Experience: The Blog

Two Reasons Why Content Is Not King

2013-05-01T11:53:00.000-04:00

"Content is king." This is something I hear every week in conversations, at conferences and on blogs, but does the fact it is so often repeated make it true? Content is vital, no question about it, so perhaps it does not matter whether we coronate it as king, queen, prince or duke, but I question if giving the throne to content might not cause marketers to lose focus of more important needs and strategies in the social era.

There are two reasons why I believe content is not king but something less.

Customer Experience Trumps Content

At a conference last week, I heard someone declare that "Content creates relationships." Is this really true? Do you love your spouse because he or she produces great content? Your friends may be funny, insightful or informative, but are they your friends because of what they say or because of who they are?

Brand relationships are no different. Think of the brands you hold most dear--are you brand loyal because they produce great content? Of course, you may love Disney or FOX News, but in those cases content IS their business, but what about other brands you cannot live without? Do you love Google, Amazon, Zappos, Apple, Walgreens, Lowe's, Subway, Ford and Target because these brands produce engaging content?

Content is not king. It is important, but it is not king. The king is customer experience. Give customers what they want when they want it, support them in new and innovative ways, make their lives better, and do this all at a reasonable value, and your brand wins. If you get the customer experience right, consumers will spread the word for you. Think of how you first learned about Amazon, Google, the iPhone, Instagram, Square, Facebook, Twitter and Zappos--was it from brand content or was it from friends and family?

If you look at the brands that top YouGov's BrandIndex list, you will find some that produce good content, but many are not known for their content. What they all share is an obsession with furnishing the customer something different. Sure, you can read Subway's site to get tips on eating better, but what came first for Subway was not content but good, healthier, convenient, fresh fast food. Amazon produces almost no content, but it holds a special place in people's hearts and wallets by providing the most efficient and innovative retail experience around. Lowe's may offer some helpful DIY content, but is beloved for its competent employees, great online experience that enables shoppers to get info about past purchases and schedule reminders, and innovative Iris smart home kits.

The lesson from strong and popular brands is that content is not king. Content cannot save your brand if it offers lousy customer service, a disappointing product and a terrible digital experience. In the social era, great content cannot overcome poor experience--your blog posts, infographics, tweets and Pinterest pins cannot win over customers who see poor ratings, hear friends gripe and observe brands focusing more effort on getting the word out than in changing the actual brand experience.

The Supply and Demand of Attention

One of the things that I think brands lose sight of in the rush to become social media publishers is that the laws of supply and demand apply as much to consumers' attention as to consumers' wallets. Fifteen years ago, brands spoke infrequently through infrequent channels--marketers may have produced a campaign every quarter, sent a direct marketing piece once a month and tried to get their information into traditional media via PR, but brand content was limited and sporadic at best. Today, brands' content machines rival newspapers'--every brand is attempting to be interesting, educational, funny and endearing through a constant, daily stream of content across dozens of channels.

The supply of content is exploding in the social era, but what about the demand for it? Consumers may be multitasking more, but they still have just two ears, two eyes and so many hours in the day to consume media. Brands are broadcasting more information than ever before, but customers' brains have not changed--there is only so much interest and ability to focus on, ingest, parse, evaluate and remember information (and let's not forget that the new tsunami of brand content is also competing for attention against larger amounts of entertainment and news content on Twitter, YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, Funny or Die, LiveLeak and the like.)

What happens when the supply of something explodes while the demand stay steady? The price drops. Content distributed via blogs, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter may be free to consumers, but the price is dropping nonetheless--in this case, people pay for content with their attention, recall and trust, and the bottom is falling out in this market:

Consumers punish brands when content is perceived as advertising: Late last year, MediaBrix released the results of a study that found that advertising appearing as content (so called "native advertising") negatively impacted or had no impact on brand perception. For example, 85% of people who had seen sponsored video ads that appear to be content said the content negatively impacted or had no impact on their perception of the brand being advertised. The 2012 Digital Advertising Attitudes Report found that 20% of US consumers would stop using a company’s products or services entirely as a result of receiving too many advertising messages, while 28% would be less likely to respond positively to that company in the future.
Consumers do not trust content from brands: Forrester finds that consumers have little trust in the things brand say. Just 18% trust emails from brands and 15% trust social network posts from brands. The most trusted brand channel was web sites, where 32% of consumers trust content, but consumers have considerably greater trust for consumer-written online reviews (46%), professionally-written reviews (55%) and recommendations from family and friends (70%). (These results, of course, track closely with Nielsen's findings on trust in corporate messaging.)
Consumers suffering information overload turn attention away from brands: Do you sign in to Facebook to see what brands are saying or what friends and family have to say? It's no different for your customers, and the result is that brand engagement is meager. According to the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, just 1.4% of the fans and friends of fans of the top 200 brand pages on Facebook are actually engaging with those pages. A recent Forrester study found that over the previous three months, less than half of people on social networks have interacted with a brand through social media; moreover, just 7% say they've followed a brand on Twitter and 7% say they've posted feedback on a company's social networking profile.

Conclusion

Content is vital. I am not suggesting content is not a worthy marketing investment, but when I read that marketers are investing more in content creation and management than in search engine marketing, web site usability and design, mobile and the commerce experience, I question if the priorities are right and we are allocating budgets where they are most needed. Content strategies are easy to grasp and "in the wheelhouse" for marketers, but we must first ensure our organizations are prepared for the era when customer sentiment trumps advertising, press releases, blog posts and other forms of branded content.

Brands have their own version of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, and content does not rest at the top of the pyramid. Getting your product and service right, having the right digital and mobile tools customers need and want, and being responsive to customer needs in all channels are more important than content. The best content in the world may help to gain a little attention, but it will not sustain a brand that does not get the fundamentals right.

Four Recent Studies on the Rapid Adoption of Social Media by Financial Advisors and Investors

2013-04-24T07:15:00.002-04:00

In the Financial Services vertical, you can still find some who think that social media is not that important--that wealthy investors and licensed financial professionals are too busy and too serious to pay attention to (much less create) tweets and posts. The time has come to look at the data and discard groundless and dangerous beliefs about social media. Here are four recent studies that demonstrate social media has a key place in FinServ strategies:

Forrester Finds a Strong Correlation Between Social Communications and Financial Advisor Payments

In his July 2012 report, "Collaborative Advice: Using Digital Touchpoints To Enhance Advisor-Client Relationships," Forrester Vice President Bill Doyle shared data about affluent investors' digital interactions with advisors. The study demonstrated a strong correlation between the number of times these investors interact with financial advisors in social networks and the investors' payments for advisors' services. The correlation between advisor payments and the number of social media interactions (0.461) was almost twice as strong as the correlation with the number of interactions in person (0.234) or by phone (0.246).

It is important to point out that correlation is not causation. Doyle's data does not suggest that social media interactions are twice as powerful as in-person or phone interactions but that frequent interactions between affluent investors and advisors in social media are associated with greater revenue for advisors. While an advisor can interact with just one client at a time on the phone or in person, social media provides a way for advisors to reach and interact with many clients simultaneously. This study demonstrates the power of social media scale and social network relationships to financial professionals.

Accenture Finds Social Media Helps Financial Advisors Retain Clients and Increase Assets Under Management

Last Fall, Accenture surveyed 400 U.S. Financial Advisors and published "Closing the Gap: How Tech-Savvy Advisors Can Regain Investor Trust." The research found that digital and social tools "offer Financial Advisors unprecedented opportunities for more frequent interactions with their clients, helping them forge deeper, stronger relationships."

Among the Financial Advisors surveyed:

60% have daily contact with clients through social media
77% affirm that social media helps with client retention
74% agree that social media helps them increase assets under management
73% say it has led to an overall increase in client interactions
40% indicate they have gotten new clients through Facebook
25% have developed new clients through LinkedIn
21% have earned new clients through Twitter

Brunswick Group Finds Social Media Drives Investment Recommendations and Research

In its 2012 survey of 476 investment professionals (including both buy-side investors and sell-side analysts), Brunswick Group found considerable adoption of social media compared to its earlier 2010 survey. More importantly, the study found that investors are using social media to drive investment recommendations and research.

Among the findings:

52% read business information postings on blogs (up from 47% in 2010) and 24% have made an investment decision or recommendation after initially sourcing information from blogs.
30% read business information postings on micro-blog services (up from 11% in 2010); 12% of investors have made an investment decision or recommendation after sourcing information from micro-blog services (an increase of 200% since 2010).
24% read business information postings on social networks (up from 17% in 2010), and 9% have made an investment decision or recommendation after initially sourcing info from a social network.
Investment professionals are increasingly posting and not just consuming information in social channels. In 2012, 11% said they post investment information to blogs (more than doubling since 2009), 8% post investment info to microblogs (up 50% since 2010) and 10% post investment information to social networks (doubling since 2010).
Overall, 56% of investment professionals say the role of digital and social media in the investment decision process is increasing compared to 6% who felt it was decreasing.

2012 Brunswick Investor Use of Digital and Social Media Survey from Brunswick Group

Cogent Research Finds Many Wealthy Investors Use Social Media for Finance and Investing

In a survey of 4,000 US investors with more than $100,000 in investable assets, Cogent Research found that a growing number of affluent investors use social media specifically to help inform their personal finance and investment decisions. Among the findings:

About 34% of affluent investors specifically use social media such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and company blogs for personal finance and actual investing
Another 41% said they use social media and sometimes come across investment information even though that wasn't the specific reason they went to those sites
About 36% said social-media research has caused them to reach out to their advisers to ask questions
Seven out of ten wealthy investors who use social media for investment research (which is 24% of all investors) have either have changed their relationship with an investment provider or reallocated actual investments because of something they read on social media
Even for high net worth individuals with more than $1 million in investable assets, 25% seek investment advice from social media.

While many firms are proceeding slowly and cautiously into social media, it seems many of our licensed financial professionals and our wealthy customers are adopting social media with more haste. In fact, the Accenture report notes that so many financial advisors are using social media that many are "likely flouting their firms’ current policies against this type of activity."

Forget keeping up with the competition. Financial Service firms ought to worry more about keeping up with their own sales networks, employees and customers.

Three Steps to Improve Ethics in Social Media Marketing

2013-04-23T08:40:00.001-04:00

In my last blog post, "The Rapidly Diminishing Authenticity of Social Media Marketing," I explored how social media professionals have turned to tactics that undermine some of the core tenets promised by social media. We set larger fan counts as a goal above authentic advocacy, and when meaningful engagement became difficult to achieve, we settled for anything that would earn a like, reply or retweet rather than striving for content that fostered relationships and created value.

I will not rehash how I think these poor priorities and tactics undermined brand success in social media. (You can read my last blog post for that.) Instead, I want to explore a more sensitive question: Have social media marketers acted ethically or not?

For example, if we accept that a basic principle of social media is that "likes" represented something important--authentic brand affinity that others would see and rely upon--then what are we to think of those marketers and brands that took shortcuts to accumulate new fans who had no established relationship with the brand? Was it ethical to launch sweepstakes, contests and giveaways that motivated "likes" from people who otherwise were not inclined to express affinity for our brands?

And if we further agree that engagement such as replies, retweets and shares ought to be authentic signals of interest in what brands have to say, then are we acting ethically when we solicit engagement merely to elevate our brands' EdgeRank? Is asking Facebook users to "like" a post if they are on "team peanut butter" an ethical way to collect signals of affinity between consumer and brand, or is this a dishonest way to get our content into more users' news feeds?

Social Media Ethics on Display (or Not) During Week of Boston Marathon Tragedy

Instead of considering this in the abstract, let's examine two brands' actions last week, during the frightening events in Boston. NBC Bay Area posted a photo of a young bombing victim and implored people to "'Like' this to wish him a continued speedy recovery." This desperate attempt to trade on people's feelings for a young victim of the bombing in order to receive a bit of EdgeRank-building engagement is horrifyingly unethical, in my book. (And if you do not agree, then please tell me how "liking" an NBC post lends support to or otherwise helps this poor hospitalized child.)

Ford, a brand I praised for authenticity in my last blog post, waded into dubious water with a Facebook status update following the capture of the second bombing suspect. The brand said, "To the first responders of Boston: Thank you. You are true American heroes." Nothing wrong with that--in fact, I love that a brand like Ford feels it can express sincere appreciation for the sacrifices of those who serve. The problem was that Ford didn't post that as text but included it within a beauty shot of their products, complete with the Ford logo and tagline.

Not everyone will agree, but I feel that Ford's use of brand imagery not only reduced the sincerity of the message but demonstrated questionable ethics. Before you disagree, I would ask you to view the two status updates below--one Ford could have posted and the other it actually did--and consider three questions:

Which is a more authentic expression of appreciation to people who sacrificed their safety to protect us?
What does the product and brand imagery of the post on the right add (if anything) to the sincerity of the gratitude compared to the simple text version?
Which version more clearly puts the focus on the heroes in Boston?

The version on the left imagines what Ford could have posted as text while the one on the right is what Ford actually posted following the capture of the second bombing suspect in Watertown, MA.

Issues of ethics are difficult to discuss. They often are not clear cut, and while it is easy to see when a company crosses the line with both feet (as did NBC Bay Area), it can tough to discern as brands toe the gray line (as did Ford, in my opinion).

It is even tougher to see when you yourself cross ethical lines. If your boss wants to know why your brand has half a million customers but only 25,000 fans on Facebook, a sweepstakes to accumulate fans may not seem unethical. Your perspective may change, however, if you put yourself on the other side of this equation; if you do not want to see your friends becoming shills for brands in return for freebies and giveaways, then your brand should not follow this path. It is unethical to treat your own customers in a way you would not appreciate from the brands you buy or the people you know. (Fifty years ago, David Ogilvy, the father of modern advertising, expressed the same sentiment when he said, "Never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your family to read. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine.")

We are roughly five years into the social media era, and I think perhaps it is time to reset our moral compasses, not to save our souls but to improve business results. Study after study demonstrate that consumers want something more from brands than silly images and memes; they want ethical behaviors and communications. The 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer Study found that customers increasingly expect brands to "place customers ahead of profits and have ethical business practices," and Interbrand's 2012 brand study noted that "Consumers... want to feel that the brands they love are, in fact, worthy of that love."

I'd like to believe this is always the case in every business situation, but when it comes to social media marketing, the ethical path also happens to be the best one for enhancing brands and business results. How can we improve both the ethics of social media marketing and our brands? Here are three steps:

STEP ONE: Understand Long-Standing Marketing Ethics, Advertising Rules and Regulation

"Those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it".
- Winston Churchill

I am frequently disappointed to find social media professionals who do not understand the basics of ethics and regulation in the advertising industry. Marketing has a long and well established history of recognizing and enforcing ethical practices, and government regulation of advertising is over one hundred years old. The issues we struggle with today in social media marketing are not new, nor are the core beliefs of ethical marketing. The latter can inform the former for those who care to learn history.

In 1911, the Associated Advertising Clubs issued the Ten Commandments of ethical advertising, and the first Commandment was unequivocal: "Thou shalt have no other gods in advertising but truth." (The italics are theirs, not mine.) Shortly thereafter, the Postal Act of 1912 required that advertising content be differentiated from editorial content. Together, these two actions established one of the most basic tenets of advertising ethics: That consumers must know when they are seeing advertising and not mistake it for editorial content. This is as true in the pages of newspapers as in the tweets and posts of your customers.

Although the core principles of ethical advertising have not changed in one hundred years, the regulatory language has evolved with technology. In 2009, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising." This document established that "When there exists a connection between the endorser and the seller of the advertised product that might materially affect the weight or credibility of the endorsement, such connection must be fully disclosed." In other words, if it would impact a person's perception of a friend's post about a brand to know that the individual was posting in exchange for a contest entry or a giveaway, that creates a material connection that must be disclosed.

Just last month, the FTC updated disclosure guidelines, providing quite detailed guidance. For example, the FTC notes that "#spon" is not a sufficient disclosure of a sponsored tweet since, "Consumers might not understand that '#spon' means that the message was sponsored by an advertiser." And to those who might protest that Twitter's 140-character limit does not provide sufficient room for a clear and conspicuous disclosure, the FTC says, "Tough luck." (Really, what the agency says is, "If a particular platform does not provide an opportunity to make clear and conspicuous disclosures, then that platform should not be used to disseminate advertisements that require disclosures.")

An understanding of the history of advertising ethics and FTC regulations is only the start. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has issued several decisions pertaining to social media that brands' must consider for their social media guidelines, monitoring policies and employment practices. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has oversight into how and when social media may be used to share information pertinent to investors. Different states have enacted laws with varied requirements for consumer and employee privacy in social media. And then there are the terms and conditions of the social networks themselves, which define what is and is not permissible. (It is shocking how often pages violate Facebook's Promotions rules as defined in the Facebook Pages Terms.)

In the relatively brief period since social media's birth, brands have been tripped up by a variety of unethical and unlawful behavior including meddling with competitors Wikipedia entries, fake community groups, fake endorsements, fake blogs, fake accounts, and other questionable activities. It is vital social media professionals know the laws, rules and ethical standards that have stood the test of time, and it is necessary for marketing leaders to ensure their social media teams are adequately trained and supervised.

STEP TWO: Improve Social Media Metrics

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”
- Albert Einstein

Bad metrics lead to bad strategies. More than that, bad metrics can lead to unethical behaviors.

The Great Recession of 2009 was caused by many factors, but President Obama laid blame on the way executives were measured and compensated. He noted in a June 2009 speech that a "culture of irresponsibility" was an important cause of the crisis, and he criticized executive compensation that "rewarded recklessness rather than responsibility."

In some ways, many social media professionals are today being rewarded for recklessness rather than responsibility. Fans and engagement are not business metrics, but these are common line items on many social media scorecards and are used by social media agencies and vendors to validate performance. Any brand can count new fans, but how many are measuring the value delivered to the brand via social media? Instead of turning to the metrics that are easiest to collect, social media marketers must determine the metrics that best validate that their social media investments deliver upon the objectives (and if one of your goals is merely to collect fans, then the problem is not the metric but the goal).

This is the point in the blog post when I am supposed to furnish an easy answer for how to measure social media success; unfortunately, I cannot. The ways to measure success are as diverse as brands, audiences and corporate objectives. If you want to better educate your customers on your products, measure that. If you need to raise awareness, measure that. If increasing inbound traffic to your site is desired, measure it. If your brand is challenged to improve a particular perception attribute, then that is what you should measure. Start with your corporate goals and challenges; pick the metrics that align to those; determine the social media strategies that best deliver on those metrics; and execute!

As our investments in social media increase, so must the science and insightfulness of our metrics. Too many brands are merely counting things--fans, retweets, comments and likes--while ignoring the deeper and more meaningful measures of brand awareness, recall, consideration, association, preference and advocacy. Smart social media professionals do not settle for ineffective metrics but work to educate peers and leaders on the social media metrics that matter for their brands.

STEP THREE: Be Honest

"Of all feats of skill, the most difficult is that of being honest."
- Comtesse Diane

Honesty sounds easy, but complete honesty can be surprisingly tricky. Honesty is not merely the absence of falsehoods; telling no lies in your social networks is only the starting point. Thorough honesty requires something more--more self-reflection, more care and more vigilance. It requires integrity and sometimes even courage.

Honesty requires a tenacious commitment to complete transparency. If you encourage people to tweet a photo of your product in return for a chance to win a prize, complete transparency demands those tweets be accompanied with a disclosure. It is one thing for consumers to choose to tweet their brand love with no expectation of reward (even if the brand solicits those recommendations), but if your brand creates the conditions where someone is motivated to promote your brand in order to win something, you must ensure transparency. It is deceptive to look the other way and allow consumers to be exposed to sponsored advertising communications without disclosure.

Honesty necessitates assertive vigilance to ensure that your employees, vendors and agencies are doing the right thing. It is not sufficient to assume your employees and partners know how to act with integrity, nor is satisfactory to set expectations and assume adherence. Honesty requires a commitment to education and engagement around ethics, and it demands that your brand supervises and monitors activities to ensure policies and regulations are followed.

Honesty demands sincerity in the intent of your communications. In paid media, brands communicate to persuade and sell, but in social media consumers expect something different from brands--it is a medium where consumers can choose to follow, comment and share, or they can choose to unfollow, block and ignore. Engagement should be earned with content that actually engages, not with tricks. For example, if you care to take a poll on Facebook, use Facebook's "Ask question" tool to do so; do not mislead your customers with fake surveys that request they "like" if they believe one thing or "share" if they believe another. Your intent with this sort of deceptive status update is not to engage consumers or learn from their answers but to manipulate Facebook's EdgeRank system. Honest relationships cannot be built with dishonest communications.

Honesty requires that you enter conversations to authentically join the conversation, not to co-opt the conversation. A new trend in social media is so-called "real-time marketing" (or RTM), where brands attempt to engage in the conversations consumers are having about sports, entertainment or world events as they occur. While it is possible for brands to post just the right thing at just the right time in a way that consumers will welcome, much of the recent RTM has been brazenly self interested and thus unsuccessful. The problem is that brands have dishonestly attempted to inject advertising messaging into consumer conversations rather than trying to authentically express themselves or add value to those conversations. If your brand can bring value to the conversation, do so honestly, but if you just want to interrupt consumers' conversations with brand advertising, then stay silent honestly (or honestly pay for media).

