Member-to-Member

Using Social Media To Build Meaningful Customer Relationships

2009-07-14T08:45:00-04:00

Part II of this series looked at the undercurrent trends for which social media is cause and effect. This installment recommends how the CMO can take on corporate leadership through customer relationship development using social media. Read the full article.

Part III: CMO Guide to Social Media

Many of the shifts and changes discussed in Parts I and II are understood in piece parts throughout your business and no doubt you and your executive peers are engaged in developing strategies to respond. The CMO has a special opportunity to contribute to this effort and lead the way forward in using the power of social technology to retool the company's key stakeholder relationships - prospect, customer and employee relationships especially - from transactional to relational. This transformation should take you from providing value through the product to providing value through the relationship (the product being a central aspect of the relationship). When customers perceive their relationship with the company as valuable beyond merely the utility of the product you sell them, they will provide value to you beyond the dollars they spend on your product, entering into a dynamic, interactive and co-creative effort to help you succeed.

Lead your peers in developing meaningful customer relationships throughout the entire customer lifecycle

It all starts with the customer relationship. None of the trends above can be addressed without a deep and intimate relationship with your market base and the CMO is the only executive other than the CEO tasked with understanding the market throughout the entire customer lifecycle, from lead to upsell/renewal. The successful CMO sees the customer as a whole elephant while their peers focus by necessity on a trunk, a tusk or a tail (e.g., sales on prospect needs, financial on billing/collections, and operations on customer service needs). When the CMO takes a holistic view of the customer, coaching and encouraging their peers to use social tools to deepen the customer relationship through an aligned set of interactions from prospecting to upselling, the company will become less vulnerable to these destabilizing macro trends and - perhaps more importantly - competitors who would dearly love that same close relationship. There is no formula for this holistic "whole elephant" approach, of course, because one company's elephant is another company's "pick your beastie". Companies and their customer bases are each unique. But here is some strategic advice to help you build on the learnings of others.

Most marketers (myself included) have been trained to represent the company to our audiences of customers, investors, partners, suppliers, employees and influencers. Sure, we understand the value of market research, target segments and customer feedback - and social media tools offer some unique new ways to research our customer base as well - but at the end of the day most of us have used research primarily as an input to our "real" responsibility, which has traditionally been to be (or manage) the voice of the company through a rich mix of brand, messages and channels we blare out at the "market". Generally this market has been fairly faceless, treating even segments of "one" as data to be mined instead of people to be engaged. But people are more than the data they generate and (as we see above) they now have the power to demand that we treat them this way.

By fixating on our external communications task as our main value to the company, marketing has ceded the responsibility for listening to and observing the customer to others, typically sales or operations. This creates a breakdown in the holistic customer relationship-building cycle because when we marketers are talking at the customer, we're just yelling at the elephant; as a result we don't see ourselves and our company in the customer's context and it becomes harder to find new ways to provide them value that will bring them naturally into a loyalty relationship with us. In this way, social marketing can act as an expansion of our qualitative market research strategy at the same time it helps create brand enthusiasts capable of using their market power to help us. The traditional focus group, which still serves an important function as the first step in quantitative research methodologies, no longer has to bear so much of the burden for qualitative research input.

Social marketing is more than a research tool, of course, and at a minimum listening to customers more carefully can make us better communicators in telling our own story. The American Red Cross learned this and was able to use social media to gain a more comprehensive understanding of their volunteers and donors. Armed with this information they adapted their communications to be more effective at the micro level of the vocabulary they used and the macro level of how, when and why they initiated customer communication, mitigating a tendency to over-communicate with blood donors.

Beyond listening, social media offers many places and ways for you to engage customers directly and involve them with your brand. The big sites like Facebook and LinkedIn offer places to put up an electronic storefront, but digging down deeper will reveal places your most enthusiastic customers hang out so you can find and engage the most active influencers in your market. When you get to these deeper levels of engagement, by listening and connecting to their personal interests, you put your company in relationship with them even before the sale. More and more in the future, marketing leadership will include actively devising strategies to put the company into relationship with your customers at every stage in the customer lifecycle - and even outside the product transaction relationship. These holistic relationships span transactional activities, including prospecting, qualified lead gen, customer service, upsell and renewals - so that the customer is constantly receiving value and your company is continually reaping reward (financial and otherwise) through the evolving relationship.

