Social Media Marketing: A Good Voice

When it comes to Internet marketing, sometimes brands just can't get it right. Often even well-established brands (like Kenneth Cole) have a hard time streamlining their social media outreach in a way that's consistent across all platforms. A well-defined voice is critical in any digital marketing initiative, especially when it comes to e-commerce brands. Below are some examples of brands that have created a distinctive voice in their social communications:

Tory Burch: She is one of the few designers to speak on behalf of her brand on social networks, specifically, Twitter. She uses Twitter for off-the-cuff comments that are the most compelling … [and] for sharing personal experiences.

DKNY PR Girl: Gives real insight into not only the day-to-day workings at Donna Karan headquarters, but also into the PR business itself. Licht (SVP of Global Communications at Donna Karan) gives career advice and resume reviews at times via Tumblr. 

KateSpadeNY: Depicts the "Kate Spade woman" and her New York City agenda. @katespadeny fictitiously checks into hot spots like the MOMA and snaps Instagram photos of Central Park and the facade of the Plaza Hotel. 

Lucky Magazine: The result is a feed that balances traffic-driving links to luckymag.com with images and posts about window displays and where editors are shopping for deals.

Shoppable Instagram Photos!

Olapic is a recently launched startup that helps brands collect user-generated photos from services like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to display on their websites. In short, Olapic helps brands better understand how content converts to sales, which is sometimes one of the hardest aspects of ecommerce conversion to track. Olapic is now cash flow positive selling their software as a service to hundreds of brands including NastyGirl, BaubleBar, New Balance, Steve Madden and Reef.  

During Olapic's Beta clients saw a conversion from 5 to 7 percent when they displayed user generated photos. Clickthrough rates on the most engaging photos were anywhere between 15 - 20 percent. Another interesting finding is although Olapic has a button where users can take a photo down from the e-retailer website, out of the 100,000 photos posted on e-retailer sites only one user has taken their photo down. Furthermore, the youngest demographic really desires a platform to further engage with the brand over a brand marketing to them.

Mobile is the Future but Culturally We’ll need to Adapt

Mobile is the Future but Culturally We’ll need to Adapt

I’m a firm believer in many technology aficionados prediction that mobile technology is the future; many would argue the “connected” world has already made the transition.  I would say Yes and No.

Sure, if you want to make a 6 second funny video on Vine or upload a breaking news story to YouTube from your mobile is definitely the trend.  Collectively the Internet using population, for purely social reasons, has made the jump.  However, what about major life events? Would you use your mobile device to submit a resume online (those services that require a little more information than uploading a cover letter and resume), submitting a college application, or completing that 20 page report for your boss?  In most cases no.

In order for us (us = internet using people) to completely make the change it will require institutions to also adapt to the growing trend.  Will education institutions, corporations, etc. make everything mobile friendly? Since most of these organizations are slow movers on new technology I think we are a ways off (10 years) from truly being a mobile device dependent society but we’re close.  All it takes is some genius entrepreneur to disrupt the system and make it easy for “The Man” to take the plunge.

What do you think? Are we closer than I think?

Ebay Now

Further bridging the gap between the brick & mortar store and online stores further, Ebay Now is a new service offered by EBay in select markets (i.e. San Francisco and New York only for now) in the United States.  The service claims to be able to deliver products from your local Home Depot, Macy's, Toys R Us, etc. in a approx. 1 hour.  They provide this service for a delivery fee of $5.

 

I decided to give it a try a couple of weeks ago, and it worked as advertised.  This products showed up in a little over 1 hour. In addition, Ebay threw in a free delivery for trying out the service.

 

I would recommend this service for the busy or lazy professionals who need stuff from local stores, but don't have the time or the will (like the writer) to go to the local store to make the purchases.

Amber Alert

Even though I received warnings through this system when FEMA warned us east coasters of Hurricane Sandy, I didn’t really give it much thought until I received an Amber Alert through the same system while in California this past week.  If you haven’t already received one, the alerts I’m referring to are administered by FEMA via smartphones in an opt-out program and have in their short history been used for severe weather warnings and to provide information on child kidnappings as they are unfolding.  I am both impressed that the government and private companies are able to orchestrate this deployment of information and thankful they have put this opt-out program in place.

One thing I found particularly interesting in the Take Two article “Were you awakened by the Amber Alert? Here's why and how to turn itoff” was that there are local alerts, statewide alerts, and presidential alerts and, according to the article, we do not have the option to opt out of the presidential alerts.  I would never want to opt of any of these alerts, but find it interesting that I don’t even have the option to do so.  I imagine that there are many people that take huge issue with this.