Honesty demands that you walk the talk. Consumers are so jaded about the way brands try to obfuscate their actions behind dishonest communications that an entire new lexicon has developed, including terms like greenwashing, astroturfing, sugging and flogs. Social media allows brands to chart a different course, not simply talking about how much they care but highlighting their care through real actions. At a time when some brands will hold their charitable donations hostage in return for likes, shares and replies, New Balance donated $1 million to the One Boston fund and did so without asking for a single "like." The actions of the Chicago Tribune went viral this week after the news organization sent pizzas to the Boston Globe newsroom along with a note that said news colleagues "across the country stand in awe of your tenacious coverage. You made us all proud to be journalists." The honest actions of New Balance and The Trib speak louder than any words could, and they are resonating honestly throughout social media. (How does Ford's branded expression of gratitude fare in comparison?)

Social media may feel quite mature, given that virtually every brand and the vast majority of people in the US have adopted social behaviors, but the medium is still very young. Social media professionals may understand today's best practices, but these continue to evolve as brands gain experience, laws and regulations change and the medium matures. In periods of rapid evolution, it can be difficult to discern the ethical from the unethical, but it starts with you. Ethical social media starts with ethical social media professionals--ones who consider the impact of their strategies, constantly challenge their own beliefs and are willing to stand up for what is right and not merely what is easy.

The idea that ethics comes from within rather than externally is not new. For support, I turn to a philosopher who died 2400 years ago and an animated insect. Aristotle believed self-knowledge was the key to individual ethics, and he wrote, “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” Jiminy Cricket, Pinocchio's sidekick, echoed Aristotle's advice, reinforcing that ethics starts from self-knowledge: "Always let your conscience be your guide."

Before you click "submit" to your next social media post, do not simply ask if it will achieve its goal, fits best practices and suits the brand. Ask yourself if it is honest, transparent and ethical. That is a much higher standard, but higher standards are what consumers want and what brands increasingly wish to deliver, aren't they?

The Rapidly Diminishing Authenticity of Social Media Marketing

2013-04-15T11:56:00.003-04:00

Join me in a journey back to a simpler time; a time of innocence, hope and more than a little naivety. I'm talking, of course, about 2008. Facebook has 100 million users, a mere 200,000 people access Twitter each week, no brands are doing anything more than experimenting with the nascent social medium and virtually no one is employed full time in the field of social media marketing.

Those of us who are predicting the future are writing about the power of this medium to create greater authenticity, to build trust and to surface genuine advocacy. Success will not be won, we emphatically declare, by the brand with the largest advertising budget but the brand that earns authentic relationships and activates authentic Word of Mouth based on trust, transparency and a commitment to do right by the customer. Brands that collect authentic fans and engage in authentic conversations will thrive while those that cheat to accumulate worthless fans and trivial conversations will suffer when consumers learn of the brands' inauthentic exploitation of the social medium.

Authentic, authentic, authentic--social media may hold many surprises as it matures, but by God, we know the future will be authentic!

Since then, social media has matured--we got that much correct--with consumers adopting social media in droves, making it a big business. Forrester reports that marketers will spend close to $3 billion this year on social media marketing, and with that kind of money comes a great deal of immediate corporate expectations. Authentically create fans? To hell with that, we want lots of "fans" and want them now. Who cares if they actually are fans (the kind that do not need to be bracketed within quotation marks)?

In the war for fans, authenticity was the first casualty, and the weapons deployed were sweepstakes, giveaways, contests and social game freebies. Einstein Bagels gave every new Facebook fan a free bagel, and it garnered a 7,000% increase in Facebook fans in just three days; perhaps a few of these folks were already fans--in the true sense of the word--but the vast majority had no affinity for the brand and were simply bought with a $1.10 bagel. Gerber deployed a baby photo contest in which those who wanted to vote for a friend's or relative's baby were required to become fans of the brand, regardless of whether they ever purchased a product from or had any relationship with Gerber. And Farmers Insurance gave away a freebie to Farmville players and set "the Guinness World Record for most 'likes' in a 24-hour period." (Does anyone else feel a bit queasy realizing there is a Guinness World Record for collecting "fans" that have absolutely no relationship with the brand? I wonder if Bernie Madoff gets his name included in the Guinness book for tricking the largest number of people with a Ponzi scheme.)

Weren't Facebook "fans" supposed to be authentic fans? According to the social media gurus, people who fanned a brand would be signalling their authentic affinity for it, and this genuine expression of brand love would ripple through trusted relationships in social networks, multiplying awareness and purchase intent from one consumer to the next to the next. This is not what happened for most brands, because most brands did not start with the most important thing: Fans with authentic affinity

No one benefited from the fact marketers used inauthentic means to amass meaningless fans. Although people could have gotten true value out of knowing which brands their friends love, today none of us can tell if our friends' likes were motivated by true brand advocacy or a Mafia Wars freebie. Marketers lost, as well. Thanks to EdgeRank, Facebook's algorithm to keep users' news feeds as interesting and sticky as possible, brands that accumulated disinterested fans failed to break through to most users' news feeds, and thus few "fans" ever see, much less engage with, brand status updates. The result is easy to see throughout Facebook--fan pages with huge fan counts but small ratios of them "talking about" the brands. Inauthentic fans cannot drive authentic engagement.

In desperate need of engagement to break through to fans' news feeds, many brands are opting to game Facebook's EdgeRank rather than build meaningful dialog--more inauthentic tactics piled upon inauthentic tactics. Why take the long, hard, authentic route of engaging people in a conversation about your product, service, brand or mission (or the things your customers really care about) when you can gather likes, replies and shares by posting pictures of puppy dogs or "Keep Calm" posters?

It is difficult, for example, to get people talking about insurance, risk and financial security, so Progressive's Flo rarely even tries; instead, she shares things like a picture of an ear of corn on a unicycle. (Oh, that Flo--it's a unicorn!) Other brands beg people to "like" if they believe one thing or "share" if they believe another. In my opinion, the nadir of inauthentic and desperate engagement tactics came when Blackberry challenged fans to "write out 'BlackBerry' one letter at a time in the comments box, without interruptions," resulting in almost 19,000 one-letter replies with "B," "L," "A," "C"... well, you get the idea.

Brands were supposed to build trusted networks with valuable content, and instead they have turned into carnival midway barkers, simultaneously shouting at passing customers hoping to catch the attention of one or two gullible enough to be hustled. Like us! Share this! Comment!

Thanks to the Condescending Corporate Fan Page for these examples.

How does any of this pass for authentic engagement that reflects authentic brand relationships? The better question is how can this sort of vapid, pandering "engagement" build brands? Are you encouraged to check out a brand, research its products or consider a purchase because one of your friends announced he or she is on "team Peanut Butter" by liking a post by GE Appliances? "OMG, my friend is on team Peanut Butter--I should buy a GE refrigerator," said no one ever.

Social media was supposed to strip away the meaningless clutter of the mass media era, exposing true brand affinity and advocacy; instead, social media marketing strategies have encouraged brands to post any meaningless thing in pursuit of a comment, like or share. The irony is that none of this actually helps brands--just as inauthentic fans cannot create authentic engagement, neither can inauthentic engagement build authentic brand value. Asking people to spell your brand name one letter a time or share your picture of a vegetable on a unicorn doesn't spark awareness, consideration, preference or usage.

For example, Einstein's freebie giveaway garnered hundreds of thousands of bought fans, but it did not prevent the company from stumbling. Today the brand has three quarters of a million fans and just 500 people "talking about" them. Moreover, six months after the Facebook stunt, Einstein reported disappointing revenue with same-store sales down more than a percent, and two years later, the company had the lowest earnings growth in its industry. So many "fans," so few fans.

For another example, Blackberry can get tens of thousands of people to type the letter "B" in a reply, but it cannot successfully launch the phone it desperately needs to succeed. In the United States, the new Z10 phone "started poorly and weakened significantly" after that. Look at its Facebook page, and Blackberry looks like a winner with 26 million fans; look at its stock performance, and you will see a company that has lost almost 90% of its market cap since the advent of the social era.

It turns out that, much like in every other marketing channel, it is possible to buy impressions but you cannot buy success in social media. Authenticity is not dead, you just have to look a little harder to find it in social media nowadays. You can find authenticity:

On Ford's Facebook page: Every post on brand. Every engagement focused on customers and enthusiasts. Not a single attempt to trick people in liking a post if they love tires or share a post if they think rear view mirrors are the bomb. Ford is a brand that conveys passion, focus, respect for customers and confidence in social media, and as a result, social media is credited with helping to build the brand and successfully launch products.
On Home Depot's Facebook page--and on its community, its blog, or the many online forums in which it participates: Home Depot has earned praise and enhanced its business by putting its greatest asset--its experienced employees--to work answering consumer questions in the social networks where consumers are. The company does not dictate either the dialog or where consumers should interact with Home Depot but deploys resources and responds to consumer questions in the channels where customers are active.
On the Duck Tape Facebook page: While the brand's 14,000 people "talking about" is disappointing given its fan count (of five million), you still have to hand it to a brand of adhesive tape for getting 14,000 people talking. I frequently hear from people who feel their brands have little interesting to say, and Duck Tape shows how creativity and crowdsourced ideas can help even a boring brand earn authentic engagement.
On the USAA Facebook page: My former employer continues to demonstrate how to mix highly-engaging content with serious information to educate consumers and build brand loyalty. The brand is not beyond posting a photo of smiling child wearing fatigues to celebrate the Month of the Military Child (and earning 10,000 likes for doing so), but other posts in the days before and after help fans learn how to switch accounts to USAA, furnish education on financial planning for a PCS (Permanent Change of Station in military speak) and address questions on flood insurance.

It may be the exception and not the rule, but there are brands behaving authentically in social media. They collect the right fans, spark worthwhile dialog and--most importantly--authentically build business value in social media. They are not the brands that get a million fans in 24 hours, nor are they the ones pandering for likes and shares.

The brands that succeed in social media do not take short cuts; they put their nose to the grindstone, focus on their customers and build their social footprints slowly but steadily. Authenticity cannot be bought, nor is it earned with a click of the "like" button. Authentic relationships and authentic conversations matter, and those are still earned the old-fashioned way--with care, shared values and hard work.

Buy This Book: "Can't Buy Me Like," Marketing and Purpose in the Social Era

2013-03-18T08:45:00.000-04:00

"Can't Buy Me Like" is a new, very worthwhile book from Bob Garfield, well known ad critic and co-host of NPR's On The Media, and Doug Levy, founder and CEO of creative and strategic agency MEplusYOU. This is the book every CEO should read, every marketer should ponder and every social media professional will want to distribute. It is not another exploration of social media but of the way the consumer and brand world is changing, what this means to brands and how "marketers can and must define their brands not by the ads, press releases, slogans, coupons, sponsorships and even product offerings but by their core purpose." (Disclosure: I had the opportunity to review the book prior to publishing and share feedback--mostly praise--with the authors.)

This is the sort of book that can help open eyes, alter thinking and spark change. It thoroughly makes the case that the necessary evolution is not merely one of tactics or even strategy, but something even deeper and more fundamental. Garfield and Levy are bold enough to state from the start that their "immodest goal is to be not merely financially, but something approaching spiritually, transformative." But make no mistake, this is not some fluffy sermon on the importance of caring and tweets; the book's brilliance is in how it ties the need for core mission and new ways of marketing to financial outcomes.

The book begins with a damning study of why the practices that succeeded in the Consumer Era are wilting as we enter the Relationship Era. Levy and Garfield probe "the limits of advertising," which does not sustain brands but works only for as long as marketers feed the ad budget beast. As it does time and again, "Can't Buy Me Like" supports its claims with actual case studies and examples; for example, Colorado tourism catapulted from 14th place to first among states as a summer resort destination thanks to a new $12 million ad budget, but it plummeted to 17th place in one year when that ad spend was eliminated.

Garfield and Levy are not anti-advertising, but they suggest there is a more sustainable way to collect and keep customers in the Relationship Era. The book introduces the Brand Sustainability Map, which graphs brands on two axes--Transactions and Trust. Sure, your brand can get high transactions with low trust, but these "reluctant relationships" are expensive to maintain and remain constantly at risk. Better to fall within the "emotional relationship" or "sustainable relationship" quadrants (depending upon your transaction volume), which can sustain and expand relationships thanks to high levels of trust. Put another way, "Indifference is expensive. Hostility is unaffordable. Trust is priceless."

Social media comes up time and again in this book, but "Can't Buy Me Like" is not a social media manual; instead, it makes the case that social is part of the change occurring around us and not a new tactic to be deployed. "There is no magic in Twitter or any other social-media platform," assert Garfield and Levy, "but there is a sort of magic in properly cultivating trust relationships." Once again, the book makes the case with a brand case study: Kimberly-Clark's Kotex shifted from advertising that perpetuated the stigma of menstruation to adopting a mission that confronts the taboo head on. UbyKotex.com announced, "This is more than a Web site. This is a social movement aimed at changing the conversation," and it garnered four million interactions, received three million sample requests and contributed to an increase in market share from 4% to 7.8%.

"Can't Buy Me Like" is packed with more studies and case studies than any other book I can remember. The examples and research support key points made throughout the book:

Need evidence that brand building creates value? BrandPower research on "familiarity" and "favorability" across 800 companies demonstrates that brand equity accounts for 5 to 7% of total equity value for the average company and as much as 21% for the strong brands, such as Apple.
Have difficulty believing that corporate purpose matters? The thirty companies identified in Sisodia, Wolfe and Sheth's 2007 book Firms of Endearment as being driven by purpose saw stock increases of 1646% from 1996 to 2011 compared to the S&P average increase of 157%.
Think "real time marketing" means having your social team ready to post during the Super Bowl or Oscars? P&G's Secret brand learned of Olympic medalist Diana Nyad's plan to swim the 103 miles between Havana and Miami. A perfect sponsorship opportunity? Yes, but by the time the brand learned of it, the event was just seven days away. In one day, its agency was on the ground at her California home filming three promotional videos; days later, the Secret Clinical Line was an official sponsor. (As it turns out, complications forced a series of delays in Nyad's swim, but with Secret's support, she went on to attempt the feat three times. She won the respect of millions and sales of Secret's Clinical Strength Waterproof doubled.)
Do you thumb your nose at the small scale of social media compared to the reach of your ad budget? Secret's "Mean Stinks" program launched on Facebook and encouraged teens to apologize for and discuss bullying. The activity created 339,000 text and video engagements yielding 1.3 million placements in users’ newsfeeds. Sound small compared to NCIS's 20 million viewers? Then you do not understand the power of engagement versus passive views of an advertisement. Reports the brand manager at P&G, "In the fiscal year that Mean Stinks launched, total brand dollar share was up 8%. Our Clinical family of SKUs, which were the products associated with Mean Stinks, grew 20% in volume versus the previous year. On our Facebook page, we saw fan engagement increase 24x with the launch of Mean Stinks, and about half of those fans engage with the page on a regular basis."

"Can't Buy Me Like" offers a rich vein of these sorts of brand stories and research insights, but it also strives to provide brands with a roadmap to embrace the Relationship Era. The book shares a seven-point plan to help brands move from listening to engaging to leading to measuring. It also shares Do's, Don'ts and "No, really, don'ts." And it conveys the real-life challenges of brands that have lost consumers' trust.

I can highly recommend "Can't Buy Me Like." Reading it inspired in me the same sorts of feelings I experienced in my 20s when "In Search of Excellence" aroused a shift in my worldview and career. I think this book can benefit everyone from young professionals (who recognize the world is changing but cannot often connect that to the business outcomes their bosses demand) to senior leaders (who have tired of some of the social media hyperbole but also recognize something profound is changing in the consumer-brand relationship). This is a book you will want to read, quote, share, recommend and buy for others.

Visit the "Can't Buy Me Like" web site for more information and to download a free excerpt from the book.

Regulators to Financial Service: Stop Fearing and Start Embracing Social Media!

2013-03-18T08:19:00.000-04:00

Financial service firms are a conservative lot, filled with risk, compliance and legal professionals who are ever vigilant detecting, preventing and mitigating risk. Generally, that is a good thing, since no one wins when your bank, insurance company or investment firm takes unnecessary risks.

Actual photo of FinServ executive
considering social media regulation.

But at times, in periods when technology, consumer behavior and customer expectations are rapidly evolving and regulation seems less certain, this natural conservatism can get in the way of good decisions. When this happens, opportunities to enhance and protect the interests of both the business and customers can be lost.

Now is one of those periods, but change is imminent. Even Federal regulators, in their own subtle and maddeningly vague manner, are telling FinServ firms it is time to stop fearing and start embracing social media. Two recent publications from the FFIEC and SEC demonstrate regulators are looking for financial institutions to be more assertive in realizing social media benefits and independently managing social media risk.

Waiting for perfect guidance from regulators is never the road to success, since perfect guidance is never furnished; consultants and law firms make rich livings in the gap between regulatory guidance and certainty. Moreover, as financial institutions wait for better guidance from regulators, it can leave the industry in general and certain companies in particular lagging far behind more innovative competition, not to mention the level of service and responsiveness consumers have come to expect. With a careful reading of the two new reports from Federal regulators, it seems they, too, are concerned that an overly cautious approach is harming the industry.

Social Media Risks: Present but Manageable

Social media poses new risks for FinServ firms, and there are good reasons for firms to proceed with caution; however, there are no good reasons for the level of anxiety and sluggishness seen at many firms. Many Financial service companies can proceed with a great deal more alacrity for several reasons:

Substantial guidance has already been furnished by regulators, including FINRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Authority), SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) and the FFIEC (Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council). At the state level there is a patchwork of regulators across 50 states, but thus far organizations such as the NAIC (National Association of Insurance Commissioners) and state regulators have taken a very similar tact to Federal regulators; the association's December 2011 social media white paper for state regulators was not terribly different than the guidance coming at the Federal level. While there are gray areas (such as whether a LinkedIn recommendation is really a forbidden testimonial), many actions by firms and licensed professionals are clearly within the safe zone, provided reasonable precautions are taken. For more information, check out the excellent guide to FINRA regulations in social media from Actiance.
No firm or person has yet been been cited by a regulator for actions in social media, unless those same actions would have been cited in any other medium. Regulators' enforcement has been sane, reasonable and understandable. Do not do anything in social media that you should not do in email, print, in person or on the web, and you will find it difficult to run afoul of the regulators.
For years, tools such as Hearsay, Socialware and Actiance have been available to help firms mitigate and manage social media risk. These platforms are not complete solutions--firms still need to take additional actions such as educating financial professionals, monitoring social media for violations and archiving to the requirements set by Rule 17a-4--but existing social media management platforms help mitigate much of the risk.
The risks to firms from actions of registered representatives (RRs) can be limited with reasonable precautions. An excellent post on the Hearsay Social blog cites an instance when the Department of Justice declined to take action against a firm because it had adequate measures in place that were circumvented by an RR in the course of violating the rules. That case did not involve a social media issue, but Hearsay states, "as long as firms have a clear and concise social media policy with a governance structure that identifies roles and responsibilities and incorporates controls for the use and monitoring of social media, an employee training program, and appropriate oversight and monitoring of social media use, they should not have liability for an individual RR’s violation."

In 2013, there are new signs regulators are not just open to but are actively encouraging financial institutions to adopt a more assertive stance in social media with respect to both exploiting benefits and managing risks. In two recent publications, the FFIEC and SEC tell the industry it cannot ignore social media and must apply good judgment to its social media interactions and processes. Of course, neither government body says that in such clear language, but you do not need to dig too deeply to see that financial regulators do not want to overburden FinServ companies (or themselves) with needless and detrimental social media regulation.

Social Business Referenced in FFIEC Proposed Social Media Guidelines

In January, the FFIEC issued proposed guidelines on social media. The FFIEC is an interagency body that encompasses the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (FRB), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Also of note is that the FFIEC, upon finalizing this guidance, will urge state regulators to adopt the same rules.

It is not difficult to sense that the FFIEC sees social media changing not just marketing and communications but financial products and services. The document addresses and references the advanced use of social media and social business by FinServ firms several times:

"Financial institutions may use social media in a variety of ways, including marketing, providing incentives, facilitating applications for new accounts, inviting feedback from the public, and engaging with existing and potential customers, for example, by receiving and responding to complaints, or providing loan pricing." Note the inclusion of forward-thinking social strategies, such as providing incentives and facilitating applications within social media; this gives a hint at how the FFIEC views social impacting business, not just being used for service and communications.
Some firms may choose to "use(s) social media to engage in lending, deposit services, or payment activities" and "Social media may be used to market products and originate new accounts."
Social media can be used to "to facilitate a consumer’s use of payment systems" and "under existing law, no additional disclosure requirements apply simply because social media is involved."
Not only are financial firms not discouraged from prospecting in social media, the FFIEC provides reasonable guidance for doing so, stating that "a financial institution that relies heavily on social media to attract and acquire new customers should have a more detailed program than one using social media only to a very limited extent."
Generally, regulators concern themselves with risks and regulation rather than promoting the advantages of new technologies, but the FFIEC makes a point of addressing that social media "has the potential to improve market efficiency" and can "help users and providers find each other and match products and services to users’ needs."

At a time when many FinServ firms are afraid even to mention products in social networks, federal agencies are suggesting financial institutions might use social media for applications, lending, deposits, payments and matching products to customer needs. This should be a huge wake up call to FinServ executives.

The document observes there are risks in social media, but it takes pain to pin those risks not to actions in social media but the potential failure of firms to monitor and manage those actions. The FFIEC expects people to make mistakes and, at times, use poor judgment, but the responsibility falls to firms to protect themselves and their registered representatives: "Increased risk can arise from a variety of directions, including poor due diligence, oversight, or control on the part of the financial institution."

