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.

Social media can not fix the world but it is a pretty bandaid

Posted on April 27, 2011 by teds

This morning in stumbled on an awesome infographic from @TWCableHelp about their social support process. I have to hand it to Time Warner, the explination is well executed and the stats are impressive – big kuddos to their social team. Problem is, I live in an community with over 750 units that Time Warner serves and I can’t recall hearing many [any?] positive comments about them. Their support team’s doing all the right things yet it’s not fixing the perception problem.

As social has gone from something the business world laughs at [anyone who pitched the value of a user community before 2006 knows what I’m talking about] to the place where everyone has to be we’ve lost a little clarity in the middle – [corporate] social doesn’t fix your underlying problem, it merely treats the symptoms.

Got a defective product? The one you replaced for Sally via twitter is just going to break again.
Service keeps going out? Facebook updates don’t make your 2 million fans any happier, just wise enough to know to head to a friend’s house to use their alternative provider.
Activists don’t think you’re up to par on ethical values? A couple blog comments won’t reverse that

What social can do, and does a great job of, is allowing you to bandaid the issues. If you’re lucky the cut is small enough that the bandaid holds it back and let it heal back up. You can’t increase product quality via twitter but you can issue a recall, troubleshoot issues and resolve them in near real time. That’s a great and thanks to 1:1 interaction earns you back some of the credibility you lost – the scar however does not go away.

But for every customer who tweets, facebooks, yelps, blogs or posts openly many more complain in “social silence” – that is to say, they post or share a comment to a network you can’t see, can’t measure and can’t touch. That’s where the problem festers and eventually grows from a couple bad experiences to a bad perception.

What Time Warner’s social team is doing should be applauded. It’s the right step for their support / marketing department to help upset customers on their own terms and something I wish more brands I used did; but it only helps as far as a bandaid can.

Many of us, probably all of us, are guilty of driving social programs that try to mask a deeper problem. I’ve certainly done it. And why not? It’s a direct solution, something we can do fast, and justify back with engagement counts and posts. In a world where executives and shareholders want to see us all using the latest and greatest social media is what gets the funding, the attention. But you can’t scale responding to problems. You can’t hire enough nice people or give out enough coupons to make up for a problem that won’t go away.

Instead of building up autonomous social support teams with the blessing of the C-levels, that momentum and interest needs to be taken into improving the full experience. Product to fulfillment to marketing to support. Only then can a company really expect their social support team to be empowered enough to be able to help grow the business, otherwise we’re just stuck with bandaids and eventually those fall off.

Related reading (aka others have said something like this before me)

Social Media & customer service: Are you scalable? – Smart Blogs

Are You Using Social Media as a Band-Aid for Poor Customer Service? – Right Place Marketing

The social media band aid mentality – The Email Guide

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.

Where are the social deals? Daily deals in a social media driven world.

Posted on April 11, 2011 by teds

Daily deals are this year’s hot thing in social. Problem is they aren’t social.

When daily deals first launched, hitting the minimum participants to “activate” the deal wasn’t a given and that made them social as people would have to bring friends in to get things going. Years later Groupon, LivingSocial and other leaders have too many users to have to worry about “qualifying” thus the social aspect is gone & deals have become glorified coupons that you just buy into.

Now don’t get me wrong. I may have critiqued the relevancy of daily deals in the past and am now joining others in questioning their business viability but I don’t doubt the potential of deals as a gateway for discovery, and value service to consumers – they just need a little network power to get to exciting. So as we watch Facebook prepare to roll out its deal offering, Google move into social & deals and Groupon and LivingSocial battle for control of the current market, I thought I’d take a crack at what the future could look like.

Deals are better when they’re done together [rhyming not intended]

Late one evening, a few weeks back I got a text from a friend (let’s call her “Sally”) asking if I wanted to jump in on a LivingSocial deal for White Water Rafting. Sally, knowing I raft frequently, wanted to put together a group trip and saw the deal as as great opportunity. To me that’s exactly what daily deals are for: great offers on services that people were considering, and now have a tipping point to take action on — together.

Problem is, it was 10pm, the deal expired in 2 hours and we all had to commit to make it work – no one wanted to take the first plunge and the deal was missed.

Risk stops purchases; but what if you could remove it?

What if, rather than a mass text, followed by a lot of hoping and messaging back, my friend, had been able to set the whole thing up as a group deal contingent on her network participating:

- Sally decides this deal is for her, looks at the calendar, picks an available date, creates an event and invites 20 people who she’d like to have show up… It hits their email, sms, facebook wall or twitter handle, their call.