Well executed, a social participation strategy designed to engage customers at every stage of the relationship allows the CMO to provide holistic customer insight to their peers, culling the most important trends, insights and data their colleagues must know see their portion of the elephant most effectively. The CMO's strategic job is not to manage the entire social customer relationship but to understand it, monitor it (have your data!) support it and provide the compelling case for change on its behalf to their peers.

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Part IV in the series will delve into the the second recommendation for how a CMO can use social strategies to help their company shift some of the basic economics of its business model. To read ahead and view the slide presentation, visit my web site or download the full article.

What's really going on underneath the market craziness of social media?

2009-07-07T08:20:00-04:00

Part I of this series introduced the subject of social media as a phenomenon that is changing marketing dramatically. This installment looks more deeply at the undercurrent trends for which social media is cause and effect. Read the full article.

Part II: CMO Guide to Social Media

Before you can use the new market realities to your favor, you have to understand the changes at a deeper level than the symptoms that show up in morphing marketing plan assumptions. The key takeaway here is that social media is much, much more than just another communications channel.

It's all about power shifts

The most fundamental change is a sudden power shift from the organization to the individual. Enabled by inexpensive, high-quality production tools and global reach, ordinary human beings - including your employees - can now produce compelling content to entertain themselves and their peers (sometimes by re-purposing others' video, audio and text), pass on juicy information or breaking news and become niche forces overnight. These people are just people, motivated by a wide variety of drivers, some of which you can impact and most of which you can't. But in all cases, you do not control them and they do hold potential market power over you, as Dell, Apple and a host of others have learned. As a result of this power shift, the professions of journalism, public relations and marketing are changing dramatically. Marketers in particular, can no longer get away with "megaphone marketing" and indiscriminate push marketing (especially through social media channels) because the public now pushes back (or yells back).

These power shifts offer your company opportunities too

Luckily the power shifts and tools that make your company more vulnerable are available for you to use in response, not just to market your wares but to build a stronger business. Your social marketing options go beyond advertising, poofy viral opportunities and word-of-mouth strategies. Marketers are catching on to the reduced effectiveness of advertising; a study at the end of 2008 showed that a majority of CMOs planned to lighten up on social network advertising (35% showing interest in ads on Facebook and MySpace) in favor of social media participation and content creation (well over 50% planning to create podcasts, webinars, forums and blogs). This is good news, because it means your peers are recognizing that commercial success in the social sphere is presaged by adding value of some kind. Why add value through marketing? Simply put, if you don't give people something that interests them enough to socialize around, they'll make their own entertainment and ignore you (which is what they're doing to social advertisers using traditional advertising formats like banner ads). While some of these content strategies are promising, the potential and impact of social technology goes much farther, reaching into the very core of your business model.

Three examples of this deeper business model impact are captured in the Crowdsourcing, Long Tail and Free Economy phenomena, all of which capitalize on the new economics of technology (including, but not limited to, social technology) to adjust the economics of business itself.

Crowdsourcing enables a company to use social strategies to remove costs from the business model and (in most cases) increase customer loyalty and create word of mouth opportunities at the same time.
Long Tail economics allows companies to aggregate (though increased reach) dispersed markets to run profitable businesses in previously untapped niches.
The Free Economy speaks to the power of free services and the gift economy, often powered by social, to generate tangible revenue thanks to rapidly declining costs of service delivery.

So while with one hand new social technology is taking away stability in our markets, with the other hand it offers up new opportunities to create value and wealth.

The market demands more than transparent and authentic communication

As the head of marketing you are shaping your brand by how you respond (or don't) in the social marketplace. The market opportunities that come with new technology also come at the price of greater transparency, authenticity and accountability, the demands for which run deeper than public relations to the very core of your company's identity. In short, the public - which is now empowered to take you down or buoy you up - has become intolerant of "spin." Your audience now demands straight talk, and will penalize those who insult their intelligence by 'faking it', at the same time they reward authenticity where they find it. This pressure to "be real" is often felt most acutely by the marketing department, often the generator of the inauthentic "spin" messages in the first place. As tempting as it is to think of increased transparency and an authentic-sounding voice as tactics prevent PR disasters to and appease a vocal few, it's more accurately understood as one of many forces coming into alignment with broad consumer demand for social responsibility and increased accountability. The way in which you respond will shape your brand identity irrevocably in the eyes of your customers, employees and the media.

