Nicholas Thomas is the Director of Business Development at Docudesk Corporation and is passionate about user experience, design, and innovation. You can follow him on Twitter @nicholaswthomas and read his blog at NicholasWayneThomas.com.
Although some discount “The Pivot” as an overused buzzword, for a startup, pivoting can mean the difference between becoming the next success story and joining the deadpool. The principles behind the pivot apply to any industry. With lean resources, fickle users and quickly changing markets, startups have the most to gain from pivoting, and the most to lose from missed opportunities.
The reasons for changing course are often varied, and there are many factors to take into consideration when making the decision. Some companies have discovered that their products need to be significantly tweaked — or even scrapped all together. Others found that they had the right products, but have marketed to the wrong audience. For some, the only thing they had right was their team.
There may be some valid criticism in the over-usage of the term. Some of what can be identified as pivoting may just be the natural evolution of the company. The technique is not new though, and many established companies look significantly different now than in their early days.
Fortunately for today’s startups, pre-existing companies provide examples of successful adaptation.
When most people need recommendations for a good doctor or a good movie rental, they ask their friends. Jeremy Stoppelman started a company and asked millions.
Along with cofounder Russel Simmons, the company began in 2004 as an automated system for emailing recommendation requests to friends. Although the duo received $1 million in funding from PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, the idea fell flat with their audience.
However, users did viewed the system in a way they hadn’t expected: by writing reviews on local businesses just for fun. They decided to change course, capitalizing on the new “blue ocean strategy” of online reviews for local businesses. The original “Friendster Yellow Pages” now sees over 50 million users a month, with 17 million reviews online.
Lean startup wisdom says to start small and focus on niche markets. But when you have a great team in place though, focusing on the bigger picture can be worthwhile.
Founded in 2005, YouTube began as a video dating site called “Tune In Hook Up,” similar to HotOrNot.com. When the site failed to gain traction, the founders scrapped the idea, and instead focused on simply sharing videos online.
Acquired by Google for around $1.65 billion in stock, YouTube users now upload over 35 hours of video per minute.
Arising from the merger between two companies specializing in financial services (X) and cryptography (Confinity), PayPal originated as a way to exchange money via Palm Pilots. Peter Thiel is credited with seeing the potential to solve a much larger problem – an easy way to transfer money online.
After securing a relationship with eBay, PayPal was soon handling over 40% of eBay transactions before being acquired by the company in 2002 for $1.5 billion. PayPal now has over 100 million active accounts, and is again bullish on the mobile strategy, expecting to process over $3 billion in mobile payments in 2011.
A successful pivot can begin as a simple means to an end, or as a solution to a purely internal problem.
Woot.com began in 2004 as a way for Matt Ruttledge’s 12-year-old wholesale electronics distributor to clear out unsold inventory. The result was a new model for online shopping that combined bargain hunting with scarcity and urgency, all while maintaining a sense of humor that would become a company trademark.
After establishing the framework for daily deals sites and expanding their offering, Woot was acquired by Amazon in 2010 for $110 million.
A great example of a feature becoming its own product, Flickr’s roots lie in the development of an online role-playing game from gaming startup Ludicorp.
Recognizing they had developed a solution to a much larger problem, Caterina Fake and husband Stewart Butterfield decided to scrap development of the game, and focus instead on the larger potential of simplifying photo sharing on the web.
Ludicorp never actually published a game, and Flickr was purchased by Yahoo! in 2005 for an undisclosed sum.
Sometimes the idea can be completely right, but the target market completely wrong.
Founded in 2006, The Point began as a platform for mobilizing groups of people towards action for various causes. Groupon was initially just one subset of another site, (even launching at groupon.thepoint.com).
The group buying aspect struck a nerve with users much more so than the social and political concept the platform. As founder Andrew Mason put it, “The Point should have been the book, and Groupon should have been the company.”
Shopify is another example of a company born from solving an internal problem, but recognizing a bigger need.
In 2004, Tobias Lütke and Scott Lake needed an online shopping cart for their new snowboard business. When they found no suitable choices available, Lütke decided to write his own, and make his solution available to other small companies running into the same issue.
Shopify now hosts over 10,000 stores and is processing over $100 million in revenues.
Outside pressure can go a long way in sparking truly paradigm-shifting innovation.
In 2006, podcasting startup Odeo was quickly made irrelevant after the release of iTunes and other competition. Seeing the writing on the wall, Twitter began as a side project originating from “hackathons” to identify viable new opportunities.
Twitter now has over 200 million users, with secondary market trading placing the company’s valuation around $7 billion.
Allowing your users to influence the nature of your offering can be rewarding.
Launched in 2008 as a dating site for groups, Ignighter grew modestly in the U.S., adding 50,000 users in its first year. The idea of a dating site for groups rather than individuals caught fire in India though, where the site began adding as many users in one week as they had previously added in an entire year.
In 2010, cofounder Adam Sachs made the company’s pivot official, stating, “We are an Indian dating site.”
At nine months old with 1.25 million users for every employee, Instagram proves that the team can sometimes be more important than the product itself.
Founder Kevin Systrom started Burbn to learn programming outside of his marketing day job, aiming to blend elements of Foursquare and Mafia Wars in a mobile HTML5 app.
After receiving funding from Baseline Ventures and Andreesen Horowitz, Systrom added cofounder Mike Krieger to the project. The duo decided to take a mobile-first strategy by scrapping the original code for a native iPhone app. The resulting feature-rich app felt cluttered, inspiring the team to remove everything except the most important features and rename the app to reflect the new use case: Instagram.
Although no more divergent than Twitter was to its inception at Odeo, Turntable.fm’s origin is at least equally disparate, and for the time being at least, much more mysterious.
Born out of the mobile bar code-scanning startup Stickybits, the buzz and exclusivity surrounding Turntable.fm has quickly overshadowed its parent.
What makes this pivot intriguing is not just the divergent nature of the products, or of the established players Turntable.fm is challenging, but is their team’s reluctance to talk to the press about it.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Liquidphoto
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The Social Media 101 Series is sponsored by Global Strategic Management Institute. GSMI’s Social Media Strategies Series are the leading educational events for organizations looking to advance their online capabilities. Learn more.
