Strategy in Social Media

It seems the key to Social media is creating a strategy, and then making a company-wide decision to manage and stick to the strategy for the long haul. As was said in the lecture, once a company makes the decision to enter into a form of social media, they must stick with it. It could be disastrous if you were to create buzz about your brand online, then drop the updates altogether.

Once a company has made the commitment and entered into a form of social media the strategy comes into play. Like we read in Scott’s book the purpose of social media from a brand perspective is not to market to consumers, but instead to create a relationship. The key to an effective strategy then for a brand into enter into a conversation with their target demographic and manage the message to keep it succinct across all forms of social media and media.

In my experience the biggest hurdle was to maintain internal interest in social media. About a year ago, Fandotech put together our blog, joined Twitter, Facebook and placed multiple videos on YouTube. All steps in the right direction. However, the plan was to post content on the blog written by internal technical staff, and then the marketing department would continue to update Facebook and Twitter. Within six months, interest waned and management was scrambling to get a weekly blog post; over time staff changes resulted in fewer Tweets and Facebook updates.

Twitter is a Celebrity Cash Cow

Thought this was an interesting article: Charlie Sheen on Twitter.

Apparently Twitter is quite a money maker for celebrities. Kim Kardashian gets $25,000 per Tweet. One of her recent tweets for Armani (which netted her $25k) drove 40,000 hits to their website in 24 hours. While it does drive hits to the website, the article mentions that they have no data on how much product was actually sold. In addition I would assume that as companies branch into this it will become more difficult to keep a handle on brand image. The article gives a good example of 50 Cent tweeting about a penny stock. Imagine a celebrity Tweets about your product, then goes out drunk driving and ends up killing someone…

So again were back to the value question. How much value is there in PR and marketing in social media?

I Would Rather Lick Your Shoe!

The new Miracle Whip ad is pretty good. They lead is with quite a few saying how much they love Miracle Whip, then they cut to a guy that says,"I would rather lick your shoe." Then they show a few people saying how much they hate it.

The commercial ultimately ends with the statement that Miracle Whip isn't for everybody.

While it is a memorable commercial I 'm not sure it will boost sales in and of itself. Is the goal for it to go viral and just keep MW in everyone's mind? If you search YouTube for Miracle Whip you will see extreme videos with quite a few hits. People rubbing Miracle Whip on each other, etc. Interesting stuff.

Teens, Young Adults, and Me

Interesting article here: Link to Article that Harlan posted. The article states that teens are only choosing to friend a brand in 6% of the cases and that young adults (18-24) are choosing to do this only 12% of the time.

 Is this a generational or maturation effect? I would be more inclined to choose the generational effect. Teens of today grew up in the digital world and for this reason have already built the barriers needed to control the influx of media through their selective filtering. What I've found with anything that I've friended that's even close to a brand is that they spam my smart phone constantly. I recently "friended" the New England Patriots and now receive every update about every small happening within Patriot world.

Would I want Coca-Cola to spam me two or three times a day in an effort to market to their 'friends'? Not really and I don't see myself wanting that even in 10 or even 20 years.

AOL and the Huffington Post

AOL is betting on an acquisition as a play to drive hits through free media. AOL paid $315 million for the Huffington Post, this represents a huge payday for Arianna Huffington, who owns a significant stake in the Post.

The Huffington Post is yet another in a long list of specialist websites that AOL has acquired recently. Huffington is by far the largest and could serve to bring a very large audience of news readers to AOL.

Arianna Huffington explains the merger this way, "By combining HuffPost with AOL’s network of sites, thriving video initiative, local focus, and international reach, we know we’ll be creating a company that can have an enormous impact, reaching a global audience on every imaginable platform."

So the real question is, will AOL truly leverage this and its other recent acquisitions into a viable patchwork of online content? Or will it simply write off yet another huge loss a year or two from now?

Social Media ROI

How do you calculate ROI for marketing dollars invested in social media? The author explains the process like this:

1. Describe the possible investment
2. Sketch out the rationalze
3. Develop a marketing/sales funnel
4. Hypothesize how the initiative might work through the tunnel, resulting in an estimated range of dollars produced.
5. Share ROI information with decision makers
6. As the initiative progresses, assess how well the step 4 hypotheses is supported by reality

The alternative to this approach is to use the "gut feel" method used by as many as two thirds of top managers. What I find interesting is that this six step "process" is doing little more than applying a process to the "gut feel" method, with a single exception. Step 6 calls for a reality check to ensure that ROI is what was expected so the initiative can be quelled if not working.

The single best take-away from this article is the point that now is the time that marketing departments should be experimenting with the different forms of social media to build meaningful metrics that may be used in the future to determine what should be invested in social media.

Transparent Marketing

I thought it interesting to write a little piece on Domino's Pizza and their somewhat recent (early 2010) transparent marketing campaign. Domino's realized in early 2010 that their pizza tastes like garbage, had for a while and they were seemingly the last to know.

