SeattleGirl

Ad Week 2011

It’s Friday morning and I’m heading home from Ad Week 2011. I had some great conversations with folks from media companies, ad agencies and brands. Each conversations spurred different thoughts of how I will apply what I heard when I get back to Redmond and need to contextualize the content into my world which is Microsoft. Lot’s of talk of mobile and social, no surprise there. I did find it somewhat amusing when I sat in on a Ad Age panel where two ad men (that’s what they call themselves) reminisced about the good of days when an ad was and ad was an ad. No confusion about is it social, is it viral, will people share it, tweet it, view it?? I also was struck by what a disconnect still exists between the NY ad world and Silicon Valley. While New Yorkers certainly know and love Facebook and Twitter I was hard pressed to find folks that had actually been out to the Bay area and immersed themselves in that culture.  There is certainly still a line that exists between Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley – which surprises me. New York is still talks in TRPs and San Fran is about CPCs. These worlds need to come closer together to find value in each others offerings.

At the end of my panel on Thursday I was asked by a reporter from Dubai what I think the next three biggest things are for marketers. I thought it was a pretty good question and would make a good blog post so here is what I told her;

• New Markets of Time – I stole this phrase from a great presentation I saw given by the VP of Marketing at ESPN. The evolution of mobile usage with smart phones and tablets have opened up a whole new opportunity for media. Where we all used to stand at bus stops, ride on trains, fly on planes and stand at kids ballgames with nothing else to do but watch we now have devices that entertain and inform wherever we go. This is a  new market of time that used to not exist for media opportunities. Now people shop 24/7 and retailers should understand how to better communicate value to their customers while they are standing in that grocery line. What’s more ESPN was able to measure across their 4 screen strategy to understand that these new distribution channels (ipad and smart phone apps) do not cannibalize their TV viewing time but in fact increase usage time of their moderate to heavy users. Where before a consumer would turn on ESPN when they got home to check scores, now they check scores during the commute or in the grocery line, but they will still tune it at home. This is key to understand because it will determine how content providers should be thinking about their content distribution.  
  
• Content is fluid – I was asked by someone how Microsoft thinks about the 30 second spot and I told them that I hope we don’t think about a 30 second spot anymore. What we should be thinking about is how to create great content that tells compelling stories and let that content take whatever format fits the channel. It may be cut into 15 and 30 second spots for TV, but have long form video for YouTube and Facebook to entertain. Maybe it’s a series of customer testimonials that get posted on our .com site but also run in vignettes on XBox Live. I want to think of content as great stories and great entertainment rather than fitting it into the model of a media format. A great example of this is what Mercedes Benz is doing. They have a series of compelling customer testimonials around car safety and how the technology in a Mercedes Benz can actually stop an accident before it occurs.  These stories take several forms, including; 30 second spots for TV, web content on MercedesBenz.com as  and  video display as part of their media strategy.
  
• Consumer data footprint across 4 screens – This I didn’t hear much of at Ad Week but am personally very interested in. Consumer like never before are leaving vast amounts of data across all four screens through credit card purchase, rewards cards, set top box viewing, web browser, app usage and c-commerce shopping and buying.  Today much of this data is disperse and doesn’t talk to each other. The real value is when you overlay all the data together to have an optimal picture of an individual consumer. Mobile payments systems are promising to bring this data together to make the best consumer experience possible by linking couponing, rewards cards, past purchase behavior and even budgeting constraints to the shopping experience. If I could be marketed to by a brand more efficiently it’s likely I would be open to push messages. For example; I walk into Nordstrom and Nordstrom knows I am a purchaser of Sam Edelman shoes and frequent their tbd department (all true). It makes sense that I would be interested in new items or discounted items within these departments but I probably would be much less interested in a mens furnishings sale. That’s hyper targeting me as a individual consumer based on data I have already given the merchant.

These are just a few of the areas I think are going to emerge as great topics for discussion as we continue our innovation planning.

Cheers!

