Most popular

    Social Media

    Corporate Social Media Departments.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    I met with someone smart yesterday and shared my view that in the future large corporations will have their own social media departments — staffed with writers, videographers, photographers, coders and digital editors.  This senior strategy and innovation officer processed the thought, nodded in partial agreement, then noted that the level of creativity likely to come out of this type of group would be modest.  He was right. 

    An internal social media department will do a good job of relating the corporate viewpoint, organizing proof and demonstrations of product value, and it will do so accurately… but in the end it will lack that creative oomph provided by an agency. And here, I mean a digital or a brand agency. 

    That’s not to say internal social media departments won’t happen, they will. They already are.  But the talent level required to do it BIG, won’t be found on staff.  Sure, some implementation can be handled inside, but not the big honkin’ creative idea. Not the polished sight and sound. And agencies need to figure out how to charge for that idea? Beyond production and mark-up that is.  Does the answer reside within Google?  Hmmmm. Peace!

    Is Resonance the Grail?

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    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!

    An Unexpected Show of Caring.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    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?

    Brands and Social Media Noise.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

     Branding is about creating muscle memory around a selling idea. It’s not about the color of the idea. Or the smiling faces.  It’s not about the talent or the sing-songy tagline.  It about finding a powerful selling idea and organizing it in a way that consumers can play back.  It’s what good brand managers and their agents go to school for. 

    What makes one hospital better than the next?  The stuff that’s been planted in your head.

    Social media and its ability to make everyone a media mogul is having an impact on brand management.  The Brett Favre brand has just taken a major hit thanks to recorded cell phone conversations and some unseemly texts.  Sorry Wrangler Jeans. Social media created a torrent of unintended and, often, untended information about brands.

    “Hi, I’m Amanda.  I’m from DDB Tribal. I teach clients how to use Facebook.”

    As an ad agency kid in NYC I once suggested giving away free tee-shirts sporting our logo to bicycle messengers. Messengers were everywhere in NYC…in and out of some of the world’s most important marketing offices. My boss said “No, what if a bike messenger broke the law and got his picture in the paper.” Like it or not, that’s brand management.

    The pop marketing psychology of the day is “Companies don’t own their brands anymore. Consumers do.”  I argued this point with the chief strategy and innovation officer at an IPG promotion agency earlier this year.  He agreed with the pop marketing thesis. I do not.  As social media allows more and more consumers to make fake ads and weigh in on products that others spend millions to build it becomes more important for brand managers to tighten up. We can’t silence the masses but we can friend them, hopefully program them toward our way of thinking, and maximize the share of message to noise.  

    Find your selling idea, campaign it, refresh it, invest in it.  And manage it. Because social media for all its good can create noise that is not always brand and sales-positive.  Peace!

    The Ascent of Marketing.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    Back in the 1700-1800s (in the U.S.) if you needed stuff you either made it or went to the general store.  The Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogue was the next marketing innovation (1888), showing pictures of products and published prices, allowing customers to purchase by mail. Among the 322 pages in the catalogue published in 1894 must have been products didn’t sell and had to be replaced. The birth of ROI? 

    Television

    The next massive marketing innovation was television. Television commercials which began in earnest in the 1940s became the most popular, effective form of advertising. But can you imaging trying to track sales to media and production back then in the very beginning? “Where’s the ROI? How do you measure this stuff?” Mad men. 

    The Web

    Fast forward to the Inter-nech. Banner ads and ad serving allowed us to count clicks. 2% click thru rates. Whoo hoo. Click to buy. Whoo hoo. But not everything could be bought over the web. (Discussion of that for another day.) CTRs diminished and web display ads became, so said the salespeople, a branding mechanism.

    Social Media

    Enter social media.  And consultants. When consultants out-number practitioners you know the market is in flux. The Altimeter Group, some very smart people let me just say, created a social media presenttion ‘splaining how to measure social media via a marketing analytics framework. Here are some of the measurables: share of voice, audience engagement, conversation reach, active advocates, active influence, advocacy impact, customer problem resolution rate, resolution time, satisfaction score, plus a couple of metrics tied to gathering input for product innovation. What’s not mentioned here, something Messrs. Sear and Roebuck might have added, is sales.  I love consultants ( am one) and the Altimeter Group is growing like a dookie, but until they and all of us tie these type of metrics back to da monies, we’re just making paper.

    A smart client at AT&T once said to me, “we collect all this data now we have to do something smart with it.”  That’s business. That’s return on strategy. Peace!

    Social Media Winning: Map and Manipulate.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    Do you know what is driving all the “free” on the Web?  Marketing. Not just advertising but marketing.  Why is Facebook so valuable?  Why does Google have more money than Allah? Where’s that money coming from?  Yep, Toyota and P&G and Verizon.

    And as we glance beyond the dashboard at the future and see, as the iPad commercial puts it, newspapers with videos and magazines that sing, we see a world in which the Web and mobile devices are the primary instruments of marketers. The devices know what we like and where we are.  They know when we are sleeping. They know when we’re awake. Dare say, they know when we’ve been bad or good.

    As the social web evolves and the big ad and marketing shops learn how to “map and manipulate”, it will become more apparent that people with influence are the drivers of marketing.  Kim Kardashian, for instance, earns $30,000 for a tweet.  To a tech start-up a Robert Scoble endorsement can mean the difference between being funded and being fun dead. So where am I going with this?  To Klout.