-The threshold on the deal is also set based on the offer type. For white water rafting its one full boat – 6 heads. More can join but without 6 the deal is not on. Other services could have a threshold as low as 2 for a spa day or 4 for dinner out, but always a group.

-Sally’s friends get an alert that there’s a deal expiring in a few hours with the right details – the time, the place and the cost. Since they already have accounts they can confirm it right from their iphones but there’s no risk, the deal only goes if the threshold is hit.

-5 people are excited to try out rafting and convince #6 to join via a Facebook group message. The deal is on. Go Sally!

Whether it’s white water rafting, learning to rock climb, or a spa day, deals are overwhelmingly for services people do together but the current systems drive individual purchase and does nothing to address the fear of being the only one to go in.

By flipping the model back to its roots and enforcing a commitment minimum, not from all participants, but from a network of friends the risk is gone and there’s a whole new motivation for people to buy.

————–

Update: as of 8/26/2011 Facebook has announced they are closing down their deal service. In my opinion they had the best shot at truly creating a discovery tool by leveraging what no other deal site really has: relationships. But ultimately it’s a peripheral service and without enough attention, likely never got the legs to have a fair shot.

Google +1 and Using Social to Drive Network Based Search Relevancy

Posted on March 30, 2011 by teds

Google’s move with +1 is sparking a lot of conversations but one area which really intrigues me, even before I can see the feature in use myself, is the implication to relevancy via an individual’s social & geo network.

One of the chief issues I’ve always seen with search delivering the right results is the lack of insight into who is searching. With the introduction of +1 Google gains a much more real insight – what those around you are looking at. In aggregate this is useful in killing spam, building up good resources and sorting out poor / unliked results but when applied back to a search’s network whether it’s a contact or location based it becomes hugely powerful.

For example, if I search for “Miramar” result #1 is a city, #2 is a military base and nowhere on page 2 is the result I’m looking for – my former apartment community. Using location Google is able to infer some information about what result I may want, and even shows a map, but it’s not enough certainity to switch out the result set. With +1 data from local (geotargeted) networks they get a whole other dimension of insights to counterweight what is the most relevant (aka most linked too/ word weighted) with what is actually being looked at and suddenly the right result has a real shot of making it up top.

If Google is able to build enough of a profile network, +1 could become even more important in driving search results by understanding that all of my friends searching for a particular sports bar with a generic name or from within a larger chain were looking at the same venue and adjust accordingly, potentially even resetting the result in time given the type of listing.

Facebook is already doing this to some degree by leveraging your own likes, connections and your larger your network to suggest people, places and brand results in searches, and most of the time it’s right on (and with 2 million+ likes, that’s a big headstart). As Facebook and Google war over who is going to control searching, relevancy to the individual has got to be in the top couple of spots for importance and whoever understands the most about the person searching can deliver the best results to win their repeat attention and usage.

Google, while smart to bring in social feedback, is behind in a big way when it comes to making this applicable personally. Facebook and even youtube, twitter and others simply have them beat in connections per user and a partnership a la Amazon’s “your Facebook friends…” would have let them move quicker to incorporate individual social learnings into output. Even without the deep networks for users there’s a lot of implications to improving relevancy right now just by weighting down “-1” results, and of course there’s going to be a lot of blackhat attempts to leverage the tool to influence results too.

Leveling the field for Small Businesses: Social Media

Posted on February 20, 2011 by teds

Driving around San Mateo it’s easy to pick out the remnants of forgotten local businesses, desolate storefronts that couldn’t cut it due to the “economy”, changing models or in many cases, the launch of stronger national competitors down the road. With stronger pricing power, larger selection, a consistent experience and huge marketing footprints it’s been virtually impossible for local business to take on national chain in any field. Putting aside the philosophical debate over the benefit or harm chain merchants are causing to communities, one thing is certain, whether it’s the local coffee shop, grocery store, gym, video rental shop (pre-digital of course), or just about any other business, volume has been the winning formula.

Chief among the disparity issues local business face versus their larger competitors’ is access to marketing channels. When Target wants to drive Black Friday sales, TV ads hit millions of homes, banners flood the front-pages of CNN, and inserts get mailed out to every home. Even a local business able to afford enough marketers to output the same volume of creative assets will be drowned out in media buys and volume efficiencies.

But now there’s social media.

Social offers all businesses an effective, low cost and, when done right, extremely influential way to reach customers. And as a new channel, it’s something all businesses are struggling with.