One of the greatest challenges of social media marketing is juggling multiple accounts across a variety of networks. As messaging, engagement and analytics differ from platform to platform, keeping yourself organized is vital.
A great way to keep your social media presences in line is with CoTweet, a web-based social media management and analytics tool. It has a simple design and the basic plan, which has fairly robust features, is free. Like HootSuite, it’s accessed through your web browser rather than a desktop client.
Mashable spoke with Kevin Bobowski, CoTweet’s marketing director, for an explanation of how to use the platform for social media marketing.
While some platforms might leave you to your own devices after a product demo, CoTweet’s Services team is on hand to help you set up your account. This can be helpful if it’s your organizations first go at social media management. The social consultant will customize the setup and training based on your needs, and he or she will also record the training session, so you don’t have to worry about memorizing each step.
Already a social media management pro? You’re welcome to pass on the setup help and get your business started on the platform however works best for you.
CoTweet is an excellent tool for small businesses or divisions of larger businesses that spread social media duties among team members and have a customer service approach to engagement. It has a number of features in place that ensure each employee is doing his or her work — and taking responsibility for it.
Like many social media management services, CoTweet allows updates and follow-up messages to be assigned to specific social media managers. This can make responses more relevant as team members with certain knowledge bases can handle appropriate questions and comments from followers. The responder’s initials are included at the end of the tweet, letting the follower know there’s a person behind the handle. This not only puts the follower at ease, but also the marketing manager as he or she will know who to talk to if questions (or congratulations!) arise for a specific tweet.
What’s different about CoTweet is its OnDuty status, which notes who is responsible for social streams at a certain time. Aside from organizing your social updates schedule, it allows for more passive monitoring. The person on duty can receive e-mails when something needs to be acted on, freeing him or her up to go to meetings or take calls while remaining aware of social media activity.
The ability to track campaigns is the most important feature many marketers look for when deciding on a social media management tool. With CoTweet, you can not only manage clicks on content you publish within the application, but also integrate any web analytics platforms with campaign codes and shortened URLs.
“This provides closed-loop reporting and allows marketers to associate revenue and other success metrics to social media activity,” Bobowski says.
The platform recently launched a new Data Integration framework that allows you to extend the CoTweet application across other CRM tools, including Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Integration. This means you can associate a conversation from Facebook or Twitter with an individual’s existing CRM profile and then tag it as a lead or opportunity. The feature breaks down silos by integrating data across platforms, allowing you to create more comprehensive customer profiles and have more relevant conversations in social media.
“We’re delivering the industry’s first solution to give businesses a complete view of their customers across online, offline and social channels,” says Jesse Engle, general manager of the ExactTarget Social Media Lab, in a press release. “This will help enterprises significantly extend the benefits of social to sales enablement to better target campaigns, increase product demand, improve client satisfaction and quantify the true ROI of social media.”
Whether you’re looking for a high-level social data reporting solution or just combating “Twitter overwhelm,” CoTweet is worth a shot. The platform supports Twitter and Facebook and has an iPhone app. The Standard edition is free and allows up to six Twitter accounts. The Enterprise version costs $1,500 a month, but you can request a free demo.
Have you used CoTweet for marketing? Would you recommend it? Tell us your experience with the tool in the comments below.
The Social Media 101 Series is sponsored by Global Strategic Management Institute, a leading source of knowledge for today’s leaders. Learn more by visiting GSMI’s website, liking it on Facebook and following it on Twitter.
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While marketing activities on Twitter are often described by silly, Twitterized words — like tweetathon, twontest and tweetchat — these types of campaigns have proven successful for marketers and brands of all sizes.
There are a number of winning Twitter strategies used by top brands, but those same companies tend to mix up the types of individual marketing campaigns they run on Twitter, whether paid or organic.
Here are seven successful Twitter marketing campaigns from American Airlines, Network Solutions, UNICEF India, IBM, USA for UNHCR, McDonald’s Canada and appbackr. Read about their successes below and share your brand’s Twitter campaign victories in the comments.
In celebration of the 30th anniversary of its AAdvantage loyalty program, American Airlines ran a Twitter contest called “Tweet to Win 30K Miles.”
The Twitter contest was a smaller portion of a larger campaign, called “Deal 30,” which involved 30 partner deals and promotions over 30 weekdays. The AAdvantage team created a microsite that promoted a new daily partner deal or promotion — the Twitter contest occurred on the fourth day of the promotion. Participants had to register their AAdvantage number on a microsite, tweet the #Deal30 hashtag and follow the @AAdvantage account to enter for a chance to win 30,000 AAdvantage miles.
The campaign was promoted primarily through AAdvantage and American Airlines’ social media channels with the goals of driving traffic to the Deal 30 microsite to increase buzz for the remaining deals and to attract new Twitter followers for the recently launched @AAdvantage Twitter account.
Success Metrics: Within one week, the microsite’s bit.ly link gained nearly 18,000 clicks via Twitter, and the @AAdvantage Twitter account experienced a 70% increase in followers. And overall, retweets on Twitter increased 43% and the Deal 30 microsite garnered more than 27,000 entries.
Lesson: Weber Shandwick account supervisor and AAdvantage community manager Colin Alsheimer shares his takeaways about the campaign with Mashable:
“Given a valuable enough incentive, users will complete several registration steps for entry. The requirement to share a specific tweet and hashtag to an entrants own social network is what drove the success of this promotion, especially given that it wasn’t heavily supported by other media channels. In the future, we’d probably require that users take fewer steps for entry in order to increase the total number of entrants. Including a specific and unique hashtag was essential for tracking purposes.”
During the 2011 Super Bowl, domain registrar Network Solutions aimed to detract from competitor GoDaddy’s risqué media blitz while promoting its .CO product offerings. Instead of directly competing with GoDaddy’s substantial Super Bowl ad buy, Network Solutions worked with agency CRT/tanaka to spoof GoDaddy’s infamous Super Bowl commercials with hopes of garnering attention on Twitter among social media influencers.
With a $200,000 budget, the company developed a concept around Go Granny, “the original domain girl,” and created a series of mockumentary vignettes featuring Academy Award-winner Cloris Leachman.