The FFIEC also tells FinServ firms that there is no way for them to avoid addressing social media, regardless of what they opt to do in the channel. "A financial institution that has chosen not to use social media should still be prepared to address the potential for negative comments or complaints that may arise within the many social media platforms... and provide guidance for employee use of social media." The report also notes that inaction on the part of some firms is increasing risks because institutions' "policies and procedures governing certain products or activities may not have kept pace with changes in the marketplace."

When a group of federal agencies begins to outline new business opportunities furnished by digital and social technologies and suggests companies are accepting risk by failing to keep up with the changes in our world, you do not need to read between the lines to get the message. The FFIEC is not suggesting recklessness, but it is clear they do not want firms failing to exploit new opportunities out of fear of regulation.

Greater FinServ Independence and Judgement Advised in SEC Social Media Guidance Update

In a new "Guidance Update" published by the SEC last Friday, the agency cries "Uncle" with the flood of social media content that firms are filing with FINRA. It cites "an abundance of caution" that is causing "many mutual funds and other investment companies (to) file materials on their social media sites with FINRA unnecessarily." (That's regulator-speak for "Stop being a bunch of wusses!")

The report is an acknowledgment that the SEC must furnish more specific guidance, but it also is evident the SEC believes firms must begin to apply better judgment in social media and be more assertive in managing risks rather than deferring them to regulators. The SEC's Update gives a level of specificity far beyond anything furnished by other regulators to date, even going so far as to provide actual tweets and posts that "would not trigger a filing requirement." The guidance suggests that the following social media posts are safe and do need to be filed with the agency:

An incidental mention of an investment company or family of funds that is not related to a discussion of the investment merits. What is notable is that you can market your financial products in social media, provided you do not mention the investment merits. For example, the SEC suggests this is an acceptable tweet that need not be filed: “Consumer Reports has written an article in which it mentions our Brand X Rewards Card. Are you a card member?"
The incidental use of the word “performance” in connection with a discussion of an investment company or family of funds, without specific mention of a fund’s return. The word "performance" is not forbidden in social media, provided you do not promote a fund's return. For example, "Click on this link (website url) where we provide full details of our yearly performance since inception.”
A statement unrelated to a discussion of the investment merits of a fund that includes a hyperlink to general financial and investment information or commentaries on economic, political or market conditions. The SEC notes you can tweet things like "Here’s a Q&A with our Portfolio Manager, John Doe, regarding his views on the economy for 2013. (website url)" or "Gold and silver have provided a relatively low correlation to stocks and bonds over the last few years. (website url)."
A response to an inquiry by a social media user that provides factual information not related to a discussion of the investment merits of the fund. Firms need not fear direct and detailed responses in their social media replies, provided they do not discuss investment performance. For example, if a consumer asks, "What was the NAV for ABC fund on Friday?," the SEC says firms may reply "$xx.xx." Another example furnished by the SEC notes that you can address the reasons investments are included within a fund; for instance, if a consumer posts "Why are your funds such a large investor in ABC Manufacturer’s stock?" it is acceptable to respond, "As you know, ABC Manufacturer is found in many broad-market indices that our index funds are obligated to track so some of our index funds hold those shares as a result."

Did you detect the recurring theme in that guidance? "Not related to a discussion of the investment merits or return" is repeated in one form or another time and again. The SEC is clear in telling financial service firms they can talk about their products, provide links to their products and share general market commentary without needing to file this content with FINRA--just don't tweet returns and investment merits. Firms have been proceeding too cautiously and over-filing, which means the are not using social media to the extent the SEC believes is possible and good for the industry.

How Financial Service Firms Can Sensibly Embrace Social Media

There are many practical steps FinServ organizations should follow to exploit social business benefits. Entire books can be produced on this topic, and since this blog post is already too lengthy, I will not attempt to address the governance, training, monitoring, policies, procedures and tools that are necessary to manage risks in social media. Instead, allow me to suggest three high-level barriers leaders and social media professional may address today:

New York Life CEO has been vocal on social media
advantages: "We're getting tremendous benefits." (Source)

Visible and assertive support from senior leadership: Senior leaders must set social business expectations for their firms and remove barriers. This begins with a recognition that social media is becoming a vital business medium and not just a place where the firm can make some fluffy tweets and posts. Socially mature organizations such as American Express are already driving business change via social, and as noted, the FFIEC has broached the subject of using social media for applications, lending, deposits and payments. A sea change is happening, akin to what is already occurring with mobile (where banks find they are saddled with unsustainable branch networks now that consumers can accomplish what they need on their smartphones). This is no longer a marketing issue, it is a business one, and if your senior leaders are not on board, social media professionals at financial organizations must raise the stakes for their bosses.
Recognize business and reputation risks equally with legal and compliance risks: Too often, the attorneys and compliance specialists dominate the dialog of social media risks, but as we have seen, regulators also see risks with inaction and "an abundance of caution." In an industry starving for greater trust, stronger relationships and higher advocacy, it should be obvious that those who manage reputation and brand risks must have an equal voice with those who manage legal and compliance risks. In addition, FinServ firms should be reminded that what they do or not do in social media is a business decision, not a compliance one. Business leaders must listen to all concerns, challenge employees to develop and execute risk mitigation plans, and make decisions that are right for the firm, its stakeholders and it customers.
Set a social business vision to overcome ROI mania: In 2000, ecommerce was just a single percent of total US retail; some companies saw this and felt no need to act while others recognized how ebusiness would soon impact the bottom line. It is 2000 all over again, and some companies are making the mistake of seeing social as something insignificant while others are rapidly embracing new social business models. ROI may be difficult (although not impossible) to come by in the short run, but firms will find it easier to justify investments in social business strategies if they look to how social will change financial services in the future rather than just how social can increase the bottom line today. In 2000, Borders cared only for whether ecommerce could move its bottom line immediately while Amazon saw and invested in the change. Which company does your firm choose to emulate, today?

Plug In and See the Beauty

2013-03-04T09:12:00.001-05:00

This past weekend was a "National Day of Unplugging." Did you unplug? I hope not. While the intent of the organizers is admirable--to remind people to slow down and focus on what matters--the plan left much to be desired, in my opinion.

Technology is all around us--it is not something apart from us but an extension of us--and if it is separating you from the things and people that matter, that is not the fault of technology but yourself. We should not need to unplug ourselves to reclaim our humanity; instead, we should strive to celebrate our humanity through our technology.

There was a time when communities had to be formed around places on the Earth where water was available. Every day, people would visit the well, river or lake to collect water for their families, and this act brought us closer--we shared stories, conveyed news and created a strong community. Then along came running water and indoor plumbing and something was lost, but more was gained. Progress marches onward.

As we change technology, technology changes us; this has been the case since we first crafted tools, harnessed fire, adopted language, controlled electricity, transmitted radio waves and connected our homes to the Internet. And with each change, some people shook their fists and claimed we were losing ourselves. They were right, and they were wrong, but they did not stop the march of change around us or to us.

Today's technology is wondrous. We can get a more accurate and timely picture of what is happening in our world, within our families and with our friends than ever before. We can control what we see and do in ways past generations could only dream about (or read about in far-fetched science fiction novels). It is up to us whether we use that incredible power to embrace our humanity or merely live a world of our own choosing. Either way, the challenge isn't to be more human on a single day we deprive ourselves of our technology; it is to be more human every single day in the presence of our miraculous and evolving technology.

Below are some photos posted by strangers of sunrise this morning. This is just an hour or so worth of images, shared from Canada to Mexico and from New York to Chicago. Plug in and see the beauty. It's there if you look for it.

View the story "Sunrise 3/4/13" on StorifySunrise 3/4/13Just an hour's worth of sunrises posted to Twitter on Monday, March 4. These stretch from Thunder Bay, Canada to Cancun, Mexico and include New York, Florida, Michigan, Illinois and elsewhere. Enjoy!Storified by Augie Ray· Mon, Mar 04 2013 05:36:41Sunrise over New York. Looks like a beautiful day ahead. (See what you're missing, @tamcdonald ?) http://pic.twitter.com/pN39Shv5zYAugie RayDirty window sunrise. JFK upper deck. 7:15 boat. #runninglate #commutinglife http://pic.twitter.com/xIv917ZGVVStacy DillonA winter morn sunrise at Big Meadows in Shenandoah National Park of Virginia. #Shenandoah http://pic.twitter.com/HNlNFiEmVtLarry W. BrownUp to watch the sunrise with @carolyn_rene and @pmorawa5 #malaga #screwdrivers #springbreak http://pic.twitter.com/69N6WOQEY1Olivia Schwartz#sunrise #gymtime #MondayTweet http://pic.twitter.com/L8JbV9kjqWB.Monday has arrived. Good Morning #Detroit! #backchannel #sunrise http://pic.twitter.com/BTd97nkZLVJoe Lopez@Ginger_Zee nice color in this mornings Sunrise #Chicago #Sunrise http://pic.twitter.com/tZPzouTX4SDavid KahnSunrise over the Motor City http://pic.twitter.com/9HczhdsEvmLisa BarryThought it would be a nuisance if I posted another sunrise picture via Instagram, so I'll have to settle for twitter. http://pic.twitter.com/bSnygW4dW5Kyleen Likas Good morning! Starting off with a beautiful sunrise here in Indy! http://pic.twitter.com/s0RkKYipgIAshley Mennelthe calm before the storm #sunrise #wisconsin http://pic.twitter.com/0B5TLKUFO3Country Sweetie Beautiful sunrise this morning over Lake Michigan.#sunrise #Chicago #happymonday http://pic.twitter.com/kDXXFJVhs5James Kampasmdonichu: Working early has its perks. #beautiful #tbay #sleepinggiant #sunrise http://pic.twitter.com/Q6TDwOeY3r http://bit.ly/Z1nPHFHello Thunder Bay!6 inches and freezin! But a great sunrise! #staugustine #sunrise, #surfreport http://pic.twitter.com/stNHiKQBh3The Surf StationGood morning from Fort Myers! Yeah, we're those college kids, up for the sunrise!! #breathtaking http://pic.twitter.com/5YF6HXgW3rRachel LengacherWatching sunrise in Cancun. This is my first trip off IOE. 18 hr layover here then fly UA1118 to SFO Dep 1657L http://pic.twitter.com/wG4aNbfPQWEric James BoylanSunrise http://pic.twitter.com/fuMfjmwzzulittlepleasuresSunrise this morning http://pic.twitter.com/5zuAKSAsMmReagan ColeCentral Park. 6 am sunrise. Glorious http://pic.twitter.com/iWOuyN5bNRMary WittenbergBeautiful sunrise! Its a life, not a job http://pic.twitter.com/TJGHingNUrcharles kruegerGorgeous photo! RT @bellegrovebarns: Who knew I could get up so early? Suffolk sunrise through the teasels.... http://pic.twitter.com/d0xB42QFE9Roadtrippers

Happy marchFIRST: What I Learned From My Dot-Bomb Experience

2013-03-01T12:40:00.000-05:00

Happy marchFIRST, everyone!

If that looks off, then you do not remember marchFIRST, a dot-com era firm that burned brightly and disappeared quickly. If you do recall marchFIRST, the name probably conjures up memories of hubris and failure. Those remembrances are not incorrect, but it is regrettable that marchFIRST's legacy is not more expansive. It was, after all, one of the first organizations to understand and act on how the Internet was going to change everything. By bringing together systems integration firms, digital agencies and brand consultancies, marchFIRST was designed to help clients adapt everything for the digital era.

I was an employee of that firm--one of around 13,000 globally at marchFIRST's peak--and I learned a lot from my experience. Some of it was positive--to this day, I still use the Brand Experience Journey that I helped develop in collaboration with many other bright people in the brand practice--but most of what I learned came from frustration, fear and even shame. I recall:

I kept an empty box on my desk, because at any time, my name could have been among those let go in the increasingly frequent RIFs (a new word to me, which stood for Reduction in Force.) I was among the many people working very hard to bring value to clients, but there is nothing one guy shoveling coal in the engine room can do to prevent the Titanic from sinking once it strikes the iceberg.
I was assigned to a huge team that charged a great deal of money to the nicest clients in world to deliver an un-executable strategy--hundreds of thousands of dollars for binders full of paper. I did my best to elevate my corner of that project, but the years have not dulled the regret I feel for being a small cog in a big machine more dedicated to keeping employees billable than delivering value to that client.
During the interview process at USWeb/CKS (one of the firms merged to form marchFIRST), I was exposed to a strategy process deck, and I was blown away. Even though I was an experienced digital strategist, I saw charts, tables and diagrams that I could not even comprehend, and I was excited to join the team and elevate my game. I was hired and immediately began to dig, eager to learn the new process, but I was having a curiously difficult time getting details. Months later, I came to realize those charts, tables and diagrams were meaningless--mere props, designed to entice prospects and gullible candidates like me.
In the waning days, with the office filled with empty Aeron chairs and the specter of bankruptcy and unemployment looming large, I was brought into a team desperately working to complete a significant deal that might keep the wolves at bay (or make our office more desirable for acquisition). My role was small--I was the guy who knew PowerPoint best--but I quickly realized the team was selling a solution that had no basis in research, customer need or reality. It was clear we should be pitching not an entire solution but a strategy engagement to validate the right course, and I voiced this. The room grew silent, I was pulled aside, and I was reminded both of my role on the team and the need to complete the sale at all costs. Those costs included my pride and principles.

I could tell more stories, but suffice to say it was an unpleasant time. It took me some years to look back, overlook the emotions and realize I had learned many positive and important lessons from that experience. They include:

Desperation, fear and pride can drive even the best among us to become the sorts of people they do not wish to see in the mirror. One can have principles and be ethical, but when unemployment is high and a family's source of income is on the line, even good people can do dubious things.
There is no overcoming poor leadership. I worked with the finest group of professionals I had every seen up to that point, but all the brains, passion and hard work in the world cannot overcome leaders who do not lead in the right direction.
Making money is not the goal of a company--making happy clients and customers is the goal, and profits are an outcome. Once an organization puts profits ahead of clients and customers, it is (sooner or later) doomed.
Make hay when the sun shines, but remember that winter is coming. marchFIRST made buckets of money at first, and leaders acted as if the gravy train was endless. Then the dot-com bubble burst, and there was no way to support the Class A office space, the outlandishly expensive Herman Miller cubicles, the enormous salaries and bonuses and the network television advertising (see below). Excessive margins are fun when you are lucky and skillful enough to earn them, but they are not sustainable. I don't think even a conservative course would have allowed marchFIRST to survive the bubble burst, but I do know a lot of people would have been better off and saved a great deal of pain had leadership been more humble and sensible.
I can always be a better person. Most of us go through life pretty sure we are good people. I certainly did--until I realized how quickly I would violate my principles out of fear for my job and career. Should I have simply quit rather than compromise my beliefs? I was diligently seeking another opportunity, but with the dot-com world crashing, jobs were scarce. That's not an excuse--I am ultimately responsible for my actions--but after the dust settled, I committed myself to (and constantly struggle to live up to) being aware of the impact I have on those around me, avoiding victim mentality and never allowing fear or laziness stop me from doing what is right. I also want to acknowledge a book that, in many ways, helped me to appreciate my difficult marchFIRST experience and channel it into something positive. The book is Leadership and Self-Deception, and I have recommended it to hundreds of people in the past decade (and now I am recommending it to you).

Years later, I had the chance to lead an agency team, and the lessons of marchFIRST weighed heavily. The agency team grew, had happy and loyal customers, did spectacular work and became the tightest and most cohesive group of professionals of which I have been a part. I was lucky to have such a great team, but I would like to think the lessons of marchFIRST also helped me to be the kind of leader I aspire to be.

For a long time, all I could see about my mortifying marchFIRST experience was the lemons, but I have come to realize I have made a lot of lemonade in the twelve years since. And maybe that is the most important lesson of all.

Happy marchFIRST!

#OscarsRTM: Real-Time Marketing or Real-Time Misfire?

2013-02-27T08:36:00.004-05:00

You're at a party visiting with friends when out of the corner of your eye you spot a stranger eavesdropping. A friend mentions she watched the Oscars, and the stranger pounces. "I work for Oscar Mayer. What a coincidence!" After an uneasy moment, another friend mentions he just saw "Les Miserables," when suddenly another stranger interrupts, "I thought Les Mis would win--could you please tell everyone at the party?"

This uncomfortable and preposterous social situation is a pretty fair analogy for what passed as "Real-Time Marketing" (or RTM) on Oscars night. Oscar Mayer posted a humorous tweet about how it was trending (Oscars/Oscar--get it?), while Special K tried to achieve virality by asking people to retweet its prediction that Les Mis would win an award. Oscar Mayer received more than 700 retweets--a more than respectable number--but Special K's image received just six retweets, half from people who appear to have a relationship with the brand (and only one of whom disclosed it).

Oscar Mayer and Special K were hardly alone. I won't attempt to provide an exhaustive list of the largely ineffective social media RTM that occurred Sunday evening, but you can see more at Jay Baer's "Convince and Convert" blog, where he does a fine job furnishing examples and commentary.

The evening of the Oscars, David Armano launched a hashtag, #OscarsRTM, to discuss the night's real-time marketing. He was dismayed when the hashtag conversation became "a constant stream of snark, dismissal, critique and a never ending barrage of 'not impressed.'" David particularly objected when someone in the #OscarsRTM stream unkindly edited a photo of the U.S. Cellular "2013 Oscars Newsroom." David rose to U.S. Cellular's defense, noting "they are TRYING to provide relevant content vs. just doing straightforward advertising."

I have tremendous respect for David--he has been a thought leader leading the charge for social media for longer than most social media professionals even knew what Twitter was--but this time I think David is wrong. What U.S. Cellular did on Oscars night was not "provide relevant content;" they tweeted ads. Each tweet contained an image attempting to tie the brand to one of the Oscar-nominated films.

The problem with the social media RTM that occurred on Oscars night is the "M" in RTM. The intent of these brands was clear to everyone--not to add to the conversation or enhance others' enjoyment of the Oscars but to create value for themselves. Almost none of the brands attempted to engage others in a dialog--they instead broadcast a stream of brand messaging. Many brands tweeted their social advertising using the same #Oscars hashtag that consumers adopted for their conversations, which demonstrates how much RTM on Oscars night was less about social engagement and more about old-fashioned one-way interruption advertising.

When brands like Oreo and Tide demonstrated wit and agility with funny posts during the Super Bowl blackout, social media RTM seemed poised for growth. Just three weeks later, the pre-planned, unfunny, heavy-handed, brand-centric posts of Oscars night managed to make RTM look not like a fresh, new strategy but old, tired marketing-as-usual.

Not every brand fell into the trap of talking about themselves. Victoria's Secret participated in social media as people would, commenting about the Bond girls, complimenting Jennifer Hudson's performance and raving about Anne Hathaway's dress. Mercedes-Benz's Smart USA Twitter profile made creative use of Vine to honor the Oscar winners while inventively pimping their products. My personal favorite tweet of the evening was Chobani's, which made fun of the fact they could not get legal approval for their Oscar tweets.

He wrapped himself in a nation's fate. Like a custom smart wrap...but for the soul. Our Best Actor #Oscars t... vine.co/v/bgghz0M5IhU
— Official smart USA(@smartcarusa) February 25, 2013

When big events occur and millions of people turn to social media to share and talk, it is understandable that brands want to be a part of that, but they have to bring something to the conversation other than their own wants and needs. If brands want to build attention and awareness using social media during international events, they should consider the following:

Don't broadcast; spark and engage in conversation. Respect that you are part of the consumers' social channels and consumers' dialog.
Be creative. Photoshopping a "Les Mis" French flag or a Lincoln stovetop hat to your product is not creativity--not by a long shot. As RTM grows, the bar will raise for what consumers will find worthwhile and welcome (and, conversely, the bar will lower for what they will dislike and criticize.)
Be spontaneous. The more you plan and prep, the less surprising, unique and topical your content will be. Watch for the unexpected to occur--such as the lights going out in the Superdome--and be ready to produce something timely. True RTM happens in real time; that's why it is called "real time marketing."
Engage emotions. Make people laugh; make them cry; give them something to think about; furnish them with something they will want to share or discuss. If you cannot do this, then maybe your brand is better saying nothing at all.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. No one wants to see how the sausage is made--they don't care how your magazine ad is produced or that your social team is standing ready to tweet marketing content. U.S. Cellular misstepped by retweeting an employee's photo of its social newsroom; it invited--and received--criticism.

In 2013, it can sometimes seem social media is a mature medium, but Sunday night proved that we are still feeling our way through this new channel with its new rules. A lot of brands paid employees and agencies to work on a Sunday and stay up late creating opportune content. Very few brands got enough bang for their buck. Either marketers must do much better to be authentic, relevant and interesting in the moment, or they should just let their employees enjoy the Oscars and other big events from the comfort of their homes.

Ten Years Damaging Reputation: The Streisand Effect and How to Avoid It

2013-02-25T08:22:00.001-05:00

Happy Birthday, Streisand Effect!

Ten years ago this month, one of the most well-known Internet memes was born: The Streisand Effect. This meme is not a frothy Harlem Shake-like viral sensation that is here today and gone tomorrow; it is a set of avoidable circumstances with serious consequences for anyone responsible for managing reputation, public relations or social media. Already in this young year, The Streisand Effect has tripped up a number of brands and people who should, by now, know better. Avoiding The Streisand Effect is not difficult, so why after a decade is it still such a problem?

