Tag Archives: YouTube

Pulling The Plug on Your Social Media Strategy

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Today your business has dozens of choices for measuring social media. Platforms exist for evaluating everything from influence to engagement using various counters and algorithms. I recommend you begin with something simpler though. I think you should ask yourself one simple, illuminating question…

“If I pulled the plug on my social media efforts – closed it all down starting tomorrow – what would my business lose?”

To answer that question, first clear the playing field. Set aside for now the industry pressure of having all your competitors in social, therefore you have to be. Set aside too any mandate coming from the corner office.

Instead, ask yourself what your company would be like next week without your Facebooking, Twittering, YouTube channel, Foursquare badges, Tumblrs, etc. etc.

Draw two columns on a sheet of paper. In column A, add up everything you’d save by shutting it all down; the man-hours internally, the cost of content creation, the meetings, the analytics software licenses, the agency retainer fees. This all amounts to the true cost of what you’re doing now and its a good thing to have in mind.

Now in column B write down all the things you’d lose as a business without your social media campaign in place. What would happen if all those Facebook fans and Twitter followers simply went away?

Take a cold, hard look. If closing your social media campaign means losing a few coupon redemptions, the occasional mention among the bazillions of tweets happening daily, and the bragging rights to some six-figure ‘fan’ count you’ve yet to figure out how to make use of, then your social media strategy is probably in need of some refinement.

On the other hand, maybe closing down your social media stuff would mean you’d know less about your customers. Maybe it would mean you’d not have that convenient focus group for getting feedback on new product ideas. Maybe it would mean you couldn’t service your customers as efficiently, or detect and address their concerns as quickly. Maybe it would mean your brand awareness would drop because your name wouldn’t circulate as much on the blogs your customers frequent. If any of that’s the case, then your investment in social media is probably paying off even if you still haven’t been able to attribute sales to it, let alone define what an ‘engagement’ really is. (That’s okay, by the way, the entire social media industry is struggling to agree on terms like ‘engagement’, ‘activate’, and ‘influencer’.)

If you’re using social media to distribute coupons you’re essentially treating it like an online FSI or DRTV spot. That may provide some sales, but the cost of maintaining that program almost always comes out of profit margins as you continue to give away coupons in return for nothing more than a click count.

For a real return on your social media investment, your column B should be full of words like ‘insights’, ‘higher satisfaction’, ‘feedback’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘quicker’. These are the things social media can do that FSIs, DRTV, and advertising simply can’t.

Most companies are looking at 2012 and asking themselves what to do with social media. Everyone is going to invest in it, true, because no one wants to be the Luddite in their competitive set. But how much do you invest? And where?

Look down again at column B on your sheet of paper. What’s missing from that list that social media could do for you? Whatever it is, that’s where you should aim your strategy and make your investment this year.

Information may want to be free, but do we?

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There’s a bit of buzz going on right now about the release of Diaspora. If you’re not familiar with the name, it is essentially to Facebook what Linux is to Windows. That’s right, the collectivists are rising up again. Just as numerous articles about iTunes, Facebook, Apps, and other ‘walled gardens’ have begun circulating through the media, the holdouts of a “free Web” are working hard to disrupt the corporate machine with a free offering.

The question is, this time, will the ‘free web’ collectivists prevail. History is in their favor. However, we live in a very different time. The capitalists have made significant inroads and far more is at stake now that the Internet is recognized by money holders as an important revenue source and potential profit center.

So, do we want information to be free? Or would we prefer to pay for the convenience of walled gardens? Facebook has been reluctant to charge for membership even though 5¢ per user per month would have major impact on revenue. Yet nominal fees for Flip cameras and ‘good enough’ technologies like MP3 have subverted higher quality by delivering more convenience. We’re all time crunched and often times good enough is truly good enough.

Different devices same dynamics.
For power users of the Internet,  ’free’ is almost an expectation. Yet increasingly people outside this small subset are becoming more comfortable with forking over a nominal fee for a small application or bit of content. Sure you could find that article online somewhere, but for a few bucks its just easier to get an online subscription.

When we do this, however, we make a choice. Just as AT&T holds iPhone users captive and Blu Ray and HDVD fought it out for format dominance, so we become held fast to iTunes or Amazon. You might argue that one can always jump ship and abandon a standard by abandoning a device but often times you have to give up previous acquisitions based on proprietary formats. That can represent a significant investment.