Cable Show 2011

I spent a very interesting few days in Chicago this week attending the Cable TV Show. Normally it would seem an odd fit for a digital person such as myself to attend a TV convention but more and more the worlds of digital and TV are converging and that was definitely evident at this years show.  Cable providers were quick to point out that people still spend 33% of their waking hours watching cable. TV is not dead, in fact cable viewing time is up from last year.  What is clearly changing is the expectation customers and advertisers have for cable providers.  The constant evolution and high speed changes in the digital world are pushing TV to evolve their offering as well. Some drivers for these shifts are;

1. People want content of their choice when they want it and where they want it.
2. Advertisers want to measure everything they do and have access to rich data for quick optimization and ROI comparisons.  We are used to getting this from digital and now expect all media across the three screens to deliver.
3. Advertiser dollars with follow cable if the cable companies can prove the advertising drives someone to take an action; ie. search, video views, like

Technology was the darling of the show. TV partners are embracing the second screen concept.  More than 50% of people now watch TV with some form of a second screen companion, whether a laptop, tablet or mobile phone. Networks and cable providers are building mobile extensions for consumer to enhance their viewing entertainment.  We saw apps ranging from simple tablet apps where people can catch up on storylines with other viewers all the way to advanced ipad apps that turn the ipad into a TV remote.  There are ipad companion apps that allow some cable subscribers to access linear TV on their ipad through the wifi connection in their house, in essence creating a mobile TV in your house.  Mobile devices are now enhancing set top box capabilities to offer features the boxes alone don’t have the sophistication to provide.

Currency

It’s not hard to imagine a time soon when networks will value their shows not just on Nielsen numbers but also on the shows social currency. For example Fox’s The Family Guy has 33.5 million likes on Facebook. It reasonable to think if advertisers want to reach The Family Guy audience on TV they would also be interested in tapping into the social currency of Family Guy on Facebook and other digital extensions like YouTube. There could be a world where a TV program with lower Nielsen ratings is just as valuable or more valuable if that same program has amassed a lot of social currency.  The challenge will be understanding what is the right currency to measure cross platform buys and how would that measurement convert to buying. Digital is sold in impressions, TV is sold by a Nielsen ratings system, mobile and social can be sold on Cost per Click or Cost per View.

The biggest takeaways for me this week are;

• Set top box technology is archaic. The set top boxes we all use today to receive cable have old hardware running old systems. It’s estimated it would cost cable providers $200 per customer to upgrade each box out there. Who pays for that expense? They aren’t going to pass that cost to the consumer and they certainly can’t absorb it themselves. This is a major gap to providing a better streamline cable viewing experience.
• Cable companies are in a race to see who can provide true Addressable TV first. The data sets are available but until now the technology hasn’t been able to support this (see note above). The second challenge beyond providing an Addressable product is scale. National advertisers like Microsoft need to be able to reach more than 50,000 households in a test market or even 3 million in a single metro area. These sample sizes are too small to show impact and have measureable results.
• TV advertisers need to move away from Nielsen ratings and demand a measurement system similar to what digital has today. This will make it much clearer to the TV advertiser what advertising is really working and what isn’t. Brands will require more from creative and media agencies and will look to optimize campaigns much quicker. Media companies will be pushed harder to deliver results that until now they haven’t had to because TV measurement tactics couldn’t hold them accountable.
• Providers are still building experiences in an app world. As long as apps are the distribution channels for these two screens program extensions there will be no way for programs to offer a richer consumer experience that gets more tailored and personalized as a consumer uses it.  A second screen media extension should know other programs and movies I like to watch and get smarter about who I am the more I use it. The only way this can happen is if the program is build in the cloud and not on a hard drive app experience.
• Organization and management of peoples media library will get better.  We saw one company that has developed something called Cloud TV.  Its a cloud based solution that allows a consumer to not guess which media option is best but rather to compare real time between providers offerings. If I want to rent a movie should I go to VOD through my cable provider, Amazon, Zune marketplace or Netflix. If the show I want to watch is on Hulu Plus for free because I already subscribe I don’t want to pay Amazon 0.99 to watch it. Today’s experience of shopping around for media is siloes and challenging at best. I imagine more companies will become media aggregators of content as the choices continue to expand.

All and all some very cool stuff. This digital marketer is intrigued by where TV will go in the next 12-24 months. It’s still the most consumed media out there and it’s exciting to see advertisers pushing media providers to get better, smarter, faster. Just one more thing we can all thank the digital revolution for.

My kid is on Facebook!

Readers may have noticed I’ve been on a blogging hiatus – otherwise known at maternity leave. I had a baby in February and took some much need to time to disconnect and ‘power down’ as I like to call it. Now almost four months later I’m ready to get back to work. Since I still have parenting on the brain it seems only fitting my first blog post-maternity leave would be about parenting.  Parenting won’t be a regular theme of this blog but certainly social media has a huge impact of how parents now think of the internet usage by their kids.

