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    Is Resonance the Grail?

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    My first encounter with metrics was when a friend at Ogilvy Direct (now OgilvyOne) explained how Vanguard Funds tracked ads to resulting investments.  Each ad had a unique code that found its way through the process and when money was deposited it generated an advertising-to-sales ratio. Ad creative, size, media could all be calculated.  This approach is why direct marketing, nee direct response, nee direct mail agencies were the digital agencies of the day in the 70s and 80s.

    In the 90s banner ads were the haps.  They were new and measurable and web advertising was ready to kill traditional. But as click-through rates diminished sales people told you banner were awareness builders. Display ads started to get bigger and richer and CTRs increased again. Then search became the new “new” and SEM/SEO shops multiplied like rabbits.  Search though, is a half nasty business — with a good deal of practitioners hacking their way to the top. (Are these the people who always talk about authenticity?)

    Resonance.

    Today social media is the haps. And social companies are finally taking monetization seriously.  Twitter’s resonance concept is a great start. Twitter’s Promoted Tweets measure nine factors to determine resonance, which is used to determine whether an ad stays or goes and what to charge. According to the New York Times, three of those factors are “number of people who saw the post, the number of people who replied to it or passed it on to their followers, and the number of people who clicked on links.” Some say social media is not about selling, it’s about engagement. That’s like saying you go to a singles bar to make friends. It’s only a 5% true. Resonance tied to sales is coming. Who ever cracks that code will be the David Ogilvy of the decade.  Peace it up!

    Bullets vs. Tweets.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Which is more powerful the bullet or the Tweet?  I’m not likely to keep my ass down if someone is firing off a Tweet at me, but one can safely say the Arab Spring and its Gandhi-esque approach to changing the world is way more a function of Tweets than bullets. That’s power.

    As we get nearer to UN Resolution 194 on a Palestinian State I’m very nervous about bullets.  Very.  The Arab Spring uprisings have, for the most part, been internecine struggles.  But the Palestinians and the Israelis are anything but.  Leading up to the U.N. vote on the Sept 23rd, the world will be watching.   And this is no platitude or verisimilitude, the world will be watching.  Thanks to Twitter and Twitpics and YouTube. 

    If there is bloodshed over the resolution it will be front page news and winners and losers. And certainly lots of spin.  If there is no bloodshed, just civil disobedience and true debate, there will only be winners.  It will provide new steps toward real compromise. 

    Gandhi didn’t need Twitter…but had he a smarty and some agile thumbs, independence in India may have taken months. Peace!

    Apple PR. Think Different.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Wanting to tune into the Apple iPad press conference yesterday I spent time toggling between live.twit.tv and one of Robert Scoble’s video feeds. It was certainly better than nothing, but considering this day and age it was pretty prehistoric. Video reboots, freezing, hippopotamus grunts, feedback, poor screen grabs aplenty.

    After about 20 minutes I blew it off and brought the car to “Tony, Park Avenue.”

    The event was reported to have slowed down Twitter, gobbled up lots of bandwidth and, stirring though it was, was not nearly the event for outliers it could have been.  So, as a PR event it was a fail. 

    A couple of weeks ago, Mr. Scoble was allowed into the Google Phone launch event and though there were some hiccups, it went much better. He streamed from his laptop. The audio was good, the video okay and the overall experience rewarding.  But had both these events been on television, the experience would have been perfect.  Were they both streamed over the net with the right software and load balancing, they would have been close to perfect. 

    Apple wants to treat the press to first dibs. Also, it wants partners and employees to have a better seat.  But the press gets this stuff for free – they don’t pay for it. I know the press is supposed to influence millions of potential buyers but this is Apple.  The demand for Steve Job’s presentation and the iPad, comes from real buyers.  This event should have been open to the global public. This event should have been for the people. This event should have been handled better. Think different. Peace!

    I Smell a Twitter Revolution.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Twitter’s soon-to-be-launched service @earlybird will transform marketing. @earlybird is a promotional service that posts participating companies’ specials and deals on a wide variety of products and services — a cut of each sale going to Twitter. It will generate billions in incremental sales for sponsoring companies and serious revenue basis points for Twitter. Such a deal!   

    No doubt they will find a way to organize these deals by category, e.g., restaurants, technology, consumer packaged goods and, more importantly, geography.  Think of it as  Woot.com but offering thousands of deals a day.  Someone commented about the service in The New York Times, thinking that it would gum up their twitter feed — deals flying across the screen every minute, but the beauty of Twitter is that you don’t have to follow @earlybird (I hope) you just have to visit the tweet stream. 

