Manhattan Marketing Maven

Making Sense of Social Networks

When your 80-year old mother forwards a video to you each day and your mother-in-law writes a blog, you can’t help but pay attention to the growth, acceptance and utility of social media. According to Forrester’s 2008 Social Technographic Profile, three out of four

US

adults use web technologies and tools to connect with other people and to share information. Adoption has grown from 56 percent just a year ago.

 

We have always been a very social culture. Lacking an overt class structure and the conventions of the old countries where social mobility was severely limited, we have long traditions of sharing information, open commentary and feedback, collective opinion polling and creative expression. We are a nation of voters, critics, reviewers and satirists. Mark Zuckerberg showed up millions of people were participating in discussion boards, user-groups, chat rooms and professional online forums of many stripes.

 

Blogs, photo and video-sharing like Flickr, RSS feeds, Twitter, del.icio.us and Digg are the latest evolution of our need to say what we think and tell others. Social networks are the digital extension and expression of our love of clubs and fraternal organizations, an update on Aunt Blabby’s annual newsy Christmas letter and an outlet to empower and unleash our inner yentas.

 

The early adopters have jumped into social networks to the tune of $920 million according to eMarketer, three-quarters of which was spent on MySpace (51%) and Facebook (19%). Like most early adapters the attention gets focused on the means rather than the marketing strategy.

 

Every marketer you meet fantasizes about creating a low-cost viral video that skyrockets them to fame and ROI-heaven with millions of free page views and mentions or replays in the mainstream media. This fantasy is validated by a Feed Company survey in which 71% of creative executives believe that viral video will become a standard marketing practice in one to three years. Forty-one percent of clients told Jupiter they intend to upload video to social network sites in the next twelve months. The hold-up, according to the Jupiter Research’s 2008 Advertiser Executive Survey,  is cost, anxiety about adapting existing TV creative and doubts about targeting. 

 

The critical questions for marketers are: How do we insert ourselves credibly into these networks and conversations? What’s the optimal use of this two-way communication and distribution channel? 

 

The answer begins with an appreciation of how these new networks are evolving and how people are electing to participate. Social media is evolving like cable TV did, from the broad initial pioneers who prove the concept and attract mass audiences to niche channels that hyper-serve specific market segments or aggregate content into broader sub-categories like dating, health or careers. If MySpace is the pioneer then LinkedIn is the B2B play and the contenders for other spots along the spectrum are beginning to line up.

 

 Josh Bernoff talks about a Social Technographics Ladder, a pretentious sounding 6-step construct, to illustrate how people actually use and participate in social media. This idea suggests that some people are online but “Inactive.” They basically don’t care about any of this. “Spectators” read blogs, watch videos and are passive voyeurs. “Joiners” sign up for things, create profiles and visit sites regularly. “Collectors” are one notch up; using RSS feeds, recommending and voting for content and adding tags to web pages. “Critics” are active participants posting their own content, commenting on blogs, or adding to and editing wikis. And “Creators” sit atop the social media food chain publishing blogs, posting images, making videos, creating mash-ups and downloading music. It’s a fair bet that the ladders map to a bell curve with “Inactives” at the right and 

“Creators” at the left. The hump is moving to the left as more people do more things.

 

Breakout Solutions, a Fort Lauderdale software provider, called this state of affairs a “social media revolution” and advised its clients, “Whenever a new discipline is introduced that changes the entire dynamics of what influences consumer buying decisions and how you deliver your marketing message, you simply cannot afford to remain unresponsive and stagnant in formulating new strategies to meet business objectives.” And while I wouldn’t put it quite that way, I agree. So here are five things to do to seed social media into your marketing strategy.

 

Find Your Peeps. It’s all about targeting. The goal is to comfortably intersect with your customers and prospects. In some cases you can add social media elements to your web site and to your marketing campaigns. In other cases it makes more sense to go where they are already going. Think like an anthropologist. Find your people. Watch what they say and do. Look for patterns. Ask them what they like and what they want.

 

Dare to Be Embarrassed. Social media shifts control from brands to customers. It’s about what they think and what they want; not what you’re pushing. Some think you suck. But you knew that and it’s okay. To embrace social networks is to risk being next to content that you don’t control, to receive and respond to reviews and criticism you’re not used to and possibly to take your brand not so seriously.

 

Lead with Your Long Suit. Social networks give brands the opportunity to expose things they know, showcase expertise, present ideas or designs, float trial balloons and introduce personalities. It’s an unparalleled chance to invite customers and prospect into your world. Don’t underestimate how into your brand your best customers are. Don’t be bashful. Put your people and your best stuff out there. Don’t let the lawyers tell you otherwise.

 

Play Around. We’re in the early stages. There are no proven formulas and no real best practices. It’s a real chance to play around by asking users to send in things, participate in contests, answer survey questions, sample products or services, download coupons, upload photos and who knows what else? Test and learn your way to greatness.  