While the campaign was centered around one parody commercial hosted on YouTube (embedded above), Twitter played a large role in the promotion and success of the campaign.
“Go Granny’s antics did not stop on YouTube. She took her sassy personality to drive traffic to the video,” says CRT/tanaka director of social media Priya Ramesh. “She took over Twitter for three one-hour long tweetcapades on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday of Super Bowl weekend. During the tweetcapades, @Go_Granny‘s tweets were carefully targeted to win the attention of influencers like Guy Kawasaki and Scott Monty, under the premise she was inviting people to her Super Bowl party. The team of powerful mommy bloggers at BlogHer participated in the tweetcapades as well, tapping into their extensive networks.”
Success Metrics: In five days, the campaign inspired more than 3,500 tweets and garnered nearly 20 million impressions across Twitter, reports agency CRT/tanaka. On top of that, #GoGranny became a trending topic in Washington, D.C., and top influencers who tweeted about Go Granny included Gina Trapani and Brian Solis. Even more impressive, the company’s sales of the .CO domain increased by more than 500% during Super Bowl weekend as a direct result of the campaign.
Lesson: “Twitter is extremely helpful for generating buzz around an online social media campaign, but it needs support from other social outlets as well,” says Shashi Bellamkonda, director of social media and PR at Network Solutions. He continues:
“For maximum success, Twitter can’t stand alone. Beyond tweeting, our team dropped blog posts about the campaign, alerted our Facebook base, sent out an email to our customer, issued a press release and conducted traditional media outreach. We also worked with BlogHer to tap into their extensive network of influential women and mom bloggers. If marketers do their homework and recognize that Twitter campaigns must go hand-in-hand with other efforts, they will increase their overall success. In our case, once the Go Granny tweetcapades started, there was no stopping them.”
UNICEF India’s agency, OgilvyOne Worldwide, enlisted social agency BUZZVALVE to manage a three-month social media campaign to promote UNICEF’s “Awaaz Do” (which means “lend your voice” in Hindi) initiative, an effort to send eight million unschooled Indian children back to education.
“The thrust of our campaign lay in targeting influential personas and celebrities on Twitter,” says BUZZVALVE CEO Rohan Chandrashekhar. “A retweet or a mention by them proved crucial for our outreach program and to get word out about the campaign.”
Bollywood icons Priyanka Chopra and Shekhar Kapur were among others to tweet about the campaign. BUZZVALVE encouraged their participation by showing them how big of an impact they had on the initiative. Chandrashekhar explains:
“We set up a two-way communication channel between us and them, where we were able to show them through our analytics the kind of impact they were having on Twitter and among their followers on every retweet or mention about the campaign. In effect, rather than have them formally ‘endorse’ the campaign, we helped them ‘participate’ actively. Our analytics helped them understand their own influence and this acted as an encouragement for them be active campaigners. We thus created an environment for them to engage with us and the ‘Awaaz Do’ cause directly, by making real-time info about their impact available to them.”
Success Metrics: During the three-month campaign, the #AWAAZDO hashtag received 1,525 mentions and the @UNICEFIndia Twitter account gained 2,198 followers. The campaign itself received 60,540 impressions on Twitter during the time period, as calculated using Tweetreach. By the end of the campaign, the Awaaz Do website garnered 203,248 signups of people interested in “joining the movement” to help get India’s children back to school.
Lesson: Non-profit organizations can increase their celebrity endorsers’ activity with a campaign by showing them just how impactful their Twitter involvement is. Sharing analytics with celebrities involved in the campaign can encourage them to share the campaign with their followers more often.
For Lotusphere 2011, one of IBM’s annual user conferences for customers and partners, the tech firm expanded its typical social media strategy and created a social media hub, a single online landing page providing a live stream of blogs, Twitter comments, Flickr photos and videos of keynote sessions and interviews from the conference. To keep chatter organized on Twitter, the company employed the hashtag #ls11.
Success Metrics: By mid-event at Lotusphere 2011, which takes place from January 30 to February 3, there were more than 20,000 tweets tagged with the #ls11 hashtag, and the hub site’s video channel had garnered 34,000 views. As of February 15, 2011, there were more than 35,000 tweets with the #ls11 hashtag, and 9,500 of those tweets were retweeted. IBM calculates that the campaign garnered more than 41 million total impressions on Twitter.
Lesson: Whether it’s as simple as employing a hashtag or as strategic as creating a social landing page, aggregating and organizing conversation around your brand, especially during events, is key to making a splash on Twitter.
For World Refugee Day this year, USA for UNHCR held a “tweetathon” as part of its overall Blue Key Campaign, which asks Americans to purchase a symbolic $5 Blue Key pin or pendant to show their support for refugees worldwide and the 6,000 UNHCR staffers who work 24/7 to assist them.
The tweetathon took place on Monday, June 13, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. ET, seven days before World Refugee Day, and it featured a number of social-savvy “Blue Key Champions” tweeting via their personal Twitter accounts for at least an hour each, while supporting tweets originating from the official @UNRefugeeAgency Twitter handle. Roya Hosseini, wife of The Kite Runner author Khaled Hosseini and the Twitter voice of the Khaled Hosseini Foundation (@tkhf) also appeared on the tweetathon as a special guest, which especially increased awareness of the tweetathon and campaign.
Success Metrics: On the day of the tweetathon, 1,524 tweets used the #bluekey hashtag, which is a significant increase over the daily average of 50 that occurred during the rest of the campaign. Traffic to the Blue Key website also increased 169% over the previous high point. Furthermore, more than 50% of key purchases for that week were a result of the tweetathon.
Lesson: A tweetathon can significantly benefit a time-sensitive social good campaign. USA for UNHCR’s social media consultant Shonali Burke explains that the campaign experienced a huge bump in activity as a result of using Twitter:
“From December 2010 (when the Blue Key site was launched) until April 2011, there were approximately 1,100 keys dispatched. For the duration of the 6-week campaign (May 9 to June 20), there were 2,645 keys dispatched, and significant awareness created via online and social media. That’s a huge jump in just 6 weeks.”
