Social Media ROI does not end at new sales… Measuring the big picture

Posted on July 7, 2011 by teds

If we’re starting a brand new company and tomorrow you kicked off a TV campaign promoting the business you’d expect some immediate sales to walk in the door, you’d expect to hear about the efforts, but chances are you’d be downright surprised if you broke even on new sales. After decades and decades of advertising we’ve come to accept the value of building brand perception to grow business over the long haul. So why is it that so many companies’ measure social media only by the short term sales bump?

Just because you have data doesn’t mean you know the full story

Since the banner first hit the web marketers have been stuck in the same paradigm – the data is there so measure it. And why not, with data coming in seconds rather than days or even weeks, the temptation to assume it’s all right there is great. Yet we’ve started to learn that people are using multiple ads, are narrowing in with many searches over time and conversions are taking longer and longer as the web becomes a corner stone of shopping. Single metrics are dangerous.

The opportunity cost of using social media only to acquire

Instead digital marketing, and even more so social media, must be looked at as holistic program that is as much a necessity as creating brand awareness and consideration is.

Some 70% of Americans say they consult product reviews or consumer ratings before making a purchase, according to an October 2008 survey by Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates

One could look at driving user reviews as an acquisition effort. There’s an audience to target, an expense to drive, host and promote reviews and a lift associated with a product that has them over one that does not. But it’s deeper than that.

When the majority of your customers are seeking reviews it’s not just about what you can increment, it’s about what you stand to lose. If you opted not to push for reviews because you couldn’t justify the cost on new sales, you risk all sales, not just new ones as people turn to other sites or product lines that offer the support they’ve come to expect. That’s not captured in lift metrics.

There are no longer channels, even tactics outside of marketing, must complement to earn a sale

Your investments into all forms of media drive people back to you or your partner’s digital properties for research. Just like with reviews, if someone who uses Twitter sends a message for pre-sales questions and gets nothing… not a customer support message, not a suggestion of a peer to peer area, just silence. That speaks volumes about what your brand will be like after they buy.

This extends to all channels… after being intrigued by a radio spot and going a company’s website a user who discovers a blog about the culture and expertise becomes a great choice, even a premium value, while the other company that just promotes their tradeshow booth feels empty, or “salesy”. Customers don’t care which channel gets attribution for the sale, they simply look for validation – a good buy or a bad one.

Let’s not forget the brand awareness opportunity either

This isn’t just about tactics that support a product purchase on the front end either. Just like TV is run on a negative upfront ROI basis to produce over the long haul, a social campaign can have the same value.

750 million people on Facebook outrank major sports events, dramas or reality tv, and they’re around just about every day. So if a customer goes knocking on your Facebook page and it isn’t there, or isn’t doing a good job of holding their attention when they “fan” up, that’s a wasted opportunity. But with social this isn’t just prospective awareness, this is true engagement opportunity where a good program can have that person showing affinity and even spreading it. How does that factor in to upfront sales?

Measure but measure the right picture

By no means do I advocate stopping or backing off on measuring your campaigns but instead it’s about making sure you understand their full impact and measure that. The problem with data is that we tend to focus on what we have easily available, and that’s new customers who come in directly or old ones who stay attached… but engagement, validation, cross-channel sales, and many of the other components of social are not easily studied and thus they are skipped and that not only short changes your programs but opens the door to cutting something that’s far more important than you may realize.

It’s not all about social media: Advertising: the forgotten, but necessary, campaign partner.

Posted on June 23, 2011 by teds

With the buzz out there, it’s easy to see why brand owners, marketers and of course the hotly contested social media experts, are extremely amped up about social, social, social but just because social is right in front of us doesn’t make it the only game in town. In fact, if you take a social only approach chances are you’re handicapping your campaign from the start.

Social media, while powerful, authentic and important only works if people see what you’re doing and that’s where advertising comes in as a symbiotic partner

The problem we see today is that people expect everything to just go viral. We’ve all be asked [told?] to make a viral video; to make a product get “out there” with sharing alone. The reality is that very few products even have a chance to “go viral”. For every blendtec or old spice is a thousand more brands with a good product that simply isn’t what people want to share around the web. That’s why on any given day the top 50 YouTube videos include one product related videos. Yup, one.

Advertising is the dependable version of viral

Instead of asking “how do I make this ‘go viral’”, which is something you can’t control or guarantee, you need to ask yourself: “how do I take something that is credible, authentic and trustworthy and make it get exposed”. This is why advertising becomes remains so important in an era of social media – advertising is your guaranteed source of visibility that insures success whether or not a viral pickup takes place.

