Why Marketers Aren’t Giving Social the Credit It Deserves

29 Apr 2012 in Social Media, Social Media ROI

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This is an interesting white paper recently released by Adobe Digital Index. They do a short but thorough job explaining the challenges with attributing website traffic to social media efforts. There are some good stats and explanation of First and Last-click attribution measurement models. The main conclusion, not surprisingly, is that the increased value of social media (measured by first-click attribution) should be enough to change how marketers prioritize their investments in social.

Download here:

Adobe Digital Index_social_whitepaper

The New Facebook Timeline For Brands

1 Mar 2012 in Facebook

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There’s a lot of buzz about Facebook’s roll out of timelines for brands. ReadWriteWeb has a good write up here. Also, the good folks at Direct Message Labs sent out an email today describing the new Facebook page timelines for brands. Instead of trying to summarize, I figured I’d just quote the email in its entirety.

Yesterday Facebook announced that the Timeline for Brands format would be rolled out during March. The changes to the page experience on Facebook will be significant but we believe very positive for brands and their consumers. In particular, the visual representation of the brand is greatly improved throughout the experience from top image to posts. To provide some perspective on the changes, here are the items that we believe will be most important and relevant to you.

Layout of the Page
The Timeline format offers a large initial image. To marketers this is a blessing. A large image provides a strong branding opportunity which can be changed out frequently to represent the latest marketing campaign or activities of the brand (not direct promotions). We encourage you to think about this in the same way as changing out the imagery on the home page of your site.

Three Highlighted Tabs
The running list of tabs down the page is changing to now highlight three tabs visually just below the top image. Brands now have the tools to visually call out the most important tabs but must choose carefully which ones to showcase. To access others the user uses a drop down box. New icons (111×74 pixels) will be required for the tab icons.

No Default Landing Page
Many brands use the default landing page to control the initial experience of the user on the page. In the new format the landing page goes away and this puts even greater emphasis on your choice of top image and the tabs that you choose to highlight. This is particularly true for new marketing campaigns where your overall messaging should now include the app, the top image, the tab image, Facebook ads and highlighted posts (see below).

Highlighted Posts
Brands now have the ability to “pin” specific posts to the top of the Timeline for up to a week. The highlighted post will remain above all other content and is a great way to ensure that the messaging you feel is most important receives the most attention.

Expanded Tab Content
The 520 width pixel restriction has been changed to 810. This provides plenty of new real estate to expand the consumer experience. Fortunately, old applications will be centered in the tab so that you can continue to provide the same experience to users as before.

Check out some brands using the new Timeline effectively:

Coca-Cola
Coca-cola uses the new Timeline to highlight Coca-Cola’s history all the way back to 1886. This is a unique and interactive way to share the brand’s history with customers.

Red Bull
Red Bull launched a Red Bull Timeline Timewarp game-sweepstakes to celebrate the new page. The game is a scavenger hunt that has participants find the answers to clues on the brand’s new timeline page.

Livestrong
Livestrong uses its signature colors of black and yellow to create a cohesive look across the thumbnail, cover and tab images.

Starbucks
Starbucks takes advantage of the way photos post on the new Timeline, sharing a variety of photos and pairing them with conversation pieces such as fill-in-the-blank statuses.

Marketers & The Crazy Place Called YouTube

6 Feb 2012 in Viral Videos, YouTube

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If you're a marketer, YouTube is crazy. For every minute that passes in real time, 60 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube; "Sixty hours every minute. That's five months of video every hour. That's 10 years of video every day. More video is uploaded to YouTube every month than has been broadcast by the three big TV networks in the past 60 years." As my colleague said, "We have 4 webs forming before our very eyes: the internet, facebook, youtube and apps.  Figuring out YouTube is going to be a very big source of stress and anxiety for brands this year."

YouTube itself is no longer focused on developing videos, rather it's about developing channels with premium content.

If you're a brand or an agency looking for help in how to successfully navigate and leverage YouTube, here's a description of the services we provide, CLICK HERE

Here's a link to an article, The Beast With A Billion Eyes, from TIME that describes the incredible growth of the platform.

The SoLoMo Manifesto – Social, Local & Mobile Education

14 Jan 2012 in Location Based Services

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My buddy Rob Reed over at MomentFeed just released the The SoLoMo Manifesto (or just about everything marketers need to know about the convergence of social, local, and mobile). You can download the whitepaper here, SoLoMo.

Rob is an uber-smart marketing/analytics guru. From his site, “The MomentFeed location-based marketing platform is a global analytics, campaign management, and social CRM service for companies with 20+ locations to manage. MomentFeed allows companies to monitor, measure, and optimize location-based campaign performance via Foursquare, Facebook, and Twitter, together with their own branded applications, across hundreds or thousands of locations.”

Content Marketing Sucks People In

11 Dec 2011 in Just Good Stuff, Social Media

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A fun new buzz word to add to the mix! “Content Marketing” The basic premise is simple…provide good content to your customers, your community, your tribe…and they will be grateful and love you…and maybe even promote your product(s) or business for you. Here’s a breakdown of what kind of content companies are creating: social media (79%), article posting (78%), in-person events (62%), e-newsletters (61%), case studies (55%), blogs (51%), white papers (43%) and webinars/webcasts (42%). This infographic from the Marketo blog provides a lot more stats and info, but the idea of content marketing, “the beacon approach,” etc., provides the foundation for any inbound marketing strategy.