Agency Golin Harris recently launched a geo-targeted Promoted Account for its client, McDonald’s Canada, which was the first brand in Canada to execute such a campaign. The goal was to leverage Promoted Accounts to increase @McD_Canada’s average new followers by using a ‘suggested follow’ that targeted Twitter users via specified keywords and hashtags.
While the client declined to share specific keywords used, citing “the competitive nature of how McDonald’s Canada gains followers using Promoted Accounts,” it was quite pleased with the results, noting that the use of diverse keywords and hashtags enabled the company to reach viewers of many demographics with many different interests.
Success Metrics: With a total budget of $15,000 USD, McDonald’s Canada gained 9,503 new followers over the course of the campaign. The campaign also drew in 14,200 profile views and resulted in a 4% overall engagement rate, which includes retweets, replies, favorites and clicks. This engagement rate is quite high when one considers that advertising click-through rates are generally subzero percentages.
Lesson: Paid advertising on Twitter, including Promoted Tweets, Trends and Accounts, can be an option for brands looking to gain new eyes. Brands should test out various hashtags and keywords to target their desired audience. “The Twitter team acted as a great resource to help McDonald’s Canada test out different keywords and bids to gain the greatest amount of new followers,” notes Karin Campbell, senior manager of external communications, McDonald’s Restaurants of Canada Limited.
App marketplace appbackr began using Promoted Tweets and Account in mid-May to promote the LSATMax app that is currently on its way to funding its next iteration via the appbackr platform. “The app is directed to people studying for the LSAT, so a 20 to 26 age group roughly,” says Sarah Cornwell, product manager at appbackr. “Our online marketing budget for this app was split between Facebook ads and Twitter. In the past, we would have focused entirely on Facebook, but with Twitter, we can watch the impact in bit.ly, and we like that immediate feedback.”
Cornwell stressed that creating a targeted campaign on Twitter, instead of targeting a wider audience, gave appbackr the most bang for its buck. “LSATMax lends itself to a targeted campaign. We were able to focus on people on Twitter searching for relevant keywords — LSAT, law school, etc. — to let them know this app was available as a study tool.”
Success Metrics: In six weeks, appbackr has increased its follower count by 140% (from 880 to 2,114) and increased traffic to its site from Twitter by 94%. Furthermore, traffic from Twitter as a percentage of appbackr’s total site traffic rose from 2.6% to 4.4%. And of its Twitter from traffic, the percentage of new visits rose from 51% to 65%.
Lesson: Appbackr’s campaign with Promoted Tweets and Accounts enabled it to reach a highly targeted audience on Twitter, resulting in an increase in Twitter followers and site traffic.
The Social Marketing Series is supported by Campaigner®. Campaigner®’s Smart Email Builder makes it easier than ever to create professional looking email marketing campaigns and affords multiple ways to grow and manage lists, integrate with CRM, and utilize campaign metrics and reports to increase results. For more information, please visit www.campaigner.com or watch a product demo today.
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This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.
If your staff room’s highlights are a handful of tattered magazines, a tired vending machine and a half-dead plant, then shame on you. With a little effort and a small amount of cash, you can offer your employees so much more.
The staff room is just as important as any other area in your workplace — work shouldn’t exclude fun, after all. Just look at how successful companies like Google manage to bring serious fun into their workplace.
Take a look through our photo gallery of some great gadgets and accessories to cheer up your staff room and let us know in the comments how you think is best to bring fun to the workplace.
This great graphic will help reinforce the theory behind taking a break from your workstation to “recharge,” while bringing some Meninos graphic charm to the room.
Cost: $29.99
Available in a variety of colors, this vinyl wall decal will add geek interest to a wall without boring anyone to death with insipid artwork.
Cost: $9.95
Why not turn an entire wall into a chalkboard? Just add chalk and your staff can use the wall for doodles, messages, lists, quotes, games and more.
Cost: Benjamin Moore Studio Finishes Chalkboard Paint costs $17.99 a tin
Because sometimes, just bringing a smile to someone’s face with a silly touch is enough to lift the mood of the day.
Cost: $10.99
Anyone can stick a Wii in a staff room, but we think a carefully curated selection of vintage board games is much more fun. Take a look on Etsy or even eBay and you’ll be amazed what classics are out there for relatively little. Older staff will enjoy the nostalgia, and younger staff will relish the retro touch.
Cost: Varies
Bean bags maybe a bit of a cliche, but there’s a reason for that — it’s hard to be stressed when you’re lounging on a LoveSac.
Cost: From $249
Show your staff the love with a photo wall offering a glimpse of life at your company. A photo rail like this is easy to refresh when you have new pics to display.
Cost: $5.99
Take a leaf out of Google’s book and bribe, sorry incentivize, your staff with candy. Keeping a dispenser topped up won’t cost very much but put a sugar-induced smile on your employees’ faces.
Cost: $34
Fun fridge magnets can be a great distraction while you’re waiting for the kettle to boil or microwave to ping. We like this LOLCats-themed set. With 256 “LOLWords,” just add a couple of kitty pics for tons of collaborative fun.
Cost: $19.99
These pixelated coasters are the fun way to protect your surfaces from watermarks in a rad, retro style.
Cost: $29.99
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Creating, executing and evaluating a social media plan takes a healthy amount of time, money and talent — resources that are scarce in today’s business world.
Mashable spoke with Altimeter Group Industry Analyst Jeremiah Owyang and Intel Social Media Strategist Ekaterina Walter to get their thoughts on how businesses can save time, money and other valuable resources by creating more efficient social media processes. Here are five essential tips.
“Leverage your front-line workers who already support customers in different mediums like live chat, phone, and in person,” says Owyang. “Use the support and customer service teams that already know your products and services and have been trained in customer relations. Take a page from Best Buy’s ‘Twelpforce‘ that empowered thousands of retail professionals to take to Twitter than just train a new social savvy workforce.”
Tread lightly when figuring out how to organize social media efforts, though. Walter says that too much time is spent “fighting over who owns what” when developing a social media strategy. “Different stakeholders (PR, web, legal, privacy, security, marketing, HR, etc.) need to partner on this and work closely together on the structure and processes that are beneficial to everyone,” she says.
