What Really Brought it HOME for ME: Audience Centric v. Brand Centric

November 19th, 2013 • COMM464, EMarketing

Showcase your brand all you want when creating that $15000 Google Adwords campaign. Use the best descriptors and showcase all your brand or product’s many wonderful attributes when beautifying your high end website or your company blog. In other words, make sure that all your actions in this realm are brand centric because the reason why consumers come to your website is because they are looking for a solution to a problem and are there ready and willing to be marketed to.

But stop there! Because, once your enter the social realm, the audience is different. No longer are they looking for a problem, at least actively. They are there to build and be a part of a community whether it be by silently observing, by commenting on the content or by actively contributing content. But to reiterate, they aren’t there to be marketed to. This is what, according to this article, most marketers still fail to understand despite understanding all the technical terms of social media marketing.

On the brighter side, just because they aren’t there to be marketed to doesn’t mean that we cannot market our wares to them. Enter audience centric marketing – a relatively new form of marketing that focuses on a long term approach to marketing and is focused on engaging the audience. As Brian Solis, the principal of Altimeter Group and author of Engage! says, social media has democratised influence which means that now potentially anyone with an internet connection and a social media account can influence anyone’s buying decision and that no longer is it a top down simple consumer decision journey with just one way communication from the marketers to the consumer. With this democratisation effect, it is important that engagement is present to avoid missing major opportunities to shape our marketing messages.In order for social media to mutually benefit you and your customers, you must engage them in meaningful and advantageous conversations, empowering them as true participants in your marketing and service efforts.

Social media is quick, generally with easy to use interfaces, relatively inexpensive and is a great platform for conversations to humanise the brand. But investing in social media has its own challenges: measurement of ROI is one issue especially because you can’t tie results to any particular campaign and another issue is using any and all data available for measurement. Using the Garbage In, Garbage Out idea, using irrelevant data can prove to be costly in the long run.

Finally, commitment. Social media requires commitment. Unlike the banner ads or the one time email advertising, creating a social media account for a company carries an implicit promise that the company will generally respond to messages within a day and that it will ensure that the content on the site is relevant, reliable and timely. Then there’s the matter of fit. Does it make business sense for a particular product like say, Coca Cola to participate in social forums on the topic of healthy eating? No! Addressing these two issues will save a company a lot of pain and also ensure that they don’t fall in the trap of shiny object syndrome and over indulge in social media.

Learning about social media in the context of marketing has been an eye opening and refreshing experience and I will always remember these lessons learned!

Dissonance between Marketers’ Perception and Consumers’ Reality

November 19th, 2013 • COMM464, EMarketing

A very interesting study by x+1 and Research Now in late 2013 in the paper The Marketer’s Playbook: Aligning market strategies with consumer expectations was detailed in E Marketer recently. This paper was extremely useful in squashing some myths and reinstating some age old beliefs.

Unlike the bad reputation that banner ads get from marketers, customers actually rank banner ads as one of the top 3 most important factors when making a purchase decision, one of the later stages in the consumer decision journey. Also, while marketers may get carried away by the use of social media for marketing, they shouldn’t forget the benefits of the age old, seemingly staid email marketing which the highest proportion (16%) of the consumers believe that is the MOST VALUABLE marketing channel!

Also, while marketers may highly value mobile ads, mobile applications and SMS as valuable marketing channels, the percentage of consumers who believe the same is much, much less. For example, 35% of marketers believe that mobile apps are valuable but only 5% of consumers believe the same. However, this is not to say that marketers are wrong, it may just mean that consumers are probably unaware of what marketing influences them the most. They may also not want to admit for example that mobile apps are in fact effective. However, whatever the situation may be, this again highlights that big spends on emarketing should only be done after carefully analysing the situation and being aware of the possibility of being influenced by the shiny object syndrome.

#AskJPM – One question that JP Morgan would not want to answer anytime in the future!

November 19th, 2013 • Comments Off on #AskJPM – One question that JP Morgan would not want to answer anytime in the future! COMM464, EMarketing

Engaging with the public, a seemingly noble objective is apparently not for everybody and definitely not for JP Morgan. Last Wednesday, the US Bank attempted to host its first public free-wheeling Q&A session on Twitter where in the questions would be answered by Jimmy Lee, a veteran dealmaker. However, soon after the announcement, the bank was bombarded with thousands of negative public reaction, close to 25000 negative tweets, who vented using the hashtag #AskJPM. Related hashtags were #toobigtojail and #banksters. A sample is below:

This highlights the risks executives face when engaging with the public. Carried away by the shiny object syndrome, executives may be persuaded to use any relatively inexpensive means such as Twitter in an attempt to increase their brand value. However, keeping in mind the FIT that a social media channel has with the brand is essential. An article debates that when a much loved tangible food brand like McDonalds can face twitter backlash during such situations, people are much less likely to have fond associations with a services firm. In this case, a more covert means of communication like say, the public asking questions by email or posting questions through an application or by DM on Twitter and then the bank selectively choosing the questions to answer would have been more useful.