What’s the Deal? Small Business Masochism or Necessity?

6 Dec 2011 in Daily Deals

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We don’t normally think of the Stockholm Syndrome in relation to Daily Deal Sites and small businesses. However, what’s the deal with these stats? 82% of businesses are unsatisfied with the amount of repeat business they generate after running a Groupon deal, but 45% of local businesses indicate they would advertise with Groupon again.

As they say on the world wide web…WTF!?

This is a great infographic from BuySellAds.com that tells the story of the divide between consumers loving the deals, but the businesses…not so much.

The Groundlings, Men on the Street and Creative Content

1 Oct 2011 in Branded Content

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In September of 2011, our friend and partners at Men on the Street entered into a branded content partnership with members of The Groundlings’ Main Company. ”

“The idea being that our advertising savvy plus their funny equals videos that don’t just get laughs, but sell products”

Combining great content with our distribution platform partner, we can guarantee front page YouTube placement for less money than we’re comfortable mentioning here.

“Creative capabilities include piece meal assignments right up to creating entire campaigns from concept through execution and delivery.”

Check it out (LINK HERE)

Facebook Changes to Individual Profiles and How It Affects Brands

28 Sep 2011 in Facebook

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Some good info about how Facebook’s changes announced at f8 Facebook will affect the visibility of brands and the engagement users have with brands. Here are some key elements to keep in mind.

Timeline
Facebook released an entirely new perspective on a user’s social profile call Timeline (https://www.facebook.com/about/timeline). Timeline is fundamentally a catalogue of the user’s whole life (at least as he may have uploaded it to Facebook) curated by the user. Users choose a cover photo and highlight life events (e.g, birth of a child, marriage, etc.) to tell their story. To make the whole timeline manageable, Facebook condenses the information that is displayed in the user’s Timline the further back in time you scroll.

What is most meaningful for marketers is that users can connect applications to their Timelines. Once connected, an app automatically loads information and actions into a user’s Timeline. The actions can be any verb and noun combination – listening to music, cooking a recipe – that the brand establishes for its apps. If it meets relevancy criteria (see GraphRank below) the auto-inserted information appears in the Ticker of the user’s friends. The insertion continues forever or until the user actively stops it – which is great for brands!. Important events also appear in the user’s News Feed. The Ticker drives social discovery of your app, and your brand, by the user’s friends.

GraphRank
For marketers, application and brand discovery have always been a problem on Facebook. To help solve the discovery issue, in addition to the compelling solution of the Timeline and the Ticker, Facebook has built a relevance filter called GraphRank. GraphRank promotes information based on the amount a user and his/her friends interact with an application and its content. More interaction – greater visibility, For marketers, this ups the ante to create and deliver applications and content that users want to, and do, regularly engage.

The above italics are quoted from Direct Message Lab‘s email newsletter. Nice write up!


B2B Social Media Fact From Fiction

22 Sep 2011 in Social Media

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“86% of B2B companies are using social media to generate leads, connect with customers, and reach business goals.”

Here are 12 compelling facts about B2B and social media, a huge area for exploration and understanding.

1. [FACT] B2B companies that blog generate 67% more leads/month than those who do not. (Source)

2. [FACT] 69% of B2B marketers are shifting their budgets toward social media. (Source)

3. [FACT] B2B companies that blog more than 4x/week see the biggest increase in traffic and leads, according to @HubSpot (Source)

4. [FACT] 51% of B2B marketers plan to increase their spend on content marketing, per @MarketingProfs (Source)

5. [FACT] 86% of #B2B companies are using #socialmedia (Source)

6. [FACT] Top use of B2B social media is for thought leadership at 60%, per @btobmagazine (Source)

7. [FACT] B2B companies are more likely to use Twitter than B2C companies: 75% vs 49%, per @businessdotcom (Source)

8. [FACT] 41% of B2B companies are acquiring customers through Facebook. (Source)

9. [FACT] 39% of B2B marketers say blogging is their most valuable content asset, per @eMarketer (Source)

10. [FACT] 60% of B2B marketers cite thought leadership as #1 reason to use social media, per @btobmagazine (Source)

11. [FACT] Social media helps B2B marketers improve search results (Source)

12. [FACT] B2B #socialmedia spending set to explode to $54M over next 5 years per @Forrester (Source)

This article originally appeared on PWB Marketing Blog and then Business 2 Community

Bacardi takes online social to real world social

20 Jul 2011 in General

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Bacardi recently hosted events in NY and Vegas where they created experiences based on the online preferences of their fans.

All aspects of the events, ‘Like It Live, Like It Together,’  were decided entirely by the brand’s online Facebook following. The fans voted with Facebook ‘likes’ for their favorite cocktails, music acts, foods, leisure activities and forms of entertainment. For example, a blog entry about the event notes how the Bacardi Facebook tab asked its users whether they preferred old school or newer video games. As old school video games received the most ‘likes’, the brand unveiled a large arcade with retro games such as Pac-Man at the following event. Tickets for the parties could be won through a competition, whereby entrants were required to write on the Bacardi Facebook tab about the three best experiences they have ever had with friends.

Bacardi’s approach is a great example of rewarding a pre-existing loyal fanbase.

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