Manhattan Marketing Maven

Capitalizing on Social Commerce

The exponential growth of social media sets huge expectations for social commerce. Marketers, reluctant to crash the karma of evolving social networks, have long thought that the channels facilitating conversations, interactions and personal CRM could easily facilitate and probably accelerate eCommerce. 

Most brands have taken a wait-and-see approach. The conventional wisdom, till now, has been that social media is for branding and a tool to to monitor the conversation rather than an active sales channel. Most marketers have silently done the math on social networks hoping that connected networks of friends could be cost-efficient viral media channels for merchandizing products and services. 

With an average of two social media accounts per person, an individual with with 50 or more friends, depending on their willingness to tout a favorite brand, product or service, could potentially message as many as 100,000 other people. This potential media multiplier makes marketers salivate. 

But most have restrained themselves fearful of alienating potential customers or of provoking a negative backlash. Notable exceptions are the Dell Outlet who reports sales of $3 million in computers and Whole Foods who hawk weekly specials on Twitter and 1-800-Flowers who set up a store or Chick-A-Fil who gave away 25,000 coupons for a free chicken sandwich over five days on Facebook.

New survey research by Performics and ROI Research and by Razorfish suggest that social media users not only interact with brands and talk up brands, but they are actively looking for deals, promotions and coupons on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and others. 

The Performics and ROI team surveyed 3011 social network users and found that 4 in 10 talked about brands on social networks and that 1 in 4 have gone directly to an eCommerce site after learning about a new product or brand in social media. With slight variations, the data holds true across the platforms, though Facebook seems to have twice as many users as MySpace, YouTube or Twitter and six times more than LinkedIn, MeetUp or Flickr and others, which have more of a specialized use pattern or niche focus. 

The leading messages that resonate with consumers seem to be coupon downloads, alerts on special deals, offers to participate in sweepstakes or win redeemable points or online currency. Scott Haiges of ROI Research drew the summary conclusion. "Consumers are open to receiving promotions and offers from brands that they're connected with through social networks."

This understanding was validated or confirmed by Razorfish's 2009 FEED Report, a survey of 1000 consumers; each of whom has a social media account, has spent $150 online in the last six months, has visited a community site and consumed or created some form of digital media. 

Between 3 and 4 of every ten respondents said special or exclusive deals is the main reason they follow brands in social media networks. Sixty-four percent said they made their first purchase from a company as a result of a digital interaction and virtually everybody (97%) said a digital interaction influenced brand affinity. Forty percent had "friended" a brand and 70 percent participated in brand sponsored contests or sweepstakes.

Garrick Schmitt, the editor of the study, figured out "people want deals." So the key to engagement on social properties comes down to old-fashioned direct marketing techniques. And these new platforms appear to work like their older counterparts with a couple of exceptions.

These exceptions are, according to David Armano of the Dachis Group writing in the Harvard Business Daily Alert, faster uptake and greater mobility which creates the possibility of dayparting. He argues that adoption will increase and deepen but be mitigated by a growing trend among enterprises and organizations to ban social network use at work. This could create distinct daytime and nighttime usage patterns, not unlike broadcast TV, that attracts different audiences of prospects and customers and prompts different creative and messaging strategies during different time periods

Similarly the increasing penetration of smart phones and the lower cost of bandwidth will spark greater mobile access to and use of social networks and video content. This will also have implications for message development and propagation as well as audience segmentation. And as these phenomenon spread around the world and get translated into multiple languages, more and more people will buy stuff realizing the dream of social commerce.

5 Facebook Brand Success Factors

Facebook is becoming a marketer's fad and fantasy. Its growth in members, daily use and search frequency make it the place to target discrete customer groups or desirable segments and earn "early adopter" social media bragging rights. But Facebook isn't a cakewalk. 

In fact, very few brands can or will report measurable results in awareness, preference or sales as result of Facebook campaigns. Most of us are in a test-and-learn mode experimenting with the nuances of the Facebook platform and trying to fit this channel into an integrated brand messaging or marketing strategy. 

The first critical understanding is that Facebook is an empty pipeline not an on-going party. And while zillions are joining and using Facebook, they aren't interacting with you or your brand ... yet. Marketers have an affirmative burden to create connections and traffic to energize brand interactions. Just like print, radio or TV, on Facebook you have to find, engage and develop a unique audience for your brand. 