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Part III in the series will delve into the the first recommendation for how a CMO can use social strategies to take a leadership role within the company related to customer relationships. To read ahead and view the slide presentation, visit my web site or download the full article.

CMO's Guide to Social Media (Part 1)

2009-06-30T10:47:00-04:00

How Social Media is Shaping Your Leadership Opportunity

I recently gave the following presentation to The CMO Club. The subject of CMO leadership through social media is so rich that I documented my notes and included over 45 links to relevant articles and data in the eight page article, the first section of which is included below. At the end of this post is a link to the full article.

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) have it rough these days. Recession marketing is always tough, but this recession happens to bring with it destabilizing forces affecting the market dynamics between many businesses and their customers. The socialization of the web is both a cause and effect of these changes and thanks to non-stop headlines about social media CMOs (and pretty much everyone in marketing) find themselves frequently responding to social media-related questions like "Do you think we should be on Facebook?", "Let's start a blog!", "Why aren't we Twittering - Tweeting... whatever you call it?"

A CMO's Guide to Social Media: How Social Media is Shaping Your Leadership Opportunities

View more OpenOffice presentations from Dana Theus.

By now, marketers know the best response to have ready to these questions, which is: "We go where our customers are and our social media channel strategy is no different, etc." This is the right answer, but it is not one that should leave a CMO, or their executive peers, feeling comfortable. Why isn't the best marketing response good enough? Because the speed of change in this market means that even a social marketing strategy that makes sense in the one quarter may be completely undermined by the end of the next quarter (for example, if last December you'd written off Facebook because 35+ year old users weren't prevalent there, by March you'd have had to rethink your strategy as that user base more than doubled in 60 days). And it's not just demographics that are shifting, in very short order, advertising has quickly begun to move to more efficient online channels at the same time that online advertising has itself become a search game where the best keyword bean counters win. Email, a long time B2B and B2C marketing staple, is proving less effective as open rates descend and email usage loses out to social networks. Though social networks are beginning to absorb a lot of web traffic, the social networks themselves turn out to be a poor advertising medium because people prefer to interact with each other (instead of ads) in these time-hog social venues. As a result, traditional online advertising formats aren't very effective on social networks and people aren't making purchase decisions there either.

In short, and despite interesting new experiments like Dell's SWARM, it's getting really - really - hard to reach your customers through both traditional and new media channels, and even when you do find the right marketing mix for your audience, it's highly likely that channel effectiveness will shift again before you build your next marketing budget.

Of course you have a job to do, so marketing through this crazy wave is what you'll do, making tactical adjustments to try to maintain and grow your customer and prospect base. But your executive peers need more from a CMO than tactical adjustments in the midst of this uncertain time; they need leadership. Leadership starts with the recognition that social media is - in fact - destabilizing traditional customer-business relationships because it is - in fact - more compelling than traditional marketing channels. Mastering this enticing engagement medium, however, will require more than just out-of-the-box marketing thinking; it will require marketing leaders to step up to broader business leadership challenges, helping their executive peers reshape their businesses around new relationship models with all their key stakeholder audiences, including customers, partners and employees.

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Part II in the series will delve into the underlying trends, the forces at work beneath the tactical social media movement. To read ahead, visit my web site or download the full article.

Social Media Digest #12

2009-06-29T14:13:00-04:00

The best links I found this week surfing the social web.

Insights & Opinions

CMO's Guide to Social Media: Overview & tons of links for the CMO who wants to use social media to get ahead.

Where Should You Put Your Ad Dollars? Big or little companies should start with SEO.

Forrester's 5 Social Era Predictions: From April '09. How did I miss this? Great stuff by @jowyang.

Twitter's Role in the Iranian Election: NYTimes documents the phenomenon.

Social Anonymity Under Fire: Is this the way to encourage responsible social behavior? [http://is.gd/142e1]

Power to the People: @owyang documents the continued tech trends to give us social opportunities we control.

Community Management - Top 5: Good advice passed on.

Social Can Give You Free Advertising. Cool, but replicable, repeatable and reliable? Sadly, no.

Life After Social Media - Social Business. Here it comes?

"Blank" Demonstrates the Power of Social Word of Mouth. Amusing video by 22squared.

Socializing Your Web Presence. Good advice and examples of some basic steps everyone should take.

Are you advertising on Facebook? Click fraud may be an issue RT @sonnyg

Twitter's Business Plan: This is a business plan?