By the same token, sticking steadfastly to open standards and avoiding the walled gardens omits us from the popular places and often leaves us chasing multiple formats and inter-device compatibility. Tech-headed hardcore collectivists will put in the time to smooth this out, but most of us won’t bother.

These are not new problems. They are the problems phone companies thrust upon their long-distance account holders 15 years ago and home video player owners pushed on people 25 years ago. Interestingly, in both cases a disruptive technology made the point moot as VOIP killed charge-for-distace telephony and is now eroding the need for a disc-playing video device in the home.

Today Hulu and YouTube and AppleTV and Netflix are all fighting to dominate the video-via-Internet market. This is the same battle as long distance telephone and home video players, just a different base technology.

There is another important difference too. We live in a mature post-mass-media world now. This would indicate that a single dominant player is less likely to emerge as market dynamics favor niche audiences and niche products most of the time.

Generation gap.
In my mind the single greatest ideological collision of our time is that of the open-source, everything-free collectivists who pioneered the web and the capitalists who have funded its explosive growth and much of its innovation. Squarely a Gen Xer, I grew up with a free internet and have that expectation. Millennials and the generation following them (now in grade school) are growing up with $2 apps and pay-for-content models. Where I am offended by the affront of having to pay for content, younger web users think nothing of this.

Sure, there will always be holdouts. You will always be able to get content for free from someone, somewhere. Even today anyone with bit torrent savvy can skip right by Netflix and Apple TV and download full length movies for free. This will always be a thorn in the capitalist’s side but now that so many others are comfortable using the Internet there’s plenty of available market share to profit on. Were I to put my money down now, I would say the capitalists have a growing advantage. Time and the aging of the Net Generation is on their side. The growing size of the non-power userbase who favor paying for convenience is also on their side. My suspicion is, just like Ning, Disapora will only see a little traction. Where Apache, MySQL and Linux are tools for the very collectivists who use them, social network software like Diaspora is meant for the non-poweruser who frankly wants to hang out with friends. Those friends have already chosen Facebook.

But…
It is worth sounding a not of caution to the capitalists though. If you build a walled garden, it needs to be Eden. AOL learned this the hard way. They built easy and convenient but blocked out too much. As more and more people began to hear that there was ‘more’ outside the garden they got curious and began to climb over the wall. Facebook works very hard to keep up with people’s needs. Adding Places to FB immediately kicked Foursquare and Gowalla down a notch. Why? Because 500MM people use FB. If the non-poweruser wants to be where everyone is, Facebook has the advantage right now.

The second challenge is privacy. While people are increasingly willing to participate in capitalism online, they are sensitive about their information. One significant slip there could have a heavy cost as trust online is hard to earn. Even more interestingly, the 140-character nature of our reading habits fuels this fire. We see the headlines of bank hacks and privacy violations and often don’t read the articles. The net effect is things can feel less secure than they really are. There’s also a strong collectivist set within the mainstream locations like Facebook. These are the people who post Facebook’s quiet privacy policy changes for the world to see. Inherently leery of the capitalists, they are self-appointed agents of the masses and work hard to subvert the efforts of capitalists from within their own walled gardens.

The third challenge is innovation outside the capitalist model. Disruptive technologies have tended to come from those who do not buy into the capitalist philosophy. Apache and Linux were swipes against what power users saw an inferior technologies that were overpriced. So these developers banded together and turned the marketplace upside down. Now the “LAMP stack” is the favored, open format for the web. Perhaps something similar is being worked on now that will shatter the proprietary iTunes and Amazon formats.

I’m watching Apple begin to behave a little less like the underdog and a little more like Microsoft used to be accused of. You know, monopolistic. Google is doing the same. My guess is, in some cellar somewhere someone with no greater agenda than sticking it to the Man is developing something that will eventually chip away at the capitalists again. If enough people get wind of this – and that is increasingly easy in our interconnected age – it might make a difference.

The future favors the capitalists and the trend right now is to choose convenience over freedom, but it is a far more fragile advantage than in the past and trends online shift quickly.

Word of Finger: Persuasion & the Science of Marketing.

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Amazon has its reviews. YouTube has its star system. Sites across the web invite people to comment, rate and review products, content and even each other. A whole other batch of people make decisions on these ratings. Does this seem unusual to anyone else?