 

Play to the Cheap Seats. Social media is like talk radio or old fashioned telephone party lines. A tiny percent call but everybody is listening. The beauty of having friends and linkages is seeing what they are doing and watching them experiment from the sidelines. The numbers of passive and occasional users far outnumber the hardcore players, even among the younger demographic groups.  But don’t ignore them because they’re getting off and getting their own ideas watching what goes on.

Avoiding B2B Marketing Obsolescence

Laura Ramos celebrated her 8th anniversary as the B2B marketing analyst at Forrester by worrying about the death of B2B marketing. Her piece suggests a frustration with B2B marketers still in love with trade ads, trade shows and brochures and still at war with their counterparts in sales.

She hints that their obsession with the top of the demand funnel ignores the reality of complex considered purchases which include larger teams of influencers and fewer decision-makers, require months of punishing interactions and requires the patience and the savvy of a chess master to close a sale. And while she points to a four "macro trends,"she misses some of the nuance that the best B2B marketers understand in adapting to a radically different marketplace. Let me address her trends in order.

Commoditization. Open architecture and software-as-service plus marketing-resource-management tools shift the marketer's burden from the mechanics of distribution and cost control to the need for sophisticated CRM to drive prospect engagement. Now anybody can get the e-mails out, the brochures customized or the personal URLS deployed at affordable prices. What most can't do is use real-time data or incorporate intelligence gleaned by inside and direct sales guys into presentations and create a natural, logical back-and-forth sales conversation over time.

A B2B sale is a ballet in time. Marketers need to understand the sequence of contacts and the prospect's expectations and internal process at each step. By understanding who does what to whom, we can orchestrate the messages, accelerate discovery, consideration, competitive analysis and surface the real objections to any deal earlier. Deploying customer-specific websites to store documents and traffic information help as do dedicated webinars or efforts to connect current customers with their peers in prospect companies.

Consumerism Rules. Word of mouth matters. Industry peers wield the most influence in terms of brand awareness and often, brand preference. The web is an obvious tool to distribute relevant content, give access to user groups and peer-to-peer communities and to influence longitudinal conversations about trends, tactics and evolving technologies. This is where social media, blogs, RSS feeds and diagnostic tools or even viral videos matter.

Everyone Hates Ads. Duh! Even though top management is often wedded to an ongoing balance of power in trade ads with direct competitors, the key to any successful campaign is to intersect prospective buyers in ways they trust to allow them to get the idea they need your product or service. Any campaign has to start with a feeling for what prospects read, what they trust, where they visit, what they opt-in for and who can influence their opinions. It makes the case for investments in natural search and pay-per-click campaigns and behavioral targeting and it reinforces the value of getting analysts like Laura writing favorable things about you.

Globalization. Offshore production reduces the costs but rarely does it improve the targeting or the content of marketing campaigns. Moreover the smartest global marketers understand that 85 percent of the positioning, the process and the pitch are the same from place to place. Leading brands create shared service operations to optimize the value of art, graphics, intellectual property, web tools, demos and a wide array of collateral. They rely on local or regional players to address the remaining 15% and to adapt or translate product or service benefits to the local business culture and to keep the brands locally competitive.  

Laura take heart! B2B marketers aren't as sleepy as you think. We are embracing and using digital technology more frequently and more effectively than you might see even though we frequently have to fight harder internally to break away from old patterns and expectations.

  

Psyching Out the Searchers

The fun and the frustration in search marketing is trying to understand and anticipate how people think. The mental processes by which people try to find things are often thought to be predictable, but new research in the journal Cognition, reported in Business Week, suggests that people file, sort, filter and associate words and ideas much more individually that previously thought.

On one hand the individualized processing model makes sense. Each person has their own personal and squirrelly system and syntax for putting ideas together. Just think about how people come up with passwords or how they choose to set up file folders and sub-folders. On the other hand, you'd imagine that public education and standard teaching approaches and textbooks in reading, basic math and language skills ought to net out broadly used word associations and tactics for retrieving and pairing data and information.

Ther prevalence of individualized associations and perceptions of similarity and difference have several implications for search marketing and requires marketers to be creative in linguistics and taxonomy..

1. Cover the Basics. Articulate and embed basic words that describe your product or service and the benefits end-users can expect from using your brand. Be as expansive as possible. Think of as many ways as saying the same thing as possible.

2. Cover the Mistakes. Be sure to plan on searches that misspell or use plural forms of your brand name and the product names. Embed and/or buy all the mistakes, variations, regional nuances (e.g hero, grinder, hoagie, sub, submarine sandwich) Assume that nicknames, idioms and even derogatory words will be used in the attempt to find you efficiently.

3. Cover Product Cognates. Plan to embed or buy all the products that naturally go together (peanut butter & jelly) and as many of the variations (peanut butter & marshmallow fluff, peanut butter & bananas) as you can think of. Be as expansive as possible and use both brand and generic names of product sets to be sure the customers find you.

4. Cover Product Details. Huge numbers of shoppers surgically search and shop. They want a medium-sized red cotton v-neck sweater with 3/4 sleeves. Each and every SKU needs to be specified this way to optimize the likelihood that they'll find the product on your site and that you'll maximize the value of your SEO or PPC effort.