The photo that launched a
meme--Streisand's mansion

The Streisand Effect was named after an incident that began in February 2003. A photographer, Kenneth Adelman, posted thousands of photos of the California coastline in an effort to document coastal erosion. One of those pictures showed an aerial view of Barbara Streisand’s Californian estate. Streisand's law firm wrote a cease-and-desist letter and later filed a lawsuit, demanding the photos be taken down.

This heavy-handed legal action not only failed to get the photos removed but called tremendous attention to the photos of Streisand's massive home. The image of her estate was downloaded just six times prior to the suit but was accessed almost half a million times in the month afterward. And thus a meme was born--"The Streisand Effect" occurs when someone's ineffective attempts to censor information results in that information gaining more publicity, attention and engagement.

It is positively astounding to me that public relations professionals still do not grasp the essential truth of the digital and social era: Information cannot be contained. If damaging information hits the web, there are many things you can do to manage reputation, including responding, issuing contradictory information, addressing individuals, enlisting advocates and contacting influencers. In fact, there is really only one option that is not available in 2013 (as was the case in 2003), and that is to attempt to get the offending information scrubbed from the Web.

Ten years after the "The Streisand Effect" was born, brands and PR professionals still have not learned. Already in the first seven weeks of 2013, we have seen some big brands stumble into Streisand Effect blunders:

Beyonce rocked her performance at the Super Bowl Halftime show, but her many strained facial expressions during her physical dance routine instantly became a new meme. Beyonce's publicist emailed Buzzfeed and requested unflattering photos be taken down. In the most predictable reaction ever in the history of mankind, Buzzfeed instead published the request, resulting in thousands of additional unflattering photos.
This weekend, NASCAR attempted to get an eyewitness video of the horrific Daytona crash taken down using a DMCA request. This was a silly move, because once the video had hit YouTube, it immediately began to spread to other sites and servers. It was also silly because it offended NASCAR fans, leaving them "boiling angry," according to Poynter. All of this was for nothing, because the takedown request failed when YouTube rejected NASCAR's right to exert copyright over the video, leaving the racing organization working to control the damage; NASCAR issued a statement claiming their request was done "out of respect for those injured in today's accident."
Google itself seems to have been caught in the very trap that its own search engine created. A week ago, a report surfaced of a security flaw in Google Play, the online store for Android users. It seems developers are being provided with the names, addresses and email addresses of app purchasers. In response, Google contacted the news site and requested changes to the story, claiming the issue was not a flaw at all. The site amended the article and noted, "This story was amended at the request of Google. News.com.au took out the words 'massive' and 'huge' - referencing the size of the security 'flaw'. The word 'flaw' was also put into inverted commas." Google likely would have faced less publicity had it simply opted to release its own contrary information or viewpoint on the topic; instead, with just a whiff of censorship, Google's decision to ask that a news article be changed has launched hundreds of tweets, blog posts and forum comments.
Big media is not immune to the dangers of The Streisand Effect. CNET was so impressed with the Dish Network's new Hopper with Sling, it announced the product was being considered for CNET's "Best of CES" award. This did not sit well with CNET's parent company, CBS, which is embroiled in a lawsuit with Dish over that company's "Autohop" technology, which automatically skips ads in day-old shows. CBS seemed to face little negative ramification from this situation, but it created a mountain out of a molehill when it asked CNET to retract the nomination and refrain from reviewing any Dish products. A waterfall of problems ensued, and in the end, Dish won the award anyway, Dish's product received more PR, CNET was stripped of its role in choosing future "Best of CES" winners, a senior CNET writer quit with a public broadside at CBS and CBS has left many with the impression its news is driven by its own interests and not objectivity. A lose-lose-lose-lose proposition for CBS, all thanks to The Streisand Effect.
Earlier this month, singer Chubby Checker, upset over a penis measurement WebOS app named "Chubby Checker," filed suit against HP, parent company of Palm. The suit claims that HP did not remove the app quickly enough upon receiving a cease-and-desist warning, and this delay, claims the suit, "adversely affect(ed) Chubby Checker's brand and value." Considering the app was downloaded a whopping 84 times and that Checker's lawsuit is now splashed across the Huffington Post, Associated Press, The Guardian and dozens of other news sites, it is difficult to see how the lawsuit's goal has been accomplished. Then again, with Chubby Checker releasing a new single, it may be that the artist is attempting to execute the difficult Reverse Streisand, using the Streisand Effect about his lawsuit to promote his new tune.

As the Chubby Checker example may (or may not) demonstrate, the Streisand Effect can also be used by smaller brands to create awareness and challenge established brands. A better, more obvious example of this comes from SodaStream's 2013 Super Bowl non-ad. The company sells beverage-making machines that replace consumers' need for Coca-Cola and Pepsi products. The first draft of SodaStream's Super Bowl ad (see below) was reportedly rejected by CBS; of course, it was uploaded to YouTube where it has received almost five million views, courtesy of the controversy.

This was not the first time the Streisand Effect boosted SodaStream's awareness. Last year, TV execs in the UK yanked a SodaStream ad for being too disparaging to soft drink companies. Soon, the number of views of the ad on YouTube surged from 100,000 to more than 2 million.

The Streisand Effect is so pervasive nowadays, it is hard to understand why so many companies stumble into the situation. Is it ego, thinking a brand's power can be used to scrub information from the Internet? Outdated thinking? Or just panicked decision making that severs decisions from common sense?

This is not the first time I've written about the Streisand Effect, and something tells me it will not be the last. Of course, preventing the Streisand Effect is really quite easy. If a piece of incorrect or damaging information begins to circulate, the recipe to avoid danger is:

Stop! Do not act until dispassionate logic has the upper hand over emotional reaction.
Do not rely solely on lawyers for guidance. For both action and communication decisions, involve PR, reputation management and social media professionals for counsel.
Appreciate that the offending information is on the Internet and will never disappear. Your goal is not to get it removed but to react in a way that mitigates damage.
Do not overreact to the situation. Take stock of how much the information is really spreading, if the company's customers and prospects care, and whether it will impact the company's reputation and business. Sometimes, no action is better than anything else.
Be transparent and embrace openness. Show people you have nothing to hide, care what they think and are open to feedback.
Do not hesitate to correct--but not censor--erroneous information. Combat misinformation in the same channels it is spreading. For example, fight video with video--you cannot counter a viral YouTube video with a press release.
Engage consumers, advocates and influencers in a conversation. This is not a shouting match but a dialog.
Admit fault where there is fault. You cannot hide from the court of public opinion, and pleading guilty will often do more to end the spread of damaging information and enhance reputation than trying to evade.
Do not, under any circumstances, post and tweet the same canned language time after time. This is like throwing gasoline on a fire, and it will only make matters worse. Avoid corporate speak and talk like a person.
Lastly, do not wait for a reputation event before you consider how to address one. Be prepared. Have a plan. Drill on it, to make sure your tools, processes and people are ready.

Remember, these situation are not about information but about People (people who need people). If you want the Internet to not Rain On Your Parade, avoid Emotion, and soon Happy Days Will Be Here Again--you and your customers will be back to The Way You Were.

(Sorry about that. I was really struggling with how to close this blog post on a Streisand note.)

Satisfaction with Social Marketing and Servicing Impacts Your Brand, Says J.D. Power Survey

2013-02-22T09:43:00.000-05:00

Last week, J.D. Power and Associates published new research on the ways consumers interact with brands in social channels and how this engagement affects behaviors such as satisfaction and purchase intent. I had the chance to probe the findings with J.D. Power’s Director of Social Media and Text Analytics, Jacqueline Anderson. Her study furnishes still more evidence of the rising expectations consumers have of brands in social media, as well as the importance for brands to get social right, both for service and marketing.

One of the findings of the study is that consumers are engaging with both marketing and servicing in social channels, but this varies with age. In the 18-to-29-year-old demographic, 23% interacted with brands (on the brand’s owned social site) in a marketing context and 43% for servicing purposes. For those older than 50, the ratios are reversed, with 38% engaging with companies in a social marketing context but just 18% turning to social for servicing.

Interestingly, while consumers’ social marketing and social servicing experiences may vary by age, the impact to the brand does not. Anderson notes that, "While there are vast differences among age groups in the frequency of servicing and marketing engagements, there is a consistency in the impact on brand perception and purchase intent through both types of engagement. A one-pronged approach to social is no longer an option."

Another important conclusion of the study should surprise no one—making people happy in social channels is good for business. Among highly satisfied consumers, 87% indicate that the online social interaction "positively impacted" their likelihood to purchase from that company. Meanwhile, one in ten of those who are less satisfied indicate that the interaction "negatively impacted" their likelihood to purchase from the company. This relationship between consumer satisfaction and purchase intent is consistent across all age groups. “Younger and older consumers alike who are satisfied with their social marketing experiences are more likely to purchase,” says Anderson.

As she evaluated the data, verbatims and conversations observed in the community, Anderson found that consumers make little distinction between a brand’s social experiences and the overall brand experience. “There’s no social bubble anymore. Everything a company is doing—whether it’s in a store, on the website, in an email, on the phone or in social—impacts the consumer’s opinion of the brand. Companies need to make sure that experience is cohesive.”

One of the primary conclusions from this study is that brands have to get serious about social customer service. Says Anderson, “So many companies jump to the marketing piece, but consumers are looking more and more to social channels for support. Some companies feel threatened by this but it’s actually an amazing opportunity.” The J.D Power survey found that 67% of consumers have used a company's social media site for servicing, compared with 33% for social marketing.

Servicing and marketing are part of the same circular brand funnel, notes Anderson. “It is critically important that consumers are able to find you in social—that’s the marketing—so they can talk to you when they need to—that’s the servicing. Then, of course, you want to keep those consumers engaged with your brand, so you circle back to the marketing again.” This synergy between social marketing and social service is “especially important for elusive younger consumers. If you can nail that service experience, you have the opportunity to make a strong connection and engage them on an ongoing basis.”

Anderson points out that the trends among Millenials is unmistakable and demand that brands “set the ground rules for their approach to social servicing now, before it’s too late. Millennials are infamous for wanting things done quickly. As this group ages and starts having families and more time constraints, they’re going to turn more frequently to the fast-paced world of social to interact with brands and get their issues resolved.”

The J.D. Power study also looked at what turns off consumers about brands’ social media engagement. Unsurprisingly, consumers hate when brands focus too much on themselves. A participant from an initial online research community described the problem using an interesting analogy, recounts Anderson. “She compared ‘liking’ a company on Facebook to dating. You take the first step and agree to go out—‘the like.’ You look forward to learning about them and sharing information about yourself, but then it becomes clear the other person is only interested in talking about themselves; it’s always, ‘me, me, me,’ so you have to break up.”

While purchase intent may be the brass ring for brands, Anderson notes that satisfying social experiences provide other benefits, as well. “We found that positive servicing experiences raise the likelihood to use social servicing again, as well increases consumers’ likelihood to recommend social servicing to friends and family. In addition, we found that social marketing satisfaction has a positive impact on overall brand perception.”

If any brands have any doubt about social's importance, the J.D. Power study should put them to rest. Says Anderson, “There is a very strong storyline here that finally supports the case that social engagement truly is important to brands.”

Amen to that!

The Secret Door--One Brand's Way to Spark Dialog and Attention

2013-02-19T09:03:00.000-05:00

Enter the Secret Door

Every now and then, an online marketing program grabs my eye and is worth sharing. "The Secret Door," from window and door company Safestyle UK, is one such program. It is earning media and consumer attention not by begging for likes on Facebook but by giving them something to talk about.

The concept is really quite simple--give people a door through which they pass to arrive at random and interesting places on earth, all thanks to Google Street View. The locations have been carefully curated to be interesting and invite exploration.

Your experience will be different than mine, but I entered the Secret Door and found myself at a rave in Stockholm. Another click brought me to the floor of the ocean. Then I was standing in a comic book store. The experience invites engagement and makes it easy to share through social networks.

So often, I hear from people who are struggling to make their brands talkable in the social era because their vertical or product is "boring." There are dozens of ways to do overcome this challenge and spark dialog, from making a difference in the community to taking a stand on an issue to developing bold products to empowering employees to creating engaging events to turning your brand over to your community. But don't overlook the old standby: Creativity. "The Secret Door" demonstrates that even a company in the relatively mundane category of home supplies can still become buzzworthy with a little creativity.

"The Secret Door" succeeded in getting people talking quickly after launch. Within a day or two, the site had generated 350 tweets, over 1,500 Facebook Likes and over 250 Google +1's, and it is still trending upward thanks to articles in Venture Beat and Technorati. I will be curious to see if all this sharing amounts to additional business for Safestyle UK, but the links and traffic certainly are boosting the firm's SEO.

Most brands and categories are more interesting and relevant to consumers' daily lives than a company that makes double-glazed windows. "The Secret Door" shows how to overcome attention challenges and create conversations by bringing a bit of creativity and furnishing a worthwhile experience with which consumers want to engage.

Click below. Where will you end up?

The Secret Door is presented by Safestyle UK

The Lure, Opportunity and Danger of "Social Selling"

2013-02-18T08:10:00.000-05:00

The term "social selling" has been around a while, but suddenly it seems very hot. I have been asked about it four times in the past few weeks, and the term has recently appeared in my tweet stream quite a bit. What is social selling and why has it become a hot buzzword now?

Source: Social Media Examiner

The definition is obvious--using sales techniques in social media channels to increase revenue--but why is the term "social selling" on the tip of so many tongues today? I think the interest in social selling is just another way of probing the ROI of social media, a question that never goes away despite the fact almost 100% of marketers are today deploying social media tactics. For some, the thinking seems to be that building community, enhancing reputation and creating advocacy is nice and everything, but if social doesn't help brands increase sales, what good is it?

Of course, social media can do lots of good aside from increasing sales. It can furnish research, decrease customer service costs, improve customer retention, decrease return rates, improve awareness, protect and build reputation, furnish stronger collaboration with customers and vendors, combat incorrect information and multiply word of mouth, all of which are beneficial business outcomes that are not directly measured in sales. Social can also enhance sales with strategies that do not explicitly fall under the category of "sales"--for example, social campaigns can increase site traffic, ratings and reviews can improve ecommerce conversions and communities can increase share of wallet.

But what about "social selling"--the execution of selling techniques in social channels? Is there a place for these tactics in social media? The answer is a very cautionary and qualified "yes." Creating successful social selling opportunities requires that brands overcome consumers' natural aversion to being sold to. No one likes door-to-door salespeople and when given the opportunity to prevent telemarketers from calling, US consumers added 209 million phone numbers to the Federal do-not-call list (in a country with just 84 million residential landlines). Consumer attitudes in social channels are no different; according to a 2011 Exact Target study:

Source: Exact Target

71% of consumers report being more selective about "liking" a company on Facebook than they were last year.
81% of consumers have either "unliked" or removed a company’s posts from their Facebook News Feed, with 43% saying their wall was becoming too crowded with marketing posts and 24% saying posts were too promotional.
And, perhaps most interestingly, while 51% of consumers said they expected that "likes" would result in marketing communications from brands, a whopping 40% did not believe it should result in marketing communications. Think about that--four in ten people who "like" your brand still don't want you to try to sell them something on Facebook.

Of course, there are circumstances in which consumers will welcome selling, and this depends on two factors--context and relationship. If a consumer enters your company's space by walking into your store, visiting your retail web site or posting a product question via a social network, they have expressed an interest in receiving information and stated an intent to consider a purchase; in this context, selling is welcome. Many social media strategies are designed to improve inbound marketing so that consumers themselves create the context for sales opportunities.

The other factor that increases a consumer's desire to be sold to is relationship--does the consumer recognize, know and trust the brand or sales representative? Consumers welcome brands and people who are partners, help improve their lives and bring value, but they are no more likely to accept sales queries (in social media or elsewhere) from entities they do not know than they are to welcome a telemarketing call. Last year, an About.com study found that 84% of respondents reported they will not engage with a brand until trust has been established.

Whether or not social media is a fertile venue for selling has less to do with the medium and more to do with what your brand and associates do to create trusting relationships and recognize when the context is appropriate. "Social" is not a magic word that converts distasteful and disagreeable sales tactics into something desirable and effective.

In 2013, the risk with social selling is that companies could become overly assertive deploying a new breed of social CRM tools that use social listening systems to identify consumers experiencing key life and money movement events. If companies use these tools to target smart and personalized messages to people with whom they have a relationship, these tools can improve social selling; however, if companies misuse these tools, the outcome could be an onslaught of spammy auto-posts that do more to offend than to motivate transactions. If a hundred companies using the same social CRM tools all reach out to a consumer following his or her post to friends about a pregnancy, birth, graduation, job change, retirement or relocation, the result is not likely to be improved sales but unfriended and blocked brands, spam reports and damaged reputations.

This is why relationships, as always, matter. Social doesn't revolutionize sales--if anything, it reinforces the importance of traditional value-based relationship building. Brands that wish to succeed with social selling must realize that sales is a lagging indicator; the vital leading indicators are the ones that gauge the strength of relationships.

If sales are a lagging indicator, what are the leading indicators that suggest a brand or sales associate is improving both relationships and social selling opportunities?

Brand-building engagement--not just "fans" and followers but interactions, shares of content, community participation, etc.
Increased numbers of advocates and influencers engaged
Increased share of voice and improved sentiment
Positive reviews and ratings on sites like Yelp and recommendations on LinkedIn
Inquiries received and appointments arranged via social media
Views, inbound requests and downloads for white papers, SlideShare decks and YouTube videos
Inbound site traffic from social networks
Surveys that validate higher Net Promoter Score, trust and affinity for the brand

Social media is not, first and foremost, a direct marketing or sales channel; it is a relationship channel. And like in every other channel, relationships are not built on constant selling but on shared values, reciprocation, partnership and caring.

Social selling can be successful for companies and people who invest the time and energy to build relationships, but those that bring traditional sales tactics such as cold calling and ABC (Always Be Closing) will find social hostile territory.

Enjoy Alex Baldwin's "Always Be Closing" speech from Glengarry Glen Ross. (Be advised, some of the language is NSFW. What did you expect, it's David Mamet, after all?)

How Wearable Tech and Social Media Will Destroy (or Build) Brands in Five Years

2013-02-11T08:45:00.000-05:00

We human beings are notoriously awful at foreseeing how technology advancements will change our lives and our brands. The problem is that we have the tendency to only consider how new technology will apply to today's behaviors rather than create new ones.

This is happening today. A sea change is about to occur in our world within the next five to ten years--one that will rock the relationship between brands and consumers--but few marketers are prepared for it, much less see it coming.

Source: PewInternet.org

First, let's explore the phenomenon of how consumers and marketers are constantly surprised by change and how our nearsightedness is costly. Take the advent of the Web--in 2000, five years after the web went public, consumers welcomed the empowering new tool into their homes, but few expected it to change their lives. Even as we soared past the 50% adoption milestone in the US, consumers thought they would retain their tried and true ways to bank, shop, work and listen to music; the reality is that online banking has skyrocketed (Bank of America saw a 300% increase in just one year), consumers now spend 5% of retail dollars online, one in five global workers telecommute and more music is purchased via download than as physical media.

Business leaders were equally unprepared for these changes. They struggled to shift marketing dollars and strategies online and allowed smaller and more nimble competitors to reframe products in a digital world. Google, YouTube, Amazon, Apple, eBay, Napster, Netflix and Paypal rose from obscurity to become household names, while Blockbuster, Borders, Yellow Pages, Tower Records, Kodak and virtually every newspaper and magazine went the other way.

The changes sparked by the Internet are nowhere near complete as the web continues to alter every aspect of business--analysts estimate that one in ten malls will fail in the next decade as retail continues to shift online, and banks that spent billions increasing the number of bank branches 20 percent from 2000 to 2009 are now reversing course and rapidly shuttering costly locations and laying off employees.

The problem is that as we humans experience new technology, we see it only in the context of today's problems and habits rather than foreseeing how it will change us tomorrow. Many consumers saw the Internet displacing encyclopedias, typewriters and postal mail, not replacing banks, retail stores, books, CDs, photo albums, newspapers and magazines. And many business leaders saw the Internet as a new marketing channel and not as a new channel for products and services.

Our inability to see new technology and not foresee how it will change us and the world has costs. The cost to individuals of being unable to see the future is that many failed to retool their own skills to stay relevant and employed in a digital world. The price paid by many businesses was even higher--the inability of corporate leaders to see how web technology was changing fundamental consumer behavior caused massive business failures, dislocated millions from their jobs and vaporized the value of brands once thought of as bulletproof. In the past decade, the Interband brand value of brands such as Citibank and Gap have been sliced in half, and Compaq and Kodak--two brands that were in the top 30 most valuable brands in 2001 with a combined value of more than $20 billion--have disappeared from Interbrand's top 100 list.

It is happening again. New technology is coming. We've all seen it and many are dismissing it as creepy, unnecessary or unimportant, just as many once mistook PCs, the Web, smartphones and social networking as creepy, unnecessary or unimportant We are once again failing to see how new technology will be adopted and change us. Marketers should not fall into this trap again--now is the time to prepare for the changes of the next decade.

Wearable technology is the "next big thing," and the most visible of the upcoming products is Google Glass, an augmented reality head-mounted display due to hit the market next year. When people first see this (and if they do not immediately discount it), they think of how it would work with today's sorts of applications: They may envision loading a Kindle book, checking Facebook or launching Yelp to find a nearby business. These are all good use cases for Google Glass, but they are shortsighted, applying new technology to old problems rather than considering how it will affect new behaviors.

Wearable technology combined with social media will not just make software easier to use and hardware less intrusive--it will change the world. How? Instead of envisioning how Google Glass will react to your requests in the same way your smartphone does today, consider instead how this will work when you are passive and it is proactive.

