The Engaged Consumer

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

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.

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.

Have you ever been on a date with someone who, from the very beginning, seemed to be the perfect match for you? You have so much in common. You both know the words to every U2 song. You both have been to Prague. You both think that any scene involving Chevy Chase in Caddyshack is pure cinematic bliss.

But something's just missing. No matter how much you try to create it, the chemistry's just not there. Though you both really want it to work, you eventually part ways. For years afterward you will both reflect on that time and say that "it just wasn't meant to be."

This is how I feel about most people getting paid by advertisers to write blog posts. This has been a hot topic in the blogosphere lately because of the FTC's announcement of rules governing blogging, including rules about paid blogging being disclosed ("blogger payola").

While important, I believe that the points about governance are moot. This is because I think that people read 99% of bloggers because they write with authenticity. So regulating paid blog posts is like regulating how fireplaces get installed in Florida. You probably need to, but it's not something that will end up happening very often. (Of course, there is an underlying assumption that there isn't a rash of people building irresponsible fireplaces that create fire hazards, which in this case one could argue there is)

People don't read most blogs because the author writes particularly well, or because he or she is presenting information that no other source is, or because he or she is Einsteinian in his or her mental proportions. Keep in mind that many reasons exist for why people write. Most people in my line of work, myself included, write because it helps us in our day job. But I believe the number one far-and-away reason why people read blogs is for an authentic point of view.

The problem is that if you have made the choice (for whatever reason) to put a lot of effort into your blog, at some point the idea of being paid to write starts to sound pretty good. If you have built a big audience, the idea of paying you to write starts to sound really good to advertisers.

So there you are, successful blogger and advertiser, sitting on your first date, completing each others' sentences. But it'll never work. Maybe for a little while, but eventually either the blogger will start to lose readers or the advertiser will be disappointed with the results.

Of course, there are many ways to get paid to write if you have a successful blog. Leverage your blog into a book, or get a column at one of the many great online publications out there. Or, consider writing guest content for a brand on their website or within their online community. Even this subtle change in context makes things click.

I don't judge any blogger who writes paid blog posts, that would be like judging someone for being on that awesome first date (or even the second or third, trying to find that mysterious way to manufacture the romance). It makes sense to try it. But in the end, getting paid to be authentic takes the focus off where it should be: why people read. And that can cost any publisher dearly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.