Manhattan Marketing Maven

6 Social Media Tactics from al-Qeada

Consumers have always been brand stakeholders. People have always liked, shared, interacted and promoted brands they find useful or identify with. In the olden days, brand advocacy was done face to face or over the phone at a small, disconnected scale. Brand marketers had the illusion of control. They believed they set the brand agenda and directed the brand evolution. Social media changed all that. 

Social media holds up a mirror to the brand asking, “Who are you and what do you stand for?” says Cindy Gallop. More importantly social media gives consumers a direct stake in the evolution of a brand. Two-way conversation invites consumers into dialog and, in June Cohen’s view, delivered at Mashable Connect, “lets others grab onto it and lets others run with it … a band without followers is just a lame idea.” The co-creation of a brand promises to add more real-time intelligence, infuse more real emotion and “create collaboration and collective buy-in between founders, stewards, fans and advocates.”   

“Imagine” June wonders, drawing on the lessons from the development of the TED brand, “if brand fans and advocates were enrolled and empowered to develop messages and engagement programs versus a handful of marketers sitting in a dark room worrying about how to control the brand and stave off unintended consequences?” The possibilities for openness, broad scale sharing, harnessing genuine enthusiasm and loyalty or mobilizing a larger brand community multiply. 

The trade offs are control for conversation and centralization for dispersion.

The new distributed branding model might be taken directly from the al-Qaeda playbook; enroll and mobilize discrete groups of brand advocates to develop relationships and conversations in their own way targeted to their own niches with an overarching common goal.

Let loose the reins and enable the true believers to spread the word on your behalf in their own time and way. Accept the idea that there are many paths to goodness and let them play out. Understand the brand’s marketing program as the backbone of an otherwise amorphous multi-headed creature that will make its way into the culture virally carrying and advancing the brand message. Accept the notion that marketers do not have a monopoly on good ideas. 

Should you be brave enough to countenance al-Qaeda-like brand governance, use June Cohen’s six rules of the road to “become more of a brand steward and less of a brand dictator” while keeping in loose touch with your disconnected cells of fervent followers.

1. Feed the hunger for participation. People want to belong and contribute, especially people who use and care for your brand. Let them join up and figure how best to participate on their own terms.
2. Encourage sharing and viral connections. Let the word spread organically. More sharing = more advocacy=deeper brand relationships.
3. Listen to users. They know the brand as well or better than you. They know where you should go, what you should do next and how you should frame the message. Users can be your brand compass. Mine their ideas. Co-create the brand.
4. Reach everywhere. Embrace channels, platforms, devices and changing media habits. Let the word go out in whatever form and to whatever device it naturally reaches. Let the brand advocates run with the ball. Accept adaptation and experimentation and embrace the ideas that work best.
5. Tell a good story. Without strong storytelling, your brand will die of loneliness. Your story must be distinctive enough to break through the clutter. Arm your advocates with content that they can adapt and share in a variety of contexts.
6. Provide clear strict guidelines. Enforce them. Develop repercussions for those who break the rules or violate the brand’s core tenets. Regulate advocate activities one at a time.

 

In Social Media -- Timing is Everything

Nielsen recently released State of the Media Advertising & Audiences. It got me thinking about timing and digital media. While time has been a critical planning factor in traditional media, digital marketers don’t think in terms of prime time, roadblocks or time triggered communications as much as their offline counterparts. 

That strikes me, as a missed opportunity since timing is everything in life and in marketing. Perhaps the reason is a lack of data on behavior or the absence of consensus on digital, social and mobile media use.  And yet digital, mobile and social media have distinct usage patterns. 

The average American spends 60 hours a month online visiting 89 domains and 2646 unique pages by logging in an average of 57 times. Half use the Internet everyday and most of them are on Facebook. According to BuzzFeed from a low point at 5a, Internet traffic grows steadily until lunchtime. After a meal time dip, volume grows modestly for another hour or two to a 4p daily peak which declines slowly but steadily from mid to late evening. 