Think about it. No one vets the people making these reviews. They could be anyone. Yet when twenty-five people give an Amazon book 5 stars we’re inclined to believe it must be a good book. Why? Are these people at all qualified to rate a book? They might be professors of literature, sure. They might also be brain-dead dropouts. Or worse (and in high probability), they might be friends of the author signing on to plug the book without having even read it. You just don’t know.

But a book is a $15 purchase; even if you buy it and dislike it, no real harm is done. However, this isn’t just happening in the small-ticket category. It happens among ‘considered purchases’ too – electronics, even cars. Again and again we allow perfect strangers, people we know nothing about, to influence our purchase decisions. It’s one thing to say I won’t trust the advertiser because they’re going to spin the story – of course they are. It’s another to go 180º in the opposite direction and rely on a bunch of strangers who with minimal effort can register their whims on a comment board.

Consumer Reports used to be the resource for people looking for vetted, impartial reviews on products. I’m staggered that said company has not made more noise. This ‘trust a stranger’ social media world  is a perfect environment for Consumer Reports to demonstrate its value and become a superbrand. Why they aren’t more vocal is beyond me.

Recently, WIRED magazine’s Jargon Watch introduced me to the term Word of Finger. It’s meant to differentiate social-media style buzz from true word of mouth though I think WIRED missed an opportunity in its definition.

Word of Mouth traditionally has implied dialog (and not necessarily orally, despite the term). This in turn implies the people probably know (at least something about) each other. Historically we don’t express our opinions to strangers unless we’re professionals paid to do so. Word of Finger, as I see it, recognizes the nuance that some social media actions are indeed between strangers. In this sense I would argue Word of Finger isn’t as valuable as Word of Mouth even though the former travels faster and has a broader reach than the latter owing to the dynamics of (true) friend networks vs. simply connected networks of individuals.

In this sense Facebook would be Word of Mouth – even though you actually enter the information with your fingers. Amazon’s comments panel is Word of Finger for most people (unless you happen to know one of the commentators). With the former, you know the people and can gauge whether they have any valid capacity to review a topic. With the latter you have no clue who they are, what they know or if they’re in any way qualified to make a judgement call on the topic at hand. Common sense would dictate that the Word of Mouth references have higher persuasive capacity than the Word of Finger. But is this so? I find scant information on the matter. This post on a Nielson blog was as close as I got. Witness the following chart:

What is surprising to me is not that people don’t really trust commercial advertising (duh.) but that absolute strangers have such a high level of trust. It’s worth noting here though that this is a measure of trust and not persuasion – an important difference. I may trust that you actually believed a certain product was great but whether that’s enough it make me buy it myself is another matter.

To date, most of the social media measurability I have seen is tied much more to reach and awareness issues. I would argue that this is because marketing people, and especially new media marketing people are firmly focused on a technological aspects of what they do. Geeks get a rise out of the idea that Facebook is getting as big as China. A nifty statistic for sure, but for most practical business purposes somewhat meaningless.

I also believe that the discourse around social media has largely been focused on how it displaces traditional media. This has had the effect of funneling the thinking around social media into comparative dynamic which tends to force old categories to the surface. I would even go so far as to say the applications of social media have been largely focused on satisfying the same needs as traditional media – awareness, recall, exposure, impressions. This latter is probably the industry’s way of adhering to the principle of apperception.

Today’s social media industry is an art-meets-math world of stat reporting which offers click paths and session times with little sense of how these are correlated to persuasion or drive. Yet the difference between Word of Mouth and Word of Finger is at least 20% according to Nielson above and I would bet, figuring for persuasion as defined by actually acting/buying/changing behavior, that Word of Mouth (among true friends) delivers added value still.

Persuasion has always been the achilles heel of marketing and advertising in terms of metrics. Since the day ‘www’ appeared in browser windows, we have all promised more measurability, yet surprisingly little ground has been gained in measuring persuasion. We tend to now, as we did two decades ago, measure awareness and exposure because frankly, they’re the easiest measurements to make – especially online with server logs.

The bad news is, while social media can provide awareness and exposure they in fact do it less well than old media did; requiring more in both resources and attentiveness. It was much easier to buy TV time in the 1980′s and just run a campaign than it is to orchestrate a social media campaign across the splintered media landscape.

