Manhattan Marketing Maven

A Twitter Sanity Check

Twitter is the new black. Twitter is the answer. Twitter is the cure. Twitter is the Holy Grail. Twitter is everything. Twitter is Oprah, Ashton, Miley, Britney, Tiger and Shaq's favorite. Twitter is da bomb. Twitter brought about revolution in Moldavia. Twitter will solve the economic crisis. Twitter will save us from all that ails us. Twitter is it. Twitter is the one.

Can Twitter be the second coming? Am I the only one who occasionally gets up from the keyboard? I suspect I'm not. If you're in the mood for a rant about Twitter check out edition #5 of Jaffe Juice TV.

Twitter is the over-hyped flavor of the week; a micro-blogging site that allows anyone to type out 140 characters worth of thought and share it with the world. It has attracted 8 million users quickly and according to eMarketer is on track to jump to 18 million or 10 percent of all US Internet users by 2010. Though some believe that the huge traffic spikes in the wake of Ashton Kutcher's race with CNN and Oprah's televised tweeting will yield 10 million unique users.

Soon users won't even have to use the key pad to participate. Greg Verdino reports that Adam Wilson at the University of Wisconsin at Madison has created a brain computer interface that enables hands free tweeting. You telepathically type your 140 characters to share with your following by thinking your post.

According to an April 2009 survey of 423 Twitter users who are on the site 2.75 hours per day (per day?)conducted by MarketingSherpa found that people crave learning from their peers and yearn for information in a timely manner. We are a nation of news junkies, gossips and yentas fueled by bandwidth and new mobile techno-toys. The study also indicates that the emotional commitment of users is not much deeper than  engagement at a cocktail party were expectations for reciprocal following, close listening, popularity and quick responses are minimal. Its about being where things are happening not about what you get out of the experience or building relationships. Twitter is transactional; quick bits easily digested.

And yet inflated claims for Twitter's value as a business-building tool and communications channel seem to be endless in spite of the fact that there is little supporting data and just a few known cases of brands using Twitter to float new ideas or mitigate PR disasters. The Twitter cheering section rivals Ron Popeil's intensity. Twitter -- It dices. It slices. It juliennes. In real life the claims run the gamut from possible to sheer hype. Consider this short list.

Twitter ...

• Enables instant dialogue; questions and responses

• Builds interactive relationships with customers, prospects and influencers

• Achieves real-time collaboration and innovation

• Creates an instantaneous feedback loop between brands and customers

• Personalizes brand-to-consumer 2-way communication

• Instills greater customer loyalty and brand preference

• Facilitates one-to-one and one-to-many messaging

• Generates buzz and enrolls brand loyalists as viral communicators

• Sells more products and services faster and cheaper

• Accelerates the two-way customer service process

• Becomes a brand's early-warning radar

For marketers hearing the rising hue and cry, Twitter is attractive because its free, its easy and its fast. You can create a page and be up in two minutes. You can staff it simply and as Dave Fleet, points out you can engage in customer conversations very quickly and interact in real time. For firms anguished about social networks and seeking a strategy, Twitter is a quick free fix. 

As Liz Miller at the CMO Council says Twitter gets you into the social networking marketplace right away with minimal risk and no technical resources. A member of the "where there's smoke there's fire school of thought; she reasons that "there's a lot of tweeting doing on; and that has to be good for business." And she argues that brands can use Twitter to cue loyalists to spend money by reminding them of sales, deals and offers, update them on scores, developments and events or answer customer questions or quash rumors and misinformation. Is it any wonder, brands with recession-devastated budgets are grabbing onto to Twitter and testing out the possibilities? 

Data from Heather Hopkins Hitwise's analytical hottie indicates that post-Twitter traffic to search engines, social networks and free e-mail sites seeks to answer basic buying questions, look for more information on selected topics and share what they saw, read or heard with others. Its about learning and sharing. Heather argues that "Twitter's clickstream profile is much closer to a social network than to a search engine or e-mail services." Downstream Twitter users go to photo/video sharing sites, personal pages and e-mail to validate and share whatever they are tweeting about. The click trail suggests that Twitter works like a billboard, a weather vane, a sextant or the canary-in-the-mine shaft cueing users about relevant offers and encouraging them to pass the word along.

The trick to harnessing Twitter to a brand strategy is finding out who is saying what to whom and when. Twitter is challenged when it comes to search engine functionality. The built-in tool is, according to Ari Herzog, "routinely considered inadequate." But there are at least 6 alternative search options to help track and follow the disparate conversations.