Planet Granite: A local gym using Facebook to share route updates and member focused events

While small businesses have an opportunity big business struggles with: the ability to be truly relevant.

Think about your local gym… what’s more likely to peak your interest: a twitter account to follow with 2 way dialogue about the latest classes or a national chain that’s trying to roll out a 50-state branding campaign to leverage their new celebrity? The celebrity may make the national guy feel more relevant, more “wow” but it’s not more actionable, in fact, the more the fan engages, the less they are likely to feel connected as it’s unlikely the brand will be able to respond to them at all.

Crystal Springs Produce - A local business with a complete Yelp profiles with photos, numerous reviews, even a special offer

At the same time, the relevancy tools large networks are using like Facebook’s “Edge Rank” favor a small business to a large one. The bigger the page is, the harder it becomes to keep up engagement rates and content that appeals to everyone… leading to an eventual slips in rank with posts becoming less and less seen by those who opted to follow.

The problem small businesses face is acting and acting now. While all companies are still trying to sort out what social can do, who should do it, and what the real return is, dedicating a social resource when you have only a handful of marketing employees (or perhaps one or none) is not viable. However the door is open wide and not an option, it is the future for business, and especially any business without the benefit of million dollar media campaigns. Small businesses have an opportunity to lead and to build their community off of passionate customers before bigger competitors figure out how to pull their ground level ‘troops’ in.

In all honesty, it’s a struggle to find local businesses really using social beyond a few logos and reviews, but it’s the only place where small businesses have a level field, maybe even an upper hand if they act soon.

Every small business should be thinking about how they build their army, how they get followed, get reviewed and use their customer comments to drive their business to be better, more appealing and therefore more talked about. So where to start? Here are 5 channels that can be setup, monitored and responded too in just a few hours a week.

Ratings & Reviews. User Reviews drive purchases so encouraging them with in-store signage, customer welcome kits and at any other place is essential to standing out. Is the business on Yelp or other relevant local services? Is the information correct?

Social Networks, Forums. The buzz words, the trends, these tools represent access to thousands of local consumers and huge spread with just a single “LIKE” or post. Is there a Facebook page? Twitter? Relevant forums in the industry? Does the page send out updates on new services, programs and relevant information? Photos of events? Fan comments?

Location Check-ins. As people get more comfortable telling their network where they are, there’s an opportunity to expand viral branding. Is there an accurate destination created on foursquare? Facebook places? A description or photo? A special to draw in fans? A program, even a smile and handshake, for the mayor?

Local Deals. GroupOn, Living Social, they’re all about deals people can use locally. But they only really work when the business has a plan to use a discounted user to build a long term customer. Is there a deal out there? Does it lend well to continued business? Are new signups getting brought into the other social features to follow and be en-engaged with?

Support & Engagement. Nothing in social matters unless it’s followed with a response, a dialogue… and seen as actually being used by the business. Are comments from all the other channels being used to update the business model and are those changes being relayed back? Is someone from the staff checking the social channels a few times a week to build and foster

Combating the inevitable service issue: Building an army of advocates, or at least positive posters.

Posted on February 15, 2011 by teds

I don’t work in the flower industry, don’t know much about the business (beyond how to order products at least) but when Teleflora made a Facebook post with a customer service email address the day after Valentine’s Day, the reason why was pretty obvious – something had gone wrong – something which was making people very, very upset.

Of course anyone working in ecommerce, or any corporation, could have told you there would be problems. Tens of millions of flower orders , dozens of companies, and just 18 or so hours to get them all there on time (but not too early), it’s only logical that some orders would fail within the process… Some complaints were inevitable.

And some level of complaints are inevitable for almost all b2c companies. No matter how perfect the process is, something will fail at some point and whether it’s the fault of the company or something entirely out of their hands, like the weather, it’s all going to come back on them, and these days back to social media. So knowing that something bad will happen, it’s up to us as marketers/ social strategists to insure that when problems come up we have the right plans to respond, but also that they don’t dominate the conversation or become the purpose of our page. We need to be more than just support channels .

Going back to my Teleflora example (and to be clear and not just pick out one company, the same issue is happening with ProFlowers and others that I checked), something is missing – balance. On the pages of most flower brands I visited just about everything was negative and support related. If these companies had happy customers (and I know they do because I am one) they were nowhere to be found and likely for good reason, no one had asked them to join up and share.

My suggestion to flower business earlier in the week was to provide an insert with orders for people to evangelize their great orders (or their bad ones, a review is what it is). All it takes is a simple note to remind people to comment, to tell them where you are, and out of the millions, thousands or even of just hundreds of customers you touch, you’ll get some balance… You’ll get light advocates.