The original book Positioning written by Jack Trout and Al Ries made healthful mention of psychology, a key science in the understanding or persuasion which in turn is central to the objective of marketing. The newer edition (still over a decade old) embellished upon this even further going so far as to stipulate that a mind that is made up is very hard to change. (Think about the implication of that for a minute brand people.) Here are a few profound little tidbits:

“..short-term memory appears to be more auditory than visual, whereas longterm memory can be both.”

“Material learned while one is happy is better recalled when one is happy, and material learned while one is sad is better recalled when one is sad.”

“Minds tends to be emotional, not rational.”

“In order to change an attitude, then, it is presumably necessary to modify the information on which that attitude rests. It is generally necessary, therefore, to change a person’s beliefs, eliminate old beliefs, or introduce new beliefs.”

“Too many advertisements try to entertain or be clever. The Starch research people can demonstrate that headlines that contain news score better in readership than those that don’t.”

“We tend to think of boredom as arising from lack of stimuli. But more and more commonly, boredom is arising from excessive stimulation or information overload.”

It’s amazing to me what happens when you step outside of one industry and its lexicon (for example, marketing) and look at the dynamics from the perspective of another industry and its lexicon (pyschology in this case).

Related to this is the interesting if controversial Transtheoretical model. Conceived to help psychologists help people make healthier choices, it nonetheless provides some interesting insights into the idea of readiness and persuasion that could be applied to other fields.

Yet except for the occasional article here and there or the tromping around of the rare psychologist hired by an agency as a brand planner, there isn’t a sense that marketing is conducted as a behavioral science.

Shouldn’t it be?

Shouldn’t we be spending as much time studying the nuances of Word of Mouth vs. Word of Finger as we do oohing and aahing about the ability to ‘check in’ at a local Dunkin Donut’s to get a coupon? Shouldn’t sociology, anthropology and psychology be departments within agency walls? Wouldn’t these skillets enable a keener understanding of what all these new media opportunities truly afford us?

The Timeless Wisdom of The Price Is Right

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The man, the myth and just maybe the gold standard of Madison meets Vine meets Social Media.

Remember the Price is Right (TPIR)? Among the digerati and urban hipster set Bob Barker’s legacy doesn’t get much mindshare, but the show is still going strong, if in a more heavy-handed attempt to garner a younger audience. Drew Carey now hosts, but the premise is much the same as the original show of the 1970′s (which, it’s interesting to note, was itself a revamped version of the true original show of the 50′s and 60′s). Today the venerable Price now has a website, Twitter feed and other trappings of the modern media era.

I started thinking about The Price Is Right today when a coworker blurted out the name during a meeting. It dawned on me that even back in 1972, The Price Is Right was miles ahead of its time. TPIR preempted a lot of trends that came up years, even decades, later. As one of the vanguard programs in ‘reality TV’ (which is basically what early TV gameshows were forerunners of), I’ve come to believe The Price Is Right is instructive to today’s businesses, the media and the marketing industry.

Building a program from the constituency on up.
I don’t know if the original producers envisioned it as such but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. The entire original Price Is Right concept (I’m talking the iconic Bob Barker version) was brilliantly built around the primary viewers of the show – stay at home wives and moms. Obviously these are the women who are near TVs during the shows airtime (midday during the week). But The Price Is Right does more than target based on availability of eyeballs, it let the people define the program (how very ‘social media’ of them, indeed)

Consider for a moment the notion that being a stay at home wife or mom is a vocation no different than being a lawyer, doctor, graphic designer or construction worker. As with any trade, there are skills involved; time management, multi-tasking, organizing, financial dealing and of course procurement. This last one, in more conventional terms, is called shopping and it is a defining job responsibility of state-at-home moms and wives.

Not surprisingly, like all other professions, there are degrees of savvy, skill and quality in shopping. Good shoppers know the stores to visit for certain products. Good shoppers know which prices are high or low. Good shoppers like to wheel and deal and work the system (coupons, buy-one-get-one, frequent shopper points). Good shoppers, like any other group of skilled workers, also compare notes, provide tips and enjoy the fruits of bragging rights. In short, they too like to be recognized for their skills just as any other professional. The Price Is Right understood this driver decades ago and built a show around it.

