The Engaged Consumer Blog

Quick-n-dirty Podcast Recap 33: Reunited Edition!

Aaron Strout — Mon, 1 Mar 2010 13:07:11 CST

About nine months ago, I started a weekly podcast called the Quick-n-Dirty show with my friend and co-host, Jennifer Leggio (Jennifer is a blogger for ZDNet). Jennifer and I take turns recapping the shows on my personal blog and Jennifer's ZDNet blog but my colleague, Beth Lopez, recently convinced me that I should be cross-posting my re-caps here. If you'd like to see more recaps, you can go here.

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It's been a few weeks since my podcast partner in crime, Jennifer Leggio, and I have been able to do a Quick-n-Dirty podcast together. For two weeks in a row, travel prevented me from joining her on our weekly show. Fortunately, we had a couple of more than capable substitutes in Brian Solis (author and principal of FutureWorks) and Greg Matthews, director of innovation at Humana. Write ups from the shows with Brian and Greg can be found here and here on Jennifer's ZDNet blog.

This week, Jennifer and I were back in the saddle again with me broadcasting live from Jackson Hole, WY (yes, I took one for the team). We had an action packed show starting with our featured social network of the week, Hollrr. Neither Jennifer or I had had much of chance to play with Hollrr but saw some decent potential in this site that Mashable likens to "Foursquare for product discovery" (full review here). Both Jennifer and I appreciated Hollrr's off-the-shelf integration with other social networks like Twitter and Facebook and I personally look forward to getting product recommendations from friends and connections. Oh yeah, they have a pretty cool logo too.

Next up was our featured guest (and former "Twitterer of the week,") Simon Mainwaring. If you don't know Simon, you should. Officially, he is a branding consultant, advertising creative director, blogger, author and speaker. A former Nike creative at Wieden & Kennedy, Portland, and worldwide creative director for Motorola at Ogilvy, he now consults for brands and creative companies that are re-inventing their industries. During this week's show, Simon shared some fascinating updates from a recent trip he took to the Middle East as a guest of the Brookings Institute. The focus was on social media and foreign policy, two disciplines that traditionally don't share the same space. I won't pretend to do Simon's interview justice so just this one time, I'm MANDATING that you listen to at least Simon's portion of the show (starts about 7 mins in and runs for aproximately 25 minutes).

Speaking of "Twitterers of the week," this week's choice was principal of The Community Roundtable (and close friend), Jim Storer. As I mentioned during the show, nobody has done a better job at taking community management skills to Twitter than Jim. Regularly mixing helpful tips, humor, love of bacon and Red Sox commentary into his stream, Jim is a "must add" to anyone's Twitter follow list irrespective of what industry they are in.

Last but not least, our point/counterpoint focused on one of Jennifer's recent blog posts, Twitter: Becoming Nothing Special. Jennifer's post theorizes that the recent announcement of Yahoo's partnership with Twitter pushes them from "new shiny object" into the merely "ordinary" category. While Jennifer didn't see this as all bad, she wondered aloud if this might hurt Twitter's future potential. Taking the opposing side of this issue, I argued that this is exactly what Twitter (and social media) need. Making Twitter and other social networks like "electricity" -- something we don't ever even think about in spite of the critical role it plays in our daily lives -- is a good thing. To me, this means that it's so ingrained in our daily lives, personal and professional, that we can't live without it.

Looking forward to next week's show, Jennifer and I will switch places and I will be working with friend and founder of Oneforty, Laura Fitton, as my guest host. Jennifer will be attending the RSA Conference and thus will be out of pocket for this week's Quick-n-Dirty. I'm sure she'll want to listen to the show (as will you). Fortunately for her, our shows are archived here and on iTunes (search on "quickndirty").

Social Media for B2B: It CAN be done

Aaron Strout — Mon, 1 Mar 2010 12:44:25 CST

This was originally posted on my friend Tommy Landry's blog, Return on Now, as a guest post on February 8, 2010.

Why is it that when it comes to conversation about social media, business-to-business (B2B) seems to draw the short stick every single time? As someone that does a lot of webcasts, blog posts and speaking gigs, the questions/comment that always comes up is, "what about B2B examples." Fortunately for me, I'm able to mention companies like BreakingPoint Systems and Hubspot that do a great job tapping into the power of social media but I often wish there were more examples (with public results) that I could discuss.

In thinking about this topic, one of the main reasons that B2B has taken a little longer to adopt social media into its marketing mix is that it's harder to do effectively. It's also feels risky because there is less control then there is in other channels. With that said, I personally believe that B2B companies stand to benefit the most from social media because they live and die based on the strength of their customer relationships. On top of that, many B2B companies actually know exactly know who their prospective customers are so seeking those folks out in a meaningful way and creating relationships with them can have a huge impact on the bottom line. Given that I'm a prescriptive kind of guy, I'd feel remiss if I didn't offer up some ways that companies can start thinking about putting social media into practice. There are obviously tons of ways but here are a few (including a diagram that provides more color commentary on item number three):

Start listening. This is easier to do than you think. Set up a Google alert for your company's name, your competitors' names and keywords for your industry. If you're already doing this, consider hiring a "listening" service like Techrigy, Radian6 or Meltwater Buzz. This will help you find out where all the relevant conversations in your space are happening.
Create a Twitter account for your business. However, resist the urge to put up links to press releases, product specs and links to press that are signing your business's praises (at least out of the gate). Instead, talk about things that people in your industry care about. For instance, if you create bill payment software, talk about the needs of small to medium sized businesses across the financial spectrum (payroll, credit, vendor managment, etc.) Link to reports and industry analysis. Point out other people's blog posts and magazine articles.
Set up a blog. Before you do this though, make sure you have someone (ideally internal) that is willing to commit to posting at least 5-6 times/month. This can be someone on your marketing, product, or PR teams or even better, one of your executives. Think about creating an editorial calendar to help guide your topics. Most importantly, spend time looking at other industry related blogs -- in fact, you should spend at least a month doing this before you set up your own blog. Be sure to comment on those blogs (talk about the topic, not your company). This will help with getting to know the relevant "social" people in the space.
Create an online community. Once you've gotten comfortable with items 1-3, start thinking about a online community. Ideally, this is for both customers and prospective customers. Some businesses feel more comfortable about creating private communities where customers can talk to one another. The key either way is to hire a great community manager and let them help you create relevant content via webinars, blog posts and conference calls (see diagram below). A community manager will also help you draw out your customers and insure that conversations stay relevant and productive.
Measure, measure, measure. This is less difficult than you might imagine. This really should start with looking at your current goals i.e. new customers, greater retention, larger share of wallet, referrals, etc. Then make sure you benchmark e.g. look at your webstats and current KPI's before you launch your social efforts. Then look at how your moving the bar over time. A key place to look is at your web analytics to see what kind of traffic and engagement your Twitter feed and/or blog efforts are driving. Also, it doesn't hurt to survey customers and ask them if your efforts are impacting their loyalty to your company.

I won't lie to you, everything I mentioned above takes effort. But it's worth trying, especially when it's done right, because it will yield results. One thing that I failed to mention is the importance of integrating the recommendations above with your existing marketing/channel activity. Social media doesn't live in a vacuum and if nobody can find the fruit of your efforts, you may as well not have exerted the time and resources. Am I missing anything? You bet I am. But that's where you come in. What types of social media have you tried? What's worked? Please feel free to share in the comments section below.

What Marketers Want

Aaron Strout — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 06:42:38 CST

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post titled, The Start of Something Bigger? It came on the heels of Ants Eye View's announcement that they had just joined forces with authors/consultants, Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell. Then last week white label community provider, Jive Software, announced that they had purchased listening platform, Filtrbox. All the while I watched with interest knowing that we had some big news of our own to announce in early January.

Let's start with the news since I know that nobody likes to be left hanging. Today, I'm proud to announce that Powered Inc is launching a full-service social media agency through the acquisition of industry leaders crayon, Drillteam and StepChange. The reason we're so excited about this is because we feel that we are now better positioned to help brands (and their agencies) define and deliver comprehensive social media strategies that integrate with their traditional marketing mix. How shall we do this you ask? By leveraging tools and tactics such as Facebook, Twitter, blogger outreach, events, communities and mobile applications of course.

We felt like it was important to take this approach because up until now, marketers have lacked a "go to" resource that could meet all of their social needs. This does not diminish any of the smart, driven and successful other boutiques and consultancies out there that help their clients with their social initiatives but rather that none of them truly provide the end-to-end solutions necessary to meet all of a marketers needs -- at least not with scale. While this may not have been a big deal in 2009 when the entire economy took a mulligan, it will be in 2010 as social media moves from experiment to mission critical. Okay, I know you've probably got tons of questions. I'm going to try to preemptively answer a few below but you there will also be several opportunities to join us live this week:

Today (01/11/10) on Twitter at 1:00 PM CT for a live press conference (hashtag, #powered)
Tomorrow (01/12/10) on JaffeJuice: New Marketing Podcast.
Thursay (01/14/10) on the Quick-n-Dirty Podcast show.

As for the answers, here goes...

Why didn’t Powered just develop these additional social media capabilities? We thought long and hard about the “build vs. buy” strategy, but in the end, we realized that we would dramatically increase our speed to market and add some serious talent (not to mention about 50 new brand relationships) to the Powered team by moving forward with these acquisitions.

Who are Crayon, Drillteam, StepChange?

Crayon brings extensive experience as a strategic social marketing consultancy to the table. They work with Fortune 1000 brands to develop strategies that positively impact customer relationships through the integration of continuous online conversations into traditional marketing programs. Crayon President Joseph Jaffe and his entire team will join Powered’s robust staff of marketers, content creators and social media leaders, with crayon and Powered immediately merging their capabilities.
Drillteam is an engagement marketing agency specializing in earned media. Drillteam helps brands acquire and energize customer advocates, then sustain momentum through both offline events and online communities, and promotions on platforms like Facebook, niche blogs and Twitter. Drillteam will retain its name and operate as a Powered company.
StepChange enhances a brand’s reach by extending presence into social networks and mobile platforms through Facebook development/applications, social site development, mobile/apps and Widget Ads. StepChange will retain its name and operate as a Powered company.

Will Joseph Jaffe (Crayon) be staying on? If so, what role will he play at Powered?
Who is Joe Jaffe? Of course we’re kidding. Joe will play a big role in the new organization as “Chief Interrupter” of the group. He will continue to challenge the industry by providing prolific thought leadership, vision and guidance via his Jaffe Juice blog, podcast and TV show, keynote and panel presence at industry events and conferences, as well as his three books (Life after the 30-second spot, Join the Conversation and soon to be released, Flip the Funnel). More importantly, he will serve as a valued resource to Powered clients to “interrupt” the status quo, think through their social strategy and help conceive and flesh out unique and specific ideas and programs in the space.

Does the industry need another agency?
The industry certainly doesn’t need another agency that does the same thing as its predecessors. To be perfectly honest, we’re not exactly enamored with the idea of being called an “agency” at all. But this isn’t about us: It’s about the world’s largest, loved and important brands and what they need. Many members of our leadership team have lived, and successfully navigated through, several key advances in brand management, communication and emerging media innovation—led by the rise, fall and rise again of digital. We see the gaping void, disconnect or chasm between identification of need and the ability to fully deliver against that need. Social media is not another color on the media flow chart and it is not a subservient subset of digital either. Instead, we see social as a truly pervasive and transformational category in of itself that spans the entire marketing gamut—and even beyond it (touching P.R., customer service, R&D, innovation and customer experience). For that reason, we believe that we will be one of the first—and certainly not the last—of specialist, best in class agents that are equipped, staffed and scaled to fully execute and activate against this growing capability, skill set, need and opportunity.

What is a Social Agency?
A Social Agency or social media agency is an entity that assists companies and brands in the new world of conversational marketing. The confluence of digital, virtual and peer-to-peer networks is causing consumers to act more as a collective than ever before, and they are demanding a truly two-way conversation. We are looking to be the partner that will help brands enter and be successful in that conversation, by building a successful strategy that:

Connects business to social
Joins and manages network presence
Builds and manages branded communal spaces
Connects conversationally through mobile and physical events

The Social Media Agency is the horizontal layer that must be centrally managed but also closely integrated with all of the traditional vertical functions of marketing, such as media, interactive, PR and creativ

What else am I missing? A lot I'm sure. But as you know, I'm pretty good at delivering updates real time through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, my blog, etc. Oh, we're also planning a couple of big blowouts at OMMA Social (January 26) and South by Southwest (SXSW Interactive) in mid-March.

Let's get it on!

Is Your Content Good Enough For an Information Exchange? Creating Registration-Worthy Content

Natanya Anderson — Wed, 6 Jan 2010 09:37:29 CST

Yesterday I read an article from Writing on the Web about the Content Marketing Information Funnel. It applies the traditional sales funnel methodology to the specific business of selling content, and outlines simply and powerfully how to create a sales funnel for content that converts content consumers from free to fee. While I’m not in the business of creating content that consumers are willing to part with their dollars and cents for, I am all about using content to get them to part with something almost as previous: the valid contact information they have to share in order to join a community. The concept of the content sales funnel as it applies to using professional content to drive community success was intriguing to me. What content best practices does it take to convert community visitors who aren’t natural contributors from “lurkers” to registered members of the community?

Content as the Hook for Community

In the last year or two, content marketing strategies have been recognized as a valuable tool in the attraction and cultivation of community members. As Joe Pulizzi so aptly said in his 30 Content Marketing Truths for 2010 post,

“Without content, community is improbable, if not impossible.”

Of course community content can take many forms, including reviews, image and video uploads, and other user contributions, which are solid drivers of community registration. However, as Forrester’s latest Social Technographics data shows, top user content contributors (and typically top registrants) – content Creators, Collectors, and Critics – are growing very slowly in comparison to those who consume the content: Joiners and Spectators. That means you typically can’t rely on them as the sole source of content in the community. They simply won’t create enough content fast enough to satisfy the non-contributors, particularly in the early stages of the community. You need another hook to help supplement user contributions and give non-contributors a reason to register for and continue to engage with a community.

Enter registration-worthy professional content.

What’s Registration-Worthy?

Given that there is a lot of free content out there that requires absolutely no information exchange with a user, what do you have to do to create valuable content that makes providing a few basic tidbits of information a no-brainer for your community visitors? While ever community scenario is different, a registration-worthy content is defined by differentiation. People are usually willing to register for content if it’s different enough in one or some of these ways:

The content is created by a credible subject matter expert. For example, an online tutorial created by a well-known financial expert is of high value to anyone looking for trusted and credible information in a noisy content space. The key here is that the content must not be duplicative of other online information provided by the same expert.
The content provides a depth of information not typically found in other online sources. An in-depth workshop on mastering Adobe Photoshop is registration-worthy, particularly if most other online Photoshop content is in the form of tips and tricks. When a user is ready to expand their knowledge base significantly, they will happily trade data for extended information experiences.
The content isn’t generally available elsewhere on the Web. A personal training program based on the New England Patriots off-season workouts, a first look at a new product, and tools for managing weight loss in accordance with a specific diet are all examples of hard-to-find and high-value content that will drive registrations.

And these are really just three ways to differentiate content. You can also leverage existing content that is free, or outside of the registration firewall in a variety of ways, including, but not limited to:

Beef it up with additional in-depth information.
Make it more useful and visually compelling with informational graphics or useful interactive components.
Provide the core information in an alternate format like a podcast, video, or downloadable PDF.
Have a subject matter expert add an introduction or special tips and tricks.

The bottom line: As you plan for content designed to drive registrations, ask yourself honestly, “Would I trade my e-mail address for this content?”

The Free to Registered Funnel

As much as I’m a proponent of utilizing differentiated and in-depth content to drive community registration, I am also a strong believer in giving before you get. While you could require registration for all of your content, I’ve seen tons of data that shows that a mixed approach is your best bet. By offering a set of no strings attached content to users, you accomplish a couple of key things for the content and the community:

Show by doing that you really are developing a destination that is user-centric and user-focused. This helps build their confidence in your motives and helps them look less and less for the bait and switch.
Give them a taste of how great and useful your content really is, sort of a “try before you buy” approach where their valuable personal information is currency.

Once you’ve given the gift of great content, you’re in a position to offer up more content but this time ask for a little something in return. But just because you’ve earned the right to ask doesn’t mean you should abuse it: keep the information you collect at registration to just a couple of key data points. Over time as you continue to provide great content of all types you’ll be able to incrementally ask for more and more information. Your user-focus and patience will be rewarded.

Social Marketing Links: Week of 12/14/09

Aaron Strout — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 13:49:42 CST

More gems from the bizdev, marketing and product teams here at Powered. As always, we love to share so this is just one more way we do so. Enjoy!

Beth Lopez (marketing)
This week's choice is the State of Interactive Agencies report by Sean Corcoran of Forrester.

Executive Summary of Report: Although most interactive marketers would prefer to have one consolidated agency handling all of their digital needs, the ever-changing landscape requires the use of several agencies. These agencies are key to success because interactive marketers need to outsource certain skill sets, and because agencies help marketers stay ahead of the curve in a fast-changing industry. Moreover, many interactive marketers don’t trust their traditional brand agencies with interactive work. Yet the complexity of the interactive landscape is creating a fragmentation of interactive agencies, which in turn is creating a whole new set of challenges to marketers. Interactive marketers should prepare their organization for even more agency partners and educate their procurement teams on the value of these relationships.

DP Rabalais (marketing)
Although not a article, I think this is one of the most useful, practical, and measureable examples of brands using Facebook to not only engage and communicate with their customers, but also to listen to what they want. BestBuy recently did an outstanding Voice of Customer outreach via Facebook. They asked their Fans which vampire movies they liked the most. Based on Fans input, Best Buy put the most popular movies on sale and promoted the sale back to their fans!

Doug Wick (bizdev)
This is a compilation of a lot of the 2010 prediction posts, including Mashable’s and Read Write Web’s. There are a lot of interesting predictions, most of them centering around brands taking a larger direct role in publishing content, mobile platforms become central to our lives, and the impact of real time information (which is significantly enhanced by mobile in terms of demand).

Bill Fanning (bizdev)
My shared post for this week comes from Brian Solis and is titled Facebook Brings Fans into Focus. The post is a quick review of the latest features released by Facebook making one's Fan page portable. Essentially, Facebook has a widget that allows you to put a light version of your Fan page directly on your website, making it more than just a static site. Just another step toward fulfilling the prediction that all websites will soon be social.

Jay MacIntosh (bizdev)
As we saw last year, big brands were experimenting with social media. According to this study by Bazaarvoice and the CMO Club, 75% of CMOs didn’t attach any revenue expectations to their social spending in 2009. Perhaps, that’s one of the factors that made a $50k a facebook or twitter experiment seem more palatable than a six figure investment in a branded online community.

According to this survey, that’s about to change big time in 2010. This year 81% of CMOs are expecting their social media investments to drive 10% of their sales. I think there’s a compelling opportunity for Powered to provide the 2009 experimenters with a social marketing strategy and execution that ultimately pulls buying customers into their .com domains (aka branded online community). Of course, we’ll use outposts like facebook, twitter, search, etc. to create awareness and invite them to the community.

Don Sedota (product)
This is an entertaining re-cap about a big agency (Saatchi & Saatchi) that recently got in over their head with a social marketing campaign for Toyota. It goes to show that there really is a difference between an interactive agency and a social marketing agency. The big mistakes; lack of authenticity and lack of involvement by the brand.

Of particular interest is the winning/controversial video (embedded) and the fact that most of the comments on the article are from the future (it’s an Australian site).

What about you? Have a great article you want to share alongside the Powered team's finds? E-mail me at aaron DOT strout AT Powered DOT com or leave your idea in the comments. Just remember to include a quick description as to why you picked your link!

Two Questions: Netpromoter Score for Social Marketers?

Aaron Strout — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 13:34:56 CST

The other day, my boss handed me a recent AdAge article by B.L. Ochman titled Two Questions Every Marketer Should Ask Its Social-Media Agency. He didn't say anything but he had a smile on his face as he laid the article on my desk. The reason for the smile? B.L.'s two questions 1) Do they [the agency] walk the walk? and 2) do they have case studies were squarely in Powered's wheelhouse when it came to prospecting for new customer

Addressing B.L.'s first question, one of my top three priorities as the CMO of Powered is "walking the walk" or getting the company to eat its own dogfood. We blog (as evidenced here and on Powered's blog), we podcast, we engage in Twitter, etc. and not just infomercial style. We also speak at quite a few different events (social and marketing focused) and webcast. For this reason, we can feel comfortable preaching to our clients that "content is king" and that "giving before you get" has a huge impact on a client's return on investmen

As for B.L.'s second point, we are also big believers in case studies. To that end, we've worked hard with our customers like Sony and HP to come up with relevant write ups spelling out methodology and results. In the cases of Sony and HP, we were fortunate enough to have our numbers validated by MarketingProfs -- in the first instance via a third party interview with our client at Sony, in the second, our client at HP actually co-presesented their results (key slide below).

In addition to liking B.L.'s Ochman's two questions for the reasons I spelled out above, her article also got me thinking about how these questions are in some ways the equivalent of Fred Reichheld's now famous and widely used Net Promoter Score (NPS). If you're not familiar with NPS, it suggests that a barometer for any company's customer satisfaction should come down to one question i.e. "How likely is it that [your customer] would recommend [your] company to a friend or colleague?" If marketers start thinking this way when chosing a partner to help them with "social", knowing if the social media agency has in depth knowledge through practical application AND past success stories with clients seems pretty straightforwar

What do you think? Is this a good measure of a company's social media chops? If not, what else is missing? Or do you agree with Chris Brogan who feels like companies may be missing the boat by focusing too much on case studies?

Back to School Podcast: Talking Future of Advertising with Simon Mainwaring

Aaron Strout — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 10:36:05 CST

Simon Mainwaring is an author, blogger and speaker who comes from a big agency background (Wieden Kennedy, Saatchi and Ogilvy). Not too long after we started following one another on Twitter, I began noticing that Simon's updates contained a large dose of valuable links to articles, blog posts and research reports. Many of these reports were on the intersection of social, digital, advertising and marketing -- four areas that are all crucial to day-to-day role as CMO of Powered Inc.

After featuring Simon as "Twitterer of the week" on my weekly podcast show with Jennifer Leggio, I decided to invite Simon to do a Back to School podcast with me to talk about the future of advertising. During our conversation, we discussed the following topics:

Advantages of social over traditional media (as summarized in his recent post on, top 10 advantages of social media over traditional).
Why Simon thinks social media is easier to measure than traditional media.
Ways traditional and social media “play nice in the sandbox?”
Why do you think more companies aren’t getting “social?
Why advertising agencies are having a difficult time "getting" it.
Examples of a few companies that are mixing social and traditional well.
A few blogs that Simon draws his inspiration from (I like the fact that this isn't your traditional fare):
- Umair Haque's Harvard Business Review blog
- Maria Popova's Brainpicker blog
- PSFK

To download this podcast, right-mouse click here. If you want to hear more from Simon on "the Future of Advertising," check out this Blog Out Loud video on Youtube.

Notes from the Desert: 5 Key Take Aways from ANA's Masters of Marketing

Aaron Strout — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:08:49 CST

Prior to last week, I had not had the pleasure of attending the ANA's Masters of Marketing Conference. That was a mistake as this is obviously where the creme de la creme of the marketing/advertising world comes together for four and a half days to learn, network and golf (not necessarily in that order). In case there is any doubt, this is the list of speakers from the event:

Mark Addicks, SVP, CMO, General Mills
Frances Allen, Brand Marketing Officer, Dunkin' Brands
Cynthia Ashworth, VP, Consumer Engagement, Dunkin' Brands
Diane Brink, VP, Marketing, Global Technology Services, IBM
Brad Casper, President and CEO, The Dial Corporation
Joan Chow, EVP and CMO, ConAgra
Andy England, CMO, MillerCoors
Neil Golden, SVP, CMO, McDonald’s USA
Jeffrey Hayzlett, CMO and VP, Eastman Kodak
David Jones, Global CEO, Euro RSCG Worldwide
Barry Judge, CMO, Best Buy
Michael Keller, Chief Brand Officer, Dairy Queen
Richard McDonald, SVP, Global Marketing, Fender Musical Instrument Corp.
Stephen Quinn, EVP and CMO, Walmart U.S., Walmart Stores
Eric Ryan, Chief Brand Architect, Co-Founder, Method
Jonah Bloom, Editor, AdAge

Over the course of the three days that I was there, I had the opportunity to find out what was on the minds of the chief marketing officers (CMOs) and CEOs at some of the world's preeminent brands. I captured these learnings via video (using my newly purchased Zi8), Twitter and hand written notes. Obviously it's not easy distilling all the pearls of wisdom from such a smart group of people into one readable blog post so I'm breaking these learnings into three sections:

Ten Twenty of my favorite quotes as captured via my (and others') Twitter streams
Video and audio interviews with several industry luminaries.
My five key take aways from the event

There were literally hundreds of tweets from the event so picking just ten is not an easy task. Fortunately, you can look back in the stream yourself at all the updates that were tagged with the #ANAMarketers hashtag from the event. I also went in and "favorited" about 50 of the best tweets so you can see that longer list of good tweets here. If there are tweets that you liked that I missed, feel free to add them in the comments below:

dwied 2.5% of shoppers make up 80% of most CPG volume. Note the 80/20 rule... no longer rules. #anamarketers (quoting Jeff Hayzlett, CMO of Kodak)
irinaskaya RT @ANAmarketers: DQ has built an online consumer following with its Blizzard Fan Club, Facebook page, Twitter & DQ blog #ANAmarketers
Hillary_Ashton @Fidelity CMO James Speros: set aside a portion of budget to experiment: [i say: this is just so key to innovation] #ANA #ANAmarketers
AaronStrout @BestBuyCMO says that employees are the differentiator. Products/prices are relatively equal. It's why they use 'em in ads. #ANAMarketers
nancyleibig #Fidelity's Speros-economic tsunami has fundamentally changed way that mktrs need to execute-fast & insight-driven #anamarketers
evantlevy Forget the 4 or 5Ps. I like this better: RT @melindabluett Kodak 4E's: Engage. Educate. Excite. Evangelize. #anamarketers
nancyleibig 1/2 of #kodak biggest products are new in the last 2 yrs. All are top 3 in their category. Biggest business turnaround. #anamarketers
AaronStrout Love it. Eric Ryan @MethodTweets jokes that the way businesses can manage "Twitter Effect" ala movie Bruno is "to make a better product" #ANAMarketers
dwied Competitors spent $15MM on toilet paper. Method spends $5.1MM on advertising. Brilliant assessment. #anamarketers
AaronStrout Schwab is sitting w/ SEC to figure out how to ease themselves into social media (still great hesitancy based on regulation) #ANAMarketers
MarthaAYoung David Jones, CEO of Havas Worldwide: The new world of marketing is open source. #ANAmarketers
MWellsatForbes #ANAMarketers Miss the ANA conference? Read about today's discussions here on Forbes.com. http://tiny.cc/Evr1Q
maadman123 Wow! From Google: 5 exabytes is the amount of ALL info we produced from pre-history to 2003. Today, we produce this in 2 days. #ANAmarketers
Hillary_Ashton Google CEO Eric Schmidt realtime feedback / openness creates a constant battle AND an opportunity #ANAmarketers
prnaylor @JonahBloom from advertising age says crowdsourcing displays that brands are owned by consumers. #anamarketers
Hillary_Ashton @JonahBloom, Advertising Age editor says trend in marketing - radical transparency see social media #anamarketers
AaronStrout Andy England, CMO of Miller Coors talks RE what sells beer. It's not sex but 1) segmentation 2) positioning 3) Execution #ANAMarketers
melindabluett RT @bwiener: Mc'D's guiding principle "Market what we serve rather than execute what we market".. authenticity is big theme #ANAmarketers
bwiener Verizon CMO "Brand marketing needs to reflect fundamental truth about brand"....can't hide behind advertising anymore #ANAmarketers
AaronStrout Walmart CMO's parting thought: Marketer's job is to get our company focused on creating true value for customers. #ana

Now for the multimedia portion of this blog post. Below you'll find interviews with AOL CEO, Tim Armstrong, Kodak CMO, Jeff Hayzlett and Method co-founder, Eric Ryan. VIDEO Tim Armstrong, CEO and chairman, AOL

VIDEO Jeff Hayzlett, CMO, Eastman Kodak Company

SIDEBAR: As promised, I mentioned to a few of the folks following my tweets from the event that I would share the Zi8/video tips that Jeff offered up prior to our interview. He uses his Zi8 quite a bit so I trust that he knows of which he speaks.