Huge numbers of people wake up and check e-mail. Loads of people buy stuff online at lunchtime or post Facebook status updates during their workday. By mid-afternoon, after school, there’s another activity spike, which then is echoed after dinner, 8p through midnight, as multi-tasking consumers watch prime time TV with their smart phones, laptops or tablets in hand commenting or tweeting on plots, checking sports scores, posting to blogs or communities or looking up or buying stuff they saw on TV. And many of us also make a last e-mail or social media check before bed. 

When you think of it this way, there are patterns worth testing and probably a substantial case for marketing at specific times to address specific offers and the persistent fear of missing out, now dubbed FOMO by the pundits. In some cases, consumers use different digital platforms at different times for different purposes, like tablets for TV or video viewing or smartphones for online banking and location-based check-ins. 

Consider these data points: 

• Facebook’s most consistent spike is Wednesday at 3pm
• Facebook predictably spikes at 11a, 3p and 8p daily
• Facebook posts appearing before 9a get more comments and shares than others
• Facebook posts at the top of the hour get more virility
• Facebook posts on Saturday draw the most Likes
• Most Facebook shares happen at Noon
• Facebook CTR’s top out on Tuesday and Wednesdays
• Sunday is Facebook slowest day

• Twitter has daily traffic peaks at Noon, 4p and 11p
• Lowest Twitter volume is at 7a
• Peak tweet volume is Friday
• Peek re-tweet days are Wednesday-Friday
• Peak re-tweet time is 5p
• Highest CTR on Twitter is at Noon and 6p 

• Saturday morning is prime time for sharing on Pinterest
• E-mail has the strongest CTR on Saturday and Sunday
• Blogs draw the most comments on Saturday
• Blog posts at 8a prompt the most clicks, views and comments
• Cisco says 9p-1a are peak global Internet use times – 25%of all traffic
• US Internet use peaks at 11p ET
• Peak mobile usage is at 5p daily with a secondary spike at 9p

• Online gaming grows 60% after 2p and spikes between 8-11p
• Game console use spikes Thursday evenings
• Online video viewing peaks at Midnight
• IMing is constant throughout the day, but reaches 80% of peak at 10a

• Sharing across networks peaks at 9:30a
• Social media (all networks) peaks at 11p ET
• Wednesday is the top sharing day
• 75% of clicks occur within 1 day of posting
• Most clicks occur 2 minutes after content is posted
• 12% of all clicks come from mobile devices

According to Hilary Mason, Chief Scientist at bit.ly, social media content follows a “burst and decay” pattern with attention spiking within the first few hours of a post and then steadily decaying into a trough. Immediacy and “newness” are factors in influencing the relative reach and virility of posts. Posts degrade from birth, much like an atomic isotope. Bit.ly has tracked these patterns by network and pegs the shelf life of a post like this … 

Twitter                         2.8 hours

Facebook                     3.1 hours

YouTube                      7 hours

StumbleUpon              > 7 hours

Tumblr                        >7 hours 

These data points suggest a few testable media and messaging strategies either for optimizing digital engagement or integrating on and offline media and messaging. 

Road Block. Align and synchronize digital and TV platforms to dominate either a high or low use period with a single message. Gaming, apps and social media all have substantial traffic that overlaps TV prime time. Brands should leverage this confluence of platforms to maximize visibility and reach or to make a dramatic statement. Imagine a campaign that parses the messages across synchronized platforms in specific time frames so that consumers follow the message or collect the clues to solve a puzzle. 

Sequence. Run media to optimize efficient reach across platforms and to be sure a sustaining weight of media and messaging carries through a daypart or influences existing behavior at specific times of day. Imagine a sequence of messages that follow each other and tell a compelling brand story driving toward an offer across platforms through time. 

Contra-Competitive Timing. Coined by Dan Zarella, this strategy says zig when they zag. Don’t try to break into high volume traffic time periods. Insted buy fringe periods or slower periods to maximize reach and frequency against smaller but more carefully targeted or niche audiences. With all due respect to Zarella, this has been a TV buying strategy used with effect by insurgent brands for 50 years. 

Inflection Points. Intercept customers and prospects when and where they are doing something they like. Position your brand and buy your media to intersect and complement the experience. Better yet, enhance the TV or online experience and win loyalty and customer advocacy. This, too, is an old TV buyer’s trick – run soup ads when it rains, run the dinner special from 5-7p or promote beer during the game. 

