A critical implication for marketers is the need to track the extended social graphs of their content if they are going to be able to understand and activate the dynamics of influence.

6. The Feed the Fire Rule

Consumers love to share relevant, engaging, useful, and entertaining content with their friends. Make it easy for them to find your content and make it easy for them to share your content.  Ninety percent of internet pages have fewer than 10 links pointing to them — making them effectively unfindable. Avoiding this abyss of irrelevance requires more thought and effort than just pasting a sharing tool on your pages. It means actively syndicating and curating your content and distributing it not only through your brand’s social graph, but through the graphs of your most influential advocates and fans.  Easy ways to do this include following/friending your influentials’ followers/friends and retweeting/posting content even if it’s not yours.

7. The More Things Change Rule

Our research consistently demonstrates that e-mail and IM remain popular ways to share content. So don’t throw out your old e-mail marketing methods just because Facebook and Twitter are the newest communication platforms du jour. The tried-and-true methods of getting customers to share links via e-mail and IM are still extremely valuable sources of traffic. Furthermore, incorporating social elements into your e-mail, such as incentives to share, can dramatically enhance an investment you’re already making.

8. Horse Before the Cart Rule

Success in social media happens when brands infuse their content with social dimensions (Facebook Connect, most notably), not when they simply stick their ads and content in social forums. In other words, if you want to succeed in social media, your brands and content need to have social attributes — content worth sharing, brands worth talking about, sites that encourage consumer participation and dialog. If your social strategy relies on advertising in social media, it’s probably better to hang on to your money.

9. The PR Pitfalls Rule

Blogger outreach and content seeding may be popular ways to get your message into the social world, but our data show that more than 90% of seeding has no material impact.  Up to 5% gets some response, but less than 2% of seeding drives valuable traffic.  In other words, if you can’t track efficacy of these efforts, don’t bother.

10. The Customer-Service Rule

Social marketing programs succeed when they provide a service to the consumer. Traditional media-planing processes that begin with reach and frequency targets are largely unhelpful in social media. Reach and frequency — as well as engagement, preference and conversion — are positive consequences of giving consumers content that is sufficiently relevant and useful that they propagate your message across their own social graphs. Focus on providing useful content and offers to your target audience and they will spread your messages for you.

Social media isn’t a science, but applying data-backed principles to your social efforts provides a structured framework that will enable you to improve effectiveness and ROI over time. And one final note: Every rule has exceptions. We live in dynamic times. Find what’s true for you — and share.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Taddy Hall is chief operating officer of Meteor Solutions and former chief strategy officer for the Advertising Research Foundation.

If A ‘Social Media’ Program Is Launched And No One Participates, Is It A ‘Program’?

While this article is couched in the context of Healthcare, it really applies across all industries and is good advice for all marketers.  Is your participation in social networking more about “checking the box” or is it a strategic approach to engagement and advocacy?

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by Tom Simons

We’ve seen ambitious programs launched that invite audience activity — “Post your video,” for example — and the invitation is summarily declined.

These are not the efforts of fly-by-night agencies or cavalier clients. Quite the contrary.

Our observation is that these are programs in which social media is seen as a box to be “checked off” — not a strategic component of a larger plan intended to cause a positive business outcome.

Since the only goal is audience participation, the audience sees little value in the invitation and opts not to get involved.

We understand the seduction. We have clients saying, “We’ve got to do something in social media!” It probably isn’t the second coming, but it is a phenomenon that is game changing in all kinds of respects. More importantly to them, it’s cheaper than paid media.

But if an organization wants social media success, it must integrate it into a larger context. Social media have more richness if they interlock with complementary marketing and media strategies — and if the messages in each are insightful and synchronous.

It can be complicated for companies that feel the imperative to jump into social media up to their ankles. But it’s better to think it through so you don’t find yourself having to explain to the CEO or the CFO how the social media experiment turned into another marketing expense that failed to generate any return.

Social Media and The Rise of Healthcare Consumerism

When it comes to healthcare, making social media part of an overall strategy can have significant benefits to reach a new kind of active and aware healthcare consumer.

Escalating health premiums — a barometric reading of increasing healthcare cost pressure — are no longer sustainable. Cost increases are created by factors that include: amortizing the expenses of treating those without insurance; lack of coordination of healthcare services that often leads to redundancies and inefficiencies; and inconsistent quality.

All of these factors are making us more active healthcare consumers. We are more active than our parents: we are 78% more likely to research information on physicians and 75% more likely to evaluate treatment options. Only 24% of us trust our doctor completely to make the right decisions for us in terms of where we should go to get our care. When choosing a hospital, only 5% of us feel that hospitals are doing an excellent job educating us on why their facility is better than others.

Healthcare consumerism is growing and requires consistent nourishment — that is where the profound opportunity lies for health organizations. The more options patients have to deepen their engagement, make informed decisions and manage expenses, the better. Hospitals regularly generate data that show patient satisfaction has direct bottom-line consequences. Health plans encourage members to use the system appropriately and manage their own health more actively to avoid the system as much as possible.

Hence, social media are vital, necessary components to integrate into all communications. They are strategic tools in the arsenal just like public relations, advertising, search, community outreach.

Healthcare consumers want — and are getting used to — freedom of choice. They are taking a more active role in making decisions about selecting who will provide their care and where they will receive it. Reform-minded providers understand that the patient experience, and patient satisfaction, can have profound consequences.

So go build something that educates and adds value, something that integrates with other programs and includes measurable online media in conjunction with traditional media. We know the majority of patients are online looking for health information and they’re discussing it.

Rather than avoiding social media, join the party. Get the brainstorms going. Think about new ideas. Start conversations in new ways with patients and doctors. Let them tell us what they want.

And then you will engage consumers on a more organic level. And they will see value. And participate.