Get an external mic (one of the best features of this camera). He said that you can get a wired boom mic, a wired lav or wireless lav. I think I'm leaning toward the last as it will be the least intrusive.
If you do get a wired mic, that you get one with batteries so that it doesn't drain the rechargeable battery on the camera.
Definitely use a tripod if shooting interviews. Although the Zi8 has an anti-jitter feature, it can pick up hand/arm movement, especially if the interview is longer than just a few minutes.

AUDIO Eric Ryan, co-founder and chief brand architect, Method (from a guest interview I did with Eric on Susan Bratton's Dishy Mix podcast show) Last but not least, here are my five key take aways:

While the social web appears to be gaining in importance, it's still not one of the top three things that most CMOs are focusing on.
In spite of many pundits (myself included) declaring that the world of advertising is dying a slow but painful death, the heads of marketing from the companies represented at this conference all show no signs of slowing down their ad spending. In fact, many mentioned that they plan to spend more next year.
Segmentation and a "back to basics" approach to marketing ruled the day. I heard several CMO's mention that their advice to other companies was to "simplify" and and "focus on what they did well."
I heard a lot less about measurement and ROI than I anticipated.
The speakers that did mention "social" spent more time focused things like Youtube videos, Facebook Fan pages and more campaign-oriented approaches than longer lasting, programmatic approaches (a mistake in this marketer's humble opinion).

All in all, I was encouraged by the positive tone of the conference and heartened that at least some of the marketers at the event (Kodak, BestBuy, Fidelity, Method, Dunkin Brands and Schwab to name a few), have "social" on their radar. I do predict that next year's conference will be much more "socially aware" and fortunately I plan to be there -- hopefully with Powered Inc. as a sponsor.

Have you been to a "marketing" conference recently? If so, what were some of your key learnings?

Who Started the Selfishness?

Doug Wick — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:02:59 CST

The recently published FEED study - The Digital Brand Experience Report (by Razorfish) presents an analysis of the brand experience within the digital world and focuses much of its attention on social media. One of the central findings is that consumers "friend" brands on social networks because of deals and customer service, mostly egocentric motivations:

"Dell has earned kudos from social media mavens for generating $3 million in sales from its Dell Outlet through Twitter. Starbucks has soared to the top of Facebook brand pages, with nearly 4 million friends, by offering fans coupons for free pastries and ice cream. And Whole Foods tops Twitter with 1.5 million followers by broadcasting weekly specials and shopping tips."

While it's difficult to disagree with these data, I think there is more to learn behind the numbers. It would be easy for a marketer to point at these examples and shrug, saying "well, consumers are selfish, I guess. This is the only way to get them to have a relationship with us." Enter a deluge of ads, giveaways, and coupons into social media.

But are marketers responding to consumers, or is it the other way around? Going deeper - if we asked consumers if marketers are selfish, what would they say?

The great thing about digital and social media is that it offers new tools that enable a brand to be less selfish, where more traditional means of marketing have the selfishness baked in and as a marketer you have no choice. But make no mistake, just because you CAN be less selfish within social media doesn't mean you will be.

Measuring yourself on revenue driven, fans, or followers alone (which incidentally, I don't believe Dell, Whole Foods, or Starbucks are doing in reality) is an indicator that you might be focusing on the wrong thing and leaving much of potential that social media has to change the nature of your relationship with consumers on the table. These metrics are intrinsically selfish, whereas other metrics like like net promoter score, brand affinity, and plain-old customer satisfaction are a little more consumer-centric.

Beyond these measures, it's important to focus on how your marketing trains consumers. What is the nature of your relationship?

Is your relationship the same transactional one that TV spots and Flash-laden websites got you?

Did you get all those fans because you gave them free stuff and novelties?

Or is it something different, where that commercial relationship has become more personal? Did you instead get those fans because of what you represent, and because those fans recruited themselves and others?

Everything you do to your current and potential customers helps them understand how you want to be treated by them, and what to expect from you in the future. If they are treating you selfishly, it's probably because you (or someone like you - a competitor?) did it first. The good news is it doesn't have to be that way anymore.

Photo via the Melle Music blog

Social media success: 3 absolute musts

Aaron Strout — Thu, 5 Nov 2009 13:04:55 CST

This post originally ran on IMediaConnection's "Connecting the Marketing Community" section on 10/16/09.

For any business that's thinking about delving into the world of social, there are a few key words that you'll likely see pop up again and again, namely "transparency, authenticity, and credibility." While these terms aren't new and their relevance is certainly not limited to the world of social, understanding how they apply and their true value is crucial in the success of your efforts. In this article, I'll discuss why each is important and then provide some examples of companies that are doing a good job employing them.

Transparency
Getting comfortable with the level of openness -- both good, and bad -- that the social web brings to bear can be a difficult thing for companies at first. For many, it goes against the grain of "controlling the message" and "maintaining control of the brand." Being transparent means owning up to mistakes publicly, responding to negative or unflattering comments, and, most importantly, providing a level of access to your culture that was previously not possible. Understand that, contrary to popular belief, this does not mean completely opening up your corporate kimono to the public but rather adding a layer of "human" to your brand that may not have previously existed.

Authenticity
This is probably the most important of the three concepts -- at least in this social marketer's mind, mainly because it speaks to the level of trust a company wishes to elicit from customers. Authenticity is about creating good content that speaks to lifestyle vs. product, or essentially putting customers first (and really meaning it). It's about standing behind guarantees and being sincere when apologizing. Authenticity is also about not using social channels to push your marketing, PR, or brand agenda down customers' throats but rather engaging them in real dialog -- good, bad, or indifferent.

Credibility
This is really a byproduct of demonstrating a level of transparency and authenticity and continually delivering on that promise. Most importantly, it governs to what degree you can engage with customers on the social web. For instance, diving head first into Twitter and holding a Twitter press conference a day after you've opened up your account probably isn't going to fly. The same goes for launching a corporate blog and creating only one or two posts in the beginning to tout a new product. This doesn't mean that a company has to wait six months to a year before deriving benefit from your social endeavors, but rather that it must establish a level of credibility before looking for the "quo" part of the quid pro quo.

Who is doing it right?
Let's start with Zappos, the online shoe store that recently hit $1 billion in annual sales (which was likely one of the things its acquirer, Amazon, found particularly attractive about the company). Transparency starts at the top with Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh. Not only is Tony the company's lead voice on Twitter -- his handle is @zappos -- but Tony regularly speaks about corporate culture, best practices, training, and every other aspect of the business on a daily basis. I've actually seen him hand out his company's 500 plus page training manual (which was written by the employees) at conferences, almost as if he's daring competitors to try and be more transparent and open then Zappos. While a majority of businesses will never want to achieve this level of transparency, Hsieh and Zappos have backed up what they do in the public domain, with great results.

Moving onto authenticity, Best Buy has embraced it in a way that few have ever attempted. Best Buy put itself on the social map with the launch of its Blue Shirt Nation community -- a place for Best Buy employees to come together to share ideas and best practices inside the corporate firewall. The success of this venture led to the company's chief marketing officer, Barry Judge, not only signing up for Twitter and blog accounts but publicly discussing things like new ad campaigns, company layoffs, and the overall evolution of marketing within the company's four walls. If you're wondering why I'm using Judge and Best Buy as an example of "authenticity" versus "transparency," it's because Judge has done a nice job at not opening the kimono too wide and thus exposing himself or the company to too much scrutiny. Judge has found that nice balance of establishing Best Buy as authentic and approachable without some of the risk that Hsieh has assumed with Zappos.

Last up, we have credibility. Certainly both Zappos and Best Buy have earned a sense of credibility in the field based on their behavior, but I'll provide a third example of a company that embodies that trait and that is JetBlue. While this "darling" of the airline industry has done almost everything right over the past several years, it had a fairly major snafu about three years back when it stranded thousands of customers for hours on the tarmac at dozens of airports across the U.S. The public outcry from the millions of JetBlue customers that had come to love and trust the airline was well documented on the news and in the press. When former JetBlue CEO David Neelman posted an apology on YouTube (below) with the comments turned on, one of the reasons this tactic worked is because of JetBlue's credibility in the social space and that it was known as a company that cared about its customers. It took a while for customers to forgive JetBlue, but eventually they did. And Neelman's public apology was a major part of the healing process.

There are of course dozens of other examples of companies embracing transparency, authenticity, and credibility, but these three companies should provide some hope that the social web can be truly embraced with positive outcomes. And of course, not every company is going to be ready to fully commit to these concepts. But the more you can think about incorporating these into your social efforts, the greater chance of success you'll have down the road.

What about you? Is your company (or other companies you work with) doing a good job at embracing transparency, authenticity and credibility?

From Media Pro to Hydroelectric Engineer

Doug Wick — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 15:23:14 CDT

Last week I wrote a blog post about "Earned Media and Siren Song of Mentions," where I outlined the problem that digital media professionals face when it comes to a world increasingly dominated by social media.

I promised to follow up this week with some ideas for a solution, since where I left off it was looking pretty grim. Have we lost complete control over message, time, and place? What can a media professional actually do in a new world slowly being taken over by the Conversation Stream?

I think the answer has something to do with hydroelectricity.

Hydroelectricity, according to Wikipedia, is “the production of power through use of the gravitational force of falling or flowing water.” The hydroelectric engineer doesn’t try to fight gravity, he or she just tries to divert falling water in a natural way so that it flows through turbines and creates energy.

For media professionals, the Conversation Stream is that falling water. The infrastructure you build to divert it, and the way you test and optimize that system over time, is the new structure for engineering brand success.

The Non-Sequitur

The first step to channeling Conversation to drive marketing, of course, is to understand how the Conversation Stream flows. The answer is actually pretty simple – it flows like any other conversation does. The enemy of any hydroelectric engineer is turbulence, and similarly the enemy of a social media pro is social awkwardness. There are lots of ways to be socially awkward, and sadly most of us have probably experienced them at one time or another in our personal lives. You can talk too much and not listen enough. You can be loud, interruptive, talking over others. You can be too quiet and not contribute anything. You can be distasteful or insensitive to others’ situations.

But the most common socially awkward action in social media today is the non-sequitur. It’s the marketer who, in the middle of the Conversation, changes the subject to something obviously self-serving or irrelevant. It happens in the ads along the side of the Stream, and it happens within the Stream itself when marketers tweet or publish a Facebook message that is promotional or faceless.

The commonly referenced solution for low relevancy is segmentation and targeting, but the problem here is less about who sees your ad and more about how they are using sites like Facebook. People watching the Conversation Stream are networking with friends and colleagues, and typically tune out ads. Not only do ads miss frequently on relevance, but the means of delivery isn’t relevant, either. This is why ads on Facebook have historically performed very poorly, even relative to ads bought elsewhere online.

Building Channels for the Stream

Have you ever observed anyone who is a really good conversationalist? One of highest order skills a conversationalist can have is the ability to elegantly “change the subject.” As a marketing conversationalist who has an end in mind, you need to ignore conversations where they are mentioning your brand (again, earned media is the end, not the means) and seek to join or start conversations about things that might be relevant - but one or two steps away from your brand. This is partly an exercise in smart hunting, but it’s also a numbers game. Only 20% of the Stream is about brands themselves, and a very small fraction of that will be about your brand, according to a recent study by Penn State.

If you are an automaker, go talk about travel. If you sell insurance, you probably know a lot about safety. Selling any type of food item? Tweet about nutrition. As a marketer, it might feel unnatural to focus on messaging that doesn’t push product, but remember that we are joining a Conversation already in progress. People will know you are from a brand (you should always tell them), but if you choose topics of conversation that have some relevancy to your brand it won’t seem weird that you are talking about it.

Once you’ve learned how to have these topical conversations and identified the ones where you can or should play a part, you can take advantage of your ability to facilitate these conversations structurally. By this I mean that instead of just striking up these conversations where they exist on third party networks, you can build digital properties that allow richer or deeper exploration of these relevant topics, and channel the Conversation Stream into them. You are now a hydroelectric engineer not seeking to interrupt or fight the flow, but redirecting it to your purposes.

Why not take this further by facilitating conversations about the category where your products or services exists? Another level of flow that moves the conversation even closer to your brand, but you still aren’t talking directly about yourself. It’s polite.

If Someone’s Interested, They’ll Ask

When someone has moved from a conversation about travel on Facebook to a conversation within your online community devoted to road trips to a conversation about the best cars for road trips, it’s time to give them the opportunity to ask you about one of the cars you make. By simply serving a highly relevant ad at this point, you give them the opportunity to click, and by clicking they are asking you about yourself.

These last-step ads are the turbines in your hydroelectric powerplant, the place where the Stream gets converted into the bottom line results that justify the investment. At every step of the way you haven’t tried to force the conversation, you’ve just helped it along, let it flow, and now a highly self-selected audience is rolling right past ads that are on your own site.

And as the Stream rolls through, it takes nuggets of your brand back with it into the main Conversation. If you are keeping it interesting and serving visitors, they will recommend your content and conversations, through technologies like Facebook Connect and various social networking APIs (Twitter's being most notable).

Build vs. Buy

So in the end you are still placing ads. The difference is that the focus has shifted away from the place where people finally encounter the ads (and how you allocated money to buy those placements) to the pathway that they took to get there. By the time they see a product placement, it will seem like the natural next step, not an interruption, and as a media pro you will need to expand your skills to deliver that experience.

Does this mean you'll have to start thinking like an online publisher? Yes. Does it mean that you'll have to expand your skills to include digital development? Yes.Being a steward of a conversational brand means you will have to build the content and code that creates a pathway that is uniquely relevant and appropriate to you.

But take heart, media (be in paid or earned) is still about reaching out and forming new connections with your audience, and you've been doing that for years. The difference is that now that connection begins much farther away, upstream.

Weekly Social Marketing Links: Week of 10/28

Aaron Strout — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:07:35 CDT

Cross-posted on Citizen Marketer 2.1

Yup. It's been a few weeks since we last posted our team's weekly social marketing links. As some of you know, I try and do a weekly digest of the links that my team (marketing, sales and product) come up with for our recurring staff meeting. Unfortunately, (work) life just gets in the way sometimes. Here's what we've got for this week:

Beth Lopez (Marketing)

Found How to Do Social Marketing in Heavily Regulated Industries to be an interesting read on how regulated industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare and Pharma should tap into social marketing and how best to do it. The thinking is that since social marketing is a “pull” technique and not a “push” technique (where traditional regulations apply), advertisers and marketers in regulated industries should focus on…wait for it…wait for it…listening to consumers on social networks to gather research and insight (doesn’t everyone say that these days?). The author also goes on to state that for pharma (look in comments), marketers should be thinking about conversations around the disease versus the actual drugs (which is where they can get into trouble). All in all, an interesting perspective.

DP Rabalais (Marketing)

This article from Adweek, The Revolution Will Be Mobile, talks about how the worldwide adoption of mobile phones (61% of the world's population has access to a mobile phone) is influencing how marketers connect with consumers. Mobile Internet usage in the U.S. has more than doubled in barely two years, and mobile communities are emerging.

According to the article, "For a brand that would like to learn more about what its customers and potential customers want, social networks via mobile are the perfect platform with massive scale. The Japanese mobile community "Mobage Town," for example, includes 12 million people. Anyone who wants to can listen in or join discussions, and anyone who wants to sell a product or service is enabled to do so."

Bill Fanning (BizDev)

This week’s post was written by Francois Gossieaux titled, Why Brand Communities Don’t Exist. Notice he refers to “Brand” communities, not “Branded” communities. To be clear, when we say “Branded” communities we are referring to where the community is hosted (on the brands site as opposed to Facebook or other external communities) not to the Brand being the topic of the community.

Francois makes a very important point (one that we at Powered built a business on) that people don’t participate in branded communities simply because they like the brand and enjoy their products. They participate because they are passionate about the lifestyle associated with the brand. The community gives them a place to get valuable information, interact with other people with similar interests and engage with the company. He notes several examples like the communities hosted by Harley, Jeep, Mini Cooper and Fiskars….we could add several others as well.

Good post!

Doug Wick (BizDev)

[Okay, so Doug has been up to his eyeballs with RFP's, contracts and keeping his blogging hat on. So I'm going to include his most recent post on Powered as his entree of the week...]

Almost anyone who knows anything about interfacing with customers or prospective customers through the Networks (Facebook, Twitter, et al.) will tell you that you should start by listening.

So most marketers' first step is to set up a monitoring tool (maybe expensive, maybe as simple as a free keyword search on Twitter). Then, the first experience that almost every media marketer (or marketer, period) has after listening to the Networks for a bit is that the brand, product, or company they are representing will be mentioned. When this happens (“just bought a Honda at Carmax, great experience!”), it will make a positive and socially important impression on everyone who views it. This is exciting because it is essentially a free media placement, a nugget of gold dropped into people's news or Twitter feeds that didn’t cost you anything! This type of mention is often called “earned media,” earned because your company created a great customer experience that made someone tell their friends. <rest of the post continued here...>

Jay MacIntosh (BizDev)

The Tribalization of Business Study (2009) by Deloitte and Beeline Labs.

Disclaimer: I don’t understand why anyone would refer to a group of people sharing an interest as tribes. I’ve always thought of tribes, similar to the clans of my Scottish background, as having to do with ancestry (i.e. people who came before us like forefathers/mothers). Do we really need to “dress-up” social media to get more people to pay attention to the significance of the online social phenomena? I guess so…

Anyhow, this recently released study from Deloitte paints a broad picture of where companies are at with their adoption of social media. As suspected, backed up by the conversations I’ve had with over 50 such companies the past several months, I’d say they’re at the preadolescent stage. Characterized by - beginning to care somewhat about if/how they fit in, have a rough idea of some goals, more focused on the future, beginning to care about how their appearance, etc.

I won’t go into the details (which you’ll get in the 10 minutes it takes you to look through the 28 slides), but here are a couple of the most interesting findings:

It looks like only about 20% of these communities have members in the thousands.
Approximately 60% of their company’s oldest community have been in existence for less than 1 year.
Stated goals (i.e. what they want to achieve) and metrics (i.e. how they keep score) are out of whack.
45% plan to increase their investment in social media and online communities while only 6% plan to decrease investment.

Don Sedota (Product)

Good perspectives by Jeremiah Owyang on the Google/Twitter/Bing deal announced earlier last week. Basically Google and Bing will now start incorporating URL tweets/re-tweets and the influence/reach of corresponding tweeters into search rankings (i.e., consumers now have a direct impact on search rankings).

His key takeaways include:

Companies must focus even more on listening to make sure PR flare ups and the like on Twitter are quickly extinguished
It’s becoming increasingly important for companies offer easy social sharing (e.g., via Twitter) for site content. (Also of note is that Facebook will be offering public status updates to Bing so sharing via FB/FBC becomes more valuable to companies from a search results perspective)
Companies must continue to develop in-house influencers on Twitter in order to juice the search rankings of corresponding tweets (URLs)

How about you? Any good articles/posts/research to share? We're always looking for fresh inspiration.

Driving Purchase Consideration: Podcast with Jackie Huba & Rob Harles

Aaron Strout — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:45:44 CDT

As part of the latest "Back to School" podcast series I do for my company, Powered Inc., our goal is to focus on the intersection of business and social. The speakers are smart people who run the gamut of bloggers, authors, analysts, journalists and business practitioners. This months flavor focuses on tapping into social to drive purchase consideration. My guests were the smart (and fun) Jackie Huba and Rob Harles. Jackie is an author and business blogger while Rob is the VP of community for a company you may have heard of called Sears.

Right-mouse click to download.

During our conversation, we covered the following topics (hat tip to Doug Haslam of SHIFT for helping me craft these interview questions):

Consideration may seem like the part of the buying cycle most helped by social media: agree or disagree?
How do we let customers “Consider?” How much of it is an active engagement (for lack of a better word) with the customer, rather than a more passive approach of letting them consider?
If passive is an approach, how hard is it for companies to let go and let customers do there thing, trusting they will stay in the cycle?
How vital is content in the consideration cycle?

Brand-produced vs user-produced?
One over the other?
A preferred mix ratio?

Types of content that work best
Might consideration be used as a tool to make existing customers more profitable (repeat buyers)?
How do you measure Consideration?

Is your company using the social web to drive purchase consideration? If so, I'd love to hear more about it.

Thanks to Jim Storer for his expert editing skills. Additional thanks to Brett Petersel for lending me the rockin' "Back to School intro and outro music." Additional thanks go to Jennifer Leggio for lending me the pic of Rob Harles.

Earned Media and the Siren Song of Mentions

Doug Wick — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:02:03 CDT

Almost anyone who knows anything about interfacing with customers or prospective customers through the Networks (Facebook, Twitter, et al.) will tell you that you should start by listening.

So most marketers' first step is to set up a monitoring tool (maybe expensive, maybe as simple as a free keyword search on Twitter). Then, the first experience that almost every media marketer (or marketer, period) has after listening to the Networks for a bit is that the brand, product, or company they are representing will be mentioned. When this happens (“just bought a Honda at Carmax, great experience!”), it will make a positive and socially important impression on everyone who views it. This is exciting because it is essentially a free media placement, a nugget of gold dropped into people's news or Twitter feeds that didn’t cost you anything! This type of mention is often called “earned media,” earned because your company created a great customer experience that made someone tell their friends.

The excited marketer who has just read a positive mention will often jump right to, “How do I make more of that happen?,” or “How can I make that person talk more about it, more often?” The sad reality is, you can’t, or you shouldn't try. The critical thing about the Conversation Stream from a media pro’s perspective is that while you can participate if you want, there is no media plan for earned media.

Featuring earned media in your traditional media is a good idea, but it's still you talking at the base of it, not your customers. And spending money to get people to blog or mention you (i.e. free food for becoming a fan on Facebook) rings hollow in the social space. You have to disclose your investment (not doing so is a surefire way to Social and now, Legal Doom). The minute you do that, people tune out in a very subtle but profound way.

The only truism related to earned media is that you should create a great experience for your customers that they will want to talk about, and then hope that they do (I call this the Zappos Way). This is all fine and good, but the customer experience is the department of product managers, interaction designers, and customer service personnel. These folks have very real tactical reasons to react to mentions.

However, the job of the media professional is to be proactive, to be the engineers of brand success by connecting marketplace to product or brand experience in a powerful way, grabbing attention and creating engagement out of nothing. Measuring earned media is a great way to see how you’re doing (you should listen for that purpose), but sitting back and hoping to earn earned media isn’t a marketing strategy.

So what's a media marketer to do? What's your perspective? I'd love to hear in the comments. I'll lend mine in my next post, "Becoming a Hydroelectric Engineer," due later this week.

The Complete Album

Aaron Strout — Tue, 6 Oct 2009 13:20:24 CDT

Another guest post from my esteemed colleague, Bill Fanning.

It’s pretty rare to find an album that’s a complete body of work where every song is great from front to back; albums like Revolver (Beatles), Road to Ensenada (Lyle Lovett), Grace (Jeff Buckley)… insert your favorite album here. When you do, you keep coming back and never forget it. I’ve revisited several of my favorite complete albums over the last week or so leading up to Austin City Limits Music Festival …getting me in the spirit. It occurred to me that a well executed social marketing program is in many ways similar to a great album. Think of all the different marketing channels as tracks and the entire program as the album.

While researching a variety of companies’ social media marketing initiatives recently I struggled to find examples of a complete body of work. Many of them had a couple good tracks but failed to deliver a great social marketing album from front to back. Why? I’m guessing it’s because their social marketing efforts aren’t yet taken seriously by their marketing leadership. It’s also possible their social media program is being run by an experimental group that’s not well integrated with the overall marketing strategy. Either way, simply having a good track does not make a great album. Not having a great album makes for a poor brand experience and a huge missed opportunity on driving real business value.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when building a Social Marketing program:

All are not equal. Some brands are better suited for Facebook and Twitter than others. Given the enormous popularity of social networks it’s very likely your customers are there. However, if people aren’t passionate about your brand or a lifestyle associated with your brand it is not likely they’ll be interested in participating in a dialogue with you. Social networks probably won’t fix that.
Work the room…well. Understand the etiquette for each social media. Tip: Sending out 10 tweets in 2 minutes will probably irritate your followers. It’s very important that the folks running your communication on social networks be proficient individual users who understand how to use the medium appropriately.
Be consistent, relevant and interesting. Keep in mind, you’re developing relationships here, not bombarding a faceless mass and hoping to catch a few eyes.
Communicate as a human, not a company. Social media gives your company a great opportunity to humanize your brand. Consumers develop real relationships with people. Make sure it’s authentic.
“Let’s go back to my place.” Invite your fans and followers back to your site. This is where real engagement, measurement and business value takes place. (All kinds of juvenile joke possibilities with this one.)
All killer, no filler. Focus on making every track great with the album in mind. Make sure all your marketing efforts (social networks, branded community, advertising etc.) have a consistent brand look and feel and are done well individually with the overall program in mind.

Which brands do you think have built a great social marketing album?

Audience Awareness Fail: Serving Frozen Food to Food Bloggers

Natanya Anderson — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:11:28 CDT

This past weekend I took a personal trip to San Francisco to attend the inaugural BlogHer Food conference. This is BlogHer's first topic-specific conference and all-in-all I would label it a huge success. I came home smarter, full of inspiration about how to make my blog better, and having made a host of new connections, three things I look for in any conference. However, there was one pretty significant blemish on the event that I truly believe was the result of a brand thinking only about themselves and not at all about the audience who also happen to be their potential customers and more importantly, advocates. Based on this brand debacle, I offer a cautionary tale of what can go very wrong when a brand fails to put its audience first in social media marketing activities.