Here is an example: For years, you have purchased the same brand of OTC drug. You are brand loyal--the product works, you trust it, you purchase it on autopilot, and you do not even notice the attempts of competitive brands to get your attention with advertising, new packaging and PR. You are the perfect brand consumer--until the day you enter the aisles of your drugstore wearing your new pair of Google Glasses.

You reach for your favorite product, your new wearable tech notes what you have taken from the shelf and it compares this product to the preferences, beliefs and priorities expressed through your actions and in social media. Suddenly, an alert pops up! You are a fan of the ASPCA, you have liked many of your friends' pictures of cats and dogs and you visit the local Humane Society to volunteer. Your Google Glass knows all of this, and it also knows there is a disconnect with the product you just selected--the company tests its products on animals.

Is it possible you will ignore the alert and purchase the product anyway? Perhaps, but chances are your years of brand loyalty have just been severed in the blink of an eye. No amount of existing affinity, catchy slogans, sizable ad budgets or snappy packaging will stop you from putting that product back and grabbing the one next to it. Cognitive dissonance, enhanced by a new wave of wearable technology and social media, instantaneously and permanently alter your brand affinity and purchase behavior.

Of course, this does not just work with people who are animal lovers. Maybe you care about keeping jobs in the US and the product you just selected on the store shelf is laying off thousands of Americans to shift production overseas. Maybe you care deeply about protecting the environment, and your favorite brand's packaging contributes to the destruction of the rain forest. Maybe you stand behind marriage equality and the brand you just selected does not extend benefits to same-sex partners. Or maybe you care about traditional family values, and the brand in your hand sponsors LGBT events. Whatever your beliefs, they can now become instantaneous and proactive information that impacts your purchase behavior far more than any TV ad or Facebook fan page ever could.

For decades, there has been a disconnect between consumer attitudes and purchase behavior, in part because it is impossible to know the corporate practices of every brand on store shelves. No more--thanks to wearable tech that knows our actions, is aware of our social media activities, and connects us to real-time information, the very nature of shopping changes.

We all recognize that today's social media has brought more transparency to corporate practices. Anyone who watches social media even minimally knows that companies such as Nestle, Mattel and Bank of America have had unwanted transparency thrust upon them and were forced to change corporate plans and standards. But today's transparency is child's' play compared to the radical transparency that will come once our virtual and physical worlds are merged by wearable tech powered by our social media data.

What can marketers do to prepare for the changes in the next five to ten years? It is not too early to lay the groundwork:

Turn inward: Shift your attention not just to external communications but to internal practices. Help your peers to understand what consumers care about and how corporate practices must align to brand attributes. Your brand is increasingly expressed not in colors, copy and images but in your company's actions.

Make tough choices: Many marketers think they know where their brand stands. This is easy when it comes to things like the saving the environment, supporting veterans or contributing to disaster relief, because every consumer supports these efforts. But what about traditional family values versus same-sex equality? Last year Oreo took a stand on Facebook and faced some backlash, but in the end the brand benefited with an eightfold increase in Facebook fans and a doubling of positive sentiment. Meanwhile, Chick-Fil-A was drawn into the same sensitive topic but from the opposite side of the issue, and it also found the social media storm caused no business issues, with usage, market share and ad awareness all rising following the controversy. I am not suggesting your brand start purposely wading into sensitive topics, but to the extent your HR and corporate policies are increasingly becoming brand drivers, it is helpful for marketers to define what they stand for, what they don't and how the brand's values align with customers'.
Build brand advocacy: A Facebook "like" is not advocacy; consumers engaging with a sweepstakes is not advocacy; consumers "liking" a brand's post about National Hot Dog day is not advocacy. Advocacy in the social era is expressed differently than in the past but is still defined in the same way--engaged consumers who are informed about the brand, care about it, and are willing to talk on the brand's behalf. If your social media activities build engagement but do not create advocacy, a change in strategy is required.
Get the word out: The key in our increasingly transparent world is not to have the most clever marketing messaging or the largest media budget; what will separate the winners from the losers is a willingness to build authentic engagement about real brand activities and beliefs. Content strategies cannot save a brand whose practices are disconnected from consumer attitudes, but if the two are aligned, it is imperative you create and encourage content that spreads the word.
Educate employees: Your employees are brand ambassadors, whether they want to be or not. Brands cannot dictate that employee beliefs and behaviors align with the brand's mission and consumer beliefs, but marketers can ensure employees are educated on what is expected in social media and how to protect themselves and the brand.
Become more transparent now: Do not be outed by an environmental, labor, animal or other advocacy group. Out yourself--engage consumers in a dialog about your brand practices and tell them why you do what you do and how it benefits them. Listen to consumers, change what can be changed and do not hesitate to defend what cannot. We cannot please all of the people all of the time, but we can prepare them to hear and disregard damaging brand information. Take, for example, the scenario I shared above about the OTC brand that tests on animals. Perhaps there is no alternative to testing on animals in order to protect human lives; if this is the case, the time to engage consumers in that discussion is not once they have been interrupted in store aisles with surprising and concerning information; by then, it is too late. It is your job to arm consumers with the knowledge they need to expect, interpret and ignore information that would otherwise create cognitive dissonance and decrease brand loyalty.

The future need not be scary if we simply acknowledge and prepare for the changes. The brands that have succeeded in the past fifteen years are the ones that embraced and invested in change, while the brands that were ground into irrelevance wasted away clinging to old business models and practices.

We can see the future coming. Will your brand cling to old ways or begin to invest in the changes ahead?

Does Social Media Impact Purchase Decisions?

2013-02-04T08:38:00.000-05:00

I published my first-ever post using Storify. I found it more than a little difficult to use, but I'm glad I finally got around to giving it a test drive.

Here is the post, which is about the wildly contradictory data around the association between social media and purchase decisions. It includes links and data from over a half dozen studies, surveys and research reports. Some show social drives substantial purchase behavior; some could find evidence for almost no association between the two.

View the story "Does Social Media impact purchase decisions?" on StorifyDoes Social Media impact purchase decisions?I've rarely seen so many studies, surveys and research papers demonstrate such a wide variation of findings as there are around the topic of how much social media drives purchase behavior. Some say a lot. Some say not at all. So, what's up?Storified by Augie Ray· Mon, Feb 04 2013 07:06:14

Forrester: Almost No Correlation Between Social Media and Online Purchases

Forrester studied 77,000 retail transactions and found social media was trackable as a source for less than 1% of online purchases. The report allowed that social may represent "highly top-of-the-funnel tactics that likely require a longer measurement period than the 30-day attribution window for this report" and that "social networks are believed to have a disproportionately larger impact on small merchants, which were not captured in this analysis."

I wanted to learn much more about the methodology, which is briefly described at the end of the Forrester report (subscription required). Which retailers, products and categories were included? What is the definition of a "trackable social link" and might untrackable social links have resulted in additional purchases? Finally, the report says the methodology tracked "If consumers 'touched' any of the retailers' marketing programs," but what about non-marketing program posts in social media or, more importantly, peer-to-peer sharing? Did Forrester's methodology only capture attributions from paid media in social? I was left with more questions than answers, but it was clear Forrester's data showed almost no correlation between social media and purchases. Forrester Research : Marketing : Less Than 1% Of Online Purchases Come From Social ChannelsThirty-nine percent of online retail transactions by new customers start with clicks from paid or organic search results and less than 1%...

Baynote: Social Media Drives Purchases, But Not As Much As Old Dead-Tree Catalogs

Baynote, a multi-channel retail consultant, conducted a study that found that paper catalogs influenced more holiday purchases than did social media, even among young adults--the people most engaged in social and least likely to use traditional catalogs. (Baynote did, at least, find a higher correlation between social media and retail purchases than Forrester did.)Baynote Holiday Survey

IBM: Social Media Barely Accounted For Any Of Black Friday 2012 Sales

IBM released a study of Black Friday sales and social media that was as damning as Forrester's report. (In fact, I detected a note of glee in how much IBM enjoyed trumpeting the lousy social media findings.) It noted that just 0.34% of all online sales on Black Friday came from referrals from social networks, and "Traffic from Twitter to retail websites was especially grim: down from 0.02% of total traffic on Black Friday in 2011 to 0.00% this year."

The thing that was really striking was that IBM reported that social media referral traffic resulting in purchases was down a whopping 35% since 2011. Does that make any logical sense at all? We've had continued growth in active users in social media and in time spent with social media during the past year, but purchases referred from social media sites dropped by more than a third? Social Media Has A Black Friday #FailIBM's report on online retailing over the holiday weekend shows online sales on Thanksgiving and Black Friday were both up sharply, 17% a...

ARF: Consumers Say They Learn About and Change Opinions of Brands Based on Social Media

Forrester and IBM, in particular, threw a couple buckets of cold water on the notion that social media drives purchases, and both base their analysis on referral data, which is hard to refute. But there are a slew of other studies that say something completely different, although these studies are based on consumers' self-awareness and self-reporting.

The first comes from the Advertising Research Foundation, which surveyed 2,000 U.S. shoppers and found that roughly one-third said they were either introduced to a brand or product, or changed their opinion about a brand or product during the buying process, because of social media. What’s more, 22% of shoppers surveyed by the ARF said that social media was “important in my final purchase decision.”

MediaPost Publications Social Media Affects Purchase Decisions, ARF Finds 01/23/2013Social media has a measurable impact on consumer purchase decisions, according to a new study from the Advertising Research Foundation ba...

Nielsen: Consumers Turn to Social Media to Learn About Cyber Monday Deals

In an interesting twist to IBM's somber Black Friday report, Nielsen asked consumers in advance of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping weekend about their intended shopping habits. Forty percent said they rely on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter for Cyber Monday sales information.

How can 40% of consumers recognize social media as a source of information on sales but less than one percent of those sales derive from a social media site clickthrough? I'll admit that asking consumers what influences them is a notoriously inaccurate way to find out what actually influences them, but there is a huge and surprising gap between the percentage of people who think social media is a source of deals and the miserly number of deals that are purchased via social media clickthroughs.

Cyber Monday Draws More Consumers Than Black Friday | Nielsen WireAs consumers increasingly turn to online shopping, the shift of the holiday focus continues to move from Black Friday to Cyber Monday. A ...

Nielsen: Consumers Complete Purchases After Seeing Social Ads

In another report from Nielsen--this being its terrific 2012 State of Social Media report--the research firm reports that people who see social ads buy stuff. Nielsen found that, as a result of seeing a social ad, 10% of consumers have made a purchase over the Internet, 8% made a purchase at a store, and 18% have purchased or obtained a coupon (through a daily deal site or retailer). As a result of seeing social ads, 15% of people shared ads, 26% of people liked ads and 14% of people purchased the products advertised. (To be clear, Nielsen isn't saying that 14% of the people who see your social ads will buy your product but that 14% of people report buying an advertised product after seeing a social ad.)

Of additional interest is that the likelihood of sharing or liking a social ad or purchasing a product as a result of seeing such an ad is different for different demographic groups. Over twice as many Asians and 50% more Hispanics as the general public have made a purchase after seeing a social ad.Nielsen | Social Media Report 2012

University at Buffalo School of Management: Social Media Engagement Boosts Sales

A study from the University of Buffalo found that customers who participate in a firm’s social media visit the business about 5 percent more frequently than those who do not participate. Not only that, but those extra visits go straight through to the bottom line. Said the author, "Our results show that when customers engage with a business through social media they contribute about 5.6 percent more to the firm’s bottom line than customers who do not." How many businesses wouldn't mind earning an additional 5.6% from their existing customers?

Social Media Pays Off for Businesses, Study Shows - News CenterBUFFALO, N.Y. - Customers who connect with a business through social media will go to the business more frequently and contribute more to...

Market Force: Vast Majority of US & UK Consumers Have Purchase Decisions Influenced By Both Friends' and Companies' Posts in Social Media

In an impressively large sample size of 12,000 consumers in the US and UK (75% of which were women), a whopping 81% of US respondents indicated posts from their friends directly influenced their purchase decision. Perhaps it is not that surprising that friends influence friends' purchases, but it may shock you to learn that 78% of respondents said that posts by companies they follow on social media impact their purchases.

Are Brands Wielding More Influence In Social Media Than We Thought? - ForbesAs one who has read, dissected and written about many a study regarding social media, brands and consumers, I can tell you I for one was ...

Knowledge Networks: The Purchase Decisions of 38 Million in U.S. Are Influenced By Social Media

In a June 2011 survey of consumers, Knowledge Networks found that the percentage that say social media influences their decisions had increased 14% in just six months. They estimate that the purchase decisions of 38 million 13 to 80 year olds in the U.S. are now influenced in various ways by social media. Other interesting findings were that 23.1 million discover new brands or products through social media (up 22% from a year before) and 15.1 million refer to social media before making purchase decisions (up 29%).

Study: Social media influences the buying decisions of 38 million Americans | Articles | HomeFor marketers who want to know the value of social media and mobile to their brands, the answer is a resounding "very." A whopping 38 mil...

M Booth and Beyond: Consumers Turn to Facebook and Forums Before Purchasing Certain Categories of Products

In a survey of 1,500 consumers, M Booth and Beyond found different product categories were influenced in different ways by social media. For example, 49% of people use Facebook when searching for restaurants. At first I found this a little absurdly high, and then I thought about what "using Facebook" means--I've never searched Facebook for a restaurant, but I have turned to Facebook to ask my friends for restaurant recommendations and have learned about new restaurants as a result of friends' posts.

Other findings from this survey include that 63% of baby product consumers use Facebook to research a brand or product, 55% of consumers researching electronics are influenced by forum posts and 44% of automotive consumers research using forums.

How to Influence Purchasing Decisions On The Web [INFOGRAPHIC]When savvy consumers are in the market for something - a new pair of kicks, a sweet DSLR camera, hair pomade, a toaster - they turn to th...

BlogHer: Social Plays a Greater Role in Purchase Decision Than Offline Media

Way back in 2010 (which seems so long ago, doesn't it?) BlogHer found that, other than search, social was the most common medium to which people turned for information to support a purchase decision. Of course, this survey had some pretty substantial bias since the "people" in this case were BlogHer site users. Still, among this set of Internet- and social-centric consumers, social was found to be a major driver in the purchase decision. The study found that BlogHer users turn to blogs (53%), user-generated content (46%), message boards (34%) and social networks (26%) before magazines, TV and newspapers when seeking information to assist with a purchase.

Social Media Plays Major Role In Purchase DecisionApart from search engines, blogs (53%), user generated content (46%) and social networking sites (26%) are among the favorite online rese...

Forrester and LinkedIn: IT Decision Makers Influenced by Social Media

To close out this blog post, we return to Forrester research--only this research report found that social media has significant influence over purchasing decisions. The study, commissioned from Forrester by LinkedIn, pertained not to consumer retail but to the more difficult, complex and lengthy buying decisions made by B2B IT Decision Makers (ITDMs).

This time, Forrester said social media influences buying decisions. 85% of ITDMs have used at least one social network for business purposes; 73% have engaged with an IT vendor on a social network; and 59% of respondents say they are influenced by at least one social network when considering business purchases. And during each of the five phases of decision making – awareness, scope, plan, select, implement – social networks influence nearly 50% of all ITDMs involved in each phase.

Now, I am puzzled. Forrester can find virtually no linkage between consumer retail purchases and social media, despite the fact many surveys indicate consumers say social media helps them learn about new products and influences their decisions. Meanwhile, when it comes to the least impulsive and most impersonal buying decisions imaginable--big-budget IT investments made via buying processes overseen by Procurement departments--Forrester can find substantial influence by social media in every step in the process?

Efficiency & Relevance: Why Social Media Is A Growing Force In IT Purchasing [INFOGRAPHIC]LinkedIn Corporation ©2012. LinkedIn, the LinkedIn logo and InMail are registered trademarks of LinkedIn Corporation in the United States...

Networked Insights: IBM's Black Friday Data Missed the Real Black Friday Story

Networked Insights, in an interesting post, challenges IBM's approach to the question of tracking Black Friday purchases. Using a great deal of listening data, NI demonstrates that Black Friday didn't impact overall tweet volume on Black Friday itself, but Twitter did see 8.7 million tweets stretching back as early as two weeks prior to Halloween. The data demonstrates that "consumers strategize how to get the best deals before stores run out of inventory" and that "hashtags are crucial to moving consumers through the sales funnel."

How IBM was wrong about social's impact on Black Friday : Networked InsightsAs consumers were still recovering from endless meals of leftover turkey, IBM released their annual Black Friday shopping trends report. ...

Conclusion: I Don't Know

"I don't know" is a lousy conclusion. It's an inconclusion, not a conclusion. There just is no way to square all this data. It is too easy to write it off by saying that consumers overestimate the impact social media has on their purchase decisions--there are too many studies and the percentages are simply too high to dismiss those findings as survey bias or poor self-awareness.

The Forrester and IBM findings also defy common sense. Common sense is pretty uncommon and very subjective, I recognize, but the idea that virtually every company and brand has adopted social media, over a billion consumers worldwide have made it a part of their lives, Americans spend 230,060 years in social every month, conferences and news sites are full of positive social media case studies, and Facebook accounts for one of every 11 Internet visit and one of every five page views--yet it drives no purchase decisions?!? That means social media is either the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on marketers, or... well, one only has to consider his or her own social media habits and purchase decisions to know social media is not a fraud.

So, what is wrong with the IBM and Forrester data and analysis? Is it possible we NEVER click links from social network to retail sites but that social media still wields great influence in our awareness, consideration and purchases? I certainly agree social media is better measured in relationship and brand metrics than in direct marketing ways, but it still seems hard to believe that virtually no clickthroughs, referral metrics and conversions can be found from social networks.

I hope more analysis of referral and clickthrough data surfaces soon, because there is entirely too much variance in the data around social media and purchase decisions. Marketers deserves better answers than they are currently being provided by the contradictory research!

How to Prevent Robots From Stealing Your Job

2013-01-28T09:09:00.001-05:00

I read a sobering article last week about how technology is slowly eating away at midpay jobs--the kind of employment that furnishes a middle-class lifestyle. The AP's "Holy Hal! A Robot Stole My Job" notes that "In the United States, half the 7.5 million jobs lost during the Great Recession were in industries that pay middle-class wages... but only 2 percent of the 3.5 million jobs gained since the recession ended in June 2009 are in midpay industries. Nearly 70 percent are in low-pay industries."

What is happening to those middle class jobs? Says the AP, "They're being obliterated by technology."

The article reminded me of another I read in 2011, "Why Software Is Eating The World." It was written by Marc Andreessen, the visionary who co-developed the first widely used web browser and founded Netscape. He saw a technology-filled future with plenty of opportunity and jobs. Andreessen said we are "in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift," that made him "optimistic about the future growth of the American and world economies."

So, whose future is correct? The AP's dystopian future or Andreessen's rosy one? Perhaps both--it may be a sad reality that economies can thrive by many measures while large numbers of citizens remain unemployed or find themselves shifted to lower-wage jobs. Just look at last week's financial news--the S&P 500 rose above 1500 for the first time in four years, and unemployment claims also fell to a five-year low, but the overall unemployment rate remains more than 50% higher than at the beginning of the Great Recession and more than double what the US experienced during the roaring economy of 2000. Meanwhile, median household income after inflation fell to a level 8% lower than in 2007, and the gap between the wealthiest and the rest of Americans grew, with income for the top fifth of American households rising by 1.6% last year compared to declines for households in the middle.

Source: CNX.org based on US Census Bureau Data

Many forces are altering our world, and technology is at the center of them. In fact, this has been the case for at least the last 150 years. In the mid-Nineteenth Century, 90% of Americans worked in agriculture and related fields, and today, that figure is only around four percent. In 1900, only 5% of the nation's factories used electricity to power machines and just 10% of its homes had electricity--a century later, electricity was universal for both homes and manufacturing. As technology changed the way we worked, it also effected the way we lived. In 1800, over 90% of us lived in rural areas; today, around 80% of us live within metropolitan areas. Technology altering how we live, work and earn money is not new, but there are some profound shifts underway today.

Fritz Lang's--or Marc Andreessen's--
vision for workers' future?

When I first read Andreessen's optimistic article, I feared he overlooked the way his software revolution was creating two very different classes of employee; in fact, his article brought to mind a vision from Fritz Lang's striking 1927 film, Metropolis, where the managers live luxuriously above ground while the workers toil in horrifying conditions beneath the surface of the planet.

Andreessen does not seem to mind--or at least does not have an answer for--the duality his technology creates. He notes, "Many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution... (They) will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again." Too bad, so sad, Marc?

The recent AP article notes that technology in the workplace has not been a zero sum game--even in just the last few years, tech has created winners and losers. "Companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index reported one-third more profit the past year than they earned the year before the Great Recession. They've also expanded their businesses, but total employment... has declined by a half-million." The winners of the economic shifts of the past six years have been stockholders and tech employees while many others are losing out.

For an example of how technology has changed an industry look at Amazon, which Andreessen praised for evolving "while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy." Amazon is one of the greatest success stories of the past two decades, but its success did not come merely by embracing new distribution methods but also by eliminating costly, wage-earning, benefits-demanding workers. Borders is gone, leaving 20,000 local retail employees without jobs, and more than 1,000 independent bookstores closed from 2000 through 2007, leaving about 10,600 unemployed. Meanwhile, printing employment has decreased a whopping 23.5% in just five years, and that drop is bound to accelerate in the next few years thanks to the adoption of new tablet hardware--IDC forecasts worldwide tablet shipments will be 40% higher in 2013 than in 2012 and will more than double last year's volume by 2016.