There is no plug-and-play community. It's not a silver bullet. Setting up a page or buying an ad flight merely gives you access to the masses. How you get them connected, opted-in and feeling good about your brand is your problem. 

To help leverage this channel for optimum impact, here are 5 key considerations to improve your Facebook campaign culled from a wide range of sources.

Develop a Posture and Voice. Social media is about interacting with customers and prospects. If each brand has a distinct personality, that personality needs to be present on Facebook. Before you do anything you have to figure out how your brand personality will be be presented and what kind of posture and voice you will take in this channel. 

To figure this out ask yourself -- If your brand went to cocktail party how would it act? Is your brand an extrovert madly working the room or an introverted wall flower coyly batting her baby blues at selected hotties? What would it say? How would it dress? What opening lines would it use or not use? Who would it schmooze with? Who would it avoid? The answers to these anthropomorphic questions should be your best creative guide.

Pick a Page Type. Brands can have "group" pages or "fan" pages. Each has distinct properties and technical capabilities. Facebook set it up so neither is ideal. So putting your brand on Facebook means making an initial critical choice of page type. 

Groups have friends which means your access is limited and messages are delivered to friend's "home" pages. Businesses have "fans" which means anyone can see your page but messages are delivered to the Updates page, which people check less frequently. 

Each type of page connects to other applications, notably traffic-building apps like "Causes" or "Events," with specific limitations. The current thinking is that Fan pages offer more flexibility and options for marketers, but that could change as Facebook refines or changes its infrastructure and gets savvier about marketing through more daily interactions with brands and agencies. This is a fluid situation worthy of careful investigation and consideration.

Create Strategic & Media Context. A Facebook page doesn't exist alone or in a vacuum. To be effective it has to be part of your brand's online ecosystem; the web of distributed messaging that is strategically placed online to intercept and interact with your most likely prospects and customers. Before you create a presence you have to determine what will the page link to and what is the overlap of information, messaging and outreach between or among your web assets.

Figure out what job your branded website will play. Where will e-mail, text, mobile or banner campaigns direct or deliver the responders? What will content you place on YouTube or Flickr? How will it relate or not relate to the Facebook audience?  Will you use Wikipedia, MySpace, Friendster, Baidu or LinkedIn to reinforce or extend the message to specific segments or target subsets or will it be used as a straight frequency extender or as an exclusive platform for a specific message or offer? Also how will you drive traffic and get your message to the intended audience? Will you use Facebook ads or other ad vehicles to build your following?

Once that is determined, you can assign unique objectives and content to Facebook as part of a larger marketing effort. This should be geared directly to brand goals and targeted by psycho-demographics.

Craft Content. Social media is about entertainment, information and interaction. What do you want to say and how do you want to get it across. Remember that huge numbers of users come to Facebook to fill time gaps, relieve boredom or catch up on friends and family. Your content has to fit into that mindset to be successful. 

Will you create unique content or functionality or link viewers from your Facebook page to somewhere else? How long will the content be live? What is the editorial calendar or refreshment cycle? What is the experience you want customers to have and what feelings do you want prospects to walk away with? This is not about crafting an ad; its about putting yourself in the users place and shaping the experience to direct a call to action or to prompt an emotional take-away. 

The most effective and impactful tactics we've seen so far include contests, requests for user-generated content (photos, stories, opinions), games, widget/badge downloads, polls and surveys, special offers and coupon downloads and early or exclusive access to information or special pricing. Some brands have used spokespeople or brand iconography to link Facebook marketing to the master brands. Others have created stand-alone, unique content exclusively for this channel and this audience.

Watch, React & Count. In order to determine if Facebook "worked" you need to have clear expectations and objectives for a campaign or a branding effort. Are you counting fan sign-ups, coupons downloaded, comments collected, games played, survey responses or what? 

The Facebook community is active, vocal and can react strongly, either positively or negatively, to commercial activity on the platform. So prepare yourself. Be prepared to answer questions, follow-up on complaints or customer service issues and to respond to random unscripted comments about your brand. By watching, listening and reacting you'll be prepared to tweak the approach, the offer or the content to better engage and mobilize the Facebook faithful.  