But First, a Word about Reality

Before I jump into my story and what I think the brand could have done differently, I would like to go on record as saying I understand the following realities of this situation:

BlogHer works with sponsors to make their conferences accessible to as many people as possible. The folks at BlogHer are amazing advocates for bloggers, particularly women bloggers, and they put together great conferences. I am one of their biggest fans. They realize that blogging is a hobby for most bloggers and that conferences represent a big out-of-pocket expense, so they work to make the conferences as affordable as possible. The cost for this conference was only $99 (plus travel and lodging) because 67% of the total conference cost was subsidized by sponsors.
In the food world, the sad/harsh/unfortunate reality is that most of the big marketing dollars needed to sponsor an event like this one lives with the big brands that make packaged foods. To make this conference possible, BlogHer had to work with brands that might not necessarily be in complete synch with the food blogging audience. This meant BlogHer had to carefully balance the wants and needs of the audience with the reality of finding the funds needed to create the conference for them. However, a really savvy sponsor would have seen this event as opportunity to introduce themselves to this large group of food influencers in a way that would make these influencers advocates. Sadly, savvy sponsors were few and far between, limited largely to Scharffenberger Chocolate who did a great job of understanding the audience and tweaking their approach specifically for us.
This was a first time event for BlogHer. While BlogHer has run many successful blogger conferences, this was their first attempt at a niche-focused conference, and to be honest, they didn't start with the easiest group of bloggers. As a group, food bloggers are opinionated, vocal, and hard to please. If I'm honest with myself, we can move beyond knowledgeable to be snobby about food, sometimes detrimentally. I think this conference was a learning experience for everyone, including BlogHer, and they now understand food bloggers better than they did and I'm fully confident that future events will overcome some of the challenges of this first one. If they announced BlogHer Food 2010 today I would be first in line to buy a ticket.

And now, on with the story.

Frozen Food for Lunch? Really?

Bertolli Italian Foods was one of the major sponsors of the conference. They created a special event for a small group of bloggers at the St. Supery winery in Napa on the night before the conference started. The event featured a contest where the prize for a couple of lucky bloggers was working with Bertolli's celebrity Chef, Rocco Dispirito, to design the menu. Bertolli also sponsored lunch at the conference itself and once again brought in Rocco to demo a couple of dishes for the attendees.

When I sat down to lunch on Saturday with two of my fellow bloggers and looked at the menu, I did a double take when I realized that the bulk of the menu featured food from Bertolli's line of frozen food. I said to my companions "Are they really serving us frozen food?" The answer, sadly, was "Yes." There were two menu items, the appetizer and dessert, which were created for the conference by Rocco, but indeed, the rest of the lunch would be the same food I could buy in the freezer section of my local grocery store. Needless to say, I was shocked and disappointed.

San Francisco is one of the best cities in the world for a foodie. There is no shortage of amazing food that features everything from haute cuisine to the best taco I've ever eaten in my life. Walking down the streets of Chinatown on Friday before the conference I passed stall after stall of fresh seasonal produce, fish right out of the bay, and luscious Peking duck hanging in shop windows. At the Ferry Building Marketplace I bought orange and fennel salami from Boccalone, sampled local produce like heirloom tomatoes, tasted amazing cheese from Cowgirl Creamery.

In this context, a frozen lunch was truly unacceptable. I love my cheese and pasta as much as the next girl, but I promised myself long ago that when I indulge in high-fat and high-calorie food, it will be great food. The lunch menu promised to be high calorie but not at all great. So, I left, along with a few of my fellow bloggers, and went on the hunt for a better food experience. The result was an amazing lunch of orecchiette pasta with heirloom tomatoes and Parmigiano-Reggiano from the San Francisco MOMA's Caffè Museo.

It was fresh and flavorful, featuring local ingredients and organic product. In other words, exactly the kind of pasta lunch I would expect in San Francisco. I was disappointed to miss out on Rocco's demonstration because he truly is a gifted chef, as well as the opportunity to network with a large group of fellow bloggers, but I had a great conversation at lunch with a smaller group to go with our great food, exactly what I came to BlogHer food for. I was however able to keep up with the conference lunch via Twitter. Here's a representative sampling of what attendees had to say:

@userealbutter: @manggy u certainly don't have to be jealous of our lunch (travesty and p*nishment at same time) #blogherfood09
@cooklocal: So why am I so upset re: lunch? Hotel states that all food they make is local/sustainable. So I thought lunch would be good. #blogherfood09
@runwithtweezers: This lunch is beyond words. Frozen food at a conference of "food bloggers"? Hayle no. #blogherfood09
@KitchenParade: @marketingmommy Ha. Rubber chicken would have been improvement over actual #blogherfood lunch.
@jonesabi: Bertolli Frozen Meal Lunch. This is NOT enough wine. Oh, just kidding! Or am I?#blogherfood http://twitpic.com/j8naj
@CarrotsNCake: Salad was delish! Not so sure about the frozen pasta. #blogherfood09

If Bertolli was looking to make a good impression on this group of 300 influential food bloggers, they failed pretty miserably. Instead of generating positive buzz among this group, they became the joke of the conference. They were so focused on their business need—getting their food into our mouths—they failed to really understand us as an audience, consider what it would take to make a favorable impression, and turn us into not only consumers of their product but influencers among our networks of readers. They had a genuine opportunity to create a propensity to buy among us and they completely missed the boat.

If Not Frozen Food, Then What?

Putting my content marketing hat on, I started to wonder what Bertolli could have done differently. After all, the whole lunch was a content marketing exercise where the content was the food they served us and the access to Rocco as a subject matter expert that they provided. It's not like they didn't have options. There were some things they might have done to create a better experience and advance their market goals:

Ideally, Bertolli would have leveraged their relationship with Rocco to create an amazing foodie-worthy menu that highlighted the best ingredients available in San Francisco. We did see a bit of this in the chocolate panna cotta that Rocco made that received rave reviews. From what I can tell about the smaller event on Friday night at the winery, this is the approach they took, so I'm unclear why they were unable to carry it over to lunch on Saturday. If they had served us an amazing lunch, we would have tweeted about it, posted pictures on Facebook, and written blog posts all extolling the virtues of the brand that created such an amazing experience for us. They would have turned us into advocates for their brand as a whole and generated positive buzz among our readership.
As an alternative, or preferably in combination with a largely fresh and special menu, they could have served us a dish that offers a unique twist on their frozen food offerings. This approach would have paid homage to us as bloggers interested in cooking techniques that go beyond heat-and-eat and further given us a creative jumping off point for our own variation recipes. Campbell's took this approach with the food at the cocktail party they sponsored and it was a big improvement over the food at lunch.
They could have provided us with the recipes from the lunch, and possibly more, to use at will on our blogs, giving content to use on our blogs after the conference. If even just a few of us had posted the recipes, or our own versions of them, they would have achieved what I assume were their goals of building advocacy among bloggers and building awareness of their products among our readership.

The bottom line is if Bertolli had started their planning with what would be most interesting, useful, and tasty content for their audience, they absolutely would not have served us their frozen food. What they failed to realize is that, for the most part, we like to cook original recipes with whole ingredients, largely from scratch. Our readers visit our blogs specifically for these recipes and techniques, so the chances of our promoting or advocating for heat-and-eat food right out of the bag are pretty minimal. They simply failed to consider the needs of their audience, and for that they paid a pretty heavy price.

Weekly Social Marketing Links: Week of 9/21

Aaron Strout — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:09:08 CDT

Cross-posted on Citizen Marketer 2.1

Oh how quickly the time passes. As some of you know, I try and do a weekly digest of the links that my team (marketing, sales and product) come up with for our recurring staff meeting. A series of all day meetings and the usual travel have conspired against me. Fortunately for you, that doesn't change the quality of the content/links that the team found.

With that as a backdrop, let's see what we've got...

Beth Lopez (Marketing)

(9/16) My article submission for this week is called The Great Trust Offensive. It appears the top 100 brands (as ranked by Interbrand) have fallen out of the trust tree with consumers. Edelman conducted a phone survey and found that only 44% of Americans stated they trusted business, down from 58% in the fall of 2007. As a result, many of the top brands are now focusing their advertising and messaging on re-building this trust with consumers and joining the “conversation”. The article goes on to provide case examples of McDonald’s, Ford and American Express and has CMO’s of these companies quoted throughout.

You can also view the 100 Best Global Brands 2009 in a slideshow format which provides a snippet of their marketing strategies. I’ll see if I can download the full report and provide to everyone. Here’s the link to the slideshow.

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(9/4) Joe Marchese throws down the traditional vs. social marketing gauntlet in the blog post,

The $1 Million Social Media Marketing Challenge, which starts with “I think there is an inherent conflict in the following statement: "We can't measure social media ROI. But when we buy television in large amounts, we know it works." He goes on to state the problem with marketers comparing social media and TV and issues a challenge: If the ROI from social media is not equal to that from traditional media, his company will deliver free media until the difference is made up.

Interesting read to say the least.

DP Rabalais (Marketing)

(9/16) As I mentioned in our meeting, I thought it would be of value for all of us to become more familiar with Net Promoter Scores, since many companies place such a high value on them.

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(9/4) The title is Social Net Branding Fails to Sway Women and the article was published today on brandweek.com. A study by ad:tech Chicago and Q Interactive that analyzes how women engage online with brands finds that 75 percent of women reported that social networking sites have little bearing on their purchasing decisions.

Sites have "somewhat" of an influence over 21.9 percent and greatly influence only 3.3 percent of users.

Only 10 percent of women said that participating in brand-related activities, such as finding information (8.7 percent) and writing reviews (1 percent), was their most common social media activity. Sending private messages to peers (34.6 percent), sharing photos (13.4 percent) and chatting (12.8 percent) ranked as women's top-three social media activities.

Bill Fanning (BizDev)

(9/16) I actually have two articles to share. The first is post on Eyecube blog titled, Congratulations TGI Friday’s, Now the Work Begins and the second post was written by Greg Verdino and posted to his blog titled, Social Media Marketers are a Shallow Bunch. Both posts highlight the latest campaign byTGI Friday’s to drive Facebook fans but are curious about what’s next. Now that they’ve blown out the goal of reaching 500,000 fans (875,170 fans as of this morning) how do they plan to keep them engaged. They’ve got a real opportunity to drive ongoing lasting relationships with their consumers and, quite frankly, revitalize an otherwise stale brand. Will they capitalize on it? We’ll keep watching and hope for the best. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to my free burger… I think.

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(9/4) This week’s shared post is from Jason Falls’ blog Social Media Explorer, titled, Brands Are People. It’s short and simple but powerful. He refers to a message he received from a friend who worked in the Golden Age of the Advertising Industry and a WWII fighter pilot. He says “It seems we got into the idea that ads were a lot easier than relationships.” I’d agree and we’ve been saying this for a while, but it just seems more credible coming from someone who actually lived and worked during that time.

The rise of TV as a mass marketing media was certainly a major contributing factor that widened the relationship gap between consumers and companies. We live and work in an amazing time where the rise of the internet has provided consumers a media that will require companies to break down the walls that divided them and re-learn how to build real relationships with consumers. The companies who choose to embrace the new media and master it will have a leg up on those who don’t.

Who knows…maybe in 30 years our kids will be watching a show like Mad Men where they act out the lives of today’s Social Media movers and shakers. If the characters are based on the folks I’ve seen speaking on Social Media panels over the last couple years, it’s bound to be funny but not nearly as classy!

Jay MacIntosh (BizDev)

(9/16) What Powered does is game-changing for marketing.

At the end of last year as I was becoming more familiar with social media marketing and our company, my intuition was that speaking with customers on their terms (i.e. things that they care about, when they’re interested and with people they trust) was the golden ticket for marketers. The disconnect for me was the lack of available data to support my intuition. What I had from our client programs, or third party sources, wasn’t quite complete or reliable enough so the results story often came up short. I think that’s recently begun to change due to a number of factors including our improved measurement & reporting capabilities as well as other practitioners publicly sharing their results.

Let’s look at one key marketing metric related to engagement – click through rate (CTR). This article from MediaPost Tuesday Super for Facebook Brand Pages talks about a study that found the average CTR on Facebook brand pages to be 6.76%. It goes on to say that certain days of the week perform multiple times better than other days of the week. Tuesday being the best and Friday being the worst. It’s encouraging to see that the Facebook 6.76% CTR kicks b*tt on other forms of marketing such as email (CTR 3.9%) and banner ads (CTR 0.2%). And what about Powered’s CTRs? For content our CTR is 50 friggin% - talk about kicking b*tt? For HP’s HHO site the CTR to their ecommerce is 7%. That’s kicking some serious booty.

And what about other ways marketing is measured like conversion, net promoter score (loyalty & advocacy), customer insight? What we deliver in these areas is also game-changing. So why aren’t more marketers going for the golden ticket? Is it lack of knowledge, understanding, familiarity, budget or something else they fear? I’d love to hear y’alls thoughts on this.

Don Sedota (Product)

(9/16) Although this probably isn’t groundbreaking insight to the team, I thought this article “When Facebook Fans Turn Ugly: Examining The Honda Accord Crosstour Page” was an interesting synopsis of a recent PR snafu that Honda had to deal with regarding their new FB page to promote the Accord Crosstour. After numerous comments from users about the ugliness of the car, a Honda rep (posing as a regular Joe) chimed in to give his support. Once he was outed, Honda had to do some quick damage control (some good, some not so good). The bad – removing the comments from the Honda rep which further enraged fans. Anyways, a good quick read that hits on some of the do’s and don’ts of containing a negative social media storm.

On a similar note, I have to feel kinda sorry for the Intuit reps that are trying to keep up with a hoard of unhappy Mint customers after Intuit acquired the financial site earlier this week. Ouch!

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(9/4) Here are a couple of pretty entertaining articles that I found this past week.

The first one from David Berkowitz’s blog called, When Augmented Reality Goes Social talks about a few applications of augmented reality (when digital is layered over real-world experiences to “augment” the experience) and social. My favorite example is a Yelp application for the Android platform which is apparently still pretty buggy but allows you to walk down a street and through your camera lens you can view Yelp overlays in the appropriate spots to show different restaurants and their ratings (really cool). Apparently more applications like this are coming down the pipe.

The second one is social related but entertaining more than anything else. It’s a blog post by Jonathon Fields called PR Gone Bad. How to Anger Bloggers and Hose Your Client. Jonathon details a back and forth exchange he had with a PR firm who was trying to get him to review a new book for their client. The PR tactics are extremely traditional and impersonal and the ensuing exchange of emails between Jonathon and the PR rep is a classic example of how certain people still don’t get the fact that social marketing is changing the way PR firms and the like have to conduct their business. Well worth the read if you have a few minutes.

Social Marketing in Retail: A Direct Impact on Sales

Doug Wick — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 09:54:13 CDT

There is more proof of the ROI of a branded community, but this time it's specifically for retailers. Courtesy of a joint study from the E-tailing Group and Ripple6, we've got some new intelligence about how consumers react to these environments and how they drive people to make larger purchases more frequently. The highlights:

83% percent of online shoppers very or somewhat interested in sharing information about their purchases with people they know.
This information sharing impacts commerce as pre-purchase opinions from others influence buying decisions for 74% of online shoppers.
67% of users are more likely to purchase more based on recommendations from people in a community in which they participate.
62% are more likely to frequent a retailer they have shopped before if they can be part of a community within that site.

Much of these types of statistics have been explored in other studies, most notably by Bazaarvoice, who has done a lot to outline the impact of ratings and reviews on purchase.

However, the statistic that I find the most interesting from this new study is the final bullet up top, where merely having the ability to commune on a retail site made 62% of people more likely to frequent it.

I suspect that people want to be able to see what others think about specific products, but they also want to hear about how those people integrate those products successfully into their lifestyle. This is a major value that retailers and their best customers can provide to rise above the lowest-price commoditization that sometimes plagues the industry.

Marketing to Marketers (guest post)

Aaron Strout — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 13:14:33 CDT

From time to time, my man, Bill Fanning, in our BizDev group gets fired up and throws a post together. You hear from him semi-regularly as he shares his wisdom on the Weekly Social Marketing Links posts I put up. You may also remember him from the Would you Join a Toothpaste Community post we co-penned several months back. Anyway, check out his latest as he talks about "marketing to marketers."

-Aaron

-------------------------------------------------------------------

I read an interesting blog post this morning about cold calling. It got me thinking, how do Marketers wish to be marketed to?…a topic I’ve been interested in since joining the business development team at Powered a couple years ago.

The truth is, I don’t cold call prospects…there, I said it. When I say cold call, I mean calling someone I don’t know, who doesn’t know me and probably is not familiar with my company. I know traditional VP’s of Sales and Business Development are shaking their heads at me in disgust as they read this post but let’s be honest, the odds of getting someone to respond to a true cold call are very slim…even more so today than several years ago. If you do get a response, you’ve effectively started your relationship by saying “Hey, I want to sell you something…” Not the best way to kick off a trusted relationship. I don’t know about you, but I don’t react well to people trying to sell me something. Actually, I don’t react at all. I simply tune them out.

The recent increase in options for us, as consumers, to ignore traditional interruptive marketing tactics has changed how we are willing to interact with vendors / brands in our day to day lives both personally and professionally.

Caller ID allows me to screen my calls so I can decide which call to answer…I haven’t answered a telemarketer’s call in years.
Tivo and DVR allow me to record shows I like and fast forward past the advertisements (I do watch the FreeCreditReport.com and E*Trades commercials though…very funny).
I have XM in my truck and use Pandora or iTunes at home…no commercials there.
I generally discover interesting brands and vendors from trusted sources through social networks, my Google Reader and off-line word of mouth from friends and associates.

The point is, traditional interruptive marketing tactics are becoming less affective and not a good way to develop relationships with consumers. True cold calling is about as interruptive as it gets.

We try to apply the same philosophy to our prospecting efforts as we do when building strategy with our customers to engage their consumers.

Provide valuable information/resources to consumers. In our case that means providing information on our website about Social Marketing in general in a variety of formats (articles, blog posts, podcasts, etc.) Not just information about our offerings. Share valuable, thought provoking information to prospects via e-mail and Twitter.
Give consumers a means to interact with the company. Anyone can add comments to our blog posts, share and rate content. We have a Facebook fan page and company Twitter feed in addition to many of our employees active on Twitter (Aaron Strout, Doug Wick, Kathy Warren, Natanya Anderson, Ryan Joy, Jay Macintosh, me…just to name a few). As appropriate for our consumers, we will add additional means of interaction on our website in the future.
Intelligently merchandise products and services in a non-interruptive manner. We learn as much as possible about our prospects before engaging in conversation and certainly before making any recommendations. We try to engage folks in a natural non-interruptive manner through our website, twitter, e-mail, leveraging existing relationships, etc.
Measure activity to understand what’s working and what’s not. We measure all behavior on our website, webinar registration vs. participation, pipeline and forecast etc. and evolve the process as needed.

Simply put, we want to be a valuable resource to consumers interested in Social Marketing. If we do our jobs right, it should naturally drive more interaction with our prospects and industry experts.

Back to my original question, how do you wish to be marketed to? How can we improve?

Photo courtesy: http://www.urban-ninja.com.za

Welcome to the New Powered Blog (please bookmark)

Aaron Strout — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:12:50 CDT

Dear friends of Powered and readers of the Engaged Consumer Blog. If you've been here before, you might have noticed that we've just recently undergone a pretty significant face lift. As part of that process, we migrated our blog from Wordpress over to our Powered blog platform (nothing against Wordpress - just trying to eat our own dogfood again).

Our new URL is pretty simple. It's simply http://www.powered.com/blog. Our new RSS feed is also pretty straightford http://www.powered.com/rss/campus/700/blog.rss

While our old content will stay up over at Wordpress, any new content from Doug, Natanya, Kathy and yours truly will happen here. If you have any problems seeing the new posts on our site, or in your reader, please let us know. If you find anything rendering funny, we'd also like a heads up on that too.

In the meantime, we plan to continue writing/recording kick @ss content. We hope you'll stick around.

Aaron Strout
CMO, Powered
@aaronstrout

Selling Social Marketing: It's not all about ROI

Doug Wick — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:02:49 CDT

If you talk to anyone at Powered as a potential client, we will be very happy to give you a guided tour of the ROI our clients enjoy (to the extent that we can without violating confidentiality). The numbers are compelling, and we measure the heck out of everything - not stopping with just the level of community activity, but working toward business impact. Purchase, loyalty, advocacy, brand affinity, consumer insight - we've launched communities that focus in all of those areas.

The investment models are very important - they tell us what we can expect, how to contruct the unique business case for every potential project, what to measure, and how to adjust to optimize results. But it's not really why marketers buy social. Let me explain.

Most of the time, the marketer who ends up talking to Powered is someone in their 20's or 30's (or is young at heart!). This person is usually bright, innovative, and is a social marketing expert or consultant brought into a brand, corporate, or product marketing team (or agency) to enlighten the broader team on the world of social marketing. They speak the same language as Powered folks, and understand why a branded community could be a powerful tool for their company. They Twitter, they blog, they're on FriendFeed, and you might even find them on Posterous or FourSquare.

Pretty quickly, the second stage of the conversation starts - the effort by the social media expert to sell our ideas internally at their company. This is certainly not reserved to Powered's offerings. Selling social media/marketing broadly is a central part of this internal expert's job, whether it's why the company should open a corporate Twitter account, fill out a Facebook page, or invest in social media monitoring tools. This is where the conversation often stalls.

For some reason, the sales pitch based on ROI numbers doesn't resonate with senior management. Certain parts of the case don't hold up because they don't agree with the statistical approach, or they don't think the case study applies to them because of the unique market characteristics of their company or brand. These are often very valid objections, but sometimes they aren't the real, underlying issue. Good marketers are analytical, and they use analytics to compare channels and campaigns - eliminating the poor performers and putting more budget toward the high performers. But great marketers are also incredibly intuitive. They have a keen sense for what provokes an emotional response, what produces a feeling of influence, what modifies behavior. This intuition is based on personal experience. At some point every marketing exec saw a 30-second TV spot that made them love a brand more, or received a really interesting piece of direct mail, or visited a really well-designed corporate website. They also know the marketing efforts that left them cold in those mediums, and why.

When senior marketers with keen intuition step into an unfamiliar marketing environment (like a social network), they can suddenly feel like the internal compass that has served them so well for so long is broken. Without a feel for the medium, they aren't going to be very inclined to put budget toward it, even if the numbers seem good on paper. This is exacerbated by the fact that their peers don't have a good feel for it either and as a result have little trust trust in it. Social media is risky enough without feeling the rest of your management looking over your shoulder. As an old colleague used to say, "no one gets fired for buying more TV."

So while putting together a compelling business case is important, the other and more fundamental side of selling social media is to help a senior marketer build a sense of value and intuition for the medium. I call this the "intuitive sell," and it's what for a marketer connects the marketing action to the results in a meaningful, believable way. The best way to accomplish the intuitive sell is to encourage the unfamiliar marketer to use social media personally - not necessarily to become a power user, but to demystify the tools and the value people are getting out of them.

The objective is to get them to understand the mechanics, and to feel the tug of why people spend so much time on social websites (compared to non-social) in a personal way - if just for a minute. Instead of showing them case studies, take them to the actual sites in the case studies and help them observe interactions at a granular level. Get them participating. Let them experiment with their own identity before they involve the identity of their company. Feeding a senior marketer's intuition is as important as feeding them a good business case. When both are served well, it may feel like less of a risk and more like an opportunity. Then the budget will start to flow.

Podcast: Driving Awareness & Engagement with Social

Aaron Strout — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:40:44 CDT

One of the things I love about my job is that I get a chance to meet and interview tons of interesting people. Some are execs at big companies? Others are authors of thought provoking books. And some are just plain smart individuals who are teaching companies how to embrace the power of social networking and online communities with an eye toward improving customer service, product innovation and tradional sales and marketing efforts.

Last week, I had yet another opportunity to interview a couple of the aforementioned individuals. The two gentlemen I speak of are none other than David Armano, a senior partner at the Dachis Group, well-known blogger and former VP of interactive agency, Critical Mass and John Cass, author of Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging, blogger and former community manager at Forrester Research. Our topic was that of tapping into "social" to drive awareness and engagement."

As usual, David helped me think outside the box by sending me a blog post he had written back in 2007 titled The Marketing Spiral.

So with that as a backdrop, here are some of the questions I asked during our podcast:

Do you have best practices to recommend in terms of driving awareness and engagment using social?

Do you have examples of companies who do it right? Do it wrong?

How do you create excitement for a product that doesn’t seem exciting (you know, like toothpaste—and you know that’s a trick question)

What are your predictions for social marketing as it relates specifically to Engagement and Awareness?

http://powered-library.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/_podcasts/back_to_school/BackToSchool-03.mp3

To download this podcast, right-mouse click here.

Do you have best practices to recommend?

Do you have examples of companies who do it right? Do it wrong?

How do you create excitement for a product that doesn’t seem exciting (you know, like toothpaste—and you know that’s a trick question)

What are your predictions for social marketing as it relates specifically to Engagement and Awareness?

John Cass

David Armano

Armano's Marketing Spiral

Live Notes from TEDx Boston

Aaron Strout — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 11:09:28 CDT

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending a unique event called TEDx Boston. If you've heard of the original TED Conference (Technology, Entertainment and Design), this is a variation on that theme. Essentially it's an independently organized version with a focus on local talent.

Having never attended a TED event, I know about the content only through the numerous videos I've watched from the event. From what I can imagine, however, this inaugural version in Boston, MA probably felt pretty similar (minus the celebrity sitings). With that as a backdrop, below are some high level notes and pictures I took at the event. If you have additional thoughts or questions, feel free to leave 'em in the comments section below.

Oh, I'd be remiss if I didn't give a giant shout out to Sean Belka and Danielle Dublin of Fidelity Investments for organizing the event. Let's just say that they did an amazing job with both the logisitics, the speaking talent, and the quality of the attendees. Hopefully this public display of affection will be enough to get me on the list for next year's event.

David Edwards, Culture Lab, Catalyzing Innovation through ArtScience

David is a fascinating character -- one whose mind obviously never shuts off. He talked a bit about the art of innovation. Highlights from his talk:

We are very curious when the page is blank (so we learn)

One of the things that David created was "inhaled chocolate" called "WHIFF" (more on this at the end of the post)

Ideation funnel: Conceive, Translate & Realize

Spend a lot of time focused on art and not-for-profit projects

Have a shop that gives public access to experiments that didn't work

Changing cultures makes you pay attention

http://artscience100k.org - making a bet on Boston school kids

Patricia Maes (head of MIT Media Lab)

In her video below (a must watch), Patrica or "Pattie" Maes shows off an amazing new device that combines camera, projector and mirror with banded colors on your fingers. Allows users to do real time research, take pictures, project anywhere, call, and create personal tag clouds for people. Key here is REAL TIME INTERACTION WITH OBJECTS AND INFORMATION

Alexa Scordato - Reverse Mentorship

It was a proud momen for me to see Alexa up on stage. I don't mean that in a "Father Knows Best" kind of way but rather it was a pleasure seeing such a poised, smart, woman up on stage in such a public venue. I had the pleasure of hiring Alexa at my old company, Mzinga in a fairly public way (link to CS Monitor article).

Based on her year plus experience at Mzinga working as a social mediast and assistant to CEO/founder, Barry Libert, Alexa learned a thing or two about reverse mentorship. To kick things off, she started with one of Barry's favorite quotes:

Easier to change the people than to change the people.

Alexa also stressed the importance of Millennials in the future workforce -- something I think many companies still aren't paying enough attention to (read more about the coming Age Wave if you need a little convincing) LINK

Ryan Chin - PhD Candidate at MIT Media Lab, Smart Cities Group
This was perhaps one of the most thought provoking sessions as it demonstrated some true outside the box thinking.For one, Ryan and his team are rebuilding cars, scooters and bikes from the ground up -- not just making minor incremenatl improvements to the existing product. The focus of Ryan's talk was on on foldable, stackable cars and how they might help with a more holistic plan to revolutionize the "last mile" of public transportation. A few highlights:

Most existing automobiles take up 200 square feet of space and spend 80% of their time parked

No surprise here but most cars are still petroleum-based and major polluters -- this is important because 50% of world's population lives in cities (and growing)

Transoportaion and building operations typically account for at least 60% of urban energy use -- 40% of gas is wasted circling looking for parking during peak times [AMAZING!]