Stats & Factoids

Google to Ad Microblogging Search Engine. RT @ moreovertech

Facebook vs. Twitter: TechCrunch looks at FB's next "attack." Nice feature, but I'm not sure it's a Twitter-killer.

A Good Laugh: Jon Stewart riffs on social media & the Iranian demonstration.

Here's some other stuff you might find useful for keeping on top of things social:

Scan past link digest posts.
Get a daily feed of these headlines before the digest publishes.
Here's a page I maintain with links to some of the more interesting info I come across (I'll make this more sophisticated later).
My delicious bookmarks.
Come network and trade links on Twitter (@dtheus)
Subscribe to this blog.

Social Media Digest #11

2009-06-16T08:19:00-04:00

This week's filter on the social web.

Insights & Opinions

Social E-tiquette: How not to be an E-Hole. Love the revision of KISS.

Smithsonian Crowdsources Their Vision on YouTube: Cool. Watch the baby.

Social Networks Make Louse Marketing Tools? Patience.

Case Study: Raising money and awareness on Facebook Causes (thx to @kanter)

Twitter's Not A Social Network? A sociologists' review. I still think it's what you make of it.

The New Brand Wars: Your personal brand vs. your company's. [http://is.gd/SuGe]

Would You Pay for Super Chirp? Maybe it's just me but it feels like buying friends...

Mommy Bloggers Revealed! Their market power, at least (tho personally I'm not sure "promo engine" is their best role)

Twitpocalypse? (I challenge you to say that out loud w/out laughing.)

Social Media Is Your Voice. Best quote: "The key isn't to be reactive — it's to be proactive."

Do You Suffer From Techno-Ecstasy? Good perspectives.

Entrepreneurial Journalism. Fascinating and a testament to the demand for information with a personal twist.

Stats & Factoids

LinkedIn-Twitter Smackdown: You might be surprised who wins. Of course it depends on the demographic.

Web Analytics Hot: Forrester says companies will more than double their investment in analytics in next 5 years.

18-24 yr olds don't glomp Twitter (only 22%) as much as they poke and play on other social networks (89%).

61% of American's still don't mobilize (at least not on the Internet)

Would You Pay To Be Poked? Facebook introduces payment for third party apps.

Reforming Communists Don't Like Facebook (apparently). Top 3 Social Networks around the world.

Twitter Growth Flattening and Facebook Still Rules. Social TV example by NBA/Turner ala Obama.

Social Network "Ads" Still Popular Target? Forrester says so (along with Email and SEO)

Here's some other stuff you might find useful for keeping on top of things social:

Scan past link digest posts.
Get a daily feed of these headlines before the digest publishes.
Here's a page I maintain with links to some of the more interesting info I come across (I'll make this more sophisticated later).
My delicious bookmarks.
Come network and trade links on Twitter (@dtheus)
Subscribe to this blog.

Social Networks Make Lousy Marketing Tools? Patience.

2009-06-02T09:34:00-04:00

It turns out people like to socialize on social networks according to Knowledge Networks, but we still don't go there to buy stuff, as indicated by user opinion about advertising on social network sites. This is news?

"Social media has reached critical mass, with 83% of the Internet population now using it - and more than half doing so on a regular basis - according to new research being released today by Knowledge Networks. But for all the media industry's hype and buzz surrounding social networks, microblogs, and other social networking platforms, the genre has failed to become much of a marketing medium, and in the opinion of the Knowledge Networks' analysts, likely never will." - Joe Mandese, MediaPost

As a social network user and marketer, I think the real potential for social networks to influence purchase decisions will remain untapped for a while longer. I believe this because I see three factors in this nascent space that have yet to mature:

User Behavior: We users are still figuring out how we want to use social networks and until our behavior demonstrates meaningful patterns, it's of minimal use to the larger marketing economy. How many of us are now making Facebook 'friends and family' and LinkedIn 'business colleagues' when only a year ago we were flocking to add our cube mates to our Facebooks so we had someone to talk to?
Social Network Tools: Social networking technology is still evolving applications and tools to help us socialize around activities other than swapping links and photos. Facebook Causes and Dell's SWARM are both recent examples of efforts to help us involve our friends in the marketing process in ways we (and they) can be enthusiastic about. Until we can refer friends to spending money in ways that aren't socially abhorrent, but actually provide us a social service, we won't see much uptick in social networks playing a obvious, measurable and positive role in the buying process.
Measurement: The tracking tools to help us watch the stats on where "social impressions" really lead as they wend their way through shares on various networks are really in their infancy, but some look very promising.