My daughter this week asked if she could have a Facebook page. I’ve held out because she isn’t 13 and that is the age Facebook requires a user to be in order to have a page. That isn’t to say a person can’t create a page, you just have to fib your birth year. The reason she gave for wanting one is “all my friends are doing it!” Typically I’m not a parent that caves to that as a reason to do anything but then I realized I’m prolonging the inevitable. When the conversation first came up 6 months ago I told her not yet, but prepared her for the #1 rule when the time came for her to join any social network. That rule is any network she joins she must friend me so I can see what is going on on her page. This is non-negotiable and something I recommend to all parents. Fast forward to this week and I agreed to let her have a page. I used the opportunity to have a long conversation about internet safely, an absolute must for any parent today. Here are the top themes I discussed with my daughter:

• NEVER accept a friend request from someone you don’t know. Yes, there are people that have 1000s of friends on Facebook and use it as a network to meet people. I honestly don’t think young people have the judgment to be able to distinguish the true intent of people so on this point I am very clear, no gray area.
• NEVER post anything you don’t want everyone including your parents and grandparents to see. I did explain to her there is no ‘delete’ button on the internet but I think this concept is not something a young person can quite grasp. So I simplified the concept to say don’t post anything you wouldn’t want mom to see because I’ll be watching. As she gets older we will have the conversation about future employers, college admissions boards and other situations where a person wouldn’t want unsavory content to be seen.
• NEVER give out personal address and phone number information for any reason. Anyone asking for it is not someone who should be getting it. If she is confused by a request she is to show it to me so I can verify.
• Privacy settings: This is a big one. I went through the Facebook settings with her and explained to her what they all meant. They I double checked her page at work and it turned out we still didn’t have all the privacy settings locked so I went back to her page with her and we tightened them up. I want her to know the first thing a person should do when they join any social network is review the privacy settings and double check the settings from another computer to be sure you’ve done it right.
• No tolerance policy around cyber bullying. If my daughter sees it she is to report it to me. My heart breaks at how cruel young people can be and I want her to know there is never a time when this type of behavior is okay.

Those are the themes we started with. Internet safety is absolutely crucial in todays world. Teaching kids from the time they start using it is the best way to keep good habits and keep them staying diligent. Would welcome any other thoughts or suggestions for other good internet tips.

Location Based ‘check ins’ turn practical – FINALLY

This is what I’ve been waiting for for over a year now. Anyone who knows me knows I’m not a big fan of jumping on the ‘shiny object’ train. Shiny objects are often media darling, ‘hot’ tech companies of the moment that catch the addition of celebs, big time investors and media houses (I will not name names to protect the innocent). But what they often lack is a sustainable business plan and scale. For my business objectives at Microsoft we definitely need scale. The emerging media team I run has a framework we use to evaluate every new media opportunity. This process usually allows us to identify the ‘shiny objects’ and not fall into that trap.  Shiny objects can generate a good amount of PR for a brand if you are the first, but rarely are there ever strong campaign results to follow. It’s okay to use PR mentions as part of your KPI’s but make sure your audience is the one seeing the PR. If it’s a great PR story in the marketing trades (All Things D, Ad Age) then unfortunately even though it’s generated a certain type of PR it hasn’t moved your target audience into action, which is the goal of marketing.

My challenge with location based services has been 1. they haven’t reached scale and 2. there was no real business case to use them. That’s not to say I haven’t seen huge potential with these services. I think there are a bunch of opportunities with this technology that can completely transform the POS/shopping experience. It just hasn’t happened yet. But I am happy to say I see that shifting. Gowalla announced this month a partnership with Disney theme parks that I believe will bring real value to the Disney customer. Besides sharing photos and tips with other park guest guests will be able to view park happenings, to see maps with check-in streams and other special items. It’s going to be up to Disney to market this service in the parks so the average park guest will find out about it and use it. I wouldn’t rely on word of mouth alone to get this check in behavior to take off. Signage at the gates and and rides with badges would be a great compliment.