Public transportation helps solve some of these problems but "first mile/last mile" issue (or need to carry something) still exists

"Sharable" cars/bikes have started to solve these problems (like Zipcar)

MIT is focusing on foldable "Roboscooter," "Car" and "GreenWheel" electric bicycle. On a nice day, you could ride an electric bicycle to the grocery store and then take a car home. Each vehicle starts with "recreating the wheel." Vehicles rely on "in-wheel" motors which allows for less weight and better foldability.

One of the trickiest issues to solve is the economics of mobility (avoiding bottle necks for drop off, pick up, parking, etc. Trying to solve through appropriate economics i.e. expensive to drop off in places where many people want to park/drop off.

With bike - can recharge motor by: 1) plugging in, 2) pedaling, or 3) going downhill

Chris Middleton - Fidelity Future Stage (Boston Latin)

Chris Middleton is part of a program called Future Stage. According to the site, Future Stage "prepares students for future stages in life through a unique music and theater education program — enabling them to learn firsthand from renowned actors, directors and musician." If Chris is any indication of the success of this program, Future Stage has hit a home run because Chris possessed an unbelievable voice, uncanny knack for song writing and great poise in front of a large audience. Pay attention to him because he's going places.

Hugo Van Vuuren: Following our Passion - Lighting London < Lighting Africa

Hugo's demonstration showed that sometimes the best solutions to big problems are the easiest ones. A few highlights from his talk about bringing light/electricity to many of the developing areas of Africa:

Africa has a distribution problem. It should be capable of providing everything it needs.

The team that was working on solving this problem realized that they could collect enough energy from dirt based on the act of biodegradation (more moisture is better). To that end, they created a battery using energy from a bag full of dirt. [Yup, a bag of dirt]

They key to this proram succeeding was going grass roots - that way if the government goes caput, the technology continues on.

In order to do this, they needed to empower people locally - this helps alleviate some of the issues of distribution

Massive opportunity in Africa - 900 million people, many with a disposable income

[started to run out of steam a little here...]

George Whitesides - Diagnostics for All

Medical care -- particularly diagnostic -- is much too expensive. Is there a way to make it cheaper?

One solution is to use paper vs. a needle. Use urine vs. blood. = less expensive and less dangerous (no risk of pricking someone with an infected needle)

Medical worker of the future - unemployed 18 year old with a back pack full of medical test kits and an AK 47

Tom Hadfield - Le Whiff

Over the centuries, we've eaten smaller and smaller quantities at shorter and more frequent intervals

With a mix of culinary art and aerosol science, they are able to deliver the particles to the mouth without getting it into the lungs (chocolate without the calories).

Will be available for mainstream consumption later this year.

Even cooler - we got to "whiff" - first mass whiffing ever

Tom Hadfield "Whiffing" chocolate

Weekly Social Marketing Links: August 11, 2009

Aaron Strout — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:42:12 CDT

Each week, the members of Powered's marketing, business development and product teams pick a news article, blog post or research report that “speaks” to them. With that article, they need to come to our weekly staff meeting prepared to give a 120 second update on what the article was about and why they found it useful. I've been a little behind in my updates recently so you're getting a few weeks worth in one fell swoop.

Links are below:

Beth Lopez (Marketing)
I enjoyed reading the article, Desperately Seeking Personal Brand, which talks about how you can tell if a social marketing “expert” is really a true guru or pretender.

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Marketers Like Twitter More Than Consumers Do
Interesting stats between the different views of marketers and consumers re: Twitter. While marketers see Twitter as a platform that is here to stay, consumers either don't have an opinion or think it's somewhat useful or dead. Both marketers and consumers feel it's not a good platform for advertising or promoting products, which is interesting considering we get a lot of questions about using Twitter for just this purpose.

I do agree with the article that Twitter can be useful for awareness efforts, but I don't think that by promoting your business you will generate leads or new business from Twitter. Twitter is about relationships. It's about connecting with people that you find interesting. It's about people…not about businesses. And if consumers don't know or don't care about Twitter, then it begs the question - Are marketers wasting time and energy in trying to figure out how to use it to propel their business?

DP Rabalais (Marketing)
In doing competitive intelligence this week I cam across an interesting story about Passenger and how they’re helping Mercedes Benz tap into 20-somethings (some current, but mostly future customers) help shape their future product offerings. Definitely worth the read if you get a chance.

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Fortune 100 CEOs & Companies: Social Media Use & Statistics

Good article on how CEO’s at top companies use social media, and also how companies are using tools like Twitter, LinkedIn and Twitter.

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I liked this post by blogger, Mack Collier titled Why Many Marketers Struggle with Social Media because it does a good job of succinctly calling out where traditional marketing and advertising is relevant vs. where SM is beneficial to companies. My favorite quote:

If you’re Burger King and you’re looking to influence whether I go there or not, use plain old marketing. It’s just fine. It’s the right tool for the job. So is advertising. You don’t HAVE to use social media for that.

But, if you’re Burger King and you want to understand me, to get what’s really going on inside my head, and know what we have in common, then THAT is where social media can be useful. Talk to me. Get to know me. Ask me about me and the things that aren’t about you.

Doug Wick (BizDev)
The danger of being an innovative start-up that is a little resource-challenged is that your innovations can be easily imitated. Facebook has been slowly learning from Twitter and incorporating their features while Twitter struggles with problems like infrastructure that Facebook solved long ago. This article does a nice job of showing where the endgame for Twitter might be, now that Facebook has acquired another sophisticated Twitter-imitator, Friendfeed.

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My article this week is Virtual Worlds are Getting a Second Life. Some interesting stats about the rebounding explosive growth of virtual worlds (especially among youngsters), and how they have been faster to develop revenue models than their 2-dimensional social counterparts like Facebook and Twitter. I would guess that is related to the fact that Facebook and Twitter ultimately deliver stickiness through the exchange of content (an activity that is complementary to our real lives), where 3D simulations can expand the possibilities for other social behaviors – such as commerce – more naturally since they do not complement, but instead emulate, our own reality.

Jay MacIntosh (BizDev)
Women are more relational and nurturing while men are more transactional…at least that’s the theory from a study by RapLeaf. http://digg.com/u3AQJa I’ve always been fascinated by how women and men think and behave differently. To see it in action, pay attention to the dynamics the next time you’re in a group setting (children or adults). You’ll likely see female energy more focused on understanding others and connecting with them by validating their experiences and feelings. On the other hand, male energy is usually more focused on being understood by others especially in terms of what we know and our past success. How do these differences show up in social media environments? Though I don’t have the data to support this…yet, I’ll bet women use “friending” features more than men, while men participate more in things like reputation management. Anyhow, something to consider when talking strategy with clients.

Bill Fanning (BizDev)

Bill's been out doing some major sales stuff but time to get him back on the "article" wagon. ;)

Don Sedota (Product)
This is a good list from Jay Baer on 11 Timely Social Media Takeaways. It’s basically a short-list of 11 recent social initiatives or planned initiatives by companies/brands and a key takeaway from each. My favorite is the one on Lane Bryant and their recent announcement of a “Plus-Sized Community” for women. It’s a great example of striking an emotional chord with the customer for a brand that on the surface may not seem to be a great social candidate. Lane Bryant is also hoping to leverage member questions/comments for the purposes of product innovation which seems to be an increasing trend.

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In the spirit of interesting stats and prospective customers potentially finding Facebook Connect as an attractive demand generator, here’s a post from Brian Solis on up to date Facebook stats . Unfortunately, he doesn’t mention the source of his information but he says that the statistics will be used in his next book so take that for what it’s worth. Anyways, some highlights that could be used to sell prospective clients on the attractiveness of Facebook/FBC as a demand generation source include:

More than 5 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)

The average social graph equates to 120 friends

120 million users log onto Facebook at least once a day

15,000 and counting websites, devices and applications have implemented Facebook Connect since its launch in December 2008

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I found this article pretty interesting, Please Don’t Follow or Friend Me, posted by Steven Hodson on the Shooting at Bubbles blog. It talks about how the concept of “friends” is different across different social networks and whether being someone’s “friend” on one social network is an obligation to accept that person as a “friend” on all social networks. A good quote from the article that sums it up (and I tend to agree) is “The richness and value of the Friending Economy comes from the quality and closeness of your ‘friends’, not the number of them. By blindly reciprocating we dilute the value of our ‘Friending’ not just for ourselves but also for those people who do decide to follow or friend us.”

There’s also an excerpt to another thoughtful post in the article’s sidebar (near the end) called “What Have You Done for Me Lately – Keeping Score in Social Media” which is similar in spirit but speaks to the viewpoint that just because you’ve followed someone, re-tweeted their comment, linked to their blog post, etc. doesn’t mean you should hold them in debt until they return the favor. The payback will be eventual and long-term, and in the end everything evens out.

Audio from 1st Social Marketing Help Desk Webinar

Aaron Strout — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 13:51:11 CDT

A few weeks ago, we launched a new flavor of webinars called the Social Marketing Help Desk. You can read more of the details here in colleague, Doug Wick's excellent post. The goal is to focus more on the questions vs. the content since we always get way more questions than we can answer during some of the recent thought leader webinars we've done like:

Our special guest for this webinar was Adam Cohen, a good friend and a partner at agency, Rosetta. If you missed the first webinar, we've provided the audio portion as a podcast below. If you'd like any of the slides (more just links to our bios/blogs/etc., let me know and I'll e-mail it to you. My address is aaron DOT strout AT powered DOT com.

To play or download the podcast, click here.

Facebook Connect: Rockstar Podcast Interview

Aaron Strout — Wed, 5 Aug 2009 09:53:36 CDT

In an earlier podcast I did regarding Facebook Connect, I talked about the fact that I think that this is the future of social marketing. I am so excited about it, I enlisted the help of our PR firm, SHIFT Communications, to collect three more big brains including Forrester senior analyst, Jeremiah Owyang, digital editor of AdWeek, Brian Morrissey and marketing blogger/consultant, Susan Getgood.

A few highlights from the session for those that like to read more than they like to listen:

Jeremiah Owyang (3:49 - 3:58) "In the past, we thought of interactive marketing which is user to Web site. Now, in social marketing, very different, it's user to user. "

Brian Morrissey (5:18 - 5:43) "What we're talking about here with Connect, is how brands can look at these social platforms and tool sets as ways to really further make connections with their consumers wherever they are. And Facebook Connect has the possibility of allowing them to embed social marketing into how they interact with consumers."

Susan Getgood (10:08 - 10:34) "Knowing what people find interesting to share is as important as knowing what they are looking at themselves. When we have a Web site, we can look at analytics and see which pages people are hitting and where they click-through and all this other stuff, but the idea that they thought something was important enough to share, that kind of information gives a company of any size the kind of information to know what kind of content really engages your customer and you can build more of it."

During the podcast, I also referred to some engaging statistics put together by the Business Insider regarding the effectiveness of Facebook Connect (thanks to Pearl Russell on the Powered team for finding these):

Registration: sites that use Facebook Connect as an alternate to account registration have seen a 30-200% increase in registration on their sites.

Engagement: sites with Facebook Connect see a 15-100% increase in reviews and other user generated content

Traffic: For each story published in Facebook, we see roughly 3 clicks back to the site. Nearly half the stories in the Stream get clicked on. This creates opportunities for the site to encourage more user actions – knowing that each one may result in 3 new visits to their site. With other models like search, there’s nothing you can do to increase user traffic besides optimizing for keywords.

Most importantly, you probably want to know the answer to which successful companies are currently using Facebook Connect? Unfortunately, there aren't many Fortune 500 companies using it yet but during our podcast, Brian brought up the examples of JC Penney (it's number 4 on the list of 10 in a great post by Mashable) and Red Bull. Jeremiah mentioned Volkswagon's Meet the VW's campaign.

http://powered-library.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/_podcasts/back_to_school/BackToSchool-02.mp3

To download this podcast, right-mouse click here and select "save file as."

If you're interested, we've got a slick demo of how Facebook will work with some of our Powered clients.

NOTE: The "Back to School" podcast series will be a regularly occurring podcast focused on the business value of social marketing, social media and online communities. Guests will include practitioners, authors, analysts and thought leaders in the space.

Here Comes The Connected Agency

Doug Wick — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 10:03:03 CDT

In February 2008, Peter Kim (formerly of Forrester and now of Dachis Corp fame) coined a term called "The Connected Agency" and co-authored a report for Forrester that predicted a fundamental shift in the agency world.

. . . marketers will move to the Connected Agency — one that shifts: from making messages to nurturing consumer connections; from delivering push to creating pull interactions; and from orchestrating campaigns to facilitating conversations.

Upon Peter's departure, Sean Corcoran has continued to flesh out the concept and has done some really interesting research. How does this idea start to evidence itself and what are the implications in the agency world? Well, it means that the focus moves from placements (and the reach, frequency, and share of voice associated with them) to conversations. And the main problem with conversations is that they can start anywhere, move, continue, move again, and finally end somewhere else. They are essentially placeless.

Social PR, Earned Media, and Community Websites

The lack of place in marketing built around conversations has started the slow obsolescence of the current agency modeled on specialization around place. Suddenly, everything is "social" and every type of agency is claiming it as their own in the rush to conversationalize themselves (it should be noted that some don't seem aware of the rush and sit blithely by). PR is now Social PR, Media is now Earned Media, and Interactive websites are now Online communities. Everyone wants to be that one agency that helps the brand with its conversations - The Connected Agency. The Connected Agency has to have the PR savvy to manage a Twitter account without a costly misstep in representation, the Media savvy to be able to understand and track the flow and influence of posted links across Facebook, Delicious, and millions of blogs, and the Interactive savvy to be able to build a campaign microsite utilizing numerous content widgets, Facebook Connect, and OpenSocial.

Team Detroit (and the Walls Come Tumbling Down?)

The major marketing companies will soon start to leverage their true advantage as a confederation of agencies across the spectrum of place. They can pull their agencies up, cross-integrate them and allow them to pitch truly conversation-based strategies that meld PR, traditional media, direct marketing, and online assets to powerful affect.

For instance, WPP's Team Detroit, formed wisely as an experiment in a large but offshoot market, is thriving. JWT, Y&R, Wunderman, Ogilvy, Mindshare, and The Park, all under one roof where "there are no walls, only ideas."

Team Detroit's strategy is one that I think we'll continue to see explored by other holding companies as the restructuring toward connectedness continues. The positive for marketers is that the more that we connect with our customers, the more we can do for them, and the more fulfilling our jobs will be.

Our New Webinar Series: The Social Marketing Help Desk

Doug Wick — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:43:08 CDT

Powered does a lot of webinars, and has had many that were very well-attended this year. Every time, attendees submit great questions and have unique business problems they are trying to solve through social marketing, but we never have enough time to address them all to the benefit of the group. This year, over 200 questions have been submitted to our webinar panelists and we've probably only gotten to a handful of them.

So please join Powered on Wednesday, July 29th at 2:00 PM Central time, as we launch the Social Marketing Help Desk - our new, monthly webinar series focused exclusively on answering your questions - no powerpoint and no sales pitches allowed. Our first effort will feature me (Doug Wick) as host with Aaron Strout from Powered and guest star Adam Cohen, a partner from Rosetta. You can register here to attend.

A few real examples . . .

"Management believes communities should cost nothing and require no staff to maintain. What is the resource commitment required to develop and sustain them?”

“How are communities different from ‘panels?’”

“Do you think that Twitter and other micro-blogging tools will become more prevalent in community based programs or will they stop growing in the near future?"

We look forward to seeing you there! If you have any format ideas or questions you'd like to throw in the hopper, please share your thoughts in the comments.

Weekly Social Marketing Links: July 7, 2009

Aaron Strout — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:55:23 CDT

Listen

Participate

Learn

I have to say, I'm a little disappointed that this article didn't deliver a little more value (because MarketingProfs is usually pretty awesome)

Bill Fanning (Business Development)
The first post is from Scott Berkun (The Berkun Blog) titled Calling Bullshit on Social Media. Similar to the post I shared a few weeks ago predicting the demise of Twitter, I had to read this one simply based on the title. Scott takes an honest and somewhat cynical look at “Social Media”, the hype, history and the behavior of both participants and marketers of social media. While he makes a lot of good points, I don’t think of most PR firms or Social Media Consultants as the “greedy” gaming the system. Sure, there are always a few but typically they don’t stay in business long. Call me naïve.

The second post was written by Tim Walker and titled In Defense of Social Media Manager. This post highlights the debate between Chris Brogan and David Thomas about the necessity of the role and job title “Social Media Manager”. Included are links to each of their blog posts stating their positions. Both worth the read. In part, I agree with Chris that companies ultimately should focus measuring what they need to change like sales, trials, PR coverage etc and that Social Media is a set up tools to help facilitate the necessary changes. He also says that using these tools is “part of a job function, not a standalone vocation.” This is where I have to agree with David Thomas, especially with larger organizations. Until everyone clearly understands the tools that are available to them and how to behave while using them, it probably makes sense to have someone focused on understanding the medium thoroughly. As the medium becomes more widely understood, we will probably see fewer and fewer “Social Media Manager” titles.

Jay MacIntosh (Business Development)
The article is entitled A CMO’s Guide to Social Media. It’s authored by a woman named Dana Theus who is a strategic marketing consultant with years of client-side experience. Though it’s much longer than the 140 microbites we’re accustomed to, I found it to be very worthwhile (but of course I did else I wouldn’t be sharing it with y’all now would I?). Anyhow, it’s an insightful POV on the societal and technological trends that have made the world more “social”. AND she offers a few strategies that marketing leaders might actually pursue. One of the things she discusses is something I’ve been hearing a lot of marketers say during my past 8 months of social media immersion – “Social media is simply another communications channel."

I agree that social media is a communications channel but it’s not “just another” one. It’s radically different. As one of my social media heroes, Doug Wick, points out social enables three-way dialog to take place; brands with consumers & consumers with consumers. That changes all the rules of engagement. Which reminds me, wasn’t it Einstein who said “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results?” Time for marketers to stop the insanity!

Doug Wick (Business Development)

This article is about Moonfruit’s high-exposure campaign on Twitter where they gave away Macbooks in exchange for retweets and followers. While the campaign was a wild success, it provides a little context on the downside. First, the campaign giveaway didn’t exactly link with Moonfruit’s real business, which is web design. There is a relevancy issue. Also, there are reports that Twitter had to cap or control the buzz because it was a strain on their infrastructure, showing that these free tools have their limits when used for marketing. An interesting case study in the evolving medium.

Don Sedota (Product Management)

Based on some of our recent prospect efforts, I found the latest Razorfish Social Media “Fluent” report had some interesting info regarding the financancial services industry and social media. The report was Twittered pretty heavily yesterday and was also Yammered internally, but thought I would mention a few takeaways I had regarding their financial industry insights:

Out of 7 industries, Financial rated last with regard to propensity for social context interaction with a brand (only 13% being likely to interact)

As an industry, the financial industry ranks a very distant second to the Auto industry (92 vs. 6.3) as far as positive consumer sentiment (as determined from positive/negative conversations on the web) and ranks 6 times better than Pharma (6.3 vs. 0.96)

BofA has the highest share of voice (31.6%); almost 3 times more than Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo has the highest brand sentiment out of 6 financial brands at 71%

Online share of voice and sentiment is closely tied to offline voice and sentiment

With the recent tumultuousness in the financial industry, there’s a ripe opportunity to improve these metrics for financial companies

Why All the Talk About Dog Food?

Aaron Strout — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:27:04 CDT

Cross-posted from MarketingProfs (original publish date May 2009)

Have you ever heard the term “eat your own dog food?” It’s a funny sounding concept that essentially means that one is “walking the talk” or leading by example. For instance, a lot of well-known companies have talked about being “customer-focused” but how many really are? Unfortunately just saying you’re committed to do something is dramatically different than actually doing it. There is no place where this idea is more true than in the world of social media and online community.

To highlight this point, [several] months ago, Jeremiah Owyang, a senior analyst at Forrester Research released the first ever Social Platforms Wave Report. In essence, this report rated the top online community providers according to their tools, services and methodologies. What the report didn’t do (and I’m not advocating that it should have) was take into account of how many of the companies reviewed in the report were “eating their own dog food.”

Being the socially engaged person that he is (there is no question as to whether Jeremiah eats his own dog food), he announced the arrival of Forrester’s Social Platform Wave Report on his blog. In his post, he offered some color commentary on the process, the companies that were selected and why the companies that were picked made the cut. One of the first comments on Jeremiah’s post asked if Forrester had taken into account whether or not these social tool providers were “walking the talk” by offering communities to their customers, creating corporate blogs and engaging with potential customers, prospects and partners in social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and even Twitter.

While I was honored to be mentioned as an example of someone that does “eat his own dog food,” it got me to thinking about how important it was for companies that were engaged in social media or their customers to engage in these same practices. The reason I believe the “dog food” concept has become so important to businesses thinking about “social” and “community “ is threefold:

Creating a great online community or social marketing program has just as much to do with the philosophy behind the effort, as it does the tools that facilitate these offerings.

Just like the field of e-mail marketing adopted best practices like opt-outs and truthful subject lines, the discipline of community building and social marketing has best practices that should be upheld. Piss off your customers by posting fake comments in your own blog posts or talking trash about your competitors and you’ll pay through negative PR or worse yet, customer attrition.

In such a transparent environment, there is little room for error (just ask Edelman how their “Blogging Across America” campaign for Walmart turned out a couple of years back). You also need to make a lot of decisions on the fly so having an experienced “pilot” can make for a much smoother ride.

To explore the concept further, I wrote a blog post recently called How We Market that talked about the importance of taking a “give before you get” approach, being authentic and embracing the social tools and sites one’s clients are using” while keeping in mind the need as a business to create awareness and leads. This is not always an easy balance to strike but it’s the key to succeeding in the new marketing world order.

In response to this post, I got dozens of comments from other “big brains” in the industry (including MarketingProfs very own Ann Handley). The resounding response was that social media is all about creating and sustaining relationships through active listening and conversation. Establishing valuable customer relationship online is much more effective when you are providing content to your community via social media channels.

With that as a backdrop, if you’re a brand looking for a company to build your online community or create your social marketing program, what should you look for?

Do they philosophically embrace the concepts that they’re asking you to adopt e.g. transparency, authenticity and a “give before you get” approach to value?

Are they practicing what they preach by blogging, engaging customers through their own customer support community, commenting on other industry blogs and engaging the public in places like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter?

Do they have “community” or “social” experience working with brands like yours?

Once you find a company you’re comfortable using to power your community or social initiatives, the question will shift to whether or not YOU are ready to eat your own dog food. If the answer is “yes,” just be sure to do so in moderation. Your customers will be happy to see you eating your own dog food but not if you stick their face in the dog food. Or worse yet, if you pretend that you’ve ALWAYS eaten dog food and can’t imagine someone not enjoying the taste.

Photo credit: http://500hats.typepad.com/

Engagement vs. Serendipity

Aaron Strout — Thu, 9 Jul 2009 09:04:54 CDT

Cross-posted from http://blog.stroutmeister.com

Earlier this morning, my Twitter friend, Michael Calienes who is also the co-founder of The Conversation Factory, tweeted out a clip he did on video social network, 12 Seconds. You can watch for yourself but for those of you that prefer the written word, Michael's question was "What if over the next couple of weeks you un-followed everyone who's never engaged with you on Twitter?"

What I liked about Michael's question was that it wasn't an "eff you" kind of statement but rather a thoughtful one. His follow up question was, "Do you think it would improve the relationships you have with the people who do engage with you?"

What I liked most about this quick video was that it got me thinking about engagement vs. serendipity, two things that are possible more now than ever via social media. The first concept, engagement, is obviously something that is high on any marketer's priority list. The second, serendipity, is something that we love when it comes our way but rarely do we feel like we have much control over the phenomenon. To me, that is really the beauty of Twitter because it allows both to happen simultaneously.

But that's not what Michael asked in his clip this morning. He wanted to know would paring down on followers that are essentially "dead weight" allow us to spend more time with the people that matter. In essence, this is something that I think we all grapple with in life in general.

So here's my answer... as tempted as I am to pare down my 8,000+ followers, I never will. You know why? Because every day someone new who was in the list of "haven't previously engaged with" crops up and adds value to my life. There are a few personal examples of how this has helped here and here It's also been invaluable in my professional life helping me helping me drive leads, create partnerships, find podcast/blog interviewees, or even land speaking engagements.

What do you think? If you had your druthers, would you slim down the number of people you engaged with based on reciprocity? Or are you like me -- willing to roll the dice based on the possibility of what might be?

Double Shot of Weekly Social Marketing Links: June 30, 2009

Aaron Strout — Thu, 2 Jul 2009 17:22:27 CDT

Crap. How many times can I make excuses for not getting our group's weekly links out there. Not many more I guess.

With that as a backdrop, let's skip right to the good stuff.

Beth Lopez (Marketing)

My article this week Social Media Is Changing the Content Marketplace by Heidi Cohen. Article focuses on the ways social media is impacting traditional media and what traditional media organizations can do to capitalize.

DP Rabalais (Marketing)

Good, quick read from MarketingProfs on the value of Online Communities in regards to market research. The article is titled Three Essential Market-Research Methods in an Online Community by John Kembel

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My second article is titled, As Economy Impacts Online Retail, Companies Shift Marketing Focus.

Bill Fanning (Business Development)

My article for this week is titled Why Twitter will soon become obsolete written by Jason Clark. I had to read this one given the title and I found it pretty interesting. To be fair, I don’t think he is saying that Twitter will not have a place at all, he is saying that Twitter is not the marketing miracle that it is currently hyped up to be. Furthermore, as Twitter becomes more “spammy” it will become a less effective marketing tool. Controversial topic and worth the read.

Jay MacIntosh (Business Development)

As the economy goes, so goes the marketing budget! Most corporations pull back their marketing spend, and therefore activities, during a recession. Though, I philosophically disagree with this strategy, it’s done because most of the marketing budget is hard to measure or not measured at all! I know, I know….just because you can’t measure something doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. Tell that to Wall Street where it’s all about numbers (revenue, EBITDA, comp sales, etc.). Anyhow, as a company whose purpose is to help marketers get smarter with their overall spend, it’s important to understand their top priorities, near and longer-term. This article summarizes an April 2009 study by the Association of National Advertisers about where marketer’s minds are now, during the recession, and where they anticipate being as we come out of the recession.

Doug Wick (Business Development/Social Media)

[Aaron here] Doug wrote a great blog post this week about Powered's Offerings/Online Community serving as a company's "401(k)." It's too good not to include in this week's update.

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My article for this week is from Gary Stein, who writes for ClickZ and is the VP of Social Media for Isobar.

The title is Open Position: Media Earner. Eventually there will need to be a way to unlock media dollars and let them flow into social, and the concept of “earned” vs. “paid” media might be conceptual connective tissue that gets us there. Here Gary makes it real by describing the person who is in charge of planning earned media. His mocked-up job description is really a description of what all marketing jobs will be in the future, where our job performance is measured by how well we are facilitating conversation, adding value to the conversation, and receiving positive mentions as a result.

