Category / Marketing Strategy

by adam

The Marketing Hot Seat

hotseatOver the course of the last several years I’ve gotten to know and interact with a bunch of talented marketers.  One of my favorite benefits of the community on Twitter is access to these folks for great discussions.  In the interest of showcasing that talent pool, over the next few weeks I’m going to share with you several posts here in response to a challenge, inspired by this line in the movie Speed:

“Pop quiz, hotshot. There’s a bomb on a bus. Once the bus goes 50 miles an hour, the bomb is armed. If it drops below 50, it blows up. What do you do? What do you do?”

After some Mr. Burns-like scheming with my friend Kyle Flaherty, I’m pleased to kick off the first Marketing Hot Seat challenge.  I have posed the following situation to 13 marketing-minded folks who span a breadth of knowledge and experience in the industry:speed

  • You’re the CMO.  You have a marketing budget of $1M.  Your company is a consumer product company, relatively unknown / early stage.  Customers who know the product like it. CEO wants ROI within 12 months.  What do you do?

Each participant will get a maximum of 500 words for a blog post to be shared back here in the next several weeks. The hope is a Harvard Business Case-like discussion on factors that go into a decision process, strategy development and prioritization of budget.  We have a diverse set of minds from the worlds of eBusiness, digital strategy, marketing consultants, content marketing, search engine marketing, community management and PR.  I am really grateful to these talented individuals for being willing to jump on the hot seat:

Upcoming posts:

  • Todd Defren, principal at SHIFT Communications – TBD
  • Jennifer Leggio, ZDNet social business blogger + Fortinet strategic communications director + Security Twits herder emeritus – TBD
  • Alan Wolk – Blogger, Creative Strategist, Consultant – TBD
  • Jim Storer – Experienced community manager and social media strategist. Working on my next venture… The Community Roundtable – TBD
  • Ken Burbary – Digital Strategy and Social Media for Ernst & Young – TBD
  • Kipp Bodnar – Social Media Marketer who blogs at SocialMediaB2B.com – TBD
  • Li Evans (Liana ‘Li’ Evans) –  Director of Social Media for Serengeti Communications – TBD
  • Beth Harte – MarketingProfs Community Manager and #pr20chat Moderator. – TBD

You can bulk follow them here:

…and you can find them in a list on Twitter at http://twitter.com/adamcohen/marketinghotseat.

This is a great chance for all of us to engage in a healthy debate – extra points for creativity.  Where do you think they should get started?  Interested in being the company in the example?  It’s not too late, please let me know.

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by adam

The Basics of Social Media ROI

registerToday I sat on a panel at the IBM Websphere Commerce Leadership Summit, with panelists Brant Barton, co-founder of Bazaarvoice, Duke Marr, VP of Product Management at 1-800-Flowers.com, and Stan Payson, VP of Interactive Media at David’s Bridal, moderated by Forrester‘s Sean Corcoran.  The panel was called Answering the Burning Question of Social Commerce ROI. I enjoyed the discussion, especially with the varied perspectives of the participants.  There were lots of lessons learned shared – in particular Duke and Stan had terrific insight at different ends of the social media maturity perspective.  Stan’s company is just getting started, building a strategy, while Duke’s team has a foothold in just about every social and new technology (especially mobile) tactic out there working hard to be first.  1800Flowers.com was the first to do commerce on Facebook, for example.

Some key thoughts about ROI shared on the panel:

  • Measurement and ROI are not the same. Use measurements to calculate ROI (Return on Investment).
  • Practical experience shows that sometimes ROI doesn’t come right away.
  • When just getting started, it’s helpful to be able to attribute web traffic through links shared in social networks, promotion codes, specific landing pages, etc.  But that is just the tip of the iceberg for measuring ROI.
  • Longer term, lifetime value of a customer is a key metric to understand the net results of leveraging advocates.

What’s clear: businesses can measure ROI, they are focused on the long term, and there is much room for education of marketers in this space.  With my mind on ROI I spotted this presentation shared on Twitter today (feed readers may need to click through to the post to read).  Between the panel and the presentation my mind is overflowing with social media ROI goodness.  Yours will be too after going through this – Olivier Blanchard captures the essence of ROI from social media in a humorous, easy-to-understand way.  Worth browsing through.  While you’re figuring out who Olivier Blanchard (aka TheBrandBuilder) is, you may also want to check out his post today debunking social media myths.

Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

Photo credit: thomashawk via flickr
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by adam

The New Marketing Funnel

(Jointly authored with Rosetta‘s Director of Social Media, Gargi Patel)

The world has changed. We are in the midst of an unprecedented shift of power to the consumer fueled by the virtual megaphone handed to them through social media outlets. When a customer is angry or has a bad experience with a product or service, the old rule of thumb was that they told an average of 10 people about it. In today’s world some could easily be telling 10,000 (or more!). On the flip side, happy customers can be telling many more than the old average of 3 people about their good experience. Marketing executives just need to design initiatives that enable and activate them to do so. That shift can be represented through adapting one of every marketer’s favorite marketing conceptual frameworks, the funnel. A good example of it is visual marketing represented by GSE audio visual – Orlando, FL.