    Klout is the new online oxy. It’s a drug…and more and more Posters will be talking about it. The Klout score will identify those people who advertisers want to target. And revere.  High Klout scores and predictions thereof will be the things around which ad agencies develop departments. Klout is on to something and they know it.  Get it right dudes and dudettes. And get it right soon before a competitors snaps it up. Peace!

    Posters of Yore.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    I’ve bifurcated the social media landscape into Posters and Pasters. Posters are original content creators: musicians, artists, video creators, subject matter experts and bloggers. Pasters are the other 92% who curate other people’s stuff. Pasters share links.

    But there is another group of social media cohorts that have been growing in importance over the past 8-10 years. Part poster, part paster, they have become a cottage industry. The Influencer. Influencers come in many styles and flavors so you know it is a thing. There are micro influencers. Nano influencers. Not to mention mega and macro, all referring to the CPM they are paid to post on their feeds.

    But some influencers are tainting the waters. They’re all hat and no cattle as the Texas saying goes. They are more videogenic than thoughtful, truthful problem solvers. More entertainment than value. Ten years ago, the way for an influencer to make money was to monetize through a banner ads and newsletters. It was a craft. Today, they’re paid by ad agencies and product placement companies and have become a media channel all to themselves. (Oh, and they may also be buying their followers.)

    Don’t get me wrong, there are a thousand of great influencers out there who put in the time, dedicate themselves to helping educate others, and sharing about the topic they love. The difference is, they are about the love of subject and intimacy with followers, not the CPM. 

    They are Posters of yore.

    Peace.

     

     

    Doing Goods Work.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

     

    We had a tragedy in NJ this week.  A Rutgers University student took his life after having an intimate relationship with another dude secretly videotaped by a roommate and posted to the web. Prior to taking his life, the young man spent some time online talking about this invasion of privacy, presumably seeking advice and counsel from other young gay men. Sadly, it did not work.

    What makes the web important is that you can go online and find communities of people with whom you can open up.  Because we’re human you’ll get good advice and bad but at least you can chat with those sympathetic and experienced – and not feel alone.  Mom’s with kids with allergies, for instance. This is a very good thing and we can thank the web for it.

    In the case of the Rutgers man, the online community he turned to did not change the outcome but it could have.  The web may be vilified as the place to “learn how to make a bomb” or “place for pedophiles” yet that is glass half empty stuff. (I love Danah Boyd for her undying perspective on this.) Finding and talking to likeminds privately can be a very good thing.

    Teen Suicide.

    If this thesis plays out, the teen suicide rate will reduce in time.  People by nature are good — even callous, hurtful teens. To those kids on the website who tried to help the Rutgers student, I applaud you. You were doing goods work. Don’t stop. Peace!

    PS. “Doing Good’s Work” is a line I’m recommending to a nonprofit in Brooklyn. (No poaching please.)   Is it better with our without the apostrophe?

    Cheesing the Social Web.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    Dan Zarrella, who has a neat person brand in social media, posted an interview with rap blogger Eskay providing a smart take on social media. Check it out here. In a nutshell it suggests social media is a good music marketing tool but not nearly as important as the music.  The artist who sits around focusing on his/her Twitter or Facebook metrics is not focused on the art. Not really feeling the audience. Certainly not the way they can by performing.

    Most musicians do care more about their art than the buzz, that’s why they are more effective in social.  They post things that fans care about.  The word “fans” is the operative word.  Bands, performers, artists have fans. Cooking oils don’t.

    Community building and social media is about fulfilling a need. Filtering and organizing a need. It’s not about selling. It’s okay to make your product or service available or one click away in an online community, but stop hawking.  Facebook knows that too much selling on the site will be its downfall. And it hasn’t yet figured out how to deal with that truism as it adds tens of thousands of users each day. Google learned this early, and smartly sequestered the sell from its Adwords program.

    Selling is crawling into social media at a higher and higher pace. And it’s coming to a mobile device near you very soon.

    So what do smart marketers do? Focus on their art. On their product. Use social media for sure…it’s an amazing tool. Enagage. Learn. Most importantly enable.  But stop cheesing the social web. Peace!

    Social Media. Quiet is the new black.

    By
    Steve Poppe
    -
    0

    I was watching an NCAA Tournament game the other day and with 13 minutes to go in an Sweet 16 game, the announcer was apoplectic. He announced each pass as if it would be the game’s last.  I can understand if we were in the finals and it was under 2 minutes, but phewwww. It seems the game for some announcers isn’t enough, it’s the delivery that creates excitement.  Like a laugh track on a sitcom. If everything is screamed and hyper- exciting, how are we to know when the truly amazing happens?  It’s like reading a two paragraph email typed in all caps.

    One of the reasons social media has taken off so nicely, in this world of many product choices, is because friends and members of your social graph tend not to sell when they are talking up a product.  Well they sell, but from the gut and heart, not from the wallet. Paid marketing agents, on the other hand, are compensated to make you buy. 

    Metaphorically, paid marketing agents shout while friends quietly discuss. Friends modulate. Friends offer no agenda.  I think it was Benjamin Palmer of the Barbarian Group who said at Social Media Week this February that commercial social media is most effective when it is “brands letting their hair down.” And he’s right.   When a brand is not in billboard mode, or advertising or coupon mode – not shouting every possible user benefit like the NCAA announcer – it has a chance to quietly and meaningfully build a case in a unique, human way.  Social is a new channel. Not an old channel repurposed. Peace.

    1234Page 3 of 4
    © Newsmag WordPress Theme by TagDiv