Gary Vaynerchuk's Gospel

I always thought Gary Vaynerchuck, the video wine guy, was a media hot dog who graduated from doing goofy low-rent videos on wine to become an Internet business guru. Then I saw him the other night work a crowd of 100+ at Powell's Books in Portland, OR and changed my mind.

Gary Vee is a hot dog. Glib, funny and focused he is relentless in selling himself and his brand. He took his family's mom and pop wine store in New Jersey and turned it into an online eComerce powerhouse using homemade social and new media. So it's not too surprising that he's become an advocate, a champion and an evangelist for others to follow his path. This is the thrust of his new 150-page book Crush It.

Seeing Gary live reminded me that he is a modern day Horatio Alger; an immigrant kid who worked his ass off to succeed and who keeps doing it. Part techie, part smooth talking Internet guru, part Tony Robbins, Gary believes that the Internet changes everything, destroys the 200+ year old media model, sweeps away gatekeepers at every level and empowers anyone with passion and elbow grease to have a genuine shot at happiness and/or wealth. Pointing to the fact that the Internet eliminates cost barriers for the creation, distribution and promotion of content, his message of universal hope is ... "go for it." 

Here's the gospel according to Gary Vee synthesized and distilled as I understand it.

Focus and work hard. If you work day and night and focus on the prize you'll be much happier and maybe much richer than working for the man. Gary is grateful for what he has been able to achieve but worried that Americans have become fat, happy and divorced from the fundamental energy that built this country.

Content is King. Millions of people have strong interests and an insatiable appetite for content about the stuff they love. If you know something and care about it you can create and monetize this content. You don't necessarily have to be original, you can aggregate information or display it differently.

Follow Your Star. Life is too short to do things you hate. Find your passion and follow it. Your gut will be your guide.

Social Media multiplies promotion and distribution. YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter let you get the word out quickly and cheaply to targeted groups of people who might share your passion. If you can get something viral going you can build relationships sufficient to launch and grow a decent sized business.

The Internet Levels the Playing Field. Everybody gets an "at bat" because everyone can put up a site, a blog or build a community of interest. Big media has fragmented and will continue to do so. No longer will editors and producers decide what gets seen, heard, read or talked about. You'd be surprised at the kind of critical mass you can achieve with an audience much smaller than a local newspaper or a middling TV show. 

Be Direct. Don't be afraid to talk to anyone and everyone. You never know what opportunities you'll turn up. Invite people to do business with you. Don't be bashful. Share your enthusiasm and your energy. Thank your customers and prospects early and often. The Internet widens your circle and offers you the potential to build a powerful network. Grab onto it.

How the Big Brands Use Social Media

A new study looked at the BusinessWeek/Interbrand top 100 global brands, audited and catalogued their social media activity, ranked their activities and compared the brand's financial performance to create what they are calling an "engagement database."

It's a cleaver exercise, a good PR move for Charlene Li, who left Forrester to establish herself at Altimeter, and an blogable way to point out the relative penetration of social media among the planet's top brands. The data was weighted so that those who use more of the 40 identified social channels got a higher rank -- kind of putting a thumb on the scale.

As you might guess early adopters and tech-forward giants like Dell, Starbucks, Google and eBay top the list while embattled and security-conscious financial services giants like AIG, Goldman Sachs, AXA, Allianz and Citi bring up the rear. 

The premise is "resembling any in-person exchange, socializing requires more than just being there -- you have to interact with others, instigate discussions, and respond during conversations." The study "implies value in social engagement on top of social presence -- it pays to actively and continually participate and invest in your networks."  

The authors claim a "direct correlation" between top financial performance and deep social media engagement." But this is hyperbole not mathematics. It turns out that the most active social brands do well financially, but, as the authors and Lance Whitney at CNET point out, "the findings don't necessarily indicate a direct cause-and-effect relationship between social media and sales." Its a lucky coincidence that makes a nice headline.

This happy coincidence -- the fact that the most active social media brands do well financially -- is probably a better indication of a company's culture and openness to innovation, according to Steve Rubel than a new financial KPI. And I agree. 

What's both interesting and hard to sort out are the applicable "lessons" from this exercise. 