Su Butcher, manager of an architectural practice in the UK recommends using Twitter as a front line engagement tool but linking Twitter interactions and directing conversations to a more robust interactive website.This way you get the immediacy of the Twitter conversation followed up with a deeper, customer-driven interaction with the brand. But she cautions to stay focused and attack on a narrow front warning "this type of networking can be very time consuming and unproductive if you don't stay on topic and stick to your goals."

Twitter is ripe for experimentation. Be true to your brand personality and ethos and play with this new tool. Test your skills by grading your Twitter page at Grader.com. I got an 88 out of 100, a generous score for someone who barely understands how all this works. The challenge is to find ways to apply Twitter to your brand's business objectives.

Mobile Marketing on the Move

The gap between the hype and the reality of mobile advertising and marketing is narrowing thanks to consumer uptake of smart phones, 3G technology and adoption of technical standards that will make provisioning and creating campaigns easier. And while there's no doubt that mobile is the next disruptive technology, the battle for control and the quest to find the nexus between targeting, formats and offers has yet to be decided.

The antagonists are carriers who control the pipes and the pricing, marketers who need to decide what to sell and determine consumer tolerances, content providers looking to monetize their efforts, browser developers seeking to improve their capabilities to enrich the mobile experience and advertisers looking to leverage mountains of potentially useful targeting data. Into this mix add the Mobile Marketing Association touting the latest revision of its technical and creative standards and mobile ad specialists, like Ping Mobile, looking to expedite the process and accelerate ad agency acceptance of mobile as a viable medium worthy of integration into big brand budgets.

Consider these signs of progress, mostly surfaced in a new report from ContentNext Media entitled:" The Changing Mobile Industry: What it Means for Media Executives" written by Lauren Rich Fine and Galen Vaisman.

• AT&T, Sprint, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile, who control roughly 80 percent of the 270 million US mobile subscribers, 84 percent of the population, agreed to new standardized marketing guidelines which should make widescale campaigns easier to do

• Mobile ad revenue is expected to grow to $200 million globally according to the Yankee Group. We are getting closer to a critical mass of early adopters who can convince the next wave of marketers to give mobile a try.

• The number of mobile banner ads served by BuzzCIty in Q1 2009 was UP 38 percent over Q4 2008. We are getting traction on banners, experience in couponing and launching significant numbers of text/SMS campaigns. We are getting pretty good at quizzes, polls and contests and synching mobile media with print, broadcast and online messaging efficiently.

• The US mobile content market grew 38 percent in 2008 and mobile entertainment (gambling, porn, games, music, TV) was up 28 percent. This evidences a big change n how people think about and use their phones.

• Smartphone sales will reach 13.5 percent of new handsets sold this year with new introductions from Apple,RIM,Nokia and Google capturing the attention of the marketplace.iPhones and Blackberries have dramatically changed the way consumers think about and use mobile phones and they have accelerated consumers' trust in mobile media. The 27,000 iPhone and iPod applications have created a new market for content, especially games which account for 1 in 4 downloads.The next step is to leverage this trust and the "cool" factor to better understand what customers want, when they want it and how best to give it to them.

• 40-45 percent of mobile phone customers access the Internet on their device, a number that should steadily increase as the experience improves, costs come down and Obama's infrastructure plans get going. As browsers get better and bandwidth becomes more accessible, video will bloom and location based targeting will take hold

But in spite of these hopeful signs, there are still significant challenges to realizing the dream of having your life in your pocket. And these gating factors are serious:

1. Carriers Control. They own the pipes; they decide what gets sold, they do the billing and compile the data. They have their own agendas in terms of public policy and revenue generation. They promise highly selective targeting but don't really have the systems in place to dice and slice the data. They are big robber barons with key allies on Wall Street and Capital Hill so there's no avoiding them.

2. Seeking Standardization. Markets blossom and explode when devices, applications and services are inter-operable. That means everybody uses the same standards and infrastructure so that anyone can send or sell anything to anyone. At the moment and for the foreseeable future, the players have divergent economic interests that will prevent this. And while we are seeing parallel app stores springing up, we won't get a hockey stick uptake until all apps are available to all customers using all devices. This will be several big battles and several years hence.

So what do we do till then?

Learn from Shira Simmonds, president of Ping Mobile, a leading mobile campaign management firm. She argues that using a middleman allows marketers to finesse carriers' provisioning issues and accelerate the process of getting and using branded short codes. She also argues that keeping it simple, using proven formats and taking a test-and-learn approach will ease brands into the medium and give them the leeway to explore different creative strategies while they gauge the interests and tolerances of their customers.

For Shira, mobile advertising begins with the 6 "Do Nots"...

Do NOT be sneaky. Be open and transparent in all your mobile identification. There is nothing to be gained by attracting customers under a false flag.