Walter suggests against “putting [social media practitioners] into a box with too many guidelines,” and instead is all for “unleashing the employee potential and giving them some freedom to engage online.”
While a triage system can be helpful for novice social media programs, make sure your communication process isn’t complicating problems. After all, social media is meant to make communications easier, not more tedious.
Walter says, “The biggest issue is the amount of time it takes to make a decision internally. It is a time of ‘now marketing,’ or what I call ‘agile marketing’ — we cannot afford to spend too much time making decisions or creating elaborate processes of approval. We need to act quickly and nimbly; otherwise, the opportunity is gone forever. This is the biggest hindrance to digital creativity.”
“Most companies like an effective triage system to pass information around the company directing who will respond and how,” says Owyang. “As a result, more than one business group may respond to customers — reducing efficiency and of course, potentially confusing customers.”
From her experience, Walter points out two areas where businesses tend to spend too much money — social media tools and consultants. Here are her thoughts on both:
After searching your ranks to find the right talent internally, don’t be afraid to hire experienced social media and community managers. Granted, you probably won’t need to hire a full social media team, but bringing on at least one strategist could save your organizations dollars in the long run.
“Most of the time we want to hire interns to do the work of experienced community managers, but then we complain that they didn’t handle something right,” says Walter. “I think the issue for most companies is that they don’t hire enough seasoned people to truly manage communities and online conversations on behalf of a brand. You need to have experienced people in place to manage communities, advocacy programs, etc. — these are the voices that know and represent your brand appropriately. And most of the time we are not willing to pay for people like that, citing lack of resources and then paying the price of damaged brand reputation or dead or inactive communities.”
Equipping social media practitioners with the proper knowledge will save them lots of time, says Walter. This means building social media education programs, creating spaces where colleagues can discuss best practices and learning from other organizations.
Leading Intel’s social media strategy has enabled Walter to figure out the best ways for educating employees of social media processes and best practices. Here are her tips on how to effectively communicate new information about your company’s social media plans to those in the field:
Walter and Owyang provided a great base for professionals looking to create efficient social media processes. Have you learned a few tricks of the trade while putting together your organization’s social media plan? If so, share your thoughts in the comments below.
The Social Media for Business Leaders Series is supported by The Awareness Social Marketing Hub, the leading social media marketing software for marketers to publish, manage, measure and engage across all their social channels. The Awareness Social Marketing Hub is leveraged by companies of all sizes including Sony, MLB, American Cancer Society, and Starwood Hotels. Request a demo here.
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Images courtesy of Flickr, Mulad, MiiiSH, JanneM, Mukumbura
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Shane Snow is co-founder of Contently.com, an “agile publishing” platform for brands-turned-publishers and freelance journalists.
Most people quit blogging — and most companies do too, for that matter.
Like healthy diet, frequent exercise, proper posture or any other New Year’s resolution, blogging results take time. A 2008 Technorati survey put the abandonment rate of blogs at about 95%.
Part of the reason for low blog success rate is that most of us have a hard time predicting what kind of return blogging will achieve. “If I blog every day for a month, will I get more leads?” Probably. But it may take six months, not one.
That doesn’t mean it’s not worth the fight.
Before the Internet put publishing and distribution tools in everyone’s hands for free, companies that wanted brand exposure paid for time and/or placement on a third party media property (radio ads, TV commercials, banners). Many still do, but a general shift is occurring online – away from outbound marketing and paid media, toward creating one’s own branded content and spreading that media across the social web.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 68% of CMOs say they are shifting budget from traditional advertising to this type of content marketing.
But measuring the return on investment (ROI) on content is difficult, especially if you’re not judging success by ad revenue.
Nine out of ten organizations market with content, according to a recent B2B content marketing survey. Companies like Mint, American Express and Hubspot are now competing with “traditional” media companies for eyeballs with their own content. They’re seeing results -– not necessarily in the form of advertising, but rather, through leads, subscribers and brand awareness.
A recent study by Hubspot indicates that Hubspot customers who practice inbound marketing (of which content is a core element) increase leads an average of 4.2 times within a few months. Other studies have shown similar results, that consistent content output increases conversions.
Content costs money, and measuring the results of your content effort is important. But an effective content strategy is like planting a garden: it takes consistent work that eventually pays off in large quantities. However, failure to water or plow that garden will result in weeds, in other words, a blog post every three months whose only comments are spam.
So how do you convince your boss, your partners or even yourself that content is a good investment? Here are three steps to effectively measure your content strategy:
Traditionally media companies use readership and ad revenue as the yardstick for content’s success. In content marketing, however, the goal is typically to achieve some sort of conversion or to build “brand awareness,” a rather ambiguous metric.
A conversion can consist of a mailing list or an RSS subscriber, a user signup, a phone call, a sale or any number of user interactions. The first step to measuring ROI on your content strategy is to set a goal.
If your content goal is to increase user signups, you first need to know your baseline: how many signups are you getting now, and from what sources? Once you start your content efforts, you want to be able to measure the results against that baseline.
Unless you’re already starting with a large audience (huge mailing list, captive user base, etc), it’s going to take a while to build momentum, and even longer to start seeing conversions. However, several proxies can help you chart your progress.
These proxies present immediate signs of encouragement, more so than, say, search engine ranking, which can take a while to manifest. Here’s a quick list of proxies for measuring a blog’s ROI:
These proxies will monitor how well your content is resonating, how you’re building trust in your brand. That trust will eventually turn into loyalty, advocacy and continued conversion.
It’s important to note that absolute measurements are rarely useful. What you’re looking for is a trend line. The number of retweets relative to previous content on your site or peer sites is a more useful yardstick than the total number of retweets.
Though it may not seem like much, an average of five tweets on a post today versus an average of one tweet three weeks ago is a great sign of progress.
Also, because some pieces of content will be outliers (whether spikes or duds), it’s important to pay attention to aggregate trend data rather than isolated post data. For example, the average number of retweets in June compared to April is a better measure of progress than the number of retweets on today’s blog post versus yesterday’s.