I’m even more interested to see who the first person or group will be to hack this capability and what message they will send.  Perhaps they will be able to send an image, not just the current 90 characters of text.  Maybe a damning photo, real or not, during presidential election polling hours.  Maybe false news of terrorist activity to invoke widespread panic.  I think it’s not a questions of if, but when, this will happen.

Facebook Even More Powerful Potential Than Thought

As mentioned in last week’s post, Facebook Rewarded for Monetizing Mobile Digital Marketing, the most popular social network site is finally being rewarded by investors for, well, its social network. With its stock back at IPO highs, many investors are wondering what comes next for the still emerging company. A recent study by Stanford University and Facebook Data Science team discovered an interesting insight into the inner workings of Facebook and the factors that determine the linear relationship between a user’s posts/status updates and its visibility.  Specifically:

·      The study looked 220,000 user profiles during a one month period. It examined users’ posts, the number of comments and “likes” that post received, then the researchers crosschecked those posts against internal Facebook data to see how many actually viewed the post.

·      Most users underestimate just how many of their Facebook “friends” actually see their posts by a factor of 4! The study found that the average post was viewed by 33% of a user’s network. Over the course of a month,  61% of a user’s friends see their post(s), on average.

·      There is a substantial degree of variance, however, when a post receives no to little feedback through the “like” or comment mechanism. Although those kind of posts saw an audience of 28% on average, the 90% range varied between 1%-55% of “friend” views.

·      There is a positive relationship between friend count, number of unique likes and visibility. However, the mean error rate was 8%, thus demonstrating strong variance.  

In conclusion, a user’s post that receives no likes or few to none comments does not actually mean his/her friends did not see the post. Rather, it could be a greater indication that his/her friends did not care about the post. 

Geofencing

Geofencing is a concept in mobile marketing.  It means making intelligent decision based on the geographical area.  Mobile display marketing based on geofencing is more effective than the regular mobile display marketing.  There are two different types of Geofencing namely app based and network based.  App based Geofencing has to resort on GPS for location information while network based Geofencing relies on the network based location system.  Many app developers depend on the network based location service to develop Geofencing.

Geofencing allows marketers to reach out to potential clients based not on location only, but also on other factors such as time of the day, week or what not.  New products and services are offered to the potential clients based on their location and reach them through SMS.  Of course the clients have to opt-in for location based services before they can receive the SMSs.  This is beneficial to the potential clients because they may be informed of products and services that are available locally and that they were not aware of those.  This marketing method could be beneficial to people who opt for the location based services.

Geofencing is rather one of the more powerful mobile marketing techniques that would shape the future of mobile marketing.  This new method of marketing could generate significant revenue growth for businesses if the power of this new technology is leveraged properly.

LinkedIn To Leads To Sales

I've been devoting a significant portion of my work to Lead Generation recently, and I have found that more than once, in our B2B sales environment, the decision maker could have been identified significantly more easily and reached faster by order of magnitude by simply leveraging the professional networks of colleagues.

Is it that the physical walls that separate Sales from Product are translating to the online world and preventing the bridging of structural holes in networks? Or, and I favor this view, is it the fact the because LinkedIn is used to network for job-finding, people seldom look for people in their current organization, thus reducing the reach of the professional network that Sales can tap into in order to generate leads?

Because I favor the latter view, my current recommendation to anyone in charge of lead generation is to take a proactive role in training Sales and Product people alike in the benefits of searching in linked as well as promoting a culture of internal networking, especially where B2B business is conducted in verticals with high degrees of specialization.

Transforming the business model - from analog to digital

Most consumer-facing businesses are now using digital tools to get closer to customers. Far fewer are close to completing the challenging but essential journey to a holistic, integrated model, with shared assets and platforms, and an overarching digital approach.

For most of these same companies, the focus over the last decade has been on globalizing the business model and its constituent processes and services, from finance to HR to supply chain management. Migrating from local to regional to global models, they’ve reaped big benefits in operational efficiency and scale.

Now the stage is set for a major convergence, whereby the globalized business model meets a digitized, increasingly customer-connected value chain. Instead of treating new digital efforts as isolated projects, companies have begun working toward a holistic, integrated global digital business model, with shared digital assets and platforms and an overarching digital approach that clearly supports the business strategy.

While the journey to a digital business model will vary by sector and company, there are important commonalities as well. No matter what business you’re in, managing multiple platforms, negotiating with numerous software vendors and dealing with compatibility issues will consume time, money and energy. Hence, those companies that effectively embed digitization into their business model view all processes as being candidates for digitization and enable the fast deployment of solutions at scale will have a key competitive advantage. Businesses looking to gain this advantage will need to clearly define how they will innovate, implement, manage and monitor the application of digital solutions throughout the organization—a significant change from working on separate solutions in various parts of the business. 