Do NOT spam. Use double-opt-in names and be aggressively CAN SPAM compliant

Do NOT under estimate potential security issues. Mobile media is the Wild West. Hackers and malevolent players are abundant. Assume that someone will attempt to hack you and prevent it.

Do NOT over complicate things. Consumers are good for 2 interactions. Use them wisely. Test variations on sweepstakes, contests, polls, quizzes, games and couponing; all of which have proven themselves effective. Assume that smart campaign planning requires a 6 month ramp-up and a thoughtful integration with other media channels.

Do NOT expect too much from mobile micro-payments or location based and GPS targeting anytime soon because of the legal and technical issues yet to be resolved. 

Do NOT be put off by Shira's commandments.

An aggressive advocate of mobile advertising she sites great response rates  for travel, retail, food and restaurant clients and expects real estate, automotive and CPG accounts to embrace mobile campaigns before too long. She is seeing mobile experimentation with older demographics, even while younger people dominate current campaigns and she cites the low cost of mobile as a reason to test-and-learn sooner rather than later.

Mobile media is on the move --. not quite zero to sixty in 8 seconds -- but these developments are making consumer acceptance and campaign execution much easier day by day. With available Sherpa's like Shira, its well worth looking into mounting your maiden mobile marketing campaign.

User Generated Content: Newsweek's Rabbi Rankings

The exclusive online publication of Newsweek.com’s third annual list of the 50 Most Influential US Rabbis pushes a lot of buttons for me. Simultaneously captivating and gross, like a car wreck, it’s a great example of the power of user generated content to drive traffic and create controversy.

 

This morbid fascination with rankings and horse races connects directly to our limbic brains; an evergreen way to capture attention. Like watching an accident, we are almost incapable of ignoring a ranking list no matter what it is or who compiled it. Even though this rump rotisserie rabbi league, conceived and continued by a handful of Jewish Hollywood types, unsettles anyone raised religiously on the notion that rabbis are learned, modest and ranked on piety rather than publicity.

 

Our need to turn rabbis into rock stars, facilitated by Newsweek’s need for content, and probably better Hollywood access, drives this pre-Passover gift to the chosen people. You can just image these smart-alecks sitting around and talking rabbi trash talk, the way millions of kids talk about their baseball cards, their favorite teams or players and their rotisserie league line-ups.

 

In some ways it’s a sin. In other ways, especially since I know a lot of the rabbis, it’s a guilty pleasure to dissect the list and the changes in rankings from year-to-year. I guess that’s what Newsweek is counting on.

 

Ranked on eight criteria that read more like a shipping list for political candidates, highly ranked rabbi’s must be known, have political influence, media chops, be perceived as leaders and have sizable flocks. Ranks are influenced also if a rabbi has “made an impact on Judaism and made a ‘greater’ impact,” whatever that is, in the judgment of the

Hollywood

Ha-hamim (wise men). It’s either a testament to or a sad commentary on the evolution of the American Jewish community, from striving immigrants to well-heeled power brokers, that anyone even has the chutzpah to undertake this exercise.

 

Nonetheless you can feel the influence of different players and denominations on this year’s list. The number one rabbi, David Saperstein, a DC-insider, is called out as a friend of Obama. Number two, down a notch from last year is Marvin Hier, of the

Wiesenthal

Center

, the holocaust whisperer. Breaking onto the list for the first time at number 20 was Steve Gutow of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.

 

The rabbis moving up the ranks the fastest represent dominant movements, probably slighted in previous years. Norman Lamm, Chancellor of Yeshiva University and leader of the modern orthodox jumped up 29 places from number 43 in 2008 to number 14 in 2009. I guess the rankers aren’t orthodox or underplay the role of the orthodox movement. The second biggest jump up was Stephen Pearce who leads reform Congregation Emanuel with 2700 families in

San Francisco

.  And the third biggest jump was Michael Greenbaum, the

COO

of the Jewish Theological Seminary, fountainhead of conservative Judaism. I’m guessing they picked the number two guy because Arnie Eisen, the Chancellor, isn’t a rabbi.

 

Also up significantly were rabbis involved in next generation activities. Author Joe Telushkin jumped 6 spots, as if they’ve just discovered all his books, as did Mark Charendoff, leader of the Jewish Funders Network, the next generation of big time donors.  Efraim Buchwald of the National Jewish Outreach program went from number 44 to number 39 while the number two newcomer was Daniel Brenner of Birthright Next, the free program that introduces young people to

Israel

.

 

Rabbis falling in rank also fell down along the ideological spectrum. The number one loser, down eighteen (chai) slots is the founder of the Jewish renewal movement Zalman Schacxter-Shalomi. Down 9 slots was Bradley Shavit Artson of the

Ziegler

School

at the American Jewish University. Third down was orthodox rabbi Arthur Schneider of Park East Synagogue in

New York

, the rabbi who hosted the Pope Benedict; a lot of good it did him.