And this week Foursquare has also taken a leap to make their service practical for users. They have partnered with Pepsi and Safeway to connect the existing Safeway loyalty program with purchase incentives (coupons, promotional deals). By connecting with an existing loyalty program they room a huge barrier to usage which is consumer behavior. The best way to get people to engage in new behaviors is to partner it with something they are already doing. Like Netflix, people already were sending things through the mail everyday, and ordering items online. It made complete sense to combine the two behaviors which led to the early, quick adoption of a new buying behavior like Netlfix.

A few thoughts if you are going to build a program on location based services;

• Set expectation with management early and don’t fool yourself. Do you homework first to understand just how much activity you can realistically expect
• Look for ways to build the check in experience with something your customer is already doing. Don’t make things too complicated!
• Promotion – this is not a ‘if you build it they will come’ activity. Use your existing channels to promote the program
• Look for partners to help you be successful. The Pepsi/Safeway program is a perfect example. Pepsis is a product but needs a distribution chain to close the retail experience (as does Microsoft products). Safeway is a channel that sells things but needs a big brand to move product.

I don’t think we’ll see too many more of these retail experiences this holiday but I’m hoping by next holiday QR Codes and location based deals will be much more prevalent which means additional value for our customers!

Technorati Tags: location based services,gowalla,foursquare,social media marketing,marketing,emerging media

Career as a Social Media Strategist

I recently had the opportunity to discuss my career path as a Social Media Strategist with the Alimeter Group. They have published a paper called Career Path of the Corporate Social Media Strategist  and Jeremiah covers in detail on his blog today. It’s a good piece of work with a lot of in-depth observations on the life and times of a Social Media Strategist. It errs on the side of a smaller company experience which is different from what we have at Microsoft so for that my perspective probably isn’t a good one. 

A couple of observations about the report;

• Overall I would have liked to see more guidance around how a person becomes a social media strategist. I get asked that question literally everyday. I’m not sure who the audience for this piece is.  If it’s the social strategist they already have their job. If it’s someone trying to get into that field this paper doesn’t give much guidance on how they would do that. If it’s for organizational management teams I could see value to them, I’m just not sure what the action, ‘go do’ for an organization would be after reading this.
• The tone makes the role sound hard, with little reward and gratification. A lot of time is spend focusing on how the role is under resourced with lack of budget and overworked, over stretched and under valued. I would love to have seen more about the rewards; self discovery, problem solving, managing and driving change for the better. All these things can be personally and professionally very gratifying. I get a lot of pleasure out of solving hard problems in a new, unique way.

A couple of areas I take a different perspective on:

Programs are nascent with no long-term direction; I was surprised at this observation. I don’t think that the fact that 81% of programs are less than 3 years old is at all surprising given the networks we are talking about a not much older than that. I would say my experience and the Windows team I ran is about 3 years old and has advanced to long term planning strategies complimented with an ability to build rapid response capabilities and stay agile enough to still be opportunistic when need be. 

Limited budgets: I think it’s difficult to look at an absolute budget number without looking at the all up investments levels. Budgets should be a % of the digital marketing investment. Our social media budget was a healthy % of the overall digital budget which allowed us to compare our investments against more traditional digital efforts. It’s also unclear if this % includes media dollars or that’s a separate budget.  For example, if Company X has $100K budgeted for social efforts but there is above the line spend happening from the media team by way of Facebook and/or Twitter buys then a true reflection of what is spent on social media would be a combination of above the line media spend and digital budget for program management.

The Social Strategist role as we know it today will become obsolete: This I agree with. I have already moved beyond my social media strategist role to a Director of Emerging Media position. I think this happens for two reason; 1. the role should and will become part of a digital strategy plan and won’t need to be called out as a particular team. It will become core to any strategy the way SEO is today. That doesn’t mean the role doesn’t exist, we still have SEO experts, but it means the newness and specialty will be gone. DM and email marketers haven’t worked themselves out of a job, they still exist today – they just aren’t the new, cool kids (although they would probably beg to differ).  2. People who are drawn to social media strategist roles are often early adopters themselves and are drawn to the latest, most emerging technologies and as social evolves into mainstream something else will become the new ‘shiny object’. These types of people will be drawn to investigate and understand the newest trends. My guess is that means Mobile. Mobile social, mobile commerce, mobile coupons, QR Codes, mobile TV (already big in Japan).  I think the guidelines they put forth on hiring for social strategists are good. I would add a few characteristics I look for when interviewing folks; curiosity and creativity. I think both of these traits a person either has or doesn’t and they are very hard to teach. Tools you can teach, but big ideas and a passion for understanding the unknown (curiosity).