The employment shifts are not just limited to Amazon and books, of course. Look at Netflix, which employees 2,400 people but has almost single-handedly put 7,000 video rental stores out of business and forced Blockbuster to decrease its workforce from a peak of 60,000 in 2004 to little more than 4,000 today. Or Pixar, a company whose creative output I revere, but which has also replaced scores of animation workers with more powerful, flexible and efficient animation technology. Or online photo distribution sites that replace photo process workers. Or digital music systems that replace those employed in CD production, distribution and retail.

Computers may even replace those jobs you might have thought safe in our digital world. Did you watch IBM's Watson beat Jeopardy's two biggest all-time winners? How might organizations put that same sort of artificial intelligence and computing power to work? Robot journalists? Robot soldiers? Robot investment managers?

What about the jobs of the 2.3 million people in the US employed as customer service representatives? IBM notes that "one of the first real-world applications of Watson’s technology" will be in customer service, and an IBM CTO dares us to "Imagine if you had a system where you just called Watson, asked a question, and you get the answer in real time." What I imagine is 2.3 million more people losing their jobs, many shifting from middle-class jobs to something less.

Even legal professionals are seeing a shift. The New York Times draws a striking comparison in a recent article: In 1978, legal discovery for the five television studios entangled in a Justice Department antitrust lawsuit cost $2.2 million to have lawyers and paralegals examine six million documents. Last year, a new e-discovery service helped analyze 1.5 million documents for less than $100,000. 01001111 01100010 01101010 01100101 01100011 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110! (That stands for "Objection!" in binary code.)

It's not that technology replaces jobs, it simply tends to outplace people to lower paying ones. Notes David H. Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Over the long run we find things for people to do... but does changing technology always lead to better jobs? The answer is no.”

So are many of us doomed to end up out of work or under-employed as workers maintaining high-efficiency robots and computers? I think that is up to us in large part, because we do have a weapon at our disposal: A deep, ongoing commitment to learning.

The idea that education in our teens and 20s will prepare us for lifelong employment is as dead as, well, Borders book stores. John Dewey, an education reformer a century ago, recognized this well when he said, "Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself."

How many of us are using today the things we learned in school? Heck, how many of us over 35 are using the same skills that propelled our careers just 10 years ago? And while technology may be increasing the speed of obsolescence and the need for constant learning, even tech jobs are not immune. In fact, the commitment that technology workers have to maintaining their own skills has more to do with their relevance and employment today than the fact they have dusty certificates attesting to their knowledge of COBOL, NetWare, ColdFusion or C++.

Software and hardware can replace repetitive tasks; they can disintermediate distribution channels; they can replace the jobs of people who search, compile, compute and report data and numbers; and they may someday answer our questions when we use customer service channels. But software cannot think--at least not yet. (I will leave for others to consider the potential societal and employment implications of technological singularity--a theoretical point when computers surpass human cognitive capabilities--which some predict could come two to four decades hence.)

Software and hardware can replace humans in some tasks, but not all. They cannot inspire others, envision the future, be creative, entertain or apply judgment. A computer may be able to do what a customer service rep or paralegal does, but no amount of hardware or software will ever accomplish what Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos or even, for that matter, Marc Andreessen have. Steve Jobs, who perhaps has done more to advance technology in our lives than anyone in generations, still recognized the vital importance of good people: "The most important thing is a person. A person who incites your curiosity and feeds your curiosity; and machines cannot do that in the same way that people can."

Do you incite curiosity in others? Do you want to change the world? Are you committed to learning every year, every week and every day? Can you discuss the changes that occurred in 2012 within your industry at the same length you can the 2012 record of your favorite sports team or last season's outcome of your favorite reality TV program? My guess is that today, more Americans can name a greater number of people Taylor Swift has dated than they can thought leaders in their own industry. In his 2005 best-seller, "The World Is Flat," Thomas Friedman notes, "In China today, Bill Gates is Britney Spears. In America today, Britney Spears is Britney Spears -- and that is our problem."

Here are some simple tips on how you can commit to regular, ongoing learning and keep the robots at bay:

Every single weekday, find something professionally pertinent to post as a LinkedIn Update--a news story, interview, survey, infographic or research report. If you have not found something to post today, then your work is not yet done for the day. (This habit not only helps you stay on top of news in your profession but also elevates your reputation among your peers. Take that, robots!)
Visit LinkedIn every day as a news source. You can find a lot of interesting web sites and blogs to which to subscribe, and sites for professional associations are also particularly good for career oriented news and information, but many overlook one of the best professional information sites around--LinkedIn. The company has been busy improving the discovery of content with LinkedIn Today and new Original Content, and while many of the LinkedIn communities can be spammy, you can also find terrific, well-managed communities to join.
Schedule non-work time for career learning. If you can make time for "appointment TV," then make an appointment with your career outside of work hours. Once or twice a week, schedule time on your calendar to read. If you focus your research on where you want your career to take you in two or three years, this habit will help you get there.
Don't overlook books. I'll admit I can be guilty of this one. In our mile-a-minute culture, it can seem that today's blog post is more relevant than a book published last year, much less last decade. While books may not be a source of the most recent case studies, great books do more than just furnish fresh stories--they can inspire new ways of thinking. For example, Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff may be several years old, but its approach to getting social media right is still as solid as ever. Find out what your boss or others in your company are reading, or ask them for a book recommendation--this can provide good reading and good professional bonding. Better yet, seek out or start a professional book club where you work--that is something no robot will ever do.
Create a professional Twitter list and follow some industry leaders on Facebook. Twitter is fun and informative, but its damn noisy. I long ago stopped paying attention to my tweet stream and instead focus on lists. Create or subscribe to a Twitter list of some of the best thinkers, research firms, professional associations and publications in your industry and check it daily. Don't forget Facebook, which has been making inroads to the professional networking space. Whereas two years ago almost none of my professional networking occurred on Facebook, today I'd estimate a third does. Instead of friending people you do not know, follow them, instead.
Write a blog. I made this recommendation in a recent blog post, so I won't repeat myself here except to say that consuming news and information is helpful, but it is much, much more powerful and beneficial for you to turn that into your own ideas, insights and recommendations.

You and I cannot change the course of the world or alter how technology will impact the lives and wages of workers, but we can change our own course. If we are hurt by the fact we fail to keep our knowledge, skills and abilities current, that is not the fault of our employer's training programs, bosses, government agencies or our education system; the fault is entirely our own.

Thomas Friedman's book popularized an African proverb appropriate to bring this blog post to a close:

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion, or it will be killed.
Every morning a lion wakes up.
It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle, or it will starve to death.
It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle.
When the sun comes up, you better start running.”

The robots are waking. They have already killed slower gazelles. And they are getting faster every day.

Start running!

The Future of Facebook Graph Search (and Google)

2013-01-17T09:39:00.000-05:00

If you do not think Facebook Graph Search is a big deal, you have not been paying attention to the way data, particularly social data, is changing the world. And if you believe Facebook's move is a threat to Google, you may have no idea how true that is, not in terms of today's search advertising market but Google's strategy for the future.

Facebook's big play here is not merely that it may have a search engine that competes with Google's. Yes, this innovation could shake up the search market and allow Facebook to make a bigger dent in Google's revenue in the online and mobile ad space. That may be good news for Facebook investors who, even if Facebook announces great Q4 results in two weeks, will still be holding Facebook stock at a price-earnings ratio that is somewhere between five and fifteen times higher than mature companies such as Google, Apple and eBay.

Instead of thinking about search in the way we do it today--reactive, slow, relatively difficult and often frustrating--flip search on its head. Think of your device knowing you well enough to furnish you with the information you would want when you want it without asking. This is a vision of "serendipitous search" that Google has been hinting at for years.

Now add the Facebook social layer--all the data it knows about you, your friends and strangers. Today, you may pull out your phone and spend five minutes with a Yelp app to find a clothes store; tomorrow your device could proactively let you know you are walking past one of your friends' favorite boutiques. And who do you trust more--strangers who may be compensated for posting trash reviews or your close friends?

Facebook Graph Search as a reactive feature is interesting but turned into a proactive feature, it can change our world. Imagine walking into a bar and knowing a friend is next door. Or entering a salon and finding out your friend loves a particular stylist. Or visiting a Greek restaurant and discovering your Greek friends love a different place around the corner. Or going to a car dealership and being told your friends were left feeling ripped off at this establishment but loved their experience at the dealership up the street. Want to extend your circle of friends? Change a setting and your device can alert you that a friend of a friend is nearby. Playing a tough golf course? One of your friends shared a tip for beating the ninth hole and posted his video birdying the hole! Listening to a song? A bunch of your friends who loved this tune also recommend a band that is new to you! Having a problem with PowerPoint? Searching for the answer is so last year when your device can recognize you are having a problem and inform you not only that your coworker is a PowerPoint guru but that she is online and available now through Facebook chat!

That is the promise of the "social layer," not simply that it populates our news feeds with inspirational Tumblr images but that it becomes data that makes our lives richer, easier and more social. If the term "social layer" rings a bell, it is because that is the phrase Google and others have been using to describe the search giant's own social strategy. And here we see how Facebook's hegemony in social data really brings it into competition with Google--not because a Facebook search engine may be competitive with Google's search engine, but because the company that has access to and uses our and our friends' data and turns it into something that enriches our lives wins and wins big.

And if that is not a sufficient picture of how Facebook and Google are on a collision course, let's take this one step further. In all of those examples I provided of how proactive or serendipitous data might change our lives, think of how this data arrives to you. Today, your phone buzzes or chirps and you need to stop what you are doing, yank out your device, unlock it and look at the screen. If you're driving, this risks lives. If you're walking--look out for that tree! On a first date? Well, that device better stay in your pocket if you want a second date.

Annoying, right? Okay, then put on a pair of Google Glasses--a new way to present information to you without demanding you drop everything, use your hands and shift your field if vision and entire attention. Suddenly the beauty of proactive, real-time information becomes even more evident. No more "third screens" that demand attention; now your real and virtual worlds can become merged seamlessly. Of course, this depends on how well the software and hardware work together and know what information you find useful and what you do not; still, you can begin to see how today's sleek smartphones could look as outdated as a StarTAC flip phone within five years.

Will Facebook be content to let Google own the wearable tech market and allow its hardware to be the conduit for Facebook's features and value proposition? That seems unlikely, and perhaps this is why those rumors of a Facebook phone have never been realized--the brass ring is not that Facebook becomes yet another player in a field crowded with iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows and soon Tizen and Firefox OS. Instead, I wonder if Facebook recognizes that its future in furnishing real-time social data depends on finding a way to make that data seamless to users in a way that even today's best smartphones cannot accommodate.

There has been a lot of press in the last two days about what Facebook Graph Search means to Facebook and Google, but I wonder if we are witnessing not another battle for today's eyeballs and ad dollars but the first strategic moves into who owns the way humans merge their virtual and physical worlds in the future.

How You Can Learn to "Think Like Zuck" (Book Review)

2013-01-16T08:50:00.001-05:00

Ekaterina Walter wants you to "Think Like Zuck." She has written a book of the same name, subtitled, "The Five Business Secrets of Facebook’s Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg." I was provided a free copy of the book so that I could furnish you with a review.

"Think Like Zuck" is easy to recommend, popping with inside information about how Facebook became the force it is today, but the book benefits by considering more than just Facebook and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg (or Zuck, as he likes to be called). Included in the book are interesting insights and tales from companies as diverse as Zappos, XPLANE, TOMS Shoes, Southwest, Apple, Dyson, 3M and JESS3. This makes the book much more approachable by bringing the lessons of good leadership out of the world of dorm room startups and into the realm of retailers, airlines and manufacturers.

Walter's "Five Ps" that form the structure of "Think Like Zuck" are not that surprising. No one, I imagine, will see the list and think, "I never would have thought that was important!" Those Five Ps are Passion, Purpose, People, Product and Partnerships. The magic in the book is not that Walter has hit upon a secret recipe but that she so thoroughly explores why each of these are important to the success enjoyed by Facebook and other industry leaders.

This isn't to say that I completely agree with the five criteria Walter shares. For example, she goes into great detail about why passion is important, but I was left feeling this chapter would be better labeled with a different "P": Perseverance. In fact, Walter herself sounds a little unsure when she says, "What I noticed is this: the most successful entrepreneurs always have one trait in common: they never give up." One can have passion without perseverance--we all know people who have been wildly passionate about a hobby or issue one day while ignoring it the next--but it is difficult to have perseverance without passion.

One portion of the Passion chapter that I found interesting is about how Zuck and other successful leaders take inspiration from things that exist rather than wholly inventing something new. Says Walter, "We have this misconception that our entrepreneurial ideas or the products we want to create have to be one hundred percent original, never done before. The truth is that some of the most successful entrepreneurs (as well as marketers, I might add) steal with pride." Zuck, the book points out, got started a year after Friendster and MySpace were taking off, but he was able to bring significant innovations to the idea of social networking because of his passion for openness and transparency. (Maybe this is another missing "P": Piracy? Or, perhaps more kindly, Permutation?)

I would have liked to see "Think Like Zuck" spend more time on how great leaders have the ability to be patient and strive for long-term success rather than chasing after quarterly stock maximization. The book touches on this without diving deep. For instance, Zuck felt it was vital he retain majority ownership of Facebook even after its IPO, noting, "Companies are set up so that people judge each other on failure. I am not going to get fired if we have a bad year. Or a bad five years. I don’t have to worry about making things look good if they’re not. I can actually set up the company to create value.” This commitment to long-term success is also seen in another quote from Zuck, “The companies that succeed and have the best impact and are able to outcompete everyone else are the ones that have the longest time horizon.” The ability to put the long-term above immediate gratification of oneself or the market is an important attribute that deserves more than Walter gives the topic.

The Purpose chapter tells how Zuck passed on opportunities to become fabulously wealthy at an even younger age. He turned down a $1 billion offer because "for him, the journey wasn’t complete yet; he knew he could take Facebook much further by not selling it, by staying the course and sticking to his purpose. He knew there was much more opportunity ahead to make an impact, to change the world."

As I read this chapter, I found myself wondering, just a little, if Zuckerberg was incrementally losing his Purpose. Walter notes how the Facebook leader decreed that "advertising should be useful for the user no matter what--it was wrong to make money off of advertising if it wasn’t adding value." It is hard to square that statement with recent advertising "innovations" such as Page Post Ads that are served to people with no connection to the advertiser or charging people to send messages to others who are not friends. These ad features do not add value to the user experience, which reinforces the constant struggle between Purpose and Profit. (Yet another missing "P!")

The People chapter was another that struck me as mislabeled. It's a great chapter full of terrific ideas, but "Think Like Zuck" seems to be saying that what is vital is not people but leaders who create and commit to culture. Walter gives a nod to this when she quotes from the book "Good to Great," noting that "The old adage ‘People are your most important asset’ turns out to be wrong. People are not your most important asset. The right people are." In addition, she ends this section of the book by noting "I cannot wrap up this chapter without talking about leadership." Maybe she didn't want to ruin the alliteration, but I thought Walter made a much stronger case for how Culture was important rather than that People are.

The Product chapter felt the weakest to me. In part, that is because Walter ends up relying so heavily on the Passion/Perseverance attribute from earlier in the book. She notes, for example, that "Zuck understands that to be successful, one needs to run a marathon, not a sprint." She quotes Thomas Edison, who said, "I failed my way to success." And she shares that James Dyson wasn't successful in developing his bagless vacuum cleaner until his 5,127th attempt.

If I was a bit disappointed in the Product chapter, I was thrilled with Walter's exploration of the value of Partnerships. This is not a chapter on the importance of crowdsourcing or development partners; instead, "Think Like Zuck" explores how great companies are often led by two types of leaders who bring different skillsets: The Visionary and The Builder. The case is made quite convincingly as Walter examines leader partners such as Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Walt Disney and Roy Disney, Bill Hewlett and David Packard and others.

I may quibble with whether Walter selected the appropriate chapter labels or too quickly moved away from one or another important topic, but it should be clear from this review that "Think Like Zuck" got me thinking. The book is engaging, full of interesting stories and is an inspiring read. I hope you will consider purchasing a copy and considering how you can bring more Zuck-like thinking to your corner of the world.

Ironically (or not), the most inspirational words in this book do not come from Zuckerberg, Edison or Hseih; they come, instead, from Ekaterina's father: “Don’t try to change the world. Find your purpose, live out your potential to the fullest, serve others kindly, and the world will change around you.” His daughter learned well.

Three Corporate Social Media Trends That Should Die in 2013

2013-01-07T08:45:00.000-05:00

Over the weekend, I read a funny article on Heavy.com called, "10 Social Media Trends We Wish Would Die in 2013." Although it is included in the site's "Comedy" section, the article seems an accurate overview of the dubious habits many of us hate on Facebook. Unappetizing Instagram photos of food? Duck faces? Cryptic Facebook posts (a/k/a "vaguebooking")? Die. Die!

The article got me to thinking about the corporate social media practices that should die in 2013. I hope you will comment or tweet me (@augieray) with items to add, but here is my list of three business social media trends that we should kill in 2013:

Demanding people spam their friends in order to participate in Facebook sweepstakes and deals

I did not have to look far for the first item in this list--it comes from the Heavy.com article. Some companies are running sweepstakes and offering deals that require (or give the appearance of requiring) entrants to tag their friends in order to win.

One such sweepstakes was the Acer S7 Select sweepstakes. To enter, participants had to tag seven friends. People entering would then arrive at a screen with two options: Either confirm that friends will receive notifications from the application or "cancel." The "cancel" option would still allow users to proceed to the sweepstakes entry form, but I am sure most people assumed this button would cancel their sweepstakes entry. The result is that many folks believed they needed to spam their friends in order to enter. Similarly egregious sweeps and deal models on Facebook are those that require people to like your brand before they can even view your official contest rules (such as Omni Hotels Social Sweepstakes) and forcing people to repin your images to their Pinterest friends in order to enter (such as Style Bistro's Fashion Week contest.)

Some may find this a smart way to spread awareness in the social era, but it is difficult to square how forcing customers to disseminate spam is ever a good practice. Moreover, to the extent that people are unaware they are being exposed to branded, sponsored advertising as compensation for a friend's access to a sweepstakes or deal, this practice violates FTC requirements for disclosure. This does not mean that you cannot use social aspects to promote your sweepstakes and deals--go ahead and ask sweepstakes entrants to share, and give them the means to do so.

In addition to being aware of FTC regulations, make sure you also understand Facebook's rules for running a sweepstakes on its platform; for instance, if you require users to take an action using any Facebook features or functionality other than liking a Page, checking in to a Place, or connecting to your app, you are violating Facebook's Pages Terms.

Holding charities hostage in return for Facebook likes

Remember when this 1973
magazine cover was considered
a parody, not a strategy?

Remember when Donald Trump offered to donate $5 million to charity if President Obama released his college transcripts? If so, then you will recall Trump was roundly criticized for withholding money he could have given to charities until Trump got what he (and others) wanted. (Many in the New York City region were further enraged when, in the wake of superstorm Sandy, Trump took to the airwaves to extend his offer to Obama rather than donating the funds to the many in need in the region.)

It is easy to understand how Trump's "quid pro quo" offer to make a donation only if someone responded to his demands might be viewed as self serving. Why, then, do so many brands do the exact same thing, demanding people like their page before they will make a charitable donation? If your company has money to donate but you will not do so until your customers honor your selfish request, what does say about your brand?

Source: TapSocialMedia.com

Yes, I know this model has worked to gain many fans for many brands, but as consumers experience more of these programs, the message it sends is becoming clearer--not that organizations care but that they are selfish. Does your brand wish to be seen as Donald Trump, only donating cash if people do something that your brand wants, or would you prefer to be Mark Zuckerberg, who selflessly donated $100 million to Newark schools without requesting a single like, tag or share? (If the founder of Facebook can donate millions without requiring Facebook reciprocation, certainly your brand can do so, as well.)

Source: Chase Community Giving

There are appropriate ways to integrate social networks into your corporate giving programs that do not run the risk of making your brand seem greedy and self-serving. One way is to involve customers in the allotment of your brand's charity dollars, as demonstrated by Chase Community Giving. (To participate, users must allow access to the Chase Community Giving application and may earn additional charity votes by liking, tweeting or emailing content from the application.) Chase also does an excellent job promoting its charitable efforts and encouraging others to get involved in their community via frequent Facebook posts and images with a distinct and recognizable brand aesthetic.

Pandering for Meaningless Engagement

Too many brands pursue Facebook strategies with engagement as a primary goal. The problem is that engagement is a means to an end and not a goal unto itself. Brands can get caught in the trap of chasing every like, comment or share without considering the larger brand impression that is being conveyed.

One way a brands' obsession with engagement can manifest is with Facebook pages that are nothing but jokey and vapid posts unrelated to the brand, mission or audience. Check out the page for "Flo, the Progressive Girl." In recent weeks, Flo has posted jokes about unicorns, dogs, the limbo, Christmas sweaters, s'mores, houseplants and dinosaurs. This strategy may increase the page's "talking about this" statistic, but what do these posts say about Progressive? Meaningless posts cannot build meaningful relationships on Facebook; that was quite clear when Progressive faced a PR crisis last year and found the brand had earned little to no advocacy despite having 4.5 million "fans."