Domino's posted a loss of $67 million in 1991. By 1996, through sweeping changes, Domino's was back on track with earnings over $50 million on revenues of $2.8 billion. For the next decade or so Domino's slowly lost market share to Pizza Hut and Papa John's.

So in early 2010 Domino's took on a transparent marketing strategy to tell everyone how bad their pizza is and how they're working to make it better.

This is a good example of shifting your marketing away from purely an advertising strategy to more of a marketing and public relations strategy.

Cashing in on the Long Tail

I currently work for a Tech company. I started five years ago almost to the day. Our offerings at the time were largely ruled by network management for our client base. Typically we spent several hours a week onsite at the client to manage all things related to their technology needs. Our revenues at the time were largely driven by our engineers billing hours to the clients. This is a tried and true model that has endured for years for many professional services organizations.

In early 2008 we acquired a company that specialized in an offering called Managed Services (MSP). This was the start of our shift to cloud offerings and our first venture into a business model that was capable of venturing down the long tail. Today we are primarily and MSP as well as managing a Data Center that enables us to offer Cloud services to companies of all sizes from one and two person shops up to hundreds of simultaneous users.

I consider the small 1-5 person companies in the long tail for a tech company of our size. After reading The Long Tail I would like to see us expand our current offerings to include cloud based services that individuals could use. If we were to offer something like cloud based data backup or smartphone integration services to individuals this would move us into a much larger market. Automation of this entire process so that software could handles the entire purchase, setup and billing would enable complete electronic delivery and lower per unit cost to near zero.

A Longer look at The Long Tail

The Long Tail speaks at length of the death of the hit. No more will the hit movie, DVD, CD or single reap such huge reward as we've grown accustomed to. Chris Anderson cites the best all-time one week sales of NSYNC's No Strings Attached in March of 2000 as the last of the big hits. Anderson does good to not shut the door on hits entirely. We all have examples of mega-movies and singles that pulled in huge box office scores. Avatar (2009) and The Dark Knight (2008) come to mind immediately. Avatar did over $300 million in one week, while The Dark Knight pulled in over $600 million just in the United States.

So the hit is not dead just wounded and may never recover. We've seen the effects of the Long Tail first and foremost in music. Peer to peer networks which enabled easy file sharing started it off. Napster did its part and the music industry was changed forever. Considering that only a very small fraction of music ever makes it onto store shelves it's not surprising that presenting consumers with more variety would produce this effect. Variety enables consumers to stray away from the hits in a brick and mortar store to sounds that reflect their taste more closely. As Anderson says, "..suddenly the hit gives way to the micro hit...top 40 now becomes top 40,000 or 400,000..)

For media products, this move makes perfect sense even today. With the internet freely (so to speak) available and electronic storage costs so low any product that can be delivered electronically can also be stocked regardless of expected sales. Anderson explains that there are three levels of retailers or "Three steps to infinite variety." Physical stores such as Tower Records, which sees a profit cut-off point for items which do not move a minimum of units. Hybrid retailers such as Amazon offer both worlds by leveraging physical warehouse storage space, fast shipping as will as electronic storage and delivery wherever possible.

Pure digital retailers like Rhapsody are able to take full advantage of the head and tail through non-existent additional overhead costs for carrying products (music in this case) quite a ways down the tail. Large retailers are beginning to understand the power of this concept and are moving towards a hybrid approach. For Example Target and Walmart now offer a much larger variety of products on their websites than you find in their stores.

Another excellent concept that Anderson writes about is the Long Tail theory in shaping company or product image. The typical consumer will no longer simply wander into their nearest Sears to buy a new washer and dryer. They first Google it. The top hits that Google returns to them will more than likely help shape their purchase decision. The example that Anderson uses speaks of "Dell Hell." We can still see the effects of a single person's blog shaping the public image of computer retail giant, Dell. In the words of Anderson,"The ants have megaphones."

Anita Elberse offers an opposing viewpoint in her Harvard Business review article, Should you invest in the Long Tail? Elberse cites sales information from Rhapsody and Quickflix to say that the tail continues to grow longer and flatter. This leads to the conclusion that marketing and sales teams everywhere should not shift focus away from the "Hit" to the "Long Tail". While I agree that all focus should not drift away from the mainstream, it still stands to reason that we should remain aware of the long tail and work to exploit it. There is no denying that the bulk of sales for many companies that are quite a way down the tail are still in the head. With that said though, Rhapsody cannot ignore the tail that accounts for 20-25% of sales.

Fandotech Blog

A couple of years back my company Fuss & O'Neill Technologies (Fandotech) started a blog. We've tried various initiatives, rewards, etc. to get employees and management to blog. The blog topics are mostly technology related and have generated some traffic. I would like to take this opportunity to get some outside input on our blog, keeping in mind that we've now all read chapters 5 and 15 of Scott's New Rules of Marketing and PR. Please provide feedback as a reply to this post. Is the blog too corporate? Does its content drive readership? What, in your opinion, can we do to make it better?