Don Sedota (Product)

I’ve been involved in a few of the messaging/positioning discussions lately around the technology section of our new website and I fortunately stumbled across this great Pragmatic Marketing article on messaging/positioning that I think is well worth the read:

In the discussions I was involved in I think we were generally in line with this article but the article gave me additional clarity on architecting a top-notch product message that resonates with consumers.

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Really good blog post here on Comment Marketing by Shannon Paul . This is basically a guide for brands on responding to blog/forum/etc. comments with the intention of marketing the brand. She classifies several situations as green light, yellow light and red light situations based on the caution that should be placed on brands responding to an online comment.

Here are the highlights:

Green light - Your company is mentioned in product comparison btw Company A and Company B

Yellow light – Your company is left out of the comparison btw Company A and Company B

Red light – No direct mention, only a general reference of industry or market segment

Yellow/Green light – Reader asks about your company in the comments

Also includes some good links to related “comment marketing” posts.

Does Your Social Media Portfolio Include a 401k?

Doug Wick — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 13:22:27 CDT

Recently I've been thinking more about (and working on) how Powered, as a social marketing provider that focuses on building online communities for brands, can expand our partnerships with those brands' marketing agencies. In an earlier post, I broke down the question of whether or not agencies can evolve into social. In that post I mentioned a lot of ways that agencies will choose to drive that evolution - with a partnering strategy being one of the major approaches.

For brands - who are really focused on delivering results in the most cost-efficient way possible today - the goal with any partner approach is to drive a social marketing offering where multiple cooperative partners in the social space can deliver more value than they would individually.

A useful metaphor for how this might be done is the world of investing. After all, social marketing is about brands investing in relationships in ways that they can't do through more traditional marketing channels. But these investments can take many forms.

Any good investor will tell you that diversification is key. You must not only invest in short term vehicles (like stocks) that can be more rewarding but are also riskier, you must also make sure you putting money into long term vehicles. Additionally, the interaction between these short term and long term investments is important to building wealth. Gains made in stocks must occasionally be funneled into longer term vehicles and locked down.

I see the world of social media the same way. Ultimately, storytelling and the production of compelling media - the ability to connect emotionally with a consumer while fitting into the current media and market environment - takes the skill and experience of a great agency. Here are some recently highlighted offline examples from the world of Outdoor advertising.

This "Day Trader" of the social media world knows how to place the right bets, which tools/networks to place them in, how to get the message just right, and the right process for spinning them up with online and offline media/search buys. His or her world is dynamic, and changes every day based on moves in technology, competitor activities, audience preferences, and hundreds of other variables.

Because of that changing world, the focus is on the near term and the strategies are campaign-oriented. They have to be, as the campaign that works today might not work tomorrow.The focus is on creativity, customization, agility, trendspotting, leveraging various technologies, short term measurement, joining instead of building, and exploration.

The good campaigns will be heavily rewarded: with consumer attention, affinity, word-of-mouth buzz, loyalty, and new business. But where will those earnings go when that Day Trader has to move on to the next campaign?

This is where the Investment Manager comes in, the person who keeps a long view and helps leverage the riches that the Day Trader produces into long term wealth. In social marketing, this is the community provider - and with that provider are the people that manage the marketing assets where fans and customers can engage over the long term with brands and with each other. This is who creates and manages a brand's 401k. The focus is on infrastructure, sustained processes, long-run measurement, building instead of joining, and content with a long lifespan.

These skill sets are both highly necessary, highly complementary, and difficult to perform at a high level simultaneously - which makes them fit a partner model well. Also, the long-term vehicle of community is the newer piece, and part of an agency's evolution into social is to understand how it works, and how it complements, their work.

Upcoming Webcast: Pitfalls and Best Practices for Online Community Building (6/24)

Aaron Strout — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 21:43:55 CDT

Yes, this is going to be a good one. Don't miss the opportunity to join Forrester Principal Analyst, Lisa Bradner, Communispace CMO, Debi Kleiman and Aaron Strout, CMO, Powered (yup, that's me) this Wednesday, June 24 at 2 PM CT as we talk about the good, bad and the ugly of community building. Our presentation promises to be chalk full of examples AND prescriptive advice on the best way to approach community building.

Specifically, we'll talk about:

Building a solid foundation for your online community initiative

Leveraging what you learn from community members in your organization

Driving participation and engagement among community members

Avoiding the 7 deadly pitfalls of community development and management

I won't BS you and tell you to sign up now because this is a limited time offer but you should do it soon so you don't forget!

Lisa Bradner, Forrester

Debi Kleiman, Communispace

Aaron Strout, Powered

Double Shot of Weekly Social Marketing Links: June 10, 2009

Aaron Strout — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:07:50 CDT

Alright, I've been a little lax in my blogging responsibilities. You REALLY know that this is the case when I can't even make the time to post a digest of the links that the product/marketing/business development teams at Powered pull together on a weekly basis. In fairness to me, I've been in the process of moving across country the last two weeks starting with a 2,000 mile drive with a car full of plants, cats and condiments from my refrigerator (all things moving companies won't touch). I am now settling in to the great city of Austin, TX and with my settling will come a redoubling of my efforts to do more blogging here.

With that as a backdrop, the good news is that you all get a double dose of articles this week -- one from last week and one from this week from each of the "Team Powered" members. Even better, this is one of the best batches of articles/posts to date. Hope you enjoy 'em!

Beth Lopez (Marketing)

Five Reasons why Content Strategy comes before Social Media

http://blog.junta42.com/content_marketing_blog/2009/06/five-reasons-why-content-strategy-comes-before-social-media.html

Liked this post as it reinforces our approach to content and community. Plus, it was written by Joe Pulizzi with Junta42.com who was one of our May Webinar panelists talking about Content Marketing strategies. The five reasons he listed are:

1. Social media does not work unless you have something valuable to say!

2. Publishing is marketing, marketing is publishing.

3. Social media activity does not mean you are accomplishing your marketing goals.

4. It's the content that is ultimately shared through social media.

5. Social media = I hear you + I'm listening to you + I understand

---

Millennials Among Those Who Don't Appreciate Twitter

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=107081

Quick read and short article that discusses a recent study that found that only 22% of millennials use twitter. I found this stat particularly interesting given the fact that Millennials are one of the larget demographics online, participate in social networks, text friends without even looking at their phone, are into the latest tech gadgets and fads, etc....I would have thought that more millennials would have been on Twitter than this study suggests. Reinforces that brands need to understand where their target audience lives online before launching social media campaigns and could be one explanation as to why brands that try to reach this audience via twitter have failed.

I liked this post as it reinforces our approach to content and community. Plus, it was written by Joe Pulizzi with Junta42.com who was one of our May Webinar panelists talking about Content Marketing strategies. The five reasons he listed are:

Social media does not work unless you have something valuable to say!

Publishing is marketing, marketing is publishing.

Social media activity does not mean you are accomplishing your marketing goals.

It's the content that is ultimately shared through social media.

Social media = I hear you + I'm listening to you + I understand

---

Millennials Among Those Who Don't Appreciate Twitter

Quick read and short article that discusses a recent study that found that only 22% of millennials use twitter. I found this stat particularly interesting given the fact that Millennials are one of the largest demographics online, participate in social networks, text friends without even looking at their phone, are into the latest tech gadgets and fads, etc... I would have thought that more millennials would have been on Twitter than this study suggests. Reinforces that brands need to understand where their target audience lives online before launching social media campaigns and could be one explanation as to why brands that try to reach this audience via twitter have failed.

DP Rabalais (Marketing)

Since we met Greg Matthews of Humana last week, I thought I’d find an article or post regarding Humana’s Social activities. The article by Jason Falls talks about how Humana very successfully tied an offline program (Freewheelin) into online social media, including: Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, plus a few fan Blogs. Interesting, light read about a company we could potentially do business with.

---

I thought this article, Five Ways to Use Twitter to Improve Your Marketing, by Heidi Cohen of ClickZ would be relevant to everyone. Most of this we all already know, but still it’s a good reminder and has a few points that can be incorporated into Powered’s online marketing presence.

Bill Fanning (Business Development)

A couple weeks ago, I highlighted an article about the new way of thinking about the web in terms of streams rather than pages. This week, the post I’d like to highlight, titled Web 3.0 is about taming the deluge of data written by David Griner, discusses how the web will evolve to manage the stream. In a nutshell, the social movement has created an enormous amount of content that is very difficult to manage for businesses and individuals alike. The next evolution will be tools to distill the conversations into digestible chunks so we can actually make the content valuable rather than overwhelming. Well worth the read and a good guy to follow on Twitter and his blog, The Social Path.

Jay MacIntosh (Business Development)

We often discuss the characteristics of brands that we believe would benefit tremendously from having a branded online community. The ones that come up most often either fall into the category of passion brands or what I call utility brands.

This article entitled America Revs Up Its Do-It-Yourself Passion talks about how more and more shoppers (56%) are dabbling in DIY. Of course there’s an economic factor that is driving growth in DIY, but there’s also a social/psychological one as well and this is where the passion comes in. Let me explain…the products that consumers use for DIY projects typically aren’t from what we would call passion brands. Home improvement products, auto parts, hair color, tax tools, etc. are not typically thought of as passion products. However, the DIY category is full of people who are passionate about DIY projects. Why are they passionate about DIY? I suspect it has a lot to do with a sense of gaining greater control in their lives, satisfaction in doing something tangible, etc.

With the growth of DIY and the consumer need for education and sharing it makes sense to pay close attention to them as potential targets in the future. To that end, here are a few of the DIY categories and associated brands that support the category:

Home improvement - Ace Hardware, Orchard Supply Hardware, IKEA
Travel and Recreation – REI, Columbia, Northface, Patagonia, Coleman
Beauty – Sephora, Loreal, Clinique
Digital Home/Entertainment – Best Buy, Cisco, Samsung
Eating – Williams Sonoma, Costco

---

Talk about blurring the line between brands…Comcast is going to provide content for target.com. Comcast owns theDailyCandy.com site which will be providing shopping/fashion content in a new section of Target’s site called “Red Hot Shop”. This WSJ article goes on to discuss how retailers are partnering with media companies to gain access to more entertaining and engaging content in order to drive more traffic to their brands. This benefits the retailers in two ways; 1) they sell more stuff and 2) it increases the demand for advertising on the their site, which creates an additional revenue stream. Meanwhile, the media company gains additional buyers (i.e. revenue) for the content it produces.

Anyhow, this article raises a couple of interesting opportunities/challenges for brands, especially those targeting lifestyle categories (i.e. travel, health, entertainment, etc.):

How do they attract and engage consumers with content that is compelling and UNIQUE in a world where media companies are desperate for additional revenue and reselling the “family jewels”? Do brands purchase exclusive rights from the media companies for a period of time? Do brands invest in creating their own lifestyle content? What about UGC? It’s much less expensive than “professional content” and maybe brands provide consumers with more powerful tools to improve the quality of their content? But who “owns” the content, the consumer, the brand, both?

What is the advertising business opportunity for brands, especially retailers, who invest in more entertaining and useful information? Is the value primarily in drawing more consumers who buy more stuff from the brand? Or does it shift (as mentioned by Expedia’s VP of Global Media Solutions) to media and advertising revenues? Whatever the mix, it’s going to be determined by us (consumers) because every action, click, forward, buy , etc. done online can and will be measured, or at least it better be!

Doug Wick (Business Development/Social Media)

I am going to go with this blog post by 360i announcing the publishing of their Social Marketing Playbook. I’m cheating a little because I got this off of Yammer, but I think it’s a good enough resource that it should be included . . .

The Agency, 360i, published a “Social Marketing Playbook” that is a useful document in the vein of Forrester’s Groundswell, but which comes at the problem of social marketing from a practitioner’s viewpoint. It’s worth a read whether you are just getting starting in social media / marketing or you know what you’re doing already. Especially interesting is their side-by-side analysis of the social marketing footprints for H&R Block, Vitamin Water, and Skittles. It also notably includes guest articles by outside experts such as Jeff Pulver, Pete Cashmore, and Jeremiah Owyang, among others.

Don Sedota (Product)

My article this week was posted on Mashable in mid-April and is entitled Social Media and SEO: 5 Essential Steps to Success. The article gives a great overview of how social media and SEO programs can feed off of each other (i.e., social media community traffic/participation can be greatly enhanced by ranking high in search results for important keywords and SEO rankings can be greatly increased by having dynamic and compelling content that is linked to by 3rd party sites, as well as strategic page level metadata tagging and other tactics). Bottom line is that SEO is a critical demand generation component of building community traffic and participation.

---

A few weeks ago, Facebook announced that they’ll be supporting OpenID registration (i.e., users can leverage an existing OpenID account such as Gmail to create a Facebook account). This obviously lowers the barrier to entry for creating a new FB account and helps online users in the effort to simplify their online account management across the Web. Here’s a good Mashable article, and here’s FB’s official press announcement. Up until this announcement, I hadn’t spent a lot of time researching OpenID but I have since this announcement and here are some thoughts/highlights regarding our platform:

Gmail accounts are OpenID (which is really what made me sit up straight) so OpenID integration within our platform would open the doors to Gmail account owners the same way Facebook Connect integration opened up the doors to FB members on our communities

The fact that Facebook is now supporting OpenID is a pretty significant endorsement that OpenID isn’t going away

Good quote from FB’s press release “In tests we've run, we've noticed that first-time users who register on the site with OpenID are more likely to become active Facebook users. They get up and running after registering even faster than before, find their friends easily, and quickly engage on the site.” – this is interesting from an OpenID perspective, but I would also think that this perspective applies to FBC integration on 3rd party communities (i.e., good to know since we just implemented FBC)

Something we should probably consider seriously for the next few platform releases

Back to School Podcast: The Real Scoop on Facebook Connect

Aaron Strout — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:31:49 CDT

With Powered's recent release of Facebook Connect, you won't be surprised to hear me say that I think this is the future of social marketing. To help share in this excitement, our PR firm, SHIFT Communications, amassed three big brains (all three of which are friends) in Jennifer Leggio, social media blogger at ZDNet, Marshall Kirkpatrick, lead blogger at ReadWriteWeb and Matthew Lees, analyst and VP at the Seybold Group.

During this 20 minute podcast, we talk about:

1. Who (if anyone) is doing Facebook Connect well?

2. Will mainstream users adopt it or will it be mainly those “in the know?”

3. What do you think about the tradeoffs between data collection (less w/ FB Connect) vs. lowering the barriers to entry?

4. How does FB Connect stack up against Open ID? Will Open ID take off? Or go away?

5. Will people tire of seeing “business” messages permeate their news streams?

6. Thoughts on FB Connect vs. FB Fan pages?

Who (if anyone) is doing Facebook Connect well?

Who (if anyone) is doing Facebook Connect well?

Will mainstream users adopt it or will it be mainly those “in the know?”

What do you think about the tradeoffs between data collection (less w/ FB Connect) vs. lowering the barriers to entry?

How does FB Connect stack up against Open ID? Will Open ID take off? Or go away?

Will people tire of seeing “business” messages permeate their news streams?

Thoughts on FB Connect vs. FB Fan pages?

http://powered-library.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/_podcasts/back_to_school/BackToSchool-01.mp3

To download this podcast, right-mouse click here and select "save file as."

If you're interested, we've got a slick demo of how Facebook will work with some of our Powered clients.

NOTE: The "Back to School" podcast series will be a regularly occurring podcast focused on the business value of social marketing, social media and online communities. Guests will include practitioners, authors, analysts and thought leaders in the space.

Inbound Marketing Summit Lessons: Listen, Be Authentic and Measure!

Aaron Strout — Fri, 29 May 2009 06:06:44 CDT

If hearing the words "listen, be authentic and measure" brings back childhood memories of your parents badgering you about "brushing your teeth, keeping your elbows off the table and/or putting your clothes in the hamper," that is a good thing. It means those of us who are doing our best to lead the social charge are doing our job helping companies think about the best way to embrace this thing called "social."

I'm writing this post as I fly back from the Inbound Marketing Summit in Dallas, TX and as a result, I have the aforementioned themes from the title of this post fresh in my mind. In fact, it seemed that "listening, authenticity and measurement" came up nearly every session at the conference. You know why? Because they are three of the most important things you can do when it comes to companies starting out on their "social" journey.

To that end, I'm not going to cop out and just share a bunch of tweets with you from the event (I've done this for a few posts recently and it really is a lazy way of conveying infomation). However, I am going to reinforce the title of this post with three messages from the conference - one from yours truly, one from uber-blogger, Chris Brogan and the last from IBM vet and author, Mike Moran.

Lesson One: Listen

Okay, I told you I wasn't going to cop out but I lied. For my portion, I'm posting my presentation that talks about:

How companies and their customers got disintermediated in the first place thanks to the phone and web

Five ways companies can "listen" and "engage" with their customers

Examples of the results companies can expect when they "listen" and "engage" with their customers

[slideshare id=1501900&doc=ibms-sf4-28-09-090528113848-phpapp01]

Lesson Two: Be Authenic

While this is something that Chris Brogan mentioned during his keynote, it's not what I want to focus on when I drive this point home. It's something that clicked in my head while Chris was speaking -- something I've heard him say several times but didn't really digest it until yesterday. During the first five minutes of his presentation, Chris likes to warn, ""oh yeah, I like to curse during my presentation. If that offends you, you can pray for me in church."

Whether Mr. Brogan is intending to do this or not (I'm assuming he is 'cause he's a pretty smart feller), what he's telling his audience right up front is that he's a no bullshit kind of guy. A nice guy, but not one that sugar coats things. Hearing this for the third or fourth time I realized what a brilliant analogy this was and how it subtley planted the seed of one of Chris' main points. To be clear, I don't think Chris is advocating that companies should swear or by surly with their customers. What he is pointing out, however, is that it's okay to be a human being. That means showing your less polished side sometimes.

The more I think about this, the more I appreciate its brilliance.

Lesson Three: Measure

Mike Moran did a nice job talking about Internet by the numbers during his session. One of the highlights from his talk that really resonated with me was that one of marketers biggest fears with social or any new type of marketing for that matter is that by measuring it, you are immediately putting yourself on the hook to fail or succeed. Obviously marketers don't mind the succeeding part but the risk of failure can be daunting. This is a particularly difficult pill to swallow for marketers that are used to well established techniques and metrics of tactics like direct mail, advertising, e-mail marketing and even paid key word search.

During a webcast I did yesterday (5/26) on the value of content marketing, one of the participants, Joe Pulizzi had an equally pleasing answer when the question came up around which metrics to use around measuring the success of content marketing. Joe warned that I probably wouldn't like his answer but went on to explain that it really depended on what the goals of the marketer were. Joe went on to explain that because marketers/companies measure so many different things depending on their product, service, marketing tactics and audiences, the measurement needed to align with the companies objectives. Amen Joe!

There were obviously tons more great lessons to be learned from a lot of really smart speakers at the event. What did you learn while you were there (or from following along on Twitter with hashtag #IMS09)? Feel free to share in the comments or provide a link back to your Inbound Marketing Summary posts.

Weekly Social Marketing Links: May 25, 2009

Aaron Strout — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:42:44 CDT

Beth Lopez (Marketing)

Found the article, The One Word You Can't Say, quite amusing given how we have always advocated the need to view social marketing as a long-term strategy. Seems that it's starting to become a mantra at all of the social marketing events and tradeshows. Per the article, the word you can't say is "campaign" when referring to social marketing...preferred alternatives include terms like "program," "initiative," or even "conversation."

DP Rabalais (Marketing)

Great article aimed at CEO / CMO level. Do You Need a Social Media Marketer? Measurement & analystic seems to be the big reason more companies aren’t embracing social media / social marketing. Another reason we need to continue to plug our analytics/insights capabilities at Powered. To that end, I called out a paragraph from the article that drives our point home:

A recent survey of 110 of the top CMOs by recruiting firm Heidrick & Struggles in Atlanta seems to echo Schwartz’s point. The report found that social media was a relatively low priority—ranked in the bottom third. “Mostly it’s because of analytics,” said Lynne Seid, a partner at the firm. “The things that are measurable are a top priority. Most marketers see [social media] as an experiment.

Bill Fanning (Business Development)

This weeks article is titled Social Media vs. Social Responsibility, written by Reid Carr (president of Red Door Interactive). It's an interesting look at Social Media being the great equalizer to the companies who over the years have behaved more like magicians trying to trick people into buying their product or service rather than honestly marketing and selling their products and services.

His premise is that this behavior has lead to a severe distrust with consumers and social media allows consumers to have a powerful vioce, finally balancing the power that traditional businesses and media outlets once owned. He notes that it's our responsibility as consumers to not only support our favorite businesses by purchasing from them but also by talking about them in various social media outlets. Likewise, it's our duty to responsibly talk about the poor experiences we've had with businesses.

Jay McIntosh (Business Development)

On a self-appointed hiatus this week.

Doug Wick (Business Development)

A very short article about the brand innovation behind Cereality, a café concept based on our favorite cereals. This article struck a chord because of the way that they developed the idea for Cereality, by building on the brand equity of popular cereal brands and focusing on a food category that is both ubiquitous and taps into brand passion. The approach put forth is similar to the process behind the conception of branded online communities, which tap into passion points and truly put the consumer at the center of the experience.

A salient quote from Cereality’s founder – “When you hit that zeitgeist and people are excited and find it relevant to their lives, they start a conversation and you have to be at the center of that conversation.”

Don Sedota (Product Management)

This week I picked a report written by Forrester analyst, Laura Ramos,titled Effective Customer Reference Management Anchors B2B Community Marketing Efforts that might be helpful to our program managers in the context of setting up community customer reference strategies for our clients and/or for our own corporate marketing efforts. Hopefully validates/supplements our current strategies in both arenas.

Cross-posted on http://blog.stroutmeister.com

A recent survey of 110 of the top CMOs by recruiting firm Heidrick & Struggles in Atlanta seems to echo Schwartz’s point. The report found that social media was a relatively low priority—ranked in the bottom third. “Mostly it’s because of analytics,” said Lynne Seid, a partner at the firm. “The things that are measurable are a top priority. Most marketers see [social media] as an experiment.

Bill Fanning (Business Development)

This weeks article is titled Social Media vs. Social Responsibility, written by Reid Carr (president of Red Door Interactive). It's an interesting look at Social Media being the great equalizer to the companies who over the years have behaved more like magicians trying to trick people into buying their product or service rather than honestly marketing and selling their products and services.

His premise is that this behavior has lead to a severe distrust with consumers and social media allows consumers to have a powerful vioce, finally balancing the power that traditional businesses and media outlets once owned. He notes that it's our responsibility as consumers to not only support our favorite businesses by purchasing from them but also by talking about them in various social media outlets. Likewise, it's our duty to responsibly talk about the poor experiences we've had with businesses.

Jay MacIntosh (Business Development)

On a self-appointed hiatus this week.

Doug Wick (Business Development)

A very short article about the brand innovation behind Cereality, a café concept based on our favorite cereals. This article struck a chord because of the way that they developed the idea for Cereality, by building on the brand equity of popular cereal brands and focusing on a food category that is both ubiquitous and taps into brand passion. The approach put forth is similar to the process behind the conception of branded online communities, which tap into passion points and truly put the consumer at the center of the experience.

A salient quote from Cereality’s founder – “When you hit that zeitgeist and people are excited and find it relevant to their lives, they start a conversation and you have to be at the center of that conversation.”

Don Sedota (Product Management)

This week I picked a report written by Forrester analyst, Laura Ramos, titled Effective Customer Reference Management Anchors B2B Community Marketing Efforts that might be helpful to our program managers in the context of setting up community customer reference strategies for our clients and/or for our own corporate marketing efforts. Hopefully validates/supplements our current strategies in both arenas.

Cross-posted on http://blog.stroutmeister.com

Loyalty Marketing Meets Social Marketing Podcast: Episode 2

Aaron Strout — Mon, 25 May 2009 17:04:05 CDT

[caption id="attachment_434" align="align_right" width="96" caption="Loyalty Podcast Series"]

[/caption]

This is the second episode in the bi-weekly series of podcasts that I'm doing with author and loyalty marketing expert, Jill Griffin (you can find episode one here). During these brief 5-8 minute podcasts, we'll be talking about the intersection of loyalty and social marketing and how focusing on both disciplines can help large and small companies deepen their relationships with new and existing customers.

In this episode, Jill answers the specific question:

I’ve read in a number of places that businesses need to start paying closer attention to Gen Y and the fact that they have different needs than those of Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers. Can you talk a little about creating customer loyalty among this age group? In particular, what can companies do to help deepen ties with these natural born “Googlers?

http://powered-library.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/_podcasts/loyalty/Powered_griffin_2_vFinal.mp3

Right-mouse click to download

Be sure to check out Jill's latest book (as referenced in the podcast) titled, Taming the Search-and-Switch Customer: Earning Customer Loyalty in a Compulsion-to-Compare World. You can also follow Jill on Twitter.

May 19: Weekly Content/Social Marketing Links

Aaron Strout — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:09:31 CDT

Beth Lopez (Marketing)
Kicking butt on next week's webcast and our new website this week - she gets a hall pass...

DP Rabalais (Marketing)

Two articles this week. One on how Retailers are Shifting Marketing Dollars. The other speaks for itself...

Study: Retailers Shift Marketing Dollars Towards Social Media

Forrester: Social Technology is Like Sex

Bill Fanning (Business Development)
The article I’d like to share was published in Tech Crunch and is titled, Jump Into The Stream. The author, Erick Schonefeld, discusses the evolving distribution of online information, from a collection of web pages to a real-time stream, and the impact on web business and consumers of information. The interesting part of this article is the idea of the new metaphor being “streams” instead of “pages”. Web business are transforming from being owners of content to providing a place to present the most relevant stream of information, i.e. Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, Digg, Google Reader, and a bunch of others. Consequently, the way we consume information has been forever altered.After reading the article, I started thinking about how this applies to branded communities. I think it re-enforces the importance of being able to share your activity in a branded community with the “stream”. For example, the ability to publish a particular activity to your Facebook feed, or the ability to share an article through sites like digg or de.li.ci.ous. Participating in these types of distribution networks are, and will increasingly be important traffic drivers to the community. It also re-enforces the need to supply a steady stream of new and relevant content to keep the community engaged. The content could be professional, user generated or both, but it needs to constantly evolve.

This article is loosely based on a blog post by John Borthwick, CEO of Betaworks (Twitter, bit.ly, Tweedeck, etc.) titled, Distribution ...Now, which he references several times. Also, well worth the read!

Jay MacIntosh (Business Development)
My article this week presents a perspective on the challenges of seller vs. buyer interactions. It’s written by an experienced marketer who has been on both sides of the “fence” at different times in her career. I too have spent several years on both sides and completely understand where the author is coming from when she points out the all-too-common salesy approach taken with potential buyers. A salesy approach is when the sales person thinks, talks and acts as if it’s about them, their product, their company. This is the way the majority of salespeople (and companies) approach buyers even today. They want to tell their market all about themselves and why they’re the best…blah, blah, blah.

Anyhow, I switched over from the buy side to the sales side about 12 years ago. At that time, the promises of the Internet and all the new technologies and tools made it okay to sell/push products. Actually, it was more about just taking the customer’s orders and getting the contract/PO in place. That doesn’t, won’t and can’t work today or any time in the foreseeable future. It is all about the buyer and what the seller can do to grow their business. Start with this as the foundation of developing a business relationship. This foundation based on the seller delivering the goods, provides an ongoing compelling reason for the buyer to buy…it really is that simple!