The HubSpot Blog argues that social engagement is self-perpetuating. That when a brand uses social channels, it "exponentially increases in engagement."  This feels tautological and obvious. Hubspot also thinks that social media is like marketing hamburger-helper; extending touch points, extending reach and frequency, opening up the prospects for viral communications and starting an adjunct process for monitoring and handling customer service issues.

Directionally this study is an interesting barometer of the risk and investment appetite of well known brands in a media world gone topsy-turvy. It suggests that media, technology and select consumer and retail brands are willing to take a flyer on emerging media and that other categories are happy to wait-and-see. It also might be a rough indicator of who desperately or practically needs to better engage customers and who needs to reconnoiter the markets to extend their share lead or to save their skins. 

Get the complete study here. 

   

Setting Up a Social Media Policy

Social media has complicated the already stressed employer-employee relationship. In a tight economy where everyone is overworked and under paid and where emotions run high and staffing levels run low, a few angry clicks can turn things upside down and make public things never meant to be shared.

Think about it -- you have people who know bits and pieces f everything you and your clients are doing. They can potentially disclose proprietary information or trade secrets, give away IP that you spent time and money to create, betray the confidence of your clients or customers, reveal personal information, embarrass or defame other employees or clients or generally tell the world what a jerk you are. And while most employees won't do any of these things -- ever. It only takes one to sink the ship.

The responsible and prudent organization needs to create a policy governing employees responsibility in using social media which threads the needle between an employer's needs for secrecy and fiduciary responsibilities and an employee's rights to free expression. The law is fuzzy on a lot of these issues so your existing non disclosure agreements and/or employee handbook policies may or not fully cover you. The trick is to create and implement a policy that is respectful and sensible without becoming Nixon, Stalin or the censorship division of the Chinese Communist Party.

Lest you think this is just a theoretical problem, Dana Mattioli reported in the Wall Street Journal that in a survey 14% of employee's responding admitted they had sent confidential or potentially embarrassing company e-mails to outsiders. Many a firm has discovered that the author of a blog entitled "X Sucks" was a disgruntled employee or former employee. Plus the emergence of gossipy and insider blogs in almost every vertical fuel the interest in insider info and encourage people to spill the beans. Evidently the threat is driving growth in web-monitoring software. Optenet reported 50% growth in the first six months of 2009.

This is further complicated by the fact that 41% of US businesses have people assigned to spending time on social media sites according to a survey conducted by Social Media Today. Of those only 21.8 percent have a formal policy in place while 41.9 percent have no social media policy what so ever.

If you were a detective or a moderate paranoid, you'd now be thinking that you have access, awareness, experience and possibly motive.

Laurel Papworth lays out 5 considerations in formulating a policy.

1. Involve staff in crafting the policy. Agree on issues and terms. Don't impose anything by fiat.

2. Frame the policy in positive terms and affirmative language. Don't assume a punitive posture. Its part of building your brand, your positioning and your IP. Treat it as such. 

3. Tone Matters. Don't talk down to employees. Don't assume evil or criminal behavior will happen. 

4. Focus on the details. Be sure you cover all your names and subsidiaries. Include freelancers, contractors and vendors. Make appropriate adjustments to your NDAs and employee handbooks. Check with your IP lawyer. Decide if making the policy public beyond the walls of your firm will serve your purpose or make you more vulnerable. 

5. Look at what others are doing. To help you Laurel has collected more than 40 policies from government and industry in the US and in Australia here that you can study and adapt.

I'm impressed and proud of the effort made by my former employer SAP, a German firm, in writing guidelines that are intently sensitive to private, individual participation in social media channels. Written in plain language in a collaborative, respective tone, the guidelines aim to "represent an opportunity to facilitate conversation with all our constituents regarding the enterprise software industry and our place in it." The policy includes inputs from employees and management but squarely puts the onus on individual and personal legal and ethical responsibility for statements made online.

You can download a copy at Social Media.com.

As social media continue to grow at explosive rates, getting a viable social media policy in place is a must-have for companies hoping to grow and thrive online. Put this on your Q4 priority to-do list. 

 

 

Measuring Your Twitter Performance

I wondered how I was doing on Twitter. Just when i thought I was getting the hang of Twitter, I was derailed by Eric Peterson's presentation at the 140 Conference. At the outset  he defined the majority of "active" Twitter users as someone with 403 followers following 398 and posting 44 updates a week. By following 480 with 198 followers and making several posts each week,I'm close enough, given my demographic, to be okay with that.

