Coolz0r Marketing Thoughts
Amazon Shows How to Protect Your Brand While Connecting to Facebook
As you probably know, Facebook and Amazon are allowing consumers to connect the two sites. What I find most interesting is the care Amazon is taking to inform consumers what this will mean to them and why they should do it. Given Facebook's repeated stumbles on issues of consumer privacy, the approach being taken by Amazon is one every marketer should note and consider. What's important about Amazon's approach is that they're not simply leaving the communication of important information to Facebook.
CNN, for example, lets Facebook do the talking. Below is Facebook's standard "Request for Permission" page, which is the message consumers receive when they click the button to connect CNN with their Facebook profile. What does it tell users? CNN can "access my basic information," but what will they do with it? Will they share or sell it further? Will it be made available to marketers or other users? Will my list of friends--one of the items mentioned in the list of basic information that will be shared--receive information from CNN as a result of my actions? And what information will CNN send to Facebook--every page I visit or only the ones I "like"?
Facebook, which arguably has done more than any other entity to create our more open and transparent world, isn't at all transparent when it comes to how our information will be used. This is one of the reasons Facebook has repeatedly run into privacy concerns--it's not that people don't wish to share, it's that they want to know and control what they're sharing.
Categories:- Brand marketing
- Facebook privacy policies
- Privacy
- Social Media Marketing
- Social computing
- Social media
- Trust
A New Analyst "On Display" at Forrester
I've spent the last 10 years, on and off, representing the buy side of the display marketing equation. For many years I held the post of Media Supervisor at digital marketing leader Razorfish, managing the display efforts for a Fortune 500 financial services brand. I co-founded, and successfully ramped, the "agency trading desk", ATOM Systems, for my agency. And I worked within Publicis Groupe's VivaKi Nerve Center as an educator and advocate for the in-house audience buying solution, Audience on Demand, as AOD's head of Brand Relations.
Never did I really get a chance to take a step back and contemplate the big picture - What are publishers struggling with in this rapidly changing ecosystem? How do the different point solutions (many of them technology based, these days) fit together… or not? What are the challenges that digital marketers are facing in their (often uphill) battle to grow digital's share of spend, and what are some solutions? Taking off my buy-side hat and taking a step back, as the newest member of Forrester's Interactive Marketing group, offers a welcome change in viewpoint!
My experience over the last few years, however, does give me a unique point of view - I've spent a lot of time thinking and talking about how the modes of acquiring, optimizing, reporting on and deriving insight from display media are going through a dramatic shift. This shift is a direct result of the rise of ad exchanges like Yahoo!'s RMX and Google's ADX, Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) like Invite Media and MediaMath, data marketplaces like BlueKai, and more. I strongly believe that we're at an inflection point in how a significant portion of Display media will be managed - and by whom - going forward, and I personally look forward to sharing my perspective on it with this community.
Location-Based Social Networks: The Conversation Continues
You know how an analyst can tell when she's hit on a hot topic? When it generates this much conversation.
We published a report about location-based social networks (LBSNs) earlier this week, and it's spurred quite a lot of dialogue. The opinions are varied -- and so much the better for it because it's lead to rigorous discussion about the users of these services and how marketers can get involved, rather than just focusing on the technologies and their (admittedly very real) cool factors.
Should Marketers Check In?
Should Marketers Check In To Location-Based Social Networks?
Location-based social networks (LBSNs) have been all over the media lately. Foursquare hit 2 million users. Twitter launched, revamped, and re-launched Places. CNNMoney partnered with Gowalla around its popular annual "100 Best Places to Live" list. There's even a social experiment -- PleaseRobMe -- that was started in response to the hype around this new social sharing technology. So it's no surprise that we've been getting a lot more questions from marketers lately about these services. Marketers want to know who's using these services, how often they're using them, what they're using them for, how marketers can get involved, and whether they should.
We dug into our research to try to answer these questions, and at a high level what we found is that just 1% of US online adults are using LBSNs weekly, while 4% of them have tried them at least once. The sample size of this 1% of adults who use LBSNs regularly is small, so our findings on their behaviors are directional only, but our research shows that these users are typically young, male, well-educated, and influential. In fact, LBSN users are 38% more likely than the average US online adult to say that friends and family ask their opinions before making a purchase decision.
Facebook Is Social Media Heroin, And That Puts It At Risk -- Or Does It?
We humans can have all sorts of addictions. Some researchers believe that addictions may be positive -- such as to jogging or meditation -- but of course many addictions are negative.
What about Facebook? There is no doubt that Facebook is addicting -- according to Nielsen, users spend as much time on Facebook as they do Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia and eBay combined. But is this a positive addiction or a negative one? Is Facebook jogging, or is it heroin?
The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) may give us a clue; the annual review of brand customer satisfaction put Facebook in the bottom five percent of private sector companies. The social network is "in the same range as the IRS tax e-filing system, airlines and cable companies." ForeSee Results, which worked on the ACSI survey, reported that privacy concerns, frequent changes to the Web site, and commercialization and advertising adversely affect the consumer experience. (And Facebook is about to get further PR problems in the form of a new David Fincher/Aaron Sorkin movie, "The Social Network," which has a plot that is said to "unabashedly attack" Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.)
Categories:The ROI Of Social Media Marketing: More Than Dollars And Cents
Brands are making plenty of money in social media: Dell Outlet's Twitter account has generated millions for Dell, the Intel Channel Voice community has decreased costs by eliminating the need for expensive in-person events and P&G used media mix modeling to demonstrate that the BeingGirl.com community is several times more effective at driving sales than the brands' television ads.