We’ve just begun to scratch the surface in applying sophisticated media thinking and cross-platform integration to digital, social and mobile platforms. Timing and usage are variables that should help us break down the silos and leverage old and emerging wisdom about media and consumers to dramatically improve digital brand communications. 

 

Optimizing Brand Posture on Facebook

It’s hard to imagine that there are people who use social media, without having a relationship with brands. Hard as it may seem, given the endless hype, social media is mostly about friends and not about brands. 

But the numbers are startling. 

• 3 in 5 Facebook users have not friended or liked a brand
• 78% of those who like brands, friend fewer than 10 brand pages
• Only 1% engage with brand pages
• Just 4% prefer to received brand promotions on Facebook
• 60% are annoyed by brand communication on Facebook
• 39% don’t think their “like” is an opt-in for marketing messages
• 1/3 of those who friend brands subsequently drop the friendship and the brand 

Jay Baer captured this idea when he wrote, “It’s not as if we signed up for social media sites so we could hang out with software companies and hotel chains and T-shirt vendors and ham merchants. We signed up to connect with each other, not with commerce.” According to Nielsen, consumers worldwide trust word-of-mouth recommendations from friends above all other sources. 

Brands need to take this to heart when framing their social media posting strategies. Brands are like a friend-of-a-friend  -- not really invited but tolerated -- at a party where everybody already knows each other. The bottom line is, in Baer’s words, “If your company doesn’t have a social media editorial program that emphasizes spontaneous, personal, human, light-hearted, interesting, funny, timely and photo-driven content, you are swimming against a powerful tide of customer desire.”

 

Does Timeline Increase Engagement?

Now that Facebook has strong-armed everyone into the Timeline format, a skirmish has broken out over how much incremental engagement brands can expect. 

Introduced with claims that Timeline increased engagement for Toyota by 161 percent and Livestrong by 156%, expectations ran high. It turns out that this study covered only 15 brand pages over a 60-day period and covered Facebook’s beta partners, like Red Bull, Coca Cola, Walmart or Macy’s, who had strong existing brand social presence, and who switched over early and were highly publicized and hardly representative. 

When you dig into the hyperbolic work done by Simply Measured, you discover that response to status updates declined on Timeline while clicks to and views of pictures and videos went up. Increased size for visual assets easily accounts for the increased engagement activities. 

New data from Edgerank Checker based on an analysis of 3500 brand pages in the Timeline format found that sixty percent of the pages studied experienced a decrease in engagement. But since the majority of friends and fans visit the brand page just once and the real locus of engagement is on friend’s Newsfeeds, the real impact of Timeline on brand engagement is basically neutral. 

The bottom line is that the format change has little ort no impact on genuine engagement. The game still turns on brands’ ability to create useful and interesting content sufficient to overcome the Edgerank algorithm and gain access and response on friend’s newsfeeds.

 

8 Ways to Optimize Your Tweets

Twitter is an always-on constantly moving information-sharing device hosting over 230 million tweets a day and 400 million unique visitors in a month. Separating the signal from the noise on Twitter is a serious challenge. Similarly finding the right combination of 140 characters and links then timing your tweet to have any effect in the on-going conversation or to engage your followers is a shot in the dark.

The objective of tweeting is to attract followers who will interact and engage with your tweets. Re-tweeting, sharing, posting allied comments to expand and extend the conversation are the measures of success.

To optimize your tweets, try these eight tactics, inspired by Heidi Cohen.