Social Media changes how you advertise

Google AdWords, Targeted Banners, Lead Generation Campaigns, Facebook Ads. Advertising has been used to sell your brand’s value under your voice, with your credibility attached. Social integrates into this chain to make your ads authentic and stand out [at least until everyone gets on board].

Rather than saying “50% off on the Amazing Widget” say “50% off on the 5-star rated Widget” with quotes from reviews visible around the ad unit. Rather than a stock photo of actors enjoying their new RV pull in a video from your Facebook campaign of a real family talking about their experience with a link to read more stories. Bring the same transparency you have on your reviews, Facebook page, user community and other social features right out and into your advertising – the more real time and authentic, the better.

Product packaging is another great place to bring social to life and get in front of the customer. Think about two boxes with nearly the same product, one has a summary rating, an expert rating and a QR / RFID / short url link to read more reviews while the other doesn’t even have a mobile friendly site. Even at a higher price the brand willing to put it all out there is worth a closer look. Mobile has become far too prevalent to think you can hide or out impulse research, so instead beat the customer too it.

Don’t assume that simply because you have UGC on your website or social channels people are going to find it. You need to tell them it’s there.

The Dark Side of Ecommerce: Using Marketing & Social Media to Stop Counterfeits [Part II]

Posted on May 3, 2011 by teds

In my last post I wrote about the explosion of the online counterfeit market. In that post I talked about the fear brand owners have around the issue, the difficulty law enforcement faces in ever stopping the problem now that fakes are shipped one box at a time, and the real world impact it’s having to our economy and customers, but the issues are just the setup – now it’s time to talk about how marketers can help solve, or at least reduce the problem.

By keeping the issue quite companies have tried to suppress it, avoid having their consumers know there’s anything amiss, anything wrong out there and as a result, we’ve left our customers unaware and easily fooled. We have made it easier for the counterfeiters to get ahead. It’s time to talk about what we can do as marketers. We can stop the demand and make this an unprofitable business to be in.

During my time at Monster we were aggressive against counterfeits taking down thousands of auctions and sites daily but we also weren’t afraid to talk about the problem to insure our customers were protected. If your brand is ready to step up and fight to stop the confusion, reduce the demand, and hit the counterfeiters square in the wallet here’s the tips from what we learned to get serious.

Monster Cable puts a warning message on every page alerting consumers about fakes, showing them the top offenders and offering alternative dealers to shop safely with.

Step 1: Remove the veil, admit the issue.

Before the first letter of a press release is drafted, the first page wireframed, you have to convince your organization that the only solution is to open up and talk about the problem. This is the hardest part for a myriad of reasons: You’ll hear that telling consumers will impact share value if you’re publicly traded. You’ll be told that it helps the counterfeiters know what you’re doing to stop them. You’ll even have people complain that your public statements will help drive consumers to go buy fakes.

These are all true yet doing nothing is far worse. Consider:

If you do nothing you will continue to lose up to 10% (and in some fields much more) of your sales. Period.

If you do nothing, 10% of your customers will not know they bought a fake product so when the poor quality replica fails they will take to social to trash your premium brand. You will see more bad reviews.

If you do nothing the counterfeiters will evolve and improve leveraging their nimble, profitable model until they have a better SEO, SEM, Social and Media strategy that you do. Counterfeiters are even buying social ads these days… anything you we do they can try faster.

If you do nothing you are continuing to build an uneducated customer and partner base. Every day you say nothing the counterfeiters profit allowing them to fine tune, expand, and make it that much harder to stop them.

Telling our customers something is wrong is exactly how we fix the problem. Doing nothing to inform does nothing to stop that demand and that loses sales, hurts brand credibility and gives the counterfeiters a chance to equal up to you in product quality before you even see the issue – there goes profitability and share prices.

Every day thousands of consumers search around trying to find out how to buy authentic products, if your brand isn't providing education, it's anyone's guess what they will learn.

Step 2: Warning customers = protecting customers.

Once your organization is willing to tell the world about its problem it’s time to do just that. Think about the issue like you would any other marketing campaign and you can find an ROI to justify the time and resources (true fact, educating consumers will not only reduce fake sales but it also makes for great brand marketing and is extremely viral bringing new customers in).

It may not be pretty but Rolex is one of only a few watch companies to reinforce the problem with knockoffs front & center on their website.

You’ll want to educate in ways that help solve the problem, that is to say, you don’t want to just say there are fakes, you want to tell people how to avoid them and why.