Doug Wick (Business Development)
This week's article is taken from Business Week’s Executive Guide to Social Media, How CEOs use Twitter. The individual stories are interesting, but the common story is that these CEOs need to be able to hear individual voices, and to choose whose voices are important to listen to at any given time. The power of social is just that, to introduce not only the voices of peers, but the voices of individuals inside companies and inside brands. Within brand communities, the consumer can listen to all of these voices and decide which ones are important given their needs and where they are in the customer life cycle.

Don Sedota (Product Management)
On vacation this week - he gets a hall pass...

Monsanto: Turning Heads with Social Media

Aaron Strout — Mon, 18 May 2009 15:57:13 CDT

Chances are, you've heard of the agri-business giant, Monsanto. If you haven't, you've probably read about some of the controversy surrounding their business. After all, they've been identified by the EPA as being a "'potentially responsible party' for 56 contaminated sites (Superfund sites) in the US¹". Their genetically engineered seeds haven't exactly endeared themselves to farmers in Europe and their "aggressive litigation and political lobbying practices, have made the company controversial around the world and a primary target of the anti-globalization movement and environmental activist¹."

So why would I want to write about a company whose director of electronic communications, Glynn Young, says "99% of people online hate and the other 1% think they should?" For one reason and one reason only... they are embracing social media and they are doing it in a BIG way.

I was fortunate enough to hear Glynn speak at The Conference Board's Marketing Conference last Thursday. Imagine my surprise as I sat there, mouth gaping, as I listened to Glynn talk about the fact that Monsanto (@MonsantoCo on Twitter) has become a poster child for social media. Due to my fascination with this topic and my belief that we could all learn a thing or two from what Monsanto has been doing in the socialsphere, I will try and do a podcast and/or blog post interview with Glynn (and perhaps some of his team) later this month. In the meantime, here are a few of the gems I pulled from his presentation:

During the session, I asked Glynn how the hell he was able to pull off the feat of getting Monsanto to embrace social:
- He found very friendly attorney
- Got permission from boss
- Flew under radar for a while until they could prove an ROI

Following efforts to fight a particularly tough piece of legislation, Monsanto agreed to write a post for the publication, Crooks and Liars -- a publication geared to criticizing companies like Monsanto. Being open and honest helped and the piece of legislation was defeated. [link to: http://crooksandliars.com/]

Monsanto has an internal community and ~2/3 of employees participate.

In spite of having a number of critics, major news media AND all of the PR people from one of their major competitors, Monsanto continues to plug away at their corporate Twitter account (side note: after my numerous conference tweets RE @ Monsanto, I got a couple of nice notes back from the corporate account and a couple of the Monsanto team members on Twitter thanking me for tweeting Glynn's presentation).

Glynn and his team are measuring traffic drivers to Monsanto.com. Facebook and Twitter are now in top 5 in terms of traffic drivers.

Monsanto maintains a corporate blog and while they don't permit profanity and inappropriate behavior, they do allow negative comments (example).

Given how powerful Glynn's presentation was, I'm going to ask if he will post on Slideshare. If he can't/won't, I will be sure to see if he might selectively make it available for folks that want to DM him or me.

Monsanto may be crazy for putting themselves out there when they know how disliked they are but Glynn says that it's starting to make a difference. The analogy I like to think about is imagine one of neighbors started spreading rumors about you that weren't true. You could do three things to combat this:

Ignore it and hope it goes away (in Monsanto's case, that ain't happening)

Move away (also tough for Monsanto given their international footprint)

Hold a neighborhood meeting and clear the air. This last approach not only lets you tell your side of the story but it also shows that you care enough to get to get the root of the rumors (or semi-truths) in the first place.

So what are you thoughts? Is Monsanto crazy for putting themselves out there? What other companies can you think of that would benefit from "starting a dialog" with their customers and detractors?

¹Source: Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto

Live from Community 2.0: How to Be a Kick Ass Community Manager

Aaron Strout — Tue, 12 May 2009 17:02:52 CDT

Broadcasting live from the Community 2.0 Conference. Lots of great people AND content here at this two day affair. A panel that I thought people who read this blog may want to pay attention to is the "How to Be a Kick Ass Community Manager" panel with folks from Intel, Sega and Techrigy. Here's the list of panelists:

Moderator, Dawn Foster, Community Consultant

Kelly Feller, Intel

Josh Hilliker, Intel

Kellie Parker, Sega

Connie Bensen, Techrigy

I'm going to cheat a little here and provide some of the key points from my fellow attendees who are live twittering this panel. Here are some of the most salient points:

tsahilWho's the community manager of the community for community managers? #C205 minutes ago from TweetDeck

BrightFuse"Fail often. Fail Fast. And learn just as fast". #c205 minutes ago from web

mdfwOne problem with 'teaching' community management is that it is often more art than science. Lot's of grey. Practice makes perfect. #c206 minutes ago from TweetDeck

templedfRecurring theme: you've got to network in this community. Since there's no Community Mgmt 101, we have to help each other. #C206 minutes ago from web

JanetJoz@cbensen hmm participation, or rather value of, is rather "subjective" - what do they value for the brag sheet out of curiosity? #c209 minutes ago from TweetDeck in reply to cbensen

cbensenBrands are starting to monitor their employee's participation in social media. Intel gives brag sheets to their staff to show off #c2013 minutes ago from TweetDeck

billjohnstonRT @templedf: @JoshProStar: create brag sheet for reluctant bloggers to show the reach and impact of what they contribute. #C2013 minutes ago from TweetDeck

AaronStrout@KellyRParker says execs are MUCH more willing to embrace social/community activities when they can see measurement/results #c2016 minutes ago from TweetDeck

whirledviewGreat transparency: Intel publishes employee social media guidelines publicly #c20 http://bit.ly/vwxc017 minutes ago from TweetDeck

helentrSome Intel product dev employees have community management goals built into their role and performance measures #c2017 minutes ago from TweetDeck

helentr60 employees involved in the community at Intel. Training and support important but so is Exec buy in #c2018 minutes ago from TweetDeck

AaronStrout@JoshProStar and @KellieParker talk about walking the fine line between being transparent but not pissing off HR #c2020 minutes ago from TweetDeck

templedf@JoshProStar: get the 90% lurkers to participate by hitting arteries. Find the topics that are interesting and untapped. #C2024 minutes ago from web

helentrone way to make the senior management team more comfortable is to set your community / staff guidelines. They like boundaries #c2024 minutes ago from TweetDeck

cbensenask your comm what they want, what would make them excited? #c2025 minutes ago from TweetDeck

helentrIntel: key to successful community is an AMAZING community manager. Hear hear #c2029 minutes ago from TweetDeck

helentr@kellieparker huge demand for community managers - no school you can go to! #c2034 minutes ago from TweetDeck

templedfCommunity management blog with tips and advice at http://conniebensen.com/ #C2035 minutes ago from web

What are your "tips and tricks" on how to be a kick ass community manager?

How is Mobile Changing Social Media?

Doug Wick — Tue, 12 May 2009 14:00:12 CDT

Last week, I received this question from @dbaron in my weekly webinar and wasn't able to get to it. But I also felt that it is a larger topic that warrants a blog post. It's a question we get frequently at Powered, typically with a follow-up question about how our platform handles mobile.

The answer right now is, at the same time, a lot and a little.

In terms of participation in social media, much is now driven by mobile devices. The iPhone and similar new smartphones by Blackberry have become portals into popular services like Facebook and Twitter, cameras that post pictures instantly for friends to see, an outlet to let your friends know where you are and what you are doing. In terms of content creation for social networks, I actually do a lot more on my iPhone than I do on my laptop now. When I'm out and about I often have lot more going on that is post-worthy. I think the emphasis on the newsfeed and short bits of information in most networking services is a response to that behavior.

Networking is just becoming more interesting and powerful with GPS-enabled devices and location-based services like Brightkite (geotagged photos) or Moximity (geography-based networking).

However, the world of social marketing hasn't been impacted much by mobile yet. This is for two reasons.

First, marketing through services like Facebook is still being figured out (and Facebook Connect offers many of the answers there), as ads don't perform very well and pages don't create long term engagement. If the model is still evolving for the broad web, the much younger mobile web has nothing to emulate.

Second, these networking services are communications tools, and mobile devices are still at their heart communications devices. While people may browse for the odd piece of information like a sports score or Madonna's age (to settle a bet), it is rare to see prolonged sessions of browsing on mobile devices the way you see them on laptops. Mobile has narrow attention that allows little space for marketers to squeeze in without angering the user.

But small geography-powered services that address particular mobile use cases - like finding a restaurant, checking movie times, or delivering timely updates on events, will find niche audiences where offers could be served within the narrow attention of mobile in a relevant way. And once Facebook and other networks get a firmer grasp on how best to integrate marketing, those models can be extended into the mobile space.

May 7: Weekly Content/Social Marketing Links

Aaron Strout — Fri, 8 May 2009 22:03:12 CDT

Here are a few of the things the IAB doc defines:

Application and video installs.

The number of relevant actions, including newsfeed items posted, comments posted, uploads, poll votes, and so forth.

Conversation size, which measures the number of content relevant sites and content relevant links, and the monthly uniques spread across those conversations.

Site relevance, which measures the density with which phrases specific to a client concern are brought up among relevant sites.

Author credibility, such as how relevant the author's content is and how often it is linked to.

Content freshness and relevance, which defines how frequently an author posts.

The average number of friends among users of a specific application.

Number of people currently using an application.

DP Rabalais (Marketing)
Keeping in line with my commitment to align_ment with our Sales Plan, I selected REI as the company to do a search on this week. My post this week is by Albert Maruggi, founder and president of Provident Partners and host and producer of the Marketing Edge podcast. I chose it because I feel like it builds a strong case to support REI as a strong prospect for Powered.

Bill Fanning (Business Development)

Jay MacIntosh (Business Development)

My weekly share is actually not an article but a few tidbits from a recently released study by Razorfish entitled “Digital Mom."

Women control the majority of spending in the US and the world. To that end:

Consumer spending accounts for approximately 70% of GDP in the U.S.

Women a.k.a. “Chief Purchasing Officers” control 85% of household buying decisions in the U.S. and the majority handle family finances.

On the business side, women have accounted for 70% of all privately held start-ups over the last 15 years.

Marketers want to engage with people who buy things…women.

Women, by and large, are much more “communal” than men. Think about it, women often turn to others for guidance, recommendations, etc., and they love to share (i.e. tell others about their experiences). Guys, we tend to be more independent and hierarchical. We hate to (i.e. won’t) ask for directions, we compete with each other in almost every- and anything, and usually prefer to conduct our own in-depth research rather than listen to someone who may have “better” research than us. Anyhow, the full report is about 37 pages and talks about a LOT of things, however, the three key takeaways that I found most interesting and relevant to us are the following:

Mom’s areas of interest are lifestyle categories…duh!

Their purchase decision funnel behaviors fit really well with what Powered does.

The highest value information sources for moms are a lot of what we provide in a Powered community.

Doug Wick (Business Development)

My post this week is from “Social Media Insider” written by David Berkowitz of 360i (cross-posted on the Agency's website).

David does a nice job of offering his experience in running a self-service Facebook targeted ad campaign, including the results he saw. Many of his results are confirming of what we’ve heard – in a pretty targeted campaign he saw very low clickthrough, and he notes that FB must find another way to monetize if it expects to live out its large valuation. The upside is that Facebook ads are extremely cheap to test, and he predicts (I think rightly) that there may be ways to reach very specific, segmented audiences with compelling content-based ads - so he encourages people to test and see.

Don Sedota (Product Management)
A recent Forrester article called, Four Essential Components of Successful Innovation Initiatives, caught my attention due to the fact that, well I’m in the product innovation business ;-). The first two components, “Creating and getting executive support for an innovation strategy” and “Use central management and coordination to carry out the strategy” are pretty straightforward. The third component, “Use individual contributors to feed the innovation function” struck a chord because it’s something we’re currently trying to implement more effectively for the internal product strategy process. Examples of this include Dell’s Ideastorm and IBM’s annual Innovation Jam. In fact, we’ve been tossing around the idea of creating an internal Ideastorm where employees can go to submit ideas and fellow employees can comment on them and vote them up/down. This could also tie into Yammer so that everyone gets notified when a new product idea is submitted. As far as I know this actually wouldn’t be that difficult to implement internally.

The fourth component, “Ties to community bring objective insight and can deepen relationships” has to do with using community (external resources) to inform product strategy. This struck a chord because it’s something that’s come up recently in the context of our product roadmapping discussions due to interest from Clinique and Sony. This form of product strategy “crowdsourcing” is becoming more and more popular.

April 29: Weekly Content/Social Marketing Links

Aaron Strout — Mon, 4 May 2009 14:04:03 CDT

As I mentioned in our first Weekly Content/Social Marketing Links post, I've asked the Powered marketing, business development and product teams to pick one news article, blog post or research report a week that "speaks" to them. With that article, they need to come to our weekly staff meeting prepared to give a 120 second update on what the article was about and why they found it useful.

My goal is to share this content on a weekly basis. Here's what our fourth week netted:

Beth Lopez (Marketing)

Paying homage to Twitter this week since I am making a concerted effort to tweet more and become more educated on best ways to utilize it both professionally and personally…couple of interesting articles:

7 tips for the Perfect Twitter Profile
Love these tips as most on twitter don't follow them (I've found)….
1. Use your real name (hard to find you if I don't know your 'handle')
2. Use a real picture (see the avatars all the time)
3. Think SEO when writing your bio
4. Include a URL
5. Consider a custom background
6. Don't protect your updates
7. Take it slow

Twitter Confesses: Most Users Don't Return
This is a very short article, but thought it very compelling. I can see why folks would not go back after using Twitter for the first time, but there is a lot of debate out there on these numbers and why people defect after the first time, so take it FWIW.
Twitter continues to grow at a rapid pace, and yet new research from Nielsen Online indicates the microblogging phenomenon faces an uphill battle in maintaining consistent use by millions of its users.

The research firm found that more than 60 percent of Twitter users fail to return the following month. During the past year, Twitter has only maintained a 30 percent retention rate. In other words, the mass of new users isn't large enough to make up for the large group that is defecting or losing interest.

For good measure, Nielsen compared Twitter's early days to that of MySpace and Facebook. Even when those two social networking sites were just emerging, their retention rates were twice as high as Twitter's, according to Nielsen data. Both Facebook and MySpace now enjoy a retention rate of 70 percent today.

DP Rabalais (Marketing)

My article of the week is not mind-blowing, but definitely relevant to our Targeted Sales Strategy. Short article on how the Big 3 US Automakers are embracing Social Media.

Doug Wick (Business Development)
This is a good article from Greg Verdino where he discusses the developing language among marketers that are referring to social media as “earned media” vs. the more traditional “paid media.” He illustrates how we aren’t really going far enough in just talking about different types of media – because media as a word still has the connotation that the message is controlled by the marketer. Greg talks about how we should be seeking “earned attention” – and that focusing on anything else as a marketer within the social web is taking your eye off of the ball.

Bill Fanning (Business Development)

This week’s article is titled, How to Breathe Life into your Loyalty Program, written by Robert Manning (VP of client services for Schematic).

As I was reading this article, I was pleased to hear him basically repeating Powered's philosophy of “give before you get”. His premise is that an effective loyalty program is good at building real relationships with people by giving them value. Not just following up with folks 9 months after purchase to try to sell them something else, but really listening to the customer, understanding the individual and providing a means for them to share their experience with your brand.

While the idea of hard rewards are nice, that will not build a strong relationship by itself…often times that builds a desire to get more points, not necessarily brand affinity. Case and point, I do everything I can to get AA miles so I can save money on personal travel (by the way, that’s getting harder and harder these days) while the fact of the matter is, I'm not a huge fan of the brand!

Don Sedota (Product Management)

There was a lot of press yesterday (and some internal conversations on Yammer) about the new Facebook Open Stream API which will allow developers to pull in Facebook’s activity streams for use within their own 3rd party applications. This article on Mashable does a good job of summarizing the announcement.

While Facebook Connect essentially allows 3rd party apps to push out their site content to the Facebook news feeds, thus enabling communities to extend its site content reach and facilitate word-of-mouth marketing (i.e., demand generation), the Open Stream API allows the consumption of Facebook content within a 3rd party site.

As a result, we could strategically leverage the Open Stream API (in concert with Facebook Connect) within our client communities.

Specifically, the OS API allows the 3rd party site to filter out comments, "likes" and stories on a per application basis. If I'm not mistaken, this means that we could track "likes" and comments that are generated from the content stories posted from the Facebook Connect facilities on our sites and could also track comments, "likes" and stories generated from the brand application on the Facebook side. In the context of our current offerings, this would allow us to keep track of Facebook conversations that occur around community content that was pushed out via Facebook story feeds.

Our New Powered Weekly Webinar

Doug Wick — Fri, 1 May 2009 12:10:41 CDT

Yesterday, I hosted our first webinar entitled "Powered Social Marketing: How It Elevates Your Bottom Line." We had good attendance, great participation, and I felt like it was an excellent start to this weekly series.

We'll be doing this presentation every week on Thursday at 2 CST, and even though it is Powered-centric and you will learn everything you need to know if you are considering Powered as a potential partner - it is largely about Social Marketing, what it means and how it can make you successful, no matter how you decide to do it.

In the first session yesterday, several folks requested a soft copy of the resources slide I showed at the end of the presentation as a follow-up. So here is what I showed (with links, below).

Please know that this is just a subset of the exhaustive list of the resources and the smart people who are focusing time and energy on education in the social marketing space, so I would encourage everyone to start here and explore outward to find new people and new ideas. And if you find anything particularly interesting, we'd love to hear about it. Thanks, and we'll see you next week!

The Sites You Saw

http://www.sony.com/backstage101
http://community.atkins.com

More from Powered (@PoweredInc on Twitter)

Powered Social Marketing 2008 ROI Report
Powered White Paper Series
Powered Monthly Webinars
Powered Blog: The Engaged Consumer (You are here)
Powered Engaged Consumer Email Newsletter (Right hand side subscription form)

More from outside of Powered

Books: Groundswell, The Cluetrain Manifesto
Blogs: Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang, Mashable, Chris Brogan, Social Media Club, Aaron Strout, Tom Humbarger, Shannon Paul, Peter Kim, Bill Johnston, Pistachio, Doug Haslam . . .

My Contact Information

Doug Wick, Director of Business Development
doug.wick (at) powered dot com / @DougWick on Twitter

The New Word-of-Mouth Marketing Infrastructure?

Doug Wick — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 10:28:33 CDT

The role of a proprietary community environment for the purposes of marketing (or social marketing program) has been hotly debated among brand marketers and social media insiders. We know that social sites are more engaging (people spend more time on them) than non-social, and marketers want to tap into that power.

So as a marketer, do you build your own community, or do you join others'? If you decide to build a community, what is the best marketing application - a community for your Loyalty Program, a community for building Insight into consumers that Market Research uses, an educational community for those considering your products that is more of a Direct Marketing play?

But it seems like brands are benefiting from building AND joining . . . and we've seen applications for social marketing that are generating value along each (and in many cases, all) of the above dimensions.

Something I learned long ago is that if your questions have multiple correct answers, then you might be asking the wrong questions.

The range of marketing value propositions that a branded online community can serve indicates that the community isn't really appropriate for just one of them - after all, separating "loyalty program" from "acquisition program," "pre-purchase" from "post-purchase," is something that marketers do for ourselves. Consumers don't classify interactions that cleanly. Plus we're seeing social tools being applied in almost every dimension of a company's customer-facing business . . .

Ecommerce - Social Commerce / product presence through ratings and reviews by providers like Bazaarvoice

Support - Enhanced Product/Service Support Forums by providers like Lithium

PR/IR - Blogging and corporate presence platforms by providers like Awareness Networks

Focus Groups and Research - Formal deep online market research environments from providers like Communispace

The problem with the above applications is that while they are powerful when a consumer is ready to hear about what you're selling, they suffer from what I call the "dinner party egomaniac" problem. If they are the only social applications you have, you risk sounding like the person at the dinner party who is only willing to have conversations about themselves - your products, your company, your brand. And if your product or brand isn't particularly sexy, that problem is exacerbated.

This makes it remarkably difficult to drive brand engagement from third party social environments to your properties. On those sites, consumers are busy talking to and relating to each other about the things that matter to them. They are not in a transactional mindset, and the invasive brand-centric presence there will be no more effective than, and probably less effective than, a 30-second TV spot.

What is needed is a transitional space, a place where consumers can go from third party social engagement to brand engagement naturally. A place that "changes the subject" at the dinner party in a way that Emily Post would approve.

This is where a branded online community can enter in - as the platform that reaches into third party social sites, converting third party social engagement into branded social engagement while retaining the context of consumer needs and aspirations. Branded communities need to be focused at the lifestyle and category level for this reason - it's where the brand connects to consumers and their conversation.

What makes this easier are technologies that most third party social sites are implementing that allow users to take their identity, relationships, content, and features seamlessly from an unbranded environment to a branded one: like Facebook Connect, for instance.

So perhaps all of these things begin to function together in a new-media word-of-mouth marketing infrastructure, as above. Social enablement of the brand presence in all dimensions, and then a social marketing program where the brand connects with the relevant aspirations and needs of the consumer - and which fields participants from social destinations in powerful new ways that wildly outperform more traditional broadcast marketing channels.

I'll be talking about this topic, social marketing, and how Powered provides these programs every week, starting tomorrow at 2:00 CST, in a webinar called "Powered Social Marketing: How It Can Elevate Your Bottom Line." Stop by and see what we have to say!

What You Can't See: 78% of Your Business

Doug Wick — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:15:50 CDT

Recently, I've been a little obsessed with ROI as it relates to social marketing, as I seek to put in more tangible terms what I feel intuitively about this new toolset's value.

To this end, Adam Cohen hit my Reader just right with a nice real-world post on measuring the marketing effectiveness of social media in general (not another post just on how important it is that it be measured, thank goodness). As Powered has done in our 2009 ROI Report he focused on purchase path as the main way to address the value created by social presence. Truly, resultant sales is the most logical way to measure marketing, and Adam rightly calls for social media tools to be linked along the clickstream more directly with end purchase. Powered's self-reported data is a compelling indicator, as we typically find on the low end that 1 in 5 consumers report a purchase as a result of social engagement within one of Powered's client communities.

But there is more here than just getting people to consider a purchase. In our ROI report and with our customers we do focus on a number of statistics that address things like loyalty, advocacy, brand affinity, and insight into consumers. All of these words are abstract; they all refer to things that are intangible. But nevertheless, a marketer's intuition tells you that these things are the essence of what we seek to impact. Unfortunately, those outside of the marketing profession see those terms as arcane and would rather you just "show them the money." You can't really blame them.

It was while considering the intangible and social marketing's impact on it that I found this article by Christopher Kenton (via David Churbuck) that I found fascinating. Christopher's article isn't about social media/marketing, but rather about why CMO's are being pushed more toward true financial measurability of marketing in general. The premise of his article is built around this finding:

According to Jonathan Knowles of Brand Finance, a consultancy that specializes in the valuation of businesses, the tangible assets that used to account for 75 percent of a company's stock market value in the 1980s now only accounts for 22 percent of market value.

Wow, I can imagine the CFO-head-scratching that this sea change likely causes. Seventy-eight percent of my company's value is in assets that I can't see? Granted, some of these intangibles will reside in the internals: the IP, the human capital, the processes and technological know-how of a company. But no doubt much of this intangible value exists outside: in the brand equity that a company has built with consumers/customers - the affinity, loyalty, advocacy, and market insight that is the department of the CMO.

Today, what the stock market knows has forced the CFO into that CMO's office to ask for a firmer grasp of the unseen - and for less arcane ways to measure it. Popular but still nascent measures like NPS (Net Promoter Score) seek to fill the gap and make loyalty/advocacy tangible, but more research and development is needed to tie it to financial impact - and that impact likely differs structurally from company to company.

In the meantime, as we wait for more widely accepted measures, I would suggest this hypothesis: there is currently no more powerful tool in the marketer's toolbelt to impact intangible marketing assets like loyalty, affinity, advocacy, and insight than social marketing. Proof points abound outside of Powered's walls, but our statistics show an extremely powerful effect that I believe dwarfs other marketing mediums when you take into consideration relative cost. Aaron Strout blogged about them earlier.

And when you're talking about assets that make up as much as 78% of your company's stock value, you might as well be talking about your entire business.

In the world of the CFO and company valuation, the two main forces on the positive side are cash flow and assets. So it's reasonable to predict that someday in the not-so-distant future, the ROI of social marketing (and marketing in general) might not only contain a short-term conversion-based model that looks like the ROI models of old, rolling into cash flows . . . but will also include a more powerful new-world long term model that analyzes the impact of social marketing on intangible assets.

Are you already there? If so, how are you measuring?

The "Oprah-ization" of Twitter (HINT: This is a Good Thing)

Aaron Strout — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 16:23:29 CDT

A big thing happened last week in the world of social networking/lifestreaming site, Twitter. One of the largest media moguls in the world -- Oprah Winfrey -- decided to sign up. This came on the heels of other celebs like the NBA's larger than life, Shaquille O'Neal, actors Jimmy Fallon, Ellen DeGeneres, Ashton Kutcher and wife, Demi "@MrsKutcher" Moore, and political savant, George Stephanopoulos joining Twitter's ever increasingly popular ranks.

Not surprisingly, this created a bit of an uproar on Twitter, especially among folks that have been with it for a while and have been organically growning their follower base during that time. Personally, I could care less because I probably won't follow Oprah on Twitter. Not because I don't like or admire what she does but because she's just not my cup of tea. The same is true with Shaq, Ellen, Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore.

While some social media folks are taking a balanced if not slightly positive outlook on this phenomena:

Rick Calvert of Blog World Expo thinks that Oprah would be a great keynote speaker at Blog World Expo 2009

David Armano of the Dachis Group thinks that Twitter's rapid growth will help it venture "further away from an obscure internet service to something that could potentially enjoy Facebook like numbers".

Vindu Goel AND Jenna Wortham of the New York Times find her newbie like approach charming.

I'm coming out in the Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research's camp of this is a good thing for not only Twitter, but social media and online community in general. As Jeremiah points out in his post, What Happens When Twitter Gets Mainstream Attention, "[with Oprah joining Twitter] expect more brands to jump on board, and within a few months"

Therein lies the beauty of someone like Oprah joining the Twitter ranks. As a leading driver of public opinion and preference -- my friend Tim Moore of Pearson says there are two "market makers in the world of bookselling , Oprah and NPR's morning edition -- Ms. Winfrey is endorsing the legitimacy of social by willingly participating in it. If Twitter or "social" is good enough for Oprah, it's good enough for the millions of Americans to participate as well. And with more participants comes a greater opportunity for businesses to engage, deepen loyalty and ultimately make money.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm selfish for wanting this to happen on a number of fronts. First and foremost, this "Oprah-ization" of Twitter and thus the world of social should help my company, Powered as we create social marketing programs for big companies. It will also help friends and family members realize that I haven't completely wasted my last three plus years with all of my blogging, podcasting, Facebooking and Twittering.