But then Eric claims the "average active user" has 4664 followers following 1165 others making 108 updates per week. I'm thinking who has the time and who has that much to say? But then he points to the "truly exceptional" user with an average of 46,000 followers, following 8600 others, posting 50 tweets a day or 567 per week. Imagine how fascinating someone's life or someone's brand must be to have enough time to tweet 80 times a day to share the richness of their thoughts, feelings and experience.

Being an alpha male and a data wonk, I just had to know how my Twitter behavior measures up. Fortunately among the 11,000 existing Twitter applications are a bunch that measure your behavior against the 18 million others using the service worldwide. 

To feel less like a twit, I used the Twitalyzer to compare my @flamster behavior to others. What a bummer! The results showed that I have no influence, clout or generosity, little velocity and 33% signal to noise ratio. Not satisfied with my performance I sought out other tools to assess my Twitter performance.

Luckily I found Ron Callari's post on Inventorspot.com which listed 5 tools to redeem my self esteem. 

Tweetstats allowed me to graph my tweet timeline (1.1 per day) my tweet density and track it over days and time periods and track my following and follower behavior. It was colorful and ego-neutral.

TwInfluence gave me a rank of 61,649 or 48% (of what I don't know) with "high average" social capital and 475,964 secondary followers which felt pretty good; a lot like those 8 million people in my LinkedIn network. For a moment I was feeling like my voice was being heard  until I compared my scores to Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) who is the leader in reach, velocity and social capital outpacing Twitterers like the New York Times, The Onion, John McCain and NPR not too mention Larry King or Oprah.

TwitterAnalyzer allowed me to view a full range of graphs outlining my paltry efforts on Twitter. Evidently I fell off the face of Twitter on 5/22 but then bounced back with avengence by spiking in followers. 

TwitterGrader from Hubspot was like an easy-grading teacher. With a grade of 91 and a rank of 223,407 out of 2,335,931 I felt like a top ten percenter even though the graph of my user history didn't print out. 

But the best feeling came from TweetPsych, a tool that uses linguistic analysis algorithms to mine the words you've tweeted to instantly paint a psychological portrait of you. According to the psychologist embedded in the formula, I write a lot about jobs and work plus education and learning, have some insight with frequent positive feelings. In terms of primordial, conceptual and emotional content, I score 75.13 on social behavior, 15.12 on anxiety and 9.13 on taste sensations. If my shrink only knew.

All 5 sites allowed me to store and print my results, tweet my results and instantly follow their authors. Being a neophyte, I did as directed.

As a data-driven marketer its hard to accept and hard to make fun of these attempts to measure, monitor and maybe even monetize my behavior on Twitter. But its clear that understanding your own value and the impact you or your brand might have is in the early stages -- an evolving mix of supposition, science, art and fantasy.

In the short run to protect my fragile ego I'm going to apply a rule I learned earlier in life to Twitter -- it's not the size but what you do with it that matters. 

 

5 Things to Do on Twitter

The aptly named 140 Characters Conference hosted by Jeff Pulver focused as much on the personalities of the presenters and attending evangelists as it did on the uses and qualities of Twitter, the social media darling of the moment. Reflecting on this orgy of self-promotion, I finally have a read on the practical uses of Twitter for marketers. Here's what I learned:

1. Use Twitter to Take the Pulse. Twitter theoretically enables you to find out what's hot and what's not and capture the real-time essence of the vox populi. The only limiting factor is the so-so quality of Twitter's own search tool and the variable quality of search tools created by 3rd parties to achieve this goal. It is widely rumored that Google will establish a beachhead in micro-search by creating a better tool to search and mine tweets.

Assuming the search issue gets solved, the next burning question becomes are tweeters sufficiently representative of any given population to rely on them as a representative or as a directional sample of public or professional opinion? Here you have to balance sheer numbers against a qualitative judgment. Zillions are tweeting. But are they following some party or partisan line (think right wingers who bombard talk radio shows) or are they truly representative of the spectrum of opinion? Does the size and weight of the tweets offset any political or partisan skews?  Do we have enough information to base a judgment call on? 