Another way to detect brands that are overly focused on engagement is when every single Facebook post requests a like, share or comment. There is a fine line between encouraging engagement and begging for it. The Clorox Facebook page is an example of one that, I believe, crosses that line. Almost every post on the page asks you to "like if you..." or "share if you..." The impression one gets is of a brand desperate for attention and more interested in what fans can do for the brand than vice versa.

Who wouldn't want to share this post?!

There is another way. Disney does not need to ask people to like or share their posts because they provide content that is so good people engage and share without being asked. Of course, not every brand can be Disney, but you do not need to be Disney to furnish strong, powerful, brand-appropriate content that gets engagement. Look at Kit Kat, Starbucks, Samsung, Barbie, Intel, Kohler, PetSmart, Ford, Gibson Guitar, Monopoly, Sharpie, Duracell and Duck Tape. These diverse brands are creating engagement on Facebook without having to ask for it, and they are sharing humorous posts that aren't just funny but say something about the brand. These brands do not beg for fans and likes--they earn brand-building engagement by offering Facebook content that conveys confidence, desirability, style, personality, affinity with customer interests and respect for customers' time and intelligence.

It is vital to remember the reason your brand is on Facebook in the first place: not to get "likes" but to build business. Focusing only on the factors that affect EdgeRank will not build awareness, consideration, intent and advocacy. Don't forget your brand vector--if your Facebook posts are not moving people closer to your brand, then you are just wasting your brand's time and opportunities on Facebook. (To learn more about brand vector, please read my blog post, The Complete Facebook Success Formula Every Marketer Should Know.)

In 2013, I would like to see better corporate Facebook strategies that give consumers more reasons to pay attention and that result in stronger brands and customer relationships. If brands can kill these three atrocious social media practices, Facebook will be a better place for both brands and consumers.

What do you think? Do you agree with my list? Anything you would like to add? Comment below, and perhaps I can write a follow-up post entitled, "Three More Corporate Social Media Trends That Should Die in 2013."

A New Year's Resolution That Helps You Personally AND Professionally

2013-01-01T13:59:00.000-05:00

The following is based on a blog post I wrote a year ago, but it seems worth revisiting on New Year's Day. I'm not a huge fan of New Year's resolutions--after all, why not work to improve yourself every day of the year rather than just on January 1?--but I'd like to propose a resolution that can improve your 2013 both personally and professionally: Write. Religiously. Every week. Start now.

You can launch a blog today. It is easy to do on Wordpress or Blogger. Beware, because the few minutes you take to launch a blog will commit you to dozens or hundreds of hours in 2013 to develop content and engage with others, but that's the whole idea, isn't it? (If, for now, you lack the confidence to share your ideas and observations with the world, start by writing for yourself.)

For me, writing was not an easy habit at first, but now it has become so essential that when I have trouble finding time to write, I become uneasy. The ideas start piling up. I can actually begin to lose sleep because I lay in bed composing in my mind the blog posts I am not producing for my blog. It is not rare for me to wake up with a developed line of thought, head directly to my PC and furiously type before I lose the idea and perspective. Sometimes those ideas stand up but other times they melt in the morning light.

Do I sound like an addict? Perhaps, but there are worse things than being addicted to a habit that leaves one empowered, educated and improved. I have experienced strong and demonstrable benefits because of my work on Experience: The Blog. Here are the ways you might also benefit by making a commitment to write regularly:

Reaffirm and strengthen the ideas you bring into the world: The process of blogging forces me to take an idea that I am confident is sound and discover the holes--and trust me, some of your strongest beliefs can begin to look awfully shaky as you convert a string of ideas into a cohesive and persuasive argument. As I compose a blog post to convince others of my perspective, I must first convince myself. I do this by filling in the blanks, taking time to analyze and study, and finding third-party data and information that substantiate my arguments. Once the blog post is fully baked, it not only becomes a piece of content for my readers but also a viewpoint I can call upon in meetings, when I am presenting or as I develop strategies on the job.
Develop a point of view: We recognize that brands are strengthened not when they are all things to all people but when they focus on one meaningful perspective for one meaningful audience. In the same way, writing can help you to focus your thinking in a way that develops your personal brand. When you blog for others, you begin to think about who it is you want to read your content and what you want them to think and do. My blog and my audience force a discipline in the things I read, research and think, and this has paid dividends by sharpening my reputation, skills and point of view.
Improve your writing: This benefit is obvious: the more you write, the better you become. I hesitate to say this because you may be thinking, "But Augie, you suffer from run-on sentences, passive voice and just misused the colon in the last sentence." All may be true, but do not let your fear of grammar prevent you from improving your grammar. Today, I can look back at my early blog posts and easily recognize that my writing and proofreading have improved. Any embarrassment I may feel about the lesser quality of my writing four years ago is more than compensated by the realization I would still be stuck at that level had I not started and committed to my blog. If you lack confidence in your composition or proofreading skills, ask a friend or peer to review your blog posts before you publish.
Build a network around ideas: The world is full of curators; millions of Twitterers share links to interesting articles and blog posts. Curating is valuable service, to be sure, but without creators, there would be nothing for curators to curate. At this stage in social media development, it is no longer easy to develop a following merely by curating--too many people share too many of the same links--but the world always needs more creators. Creators are the people who stop (or decrease) social media from merely being an echo chamber, and creators also earn the most attention. There is no more powerful way to be recognized and build an engaged network than by giving others content and ideas they may consider and share.
Create your own database of news and statistics: Ever have the experience of vaguely recalling an interesting bit of data or news but being unable to locate the content when you need it? Blogging is a great way to create your own personal database of the information you want to find again in the future. When I find interesting data or a pertinent case study, I write about and link to it, and that means I can always find this information by returning to my own blog. Take my last blog post, "Where Social Media Will Grow in 2013 (and Where it Won't)"; that one blog post contains more than 40 links; as a result, I will never have to waste time searching for the American Express study that found people tell 15 friends and family about positive brand experiences but 24 people about negative ones.

So now you know my secret--I write as much for myself as I do for you. This blog has improved my knowledge and skills, gained me new friends and professional contacts and helped me to land jobs. I wish the same benefits for you.

I hope all of my blog posts change minds, at least a little, but nothing would make me happier than to have someone thank me a year from now for encouraging them to write, share and connect in 2013. You may not get thousands of readers right off the bat, but there are people who are waiting to hear your voice. Do not disappoint them--or you.

Where Social Media Will Grow in 2013 (and Where It Won't)

2012-12-31T08:57:00.000-05:00

Social Media has had a terrific ride for the past several years, but the days of easy growth are gone. In fact, the days of easy anything in social are behind us. For many brands, 2013 will be a year of social media disappointment.

With so many consumers spending so much time in social media and expecting so much of brands, our investments in social will continue to grow, but that does not mean our results will grow, at least in easily measurable ways. Certainly, all of our brands will earn more fans, see more comments and collect more retweets, but we all know this is no longer enough--our bosses want to know the business results we are delivering, and fans simply are not a business benchmark.

Success in 2013, more than ever, will be measured in difficult metrics and not easy ones, and increasingly, it will come not just from the Marketing department but from every corner of the enterprise. To succeed in 2013 and beyond, organizations must recognize how social media is altering the way we live, work and conduct business and not just the way we kill time on Facebook.

Here is where (I believe) social will grow and where it will stumble and stagnate in 2013:

Stagnate: Number of Social Media Users: Social networking has seen explosive growth in the past decade, but that is ending. It has to, since the point of saturation is nearing. In 2005, just eight percent of US online adults participated in social networking; by 2008, that number had grown to 35%; and today it is 69%. The slowing growth in new users will, for a moment, feed the doubts of some senior executives (who are part of the 50-to-64 crowd of which little over half use social media) that social media is more distraction than it is imperative. This attitude would be wrong, of course, which is why we need to focus not on users but...
Grow: Social Media Usage: The growth in the number of users may slow, but the way users adopt social media into their lives will not. Nielsen/NM Incite tells us that total time spent on social media in the U.S. across PCs and mobile devices increased 37% to 121 billion minutes (230,060 years!) in July 2012, compared to 88 billion in July 2011. People may be multitasking more than ever--40% of us use our phone or tablet while watching TV--but that does not mean that social media's growth is not coming at the expense of other media consumption activities...
Grow: Social and Digital Media Pushes Aside Other Media: Especially in younger demographics, media consumption habits are shifting considerably and show no signs of stopping. comScore data demonstrates that the time spent with web-based email by 18-to-24 year olds declined 34% in the last year and nearly 50% since 2010. Even TV viewership is being affected; the 18-to-24 group watched a weekly average of 22 hours and 32 minutes of traditional TV in Q2 2012, about 1 hour and 45 minutes less than they did the year before. Meanwhile, although online video viewing is still eclipsed by TV, it is growing rapidly; the 18-to-24 folks watched one hour and 45 minutes of online video per week in 2012, a 75% increase in a single year. As for print, it continues to shrink--as Newsweek publishes its final print edition, it is time to consider what it means that Americans now spend more time staring at mobile screens than magazines and newspapers.
Grow: Second-Tier Social Networks (But Who Cares?) Growth of the "big three" social networks is slowing (Facebook and LinkedIn had no growth in desktop visitors in the past year and Twitter's growth was just 13%), but sites like Pinterest, Google+ and Tumblr are still collecting new visitors. If you are in one of the few industries that has a clear strategic interest in social networks such as these, that is good news, but most brands should greet this news with nothing more than casual interest. Within most industry verticals, there are few scalable use cases and precious few case studies for marketing programs on Pinterest, Google+ and Tumblr. (For example, I recently researched what success financial services firms are having on Pinterest and found none.) Unless something notable changes in 2013, I see little reason to do anything more than experiment on these second-tier social networks.
Grow: Mobile Social Media (and Mobile Everything Else): It is no secret that mobile adoption continues to explode, and along with it so does social media usage. The big three social networks may have seen little to no growth in visitors from PCs in the past 12 months, but all three have experienced growth of 85% to 140% in visitors from mobile apps and mobile web sites in the same period. In addition, while Foursquare has not been quite as talkable in 2012 as in prior years, it is still experiencing triple-digit annual growth of its mobile app. (Many of you may be surprised to learn that, as of July of this year, Foursquare's mobile app had a larger audience than either Google+ or Pinterest.) In fact, despite privacy concerns around checking in, comScore found that one-third of smartphone users have shared their location with a retailer. All of this points to more SoLoMo marketing and service in 2013, and that means brands with physical locations have to continue to not simply have a local presence in social networks but drive more meaningful local engagement.
Stagnate: Earned Media on Facebook: Getting people to pay attention to your brand on Facebook will get harder without opening your pocketbook. The issue, believe it or not, is not with Facebook--it's your brand. What makes your brand interesting, engaging and shareable? Why would your brand earn enough EdgeRank with people to be as worthwhile as their own friends? While Mark Cuban may complain, what is it that we expect Facebook to do about it? As marketers, we may want EdgeRank tweaked to show more brands in users' news feeds, but as users, does that sound appealing? (How often have you or one of your friends said, "You know, I just want to see more brands and less friends in my news feed"?) Brands must continue to maintain a presence on Facebook because our customers expect it, but increasingly attention will shift to paid media (or, more appropriately, to how paid, earned and owned media work together.) Of course, opening your pocketbook and buying media is hardly a guarantee of success on Facebook...
Grow (But the Jury Remains Out): Paid Media on Facebook: While some studies have shown Facebook advertising can be effective, many marketers are still struggling to measure it. In a recent Ad Age study, one-third of marketers either did not know or said Facebook is not useful in building purchase intent, and over half felt it was only somewhat useful. Moreover, advertising success on Facebook may be harder to achieve as the year progresses--with modest user growth, little ability (or willingness) to increase ad presence on the platform and more marketers increasing their budgets, Facebook ad prices will rise. Success will require ever more complex targeting and measurement, such as retargeting, CRM targeting by email address or phone number, View Tags, improved first-party data collection and segmentation and custom segmentation from third-party providers to reach influencers on Facebook. There is a cottage industry exploding to help marketers spend their Facebook budget more effectively--check out the long list of Facebook advertising partners--and 2013 will be the year to start separating the wheat from the chaff.
Grow (in Fits and Starts): Big Data: I have seen many year-end predictions that 2013 will be the year that social helps "Big Data" succeed. I do not believe it, not because I doubt the promise of Big Data but because it seems apparent the road to Big Data success will be a long one. The current hype and optimism for Big Data reminds me of the exuberance we saw for ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) in recent decades, but success with ERP implementations has come slowly and with many failures. Even now, twenty years after Gartner coined the term "ERP," we still see high-profile ERP failures that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Big Data is not a system you merely switch on and see results; it will take time, care, investment, and incremental improvement to turn petabytes of data into useful knowledge that drives business success.
Shrink: Bad Social Media Research: Increasingly, when I speak to peers within the discipline of social media, I am hearing frustration about the amount of bad research being shared. Blogs, podcasts and YouTube may have democratized the mass broadcast of information, but they also opened the door to every Tom, Dick and Harry to misreport, misinterpret or misrepresent data. We continue to see ridiculous "what is the value of a fan" studies and blog posts, even though it has been long evident that fans are a means to an end and not the end itself. Having 4.5 million fans did not prevent Dippin' Dots from declaring bankruptcy, nor did Best Buy's 6.5 million fans (and its widely praised Twelpforce Twitter program) prevent the company from being one of the worst stock performers of 2012, losing more than 50% of its value. From analysis that confuses cause and effect to studies that rely on the self-awareness of consumers to biased surveys, there is an astounding amount of bad information being disseminated. I sense social media professionals are growing tired of it, and I think this is the year where we see gravitation toward fewer information sources that we trust. This may be more wish than prediction on my part, but if you join me, we can make it happen!
Growing: Consumer Expectations of Social Customer Service: Increasingly, the reason to be in social media (to paraphrase John F. Kennedy) is not because of what your fans can do for you but what you can do for your fans. Social media is becoming a customer service channel of choice for many customers. Almost one in five consumers have used social media at least once in the last year to obtain a customer service response. Not only are the number of customers expecting service in social media rising, so are their expectations: One recent study found that 42% of consumers who post a service request to a brand via social media expect a response within 60 minutes, and 57% expect the same response time at night and on weekends as during normal business hours. Unsurprisingly, the stakes continue to rise for brands; an American Express study found that consumers tell an average of 15 people about positive experiences – up 67% from last year--and tell an average of 24 people about poor experiences – up 50% from 2011. Given this data, it is baffling to see a company like Charter Communications announce it is disbanding its social media customer service team and shuttering its customer service profiles in social media. A Charter representative stated, “We believe speaking directly with a customer is a more personal, effective and consistent way to answer questions," which demonstrates both an astounding lack of understanding of social media and a remarkable arrogance in believing that companies have the power to decide which service channels customers prefer. My prediction: All brands will be beefing up customer service in social media in 2013, and Charter will be back furnishing service via Twitter and Facebook before long.
Exploding: Social Business: Almost everything I have included in this blog post thus far is the appetizer to this, the main course: Social business models may still be nascent, but they are exploding at a spectacular rate. As I have written in 2012, social is not just changing the way we communicate but the way we conduct business. The evolution of the Web followed a similar path over the past 15 years--the Internet altered not just the way we gather information but the way we make product decisions (search, ratings and reviews), purchase items (ecommerce) and use products (digital downloads, ebooks, streaming video, digital photos, etc.) Social media is already doing the same thing to certain industries, and I expect 2013 will be the year more companies take notice:

P2P Lending: Midway through 2012, Lending Club and Prosper, the two leading peer-to-peer (P2P) loan services, surpassed $1 billion of loans issued since their founding. Lending Club, the larger of the two, issued $88 million in loans in November 2012, an increase of 200% over its November 2011 volume, and--in a sign of how P2P models will soon challenge traditional banking--the firm recently added Larry Summers, former World Bank VP and US Treasury Secretary, to its board of directors.
Car sharing continues to grow, albeit more slowly than P2P lending; Zipcar's stock was battered after its last quarterly report announced it "only" had year-to-year membership growth of 21%. Meanwhile, virtually all the major car manufacturers and car rental agencies are making their own investments in car sharing models, including General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Enterprise and Hertz. We Americans love our cars, so change here will come slow and steady. Don't expect a "hockey stick" moment for car sharing in 2013, just more growth that chips away at traditional car ownership habits.
Space sharing: Airbnb continues its rapid growth, allowing people to rent out homes and rooms to others. In June, the company announced the number of guest nights booked had grown from 5 million to 10 million in less than six months, and recently CEO Brian Chesky was quoted saying that by the end of 2012, Airbnb would be filling more room nights than Hilton Hotels. Meanwhile, mobile continues to be a huge growth driver, with 26% of Airbnb’s overall traffic coming from mobile devices (compared to only 12% last year) and downloads of its iOS app increasing 80% over the past three months.
Other Collaborative Consumption Models: Social business does not stop at cash loans, autos and places to sleep. A great deal of experimentation is underway, including P2P parking, home-cooked meals, chores, free stuff, home goods and rides. Sure, these businesses are small, but ecommerce in 2000 was less than one percent of total US retail; twelve years later ecommerce accounts for five percent, a small percentage of retail in the US but more than enough to knock former giants like Kodak and Borders into bankruptcy. What will happen as these P2P business models continue to grow and chip away at existing business models? In 2013, watch for larger numbers of traditional companies to increase their experimentation and investments to hedge their bets for the future growth of social business.

Do you think my forecasts for 2013 are correct or all washed up? I would welcome your dialog--both criticism and agreement--in the comments below or on Twitter (where my handle is @augieray.)

Miracle on Social Media Street

2012-12-27T12:54:00.000-05:00

It may be the week after Christmas, but it is not too late for social media professionals to prepare themselves for 2013 by watching the old, classic, holiday film, "Miracle on 34th Street" (the 1947 original, not the inferior 1994 version.) Not only is it a terrific and heartwarming movie, but it also contains lessons about what we are doing wrong in social media and how we can enhance our brands in 2013.

Early in the movie, a Macy's executive instructs his department store Santa (who may or may not be the real Santa Claus) to push the toys that Macy's has in stock. However, when a child hops on his lap and asks for a toy Macy's does not carry, the Santa tells the child's mother she can get the item for a good price at a Macy's competitor. She is surprised to hear this at Macy's, to which Santa replies, "The only important thing is to make the children happy." The mother seeks out Santa's manager (who is about to fire his well-intended employee) and says,

"I want to congratulate you and Macy's on this wonderful new stunt you're pulling. Imagine, sending people to other stores... Imagine a big outfit like Macy's putting the spirit of Christmas ahead of the commercial. It's wonderful. I never done much shopping here before but from now on, I'm going to be a regular Macy customer."

And there is your social media lesson from the 65-year-old movie: Dedicate your brand to doing what is right for the world and your customers notice, trust more and become loyal.

"From now on, I'm going to be regular Macy customer,"
the astonished mom tells the equally astonished Macy's exec.

What is vital in this example is not that the department story Santa conveyed content but that he conveyed an honest intent to help the customer. We put too much stock in content nowadays; content strategy is vital in 2013, but too often, our brand content conveys our real selfish intent instead of authentically benefiting others. Consumers are beginning to notice the selfishness of our content, and they are not rewarding it: A recent study by MediaBrix found that 86% of consumers find sponsored video ads that appear as content to be misleading; moreover, 85% indicate that when they come across sponsored video ads that appear to be content, it negatively impacts or has no impact on their perception of the brand being advertised. Many people say "Content is king," but history is littered with kings who were awful and unsuccessful (just like most of our branded content)!

When the Santa in "Miracle on 34th Street" told a Macy's customer to go elsewhere to find the toy her child wanted, his goal was not to create "engagement" and build his "brand." He just wanted a child to have a Merry Christmas, and the customer noticed. Actually, in the film many customers notice, and soon Mr. Macy's himself is fending off his annoyed Advertising Department (the paid media folks responding angrily to the selfless acts in earned media), saying,

"I admit this plan sounds idiotic and impossible. Imagine Macy's Santa Claus sending customers to Gimbels, but gentlemen, you cannot argue with success. Look at this. Telegrams, messages, telephone calls. The governor's wife, the mayor's wife, thankful parents expressing undying gratitude to Macy's. Never in my entire career have I seen such a tremendous and immediate response to a merchandising policy. And I'm positive if we expand our policy we'll expand our results as well. Therefore, from now on, not only will our Santa Claus continue in this manner, but I want every salesperson in this store to do precisely the same thing. If we haven't got exactly what the customer wants, we'll send him where he can get it. No high pressuring and forcing a customer to take something he doesn't really want. We'll be known as the helpful store, the friendly store, the store with a heart, the store that places public service ahead of profits."

And therein lays the business wisdom of "Miracle on 34th Street." Do good, make a difference, give selflessly and people will reward you. In other words, have a positive intent and customers notice. This is not just some silly little contrivance from a fictional, old film; there is science to it, as well:

Havas Media Labs Meaningful Brand Survey found that more than half (51%) of consumers want to reward responsible companies by shopping there; 53% would pay a 10% premium for products from a responsible company. And they want companies involved: 85% of consumers want companies to be engaged on global issues, but only 22% think they’re getting enough.
The Forbes Top 100 Brand study found that the top corporate brands "are organizations increasingly known for their charitable giving, sustainability efforts, environmental cleanups, transparent business practices, clearly labeled packaging, respected leaders, ground-breaking innovation. These are benefits that go far beyond the crispness of corn flakes or the cleaning power of laundry detergent."
Interbrand's 2012 brand study found that "Consumers are expecting to see not just great products and services from the brands they choose; they also want to feel that the brands they love are, in fact, worthy of that love." Interbrand points to the importance of corporate citizenship, but it tells it clients, "It’s about more than the spend. It’s about the credibility of a company’s culture of citizenship."
A 2011 Weber Shandwick study found that 70% of consumers avoid buying a product if they don’t like the company behind the product. And 56% say they "try to buy products made by a company that does good things for the environment or community."
The 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer Study found that the attributes that build future trust are "societally focused," including "listening to customer needs, treating employees well, placing customers ahead of profits and having ethical business practices." The report's first recommendation is that organizations "exercise principles-based leadership instead of rules-based strategy."