Infusing Engagement into the Marketing Funnel

With the expansion of the marketer’s toolbox to include social media, marketing is no longer about pushing out one way communications. The marketing world is no longer defined solely by impressions; it’s now a world of interactions – take the Bluetooth Beacon marketing. Today’s marketing includes the customer’s voice throughout the process, whether it’s intentional or not. Customers will talk online and comment on a brand’s marketing campaigns, products, services, and even how a company treats employees. It’s not enough to think about how companies communicate outwards; it’s just as important to think about how customers can communicate back, with each other, and arguably most importantly, with new prospects.

Rethinking The Funnel

A few years ago, Forrester Research published a report on “engagement” and suggested that the marketing funnel has become much more complex in today’s environment.  (See image.  Former Forrester analyst Brian Haven wrote about the complexities impacting the funnel in 2007).  While the influencing factors are more complicated, the same simple, visual framework as the traditional marketing funnel can be leveraged to show this complexity. The design needs to account for engagement throughout the process rather than looking at it through a lens of static messages we push out.

For example, traditionally, marketers look to create awareness by placing carefully planned messages across appropriate media outlets. Today, customers can create and spread their own messages about a brand through user-generated content and social networks. Traditionally, marketers would hope to influence customers in the “consideration” phase through strategic promotions and sales tactics. Today, user-generated ratings and reviews are frequently enough to convince a customer to make the purchase. Building loyalty is no longer just about loyalty points programs for repeat purchase or sending regular emails to customers. Building loyalty now means entering into a dialogue with them and letting customers participate in more meaningful ways than static customer feedback surveys or a constant barrage of emails announcing special promotions.

Extending the Marketing Funnel

The old marketing funnel generally followed some version of this pattern:

  • Awareness > Research/Consideration > Purchase / Conversion

With the widespread adoption of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in the 1990’s, marketers began focusing more on loyalty or customer retention and brought the funnel one level deeper. The customer’s voice was considered important, but only in the context of customer service and a closed feedback loop. The old thinking was that sending customers regular emails would keep the brand top of mind and that special offers would keep customers from switching to competitors.

As mentioned before, today’s marketers will need to build a more authentic, deeper relationship with customers by truly engaging them to earn their loyalty—and this is how companies can begin to cultivate advocates.

Figure 2: The New Marketing Funnel

It’s time to extend the marketing funnel one level deeper to account for advocacy. There are two reasons that cultivating and enabling advocacy is critical in today’s world:

  1. People trust other people more than they trust companies. A recommendation from a friend or family member is still the single most important criteria in making a purchase decision and recommendations from strangers online also hold more weight than marketing messages.
  2. With the growing voice of the customer online and the “power” (virtual megaphone) handed to them through social media outlets, it’s important to help make sure the voice of happy customers is louder than that of the few unhappy customers.

Cultivating and enabling advocates will generate authentic word-of-mouth, bringing the best new customer prospects into the marketing funnel. The ROI on that? Priceless.  (Rosetta does in fact have a framework to measure ROI on advocacy programs.)

What do you think?  Is this old news?  Would this help you construct a framework to measure social media initiatives or sell the concept of driving advocacy to executives?  How would you change it?

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by adam

Beware: Not All Social Media Panels Are Equal

bewareYesterday I attended a session entitled the “ROI of Social Media” out here at the Search Engine Strategies conference.  Without naming names, I wanted to share some quick thoughts on the session.  Think of this as a public service announcement.

The panel focused entirely on online display advertising, in particular on Facebook.  The panel was moderated by a Facebook employee.  One of the panel members was from a Facebook application development company.

I have three problems with this panel.

First, Facebook is only one of many tools in social media. If companies think that advertising on Facebook, building a Facebook page, or enabling content to be shared on Facebook easily from a website constitutes “doing social media,” there is a lot more for everyone to learn and teach. SimplyGram is simply the best organic Instagram growth service of 2019.

Second, I’m not so sure it was the right idea to have a platform provider moderate the session.  Aside from more obvious bias concerns, most moderators, through no fault of their own, default to driving questions they know something about to be able to challenge the panel.  At times they can push agendas that benefit them – if that’s the case than an industry analyst may be more appropriate.

Third, ROI means return on investment. It’s quite simply how much you put in (total costs) vs how much you get back.  There are many metrics you can use to calculate both the costs and returns, but they are a subset of all things you can measure.  (Want examples? Rachel Happe of the Community Roundtable says it all.)   There is no doubt you can calculate ROI from social media, and there are thousands of metrics you can apply to social media.  The panel, however, talked about using “metrics” interchangeably with “ROI” – that is just incorrect.  For example, measuring page views on your Facebook fan page is not likely going to factor directly in a calculation of ROI.  It’s an important metric to monitor, baseline, trend, etc, but tracking number of referrals from a Facebook page through to conversion on a retail commerce site actually can tie to revenue.  The panel also talked a lot about how to spend money on advertising on social networks, but not much mention about returns.