The direction my career as gone since being a social media strategist is not highlighted in the ‘what’s next’ section. I moved into a role where we look at the impact of social on our global media spend and look for emerging media opportunities and technologies that allow us to leverage the impact of our social programs and channels into impacting our global media spend. Great example of this is the Windows Phone launch where you can see engagement programs complimenting the TV spots on our Facebook page. I still use my experience in social media but now it’s focused on building stronger, more all inclusive global media programs for all our advertising brands.

Technorati Tags: social media,microsoft marketing,jobs,careers,digital marketing

Razorfish Client Summit recap

I was fortunate this week to attend the annual Razorsfish Client Summit in Boston. After working with Razorfish for five years now this was the first Summit I attended. The lineup of brands was a good one, they varied from large global brands like Mercedes Benz and Nike to small, niche start ups like Skillet Street Foods in Seattle. The variance in brands really drove home the theme of the Summit which was consistent across all presentations, be a great storyteller! Bob Lord, CEO of Razorfish kicked off Day 1 with his perspective for CMO’s. His message to CMO’s is that the expectations of a brand have evolved and now CMO’s must understand how to make the brand LIVE for consumers. The three things he sees as table stakes for CMO’s going forward are:

1. CMO’s must understand technology
2. CMO’s must go beyond focus groups or segmentations studies – suggesting Social may be the new real time customer segmentation
3. CMO must push change throughout the organization

Best Buys’ CEO Brian Dunn gave a passionate talk about how Best Buy is embracing and letting their employees lead the companies direction. “Engage your employees and allow them to change the course of the company.” Best Buy has been a leader in the concept of meeting people where they are. They have programs across multiple digital channels including Twitter’s Twelpforce, IDEAX and over 1.2M fans on Facebook. It’s a decentralized digital model leaning into the theory that conversation is good no matter where it happens, in fact they never even mentioned http://www.bestbuy.com/. I actually think there is a digital model that recognizes conversations happen all across the web but I don’t think the domain.com is dead. I still go to Microsoft.com when I want specific information about a product. The difference is when I’m looking to talk about a product, then I’m going to go to a social domain for continued information gathering.

By far the most pervasive theme across all presentations was the need for compelling storytelling. And not fly by night UGC campaigns, but compelling, authentic, storytelling threaded through the marketing bringing to life customers and employees passions. Mercedes Benz shares stories of real customers safety and survival.  Nike created Write the Future which embraced the passions of football enthusiasts leading up to the World Cup.  Both of these brands know who they are, and they know who they are not. 

I was particularly impressed by JCPenney’s CMO Mike Boylson. His position on the new world of marketing is relevance is the new price of entry, consumers can now filter out messages and JCPenney’s focus is on creating customers who create customers. They start with Innovation, picking an inflection point and move quickly to test and learn. Some will fail and a few will succeed, moving quickly allows them to get to the best and move past the rest. They have created a culture of speed and educated risk. They embrace ‘falling forward’ and have dubbed this ‘fallure’ recognizing the only true failure is when one quits. The are focused on four criteria which they measure every opportunity by; it must be relevant, connected, consistent and measurable.  An example of educated risk can be seen in their most recent Back to School campaign where they embraced a new teen trend called hauling.  Theirs is a culture where they are constantly challenging themselves to innovate and lead in their category and hoping this connection to the new, savvy social customer will put them ahead in a crowded category.

Ashton Kutcher wrapped up the Summit with an hour long Q & A. He takes an absolute view of the social web opening his remarks with “all advertising on social channels is bad.” I think this is an easy perspective to have if you are running a social agency like he is.  If you have a dynamic brand like Mountain Dew and can crowdsource a new flavor of soda to draw attention to your channel then that position makes sense. But the reality is a brand is only going to run a campaign of that size once in awhile. The question is how does that same brand attract attention when they don’t have a big campaign driving awareness virally? Ashton tends to subscribe to the market research of one position in that he says he doesn’t like to get promotions from brands and won’t follow them if they are sending coupons and promos and goes so far as to recommend brands stop doing that. This flies in the face of research that says the #1 reason people follow and like brands is for promotion and discount opportunities. He advised “stop advertising and start entertaining.” Entertainment done right can create it’s own conversation as was seen with the Old Spice campaign of late.