1. Be a source. Add new, useful information. Share interesting links that you come across. Focus on topics where you are an expert or an interested student. Say something that hasn’t been said yet.
2. Be Funny. The Twitteratti love a good joke or a snarky, snappy sarcastic comment.
3. Take the miniskirt approach. Tweets should be long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to be interesting. But readers need context to get your point. Don’t just tweet a URL. Add information that gives readers insights.
4. Use a strong headline. Motivate your audience to click through. If your tweet is complete on its own, readers won’t click on your link or do anything else. Your first 5 words should be teaser/headline copy.
5. Contribute to the conversation. Don’t just retweet. Add comments or a point of view. Phrase your tweets so that others will RT or comment. Feel free to rant, whine or bellyache.  Drama and strong emotion stimulate reactions, responses and re-tweets.
6. Skip yesterday’s news. Twitter is a global news ticker. It’s where news breaks. Be immediately relevant or be gone. Use hashtags to connect with the immediate topic.
7. Don’t disclose too much.. The news is enough of a downer. Avoid TMI. No one wants to know the intimate details of your life, tweeted moment by moment even if you’re a Kardashian. Keep personal messages personal. Use direct messages instead of public posts.
8. Avoid Twitter clutter. Be judicious with hashtags#, @ signs, RTs. They are meaningless jargon. Nobody thinks its cool any longer. It just obscures your message. Use hashtags to connect your message to on-going conversations or trending topics and @ signs for attribution or shout outs.

 

 

You & Your Data

You've probably been hearing a lot about Big Data; huge databases accumulated by companies. The challenge is to make sense of that data in ways that personalize the experience for consumers and sell more stuff. 

The other faster moving data trend is collecting different sets of data, linking them and automating them to serve specific purposes. A huge number of start-ups are based on this premise. They use Facebook, as the database of choice because it’s rich (and getting richer each day) in personal information and because Facebook has made it easy and cheap for developers to get access to its data. 

Imagine a travel company that uses your Facebook info (posts, photos, apps, games) to figure out what kind of traveler you are. They know or can infer who you are, where you went, whom you went with and what you did there. Then they marry your info to a database of travel locations and deals and serve you up offers that match your style and your inferred budget. 

The richer the data sets; the richer the value to you and to them. The underlying assumption is that people will appreciate data mash-ups because it will yield more personal, relevant and valuable ways to enrich our lives expand our connections one to each other and make our money go further. At the moment this might seem, far-fetched. But when you realize that more than 25% of the population has always lived with the Internet and is very comfortable with living out loud, sharing their actions and ideas publicly and is quickly embracing the latest technology, you can begin to see the near-term future. 

The use of data is simultaneously creepy and useful. Studies have shown that the vast majority of Americans will trade off private data for utility or value. As data sets automatically talk to each other, this trade-off will be perceived as less scary and more useful. We’ll get used to being cued and prompted easily and quickly. 

A principle tool for data collection is your mobile phone.  You may not realize it but everything you do with your phone is stored and captured. It’s easy to figure out who you talk to or text, how often, from where and at what times. 

Your phone's GPS device records and potentially tracks or monitors your whereabouts and movements. The built-in accelerometer can imply what activities you do, the speed you do it and the likely impact. There are many apps with sensors that measure and record vital stats like blood pressure, heart rate, etc. All of these technologies reveal a great deal about you that could be used to personalize offers and enrich or personalize a brand experience. 

This is data arena is where technologists and entrepreneurs are playing today.  There will be some horrific privacy breaches and some amazing new gadgets that come out of this tension between privacy and technology.

 

 

Engagement is No Real Metric

“Engagement” is being proposed as the new metric for online and social media interactions. Although not uniformly defined, “engagement” seems to be an aggregate measure of a variety of interactions, which include clicks, likes, comments, shares, and re-posts. It’s a proxy for conversion in environments where goods and services aren’t directly sold. 

To the old school crowd, including yours truly, engagement is measured more discretely by counting the number of people who show up on a site, view a desired number of pages, spend significant time per page and per session, and take the desired action. These “engaged” visitors sign up for a newsletter, download something, use a calculator, enroll in a class or webinar, or maybe even buy something. 

Part of the debate centers on a definition and the use of the term relative to media values and media buying. If someone comes to your site or onto your Facebook page, are they engaged or not? If they spend a nanosecond to click “like” or view two pages or less, are you suffering from low engagement? 

In the old media world, we measured time-spent-viewing or time-spent-listening and inferred engagement from lapsed time. So if Nielsen clocked you listening to Z-100 for 45 minutes between 6a and 9a, we inferred that you liked that station, probably tracked with the core demographic, probably listened as much as the average dedicated listener, and probably paid some attention to its content and the ads. 