From a practical standpoint, measuring conversions can be as simple as installing Google Analytics, or keeping a spreadsheet of leads or even tick marks on a whiteboard.
While keeping track of the raw conversion numbers (How many leads are we getting this month versus five months ago when we weren’t blogging?) is important, it’s also crucial to measure secondary indicators. If you’re measuring leads, these might include the following:
“One way we try to quantify ROI is to track content users very closely,” says Sam Slaughter, a producer at Comcast.net. “That way we can tell if they went from consuming content to buying a product, or to bookmarking the page, or to digging deeper into the publisher site or any number of actions that the publisher might be able to monetize. From there, we can often come up with an actual dollar value from that piece of content.”
Content strategy for most businesses isn’t about instant advertising metrics anymore; therefore, clear ROI data can take a while to manifest. Once it does, however, returns will generally increase as you continue to consistently publish.
“When we talk about ROI for content we often use terms like ‘adoption,’ ‘time on site,’ ‘page views per unique’ and things like that,” says Slaughter. “The idea [is] that while you might not be monetizing the content on your site directly, you are using that content to attract new and better users who you can monetize down the road.”
In the end, planning, tracking and consistency will help you succeed. As Problogger founder Darren Rowse recently tweeted, “Building blogs is like building muscles.” Great content properties, like muscles, take patience.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, pearleye
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Jamie Beckland is a Digital and Social Media Strategist at Janrain where he helps Fortune 1000 companies integrate social media technologies into their websites to improve user acquisition and engagement. He has built online communities since 2004. He tweets as @Beckland.
Marketers have built a temple that needs to be torn down. Demographics have defined the target consumer for more than half a century — poorly. Now, with emerging interest graphs from social networks, behavioral data from search outlets and lifecycle forecasting, we have much better ways of targeting potential customers.
The rise of mass-produced consumer goods also brought the rise of mass-market advertising. In the 1950s and 1960s, the goal of television was to aggregate the most possible eyeballs for advertisers. In order to convince consumers that an advertising message was relevant to them, consumers had to buy the idea that they were just like everyone else.
Marketers created that buy-in by bucketing people into generations. When you lump 78 million people into one group called “Baby Boomers,” it’s much easier to sell them stuff, especially when consumers accepted their generational classification.
But now, that entire system has broken down. The year that someone was born will not tell you how likely he is to buy your product.
Fragmentation is now the norm because the pace of change is accelerating. Generations have been getting smaller because there are fewer unifying characteristics of young people today than ever before:
With the recent rise of the social web, people self-select into groups so small, so fragmented, and so temporal, that no overarching top-down approach could be successful at driving marketing performance.
Marketers have responded by adding more demographic information to the mix, but even that is a losing battle. I worked with one client who was introducing a technology product, and had identified a target market of “connected consumers.” Connected consumers were 34-55, had a household income over $120k, and read technology publications regularly. This target market represented 14 million consumers.
They were targeting 14 million consumers to sell 50,000 units — that means they were hoping for 3.5 sales for every 1,000 people with whom they connected through their marketing.
What if, instead, you could get 500 sales from every 1,000 people you marketed to?
It’s possible through psychographic profiling. Psychographics look at the mental model of the consumer in the context of a customer lifecycle. Amazon.com has long been a leader in this space, through innovations like “recommended products” and “users like me also bought.” Its algorithms have learned to predict its users, and what they are interested in. And now, there are a number of tools that any business can use to leverage psychographics.
Here’s how a psychographic profile might look different from a traditional marketing profile target for a childcare provider:
Psychographics provide much more useful information about users. There are multiple data sources making this possible today. Social profile data, behavioral data and customer lifecycle data can now finally be leveraged to contact people who are ready to buy.
Profile data from social networks consist of all the fields users grant permission for brands to use on their behalf. Most things that users track on social networks can be leveraged to create a closer relationship with a customer. Fields like relationship status, alma mater, interests and occupation can all be managed through social profile data management tools.
Social profile data is the critical cornerstone of psychographic insights. The level of nuance and insight provided by social data, when compared to standard demographics, is the difference between performing surgery with a scalpel or a butter knife. Previously unimaginable questions are now routine:
In addition, companies such as GraphEffect are measuring purchase intent by doing semantic analysis on Facebook status updates. This type of qualitative analysis can move users into specific marketing funnels from their very first online experience with your brand.
Retargeting advertising messages is gaining popularity among marketers, but its very success has jeopardized its effectiveness. Ads that follow users around the web have been implemented — usually poorly. Every ad network quickly incorporated the ability to place cookies in users’ browsers, and display specific ads to them any time they visit a site that’s part of their networks.
The next generation of ad targeting will focus more on telling the customer a story over time, based on specific behavior triggers. That means ad networks and clickstream data aggregators will work together to trigger when a customer moves forward in a mental model toward a purchase event.
Site content and product recommendations will also be informed by clickstream analysis. Companies such as RichRelevance, Certona, Baynote and Monetate all offer the ability to personalize information to specific visitors based on their behavior. Leveraging those alongside a payload of social profile data can turbocharge those services from the first moment a new user visits a site.
Social profile data can also be used to predict customer lifecycle. Imagine knowing not only if a customer has children, but the exact ages of those children. In addition, key indicator purchases, like buying diapers for the first time, indicate a customer entering a new lifecycle. Other key indicators, like shipping address changes, first purchases of furniture, or first purchases of substantially higher-value goods can all indicate the start of a new customer mentality and behavior pattern.
These patterns are predictable, so you know the future behavior of high school seniors by looking at the current behavior of college freshmen. By using demographics alone, all high school graduates would be marketed to identically. Using psychographics, we know who is likely to be interested in specific product or content recommendations at a specific time — such as when they actually start their first day of college.
This vision is starting to gain traction among serious marketers. At the 2009 Internet Strategy Forum, Xerox’s VP of Interactive Marketing, Duane Schulz, said that a 1% clickthrough rate was a huge failure — even though it is 10 times the industry average. In his mind, a successful campaign would never waste 99% of its impressions. Using psychographic data, you don’t have to waste any impressions.