I suggest you look at this as a multi-channel initiative. Online is certainly the place to be seen and heard, especially since so many sales take place through the web, but the same rules apply to a press release, retail storefront, or even an event:

Have your facts lined up. You don’t have to share every detail or trick; just enough to get people to understand that buying fake is no good.

What is being faked, how it hurts (safety, quality, performance implications)
How customers can avoid fakes (spotting tips, serial number registration)
The really bad guys that you can’t get rid of (your bad dealer / site blacklist)
The good guys people they should buy from (your site, retailers, partners)

With your facts in hand it’s just another marketing campaign to slot in.

Step 3: Put your message where people are looking

In writing this post I did dozens of posts about top brands who are known for having huge counterfeit issues and in just about every case when I searched for “brand + avoid fake” or “brand + buy online” what I got was user guides, forums and comments about fakes. How can you stop people from buying something they don’t even know exists?

Buy up search terms from people looking to avoid fakes or to buy authorized.
Try swapping in counterfeit messages to general brand terms to see if that attracts attention over more general marketing terms.
Push the same messages back to your site with the same urgency that there is business impact. If the issue is big, the warnings should be big, if it’s smaller, they can be relegated to a navigation item or footer.
Spread the issue out to marketing partners, authorized dealers, microsites or anywhere else that has your product and brand.

eBay Sellers and Third Party sites are providing their own opinion on authorized products. With SEM they can easily be replaced with official education.

Wherever you place the message remember to keep it simple and interesting… I’ve see a lot of sites with warnings that are so long & boring a contract lawyer would give up. Give customers the facts and give it to them in a way that represents your brand as well as any other educational effort you put out there. That’s all they need.

Step 4: Leverage the customer to become the educator.

Your loyal customers are the most potent source of education you can possibly have in addressing counterfeits. Their action as advocates can turn the issue from boring, corporate education and make it real and important. Through social it’s easy to spread the message, identify bad sites, and even create a culture of customers who call out the bad guys and people buying from them.

In the end quality only goes so far, especially when the savings are 50, 60 or 70% but if it’s not socially acceptable to have the knockoff, you’ve got a big advantage. Just look at the purse industry: while everyone knows where they can buy a similar-but-different knockoff, no one wants to be caught dead with an imitation version. In luxury goods that is essential to surviving.

In the consumer audio space, Beats by Dr. Dre has become a household name to youth and the counterfeits have followed. From photo galleries and posts about fakes to made-for-web videos [contains profanity], Beats has used social media channels from twitter to facebook to youtube to engage with loyal customers and build a negative stigma around “#FakeBeats”. This authentic conversation has in turn created a class of brand advocates so passionate that when someone buys or even asks about a fake site on a blog, forum or social network, they jump in and respond fiercely to warn them away, often before a community manager or brand employee has to get involved. Their advocates bring credibility to the problem and make it uncool.

This single post on fake headphones from the Beats by Dr. Dre facebook page has over 1,800 engagements from fans.

Leveraging the power of the fans to spread the word and defend the brand trumps any other strategy. People will dispute a brand’s message on quality, warranty or other advantages but just like a user review is trusted, a post back about a bad experience goes miles. Enough posts and you’ve got a trend that influences purchases online and off.

Leverage social channels to educate your followers about the issue.
Empower them with examples, bad sites, and one-to-one responses on the inevitable questions so they know what’s bad and what’s good.
Allow them to dialogue with other fans, calling out sightings of fakes and making it something advocates are looking to attack. Put reporting right into social channels.
Encourage customers who buy a fake and come to support or legal for help to share their experience back to your social channels as well as other blogs and channels they use to build the network effect. your own educational center so it’s not just your brand speaking, it’s real customers with real stories and faces explaining why it’s just not ok to make the purchase.

Educated customers will spread the message. This user went to Craigslist and posted against fake products because they saw and wanted to help others avoid a problem.

Putting it all together

As marketers we can’t individually stop an issue that spans the globe and brings in billions but when you look at the issues facing enforcement for both government and our brands, it’s clear that there won’t be a short term end but there can be short term wins by curtailing demand.

In the long term, educated customers avoid buying fakes, turn into advocates and, if that spreads enough it will disrupt the flow putting your brand on the list of companies not to bother with. Offense up front is a whole lot more effective than relying on your last line of defense when this much is at stake.

Icons and the everyday user: Where does social influence lie?

Posted on April 19, 2011 by teds

“When a celebrity with a lot of followers tweets something, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get an avalanche of traffic.” – Ricky Van Veen, co-founder and CEO of College Humor [SocialTimes.com].