When these three areas begin to mature, we'll have the basis on which to make judgments about how social networks will help the marketing process. Until then, we're trying to evaluate the new paradigm using the old world view.

Incidentally, Joe Marchese (not to be confused with Joe Mandese above) had a great rebuttal to Joe 1's article by using simple logic to see through the shifting paradigms:

Dave says: "'Obviously, a lot of people are using social media, but they are not explicitly turning to it for marketing purposes, or for finding out what products to buy. It's really about connecting with friends, or connecting with other people,' says Dave Tice, vice president and group account director at Knowledge Networks, and the top analyst behind the report. 'What we're seeing is that word-of-mouth is still the No. 1 most influential source, followed by TV...'"

Joe 2 says: "This point blows my mind. I thought that it had already been established that effective social media campaigns generate word-of-mouth. Online is about people connecting to each other, as mentioned above, and if brands can get people to talk to each other about their brands, they are in effect generating word-of-mouth. So how can word-of-mouth be the most influential source, while at the same time social media, one giant word-of-mouth engine, is ineffective?" - Joe Marchese, MediaPost

Go Joe 2.

Social Media Digest - #10

2009-06-01T09:37:00-04:00

Interesting links tracking the social web phenomenon.

Insights & Opinions

Marketers, Get Real: Latest blog post on how the marketing process needs to deliver social value.

Dell SWARMS out of Singapore: Unleashing the power of collective buying, Dell experiments with social pricing.

Google Eyes Real Time: Twitter demonstrates the power of now.

Facebook Causes Increases My Fundraising ROI (and it's own)

Business Week's Social Media Myths: When BW says it, it sounds so important. (And fyi, Twitter churn at 30%?).

10 Social Media Obstacles (and how to avoid them).

Marchese calls BS on Knowledge Networks Social-Doesn't-Sell Research. He's got some good points.

A Revolutionary Thought: Social media as revival of free speech by @ethany. Go Ethan.

TechCrunch Twit Rant: Reasons Twitter may not be a reliable source of news. Who says crowds are always wise?

Social Communication Catches the Google Wave: Wow. This demo is worth the watch.

The Value Of Entertainment: How social fun (Facebook/YouTube) stole shopping fun's thunder (ebay). Funny video.

Backchannel Thoughts: The price we pay for the speed-of- social.

More Backchannel Thoughts: Will The Wave Kill The Blog? Probably.

Social Media allowed (and not) in the workplace. As heard on Marketplace by American Public Radio.

Stats & Factoids

Impressive: Online video fastest growing media in the history of the WORLD.

Game Theory: Sony launches @Resistance2018 Twitter game to promote movie Terminator Salvation. RT @randymatheson

Google Enterprise Makes Gains: Hmmmm. Maybe I don't need MS Office on my new mini after all.

Social Networking Four Times More Effective at Selling Tampons Than Regular Advertising: @jbernoff updates us on the Groundswell (video).

Here's some other stuff you might find useful for keeping on top of things social:

Scan past link digest posts.
Get a daily feed of these headlines before the digest publishes.
Here's a page I maintain with links to some of the more interesting info I come across (I'll make this more sophisticated later).
My delicious bookmarks.
Come network and trade links on Twitter (@dtheus)
Subscribe to this blog.

Marketers, Get Real

2009-05-26T09:16:00-04:00

By now we all know that the day of the banner ad is past and that the formula for social marketing is being created by us. Here. Now. I believe that this reality is forcing the profession of marketing to change and that the successful marketers of the future will be leaders in their organizations, using not just communications techniques, but deploying social marketing campaigns that provide real social value all by themselves. In other words, if the recipient never takes your call to action, they would still have acquired value from you.

The very nature of that statement seems counter-intuitive to many marketers. What? Provide real value without them paying for it? Like it or not, as the age of message bombardment passes and the social sale becomes more prevalent, marketers will need to provide social value simply to get people's attention, to prove their good will and to demonstrate that they really understand customer needs and motivations.