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Aaron Strout

Aaron Strout — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 14:12:30 CDT

Next up in the #CommunityPowered podcast series featuring Susan Bratton of DishyMix, is little old me. That's right, yours truly. Aaron Strout. Susan thought it was only fair that after working with her to arrange 13 other podcasts, helping her set up shop and then posting all other 13 that I should get a little "time in the sun." By way of background, I'm the head of marketing at Powered -- the company that owns this blog. Prior to that, I was the VP of social media at Burlington, MA-based Mzinga. Before joining Mzinga, I held a variety of director level roles at Fidelity Investments.

During my conversation with the lovely and talented Ms. Bratton, we talk about things like:

Twitter etiquette

My Experts in the Industry blog interview series

Companies that are doing a great job with their online communities

And the importance of eating one's own dogfood.

In addition to reading me here on this blog, you can also check out my personal (but professionally focused) blog cald Citizen Marketer. It if you really can't get enough of me, follow me on Twitter at @AaronStrout. I am also the chief tweeter behind our corporate @PoweredInc account (although I'm working on getting our CEO to start tweeting from that account as well).

http://powered-library.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/_podcasts/SXSW2009/AaronStrout.mp3

Right-mouse click to download.

FULL LIST of SXSW #CommunityPowered Podcasts are here.

Susan Bratton & Aaron Strout at the SXSW Mashable Party

April 15: Weekly Content/Social Marketing Links

Aaron Strout — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 11:00:05 CDT

As I mentioned in our first Weekly Content/Social Marketing Links post over on my personal blog, I've asked the Powered marketing, business development and product teams to pick one news article, blog post or research report a week that "speaks" to them. With that article, they need to come to our weekly staff meeting prepared to give a 120 second update on what the article was about and why they found it useful.
My goal is to share this content on a weekly basis. Here's what our third week netted:

DP Rabalais (marketing):
I’ve decided that since I like to travel and have an upcoming vacation on my mind, that I’d stick with that industry for the entire month of April. Today’s article is titled, Travel Brands Lacking in Social Media Activity – it is the result of a an article written by Peter Kim titled A List of Social Media Marketing Examples.

Both articles take a look at brands that are using social marketing and to what degree: the Peter Kim article could be of interest to Sales since it outlines the Social activities of over 300 brands.

Jay MacIntosh (business development):
I’m sharing the highest of highlights from Web 2.0 (i.e. phrases I highlighted from my written notes):

Session titled “Why Social Media Marketing Fails” led by Owyang, Charlene Li and Peter Kim. For a thorough review go here. That said, here are the sound bites that stood out for me: “Don’t think of SM as a campaign, it’s about building relationships…what kind of relationship do I have today, what kind of relationship do I want to build?” “Understand your purpose with metrics…either activity which is analytics or biz metrics which are outcomes” “One large financial services firm decided they weren’t going to allow employees to engage in conversations with customers, therefore, Charlene’s recommendation was don’t do community/social.” “The most common reason for not doing community/social is executives don’t trust employees to engage in customer conversations!” “Does SM matter today? No. Will it? Yes, it will matter a whole lot because humans are and always will be social beings…we’re just having trouble adapting to these new tools/technologies.”

Session on measurement. “½ -2 % of people in social networking sites are “answer people” which you gotta have if you want discussions taking place on your community. Find ways to identify, recognize and encourage these people.” “Social media is about collective action…and why does this matter for businesses? Businesses are effectively conversations and measuring conversations is about measuring the context in which the conversations arise.” “If discussion is important to your community make sure you design it for at least audiences 1) the ½-2 % answer people and 2) everyone else. And make sure you validate people’s roles in the community because they value it (i.e. validation).”

Session on Ford’s use of content in SM. “Ford wanted to make storytelling for the consumer easy and they did this by enabling them with content to help them tell stories…Monty used the term “democratize the content” “Overall approach to SM at Ford is that it’s not a campaign, it’s about ongoing engagement.” “When asked how measure the ROI…sometimes answer with the question of how do you measure the ROI of phones, email, wearing pants to the office…hard to measure but he guarantees that all have a positive impact on your business!” “Fords vision for SM is to be one of the world’s leading social brands.” “We use the Sharepoint platform from Microsoft for our technology.”

Guy from Digg discussing how publishers can integrate with social networks. “Some interesting stats on Facebook…the average user has 120 friends. Of those approx 1/3 will see a Newsfeed item with anywhere from 0.8 – 2 clicking through to the item of interest. TechCrunch experienced a 100% growth in registrations when they implemented Facebook connect. Others like Telegraph, The Onion, Time, etc. saw registrations rise at least 30% with Facebook Connect.”

John Maeda the president of Rhode Island School of Design. “Electrons travel at lightspeed…people don’t”

Head of Microsoft Business Software unit. “Sharepoint is a social computing platform for within the enterprise…”

CTO of Bluestatedigital (the tech company behind the Obama social campaign). “ They sent 71B emails, had 200k offline events planned via the site, 14.5M YouTube viewing HOURS, $770M raised of which 65% occurred online.” “They accomplished this by driving ACTION. Email was the thing that had the biggest impact in terms of opt-ins and donations. The way to get advocacy is to create ownership. For example, as opposed to just having donors ask others to donate, they allowed individuals to create a personal fundraising page with goal, personal commentary, etc. along with tools to then easily contact friends and family to “support” their cause.” “Email is still king…1) There’s not too much email, just too much unwanted email 2) Nobody reads newsletters (give soundbites with links to more) 3) Give more than you ask 4) Your list isn’t an ATM machine, but if you deliver good/relevant content it can be very effective.” “70% of all actions on the site came from 10% of the members. Segment user/member types by pyramid and develop ways to get people to move up the pyramid.” “#1 fundraiser for the campaign was Sarah Palin’s speech at the Republican convention. Within a 24 hour period they had anticipated how their users would react to her and via the site and email rallied people with content and calls-to-action which generated $11M” “Measure everything and test what works good, better, best…for example they had a few different email concepts on one topic…the good email achieved a 30% open rate the lesser had an open rate of 15%. Try and test different content and see what works!” “Biggest unexpected lesson learned is that it’s important not to underestimate what people will do if you provide them with info and tools.”

Doug Wick: (business development):

This is a great article by Chris Kenton (originally published in the CMO Council’s “Marketing Magnified”) that describes at a strategic level the drivers behind marketing measurability, and settles on the biggest impact social marketing has – the effect on intangible assets like goodwill and brand equity. This article shows that path that connects the value of social marketing to the executive suite.

Bill Fanning: (business development):
This article was written by Adam Weinroth, product manager at Pluck, last week. The title is “How to craft a social media plan that connects.” The article emphasizes the fact that there is no “one size fits all” social media plan for all brands. To demonstrate the point, he outlines 5 tips for strengthening online growth through social media and references examples for each. The high level points and examples are (check out the article for the details).

1. Know your audience

Scotts

2. Get real

Kodak
- A Thousand Words
- Plugged In

3. Provide relevant content

Whole Foods

4. Drive community back to you

Dunkin’ Donuts

5. Leverage social syndication

eHow

It’s important to note that before you begin thinking about the technology and content needed to connect with a particular segment, you must first understand why you want to connect with them. Are you trying to drive customer acquisition, build brand loyalty, listen to the community or some combination of the three? Answering these questions first will start you on the right path to building a comprehensive strategy that not only addresses how to connect with your segment (as outlined above) but also how to achieve your business / marketing objectives once you have them engaged (intelligent merchandising or driving specific calls to action etc.) and how to measure the success of the program in order to continually optimize effectiveness. This is the difference between a Social Media Plan and a Social Marketing Strategy.

Beth Lopez (marketing):
On vacation this week - she gets a hall pass.

Don Sedota (product management):

This is another product management related article but I thought it was timely given PM’s recent effort to make product strategy a more collaborative effort and to enhance the level of documentation available per product releases. The article, entitled How to Turn Sales Engineers into Your Biggest Fans, is geared towards the information flow between PM and Sales but the article can easily be applied to AM, Content, Ops, Tech Services, etc. as well.

The author offers the following (selected) advice for PMs in making key business groups more a part of product strategy and release processes and enabling them to do their jobs better:

Transparency (builds trust)
o Clear feature selection process for each release
o Provide the “why” behind features
o Share the roadmap
o Solicit customer/prospect input and involve business groups in product direction

Formal Process (sets expectations and provides consistency)
o Involve key business groups in release cycle
o Clear and transparent enhancement request process

Transference
o Provide sufficient documentation so that business groups can be self-sufficient in certain situations
o Provide performance data via efficacy reports, case studies, etc.
o Competitive data
o Training

It will obviously take a while before we are hitting on all cylinders for all of this, but I’m excited that we’ve recently started improvement initiatives across many of these facets and that we seem to be heading in the right direction.

Cross-posted from http://blog.stroutmeister.com

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Tara Hunt

Aaron Strout — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 10:59:19 CDT

Next up in the #CommunityPowered podcast series featuring Susan Bratton of DishyMix, is Tara Hunt, marketing lead at Intuit. Prior to joining joining Intuit, Tara has been involved in innovative projects and companies like Riya, Pinko Marketing, Citizen Agency, Barcamp and the Whuffle Factor.

During her conversation with Susan, Tara talks about how powerful online communities can be for companies, her love for FourSquare (formerly Dodgeball) and her thoughts of the difference between working at a large corporation (Intuit) vs. going the smaller, startup route.

In addition to reading her on her Horse Pig Cow blog, you can follow Tara on Twitter at @MissRogue.

http://powered-library.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/_podcasts/SXSW2009/TaraHunt.mp3

Right-mouse click to download.

NEXT UP: Aaron Strout (that's me) of Powered Inc.

Tara Hunt

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Cathy Brooks

Aaron Strout — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 18:24:33 CDT

Next up in the #CommunityPowered podcast series featuring Susan Bratton of DishyMix, is Cathy Brooks principal of Other Than That Consulting and head of content and bizdev at Seesmic. By way of background, Cathy has spent more than two decades working in and around media and communications beginning in 1982 with a job ripping wire copy (yes they actually still had wire copy machines) at the largest all news radio station in Philadelphia, PA. All these years later, Cathy’s experience as a Journalist encompasses reporting, writing, editing, broadcast management, and most recently media training and strategy development. She also writes/broadcasts at the Other Than That blog.

During her conversation with Susan, Cathy touches on a point that is near and dear to my heart... namely that "social media is only as social as the people who are in it. And so, that means you actually need to see people in carbon-based life form." Cathy also notes the importance of "quality" in terms of "quantity" in terms of those that engage with you and/or read your blogs or Twitter stream. Please note that Cathy had less of a voice at SXSW than I did so if you find it too hard to hear her,a transcript of the podcast is here).

In addition to reading her on the Other Than That blog, you can follow Cathy on Twitter at @CathyBrooks

http://powered-library.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/_podcasts/SXSW2009/CathyBrooks.mp3

Right-mouse click to download.

NEXT UP: Tara Hunt - Intuit

Cathy Brooks and Susan Bratton

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Dave Evans

Aaron Strout — Thu, 9 Apr 2009 16:05:11 CDT

During his conversation with Susan, Dave shares some pearls of wisdom from his book which he specifies is a book about marketing vs. social media. One of my favorites is Dave's point about the importance of developing a culture of operations rather than a culture of marketing within your organization meaning don't just silo your social experiences. Learn more NOW by clicking on the play button below...

http://powered-library.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/_podcasts/SXSW2009/DaveEvans.mp3

In addition to reading him on his Digital Voodoo blog, you can follow Dave on Twitter at @EvansDave.

Right-mouse click to download.

NEXT UP: Cathy Brooks, Other Than That Consulting, Seesmic and LeWeb3

SXSW CommunityPowered Podcasts

Aaron Strout — Wed, 8 Apr 2009 13:07:44 CDT

A few weeks ago at SXSW, our friend and advisory board member, Susan Bratton and I did a number of podcasts with some thought leaders/practioners in the online community and social space. Each podcast is going up as its own blog post but I've heard from several folks that they would like a centralized location to see all the interviews at a glance:

[PODCAST] Patricia Martin - author, AdAge and Huffington Post

[PODCAST] Guy Kawasaki - author and Alltop.com

[PODCAST] Angela Benton - BlackWeb20.com

[PODCAST] Lee Odden - TopRank Online Marketing

[PODCAST] Henry Jenkins - MIT's Collective Media Research Lab

[PODCAST] Dave Taylor - AskDaveTaylor.com and FilmBuzz.org

[PODCAST] Chris Brogan - New Marketing Labs & Chrisbrogan.com

[PODCAST] CC Chapman - The Advanced Guard

[PODCAST] Rohit Barghava - author and Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence

[PODCAST] Peter Fasano - The Coca Cola Company

[PODCAST] Dave Evans - author, Digital Voodoo and ClickZ (4/9)

[PODCAST] Cathy Brooks - Other Than That Consulting and Seesmic (4/10)

[PODCAST] Tara Hunt - Intuit (4/15)

[PODCAST] Aaron Strout - Powered Inc. (4/16)

Photo Credit: Jim Storer

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Peter Fasano

Aaron Strout — Wed, 8 Apr 2009 12:40:56 CDT

Next up in the #CommunityPowered podcast series featuring Susan Bratton of DishyMix, is Peter Fasano, global interactive marketing team member and social media marketing manager at The Coca Cola Company. Peter Fasano is also the principal of mass+logic, a consultancy focused on digital marketing and social computing. If that wasn't enough to keep Peter busy, he's also co-founder and partnership director of Social Media Club Atlanta.

During his conversation with Susan, Peter talks about the importance of brands not being afraid to make mistakes in social media. He also provides some background behind the evolution of Coke's Facebook Fanpage (an organic process). Peter also shares some of the things he's thinking about [hint: portability and vendor management relationship].

In addition to reading him on his social media strategy blog, you can follow Peter on Twitter at @PeterFasano.

http://powered-library.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/_podcasts/SXSW2009/PeterFasano.mp3

Right-mouse click to download.

NEXT UP: Dave Evans, co-founder of Digital Voodoo, author and regular writer for ClickZ

Photo Credit: Keith Burtis

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Rohit Bhargava

Aaron Strout — Fri, 3 Apr 2009 18:36:08 CDT

Next up in the #CommunityPowered podcast series featuring Susan Bratton of DishyMix, is Rohit Bhargava, SVP, Strategy & Marketing at Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence. By way of background, Rohit is a founding member of the pioneering 360 Digital Influence team and author of the award winning new marketing book, Personality Not Included. He also writes the Influential Marketing blog, one of the 50 most popular marketing blogs in the world.

During his conversation with Susan, Rohit advises that brands looking to get started with social might want to take a look internally to see if there are existing employees/stakeholders that are already engaging in Twitter, blogging etc. vs. just handing it off to PR. Rohit also tackles the common question of "what if someone says something negative about our company?" Oh yeah, Rohit is looking for new podcasts to help him "learn" during his soon-to-be expanded "drive time."

In addition to reading him on his Influential Marketing blog, you can follow Rohit on Twitter at @RohitBhargava.

http://powered-library.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/_podcasts/SXSW2009/RohitBhargava.mp3

Right-mouse click to download.

NEXT UP: Peter Fasano, Global Interactive Marketing, Social Media Marketing Manager at The Coca Cola Company.

Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy

I Would Join a Donut Community

Doug Wick — Thu, 2 Apr 2009 15:07:01 CDT

Within Powered, we've been mulling over the question "Is Social Marketing for my Company/Brand?" more than usual lately, mostly because we're working on a white paper addressing that question.

Evaluating your situation as a marketer relative to the social marketing program opportunity is something we've addressed a lot in this blog, particularly with Aaron's popular "Would you Join a Toothpaste Community?" post, along with follow-up posts where Aaron tackled a few challenging products from a community-building perspective. I also sounded off on how the brand is your bridge to community strategy.

But should you build a community? It really comes down to two phases of evaluation. First, is what you're selling community-worthy? I call this "genetic fit," because if you're selling toothpaste, that isn't going to change overnight, along with other things like your marketplace positioning and branding. Some types of products and services just generate more natural community activity than others.

Second, is your marketing organization and larger company culture in a place where you could pull it off? I call this "cultural fit." This actually can, and does, change over time - more easily than the genetics do.

But let's talk about genetic fit, since it's the one that you really can't change. And donuts.

I love donuts, but I eat them pretty infrequently - they are something I treat myself to every now and then. Despite my love for the occasional Boston Kreme, I certainly wouldn't name donuts as one of my passions in life.

So would I (or anyone) join a donut community? Well, maybe for a little while. It would be diverting to go and rate my favorite donuts, debate the virtues of filled donuts over glazed with others, and discover the origin of the bear claw. But would I return again and again over time? Probably not.

Ok, now let's talk about Dunkin' Donuts. This changes the discussion a little bit, as I'm now seeing donuts through the prism of a brand. I can visualize Fred the baker from the old commercials getting up and saying "time to make the donuts." I'm thinking about how good their coffee has always been, along with pretty tasty donuts. Finally, I'm recalling some of the funnier ad spots I've seen lately featuring their latest brand campaign "America runs on Dunkin." Would I join a Dunkin Donuts community? Hmm, a little more interesting than just plain donuts, but again probably not a place where I would return after the initial visit.

But let's think a bit more about the Dunkin Donuts' brand. How does Dunkin Donuts get you interested and get you in their store? How do they connect with your needs? A good place is always to start with the tagline - "America runs on Dunkin." Are they really selling donuts and coffee here, or something more important? Something more basic?

It sounds to me like Dunkin' Donuts is selling energy. Something that powers you. In a literal sense, the sugar and caffeine is a boost, but energy is something people struggle with - managing your energy level throughout the day is tough. The popularity of energy drinks is escalating rapidly because people are looking for pep. The concept of energy could extend beyond nutrition and the daily grind, too. What about Motivation? Long-term Achievement? Entrepreneurship? These are all principles of energy . . . and things that also fuel the American perspective, a nice tie-in with the tagline. Ok, so what about a community focused on your energy, powered by Dunkin?

Suddenly a fairly compelling community idea is coming into focus that is relevant to the Dunkin' Donuts brand, and is about something that people care about on a day-to-day basis. I would join this community, and I would come back. Perhaps I would learn and chat about everything from how to avoid the post-lunch doldrums, to the physiological effects of energy drinks, to how to write a business plan for that idea I've been trying to get off of the ground. Immediately and over time I would see Dunkin' Donuts as a bit more than just a brand that makes great donuts, but as the brand that "powers me." In the end this is what the 30-second spot is trying to do, but this does it in a much more powerful and lasting way.

My involvement in this type of community would significantly affect my Dunkin brand loyalty, and now because the brand isn't just about donuts to me anymore perhaps they could sell me other things. More products from their expanding home coffee line (perhaps this is the entire initial thrust). An organic energy drink. Baking mixes and cookbooks.

This all started with a donut. And all great brands and businesses start with something that simple. The evolution of your genetics might happen faster and in different directions than you think, dictated by relevant opportunity. Part of understanding what your online community might look like is thinking about what your company might look like, someday.

Loyalty Marketing Meets Social Marketing Podcast: Episode 1

Aaron Strout — Wed, 1 Apr 2009 13:18:27 CDT

This officially kicks off a bi-weekly series of podcasts that I'm doing with author and loyalty marketing expert, Jill Griffin. During these brief 5-8 minute podcasts, we'll be talking about the intersection of loyalty and social marketing and how focusing on both disciplines can help large and small companies deepen their relationships with new and existing customers.

In this episode, Jill answers the specific question, "How and why the Internet has unleashed intense buying scrutiny unlike anything most firms have ever experienced. And more importantly, is there anything the world of “social” can do to help?"

http://powered-library.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/_podcasts/SXSW2009/Powered_griffin_1_vFinal.mp3

Right-mouse click to download

Be sure to check out Jill's latest book (as referenced in the podcast) titled, Taming the Search-and-Switch Customer: Earning Customer Loyalty in a Compulsion-to-Compare World. You can also follow Jill on Twitter.

Loyalty Podcast Series

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: C.C. Chapman

Aaron Strout — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:53:34 CDT

Next up in the #CommunityPowered podcast series featuring Susan Bratton of DishyMix, is co-founder and managing partner of The Advanced Guard, C.C. Chapman. In addition to his full-time gig, C.C. regularly shares his knowledge about new media and technology on his on his Managing the Gray site (posts and podcasts). He's also an avid photographer and can be found regularly with his Canon strapped around his neck (some of his work can be seen here on Flickr).

During his conversation with Susan, C.C. says that the "bright shiny object" he's most excited about right

now is RFID technology incorporated in things like POKEN (he demonstrated his for Susan). CC also shares some tips from his latest Facebook Fanpage white paper (think blueprint for brands to create a social presence on this uber-social network) including, the importance of creating engaging content for their fans.

In addition to reading CC on Managing the Gray, you can follow CC on Twitter at @CC_Chapman

http://powered-library.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/_podcasts/SXSW2009/CCChapman.mp3

Right-mouse click to download.

NEXT UP: Rohit Bhargava, SVP, Strategy & Marketing at Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence

Co-founder and Principal of The Advanced Guard, CC Chapman

Poken - powered by RFID technology

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Chris Brogan

Aaron Strout — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 21:21:46 CDT

CommunityPowered podcast series featuring Susan Bratton of DishyMix, is Chris Brogan who is not only a good friend but number two on AdAge's list of top 50 Marketing bloggers (watch out Seth Godin). In his spare time, Chris is the President of New Marketing Labs, co-founder of Podcamp and spiritual lead of the Inbound Marketing Summit events.

Listen in as Chris weighs in about location-based platforms like Brightkite that are finally starting to deliver value beyond the "Starbucks coupon" offered on your cell phone as you walk by a local franchise [love his example of how movie makers can use this]. Chris also reinforces the importance of "cafe-shaped conversations" or the humanizing of certain brands by allowing brand ambassadors to have real conversations with customers in places like Twitter. When it comes to community building, Chris recommends things like: listening first, being helpful and not being afraid to make mistakes.

In addition to reading ChrisBrogan.com, you can follow Chris on Twitter at @ChrisBrogan.

http://powered-library.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/_podcasts/SXSW2009/ChrisBrogan.mp3

Right-mouse click to download.

NEXT UP: CC Chapman, Principal and founder of The Advanced Guard.

Uber Blogger and President of New Marketing Labs (Photo Credit: Jim Storer)

Social Marketing: This ROI is Too Good to be True (slides)

Aaron Strout — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 12:25:31 CDT

Yesterday, Powered hosted a webcast titled "Social Marketing: This ROI is Too Good to be True (archive coming shortly). The presentation consisted of 20+ slides focused on:

Branded Online Community Measurement - Kathy Warren, Powered

Results of the 2008 ROI Benchmark Study for Social Marketing Programs - Bill Harvey, TRA

Social Media: Why it Makes Sense and How I Prove it to Myself
- Brian Halligan, Hubspot

[slideshare id=1203585&doc=q109roiwebinarfinalpresentation-090326112754-phpapp01]

Archive of this webcast will be up soon (I'll link to it from this post).

Cross-posted on Blog.Stroutmeister.com

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Dave Taylor

Aaron Strout — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:55:51 CDT

Next up in the #CommunityPowered podcast series featuring Susan Bratton of DishyMix, is theDave Taylor, the brains and brawn behind AskDaveTaylor.com and Filmbuzz.org. Not only is Dave a serial entrepreneur (see his bio to learn about the dozens of startups he's been a part of) but also an author and big idea guy.

Listen in as Dave gives advice on how brands should think about engaging with their customers in the "communisphere." Dave also provides great insights on the importance of engaging with social (think Twitter and blog comments) as part of a company's marketing efforts. Trust me when I tell you that Dave is worth the listen.

In addition to reading the AskDaveTaylor.com, you can follow Dave on Twitter at @DaveTaylor or at @filmbuzz .

http://powered-library.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/_podcasts/SXSW2009/DaveTaylor.mp3

Right-mouse click to download.

NEXT UP: Chris Brogan, CEO of New Marketing Labs and blogger at ChrisBrogan.com.

Photo Credit: FunTimesGuide.com

Social Marketing ROI Report (Video)

Aaron Strout — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:32:26 CDT

Today is a red letter day for Powered. We're announcing the release of our annual Social Marketing ROI report. To kick it off, we're holding a webcast (there will be an archived version) with Bill Harvey of TRA, Brian Halligan of HubSpot and Kathy Warren of Powered (that's us). See the video below for more details.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmkBkiXxJ4w]

Sign up for the webcast and you'll get the report for free.

Facebook Connect: Your Invitation to the Party

Doug Wick — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:24:57 CDT

Have you ever been so steeped in something that you see it everywhere you look? Standing in the middle of the Powered-sponsored Mashable party during South by Southwest Interactive, beer in hand and exploring the various rooms of the Six night club, I started to think about Facebook Connect. Yeah, this is how bad it's gotten.

Facebook is a party. It's a huge place where you can share content and news, play games together, engaging in many of the activities you do with friends in the offline world. The problem is that the party, up until now, has really just been for Facebook itself and its users. If you were any entity with commercial interests, the best you could do is give Facebook a banner to hang somewhere for you. This would be like if Powered sponsored the Mashable party but we could only hang a banner inside the bar. How effective would that be for our marketing, over the din of the music and rumble of conversation?

With Facebook Pages, now you can attend the party. You're just like I was at Six, a sponsor floating around the crowd, having a few conversations and talking about Powered. This is much more effective marketing-wise than a few banners (at least I think so!), but still I'm just one guy and although there were a few other Powered employees our impact at the event was still limited. This was compounded by the reality that people didn't always want to talk about Powered, a fact that is even truer in the personal-conversation world of Facebook - which is about as far away from an industry party as you can get.

Facebook Connect is really where things get interesting. It allows you, as a brand, to have your own room in the bar. By that I mean you can build your own communal experience and attach it in a meaningful way to the Facebook experience. People can walk into your room, find the people they already know, and message people outside the room about the cool things going on there.

Word-of-Mouth Traffic Flow

This doesn't absolve brands from creating an engaging experience in their own community environment. You still need to populate your room with interesting content, people, and programming. But it really helps with one of the main problems branded communities have, which is getting people in the door. There is only so much you can do with email marketing, media promotion, and search. Here, Facebook runs the party, and you just hook into their flow. You are instantly rewarded for creating engagement, versus having to create engagement and then work hard to get the word out.

The Power of Context

The reasons why you would build your own room (Facebook Connect) versus just attend the party (Pages) are similar in both the online and offline world. With Connect, you gain context. Everything that happens in your community is in the world of your brand, versus the world of Facebook. Context is extremely powerful in the user's mind, and it has a lot to do with building people's brand affinity, advocacy, and loyalty. Does reading this blog entry on the Powered blog make you attribute the value to Powered, or to me (Wick, Doug Wick)? How would that change if you read it on my personal blog? If you walked into the Powered Room at the Mashable Party, how would this be different than just meeting someone from Powered?

Learning Ability

Also, with Connect comes data. Your ability to listen and learn as an organization is significantly enhanced when the technical handoff between Facebook servers and yours happens. What if the Mashable party went on indefinitely (I felt like it might at some points) and you never adapted your room to be more reflective of partier's preferences or need - or even just freshened things up a bit? If you don't have the data, you won't have the visibility into individual behavior on a quantitative or qualitative level. You won't learn or adapt as effectively, and you'll start sounding like that boorish guy who's always at the party saying the same things. Yes, we've heard that story about how you went bungee-jumping in Cancun eight times, thank you very much.

So now that you've been invited to the party, will you get in there? Or will you sit at home and let other brands have all the fun?