This is a matter of individual taste or editorial policy. So far many mainstream media types are using Twitter as an opinion direction finder and are counting pro and con tweets as if they were straw polls. They are reporting on the intensity of opinions expressed and taking the Twitter community seriously.

For those participating in events or conferences or watching events on TV, Twitter is real-time reaction meter. By using the hash tag convention, you can group comments and make them more findable. Probably 99 percent of the 140 character participants were madly posting tweets during individual presentations; offering individual assessments of the crowd, the food, the swag, the venue not to mention the looks, words and attitudes of their fellow participants. It was a multi-taskers ball. 

2. Join the Conversation. Tweeting is expressing an opinion -- everything from your mood to a point of view on any topic. Naturally by connecting your tweets to a broader conversation you gain traction and credibility. Similarly by attracting followers you spread your opinion and encourage others to retweet your words to even larger audiences. Brands have an opportunity to craft a Twitter page to reflect the marketplace posture they aspire to. The burden is on the author to say something interesting, different and relevant and to attract sufficient attention for that opinion to matter.

3. Outmaneuver Dictators. Because of its immediacy and broad use Tweeters can finesse government controls on websites, e-mail, SMS and instant messages. In the case of Iranian election protestors this might be short-lived since Tweets do leave a trail that the descendants of the SAVAK can use to hunt you down and arrest you. It has also temporarily gotten around controls of oppressive state regimes in several countries, though its long term viability as a revolutionary communications tool, even with the endorsement of the US State Department, is uncertain. 

4. Augment Customer Service. Several brands, notably Dell, Starbucks, Zappos, JetBlue and Whole Foods have added Twitter as a customer service channel with results that customers have bragged about. We don't know if the channel per se or the small team working on it make Twitter a more nimble tool than an 800 number, e-mail, live on-site chat or web contact forms. Customer value seems to be derived by the perception that brands are listening closely, addressing issues one-to-one, moving quickly in close to real time and then telling others what they did.  

Success turns on communicating the availability of this channel to your customer base, attracting significant numbers of followers and building buzz around your brand's responsiveness. There is also the possibility that by monitoring tweets about your brand that you can discern customer needs, create opportunities to improve customer satisfaction and gather marketplace and product intelligence. 

5. Actively Promote Your Brand. Brands are using Twitter to announce new products and services, socialize news and communicate sales. By telegraphing branded information in short messages, marketers hope to borrow some of Twitter's high tech, fashion-forward equity and to impress online customers with their sensitivity and savvy.  

Success depends on content, relevance, tone, manner and frequency. Brands have the burden to create followers or to inject branded messages into the natural context of ongoing conversations. Tweeters are fairly sensitive about over commercializing the channel and can quickly respond to perceived violations with negative tweets. You must also be forthright and overt about who you are and what you are selling -- all in 140 characters or less.

Twitter is a mass market online phenomenon. Growth trajectory of new users and defectors are both strong. Customers in every psycho-demographic cell and trying it out. It makes sense to experiment with micro-blogging  by crafting a credible brand presence, building a following, following customers and/or competitors and participating regularly in the cycles of tweeting, listening and responding. 

Use Sharing Tools to Multiply Site Traffic

Pass-along has been a constant media multiplier for print vehicles. So its not too surprising that pass-along -- now called sharing or share-to-social -- is becoming an audience and traffic multiplier for online media. In a world where you can virtually broadcast something with a click, enabling pass-along can yield incremental direct and search-driven traffic for a tiny investment in time and technology.

In a growing social media universe, passing along a link can become a tactical marketing strategy to drive direct traffic and to enhance a search effort. The trick is targeting the pass-along options so that your audience will recognize the sharing options and use them in context.

MarketingSherpa ran a test with B2B publisher Smartbrief to test the viability of sharing in a B2B environment and to validate the notion of targeting pass-along links to prospect segments. By identifying the networks most relevant to their audience and embedding icons for sharing on each individual article they increased traffic to their sites from 1351% coming from Facebook to 2070% coming from LinkedIn. 

Keep in mind that mass sharing sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit and Delicious already have massive audiences and have significant search advantages for driving added traffic. Making your content even easier to share will offer you options to intersect customers and prospects open to your brand in unexpected ways. 

Here's what you have to do to leverage this learning:

1. Identify the content you want to be passed along.

2. Structure where you want to direct traffic to. In the same case traffic was directed to article summaries rather than directly to content assets. 