Takeaways:

1. Ask yourself what is the last innovative thing your brand has done? Does you culture support innovation?
2. Can you honestly say your marketing takes educated risks? Do you have a model by which you measure opportunities? Does your culture reward risk?
3. How quickly can you respond to opportunities for your brand. JCPenney put together the Hauling campaign in less than two months start to finish.
4. What’s the last think your brand did to generate a conversation your customers care about?

Good stuff Razorfish!

Technorati Tags: social media marketing,razorfish summit,digital marketing

Latest in Emerging Media – Summer, 2010

I’ve seen some very interesting opportunities coming up in emerging media and want to share what I see as some interesting trends as of now – could change at any moment.

Value Exchange This is the notion that a consumer will ‘pay’ some cost to get something they want for free. There is an exchange of value between the advertiser and the consumer. The consumer wants something and is willing to ‘pay’ a price to get something that isn’t free. A few ways this works today;

• social gaming; ad networks like gWalllet and Social Vibe will trade video views of a product the consumer is interested in for a currency the consumer wants, maybe it’s Farmville bucks or a downloaded song from an up and coming artist. It’s incentive based, you do something for me and in return I will ‘pay’ you a value that is interesting to me. It’s a win/win if the consumer is somewhat interested in the activity they are forced to do. Often times a consumer will get to choose between a list of products and they can pick the video they are most interested in.
• wireless services; imagine being in an airport or hotel and wanting wi-fi but not wanting to pay $9.99 for the luxury. A consumer may get the choice to pay the $9.99 or watch a demo/video/movie trailer, etc instead and get it for free.
• premium content: Imagine the articles today behind pay walls like ESPN and Wall Street Journal are free if a consumer watches a demo, video, etc.

My opinion: I think this makes a lot of sense and will become more prevalent.  I,for one, love free and am happy to participate in an exchange if it’s of value to me.

Current players: Hulu (watch this ad and get a free show) and Social Gamers Zynga, Playdom, etc.

Mobile video People now use their mobile device for not only as a phone and productivity device but an entertainment center.  Mobile data is now showing people are more engaged and entertained by mobile ads then web banner ads, but mobile banner ads aren’t really any more efficient that web banner ads. Enter mobile video ads. These can run is a few form factors; interactive pre-roll video, interactive full-page interstitial, interactive app launch & banners.  What I see is a real win/win is the interactive app launch unit. This appears when a consumer is downloading an app. There is a delay while the app downloads and during this time to consumer is staring at a blank download box. Great opportunity to serve a video to this captive audience. Similar to the value exchange idea above the consumer is getting something they want, the app, for free and in return watching a video. I think this concept could and should be extended to online gaming and any screen experience that is interrupted by a load time.

My opinion; All goodness in my opinion as long as the video is entertaining.

Current players; Rhythm New Media,

Content syndication In the old days big brands like Microsoft, Toyota and IBM would spend lots of money on advertising that drives consumers back to their .com domains so the consumer could see the information, watch the demo or read the review the brand wanted them to see. Fast forward to today and consumers are all over the web living life on thousands of different domains and it’s now cost prohibitive to drive consumer back to a web experience when they don’t want to leave the experience they are in; for example Facebook or Huff Post. Consumers on these sites don’t really want to go to Microsoft.com or Toyota.com because they are entertaining themselves on a different web experience. This means the content providers need to bring the information to the consumer wherever they are at on the web. This can be done through interactive banner that really act more like widgets. Content can be posted through these widgets and the widgets can move across the web and show up through ad networks bringing the content right to the consumer.

My opinion; these ads units perform very well, probably because the reader doesn’t know it’s an ad unit and thinks of it more as content

Current players; Widget Box , Huffington Post (has ad units that do this)

There are more emerging concepts but may they lack the scale needed to make them relevant, location based services comes to mind. When testing new media there has to be at least the opportunity to have impact so make sure the number and reach are there. Location based services still have very limited active engagement and therefore will require a lot of media dollars to drive awareness. Today those media dollars may be better spend in areas with scale, and by scale I mean millions of viewers. Each of the concepts above will easily scale to millions of users within a campaign.