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Henry Jenkins

Aaron Strout — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:27:50 CDT

Next up in the #CommunityPowered podcast series featuring Susan Bratton of DishyMix, is the Director of MIT's Collective Media Studies Research Lab, Henry Jenkins. It's probably no surprise that Henry is a busy guy. In addition to teaching and running the CMSR Lab at MIT, he is also one of the most productive and influential film and media scholars in the world. His books and articles have been major contributions to existing fields of inquiry such as film history, political communications and children's studies. Henry is also the co-editor of the Media in Transition series at the MIT Press and is a column contributor on media and technology for Technology Review Online and Computer Games Magazine.

Listen in as Jenkins gives his advice on "courting" community vs. "creating" community. Jenkins says that this starts by studying and connecting to existing communities vs. necessarily always building from scratch (hint: he's bullish on a Krispy Creme enthusiast). Henry also thinks that looking for folks with common interests by using existing tools like podcasts and Google make sense. Simultaneously, you should be thinking about what you have to offer consumers. Oh yeah, he's also a big fan of blogging.

In addition to reading the Online Marketing Blog, you can follow Henry on Twitter at @HenryJenkins.

http://powered-library.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/_podcasts/SXSW2009/HenryJenkins.mp3

Right-mouse click to download.

NEXT UP: Dave Taylor, the brains and braun behind AskDaveTaylor.com and Filmbuzz.org.

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Lee Odden

Aaron Strout — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 12:24:54 CDT

Next up in the #CommunityPowered podcast series featuring Susan Bratton of DishyMix, is the CEO and founder of TopRank Online Marketing. Lee also publishes Online Marketing Blog which is recognized as one of the top marketing blogs by Advertising Age and ranks in the Technorati top 50 blogs (by fans) out of 133 million.

Listen in as Lee talks about the importance of companies starting with a strategy, avoiding a "siloed" approach and focusing on measurement and objectives when getting started with social. Lee also talks why he's bullish on "listening" and why he's excited about the integration of social and web anyltics (think WebTrends meets Radian6). As a side note, Lee further endeared himself to me by sharing his passion for content and how it can drive deep customer engagement - well done!

In addition to reading the Online Marketing Blog, you can follow Lee on Twitter at @LeeOdden.

http://powered-library.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/_podcasts/SXSW2009/LeeOdden.mp3

Right-mouse click to download.

NEXT UP: Henry Jenkins, Director of MIT's Collective Media Studies Research Lab.

Photo Credit: Susan Bratton

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Angela Benton

Aaron Strout — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 17:47:50 CDT

Next up in the #CommunityPowered podcast series featuring Susan Bratton of DishyMix, is founder an publisher of Blackweb20.com, Angela Benton. Prior to founding Blackweb20.com, Angela has had consultative relationships with leading companies such as UPS, Bizjournals.com, Realestate.com, and Lendingtree.com.

Listen in as Angela talks about companies that are doing a good job in the world of "social" like H&R Block, Kodak and even personal brands like Diddy. Angela is also a big believer in the value of embracing those beyond just the influencers.

http://powered-library.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/_podcasts/SXSW2009/AngelaBenton.mp3

Right-mouse click to download.

NEXT UP: Lee Odden, CEO of Online Marketing Blog.

Angela Benton (left) and Susan Bratton (right)

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Guy Kawasaki

Aaron Strout — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:12:05 CDT

Next up in the #CommunityPowered podcast series featuring Susan Bratton of DishyMix, is Alltop co-founder, Guy Kawasaki. Unless you're movie star, Jackie Chan, you've most likely heard of Guy. One of Apple's "big deal" marketers back in the mid-80's, Guy is also an author, serial entrepreneur and general all around funny guy.

Listen in as Guy talks about his love for Zappos' CEO, Tony Hsieh's excellent Twitter skills, his regular tormenting of Comcast (out of respect of course) and why big brands shouldn't sweat it when their followers tweet them negative comments. By the way, for anyone wondering what Guy's "news" was, he announced my.alltop.com this weekend at SXSW. Details are here.

http://powered-library.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/_podcasts/SXSW2009/GuyKawasaki.mp3

Right-mouse click to download.

NEXT UP: Blackweb20.com founder and publisher, Angela Benton.

Photo Credit: Jim Storer

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Patricia Martin

Aaron Strout — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:07:39 CDT

We could not have picked a better person to kick off our #CommunityPowered podcast series, live from uber geek conference, SXSW. Patricia is not only an absolute joy to be around (she was kind enough to meet with us at 9:00 AM on Sunday morning), she's also a very sharp cookie.

By way of background, Patricia Martin is CEO and founder of LitLamp Communications and specializes in tuning into "social tremors" before they become trends to help clients win hearts and change minds. You may also know Patricia for her top-selling book, Renaissance Generation: The Rise of the Cultural Consumer and What it Means to Your Business, In her spare time, she also writes for Ad Age and the Huffington Post [hint, she's kind of a big deal].

Listen in as Susan Bratton of Dishy Mix and Patricia talk about what companies need to do to succeed in the world of online communities, Tony Hsieh of Zappos and his focus on "creating hapiness" and which areas of social media are turning her on.

http://powered-library.s3.amazonaws.com/shared/_podcasts/SXSW2009/PatriciaMartin.mp3

Right-mouse click to download.

NEXT UP: Guy Kawasaki of Alltop.com

Photo Credit: Jim Storer

South by Southwest: Right Around Our Corner

Doug Wick — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:00:47 CDT

Austin is buzzing right now as people arrive for the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference, and we at Powered are pumped to bring our own flavor to the event!

We have several things going on - including a sponsorship of Monday night's Mashable + Blurb SxSW Bash '09, and we'll be sporting our custom tees that sing the praises of both dogfood and content (pictured here, look for us!).

The Engaged Consumer blog will be rolling out its own red carpet. We'll be seizing the opportunity, with so many social media mavens present right around our corner, to gather their collective brain share and hear their thoughts on social networking and brand-managed online communities.

Coming off the success of our own Aaron Strout's “45 in 45” blog series which features interviews with 45 social media luminaries in the 45 days leading up to SxSW - Susan Bratton, founder and CEO of Personal Life Media and Powered advisory board member, will be conducting interviews with social media thought leaders including: Patricia Martin, Guy Kawasaki, Angela Benton, Chris Brogan, Peter Fasano, and Cathy Brooks.

The interview podcasts will be held throughout the conference and will be available right here on The Engaged Consumer beginning at 12:00 p.m. CST on Monday, March 16.

Please come back throughout the week to pick those up and to enjoy our ongoing SXSW coverage. Welcome to Austin, Everyone!

It Takes a (Twitter) Village

Natanya Anderson — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:04:14 CDT

Yesterday when I picked my daughter up from school – she's in fourth grade – she almost sheepishly showed me a necklace I knew I'd never seen before. When I asked where she got it she said "It was on my desk", but I knew that wasn't the whole story. After a little carefully poking and prodding, I ferreted out that it was from a boy whose identity she was pretty sure about even though he didn't actually reveal himself as the giver. I let things go there with her, not wanting to push too far or seem too panicked/interested/overbearing/crazy. Although I was able to keep it together with her on the outside, my mind was racing a million miles an hour asking approximately as many questions. I couldn't immediately reach out to one of my girlfriends to start soliciting advice because I was with my daughter for the evening and I didn't want to kill her buzz with my own internal machinations. Even so, I recognized that how I approached this situation would in many ways set the tone for future situations where there is much more at stake than just a necklace.

One of the few parenting promises I've made myself is to do whatever it takes to be a mom she can talk to about anything – a trusted advisor if you will. I know I won't be her only resource but I want to be sure I'm one of them, and to do that I have to put her needs first and figure out how to weave in my messages in a way that is helpful and useful to her, without preaching or thinking solely about what I want. (This approach is integral to success in content marketing and branded community initiatives, so at least I have some experience to draw on.) Knowing I had a real opportunity but still silently thrashing, I posted the following to Twitter:

"My daughter got her first piece of jewelry from a boy. I will not freak out, I will not freak out..."

Voicing my inner turmoil, even in less than 140 characters, brought me calm and focus. It also brought me something unexpected – the aid of my personal Twitter Village.

The Virtual Village

The first person to respond to me was IncSlinger, a fellow social marketing practitioner whom I've never met in person but have developed a relationship with on Twitter and respect very much as a peer. He commiserated with me and let me know it would be worse when she's older (great). Even with the threat of worse things to come in a few years, my first set of Twitter exchanges with IncSlinger brought me clarity: I wasn't the first parent to go through this, nor would I be the last. This is part of what I signed up for and I had no choice but to navigate it. My choice instead was how to navigate it. For the next few hours comments came in on both Twitter and Facebook that ranged from snarky (which helped me keep my perspective and laugh at myself) to empathetic to exceptionally useful. My favorite "don't take yourself too seriously" response was from a co-worker, Palpatim:

"Cover all your bases. Our house rule (2 girls) is: "Boys are trouble. Girls are worse." (Parenting by bumper sticker since '92.)"

While absolutely hysterical, it was also wise. And the piece of advice I need to tattoo on the inside of my brain for all things parenting was from a dear friend who I don't talk to as much as I should to whom I can always connect when needed on Facebook:

"Just remember that honesty is gold, and make no decisions based on fear."

I'm happy to report that I was able to use the (relatively) innocent necklace to start a dialog with my daughter that I think will be the first of many good ones. And although the navigation and words were all mine, I was supported along the way by a network of friends, colleagues, and peers who are parents just like me. I'm crystal clear now that my daughter will be raised by a virtual village and she'll be a better person for it.

A Lesson for Brands: Become a Contributing Member of the Village

I'm sure you're thinking "Gee, this is a nice story and all, but what does it have to do with engaging consumers and brands' efforts to connect with their customers?" More than you might think

Every second of everyday people are using Twitter to support their lifestyle. Whether they are soliciting input for a purchase they are making, looking for help with a new product they just bought, showing off creative projects, planning a vacation, enjoying a meal, or one of countless other activities, they are sharing their experiences online and using their ever-growing Twitter village as a resource. Brands have a significant opportunity to step up and be a useful, contributing member of the virtual village. This won't come from broadcasting marketing messages, press releases, or new product announcements. Instead, it will come from true interactions with consumers that provide useful, helpful information. If someone from a brand had pointed me at an article or other good resource to inform my thinking yesterday they would have established a relationship with me that no commercial or e-mail marketing campaign could ever create.

While the tools for sifting through the myriad lifestyle discussions on Twitter today are rudimentary at best, they will get better and brands should take advantage of them to listen closely to conversations and then contribute to those discussions with the same goal as my village did yesterday: to make someone's life a better place. Support your villagers with their best interests in mind and the rewards will come back to you in spades.

Need help getting started as a productive member of the virtual village? Kyle Flaherty of BreakingPoint put together a most useful guide that every business on Twitter should read and review. And more than anything trust your human nature to be your guide. If you join a conversation on behalf of your brand, question your motivations each step of the way and ask yourself "Am I being of service to the greater good of the village?" As long as you can always say "Yes," you'll also be in service to the greater good of your brand. When the village is smarter and happier, everyone, including the village businesses, benefits.

My “Last Supper” list for SXSWi - a.k.a. Where to Eat in the ATX

Kathy Warren — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 20:44:42 CDT

UPDATE: Here's a map

I don’t cook. Not even a little. However, I made it through college waitressing and bartending in fine dining restaurants in Austin and have lived in the capitol city for 17 years. I also interned at the Texas Restaurant Association and was once published in Restaurants & Institutions magazine thinking I may end up a food critic. I love eating out.

More than simply eating out, I love finding the amazing treasures that only locals know about. I want finds that are slap-your-mother good. Meals that are instantly added to my “last supper” list. (see Death Row incarceration, etc) When I travel, I skip the concierge, find a bar and seek counsel from the waitstaff and bartenders on where to go. Waiters pride themselves on knowing ‘the best’ while concierges are paid by local restaurants for referrals.

So while I have no business cooking a meal for anyone, I can certainly share my favorite picks and feel confident that you’ll dig at least some of them. Assuming that most of you will be in town for up to five days, I’ve compiled my top five breakfast, lunch, and dinner meals to cover your stay. And as a bonus, I’ve also included my top five happy hour spots. My approach is based 100% on my personal preferences, so check out Yelp for additional context or validation against your preferences. Enjoy and please leave comments if you try (or also recommend) any of these recommendations…..even if you hated it. Salud!

Top 5 breakfast or brunch meals:

1) Maria’s Taco Express – potato & egg, chorizo & egg breakfast tacos

2) South Congress Café – classic eggs Benedict with smoked gouda potato pancake and horseradish cream - or - wild boar pozole

3) El Sol y La Luna – Machacado breakfast plate – or – machacado breakfast tacos on homemade corn tortillas (machacado is scrambled eggs with dried beef, onions, tomato and jalapeno)

4) Chez Zee – Maryland crab cakes Benedict

5) Kerbey Lane – one word, pancakes (go to the original location on Kerbey Ln.)

Honorable mention: the entire Sunday brunch table(s) at Fonda San Miguel – haven’t been in while so couldn’t solidly recommend, but I remember it felt like death by mole.

Top 5 lunch meals (interchangeable with dinner if you want super casual):

1) Vivo – beef fajita tacos ON CORN tortillas – or – chile enchiladas - or - puffy tacos

2) Guero’s – thinly sliced beef tacos on corn tortillas with charro beans and rice – or – tacos al pastor (pork with pineapple pico de gallo) - or - chicken al carbon tacos on corn. BEST margarita's evah.

3) Enoteca – Fettucini al fungi, rigatoni with spicy Italian sausage, or penne puttanesca

4) Mekong River – B6 (vermicelli with chargrilled pork & egg rolls) - note, service is not the main attraction here

5) Little Mexico – Jerry Jeff Walker dip, carne guisada plate (warning, this is not a traditional tex mex joint, don’t go for fajitas or enchiladas here) - 2304 s. 1st Street

Top 5 dinner meals (chi-chi picks relative to the lunches):

1) Uchi – their entire menu of sushi and/or specials. Make a reservation now. Seriously. Now.

2) La Traviata – endive & prosciutto salad, mussels, rigatoni with lamb meatballs, fettuccini con fungi, osobucco (who am I kidding, everything is good here).

3) Wink – their entire menu, local farm-fresh produce meets Austin fine dining

4) Sullivan’s – only for the steamed Alaskan King Crab Legs & creamed spinach – eat at the bar if not too crowded

5) Ranch 616 – the buttermilk biscuits & kitschy cowboy-chic attitude alone are worth it, but I’ve had great luck with their mixed grills especially when quail is available

And drum roll please…..Top 5 Happy Hour Joints:

1) Belmont – great patio & people watching

2) Cedar Door – Mexican martini’s and great patio

3) Rain – definitely a gay bar, without a doubt the best patio in Austin, and did I mention the dancing?

4) J Black’s – can get a little scene-ish, but really great snacks and people watching

5) Gingerman/Woodrow’s – great beer selections (note: Gingerman is moving, so may or may not be open - call first)

Wait - what about barbecue???

It occurred to me that I didn’t include any barbecue picks on these lists – if you have a craving for barbecue, you’re in the right spot. Hit the Salt Lick (BYOB) for a total Texas barbecue experience – especially with a large group. Honestly, though, my top pick strictly based on the food is Rudy’s. Warning: Rudy’s is also a gas station. They offer the best barbecue chicken I’ve ever eaten.

Social Technology from the Mean Streets

Doug Wick — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 17:42:21 CDT

The web, from a technical perspective, is orders of magnitude more complex than it used to be. What used to amount to the creation and layout of graphic files and text on a page has blossomed into a network of websites that look more like applications than publications.

Most of this complexity is due to the fact that interactive has gotten more, well, interactive - with users putting as much content into websites as they are getting out. (this is of course referred to in many circles as "Web 2.0" <shudder>)

In the area of marketing this has introduced the need for technology investment. When the interactive agency of the Year 2000 built a website, they essentially started from the ground up or with a very basic content management system every time.

In short order, website marketing evolved into CRM and loyalty/relationship marketing - where users were registering, taking polls/surveys, receiving automated emails, and being served custom content based on their preferences. It was at this stage that it became more efficient to reuse technology, as many relationship marketing programs had these common elements that supported interaction between the user and the brand.

As a result, many agencies created platforms, some investing so much in their platforms that they found they could specialize in executing loyalty/relationship marketing strategies specifically - companies like Brierley and LoyaltyLab.

Social technology continues this evolution in the same direction, from content management to relationship management to now, social management. Not only are even deeper user-to-brand interactions supported, but user-to-user interactions as well. And the technology is more complex than ever.

In fact, the benefits of platform development have escalated to the point where now the platforms are businesses in and of themselves, no longer requiring an agency shell to remain viable. Companies like Jive, Mzinga, Lithium, and many, many others dot the interactive landscape.

The issue is that not all community technologies followed the marketing evolutionary path - many didn't cut their teeth on the Mean Streets of Web 1.0. In this case, when technology comes from the "Social Suburbs," it often lacks many web marketing fundamentals - things like content management, email campaign management, robust analytics, a contextual product/call-to-action catalog and ad placement engine, and contextual site search.

Don't get me wrong, marketing is certainly not the only goal for building an online community. With objectives that are more networking-oriented, the technology doesn't need to be a hardened marketing platform. Social point solutions and standalone social tools (many of them free) work well to build community for non-marketing purposes - intranets, niche enthusiast groups, etc. This is why Ning, the ad-supported social networking platform, is popular and works from a business perspective. It didn't require the investment that a marketing platform would require.

It also contributes to the reason why companies that separate the platform business from an agency shell are profitable endeavors - they can sell to the non-marketing side of their propective customers.

But in order to build community for the purpose of marketing, the new-school social widgets must be integrated and layered over an old-school enterprise-class content and relationship management foundation. It must add new types of interactions on to the legacy built by earlier versions of interactive marketing, and the platform must still be tightly integrated with the functions of an agency (strategy/creative/measurement), either through a partnership or one-stop shop approach.

The key, as with any technological decision, is simply to pick the right tool for the job, not to buy a hammer and treat every community like a nail. And from a corporate perspective, it's not to overspend for networking or underspend for marketing.

Give Before You Get [My Stump Speech]

Aaron Strout — Mon, 2 Mar 2009 18:13:48 CST

For what it's worth, the original title of this post was originally "Are You Smarter than a Drug Dealer?" It came out of a conversation I was having with our CEO about the fact that the business model we encourage our clients to adopt – namely, "give before you get" – in many ways is no different than that of a drug dealer's. Well, except that in our case, we are asking our clients to give value away for free to get their customers "hooked," vs. causing a lifetime of pain and addiction. But you get the point.

Up until the writing of this post, I toyed with keeping the original title but realized that as much as it may have piqued people's interest, it ultimately sent the wrong message. So instead, I went with the title of my latest stump speech, "Give Before You Get." As I mentioned above, it's something that we talk about incessantly with our customers and prospective customers. Having worked at a large corporate for nearly 10 years (Fidelity Investments), I understand how counterintuitive this feels for many companies. But what I can tell you is that it works!

A recent Seth Godin blog post that my colleague, Doni Wilson, seems to encapsulate the essence of "Give Before You Get." Amazingly, this is such a short post, I'm going to quote the entire thing here with attribution and a link back to Seth's The Panhandler's Secret. Hope Seth doesn't mind:

When there were old-school parking meters in New York, quarters were precious.

One day, I'm walking down the street and a guy comes up to me and says, "Do you have a dollar for four quarters?" He held out his hand with four quarters in it.

When there were old-school parking meters in New York, quarters were precious.

One day, I'm walking down the street and a guy comes up to me and says, "Do you have a dollar for four quarters?" He held out his hand with four quarters in it.

Curious, I engaged with him. I took out a dollar bill and took the four quarters.

Then he turned to me and said, "can you spare a quarter?"

What a fascinating interaction.

First, he engaged me. A fair trade, one that perhaps even benefited me, not him.

Now, we have a relationship. Now, he knows I have a quarter (in my hand, even). So his next request is much more difficult to turn down. If he had just walked up to me and said, "can you spare a quarter," he would have been invisible.

Too often, we close the sale before we even open it.

Interact first, sell second.

Not only have I seen this approach benefit me time and time again in the form of leads, awareness, job candidates and free research but it's also had a tangible ROI for a number of our clients. One client in particular, Sony, cited some amazing results in a recent case study they did with our friends over at MarketingProfs.

Engaging more consumers, growing member registration, and increasing return visits to the site: Year over year, in 2008 Backstage 101 experienced a 388% increase in the number of user engagements, 34% growth in member registration, a 31% increase in unique visits, and 179% more repeat visits.

Retaining high-value global segments: Return visits accounted for 20% of all traffic in the first half of 2008, compared with 10% for the first half of 2007. And 15% of users who registered on the site prior to 2008 remain active. Currently, 90% of users match Sony's target user profile, and 53% are considered "innovation enthusiasts." In addition, 79% of users say they plan to purchase a consumer electronics product within six months.

Increasing consumer loyalty and advocacy: The program has a 90% usersatisfaction rating, and 78% of users report that they are more likely to purchase a Sony product as a result of Backstage 101. Sony's NPS (Net Promoter Score) for 2008 came in at 44%, with 59% of users classified as "promoters" who are likely to recommend Sony electronics to a family member, friend, or coworker.

Providing increased value to the Sony Electronics business: The number of users claiming to have purchased a Sony Electronics product grew to 36% for the first half of 2008 (prior to the launch of Digital Darkroom and Frontline Community), compared with 20% for the first half of 2007, and Center reports that sales on the Sony Web site "continue to increase month over month." In addition, survey completion is up 12% this year, providing Sony with valuable additional consumer insight. And retail syndication along with the addition of Backstage 101 to the company's CyberScholar site are allowing Sony to better support its retail relationships.

For the full version of the case study, you can grab it on MarketingProf's site or download it from Powered.

So what are you waiting for? Start giving and then maybe your customers will be willing to share a "quarter" back with you. Or maybe more!

Sales Troubles? No Comment(s)

Aaron Strout — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 09:47:39 CST

It probably won't surprise you that personal advice is the number one reason people buy products from one company vs. another. It's only natural to ask a co-worker, friend or family member's advice before purchasing a new product or service. What I'll bet you didn't know was that online comments were the second most influential source for driving purchase consideration*. And not just by a little bit.

As you can see from the chart below, 50% of the 3,036 people surveyed selected "influence me strongly" or "influence me very strongly" as their choice when it comes to online comments. That compares to 70% of people that cite "personal advice" as their top motivator and 40% who look to "articles posted by newspapers/magazines" for advice.

So what if you don't have comments on your site? What if you don't have any type of community or social presence? Unless you can get people telling their friends and family about you (something online communities/social media is also good at) you have to hope that a magazine or newspaper will write about you or the editor of a third party website favorably reviews you. Not surprisingly, "advice from salesperson" comes in at a whopping 20% in the top 2 box.

In a society where people are becoming less and less trusting of what big companies are telling them, don't you think it makes sense to create a place where your customers can tell other customers what they think about you? Yes, they may something bad but guess what, if you don't make good products or your customer service stinks, they are already saying this about you. Don't believe me? Try doing a Google search on your company's name plus the word "sucks" in your query.

Looking for an example of a company that is doing this well? Take a look at Sony's Backstage 101 community. Their engagement, loyalty and willingness to recommend numbers are off the charts. Yes, Sony is a customer of ours but don't take our word for it. Check out the case study that our friends at MarketingProfs put together.[the report requires premium membership - if you need a copy, e-mail me at stroutmeister AT gmail DOT com].

*Online Communities and Their Impact on Business: Ignore at Your Peril - Rubicon Consulting, October 2008 (thanks to our friends at SHIFT for forwarding this report over to us).

Influence of various sources of information on purchasing - Rubicon Consulting 10/2008

Engagement is a Means to an End - Measure the End, Not Just the Means.

Kathy Warren — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:12:00 CST

Many marketers, PR reps, pundits and analysts are seeking proof that social media has a demonstrable impact on business. A Google search of "how to measure engagement" yields over 12M results with claims of "how to REALLY measure engagement," and proposed formulas that are smart but insanely complex and still don't answer the question regarding business impact.

The truth is that companies are just beginning to tap into the possibilities of leveraging social behavior into the marketing mix and naturally, it's begun very tactically. After all, brand ambassadors are NOT comfortable with two-way conversations and if consumers weren't forcing it via non-branded social networking channels, we'd still only be talking about reach, frequency & CTR.

What I'm referring to as 'tactical' beginnings for social inside the enterprise include but are not limited to - support forums, e-commerce ratings & reviews, the corporate blog, a brand's Facebook page, a brand's twitter stream, etc.

Next-gen branded social initiatives are highly strategic (and thereby measurable). They engage consumers on their terms with strong value propositions that complement the brand. They do not broadcast a 30-second 'brand message' - they create an attentive audience for relevant information from the brand. In this strategic context, engagement is a means to an end, not the end itself.

And like most online marketing initiatives hosted by brands - the objectives are or should be consistent - to acquire new customers, maximize revenue, inspire loyalty, enlist advocates and retain customers. Strategic marketing initiatives are designed to influence these metrics and have associated measurement plans to benchmark and trend impact over time. These measurement plans must include both web analytics and primary research because the desired outcomes include brand perceptions.

As long as we are focused on the 'media' in social media - measurement will seem elusive at best and have lackluster impact at worst. It's like trying to measure the impact on my company's revenue because they bought me a phone.

The Engaged Consumer Blog

Quick-n-dirty Podcast Recap 33: Reunited Edition!

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What Marketers Want

Is Your Content Good Enough For an Information Exchange? Creating Registration-Worthy Content

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Notes from the Desert: 5 Key Take Aways from ANA's Masters of Marketing

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From Media Pro to Hydroelectric Engineer

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The Complete Album

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Audio from 1st Social Marketing Help Desk Webinar

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Our New Webinar Series: The Social Marketing Help Desk

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Engagement vs. Serendipity

Double Shot of Weekly Social Marketing Links: June 30, 2009

Does Your Social Media Portfolio Include a 401k?

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Double Shot of Weekly Social Marketing Links: June 10, 2009

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Inbound Marketing Summit Lessons: Listen, Be Authentic and Measure!

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Loyalty Marketing Meets Social Marketing Podcast: Episode 2

May 19: Weekly Content/Social Marketing Links

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Live from Community 2.0: How to Be a Kick Ass Community Manager

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April 29: Weekly Content/Social Marketing Links

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Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Tara Hunt

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Cathy Brooks

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Dave Evans

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Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Peter Fasano

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Rohit Bhargava

I Would Join a Donut Community

Loyalty Marketing Meets Social Marketing Podcast: Episode 1

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: C.C. Chapman

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Chris Brogan

Social Marketing: This ROI is Too Good to be True (slides)

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Dave Taylor

Social Marketing ROI Report (Video)

Facebook Connect: Your Invitation to the Party

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Henry Jenkins

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Lee Odden

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Angela Benton

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Guy Kawasaki

Community Powered, Live from SXSW: Patricia Martin

South by Southwest: Right Around Our Corner

It Takes a (Twitter) Village

My “Last Supper” list for SXSWi - a.k.a. Where to Eat in the ATX

Social Technology from the Mean Streets

Give Before You Get [My Stump Speech]

Sales Troubles? No Comment(s)

Engagement is a Means to an End - Measure the End, Not Just the Means.