We have seen a similar upheaval in marketing before. In the 1960s, marketers who embraced the power of television, broad-based insights into psychology and demographic data created world-class brands and billions of dollars in value. At that time, if you didn’t advertise on TV, you lost. Today’s new tools offer a similar choice: Build a deep understanding of your customer, or risk irrelevance.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, porcorex
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If you’ve tried to run a campaign on Facebook and were frustrated by its poor results, you’re not alone. Facebook‘s ads have a pretty poor performance record and its ads continue to be cheap, though plentiful.
The good news is that Facebook is working hard to improve its ads’ performance. The company continues to experiment with new ad formats and has lately cozied up to the ad community with Facebook Studio, a forum for new campaigns that features a directory of ad agencies.
The idea is that marketers can learn from each other as they try to navigate Facebook, which is terra incognita for everyone since it’s so new. In that spirit, here are five recent Facebook campaigns that offer some instructive examples on how the platform can be used to amplify a message or interact with consumers in a new way.
Bahrain Telecommunications Co., a.k.a. Batelco, isn’t going to give Apple a run for its money in the name-recognition department anytime soon, but for those interested in social media marketing, it’s the little brand that could. You may recall that Batelco’s “Infinity” video made the short list of favorite TED ads earlier this year, but the Facebook aspect of that campaign is just as notable.
Batelco aired two trailers for the video in movie theaters and online in September 2010. To spread the video even further, Batelco’s app included a prompt for users to activate their webcams and take pictures of themselves reacting to the video. The picture was then posted on Facebook (with the user’s permission). Next, the company and agency FP7/BAH disseminated information about the making of the video. Realizing that all the target customers were online, Batelco also set up kiosks in malls and airports letting consumers see the video. As a result of the exposure, Batelco gained more than 200,000 fans on Facebook. More than 70% of Bahrain’s Facebook community are fans.
The Upshot: Batelco bet heavily on a viral video and it paid off, partially because the video itself is so compelling, but also because it provided a means for people on Facebook to add something to the experience.
Flair, a Belgian women’s magazine, observed that women check out each other’s wardrobes in real life and figured that might be the case online as well. That reasoning prompted the creation of Fashiontag, an app that lets users identify their friends’ clothing in Facebook pics and ask a question about the item. The question also was posted on the friend’s wall.
Those conversations then ran on a Fashiontag Page on Facebook. The best ones ran in the magazine. According to Advertising Age, after the app launched on March 22, the magazine’s Facebook Page got a 35% bump in fans, to 23,000. Best of all, this was done on the cheap: The app only cost about $35,000 to create.
The Upshot: Flair created a genuinely useful app and one that tied in with its brand mission. As a result, the title not only got attention, but found a new way to interact with readers and create content.
Kraft introduced Comida Kraft, a recipe website targeted to Hispanic consumers, in 2001. Nine years later it launched a Comida Kraft Facebook Page as well. Kraft stepped things up in May 2011, by enlisting Mexican celebrity chef Alfredo Oropeza, which boosted the Page’s fans by 38%. But Oropeza isn’t just lending his name. In July, Kraft is planning three livestreamed video chats with the chef, during which participants can ask questions in real time. In November, Kraft is planning to give Latina moms who subscribe to Comida Kraft recipes by email — those who subscribe to the Comida Kraft Mobile Club will get free exclusive access to additional recipes and videos on their mobile phones.
The Upshot: Kraft, working with digital marketing agency 360i, has added new activities to engage its Facebook fans. The addition of a celebrity chef and exclusive access gives consumers a reason to become fans and gives fans special access.
The problem with a lot of branded Facebook Pages is there’s nothing to do there. Israeli juice company Prigat not only gave its fans something to do, it put them to work. Prigat set up an app that let fans activate an orange juice machine by smiling. (The company used face-recognition technology to recognize those smiles.)
It turns out, a lot of users were up to the challenge. More than 20,000 users uploaded photos of themselves, which led to 30,000 “likes,” (a 300% jump in growth). More than 40,000 oranges were also squeezed during the effort — the juice was given to charity.
The Upshot: Bridging the real and the online world can spark some interesting ideas. Asking users to smile also ensured that the program was fun.
Here’s the pitch: Don Draper and his team have a new assignment — an ad about you. But first they have to know a bit about you — what kind of car you drive, what’s your drink of choice, that kind of thing. Next, they need a picture of you. Then you get to see a few mockups of ads about you. When you settle on one you like, you post it to your site. The best ads will run in the Dutch magazine BLVD Man and on billboards in Amsterdam.
The campaign, from an agency called Greenberry, launched in June to promote the premiere of season 4 of Mad Men in the Netherlands. So there you have it: a promotion for a show about advertising that creates advertising about you that might actually run as a real ad somewhere. Is your head spinning yet?
The Upshot: This promotion stays true to the concept of the product it promotes, but involves consumers in the process as only Facebook can.
What other innovative Facebook campaigns have you seen? Let us know in the comments below.
The Social Marketing Series is supported by Campaigner®. Campaigner®’s Smart Email Builder makes it easier than ever to create professional looking email marketing campaigns and affords multiple ways to grow and manage lists, integrate with CRM, and utilize campaign metrics and reports to increase results. For more information, please visit www.campaigner.com or watch a product demo today.
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Sandeep Bhanote is CEO of Global Bay Mobile Technologies, a provider of next generation mobile retail software to top retailers including Guess Jeans, True Religion, City Sports and many others. For more information, visit globalbay.com or follow @GlobalBay on Twitter.
In a commercial environment dominated by online and mobile shopping, it’s only fitting that the iPad is leading a brick and mortar renaissance to recreate in-store excitement. Across the industry, everyone from retailers to restaurateurs have devised new ways to create brand loyalty, generate sales and enrich customer experiences.
It’s too early in the game to measure concrete ROI and bottom line effectiveness that the iPad has generated for retailers. While iPad retail integration is still in its formative stages, here are seven businesses at the forefront of the iPad retail wave that have leveraged the device in unique, innovative ways.
When you see an electronic kiosk in a store, how often do you actually want to get your hands on it? Probably rarely. Traditional kiosks are usually slow and bulky. Things Remembered, a personalized gift store, has ushered in a new era of the self-service “kiosk.”