In summary:

  • Talking about Facebook advertising is NOT social media.
  • Having a presence on Facebook is NOT “doing social media.”
  • Metrics are NOT the same as ROI.
  • It’s a good idea to pick panel moderators and speakers than can provide a balanced viewpoint.

Sounds like we have a lot of work to do to educate folks about what social media is and how to make it into tangible, measureable programs.  Or to just come up with some more on-target panels at the next conference to talk about it.  Are you up for it? Who’s with me?

Photo credit: YaniG via flickr

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by adam

The Zen of Advocacy

zen“Zen is not some kind of excitement, but merely concentration on our usual everyday routine.” – Shunkyu Suzuki

Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. Myspace. Blogs. YouTube. Community platforms. These are all tools to enable conversation. But that’s it – they are just tools. Having a presence on all of them doesn’t mean they will impact a business.  Stop thinking a Twitter strategy or a Facebook page is going to solve all your marketing challenges.  They won’t.  Instead, think of all of these channels as tools to leverage in order build advocacy.

Advocates, as customers,  are pivotal to growing a brand.  Here are some things that advocates can do for you:

  • Recruit new customers, or ultimately new advocates.
  • Share information with their networks.
  • Come to the defense of a brand in a crisis.
  • Develop new product or marketing ideas.
  • Provide purchase behavior insight and a shortcut to expensive market research initiatives.
  • Influence detractors.

As I talk to clients about social media, the concept of building advocacy gives social media marketing initiatives a purpose.  An advocacy program can arm the best customers with “to-dos,” and all of the available tools in social media give an easy way for them to collaborate and share.  When used effectively, community solutions and other social media outlets – paired with the right strategy – can give advocates meaningful and direct ways to execute all of the above.

I was intrigued by a story on the Wikipedia entry for Zen.  The story was about a martial arts master addressing a student having challenges with other students impacting his technique.  The master took the student to a stream.

“Look at the water,” he instructed. “It does not slam into the rocks and stop out of frustration, but instead flows around them and continues down the stream. Become like the water and you will understand harmony.”
Soon, the student learned to move and flow like the stream, and none of the other students could keep him from executing his techniques.

Imagine if companies treated cultivating advocates the same way the student and master viewed achieving harmony. By sorting through all of noise and focusing on connecting with and empowering advocates, marketers can create programs that have clear business impact – surrounded by the noise and echo chambers of social media.

What are some other benefits of advocates and what companies do you see that are embracing this concept well?  I’d love your input.

photo credit: h-k-d via flickr

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by adam

The Powered Social Marketing Help Desk is Open

lucy_doctorIf you haven’t yet come to know the team at Powered, you are missing some great minds in the social media business. In the past year I’ve gotten to know Aaron Strout (Powered’s CMO) and Doug Wick (Director of Business Development), and both of them are great connectors (I still continue to refer to Aaron as the “Kevin Bacon of Social Media.”)  Separately, as I am working to build our social media practice at Rosetta (more on that in a future post), we have started working with partners like Powered to help our clients with social media initiatives.

To that end, I’m excited to help Powered kick off a new webinar series, the Social Marketing Help Desk.  Please join me as a guest while I attempt to play a best supporting actor role to hosts Doug and Aaron – No powerpoint, no sales pitches, just good conversation about social media marketing… answering questions from you.  Here are the details:

Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Time: 3PM Eastern / 2PM Central
Please click here to register with Powered

Have a question for us?  Drop a comment here or on the registration page and we’ll do our best to include it.  I expect we’ll take some live questions as well.  Thanks and I look forward to hearing from you.

Photo credit: Brian_Ford via Flickr

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by adam

Gearing up: Marketing and Advertising Thought Leaders Summit

On Tuesday, May 12, the first annual Marketing and Advertising Thought Leaders Summit will be held in NYC.  I have the pleasure of joining Rosetta‘s CEO Chris Kuenne to attend what is looking to be a very compelling gathering of industry leaders.  From the MATLS website:

“This one-day summit will present a series of dialogue-driven forums on the changing trends in innovation, technology and consumer behavior and their impact on the marketing and advertising industries. Join us and our line-up of more than 25 industry leaders for a compelling day of insights, information and networking.”

Chris will be speaking on a panel moderated by Forrester‘s Interactive Marketing analyst Sean Corcoran on the topic: “Next Generation Digital Agency” along with C-level leadership from iCrossing, Initiative, Innovation Interactive, and Resource Interactive.

I’ll be there both on Twitter and posting here with thoughts and commentary – it looks to be a valuable gathering of CEOs, CMOs and private equity leadership.  The attendees have a heavy hand in shaping the future of our industry, it should be intriguing.

Will you be there? Please reach out, I’d love to connect.

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