As you plan your social media and content strategies for 2013, think of "Miracle on 34th Street." Are you creating content that truly helps customers and builds trust, or are you creating content to drive traffic but that harms trust? Are you starting your 2013 content calendar by looking at your brand's product release and ad campaign schedule, or are you starting it with an assessment of what will be on customers' minds throughout the year? Are you trying to create relationships and advocates, or are you trying to create sales and customers? In summary, are you being the customer-focused Santa or are you the brand-focused Advertising Department?

Surely, you don't doubt Santa, do you?

How Often Should Your Brand Post? Don't Misinterpret the Data

2012-12-13T10:08:00.000-05:00

Ask the wrong question and you will get the wrong answer. That is the problem with so many of the studies we see in the digital and social space, particularly those done by vendors with a stake in the outcome.

A classic example of this was the announcement earlier this year that 70% of consumers "said mobile advertising is a welcomed personal invitation from brands, rather than an invasion." Of course, whether people think mobile advertising is a "personal invitation" or a "personal invasion" isn't the pertinent question; the appropriate question is whether people trust mobile ads and whether those ads convert mobile surfers into mobile shoppers and buyers. On those more vital questions, other studies tell a different story--Millward Brown recently found that consumer favorability toward mobile ads was so poor that it ranks with non-opt-in email, and Nielsen found that trust in mobile ads was lower than every other ad medium. Ask the wrong question and you will get the wrong answer.

Source: eMarketer

I had this same reaction today to reading eMarketer's review of SocialVibe's research into brand social media connections. The study found that the number one reason people unfollow a brand is "Too many updates." The second reason is "Brand's values and/or content differed from original perception."

I would suggest that these two answers are one in the same. If people received what they expected to receive from the brands they follow, it would be difficult for the number of brands' posts to rise to the level of "too much." Follow Mashable on Facebook, for example, and you will get a couple dozen posts a day, but Mashable has a million fans and almost 50,000 people "talking about this," so clearly they are getting something right even though they break every "rule of thumb" for frequency of posts. They offer valuable content people welcome, and so long as they do that, it is hard for Mashable to fall on the wrong side of the "too much" perception barrier. And this isn't just the case for media brands, either--how often could Disney or Harley-Davidson post before people would cry "too much"?

Ask the wrong question and you will get the wrong answer. If you ask people whether they unfollow brands for posting too much, they will answer in the affirmative. But the psychology behind the decision to unfollow is not really about quantity of posts but their value. If consumers saw more value, they would welcome more posts.

This isn't to suggest your brand has carte blanche to post as often as it wishes but to advise you ignore studies that ask the wrong question and instead focus on the needs and expectations of your own audience. If you bring laser focus to how your brand can truly and selflessly serve those needs and expectations, you can pretty much ignore all those studies and "best practices."

No study can tell you how often your audience will accept your brand posting in social media, but your audience can. And that is the right question to ask!

The False Promise of Pinterest for Financial Services

2012-12-06T08:00:00.000-05:00

A year or so ago, as Pinterest started to garner media attention and a mass audience, a host of agencies and consultants that focus on the financial services industry launched a wave of blog posts and presentation decks to champion the power of this new image-sharing platform for banks, insurance firms, credit card companies and credit unions. A year or so later, those optimistic predictions have been largely unrealized. While Pinterest is proving successful for retail, home goods, media, style and other categories, it is not proving to be the "next big thing" for financial services.

Clearly, Pinterest has had a great 2012--Nielsen tells us that traffic to Pinterest has increased over 1,000% this year--but traffic and demographics alone do not make a social network useful for business. Marketers must consider consumer behaviors and expectations on the platform. The failure to do so undermined many of the concepts bloggers were so eager to promote to financial services brands. For example, many suggested a bank could start a "wish list" board for photos of items people can save for, and another common idea was to start Pinterest boards that match customers' interests, such as golf or travel. The uselessness of these ideas is obvious to anyone who has spent a few minutes on Pinterest--people share photos of the things they cannot afford and the places they want to travel without any assistance from their financial services providers. Consumers simply do not need their bank or insurance company to help them do on Pinterest what Pinterest exists for in the first place!

Financial services firms have done an outstanding effort of testing the new platform but seen very little by way of evident results. This is not a criticism of Pinterest--no single social network or tool needs to (or should) fit every brand and industry--but perhaps this is a criticism of a marketing machine that pushes every new thing, regardless of the sense or strategy. Now that we can look at 2012 in the rear view mirror, it is easy to see there are few, if any, case studies that demonstrate Pinterest is a match for the goals of financial services brands.

If you know of great case studies I have missed, please share, but my recent survey of bank, credit card and insurance brands on Pinterest came up very dry:

Citi Jobs for Recruiting: Recruiting is considered a potential use case for Pinterest, but it is not evident how photos and videos of people in conference rooms and cubicles really help. Citi had eight boards dedicated to their efforts in the community and careers, but it had only 32 followers and, interestingly, from the time I researched this blog post to the time I published it, the Citi Jobs Pinterest board has disappeared. Did Citi find the board was more costly to maintain and monitor than it was worth for the results?

Source: americanexpress.com
via American on Pinterest

American Express for Brand: AmEx is a true social media leader in the financial services industry. It has blazed trails on Facebook, where the brand has earned 2.7 million likes and has more than 100,000 monthly active users of its Amex Sync Facebook app. If I had to guess the financial services brand that would make Pinterest work, it would be AmEx, but it has a mere 313 followers and a single like. Even terrific visual content such as this infographic on the importance of small business to our economy has earned just three repins and one like. The same image posted to the American Express OPEN Facebook page garnered 75 likes and 22 shares. In a sign of just how bad Pinterest engagement is for this interesting content, American Express had more success posting the infographic to Google+, where this same image earned one share and eight +1s.

PerkStreet Financial for Driving Traffic: PerkStreet has been experimenting with various Pinterest strategies and has shared its middling results in an interesting deck posted to SlideShare. The brand attempted contests and found them difficult to run, although they did generate interest on Pinterest. (Whether interest in Pinterest pins equates into business is another question altogether, of course.) The company also attempted collaboration boards--encouraging people to post "stuff I didn't buy"--and found it was difficult to get participation. In the end, it seems the most successful thing PerkStreet did with Pinterest was to post more images to its blog and allow easy pinning to Pinterest boards; Pinterest became the fifth highest driver of traffic to its site. Despite these efforts, their board only has 304 followers.

USAA for Brand: At my former employer, we began experimenting with Pinterest in the past year. Given the community served by the organization, the goal on Pinterest was to share evocative images that conveyed the spirit and commitment of the military. Despite posting excellent shots into boards such as the U.S. Coast Guard Birthday and U.S. Army Birthday, the account only has 407 followers. Few of USAA's 155 pins have been repinned more than a handful of times, and almost none has earned more than a couple of likes. Compare this to one recent photo that USAA posted to its Facebook page of a child greeting his mother returning from deployment --12,702 likes, 2,318 shares and 178 comments. I am pleased to see USAA continue to experiment, but it is evident the association gets far more bang for its buck on Facebook than on Pinterest.

Capital One for Promotion: Cap One offers a Pinterest Board focused on its Venture rewards program. It has almost twice as many pins as it has followers--406 pins, 217 followers and 38 likes. Just five percent of these pins have had any repins. It is not possible to tell if these images are proving successful at driving traffic to the Cap One site or interest in Cap One services, but there is no reason to think this is providing any benefits of significant scale.

At best, Pinterest seems an adjunct to the other visual marketing programs that financial services brands are already running rather than the hub of these sorts of programs. Given the modest results to date, the best thing brands in financial services can do is to be sure to implement sharing mechanisms on their sites so that consumers who care to share on Pinterest can easily do so.

Of course, one of the biggest challenges to financial services firms on Pinterest is not the lack of results but the need to manage Pinterest programs in a compliant fashion. Whereas platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are more mature and have APIs that permit the management and archiving through Social Media Management Systems (SMMS) such as Socialware, Sprinklr and Buddy Media, Pinterest still lacks such an API. That creates challenges for financial services firms who are required to archive, monitor and moderate based on the regulations from FINRA, SEC and others.

Pinterest may eventually come of age in the financial services space, but it is difficult for me to see how its core purpose and interactivity will benefit financial services brands in any way with significant scope. I'd welcome your input if you disagree or can offer good examples of financial services brands succeeding on Pinterest.

How Powerful Is Social Media Sentiment Really?

2012-11-26T09:11:00.001-05:00

In the church of social media, there is no concept more sacrosanct than that of public consumer sentiment. In the social era, the gold of the realm is no longer the number of impressions made by your ads but the number of impressions created peer to peer. With brand praise and gripes broadcast to hundreds of friends and followers, public opinion has never been more public, so brands must bow before alter of social media sentiment.

That is the party line among social media professionals, but does it stand up to scrutiny? While it may seem heretical to say, I believe there is ample evidence social media sentiment does not matter equally in every industry to every company in every situation. By focusing attention and altering corporate behaviors where it matters, we might better change sentiment in ways that protect and enhance the bottom line.

Before you sharpen your knives, let's define what social media sentiment is and is not. In our highly networked world, we are exposed to more people saying more about brands than ever in the past, but do all those exposures influence purchase decisions as much as we seem to believe? Clearly individual sentiment matters--what you think about a brand affects your own decisions--but how much do the opinions of crowds impact your buying behaviors?

Look at Hostess Brands. The news of the impending death of Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Ho Hos has been greeted with the sort of wailing and rending of garments usually reserved for the passing of a beloved public figure. But if we all love Hostess so much, how did it come to such an ignoble end? The positive sentiment the public has for Hostess is based on golden-hued memories of childhood, but in an age of "buy local," organic, health consciousness, these positive feelings drove insufficient sales in the harsh, fluorescent reality of the grocery store aisle. (Of course, while the public sentiment for Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Ho Hos will not save Hostess, it may drive the acquisition of the iconic brands.)

In 2010, Harris Interactive released a list of most and least respected companies. Given how networked we were in the intervening two years, it stands to reason that all the buzz shared about the most respected companies would be lifting those stocks while the anger and frustration directed at the least respected firms would be evident in depressed share prices. Of the ten most respected companies, seven are, in fact, on the list of the United States' 50 most profitable corporations, but so are five of the least respected. Moreover, in the last twelve months, the seven publicly traded companies on the 2010 "least respected" list have outperformed the DJIA by more than 200%. The fact so many people dislike these companies and share those feelings online does not seem to dent the financial success of these firms.

Scan the list of the most hated companies in America according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index and you will see that certain industry segments seem immune to the power of consumer sentiment. Corporations in cable and internet service, banking, power and airlines, many of which are among the most profitable companies in the U.S., dominate that list. How can these industries be continuing to thrive in the social era despite the negative public sentiment? They share some commonalities that help to inoculate them from the dangers of negative sentiment--they are capital intensive, highly regulated industries with limited competition and have both great barriers to entry for new competitors and high switching costs for consumers.

Other factors may also be at play. For example, banks often make the lion share of their money off a small minority of their customers. Bank of America suffered what should have been a damaging blow to its business results due to the wave of negative sentiment associated with Bank Transfer Day, but BoA seemed to emerge not just unscathed but stronger for it. At least part of the reason the bank did so well is that the lowest-profit, highest-cost customers likely were the ones who abandoned BoA for credit unions. In other words, not all sentiment is equal in a vertical where customer contribution to the bottom line is wildly unequal.

Even within some industries, it can be impossible to see the impact of sentiment on business results. Look at the retail vertical, where the ACSI tells us Nordstrom, J.C. Penney and Kohl's enjoy customer satisfaction rates well above average while Walmart not only anchors the bottom of the list by a substantial margin but actually saw a decrease in satisfaction in the prior twelve months. Now look at the stock performance of these retailers in the past year--J.C. Penney is the worst performing stock of the bunch, Kohl's is one of the few with a stock price down in the past year and Nordstrom's stock performance is in the middle of the pack. Despised Walmart? Its stock is up more in the past year than the three retailers with the strongest customer satisfaction ratings. Many hate shopping at Walmart, but apparently low prices trump sentiment, reputation and customer satisfaction.

Obviously, a year or two of stock performance and social media sentiment data is not a lengthy enough period to evaluate the interrelationship. Strong negative sentiment is not an explosion that tears apart the financial foundation of a company but is more like a river that wears it away over long periods. Nevertheless, some of the most hated companies have been hated for many years and remain solidly in the black--the consistent revenue and profitability of AT&T, Comcast, Walmart and others seem to mock our current obsession with public sentiment.

It is easy to understand why the adoption of social media caused us to worry more about the public sentiment around our brands, but step back and ask yourself what has really changed. People's perceptions of companies such as McDonald's, Walmart or Comcast did not change simply because Facebook was adopted by a billion people on the planet, nor were the attitudes of these brands shrouded in secrecy until Twitter ripped the blinders from our eyes. Did anyone really get on Twitter, see what people are saying and think, "Holy cow--I had no idea people find shopping at Walmart a bit unpleasant, that cable companies offer poor customer service or that McDonald's serves food of dubious health value"?

Let's move this out of the realm of the theoretical and into the real and personal:

Did you see the video that surfaced last holiday season of a delivery person throwing a computer monitor box over a customer's fence? Which delivery service was it, and did you purposely stop using them after seeing the clip? Answers: FedEx and no.
How many times have you seen United Breaks Guitars? Because you saw Dave Carroll's United experience have you chosen a more expensive or less convenient itinerary to avoid flying on United? Answer: No.
And on the positive side of sentiment, how many of you heard Peter Shankman's story of Morton's Steakhouse delivering a steak dinner to him at the Newark airport in response to a tweet? It is a delightful story that has been retold via social media many times. I am sure it cemented Peter's loyalty for life, but did you run out to a Morton's Steakhouse because of Peter's experience? Do you think if you tweeted out a request, the restaurant would chase you with free meat? No and no.

Another way to explore this is to look at the companies who earned headlines in the early days of social media for leading the charge to listen and respond to social media sentiment. If public sentiment is as vital as we have been led to believe, it stands to reason the leaders in listening and managing consumer sentiment must be soaring, but instead many are struggling:

In December 2010, Dell created waves with a social media command center that would make NORAD blush--and since then the stock is down 33% and the company is now facing layoffs.
The first brand I recall launching its own command center to listen and respond to social media sentiment was Gatorade, but while the brand's marketing lifted sales for a while, it has continued to lose market share to Powerade.
Remember Twelpforce, Best Buy's all-hands-on-deck push to respond to public comments and questions on Twitter? It launched in mid 2009 to much praise and is still going strong on Twitter, yet since Twelpforce was deployed, Best Buy's stock is down two-thirds while the DJIA has climbed nearly 50%.

Social media sentiment has been elevated to God-like status when really it is more of a minor deity. In most situations, what others are saying does not trump our own personal experiences. Nor does it trump our laziness and the costs of switching (or even our own well-worn habits) in the vast majority of cases. In addition, while public sentiment may be a factor in our purchase decisions, we weigh it against many other important factors such as price, convenience, perception of quality, etc.

Let's face it, we all expect brands to disappoint us some of the time, so individual complaints we see on Twitter or Facebook become part of the fog of social media sentiment--none of us have the brain cells to receive, store, recall and evaluate every gripe we see on social media. Hell, I can barely recall my own gripes! I know I have tweeted complaints about airlines, but I couldn't tell you if I have shared more criticism about United, US Airways or Delta. Like most consumers, I continue to fly the same airlines (and gripe about them) because they have the routes and prices I need.

Even if public sentiment has been overvalued, there are situations where it matters a great deal. Moreover, the way we deal with these situations cannot be to conduct business as usual, wait passively for bad sentiment to bubble to the surface and then try to appease people with responsive tweets and comments. We need to recognize when social media sentiment matters most and alter not just our communications and service strategies but our business practices. For example:

Carefully Considered, Non-Recurring Purchases: Few people seek out ratings and reviews for toothpaste, toilet paper and other low-consideration purchases, but does anyone take a vacation, buy a TV or purchase a car without reading and considering customer reviews, any longer? Electronics manufacturers, hotels, automakers and even restaurants (most notably in travel destinations) need to be concerned with their social media sentiment; for example, one 2011 study demonstrated that a one-star increase on Yelp leads to a 5 to 9 percent increase in revenue for restaurants. According to another study, 87 percent say that hotel reviews help them feel more confident that they are making the right decisions. One way to improve ratings is merely to be responsive to customers' ratings and reviews--one travel destination that began monitoring and responding to reviews saw traffic triple and direct revenue double from TripAdvisor in a one-year period. Companies in these industries are also being more proactive, focusing on improving the customer experience, actively seeking consumer input to enhance service and listening for and resolving problems. One bank customer experience team noted a high number of requests for reset PIN numbers on new debit cards and proactively made a change to the timing of PIN mailings, instantly decreasing these requests by 54 percent.
Product and Service Changes: Social media sentiment drives a great deal of timely attention around newsworthy events. That is what Bank of America learned when it tried to increase fees on debit cards; as noted earlier, the bank may not have suffered financial ramifications from its painful social PR event, but the raging public sentiment did force the bank to rescind its decision in embarrassingly public fashion. BoA is hardly alone--other brands (such as Gap, Tropicana and Netflix) have suffered uprisings when they surprised customers with unwelcome changes to products and service. Brands cannot conduct business the same old way, making unilateral decisions and preparing to respond to complainers. More and more, companies are recognizing the need to involve customers in decisions and enlisting their aid to deliver the message. Barclays offers a wonderful example of this new approach--the company recently issued a new credit card, but instead of dictating fees and policies, it is crowdsourcing them. The result was a 25 percent drop in the card's servicing cost compared to other Barclays cards.
Corporate Practices: While others' gripes about the quality of a product or service may get negligible attention, little gets people so easily worked up as a heartless corporation destroying our planet, taking advantage of employees or doing the wrong thing for customers. An insurance company made your friend wait on hold for fifteen minutes? Yawn. But an insurance company that legally supports the person who killed a family member who paid the insurance premiums? Outrage! We all can excuse the occasional product or service disappointment, but when Mattel is accused of deforestation or Walmart sues a brain-damaged employee, thousands of angry customers will take action and make their voices heard. Little a company does is private and opaque any longer, so increasingly companies are making decisions not only based on financial and legal criteria but also on how consumers may react. "In the court of public opinion, no one cares that it’s legal or if the regulator approved it," says Robert Hunter, the director of insurance at the Consumer Federation of America. Rather than focus on collecting fans with another sweepstakes, brands that want to make a real change and decrease their risks in the social era must identify their most risky corporate practices and change them (or proactively communicate better about them) before they are outed in agonizingly publish fashion.
Time-Sensitive Products: Social media sentiment becomes more important in key moments of time for certain sorts of brands. A movie opening or new album from a music artist lives and dies on what consumers have to say online in mere days. The same is true of new products--the social media sentiment in the weeks following a product launch can help to make or break its chances. Once again, the solution is not to prepare for consumer reaction and hope for the best but to engage people along the route. Movie studios have found social media campaigns can be a mixed bag--"Snakes on a Plane" used crowdsourcing to get a whole lot of people talking but very few showed up at theaters, while the social media campaign for the documentary "Bully" helped the producers earn a favorable rating from the MPAA and boosted ticket sales. Meanwhile, many consumer brands are crowdsourcing product development to produce better products and give consumers a sense of ownership in their success--Lego is a leader in this, involving customers in new product decisions.
Local business: Finally, social media sentiment can particularly help to make or break a small, locally owned business. One recent study found that Facebook and Twitter drive more than half of all referred visits for small business sites, three times the percentage of larger sites. It may be hard for tweets and posts to move revenue and profit significantly for a company the size of Bank of America or Comcast at a national level, but for the small boutique or restaurant on the corner, it can make all the difference in the world. There are plenty of places to find examples of small business social media success stories, including TechCrunch, Hubspot and Social Media Examiner. One craft brewer combined national advertising with 250 launch parties across the country to introduce local consumers to its new IPA, and in six weeks the brand achieved its three-month sales goal. Even big companies can get on the local train.

If brands come to realize social media sentiment is not as strong a factor for success as we first thought, how should they react? First, they should not pull away from social, because it is becoming a channel of choice for many consumers. Whether or not public sentiment is as powerful as predicted, individual sentiment still matters, and you can no more ignore consumers tweeting your company as you can ignore their phone calls.

Secondly, as I have shared on this blog many times, social business and peer-to-peer models are changing products and services themselves. Today we are much too focused on how to tweet and post while ignoring how the social era demands changes in the way we conduct business. Brands that ignore the changing nature of the consumer/brand relationship in the social era may find themselves facing the same fate as those companies who ignored it in the web era. Ask Borders, Kodak, Blockbuster and others how that worked out for them.

I had difficulty writing this blog post, because it was hard for me as a social media professional to wrap my head around the idea that social media sentiment may be overvalued. In addition, I knew (and hoped) that this blog post would be subject to criticism among my peers. What do you think? Am I missing key data points and concepts that tie social media sentiment to business results? Or are there additional instances when social media sentiment becomes more vital to brands? Your input would be greatly appreciated.