This latter point cannot be overemphasized. Marketers used to get away with general messages and campaigns promising a benefit or two. No more. Now our efforts must demonstrate - based on insights gained from analyzing transactional customer data as well as qualitative listening - that we understand customers' emotional and rational needs. It's not a one-size-fits-all world and customers know when we don't "get them." What's worse is that when they feel misunderstood, they're more likely than ever to complain about it, publicly. These principals of value delivery are the essential principles of relationship marketing that are staples of the corporate B2B sales force, and which we must now bring to mass B2B and B2C marketing situations. Luckily, we are finally being given the technology to do reasonably well.

Here are a few examples of initial forays into this strategic paradigm:

(Update) Dell SWARM: Dell is using social principals to let groups negotiate down the price of laptops. For limited periods of time (e.g., three days), anyone can pick the laptop configuration of their choice and promote to others. The more people come in on the order, the lower the price goes. They even make it easy to advertise your configuration on Facebook to help promote! Only available in Singapore right now, this experiment in social buying goes beyond collective buying concepts of the past and turns individuals into social sales people. What is the social value to the individuals involved in Dell's new marketing process? Choosing and buying become a social activity online. Even if you don't go in on the purchase, the fact that your friend is participating in a SWARM may be of interest for you in your own product research and evaluation efforts and you certainly will pick up Dell's branding in the process.
Charmin's SitorSquat.com: An evolution of P&G's successful community strategy for teenage girls, BeingGirl.com (as documented in Forrester's Groundswell to be four times more effective than traditional advertising for selling tampons), SitorSquat provides a valuable find-a-toilet service to mobile phone users on the go (and who need to go). It also provides a swapping venue for bathroom humor. Jury's out on how well it will take off as a social site, but at least the combination of personal functionality, crowdsourced information (rate your toilet experience) and social features holds the promise that it may become largely self-maintained and provide Charmin with a brand loyalty foundation for bathroom users everywhere. (I wish I had a more upscale example, but it demonstrates the principal.)
Facebook Causes - Birthday Wish Campaigns: Causes newest tool turns the average Facebook user turning a year older into a mini fundraising powerhouse, encouraging friends to donate instead of give, and (importantly) providing them the tools to organize their social campaign for their friends list.
Sony's Resistance2018: Sony has created a game on Twitter to promote its newest Terminator movie and video game. While it's not the first advergame ever, it's one of the first, fastest and least expensive social games to pop up and reportedly is fun (not being a gamer, I don't really have an opinion myself - I am SO not the target of this campaign.)

Providing value through a marketing campaign is not new. Strategies for value marketing includes free samples and qualification surveys that tell the consumer something about himself (but tells the company more). The most common value-delivery strategy in the traditional paradigm is sponsorship, wherein the marketer provides financial or other support in exchange for visibility. The people that enjoyed the benefits of the sponsored event/service - the social, educational or entertainment value - might or might not attribute their enjoyment to the sponsor, but at least they got blasted with the sponsor's message along the way. Sponsorship isn't always very efficient from an ROI point of view, but traditionally it's been cheaper than paying for the whole event/service yourself.

The social web has changed the business model of sponsorship by reducing the costs to produce certain types of online events, services and social applications. When the advertiser can develop the thing that provides value up front, why let others get the credit? And what's even better, because the value can be delivered in a social context, letting your audience create content as well as share, refer and virally grow the community, the overall cost of maintaining and marketing it can be cost-effective because your audience does a lot of the work.

So are you all jazzed about making a cool little social app for your product? Coolio. Go forth and valufy! But beware the pitfalls of social web and don't make the mistakes so many marketers before you have made. I won't reiterate all the oopses even some of the biggest brands have blundered into, but it will boil down to this: if you are not genuine, accountable and tuned into your customers you will fail. By contrast, if you listen, invite your customers into the marketing experience and change your concept of "brand control" to invite your customers and employees into "brand creation" you may very well succeed to the point that your customers do much of your marketing for you simply by participating and inviting their friends into the experience.

What's the ROI on this strategy? It's as unique as the application and customer segment you address so you'll have to figure that out for yourself; and I admit, sometimes an ROI just isn't there for a social app, so don't force it. You can pay consultants to bring a valuable outside perspect to help you, but in the end it is you that must understand your customer base well enough to serve them through your marketing efforts; the best consultants will encourage you to invite your customers into the conversation up front to increase your knowledge and sensitivity. Be genuine in your outreach, tolerant of mistakes and enthusiastic in your desire to serve them even before selling them and you have the best chance of success.