Don't Trust Anyone over 50

While consumers over 50 account for half of the population and spend more money than any other age group on products, the 18-34 demographic is still the most coveted by advertisers. This is mostly due to the perception by advertisers that once their product is associated with the Alpha-boomers they are forever doomed to that demographic.

For this reason the viewership for consumers past 50 is not even tracked. It seems that advertisers and companies are giving up a substantial opportunity to attract a large and possibly untapped portion of the market for fear of being pigeon holed and loosing other key demographics. The article mentions that the perception of "old" is changing. Will this be enough to start tracking alpha-boomers viewing habits? Can we market to 55+ demographics without loosing market in other demographics?

The Long Tail

RonAmok brings up an interesting way of shifting thinking of the long tail from sales in the tail to more of a brand or image management strategy in the long tail. From a pure media perspective companies may be better served by releasing small bytes of information more often rather than focusing on single large media releases. The Long Tail will overall result in more exposure using the smaller, more often released strategy. These smaller, more often released media bytes increase the chance for the double-value curve that is discussed.

Chris Anderson does a good job of summarizing his 250 page book into a 9 minute video clip. The Long Tail concept is powerful and will become only more powerful as new markets enter the Long Tail. The new long tail markets represent the industries where technology continues to reduce cost of delivery. A good example of this is from Anderson’s book, where he discusses the desktop fabricator, which is capable of creating an object to any specifications.

Let's Begin with Marketing!

Whether talking about churning ads through television or leveraging blogs marketing is best summed up with Peter Drucker’s statement, “The aim of marketing is to make selling unnecessary.”

In my opinion, the video “What is Marketing?” was quite entertaining and spoke to plenty of the stigmas surrounding professionals in the marketing space. In its simplest form, marketing is the act of bringing products to the market, once in the market the laws of supply and demand take over. The self-proclaimed marketer in the video explores this simple definition a bit deeper explaining that marketers leave this well-defined world and turn “evil” when they aim at bringing a product to market that is known to be detrimental to the good of mankind. From this perspective it seems that this clip serves as a simple platform in stating that while some marketers are “evil” most are good.

The second video, “A Short Introduction to Marketing” is just that. It serves as an introduction to marketing in its simplest form. It introduces the CVP principle and the four P’s of marketing. The video then goes on to examine a simple example of a marketing practice and the cyclical nature of planning, marketing, bringing the product to market and gaining feedback. This look at marketing is focused on the traditional approach without accounting for the recent paradigm shift in marketing to the internet.

Professor Philip Kotler presents his definition of marketing as (CCDVTMP) create, communicate and deliver value to a target market at a profit. What’s interesting about this video is the discussion on managing the brand for an organization. What we’ve seen recently is a departure from this school of thought. In The Long Tail, Anderson talks about the recent “marketing” campaign by GM to boost sales of the Tahoe during the gasoline price spike in 2006. In this case the decision was made to create a forum for any and everybody to upload potential commercials to the internet on GM’s website. This was originally thought to be detrimental when multiple negative ads were posted on the site, yet proved to be quite effective in boosting sales. This move took the years of brand management that GM has invested in and threw it out the window, yet proved effective.

Seth Godin presents marketing as, spreading your idea to your audience. Godin starts out with a brief look at where marketing used to flourish. Television. Seth then explores the shift in marketing to targeting the innovators and early adopters since the early and late majority who are exceptionally good at ignoring marketing efforts. “Sell to people who are listening and maybe they’ll tell their friends.” The riskiest thing that a company can do is be average and safe.

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When the Customer Became Important

My Thoughts on Webster’s Expanding Your Network article:

Traditional marketing is antiquated. The new focus of marketing as stated in the article is the focus of all stakeholders at creating value for the customers and developing the company’s brand. That was a good point in the article that many companies focus their marketing efforts on things that they can control. This is reminiscent of the Long Tail point about Dell. Dell pumps millions into marketing every year touting its customer service and technical support, yet consumers can go online and search “Dell Hell” and get over 42,000 pages of results from Google. In the case of Dell, stakeholders are better suites at working to fix the customer service and support issues which will strengthen the brand through the magic of all of us “ants with megaphones”[1] out here on the internet.

My Thoughts on Haeckel’s The Post Industrial Manager article:

In a post-industrial age when it can no longer be predicted what consumers will want, how does a manager create value? Haeckel theorizes that this calls for a shift away from the make and sell managerial framework of the 20^th century to a sense and respond framework. The most daunting task in introducing this framework is thought to be getting buy in from the managers that are stuck in the old ways and unable to see the paradigm shift. For these situations Haeckel theorizes that the best method is to introduce the new methods, processes and innovations and let management work backwards to build the management frameworks to support them. This is done to create value for the customer. Haeckel uses the Xerox example to illustrate this.

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[1] Anderson