3. Identify the social sites most used and relevant to your target audience.

4. Test a few at first to gauge pass-along and validate audience appeal.

5. Embed the icons and links from the social sites on each element of content

6. Enable users to e-mail content to friends as well

7. Measure inbound traffic from each source and outbound e-mails

8. Adjust and tweak based on results

 

eTailers Start Prepping for Black Friday 2009

Prepping your eCommerce site for Black Friday is as much a Rite of Spring for e-tailers as daffodils in bloom, the start of hay fever season or the run-up to Mother's Day, Father's Day and Graduation.

This year "optimiization" is on the minds of the 190 senior executives responding to the e-Tailing Group's 8th annual merchant Survey. These executives charged with leading the only real bright spot in the retail landscape are looking for the tactics and investments that are the cheapest to implement and convert the most customers fastest while delivering a satisfactory online experience.

How do I know this? auren Freedman told me.

Lauren, who leads the Chicago-based e-Tailing Group, is the doyenne and the den mother of eCommerce merchants. Twice a year she surveys the waterfront. This 8th annual survey asks operating executives what they think. It is the sweetheart part. Her ten year old mystery shopping survey is a hard, cold, gut wrenching  reality check that many of these same executives live in fear of because she measures the distance between their talk and their walk. In between Lauren and her gang consult with many of the top and insurgent online brands. If anyone knows what's really going on in online commerce; Lauren does.

eCommerce is the only part of retail showing any kind of growth and even those projections are modest. But Lauren says "management is growing somewhat dissatisfied with ROI and dropping conversion rates." Therefore according to the survey results year-over-year the top three strategic focal points for merchants are  1) greater emphasis on profitability, 2) improving KPIs and 3) applying the right resources. The objective in this recession-tossed year is profitability; defined as making your revenue and margin goals PLUS doing it in the most financially efficient way possible. Evidently eCommerce is well enough established as a channel that it must adhere to the same tough metrics that govern retail plan-o-grams and deliver the same kinds of measurable returns.

As merchants cull through the lessons from last Christmas and look ahead, they are looking to bet smaller budgets on key moves to increase revenues, drive greater conversions and keep customers loyal, happy and coming back. If you have a choice of where to put your chips, Lauren believes these tactics will yield the greatest bang for your buck:

1. Segment and target e-mail better. Most merchants are already running sophisticated outbound e-mail programs. An incremental data mining effort will yield a disproportionate result.

2. Buy better on-site search. More than half of shoppers immediately hit the search box when they land on your home page. The better the search function; the faster they find what they want and the faster they buy. Similarly the faster they find what they want; the happier they are and the more people they tell about your site. And while search tools are not necessarily cheap, there are many work arounds so that even a modest upgrade in on-site search will produce a sales spike.

3. Improve merchandising. Show more, enable shop-by-outfit, use video if you can afford it, allow shoppers to "view in a room" or store merchandise under consideration. And while the tactics will change based on the category you are in; this is about enhancing the experience and giving customers greater control over how they shop. At some point in the near future sharp search, video and even social shopping will become industry standards. The closer you can get today; the more productive your customers will be.

Interestingly, Lauren's advice jibes directly with a survey of 22,699 direct marketers done by Target Marketing Magazine in January 2009, that ranked e-mail, direct mail, natural and paid search and web advertising as the most popular tools for customer acquisition and the tactics that would draw the greatest added budget investments in 2009.

Other site features that can contribute to conversion and customer satisfaction are, says Lauren, more guided and sign-posted navigation and alternative payment forms. Customers too are looking for maximum purchasing power and satisfaction for minimum bucks. Anything you can do to show them the path to the goods, put together outfits for them and help them manage payments by using PayPal, billing it to their phone bills or their checking accounts or accepting debit or stored value cards helps move more merchandise out the door.

In a monkey-see; monkey-do business like retail, smart online merchants keep an eye on the EGEG (the E-tailing Group E-Commerce Gauge) sort of an EKG for e-tailing, which found that mass merchants seem to be doing the best job while drugstores don't. Toys and game sites made the biggest improivement in 2008 and department stores had the biggest fall. As merchants in all categories get preparations for Black Friday under way, leveraging these insights can make a significant difference.

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.