Some marketers will be excited by reading this post, others will be uncomfortable. If you're unsettled, be honest and ask yourself if the concept of actually creating value, not "marketing value" but "customer value," is uncomfortable. If so, don't despair. Many marketers have been trained to talk about the value that others provide (your product folks or your customer service department, for example). We call this talking-about skill 'communications'. Not so many of us have been trained (or funded) to actually provide value in the awareness process itself, and if we were, it was an entertainment value, a sexy or funny communications that grabbed someone's attention. But the communications-only value of marketing is quickly diminishing as affordable tools put the entire Internet population in the entertainment business along with us. The marketing department now needs to pull its weight along with the rest of the company to provide value to the customer, even when they're just a prospect.

This is the challenge for the 21st Century marketer, to add more and more customer value to the marketing process so that customers get pulled into relationship with you smoothly and enthusiastically. To the extent your management doesn't understand this concept of marketing yet, you'll have to help educate them. It's a big job but don't despair, jump in and help redefine the profession of marketing. It's an exciting time!

Case Study: Facebook Causes Increases My Personal Fundraising ROI 220%

2009-05-20T08:24:00-04:00

I recently got older. Rather than get depressed however, I found reason to celebrate my encroaching mortality with Facebook Causes. The reason I'm writing about it is because Causes' new birthday application enabled me to garner social profit for myself and financial gain for those I'd like to help in a unique way. By evolving their cause marketing platform from an "invite your friends" model to a "run your own fundraising campaign" model, they personally helped me increase my Causes fundraising ROI by 220% and helped me raise $160 for my chosen cause, Educate Tomorrow. Based on my rather general assumptions detailed below, by creating a social marketing tool that let me build my own fundraising campaign, Facebook Causes could raise their donations revenue by as much as 93% (or $18 million).

I think Causes' new Birthday Wish for Charity application is an awesome demonstration of the principle that when an organization can enable its audience to accomplish its own goals more effectively, the organization wins too. Actually, because Causes is about helping others raise money and awareness, it's a three-way win. If you think this model only applies to non-profits, check out examples of how Nike and other commercial companies are experimenting with similar strategies to tap into their customers' interests and energy.

I've used Causes for a few years, fanning groups I've supported offline and those my friends invited me to in order to help get the word out. I'd donated a little and encouraged my friends to donate as well. Through several years' of off-and-on participation, between my own donations and those of others I'd invited, I'd raised a whopping $50. This year, the week before my birthday Facebook Causes remembered and was nice enough to send me an automated email wish. But this wish did more than give me a link to go donate, it gave me a fundraising toolkit wizard. Intrigued at being able to set a goal and modify my own appeal to my friends - in terms of both message and outreach strategy - I signed up.

There was more benefit to me personally than just feeling good about raising the money. I got positive comments from some of my friends too, glad they could help me celebrate in a meaningful way. Of course when I promoted another cause-related event the following week I encountered a little 'donor fatigue' from some of these same folks, demonstrating once more that timing is everything and that individuals fall prey to the same issues professional fundraisers do if they hit folks up too frequently.

There are a few things that Causes could do to increase the value of this capability for me personally. They suggest a LOT of communications to your friends - constant status updates for the week before and after your birthday, lots of direct message appeals. I toned down my campaign worried about spam, and I still got one of my friends (who is on Facebook a LOT and who had already donated) making the wry comment that she was 'getting tired of celebrating my birthday' after the fourth day of appeals in my status. So it would be cool if Causes could hide those status messages from people who've already given or who 'opt out' of seeing them anymore (an "unsubscribe" for those particular status messages I guess).

Of course, maybe if I had erred on the side of spamming my friends more often through more status messages, I would have reached my goal, but on balance - and for an additional five minutes of my time it took to set it up, which is a key factor for me - I'm happy with the results. I can't wait for my next birthday so I can decide which of my personal causes to support. Maybe Causes will catch on to the fact that this capability would be useful for events other than birthdays sch as anniversaries or parties.

This experience underscores the reality that social marketing is not about message bombardment, but about giving people meaningful things to do together socially. Its the same reasons some humor (in the form of email jokes or videos) goes viral. People like to laugh together, and they like to do other things together as well. The more companies and nonprofits that figure out how to deploy social technology to help us do stuff together, the sooner we all win.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

ROI assumptions and calculations for the truly intrepid (major factors bolded)

Here is a contrast of old and new marketing plans leveraging social connections which Causes enabled with a simple little personal fundraising application. I am making up the "old" scenario, but I think you'll recognize it as the typical way we've done direct marketing for years. The "new" scenario is verbatim of my Causes Birthday Wish and some guesstimates about how it applies. Even if I'm off significantly in my assumptions, these numbers are significant.