Things Remembered is one of the first retailers to allow customers to design their own gifts on in-store iPads. The once paper-based process has been streamlined through the iPad, offering self-designed engraving and adding some excitement to the shopper’s experience.
The Delta terminal at JFK airport may be the exception to the normal headache of air travel. The airline installed almost 140 iPads at its gates, so passengers can order food and drink or simply peruse digital entertainment.
Delta’s iPads have no time restrictions or ordering minimums, allowing passengers to happily pass time waiting in the terminal. As Delta travelers order Caesar salads or swipe through the People magazine app, the customers’ iPad-driven satisfaction is easy to see.
New York City’s 4food has aptly integrated the iPad into the restaurant dining experience. 4food’s customers select from iPad-hosted menus and customize their orders via the devices right at their tables.
4food is just one of several iPad-embracing restaurants popping up across the country and we certainly hope to see more of this tasty technology integration.
Sports retailer City Sports joined the iPad bandwagon by weaving the device into the fabric of its Washington, D.C. concept store. In addition to accessing product information, City Sports’ iPad kiosks allow customers to connect to specific local content such as running clubs and area events.
J.C. Penney, one of the oldest department stores in the world, is proving it can stay relevant by using iPads as part of its “findmore” experience. Sales associates in 50 J.C. Penney fine jewelry departments can now showcase the company’s full offerings of bridal jewelry, rather than just what’s available in any given location.
Puma is using iPads to allow its customers to design their own sneakers right from its stores. The in-store iPad station, dubbed The Creative Factory, connects Puma wearers around the globe through an app for comparing sneaker designs and learning about the lives of the shoes’ creators. Stations can be found in Europe, Asia and Africa but are not yet available in the U.S.
Among the state-of-the-art amenities at the just-opened Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas hotel is an iPad embedded at the hotel registration counter. During the registration process, guests can virtually explore the hotel’s facilities, restaurants, music venues and bars. The iPad is simultaneously a marketing tool for the property and an impromptu day planner for its guest.
Image courtesy of Flickr, tyle_r
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Chris Schreiber is director of marketing at social video advertising company Sharethrough. A leading expert on social content strategy, Chris recently presented a two-hour workshop on viral video at the Cannes Lions festival, entitled “Making Videos Go Viral: Creative, Social, and Technological Techniques.”
Last week, the world’s top brands and agencies descended on the Cannes Lions festival to discuss creativity in modern advertising and to anoint the campaigns that most effectively captured our imaginations. While the conference was renamed this year to the “International Festival of Creativity” (previously the “International Advertising Festival”), it featured an unprecedented amount of participation from blockbuster technology companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
Over the course of the week, the significant relationship between the powerful new forces in technology and the creative output from the advertising industry became quite clear. As the web increasingly empowers us to choose and share the media we care about, brands genuinely commit to creating content and experiences that thrive in our on-demand culture.
Here are five key themes from the conference that point to major changes in the world of advertising.
In one of the opening sessions, brand futurist Martin Lindstrom noted,”It’s more effective to feel the brand, not to see it.” Experiential marketing was prominent at the conference. A number of brands discussed the ways we will use technologies, such as augmented reality apps and near-field communication (data exchanges with touch), to connect with consumers.
Few brands have committed to experiential marketing more than Nike, which has had a 55% drop in television advertising spending over the past 10 years. They filled the void by sponsoring over 200 club teams, offering revolutionary mobile technology for runners and creating over 10,000 pieces of original content.
If this conference is any indication, we are about to see an absolute explosion of new types of content from brands. While this process has already begun (especially with online video), we may just be scratching the surface.
No session was more memorable than Coca Cola’s, which delivered a compelling presentation on its “Liquid and Linked” content creation strategy. It emphasizes dynamic storytelling to establish multiple connections with people. Coke is vastly increasing its investment in many varieties of content production to help drive conversation and increase its popular culture relevance.
AOL president Tim Armstrong and Huffington Post founder Ariana Huffington also spoke at length about the vital importance of ad content. Former Googler Tim Armstrong addressed the advertiser audience: “Stop taking orders from Silicon Valley.” He referenced the importance of creating unique content rather than simply optimizing traditional ads to perform better against technology algorithms. Throughout the conference, it was consistently noted that today’s on-demand media consumption habits require brands to create content that people choose to watch (and share), rather than pushing unwanted commercials on its audience.
The “collective” has now begun to replace the “community.” The term refers to the new generation of passionate online groups initiated by brands. This year’s most buzzworthy collective was Sneakerpedia, a Wikipedia-style site powered by Foot Locker, intended to galvanize “sneakerheads” worldwide to document the history of sneakers. The site has built a ton of buzz, a great example of how a brand can create new collectives around topics people are truly passionate about. Additional collectives included Nokia Push Snowboarding and Lady Gaga’s fan group “Little Monsters,” created by Interscope Records.
Advertisers are ready to build. As advertising becomes increasingly digital, agencies are looking to bring in more developer talent to help them create new, original products. Jeff Benjamin, VP Interactive Creative Director at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, spoke about this transition, calling for “invention” in advertising and noting that “inventors are modern storytellers.” The same day, Toronto holding company MDC Partners announced a new $1 million competition for investment in technology-driven projects. Mark Holden, Global Strategy and Planning Director of PHD, noted his future predictions for the advertising industry, that new product development will be essential for the survival of media agencies as media buying becomes increasingly commoditized.
The Domino’s Pizza Tracker, a Crispin website for Domino’s, tracks the progress of a pizza delivery — from dough-rolling to delivery.
The award for the most overall positive mentions goes to Lady Gaga. The Gaga brand has quickly taken hold globally thanks to the previously listed tactics.
Gaga brand-building tools include the creation of her own collective (dubbed “The Little Monsters,” her fans on Twitter number over 11 million), original content (Gagavision video series leading up to her new album release), gaming experiences (Gagaville allowed users to win song tracks by beating game levels) and product development (working with Polaroid on a new product line). In many ways, Gaga is the epitome of the modern brand, deftly leveraging digital tools to distribute her content and broaden her fan base… and other brands are taking note.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, alengo
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