Every aspect of the Price Is Right is about shopping and the benefits of being good at it. Additional layers of risk and reward are added to make it exciting: the thrills of roll-of-the-dice randomness, the suspense of ticking clocks and the mayhem of group sourcing (remember how the audience yells bidding suggestions to contestants vying for the opportunity to play a game?).

Social Media 1.0
Think about it and you’ll realize that The Price is Right  leveraged a lot of the principles of social media a full generation ago. Per the mention above, it provided for group sourcing. It also plucked people from the studio audience to participate thus elevating amateurs to near-professionals – the same 15 minutes of fame people now get publishing on YouTube, Flickr or Facebook. And of course every show ended with a solicitation for people to call or write in for tickets to be in the studio audience. It might be a stretch to call this ‘joining a community’. Then again, for thousands of women bound together by the joy and skill of bargain hunting, price guessing and shopping-for-rewards it could also be argued that fans of the Price Is Right were a powerful community already and that TPIR simply gave them an early aggregation point (the same thing a lot of brands are trying to do with social media today). It’s also worth noting here that advertisers would kill today for access to a captive, engaged shopper community of stay at home moms and wives.

Product Placement 1.0
Remember the stir a few years ago around “Madison & Vine”? The concept – a reaction to the breaking down between marketing and content in a fragmenting media space –  was to blur the lines between programming and advertising. It spawned forced new terms like ‘advertainment’, it led to books, brands making movies, and more than a little buzz. Before the social media gurus jumped in and took over the spotlight Advertainment gurus were pontificating on how insert brands into storylines in a way that walked the fine line between selling and selling out. Had they looked at dusty old Price is Right they’d have seen a sterling example.

TRIP was a natural fit for brand integration. Numerous products could be featured. They’d play a central role in the show. There was time to deliver a little sales pitch (I recall Turtle Wax and Rice A Roni being Price is Right standards).Think about it, here you had people watching other people guess the price of products that were being advertised to them as they played. Even more brilliantly, the Price Is Right built tiers into the process of integrating brands. Small packaged goods figured into most of the games as devices for gameplay. more treasured items like washers, driers, fur coats and ‘a new car!’ were served up as prizes.  And finally, the Showcase Showdown was full of luxurious products from every category including exotic hotels and airline travel.  All were given a collective ‘oooooh’ from the infatuated (and no doubt, teleprompted) audience. TPIR sold its sponsor’s brands hard because doing so benefited the brands, the show and most importantly excited the professional homemaker who’s middle income dreams were fulfilled with the chance to one day drive off in that convertible Malibu.

You can almost hear brands lining up to be involved. Can you imagine the premiums you’d command today with the trifecta of seamless brand integration, perfect and large viewer audience and  a narrative the encouraged participation and sharing.

Price Is Right 2.0
Sadly, the Price Is Right hasn’t kept up with the times too well. Sure is still has a warm and inviting host. And sure it has comely aspirational women fawning over the products. But the attempts to appeal to college students feels forced and out of place (most college students know the price of beer and books but otherwise aren’t savvy shoppers). The online presence of The Price Is Right is superficial and feels equally forced. It’s done little to follow its customers online besides apply the lipstick of social media by setting up the requisite Facebook page, Twitter account, flash games, and chat rooms. It looks, in short, like a website conceived by a television-centric company that read a few books on social media and shopped for an ‘interactive agency’ to work through the punchlist.

I believe The Price Is Right could recreate its greatness again in the social media age if they took the core elements of what made them great the first time and applied them to today’s blog-hopping stay at home mom’s. TPIR could leverage a brand still associated with shopping and fun and by using the tools those mom’s have come to know and love establish itself again as the expression of homemaker savvy. By respectfully reflecting what it means to be a professional homemaker today, TPIR could again find brands beating on their door for a chance to participate all the while gathering a valuable community whose data, eyeballs, input and wallets would command an absolute premium.

In the meantime though, The Price Is Right offers those of us building brands, selling programs and trying to build communities a great case study in how to do it. It all boils down to one word…

Alignment.

What The Price Is Right did was align its program, game play, strategic partners (the brands) and talent around an understanding of the lives of the women it wanted to reach. This methodology doesn’t start with tools or technologies. It starts with people’s lives and a desire to look deeper that demographics and man on the street interviews. The Price Is Right appealed to the psychology of what being a stay at home mom/wife meant in terms of worldview, self-worth, desires and ambitions. It reached a lot deeper than the execution of the show would indicate at first blush.