OLD SCENARIO: Sending out a private message/email plea.

   1. Acquire my birth date during registration and line up a birthday wish to go to me.
   2. Send me an email birthday greeting
   3. Message exposure #1: 30% (me reading email [1]*[30%] generous open rate as compared to averages because it's sent by Facebook)
   4. Email call to action: Donate now!
   5. My personal chance of donating: 10% (because it's competing with two friend appeals to support their rides for MS, to which I just donated $100 that morning)
   6. My personal decision to donate: $25
   7. Message Exposure #2: 14 (10% of my friends who might see my donation posted to my profile):
   8. Total return across populations like me: $0.75/person (.3*.1*$25)
   9. Elapsed time for me: 5 minutes
10. Cost to company: Database field development/testing, script-writing/testing, invite writing: $4000 (5 FTE days, est. @ $100/hr)
11. Potential return across 16 million Causes users: $12 million (16 million * $0.75)
12. Error assumption because not everyone is like me: 90%
13. ROI: $1.2 million ($12 million - $4,000 * .1)

NEW SCENARIO: Setting up a birthday wish campaign (Actual figures)

   1. Acquire my birth date during registration and line up a birthday wish to go to me.
   2. Send me an email birthday greeting
   3. Message exposure #1: 30% (me reading email [1]*[30%] (same as above)
   4. Email call to action: Ask your friends to celebrate your birthday with a donation!
   5. My personal chance of taking the link: 25% (more than double because it's not asking me for money, but to mobilize my friend base; I commit nothing by exploring and I hope at least my mother donates)
   6. Personal chance of setting up a birthday wish campaign: 25% (higher in order to demonstrate to my friends my true commitment)
   7. Message Exposure #2: 83 (10% of my network to whom I will send approximately 6 messages over 4 days the way I set up my fundraising campaign)
   8. Personal campaign goal: $250
   9. Actual amount raised: $160 (64%)
10. Total return across populations like me: $12 (.3*.25*$250*.64)
11. Elapsed time for me: 10 minutes
12. Cost to company: app development/testing, script-writing, invite writing : $73,000 (90 FTE days, est. @ $100/hr)
13. Potential return across 16 million Causes users: $192,000,000 (16 million * $12)
14. Error assumption because not everyone is like me or my friends: 90%
15. ROI: $19.2 million ($192 million - $73,000 * .1)

TOTAL ROI IMPROVEMENT: 93% increase ($18 million)

ROI Improvement calculations:
19.2-1.2 = 18/19.2=93% increase
18/1.2 = 15 time increase

Social Media Digest #9

2009-05-12T10:53:00-04:00

What made it through the social web filter this week.

Insights & Opinions

Marketing - as an industry we still don't get it. IAB's social media metrics lost opportunity

What we write about: Content gap in blog vs. media coverage is interesting, but what is the pattern?

MTV Stays on the edge: New show to integrate broadcast, social media and user generated content.

Social Media Diet: @jowyang prescribes some vitamins for brands experimenting with social media.

Cult of the new: Don't be second in social media spectacle, the stats don't support it.

Twitter makes you a better writer? Only if you're trying to be a better writer.

History Lesson: 5 Eras of social media by @jowyang.

Ning finally reaches out to developers. A long time coming and very welcome.

Good Advice: Conversation isn't always welcome and social media should know when to stay out of the way.

Dell on Corporate Blogging. Short, sweet and inciteful slideshare.

Twitter as spam. I'm not offended. Does that make me a spammer? I hope not! by @dkrcarter.

Downside of Crowdsourcing: When enthusiastic fans can be a liability.

Stats & Factoids

Malware, Data Leakage, Lost Productivity - Oh my! Businesses still suspicious of social networks at the office

Video going strong: Up 11% Feb-to-Mar '09. YouTube still king, but Hulu merits prince rank now.

Curious: Adults and teens use social media differently (duh) - but what does it mean?

OMG Who Has Time To Read It All? 44+ books on social media coming out soon? Actually, I bet there's more...

Here's some other stuff you might find useful for keeping on top of things social:

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Here's a page I maintain with links to some of the more interesting info I come across (I'll make this more sophisticated later).
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