Learning from past mistakes is good but what makes a company great is learning from other’s mistakes. British Gas unfortunately chose to have a similar Q&A session on the same day as announcing a 9% price increase and the result? A hilarious but sad outcome of events:

This teaches us that while social media has many advantages and is a relatively inexpensive way to communicate with the public, it can have many pitfalls especially when the company is not in control of the channel. This also teaches us that while we may love to pay for and orchestrate positive brand messages and evangelists, social media ensures that evangelism is something that is necessarily earned, not paid for or orchestrated.

Business Intelligence and Marketing- The New Kid on the Block- DOMO

November 18th, 2013 • COMM464, EMarketing

While data is critical to any business function, it is the lifeline of marketing with 83% of the marketing professionals saying that it is critical to have real time marketing data. However despite this need, there is a disparity here in terms of an overwhelming 37% of marketers saying that they cannot access data in real time.

While accessing real time data is one issue, analyzing large mountains of data from multiple sources such as email marketing and social media and gaining insights is a whole other issue.

Enter DOMO

This Software – as – Service company provides real time access to business data and puts business intelligence in the cloud and displays it in a format that is easy to use and draw insights from. Having talked about the use of data and the importance of data management with the use of tools such as databases, DOMO seemed instantly appealing to me. According to various sources and websites, DOMO is able to draw data from various sites, aggregate it, analyse it and then finally display it in a easy to use format. Despite not yet being released full scale, it has already garnered a lot of attention for the capital that it has raised and the various uses its clients are using it for. One example is that of a Fortune 500 retailer seeing real time what colours of products are selling in real time and making changes to production and manufacturing in real time. Such applications can be seen in marketing as well as you can assess in real time, the ROI of different marketing spends and decide if we need to change any aspect of the campaign.

DOMO’s magic doesn’t end here! Not only does it help the marketing professionals achieve excellence by providing them with access to insights but it also is seen as an example of a great user of social media for its own growth. The CEO of the firm Josh James MANDATED his staff (yes, all 130 of them) to essentially complete 20 social media tasks such as tweeting, applying the new Timeline feature in Facebook etc within 8 weeks. The reward? They get to keep their jobs, earn small badges along the way and finally get a day off if everyone completed their goals. This experiment was a huge success and had a positive impact on their brand and in terms of numbers, their twitter followers count increased by 300%, Facebook increased by 28% and Pinterest by 91%. This is DOMO’s magic!

Twitter Gaffes…Beware of Autotweeting and Scheduled Tweets!

October 15th, 2013 • COMM464, EMarketing

How a company inadvertently ends up committing a social media gaffe when attempting to navigate through social media is always humorous and no so infrequent as people think it may be. With brands able to autotweet their messages, there have been many gaffes in the past. These are some popular gaffes that have been sourced from Buzzfeed.

Yesterday, Twitter announced on its blog that marketers can now schedule their tweets up to a year in advance if they use the company’s ad product! While this can help the company in planning its complex ad campaigns months in advance, as detailed above, there could be serious repercussions too.

Autotweets can turn out to be the bane of people’s lives too, not just those of brands. As a marketing and PR enthusiast, I love listening to Guy Kawasaki talk and recently, he was in the news for failing to shut off his regular stream of autotweets in the midst of the Boston Marathon tragedy. In fact, many people criticised him for trying to “hawk his wares” when the nation is dealing with a tragedy.

But this was the story of 1 prominent person. What if this was a company, large or small, who had an active twitter base? Any errors in this realm can not only quickly reduce the precious  follower count but also create a lot of negative press.

Also, scheduling many tweets, all advertorial in nature, can put off your audience who is looking to strike a conversation with you. They can unfollow you or worse, collapse your feed! Often ignored as a concept, collapsing a feed from a specific follower allows you to avoid seeing their posts unless you want to see them specifically. Also, autotweets could be seen as impersonal, unauthentic and unengaging- three words that could mean great harm to your brand!

Advertorials- The ads you like to read!