 

Technorati Tags: emerging media,marketing,microsoft marketing,social media marketing

Narrowcasting

This spring has been an amazingly busy time for me. I can’t believe it’s been 2 months since I last blogged . Blogging is something I really enjoy but when work gets busy it’s usually the first casualty.  I’m getting the Emerging Media team up and running which means creating process, hiring people, creating a business plan and socializing what we do.  The Emerging Media team is a horizontal on the global media team which give us the amazing opportunity to work across all global campaigns. I’ve been out meeting with new media companies and getting a better understanding of how and where our team can plug into these new media opportunities.

This spring has also been an interesting time for social media marketers. Platforms and offerings are changing at lightening speed. Twitter announced their first advertising platform called Sponsored Tweets, then quickly rolled out Trending Topics.  Facebook announced their Open Graph concept.  Ning announced a restructuring of their business focusing on niche paid communities as opposed to being a free community service for all. AOL and Bebo, need I say more.  But as much as things seem to change one reassuring thought I have is that the fundamentals haven’t.

Mark Pincus from Zynga said at F8 this spring that when people are given the chose to share with their personal network vs the larger world they are much more likely to share with their own network. People are still most influenced by the people they know. We are all still looking for connections to one other whether it’s virtual or live. Facebook reported the most heavily trafficked day of the year is New Years Day and has been for 4 years, followed second by Halloween. People want to share with family and friends their pictures, well wishes and well… life. Enter Narrowcasting.

Narrowcasting is people sharing with people they know what is happening in their lies, as opposed to broadcasting where people share with everyone including lots of people they don’t know. Twitter is broadcasting, Facebook is narrowcasting. This isn’t any different than we as a society have done for centuries. Communities, towns, parishes, schools, families have been coming together throughout history to share celebrations, tragedies and making of history. Hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets and parks of downtown Chicago the night President Obama won the 2008 election because experiencing a moment in history is best done together. We at our core want to connect with each other – feel like we are part of something bigger than our concentric circle. But the best sharing is done with those we know. Enter the ‘Groupon’ ‘Social Vibe’ phenomenon.

Groupon and Social Vibe are about narrowcasting. Get the people you know to share in the deals you like and you’ll be rewarded. I love this concept (got a great deal on a facial for me and by BFF). Expect to see this strategy more and more from bigger brand campaigns. I recently saw an execution like this with a local cable company. If a person signed up for the cable service and got 3 friends to do the same they all got a month for free. I want a free month and I definitely want to share that free month with my friends. This behavior is second nature to Millennial’s but my mommy friends are on board with it too. Think about how you can incentivize your core customers by rewarding them and their friends and family and make sure you enable the ability to one click narrowcast it.

Technorati Tags: new media,emerging media,social media,narrowcasting,microsoft marketing

Chat with Twitter COO Dick Costolo

Yesterday I got the opportunity to sit with Dick Costolo, COO of Twitter, and hear first hand Twitter's positioning of their Sponsored Tweets program and what they are focusing on next. Twitter launched their first monetization program this month called Sponsored Tweets. Sponsored Tweets offers a good opportunity for brands to get their message in front of possible consumers that would not otherwise see it. Sponsored Tweets allow brands to buy key words and post their tweet at the top of the Search.Twitter.com page without it falling down in the stream and likely not being discovered after 10 minutes of activity (each new tweet goes to the top of the Twitter stream pushing down older Tweets).

One thing that impressed me was how Twitter is approaching their ad model. They are focused on learning and not repeating mistakes made by the pioneers before them. Seems quite a few of Twitter employees (including Dick) came from Google so they have first hand knowledge of success and mistakes Google made while developing an ad model. It's good to see they are laser focused on not repeating those mistakes.There are early signs the Sponsored Tweets program is working. Virgin America told Mashable that the day Promoted Tweets went live, Virgin ended up scoring the fifth highest sales day in its history. One learning so far is consistent tone matters. If a brand's Twitter page has been designed to offer customer support and that's what followers have come to expect followers will not be happy if a brand all of the sudden become a pitch machine and laden's their tweet with heavy marketing messages. Because resonance is a determining factor in which tweets make it into the Sponsored Tweets a brand will be hurt by irrelevant tweets that drive followers to unfollow that brand. Unfollows will drop the resonance score.