5. Cover Trigger Associations. Think like a sitcom writer and try to anticipate which ideas, needs or stimuli might trigger product or service associations. Fall prompts thoughts of Thanksgiving. Football cues beer. And there are millions more. Remember you are trying to psyche out millions of individuals who process information in zillions of different ways.

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eCommerce Mandatories

More than decade into eCommerce, it still surprises me how out of synch buyers' and sellers' expectations are. Retailers have not universally embraced the idea that point-and-click shopping creates surgical shoppers who zero in on desired merchandise driven by 24/7 convenience and widespread product availability at competitive and comparable prices. They still harbor fantasies that they can simply translate the store or the catalog experience onto the Web and save marketing costs.

In the wake of a bunch of new data from www.shop.org and research by Lauren Freedman in www.multichannelmerchant.com here are the practical variables to insure eCommerce success:   

Celebrate Search. Huge numbers of customers, as many as 40+ percent, go right to the search bar. Invest the time in tagging and sorting the merchandise. Taxonomy is destiny. Think like a customer.  Enable shoppers to search by skew number, color, pattern, cut, size, product description, category description and product use. They are looking purposefully for a specific item. Do everything you can to connect them with the object of their desire as quickly as possible. All good things flow from this initial connection. 

Show the Goods. Use pictures to overcome the absence of tactile sensations and in so doing invest in technology and photography sufficient to answer the questions; “how will this look on me?” and “will this fit/go with X?” Show the merchandise in context. Aggregate the items that naturally go together. Display “Shop by Outfit” “Shop by Occasion” Shop by Room/Function” images. By meeting initial visual and merchandising expectations you build-in a stronger, subtler cross-sell.

Leverage Free Shipping. This is customers' favorite incentive. Eight in ten online retailers have made free shipping conditional in the last few years and customers have accepted it. But don’t get carried away. Shoppers can do the math in a nanosecond and have trained themselves to walk away from bad deals.

Compare Products. Sixty-four percent of customers say they want this feature. Many compare similar products from your collection. An equal number want to see how your merchandise compares with other merchants.  The existence of comparative information signals a merchant's confidence in his or her product line and pricing strategy. This feature is prima facie evidence of a customer engagement strategy that respects and understands shoppers. Don’t be afraid of customer reviews. They have strong credibility with shoppers. Customers want to know about peer experiences and peer assessments of products, services, prices and service.

Merchandise Your Locations. Less than 30 percent of e-tailers synchronize online and offline shopping by offering in-store pick-up or returns and product locators. Many merchants don't think about multi-channel shopping patterns. But the best customers shop all channels. List your store locations and offer directions or a link to Google Maps.

Customers rule the online shopping world. If you don't cater to what customers want, they won't be your customers. Commitment is a matter of a click. 

 

Retail Email: How Much is Too Much?

Retailers love the instant stimulus-ka-ching of e-mail marketing. You blast out an e-mail and cash flows in.That's why 54 percent of retailers say e-mail performs better or much better than other marketing programs. And that's why they'll send 158 billion marketing e-mails this year according to forecasts by Forrester Research reported in the current issue of Internet Retailer.

But when 77 percent of customers complain they get too much e-mail, marketers have to ask themselves; "how much is too much?"

Consider the case of Fashion Outlet, analyzed by Arthur Middleton Hughes, in the same issue. These guys fell so much in love with the blast-bucks cycle that they tripled their marketing e-mail frequency from 5 per month to 15 per month. Working with a list of 500,000 double opt-in customers they were generating gross revenues of $6.5 million which after deducting COGS, the cost of e-mail creative and blasting and the cost for churning names yielded $1.2 million in profit or a nice margin of 19.1%

Looking to do even better, they figured some percentage of their list was always up for shopping so the discounter presented more opportunities to more customers assuming many would would shop. By cranking up the number and frequency of outbound campaigns, the revenue doubled to $14 million along with orders and the number of unique buyers.

What wasn't obvious were the attendant costs, especially the costs of replacing about half of the opt-in list who bailed under the weight of every-other-day e-mails. In the end while the top line grew, profits fell 8 times down to 2.6% under the weight of the added cost factors. And this doesn't measure or monetize brand preference, which had to suffer if half the list defected!

Fashion Outlet went to extremes. What if they increased frequency from 5 to 7 or 8? And what if they were smarter about segmenting the list and instituting a contact strategy limiting the frequency of outbound e-mail per customer per month?

As it turns out 44.8 percent of e-mail markets don't segment their lists. Not even the basics like -- geography, responders versus non-responders, products bought or order value. These simple sorts can make an enormous impact in campaign reception, response and profitability. So can A/B testing which carves out a small number of names to measure the relative pulling power of different SUBJECT lines, copy or graphics before a campaign is transmitted to the list.

Nervous retailers, especially those facing predictions of holiday doom, can probably increase their e-mail frequency slightly without alienating customers, provoking significant opt-outs or reducing profits. But the key to making additional campaigns more palatable to customers is pre-testing and basic segmentation.