Van Veen’s comment, while just a single remark in a much broader interview, pries into an ongoing dilemma that marketing is facing – who influences consumers?

In the “old days” brand marketing became almost formulaic: Take a compelling message, put a compelling plot behind it and pair it up with an icon to really drive results. Browse old TV or Print ad archives and its clear: this worked. Fast forward into the modern age and celebrity visibility has not gone away, in fact thanks to inventions like reality TV, twitter and just the simple amount of information consumers are able to access, celebrities have likely become even bigger.

But the role of the celebrity has changed.

Today’s celebrity is important and visible making them an ideal cornerstone to whip up attention. Attention however is not, as any direct marketer will tell you, sales. Today’s consumer is informed; right or wrong there is more information out there than anyone wants to read, a significant shift from when John Wayne put his name behind Camel cigarettes. A celebrity is an icon.

“Some 70% of Americans say they consult product reviews or consumer ratings before making a purchase” – Penn, Schoen & Berland Associates – October 2008 via Business Week

On the other hand, if you take a look at the Social Commerce Stats page BazaarVoice maintains and you’ll find literally hundreds more quotes about the power, demand and use of ratings and reviews like the one above. When it gets down to brass tax, it is the everyday user who, through a good post, a bad post, or even no post, makes or breaks the sale.

One conversation between a group of friends; one pseudo-anonymous 5 star review on Amazon; one rant on a Facebook wall. It all adds up to trust, credibility and authentic support. Technology has made people aware of what other people think. The user is now the influencer.

The right celebrity still has value, but relevancy matters.

When Eminem paired up with Chrysler for the Super Bowl / Detroit ad the first comments were surprise and after a few minutes the conversation became very positive (10 million views later it’s still rolling with 32,000 thumbs-up to just 1,600 down). Eminem wasn’t saying this was the best car ever – he was an icon of the location bringing attention back to it and the brand that is represented by it. An endorsement of the brand and where it’s going was something authentic and it worked.

Similarly there are many celebrities who have built their brand in social channels. Ashton Kutcher is probably the most common example, and why not, he has over 6.5 million twitter followers and while the vast majority of these individuals are likely not even using Twitter anymore, have little “Klout”, he’s spent enormous time setting up his personality as someone accessible and connected. If you can get @aplusk to talk about a brand that’s relevant to who is as a persona, you can find success.

Flip it around and unfortunately there’s a lot more bad than good. Look at the 10 Strangest Celebrity Endorsements blog and you’ve got the former U.S.S.R. president positioned next to one of the flagships of consumerism: Louis Vuitton. Flip on TV and you’ve had the outspoken A-Team member, “Mr. T”, talking about cooking products. These are ads that draw visibility, perhaps get the person’s attention, but are not going to close a sale [unless it’s a practical joke].

It’s not a black and white subject… brands will not, cannot just drop celebrities, too much visibility is at stake; but the icons that they use must be the right partner to support their brand, and frankly, the icon’s as well.

So what is a marketer to do?

In my career I’ve had the chance to work on a number of celebrity driven marketing campaigns and without giving away any specific on which ones or at which role, I’m quite certain that they create noise, attention and awareness which are all good things. Sales however require something more – visibility paired with believability.

In a world with social media nothing is more important than the authenticity that user generated content can bring, except perhaps for people wanting to see if the product is really that good in the first place. You can’t do a good job in convincing people to buy when no one is looking at you, so while I wouldn’t rely on a random celebrity to sell my products any more than I would believe their ad as a consumer, their voice can bring the right attention to push people to take that next look.

Just imagine an ad where a major celebrity, someone with a family, in the spotlight talked about their first trip to Disneyland and told you to read a million “real” experiences on the new Disney stories page. Or an ad with a musician telling you that they went to iTunes for the best new songs, rated by you, the users. Attention getting, believable and relevant.

Celebrity marketing can work. It just works best when you understand that an icon doesn’t influence, we do.

Social media… it’s not just about reaching social adopters

Posted on July 2, 2009 by teds

Social is often talked about as a tactic to use to communicate with younger, technologically connected consumers. However just as social has evolved from community discussions to real time chatter, the reach and pervasiveness is changing as well and no business can afford to remain on the sidelines these days.

Earlier this week Bing introduced Twitter content into search results and for select individuals is even including Tweets directly. This is likely just the first step in what will become a much larger change in how search works. Twitter’s open, searchable network offers a whole new opportunity for search to remain relevant and real time. Even Facebook, the site which excelled because of it’s ample availability of controls and privacy options is moving towards open content and real time information as it pushes users to share pieces of their interactions more publicly.