October 14th, 2013 • COMM464, EMarketing

Thinking about ads especially the banner ads in the mobile space often brings a sense of caution in me and I carefully make sure that I avoid clicking on the ads. I inadvertently do click them thanks to my “fat finger syndrome” but I soon after close the window and continue on with my browsing.

But what if there was an advertisement that I would seek out to read and would enjoy having it interspersed on the web page? What if this ad had the right tone and fit well with the content of the website. Such ads have been around for a long time and were called advertorials in the past. Now known as sponsored content or native advertising, this “signifies advertising that is meant to match the style readers are used to in the pages of their favourite publication or website”. Marketers partner with media companies to nestle their ad messages among that desirable content of the website.

But how does a website like Buzzfeed manage to use native advertising effectively but Gawker’s advertising is not appealing?

In my opinion, it comes back to following monitoring, listening and conversing procedures. Buzzfeed introduces ads only after carefully understanding what the audience converses about and what articles are popular with the audience.  Also, in order to ensure that the advertising is authentic and effective, it has a dedicated team to make sure the branded content has the right tone. Transparency is also important: the advertised content is highlighted and advertiser’s name is mentioned.

Buzzfeed’s advertising model is this: it aids in creating content that looks like Buzzfeed editorial content and runs these sponsored ads on Buzzfeed.com. Because, these ads as mentioned previously are original, unexpected and authentic Buzzfeed’s sell is that its audience will share content around social networks, giving advertisers the much coveted “earned media.”

The only issue with this is that there is little scope for automation in this process. Curating ads and choosing the right set is a painstaking process in authentic native advertising as evidenced by the dedicated team that Buzzfeed maintains. But the returns are high and the ads are much more credible and have a potential to go viral if native advertising is used effectively.

What we need to know NOW about Facebook’s Promotions Guidelines! (this is good news)

October 3rd, 2013 • COMM464, EMarketing

Promotions through Facebook are going to get a whole lot more popular! On Aug 27th, when I was relishing the last few days of a sunny summer, Facebook changed its promotional guidelines that now makes it easier and potentially a whole lot less expensive (!!) for companies to run promotions through their Facebook pages!

On Aug 27th, an age old rule that allowed companies to run promotions only through a third party app was scraped and instead, now companies can run contests on their pages! So, now posting a status and asking its audience to “like” or comment on the post for a chance to win is allowed. This, in my opinion, is huge! Not only can small business now stop relying on the expensive third party developers to run their Facebook promotions, but with incentivising users to like their posts to win, there is a potential that a status update can now become viral or gain a lot of traction. Also, by asking customers to post their entries for contests on the page itself, you are earning content that is curated by the customers and is generally positive.

You still cannot however ask a consumer to tag a picture of themselves with the product to win. So while there are still a few rules in place, the playing field has now become a lot fairer for small businesses who early could not legally run promotions due to a lack of resources to hire a third party developer. Also, it is simpler for companies to run ads as well directly on their page. And finally, this relates to my previous post about brand consistency and the ensuing credibility and trust – many third party ad developers have an interface that is different than that of the brand and this inconsistency can lead to dramatically less customer engagement.

So will this be the end of third party apps? Shortstack CEO Jim Belosic certainly doesn’t think so and says that the merit of the third party apps lie in their ability to not only collect data but also leverage it for use in continuing marketing promotions. But  at the end of the day, the biggest winner is Facebook itself which will undoubtedly see companies competitively create content on their news feeds to attract eyeballs and thereby greater consumer engagement.

One challenge though- Facebook  shows only 500 likes for a post at a time so if a small pizza parlour runs a contest and gets 20000 likes and needs to choose one winner from all the likes submitted, how will the shop do this equitably? Is there any potential for consumer dissatisfaction?

Sources:

http://bit.ly/15Kl0k9

http://on.fb.me/182byF1

Run Easy!

October 2nd, 2013 • COMM464, EMarketing

Do you recognize the above slogan? If not, try this: There are two people in everyone. Do you recognize that? No? Finally, what about this: Just Do It. Yes, you are right, the third slogan has been Nike’s tagline for the past 15 years! The first two slogans, belong to Nike’s chief competitor Reebok who has changed its slogans 14 times since 1987! Little wonder then that you couldn’t recognize this!

How does this translate to profits? According to this article Nike successfully increased this brand share from 18% to 43% in the 10 years ending in 1998. This is just one small example of how brand consistency whether it be in the form of slogans or website design can increase a brand’s awareness and market share.