There are still open question around the Sponsored Tweets program. Currently the cost model is CPM but they hope to go to a cost per engagement model when they have more data that will allow them to price a cost per engagement. At present there isn't enough data to understand the real impact Sponsored Tweets will have. Brands will be able to buy key words around events, like the World Cup or Superbowl but it's unclear how they will monitor brands buying common search topics like Justin Bieber. He's been a top trending topic on Twitter for weeks but should Twitter be selling advertising against a person or an untimely event like the death of Michael Jackson which also was a top trending topic? Twitter activity is largely driven around events and brands will likely pay dearly to show their tweets to World Cup followers who are searching for game day conversations. Or imagine a sponsor of a major concert series wanting to reach consumers at the concert in real time. Look for Twitter to bring Sponsored Tweets to 3rd party developers such as Seismic and Tweetdeck and offer rev share for partners who support Sponsored Tweets.

Annotation is another feature Twitter announced at their Chirp Developer conference. The best way to think about annotations is Sticky Bits meets Twitter. An annotation can be added to a Tweet and that icon contains information that can be viewed by clicking the annotation. Imagine linking a movie trailer to a tweet so followers could view the trailer or local movie times by one click on the annotation. Or say you are Britney Spears and you are releasing a new single. The annotation could play 20 seconds of the song when a follower clicks on it. That song stays attached to the tweet as people retweet.

Twitter refers to their conversations as an interest graph rather than a social graph. Facebook is all about the social graph because it's connected by conversations with people you know and are social with. Twitter is connected by conversation that interest you. Look for Twitter to find ways to lean into an interest graph as they evolve their Sponsored Tweets program. They have the data that says who I follow so they could likely serve tweets to me by brands that fit my interests. I follow Kate Spade and Stella McCartney so it's logical to assume I would be interested in sponsored tweets by Nordstrom.

Facebook announces Open Graph

Today at F8 Facebook announced radical changes to their API offerings. They introduced a concept they call Open Graph. By using something called Social PlugIn's any website can benefit from the social currency they have on Facebook. Social currency is the value a brand has in the people connected to it on Facebook. It works like this; If Toyota runs an ad on Facebook and they have lots of fans, every time someone on Facebook sees the ad they also see people they know that already 'liked' it. This is important because Facebook has data that says social currency in ads perform better than ads with no social currency. Meaning, people are more engaged in content and more likely to remember it if they connect it to people in their social graph.

Social Plug-ins can be added to a website with just one line of code. The interaction can take several forms. A website can use a toolbar across the bottom like Meebo does now or they can add a 'like' feature next to content. I just tested this out with Pandora, one of Facebook's launch partners. I was on Pandora and Matt Nathanson started to play. I clicked on his link and it took me to Matt's artist page where I found a Facebook like button. Two things to note here;

1. This builds Social Currency. I was able to see how many other people 'like' Matt. Since none of my friends in Facebook have 'liked' Matt yet their names didn't show up. But 2 other people had 'liked' Matt and that showed up (screen shot below). The value of this to brands is fans can now show their preference for a brand without going to Facebook. I fanned Matt on Pandora, not Facebook, but it still feeds my newsfeed and sends a status update to my network. When people in my Facebook network see I 'liked' Matt on Pandora they can click on the link and it drives them back to the Pandora page for Matt.
   2. This could drive dramatic growth for a brands fan size through Earned media (impressions the brand gets through someone taking an unpaid action that drives a brand impression).The more fans a brand builds on Facebook the more impressions they drive every time they make a status update. In addition to the increased impressions they will likely see a bigger lift in their advertising since more social currency has proven to deliver a higher brand awareness for their ads.

Facebook also announced that the data collected through these 'likes' will feed a person's bio information which up until now has been static. When a person signs up for Facebook they put in their favorite TV shows, movies, music, etc but rarely doesn't anyone ever go back and change this. The information becomes dated and isn't as reliable for targeting. With the social plug in's feeding a persons bio the user data will become much more relevant and targeted for advertisers. Sticking with the example above I didn't add Matt to my list of music I like on my bio but since I've 'liked' him through Pandora he will now show up in my bio information – hence more specific targeting data.

Facebook's goal is to take the information from around the web and organize it by people and the network of friends they care about and trust. This is definitely a win for brands and Facebook. I would guess it will drive additional Facebook sign up's as well as drive people back to Facebook that have registered buy aren't regular users. For brands adding one string of code to their site is a complete no brainer. Bringing social currency to a brands website layers customer advocacy to the experience a brand could never have delivered without Facebook. It will be exciting to see how prevalent this becomes and what type of fan growth it drives.

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