While Bing may be the only engine to use social natively, consumers are already asking for others to do so. The Realtime Twitter Search Results FireFox plugin pulls tweets right into a search result, which as the screenshot below shows, puts social media front and center for a searcher.

As social becomes more categorized and even more utilized it’s completely possible that we will see social discussions start to replace webpages to answer questions and seek information. Users may have the option to view matching sites, tweets or simply post their own question which, thanks to real time networks, will likely be addressed in a matter of minutes if not faster.

All of this means that brands who are not participating in social are missing the opportunity to be seen well outside of the traditional social walls. Looking at the example above there is a clear opportunity to reach right into what a consumer needs and route them back to your business. Whether you’re a national chain looking to add to the conversation about your deals or an individual store talking to a local consumer about a question they had, when it starts showing up in search results not being found isn’t an option.

Successful blogging part 1: Frequency & Relevancy

Posted on April 5, 2009 by teds

It’s not easy writing this blog week after week, coming up with relevant & informative content and finding the time to actually write. Of course this isn’t just true for my blog and if you write your own be it for a personal hobby or for a company you face the same challenges. Still blogs live and die by their updates and the quality of the content those updates contain.

Frequency. People bookmark and feed blogs so yours needs to be updated on a fairly regular basis if you want it to gain any long term traction. While daily updates would be great most of us don’t read all of our favorites every day and wouldn’t be able to consume all that content. I suggest getting a post up once a week unless you’re writing extremely informative articles in which case people will wait a few weeks before dropping you from their list.

For example Avinash Kaushik’s analytics blog updates every other week or so but each post is filled with screenshots and actionable resources that takes some serious time to digest so even if I have to wait for an update it’s worth it.

On the other hand GrokDotCom by Future Now updates several times a week and while each post is generally informative, they tend to be shorter in length and something I’ll skim through every few days to catch up on.

If life gets too busy to post for a few weeks it’s always advisable to put up something, even if it’s brief so people know that your blog isn’t dead but really if you suspect you’ll be away or slammed try and craft something in advance and stick to the two week rule.

Relevancy. If all you needed to do to have success was to post something blogging would be easy but with millions of blogs out there (really there’s millions) relevancy and utility is as important as frequency of not more so. This is especially true for corporate blogs where there’s often a lot of “information” to post but very little actual “content” that people want to read. Without relevant content people won’t follow your blog and certainly won’t share it with anyone else thus defeating the purpose. To truly grow your blog needs to go beyond corporate speak or rehashing other people’s content and create.

My thought is that product launches, demos and other promotional items are interesting but really just noise and you should work to maintain that one quality post a week even if you’re adding additional information for marketing purposes far more often.

Starting up. The last thing to consider is actually the first thing in blogging – a new blog. While you can get away with weekly or bi-weekly updates when you start out you need enough information for people to get your message. This means creating a series of articles to either launch immediately or frequently over a few day period.

Next time: Finding inspiration for content when there are no new products or announcements and when creativity starts to dry up.

Cutting optimization & online marketing budgets…. A wise choice?

Posted on November 17, 2008 by teds

There’s no doubt that the current economic climate requires certain cuts and pull backs especially as customers tighten their own wallets but does that mean you should be cutting your online budgets in marketing or optimization? While many out there have jumped up and say yes, stating that less consumer dollars necessitates less spending and less project development to save cash I’m not in agreement, and certainly not when it comes to taking big cuts and drastic steps.

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Same old suggestions… no changes?

Posted on November 17, 2008 by teds

So I’m browsing around some of my favorite blogs tonight I’m seeing a lot of the same suggestions from site to site… FutureNow is talking about common shopping cart mistakes, BeRelevant is linking to a post on using analytics to drive email, LunchPail is explaining the basics of using cookies, and Bazaar Blog is hyping up the perks of social media for increasing sales and decreasing returns thanks to relevancy. What’s interesting here isn’t what the suggestions are but that they keep coming up, month after money, year after year. One week I’ll see a topic covered by one blog, a few weeks later by another and I don’t think it’s a result of sites ripping content ideas.

So what gives? Why are marketers having trouble optimizing their campaigns and adding features? Click in to keep reading…

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Competing in the social space means moving right now.

Posted on July 7, 2008 by teds

Last week I put up an article about ways to get your brand into user generated content and social networking websites in which I mentioned that if you aren’t willing to move fast, you shouldn’t move at all. This morning’s release by EA of a Scrabble Game on FaceBook serves as a great example of just why you have to be ready, willing and able to move quicker than quick to play in the current market.

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