Take this a step further, build a social program that encourages fan participation before the issue and you’ll be far more prepared when one does strike. This is where best practices really kick in – buying fans in masse with discounts, coupons and giveaways is easy and gets numbers, but successfully cultivating them takes a great deal more than good offers, it takes useful content, engaging directly around posts other than support, even how the business goes to market, the policies and programs that you have and how your fans react to them. But if you can build a dialogue and a regular flow (and yes, this is possible for even seemingly mundane brands) then you have moderate advocates on and around to help when there are negatives, to explain that there is a good to the bad, and to be talking about things other than support and trouble. And of course if you really go all the way, develop that full advocacy program and engage customers to become brand evangelists, community leaders, and the like, well now you have a whole force of people to balance and even better, aid.

Now don’t get me wrong, the issue customers are having with their flower orders are certainly very real and need a response, not to be buried or hidden by a flood of off topic discussions. Transparency is good, real responses are what matter. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have both – it is again a balance of what your social media channels do for you and your customers.

As for the support side, we all know it isn’t easy, or cheap, but it is something which companies tend to get… and here, the flower companies are doing a good job of responding 1:1, giving direct email addresses, and all of the other support processes you’d hope for when customers are upset and support lines are backed up with callers… they may not be perfect but they’re on it for this part. But while the support side is going well, when all people see is bad, they get more upset, the assume nothing is going right, and they lose the benefit of peer to peer support or comments to turn too.

And that’s why you need your fans to know, connect and be involved with your social media presence now, when things are good. Social media is not just about offers and sales generation, not just a support system, but when used right, it can be a dialogue platform to get insights, have the right discussions that curtail or stop issues early on, and yes, be a place where people share all the great things your product / service / brand are doing that may them advocates and repeat customers.

Event Marketing: The importance of exposing your social media channels in offline marketing

Posted on January 10, 2011 by teds

Last week at the consumer electronics show (aka CES and aka “the week you do not want to be trying to catch a cab in vegas”) I made a tweet about the lack of social signage around major booths and after a few days of wandering looking for good examples to tweet about, it’s pretty startling how far event groups are from their social media counterparts… and a good enough reason to pop back on and restart my blog after a long time away.

Now I’m not talking about sophisticated integration, touchscreen kiosks or integrated promos, just simple signs pointing out the facebook, youtube, foursquare and / or twitter profiles for any given booth… the basics.

This is an example of marketing in a silo a silly miss to have after all the expense that goes into building a booth for a show like CES. After all, a tradeshow is suppose to be about getting the word out and while no one is going to need a sign to know to tweet on an awesome new 3D TV, without a message it’s completely on the user to figure out how or even remember to do so. We all know that social works best when messages aggregate whether it’s to trend or simply for metrics and responding by the brand yet if you asked me what the twitter handle was for Philips I wouldn’t have a clue (and no, it’s not @Philips).

Of course there were a few companies that really “get it” and made it more than evident to figure out their show specific or mainstream channel, often using their own big screen displays to get the message across. These should be the goal example for all exhibitors and really is just a starting point. Given the adoption rate (facebook’s userbase is large than the population of all but two countries) social urls are very possibly the most important fact you should be sharing, even versus your own website.

This means going beyond a sign and putting social urls on pull up banners, flyers, business cards, even window clings on the side of TVs… Heck, we even went so far as to make a tshirt with a fill in the blank for our various product managers and marketing teams to use for promotion around the show.

Let people know where you can be found, give them a reason to share, and you’re the one they’ll be talking about.

In closing and very unrelated to this message, it’s been a while since this blog was last written too but look for more posts coming along as I get this all fired back up.

5 tips for creating a successful contest on Facebook

Posted on February 25, 2010 by teds

Study social users and you’ll immediately find that what they’re looking to be engaged with through interesting content, events, photos and yes, contests. Contesting has long been used by brands looking to participate in user based communities as it offers a simple way to build discussion and potentially even capture customer data.

Of course with thousands of brands competing for the attention of the hundreds of millions of social users it’s easy to get lost in the dust, or even worse, turn a good program into a disaster with a logistical problem. So before you start in on a contest of your own here are 5 tips to get you going in the right direction.

1. Contest frequency is as important as prize value.

While users love the big prizes these are your fans and they want to participate. Brands that understand this successfully capture a lot of attention and day to day growth by giving away something here and there rather than waiting months to do all inclusive, super expensive giveaways.