    Twitter will transform commerce well beyond coupons and customer service. And this 140 character promotional vehicle is just the beginning. The idea to have an idea.  I can smell marketers lining up. And small local businesses?  They’ll have an absolute  field day with this thing.  Oh the possibilities. Can’t wait. Peace!

    Twitter’s New Ad Plan.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    It sounds as if Twitter’s new advertising program has been well thought out.  Sponsored 140 character Tweets, called Promoted Posts, will appear atop the results of key word searches.  If you search for Tacos, you might see a Chipotle tweet above all others.  Small type will let you know it’s a sponsored ad. And should you cursor over it the ad turns yellow. Twitter is stealing a page from Google by keeping only ads deemed relevant, i.e., that are clicked on, retweeted or direct messaged in reasonable numbers.  

    Twitter will charge advertisers on a CPM (cost per thousand basis), the way TV and print media are priced. (Read more about social media monetization here.) I suspect that in a while CPMs will be one price and clicks another, but we’ll see.  

     Next Phase of Twitter Ad Plan.

    Down the road ads are expected to appear in the midst of tweet streams surrounding conversations. The ads won’t result from searches but from the content within posts.  So if there are discussions about tacos Chipotle might buy its way into the conversation.  Whether these purchased posts appear in the stream or along side a la Google is still to be determined.

    This is just the tip of the iceberg.  There are so many other ways to monetize Twitter which we’ll all be reading about in the coming months and years.  I’m happy with the current approach – it is America after all – and I am happy that Twitter has tabled the in-stream advertising effort for a while. One bite at the apple at a time.  Peace!   

    Spotlight On Social Media – Today and…

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Spotlight on Social Media was held yesterday in NYC, put on by the Participatory Marketing Network (PMN) and Direct Marketing Association (DMA).  There were a couple of important takeaways every marketer should think about. 

    Intent.

    Search is still important, no doubt, but it’s a little 2008.  Immediacy – what’s happening now — is the rolling thunder these days, so services like Twitter and Foursquare are the rage but the marketing future is something Rapleaf’s co-founder Vivek Sodera calls “intent driven” applications. Think of a suped up Four Square To Do tab. Facebook will certainly build an intent-based app and others in the VC pipeline will emerge, but just know intent+social+search+moblie is going to pay out lotto style. 

    Unanonymous

    I know, I know it’s not a word. But it’s a better word then unanonymize, which is the word that clanked like a dropped crowbar off Mr. Sodera’s tongue during his presentation.  Hee hee. That said, it’s a word that wonderfully describes what Rapleaf does. Rapleaf crawls the web and creates single records of an individual’s behaviors, activities and associations.  And surprisingly, it’s not that scary.  They do this using your email address and a cool piece of software. In email or direct parlance they append records using the social web. When I asked to be unanonymized, the Rapleaf software generated 100 of my web proclivities, the first of which was something called “Social Care” a membership I did not recall.  All the rest were spot on. 

    Facebook

    Facebook also presented at Spotlight and mentioned its 60 million daily logins put prime time television to shame. Sean Mahoney’s case studies of marketer successes were very impressive and prove that Facebook is the “new” digital. Its targeting capabilities are phenomenal.  There are specialty ad and marketing shops opening up just to handle Facebook-enabled selling and they’re worth looking in to.  It’s a cottage industry on the way to becoming transformational.   

    Others

    Other smart companies worth mentioning include Acxiom, a behemoth company that also transforms social data into social profiles (for targeted marketing), Cisco which has a neat B2B app in its NowVan program (like Kogi BBQ trucks for routers) and Air Miles a rewards program out of Canada, trying hard and having very good success. 

     Michael Della Penna of the PMN and Conversa Marketing and Neil O’Keefe of DMA deserve shout outs for empanelling a great program. Peace..it together!

    An Unexpected Show of Caring.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    My wife does Yoga at Fitness Incentive in Babylon a couple of mornings a week and she just retuned asking if I would smell her.  The instructor, you see, had sprayed some lavender on her at the end of today’s session, saying something about its soothing properties.  This was an unexpected show of caring on the part of the instructor. 

    Marketers would do well to learn from the instructor and offer unexpected demonstrations of caring to customers.  Bob Gilbreath, chief marketing strategist at Bridge Worldwide, is building a brand and a movement around Marketing with Meaning.  Is an unexpected show of caring marketing with meaning?  Most certainly.  

    Expected

    When leaving a store and someone says “thank you for shopping at ____” it’s nice, but not unexpected.  While at a restaurant with spoon to mouth and the proprietor sticks his smiling face in asking “Everything alright?” — this may be unexpected but it is not a real show of caring. While at Mary Carrol’s Pub and the bartender buys back after your third quaff, unexpected?  Not really. Good business, yes, but not necessarily a show of unexpected or caring. 