The New Enterprise IT model

Look around and consider the technologies we rely on today: social platforms, smartphones and tablets, analytics and cloud computing. It’s hardly news that the impact of these advancements has forever altered the way we live — and not just on a personal level. They've infiltrated the workplace too, creating an unprecedented and, in some cases, caustic reaction for many proven business models.

To remain relevant, companies need to digitize and virtualize the way they work, updating key processes — as well as the organizational and financial models that support them — to keep up with today’s information-based markets.

Make sure your organization understands this new technology wave and learns how to ride it.  Start by focusing enterprise attention and resources on three key, interrelated issues:

·         Technology: Harness the multiplying effect of this new technology stack to transform your business.

·         Business Models: “Unchain” your industrial value chain by creating boundary less ways of working within your organization and with business partners and customers.

·         Focal Points: Identify key knowledge process areas where the confluence of new technologies and ways of working can truly differentiate your business.

Connecting the hashes...

Twitter and Datalogix, a digital media and database marketing firm, announced this week that they will be working to estimate 'offline sales impact' of tweets.   How are they doing this you ask, because you try to stay anonymous by using a Hashtag?  Datalogix obtains email addresses from stores that a user has registered and combines it with information obtained from Twitter by matching email addresses to hash tags.  While this is a necessary move for Twitter which needs to prove its efficacy in the marketing world, does it render the users of twitter to more targeting? Twitter has addressed privacy of individual tweeters by adhering to a set of guide lines described at https://blog.twitter.com/2013/promoted-tweets-drive-offline-sales-for-cpg-brands.  However, we all know that privacy rules can be changed by companies easily.

Marketing today has become personalized and customized to each individual that it is bordering on creepy.  Most digital marketers who know the ins and outs of the digital world choose not to leave a digital footprint on any of the sites.  Credit card companies, search engines such as Google, and retailers like Amazon to Target have intimate knowledge of where we are physically, what we are buying and what we might purchase next.  With so much of our information being publicly available, don’t you feel that the outcry about the government tracking information about our phone calls is reverse discrimination?

Shift in multimedia ads - Facebook video ads

Users experiences using are shifting more and more to the mobile platforms. Technology has advanced that more users are adopting to video from photo. Instagram, Vine and other companies have been introducing short video clip apps. Digital advertisers should also keep a close eye on the changes in the user experience and trends in order to capture better business opportunities in digital advertisement. Social network companies such as Facebook cannot simply overlook the shift.
At the same time, there has been a huge shift in who is initiating the experience: users. Users gain more power and control over generating contents. Moreover, users are more satisfied when they have control over when they can see the video ads. Without giving them a control, Facebook will be simply a massive collection of information and becomes extremely clustered, which weakens the users experience.

http://www.bloomberg.com/video/facebook-video-ads-are-a-great-idea-kagan-MHgBhdsARDyDpO8xmuf57A.html

An unfortunate search keyword combination?

My wife was recently looking for a new pressure cooker, which she uses to cook lentils. So it was rather scary when we found out about a woman who had the FBI appear at her door because she searched for information on pressure cookers on Google.

Given all the attention on online "privacy" these days, it is interesting to see how this story came about. Did the whole family use the same browser and Google account? And of course I'm sure we'd all like to know how to split up our family's searches to avoid this unfortunate situation happening to us.

An update to the story claims that it was not the FBI, but her employer who alerted the police of suspicious searches. Of course, that's rather scary as well...

Becoming a LinkedIn Influencer

Since Influencers was announced last year, LinkedIn has seamlessly stepped into the business content publishing business and has found a potentially potent way to attract advertising spend  According to its Q1 earnings report, some posts generate more than 100,000 views and that is likely one component contributing to 63% more page views year on year. 

With an ever increasing in top influencers joining the site and a plethora of C-level aspirants demanding this content, I don't see these trends falling off any time soon.

But clearly not just anybody can become a LinkedIn influencer.  The 4 or 5 views I get on this site certinaly don't qualify me.  What must I do to "make it" in the LinkedIn world to take advantage of the 200 million person audience? 

Short answer is become CEO, invest the time in blogging and demonstrate some serious runs and views via your regular LinkedIn posts.  All of these things are on my post-MBA to do list.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/17/technology/sharing-business-insights-linkedin-builds-its-publishing-presence.html?_r=0 

http://www.brw.com.au/p/tech-gadgets/how_to_become_linkedin_influencer_Y3xMqXDsOZmWzTRavQ5QJM

How much is email advertising is just right?

If you are going to implement an email marketing campaign, what is the frequency of emails sent that will keep you out of the SPAM folder?
This is a key question, but once you end up in the spam folder you will probably never get out.
Speaking from personal experience as an active online shopper, I don't like to receive any more than one email per week from any vendor, even the ones that I have done business with.
The only exception would be for a truly special sale, but it better be worth my while!