 

Also down significantly was Eric Yoffe, leader of the reform movement, Sharon Kleinbaum, pioneering gay rabbi and Elliot Dorf, who leader of the law-making committee of the Conservative Rabbinic Assembly.

 

You’ve got to wonder what these guys were thinking in making the list and how much lobbying, pressure and wheedling they are subject to. You can almost discern a liberal bias corrected or balanced to be as inclusive and politically correct as possible. But that’s the beauty of user-generated content launched into a social community. It creates, heat, engagement and guilty pleasure.  

 

Facebook -- The Personal CRM Tool for Baby Boomers

Baby boomers have glommed onto Facebook in huge numbers and are using it ways unanticipated by its Gen Y founders. If you don't believe me, believe Lev Grossman in Time Magazine, yes that ancient relic, who announced in the February 23rd issue "Facebook is for Old People."

The interesting question is ... Is this truly a new thing or a changing social phenomenon or have the biggest, chattiest, most adaptive and  coolest age cohort simply found the right technology to facilitate what they've always done  -- start or follow trends or connect and hang out with each other?

The adoption curve is a hockey stick. The Accenture Consumer Electronics Survey says boomers posted a 59 percent increase in use of social networks; a rate of adoption 30 times  faster than any other age group. Facebook's InsideFacebook blog reports that in the last 60 days alone, the number of Facebook users 35+ has doubled to roughly 17.1 million out of the 200 million global users. NPD's Entertainment Trends in America study found that 41 percent, of 11,600 boomers surveyed, visited social networks an average of 8 times in a 90 day period. 

Since online interactions aren't unfamiliar to boomers maybe social networking is a natural outgrowth of existing personal and business behaviors. People 35-44 spend more time on the web than any other age group -- 74 minutes per day on average --according to Nielsen's Council for Research Excellence. And 45-54 year olds lead the way in two-way communication spending the most time on e-mail.

The data provoked "surprise" from Russ Crupnick at NPD and convinced Adam Kasper at Havas Digital "that the growth of Facebook reflects an important demographic shift which is now a cultural phenomenon." For Clara Shih, who created the first Facebook business application which led to write her new book titled The Facebook Era, "Facebook has brought on a transformation in human relationships. Its a sociocultural paradigm shift that is a change in the way humans interact with one another, and therefore a change in the kind and quality of relationships we're able to have across our personal and professional lives."

Clara is an over-educated, Silicon Valley tech evangelist so you have to excuse her over-the-top shot at pop sociology. But she identifies Facebook as "personal CRM" which is spot on. She also sees Facebook as a humanizing force that changes the web from anonymous information to a"world wide web of people" were communication is one-to-one, subject to permissions and emotional because you see images and "get to know or get reminded of the person behind the name." This raw human connection engine is my candidate for the driving force behind the growth of Facebook. 

But I'm equally intrigued by Clara's notion that "the power of the social graph and knowing who is connected to whom, and how ... where information flows through social filters and get socially distributed" has the power to accelerate word of mouth marketing, personal referrals and even multi-level-marketing to warp drive. It also potentially changes how we conceptualize, craft, target and deliver messages to penetrate social networks and capitalize on the network effect.

Facebook, rather than changing behavior, is a personal CRM tool to super charge the behavior boomers have always done or wished to do. You can find, connect and communicate with people from many places, times in your life or associations easily and quickly. You can do so actively, by writing, commenting or tagging. Or just be a happy voyeur. You can decide who gets what information, cross-pollinate information or make new connections among the people you know and deposit ideas, news, pictures, video and things you like or care about in a central, universally accessible place for your friends, family and even business acquaintances to access. Facebook makes boomers' lives easier.

And while it might freak out our kids to be "friended" by Mom or Uncle Bob, boomers use Facebook differently than their children. They are more reticent to share information, less likely to leave comments and a bit slower to join groups. Some of this reflects our upbringing and some reflects our limited skills at uploading or cross-platform processing.

The challenge for marketers, who themselves have been reticent to use Facebook as an advertising and communication tool, are ...

1. How can you present your brand credibly in this environment? What kind of imaging and messaging will resonate with boomers in the moment? How user-centric are you or should you be?

2. Is there genuine, measurable business or customer relationship value in accumulating fans or friends?

3. Will your brand advocates/loyalists use their personal CRM tool to give you access to their networks? And if so, will it pay off? Are your core customers on Facebook and do they expect to see you there?

4. What's the most sensible and efficient way to test-and-learn on Facebook?