    Caring and thank you are two different things.  The latter requires thought; it’s a skill actually. Twitter can be used as an example of unexpected caring, used correctly.  A coupon dispenser is not caring.  Customer service is not caring, it’s the price of doing business. When Steve Jobs, as was reported in the news yesterday, answers an email to a customer it is unexpected. And it’s caring.   

    Let’s get on with it marketers!  When you leave the building each day ask yourself “What did I do to show a customer – not every customer – I care about them in a surprising way. Lavender anyone?

    Hashtag. A Universal Symbol of Change.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    Those who love social media surely are getting tired of ignorant commentators who publish that social is only used for sharing what one is doing.  Comedians, editorialists, and barflies love to hate on social media, especially Twitter, declaring it a means for sharing self-centered, self-aggrandizing bits of information — “I’m buying shoes on Spring Street.”

    Perhaps Twitter was this way the first month and no doubt people still drivel on a bit about their whereabouts and transactions, but Twitter and the hashtag are a very different animal than the one naysayers see. There was a gentleman in Pakistan, Sohaib Athar (@reallyvirtual), who was tweeting about Osama’s death well before the rumors hit the U.S.  This I learned from a Fashion Institute of Technology student, who wasn’t buying shoes at the time. Mr. Athar, though not thinking about it at the time was a citizen journalist. A global citizen journalist.

    When Syrian president Bashar al-Assad decides to hack the Syrian Revolution 2011 Facebook page and change its content, it was intended to chance the course of history. When videos on YouTube show global atrocities in near real-time, that’s important.

    Marketers and investors are spending a lot to time trying to monetize social media, and that is taking our eyes off the ball.   Commentators are trying to gain contrarian props by telling us how frivolous social media is. But know this, the hashtag will change history. For good and in some cases bad.  It is a cross media, cross language symbol. Perhaps, the first such symbol or character of its time. Peace.

    Publicis, Slinging the Hashtag.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

    I love Twitter and have long said it is a very important media. Global, real-time news with attachments. In a presentation first given to the Long Island Social Media Club, I shared a slide entitled “rock the hashtag.” (Sorry, it was a while ago.)  I encouraged people to be inventive with the hashtag and suggested that in the future marketers would find unique and exciting ways to be promotional with it.   

    publicis logo

    Publicis, an advertising and holding company has just announced a R&D labs with Twitter to help consumers use Twitter thusly.  Right now, they’re focused on marrying Twitter with TV programming which is just a sign of the times; the times being there is a lot of poor television around…and more channels on which to watch them. (Psst, TV Program Creators — the idea is to not bore your audience into using second screens.) Anyway, the labs will no doubt come up with some interesting ideas and twists, which will give birth to new ideas, twists and forms of technology.  Publicis may have just hit a home run here.

    Twitter is about much more than just the hashtag – but the hash is a transformative tool. Hopefully, mid-level marketing managers won’t be at the controls and brand managers will keep an eye on what is going on. Poorly executed programs will have the potential to do more harm than good…rocking that hashtag.  Peace. #merleFest

    Staples on Twitter.

    By
    Steve Poppe
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    0

     staples logo

    A “social” friend of mine, Julie, turned me on to a Twitter site today that kinda follows one of my best practices for commercial tweeting. It’s Staples.  I preach to clients and friends that corporate users shouldn’t just broadcast promotional info and/or respond to help questions on Twitter. Rather, they should create a persona for their Twitter presence that embodies the brand and inspires positive thought and action. Think of it as a role in a movie with a motivation. The motivation should track to the brand plan and push the brand planks.

    In the case of Staples, the “tweet team” consists of five people, each with their own tag. Michelle is MO, Kevin AB, etc. This allows them to be identified and personalized, plus it shares the workload. At this point, I’m not yet sure if these people are SMEs (subject matter experts) or generalists.  It would be a smart if they had discrete areas of expertise and personalities to fit. 

    Buy and Multiply.

    More and more companies are hiring people to handle social media.  Some are outsourcing (stopgap), others using interns (big gap), the smart ones employ senior management who get the brand strategy.  The big promise of Twitter is not to make customers happy – one at a time – but to inspire customers to buy, share and multiply.  The key word here is inspire. Tweeters have to be engaging individuals…with personalities.  And just like in a retail setting they can’t be shills. They must be sensitive, funny and friend-like.  If you are on the receiving end of a commercial tweet you need to “feel” the company tweeter – and like her/him. The persona is key.

    Staples has made a good start here, let’s see hat they do with it. Peace on Haiti.

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