All media experiences are not equal and, therefore, have different outcomes. Engagement is a catchall concept designed to obscure rather than illuminate these differences in outcomes. 

The engagement debate is a step in the evolution of an elusive advertising rationale to support spending money on social networks where people come to do cool things, but brands haven’t figured out a way to quantify what they do, what it means, or how to justify incremental investments. Engagement will help social networks monetize their inventory but do little to help brands understand how they are interacting with customers or prospects.

 

4 Ways to Engage Millenials

Every younger generation knows better. Every younger generation wants to un-do, reject, fix or repair the mistakes made by their elders. Every younger generation brings its own POV to the party. 

Seventy-five million individuals born between 1981-2000 grew up with computers at home and at school, are beyond the tricks and techniques of advertising and wield enormous buying power. Millennials are better educated, more diverse and better at multitasking that their Boomer parents. They’ve been indulged, encouraged, pampered and have different expectations and sensibilities than their elders. Catching their attention and involving them in a brand isn’t easy.

Consider four ways to open the conversation: 

Give them instant access and status. Collaboration, shared responsibility and consensus constitute their worldview. Millennials want to be taken seriously and have both a voice and vote. They expect to weigh-in on the key issues regardless of rank, tenure, status or skill set. They don’t want to be bossed around and expect to be included in every relevant decision. They reject hierarchy. Seniority and tenure are dirty words. They don’t want to be bored or have to work their way up along a well-trodden path. 

Maybe this is a presumption unique to this generation. Though, I doubt it. It feels like the same youthful enthusiasm that newbie’s have always brought to the party. The plea for immediate inclusion, access, status and respect is characteristic of people not yet burned by the system, circumstances or peers. Vaguely socialist, it’s a good but naïve starting point. 

Personalize a user-driven experience. Raised as digital natives and gamers, it’s all about the intuitive experience where there are always several ways to solve the puzzle and where the best idea always wins. They want cool design and easy navigation to deliver end user benefits. And they want to be able to adjust the level, the design, the content, the frequency or intensity according to personal preferences.  They watch TV on a laptop or a tablet as they text their friends, create custom iTunes music mixes and play Xbox games against unseen opponents in China.

These are different expectations from Boomers or other generations. Millennials gather and process information differently. Nothing is linear in their world. They live out loud and freely share information among themselves. They embrace new technology and new devices instantly. Used to multi-media, non-linear data displays and multi-channel multi-tasking, they experience the world differently. They owe no loyalty beyond the next experience and demand constant improvement and re-invention from their favorite brands. 

As a result those seeking to communicate with them have to engage them on their own terms. This requires a different construction and parsing of content as well as a radically different approach toward fundamental concepts like reach, frequency, media channels and engagement. 

Eco-consciousness doesn’t matter. It’s a nice-to-have but not a cornerstone of their worldview. They assign the responsibility for saving the planet to business rather than to individuals. But as they better understand the trade-offs between business efficiency and ecology or humanitarian causes, they are willing to make fiscally friendly decisions. The global economic crisis forced them to recalibrate their expectations and their spending habits. Efficiency and value trump causes.  Evidently, the younger crowd isn’t much different from the rest of us in this regard. They are more than happy to live in the moment and pass on the consequences of their actions to the younger generation. 

It’s about character not celebrity. Raised in a celebrity culture, Millennials reject direct endorsement and the cult of celebrity preferring instead to relate to the characters portrayed rather than actors portraying them. They snicker at faux celebrities like the Kardashians and discover and embrace home-made YouTube stars. Used to selecting images and qualities to represent themselves, they reject the obviously manufactured personalities shoved down their throats by media and marketers. 

Millennials demand the right to anoint their own celebrities and esteem peers or personalities found worthy by crowdsourcing or by other more “democratic” ways. Stars are still stars for the younger crowd with all the volatility, vulnerability and hype that goes with it. Maybe this is where social networks, word-of-mouth communication and peer-to-peer recommendations play the biggest role rather than relying on traditional tastemakers or star-makers. 

The younger generation will inherit our jobs and our economy. Understanding their formative experiences, understanding their needs and perspectives will determine how successful they can be at digging us out of our economic troubles, re-inventing our business models or bringing about the revolution we all clamored for when we were their age. 