Alternate between the big giveaways and the simple ones. Depending on your brand a t-shirt can get nearly as much response as a premium product. And the more often you give, the more people look.

In the example above Hot Topic drives great fan response and keeps people logged in by handing out movie tickets and other small ticket items one at a time, randomly.

2. Keep your contest on facebook, use apps to extend it.

While it’s easy, and generally a good idea, to do a simple video, photo or even “like” contest you want people giving something back to you and you don’t want to force them to leave your page to do so (that would reduce the interest and buzz). Whether it’s a few pieces of data, a survey response or virally spreading the giveaway, the basic contests are limited and you have to go jump outside the box to get richer tools.

Wildfire is one of the more popular apps offering a variety of features from basic data capture through to a fully co-branded sharable experience. This comes at a cost but if you’re expecting a larger response you want the email optins, the fans, the branding space.

Just don’t try to force people through long forms or to share the contest, never works in the long term.

3. Spell out all the details in your head & then to the user.

Individually people tend to be forgiving but in mass they can be easily upset and downright underhanded. You want your contest to be airtight so everyone has a good experience… fans take these things very seriously and confusion leads to disgruntled response, emails and other unneeded negatives. Keep it all positive and airtight so no one feels cheated in the end…

To be sure you’re got think your contest through at length yourself and then share it with a half dozen co-workers to see what they think.

Is it easy to enter? If so, is it easy to game?
Is there a way to figure out who entered? If not how will you get an answer?
Do people know who can enter and who cant?
Are the rules easily found to clarify things? Are they broad enough to cover an issue? Fraud? Cheating?
Do you have a way to contact the winner? That is an important one.

4. Take advantage of profile targeting & avoid upset users.

Since contests are rarely open to, or intended for everyone when it comes to ads or a post to your wall this feature is truly invaluable in facebook contests.

Use profile targeting (country / demographics) wisely and you can minimize upset fans who are not able to enter. This becomes essential as your page grows from country specific to global and fans feel left out.

You can also accelerate your growth finding well suited users and driving them over to your page. And since you’re fan page is where the contest takes place people can fan you in the same ad – double win.

5. Don’t “set it and forget it”

Your first few contests will have hiccups and users always have issues. Don’t leave your fans hanging and guessing… jump in and help. This not only solves problems but enables user to user assistance as fans find a solution and share it with others. There’s nothing worse than turning your computer on after a long weekend to discover the great promotion you did failed. Your users will be on 24×7, don’t forget that.

And remember to always K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple, stupid). Just like no one reads an entire web pages, users get bored with long posts, want to find a simple method and want a simple answer.

This is the golden rule of just about anything in social but even more so in contests. People’s attention spans online are short, as is their willingness to put up with barriers or issues. When you want to get people involved you want to get a lot involved and the easier it is for everyone to participate the more will.

As a final suggestion, never forget about the wall – that’s the most valuable real estate in social marketing and where you should be aiming to get. So in every giveaway be sure you’re aware of how your promo can, or can’t get you in that space.

Social Media Strategies: You can’t afford to turn the computer off Friday at 5

Posted on December 23, 2009 by teds

I think it’s safe to say we all enjoy getting away from the office at least sometimes but for many companies, social stops when the clock strikes 5 (or maybe 6). While there’s a lot of logic behind this in the eyes of those doing the posting it doesn’t reflect the reality of the channel – customers don’t stop knocking. The notion of responding 24×7 or close to it isn’t new, many companies have customer service on 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, potentially every day of the year, but with so much of social being handled by more “senior” staff this philosophy is often forgotten.

When companies go away from their channels two important things happen – first the questions stack up which is an annoying experience for the customer who is waiting and the employee who must wade through tweets all of Monday but more importantly an opportunity is lost.

Think about it for a second – a few years ago your web traffic was probably minimal on the weekend and big during the week. Weekdays may still be bigger than weekends but it’s a digital world and people are online all days of the week, from the office, from the home, even the mall on their cell phone.
Think about it some more – issues happen 24×7 and in a connected world no one waits to hear back on Monday. By the time you respond to provide the insight your customer needs, they already bought or that new nasty video with an incorrect fact is already out there.

The solution is of course an unpleasant one for anyone reading this but it is reality. You need to be on more than from the office. Whether it’s a customer service rep taking an hourly glance at automated reports or your staff actually getting into the weeds the biggest gains happen when no one expects it. Respond at 9pm on a Sunday and you’ll wow a few power users. Get product announcement clarified and you’ll avoid the confusion from that one blog. It’s not like you aren’t already on checking your own accounts anyways…