Many marketers can draw a straight line between investments in social media marketing and financial results, but many more cannot. This doesn't mean social media marketing is ineffective; it just means that marketers have to recognize benefits beyond dollars and cents. Facebook fans, retweets, site visits, video views, positive ratings and vibrant communities are not financial assets -- they aren't reflected on the balance sheet and can't be counted on an income statement -- but that doesn't mean they are valueless. Instead, these are leading indicators that the brand is doing something to create value that can lead to financial results in the future.
Categories:- Marketing Measurement
- Marketing ROI
- Measurement
- ROI
- Social Media Marketing
- Social computing
- Social media
Three Lessons About Marketing (Not Just Social Media) From Old Spice's Successful Social Media Program
Unless you're living under a rock, you know about P&G's success this week in turning its popular Old Spice Guy commercial into a true social media success story. There's a lot to be learned from this program about social media, but I think it says more about marketing than about social media. Leave it to a 71-year-old brand to show us how to do 21st century marketing!
Lesson One: Paid And Earned Integration: As my friend and Forrester peer Sean Corcoran says, "no media stands alone." Old Spice's social media success started with what some think of being an old and tired medium -- television. But TV isn't going anywhere and paid media is no less relevant in the social media era than it was in the mass media era. As the Old Spice program shows, the key to making paid media work -- really work -- is to focus on how to make it more social.
Lesson Two: Adaptive Marketing: Today's best marketing is adaptive marketing. To quote another friend and former Forrester peer, Lisa Bradner, "Today's brand marketing organizations are ill equipped to handle the world of 'always on' marketing in the digital age. To remain relevant, marketing leaders will embrace Adaptive Brand Marketing." The Old Spice social program wasn't an idea that was part of a one-year campaign planning process but instead was envisioned and executed in rapid fashion to respond to the success of the Old Spice character and commercials.
Microsoft Outlook Social Connector: Making Daily Activities Richer And More Social
Microsoft has announced the release of Microsoft Outlook Social Connector, which will bring friends' data from Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace into users' Outlook 2003, 2007 and 2010. Before anyone says "Buzz" and discounts the value of this offering from Microsoft, I think we need to consider this not from the angle of yet another social platform or social aggregation tool but as a means of making our daily activities richer and more social.
The Microsoft Outlook Social Connector won't change the social networking world, but it isn't designed to do so. The Outlook Social Connector won't replace any social networking behavior that we already have; you'll still check Facebook.com, use Facebook's mobile site and apps and make status updates via Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. Instead of competing with existing tools, Microsoft's new plug-in is another step toward a more social experience where social data is organically integrated into our daily habits and activities.
The word "organic" comes to mind a lot as I consider the Outlook Connector because, rather than learning of our friends' activities by making a special effort to do so (as in going to Facebook.com), this information will instead come to us. For example, we will read an email from a work peer and be able to see the things they're posting to LinkedIn and Facebook (provided their privacy settings permit). Instead of retrieving friends' information, it will be presented to us at the time and in the context when we will care to see it. Of course, we'll still have explicitly social behaviors -- we'll visit Facebook to retrieve friends' information, play social games, post pictures to Facebook and the like -- but Microsoft Outlook Social Connector gives us yet another way to be social that is organic and integrates into previously non-social activities.
Categories:How Mature Are Your Mobile Marketing Efforts?
We're gearing up to write a lot of research about mobile marketing (and mobile content and mobile commerce) in the next few months -- and we'd love your help in benchmarking the state of the industry. No matter how much or how little mobile your organization has used, we'd very much like you to spend a few minutes answering our mobile maturity survey. It'll only take you 10 or 15 minutes at the most, the results will be kept 100% anonymous, and in return for your time, we'll send you a free summary of the survey results. Please spend a few minutes helping us collect the best possible data on this topic!
UPDATE: My apologies, but since the survey doesn't seem to be working properly at the moment, I've taken down the link. Hopefully we'll get it back up and working again soon.
What Is The Value Of A Facebook Fan? Part 2
The other day I authored a blog post many found interesting, infuriating or both: What Is The Value Of A Facebook Fan? Zero! I appreciate the great dialogue from the folks who offered feedback in blog comments and on Twitter. Because this is such a hot topic and because the feedback was so thoughtful, this seemed worth further exploration.
In that blog post, I suggested that marketers approach the question of how much a Facebook fan is worth as if the answer is zero. I said, "It is what companies do with fans that creates value, not merely that a brand has fans." I went on to suggest that marketers should recognize a difference between potential value and real value. Like a coil that is compressed to store energy (an apt metaphor from my Twitter friend, Blair Goldberg), Facebook fans have little actual value until they are activated by the brand, just like releasing a compressed coil.
But a compressed coil still has energy, just like a Facebook fan has some value, no matter what my attention-grabbing blog headline said. (I was accused -- quite accurately -- of being sensationalist by Robin Moss and Brian Carter.) After all, if I were to take a brand marketing job in the future, would I want to work at a place with no Facebook friends or 500,000 friends? All things being equal, I'd take the latter job, which means those fans have value. But a marketing asset is different than a financial asset, and that's why I'm concerned with those who would answer the question "What is the value of a Facebook Fan?" with a dollar amount.
Categories:What Is The Value Of A Facebook Fan? Zero!
It is a question I hear several times a week: What is the value of a Facebook Fan? I've seen answers ranging from $136.38 to $3.60. I can't blame vendors, agencies and consultants for trying to answer the question -- the hunger from clients is so great that anyone promising a simple answer is likely to get attention. The problem is that there is no simple answer to such a complex question. In fact, it may be best if marketers approached this question as if the answer is zero -- unless and until the brand does something to create value with Facebook Fans.
There are numerous reasons the question of Facebook fan valuation is problematic:
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