 

 

Facebook's New Ad Units

Does it really surprise anyone that Mark Zuckerberg has his own vision of how advertising on Facebook ought to work? Is anyone really troubled by the fact that he is willing to force advertisers to conform to his wishes by changing the rules yet again? 

New ad units and parameters are expected to roll out next week. This continues the evolution of an advertising universe in which Facebook encouraged brands to build apps, buy ads and run promotions to aggregate large audiences. Then Facebook encouraged individuals to sort themselves into sellable segments. Then Facebook created filters using a sophisticated EdgeRank algorithm that essentially eliminated the free reach they enjoyed from spending to collect all those fans. And now, after experimenting with sizes, placements and formats, Facebook offers brands options to buy back the access and the reach they previously enjoyed. If you feel like a rat running through a maze, you’re getting the point. 

The new units, which were leaked online, are touted as bigger, more prominently placed, and likely to prompt more engagement, better recall, more brand affinity and greater purchase intent based on research that nobody has seen. They will be better integrated into fans Newsfeeds and will be sold on CPM basis, like broadcast advertising, and because they are intended to be used for awareness and brand building. 

The units will be inherently social drawing copy and images from posts on brand pages. They will also automatically clue Facebook friends that you engaged with an ad and give users the options to Like, Share or Comment on the ad messages. 

The system is designed to parallel and reinforce the Facebook experience and gestalt, which will materially improve communications for many brands, especially those who took a banner ad approach in their Facebook ads. Ideally the changes will be a trifecta by making Facebook fans, brands and shareholders happy. Let’s see how it shakes out!

 

The Pinterest Success Formula

Pinterest, the virtual pin board, tickler file and scrapbook, has come out of the woodwork two years after launching and captured the attention and the traffic of 10 million unique users and generated approximately 1 million pins almost overnight. The average user is a woman who spends 15 minutes per session on the site. 

According to RJ Metrics, Pinterest engages users two to three times more efficiently than Twitter did at a similar point in its history. Eight weeks after signing up, 40-60 percent of users are still pinning. This is counter to the usual cycle of sign-up, test and abandon that plagues so many sites and niche social media properties. 

In an arena of social media phenomena, it’s the latest skyrocket that sent start-up CEOs and VCs into a state of jealous lust. 

How has Pinterest done it and what is the formula? 

Newness. We’ve been doing Facebook and Twitter and the others for a while.  As we become complacent about social networking or burnt out on cat videos and baby pictures, it’s a shiny new object. 

Familiarity. Pinterest uses technology to do what most women already do – clip, pin and save stuff. They tapped existing scrapbooking behavior and it’s muscle memory with a new twist by adding the ability to share and see other women’s pins. 

 Petula Dvorak called Pinterest “digital crack for women” arguing that “the site’s churning cycle of interest, hope, inspiration, jealousy, desperation, despair and depression keeps them coming back. Add easy functionality. You sign-up and hit the “Pin it” button. It requires no investment of time or learning and accelerates behavior many women were doing anyway. 

Etsy is the most pinned site followed by Google, Tumblr, Flickr and shelter sites like Martha Stewart, Better Homes & Garden, Houzz, Apartment Therapy, Real Simple and others. Pinterest takes flipping through magazines and clipping them out of the bedroom, the nail salon or the waiting room and puts its online and on public display. Over 80 percent of pins are actually re-pins. Women see stuff other women like and virtually endorse it by passing it along or re-pinning it. 

Strong Visuals. Pinterest is about pictures. It is a visual cornucopia reflecting personal tastes, choices and aspirations. Women vie to pin the most interesting and arresting images because what you pin says something clearly and definitively about your taste, aesthetic, class and lifestyle. It’s a fantasy look book and an on-going social competition that everyone can rally to. 

Press. Pinterest has become a media darling. And each story or link brings new traffic and new users to the site. The volume of coverage has created a spike in registration, even though newbies may be less committed or engaged than users who found Pinterest before it was cool. Add the usual woman-to-woman WOM to this press gusher and you have serious inbound momentum.