Brand consistency wasn’t a challenge before in companies who had one store front and one radio advertisement per week. However, with today’s multi channel marketing tools available at one’s disposal, it is easy to be inconsistent in messaging or interface when juggling these various tools. The picture below is a classic example of how the vast differences between an email picture and the website can rob the business of its credibility and potential sales. The traditional funnel mentions that prior to purchase, it is important that people can credibly evaluate their options and inconsistencies in the brand can only harm the brand.

The article however cautions that consistent messaging doesn’t mean identical messaging because then you are not exploiting the social media tool’s ability to give flavour to the brand. Instead standards should be put in place to ensure that key messaging is stressed in the same way in all the channels.

Storytelling and Social Media

October 1st, 2013 • COMM464, EMarketing

Personal, Authentic, Simple, Engaging and Inclusive- these are the five characteristics of a good brand story. While this formula may be easy to learn, it is difficult to put this into practice in today’s times. We today have a multitude of marketing means be it mass means of social media such as Facebook and Twitter or niche marketing means such as Foursquare. Hence the first challenge that companies face is to decide which means to use. Here, the Conversation Prism presented by Solis is useful. So, for example if a company wants to attract a large audience and wants to tell a story through the use of video, then looking at the prism, the company can choose to use YouTube.

Choosing a medium is the first step of brand story telling. The second step is to actually tell the story convincingly and consistently. Talking about convincing story telling, it is important to realize that engaging the consumers is the first step as described by Solis in his book Engage. For this, monitoring and understanding the audience either by means of the altimeter or social ladder is important.

To tell the story convincingly, it is important that everyone who has the responsibility of say, using the company’s twitter account to tweet out messages, has the same tone, voice and message. Conflicting messages because different people are tweeting leads to inconsistency and less value for the story as per this article. 

This article talks about how good story telling can reap each dividends in the future: telling a good story through social media can easily be amplified by happy customers thereby increasing the amount of the much coveted earned media.

Story telling is key to marketing both offline and online and combining story telling with cost effective marketing means such as social media can only mean success for the brand in the long run case in point being Dunkin Donuts where people voluntarily shared pictures of the product after an initial attempt by the company.

The Man with the Wings!

September 16th, 2013 • COMM464, EMarketing

Think Red Bull and undoubtedly the first thing that comes to my mind is the experience of having instant caffeine rush  in the midst of yet another all nighter before an accounting exam.

But the thought/ image that comes a close second is a pair of wings and Felix Baumgartner. Red Bull is a much adored brand in the beverage world and a marketer’s favourite in the ad world. In this blog post, I am going to focus on specifically the spectacular success that the Red Bull Brand has had with its tie up with the skydiver Baumgartner  for his 2012 sky diving record.

Some numbers first: the live webcast of the jump has 52 million views (the most of any live webcast in history), there were 280 digital partners and 80 TV stations in 50 countries showed this feat! While the actual cost of the whole endeavour is not disclosed, a report in this article mentions that just the balloon that took Baumgartner to his ascent cost $70000! However, Red Bull has a lot of prior experience in the realm of extreme sports such as Red Bull Racing and hence, it is possible that the total cost may not be too outlandish.

So was this cost all worth it? In other words, what was the ROI of this marketing endeavour, especially in the online social media space? Erica Buckley in “The Business Return from Social Media” talks about measuring the success  by first realising where the start point is and then checking what the magnitude of the change is.  In this case, let’s measure success by the increase in revenue that Red Bull earned. The success of this elaborate marketing strategy is beyond imaginable: After the Red Bull Stratos (which was what this endeavour was called), tough-to-penetrate markets such as Japan and India opened up. Sales in the US too went up by 7% to 1.6 billion in the 6 months after Red Bull Stratos. Moreover, markets as varied as South Africa,Japan and Germany saw double digit sales and this testifies to the global reach that this brand now enjoys.

It is important to note here that all this success earned was not just due to paid media and owned media (such as the company’s social media pages and website) but also due to the abundance of earned media that it enjoyed be it in terms of the newspaper and TV coverage and free word of mouth publicity. It is also curious to note that the event, whenever mentioned, was always mentioned in full and not just as “Stratos” and this advantaged Red bull greatly.

I believe this fantastic success is a result of Red Bull’s marketing team headed by Arun Hozack (Red Bull VP North America) following the strategies essential to social media implementation according to Buckley. First, as per this article, the team focused on defining the objectives and then they placed metrics on top of these objectives. An early player in the social media space, Red Bull has always treated social media not as a siloed marketing tool but as an integral part of its strategy and hence, it enjoys this success today while others struggle to find their way in the vast expanse of social media.