Marketing-Gimbal

The Best Socially Connected Marketing Campaign of 2011: Museum of Me

I recently tried Intel’s interactive brand campaign, in support of launching their Icore5 processors, and was blown away by the creativity, and the personal level of engagement their brand had with me for 2 minuets.

 
 
This is what socially connected marketing is all about, in that you want your brand to have a personal, sustained, and meaningful engagement with the consumer. What’s amazing is that Intel did this in support of a computer chip.

The concept of the Museum of Me is brilliant in my view, in that the application harvests your Facebook information (only after you give it permission, and noting that the data is not shared with anyone else) to create the context of a museum exhibit that showcases the visual aspect of your social life. How much more personal and engaging can a brand be.

 

The visual context is spot on, as the chipset is optimized for visual media, and the brand is positioned as an innovator in the space. Intel was successful in establishing an emotional connection with the viewer due to the personal level of engagement-your visual social life.

Now what’s interesting is the media and pundits have given rise to some more controversial takes on the campaign, and along the lines of data privacy and of course a little narcissism. On some level if you haven’t already realized what information is accessible on Facebook and that you allow to be shared, The Museum of Me certainly does a good job of slapping you back to reality.

 
Data privacy is going to be a huge issue in the coming 10 years as Christina Gagnier of the Huffington Post writes “As the newest evolution in privacy warnings has moved towards icons, such as TRUSTe's "Truth in Privacy" framework, consideration should be given to visualizations that personalize the experience that someone may have on the website they are visiting or the mobile application they are using. If there was a means of prospective visualization, this may be the future of educating users on privacy in a meaningful way.”

Of course I could also look at the side bar on data privacy from the purely capitalistic side. Could Intel be looking to create a parallel discussion on data privacy as a result of this campaign? Why? You ask. Well at some level personal data privacy would need to be protected at the Chip level in our ever growing, always on, and mobile society. Intel has certainly demonstrated its intent to integrate data security at the chip level with its purchase of McAfee, so why not data privacy?

 
While any discussion on data privacy is good, and needed I look at this effort purely from a marketing point of view. In that vein, I think Intel, and their creative partners have done a masterful job at  creating a highly personal and engaging experience between me, and their brand for two minutes. The campaign even reached in at a philosophical level by ending with your visual social graph, and then scaling out to show how your graph is connected to millions of others.

Isn’t this what socially connected marketing is about? Nuff said.

The Coming Future of the Greatest Sponsorhsip Ever Sold

A fantastic TED talk by Morgan Spurlock of "SuperSize Me" about the world of big corporate advertising and  its incestuous relationship with the media channels. Morgan's new movie "POM Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold" The thought of true transparency is still somewhat of a figment of the imagination in these circles. The point this is trying to bring home, in my view, is that we are now being inundated with corporate shill 24x7. The thing that is changing the fastest, in my view, is the way in which the pitch is getting delivered, as the sponsored message is becoming ever more blended in with the content and delivery channels we consume.  

 

Today it could be a tweet or comment on a late night show from a well known celebrity mentioning how great a coke would be, or even a local mom recommending a product to her network on Facebook. Schools are selling advertsing like it nobody’s business as school buses and hallways now market to our youth. As I work in the "biz" so to speak I have a pretty good sense of what is a pitch as I know that there is no relaity in reality TV. Every thing is planned and well coordinated from late night to the fabricated drama on on Dancing With the Stars. 

How long until we see corporate messgaing and sponsorships pervade our professional spots more than what they have already. It's only a matter of time before we see corprate brands on our pro teams uniforms in the US just as they do in Europe. The WNBA has already started selling sponsorships for player’s uniforms, so how much longer before we see the Citibank Mets?  

We all talk how great social media is and how wonderful it is to be connected to one another. While there is a lot of good from that always remember that the social media platform companies need to eat, and feed their kids and that the most valuable commodity they have is your data.

Today we see the emergence of location based services that will serve as the foundation, along with trillions of lines of data about all of us, to facilitate the delivery of targeted and custom sponsored messages 24x7. It’s interesting that one of the big future mega trends will be the sheer growth of ‘screens”. Screens and displays will be all around us, pervading every facet of our lives with the purpose of delivering us commercially sponsored messaging (i.e a pitch).

 
As a smaller marketer I’m not any less guilty. I do conduct custom research with the aim of supporting a position or point of view in the market. I do develop white papers and videos with a pitch that is designed to push a viewpoint that’s favorable to my company and my product. I’m certainly not producing high quality content for humanitarian reasons alone. I do try to keep the pitch to minimum and always try to make the content of high quality, but the end goal is the same in that I’m trying to position a point of view that benefits my interests commercially.

The difference is that it’s pretty apparent when you take content from a corporate website or off a corporate advertisement your going to get some pointed messaging. What's changing is that these commercial messages will be delivered across all channels and packaged within seemingly non commercial messages and this is where we all need to be more aware and do as our parents said:

“Always question who is delivering you the news, and always ask who “they” are”

I worked with Morgan many years back, and during that time we all knew he would be very successful. Congratulations on your new movie and as a marketer I can’t wait to see it. Nuff said.

More Marketers To Start Blogging

According to recent research by eMarketer more companies will start blogging to support their marketing efforts with 43% of all US companies expected to have some form of blog in use for marketing by 2012.

What’s still amazing to me is the number of B2B companies that do not blog and those who start their foray into social media with Facebook or Twitter as their primary focus/goal.

 

 I have always held that the "blog" is the best form of social media in which to start conversing with your audience, and sharing your ideas. A good company blog gives you immediate SEO and thought leadership awareness and if coordinated within your PR & Communications processes and agency partners you will see your business and vertical media coverage rise significantly.

 

The reason for this is that the model of journalism is basically that of independent blogs by former journalists and analysts. These folks are always looking or for ready-to-wear content, and if you provide them that content at the right time your message will usually be posted verbatim within the context of their article.

Want to enter social media? Start with a great blog. Nuff Said.

Are Mormons Better Marketer's Than Jews?

Be a Mormon and not a Jew when it comes to your viral marketing according to Jonah Peretti, CEO at Buzzfeed. Peretti posts 5 tips on how to make a message or idea go viral in todays environment:

· Create media for the Bored At Work Network: There are hundreds of millions of people around the world bored at work sitting in front of their computers connected to high speed networks.  This network is bigger than any traditional media network like CNN or ABC. Create something they will want to pass around.

· Practice The Mullet Strategy: Business up front, party on the back.  If you have a Website, keep the front page serious so as not to scare off the casuals.  Give all the crazy commenter’s and contributors space in the back, and only show them to the rest of the world when they create something that catches on.

· Try Big Seed Marketing: If you are  brand trying to create  a viral campaign, it might be hard. True viral memes are hard to reproduce.  It is much easier to make something that still gets passed around, but you might have to spend some money to seed it around the Internet.  The more seed you spread, the more chance it will grow. “Buy the seed, get the viral for free,” he says (this is basically BuzzFeed’s business model).

· Target The Maniacs: The Web is ruled by maniacs, people who get worked up about things and push their ideas out.  ”Content is more viral if it helps people express their personality disorders,” notes Peretti.

· Be A Mormon, Not A Jew. This one is tongue in cheek.  But Mormonism is a growing religion, whereas Judaism is stagnating in terms of population.  Why?  Mormons are better evangelists.  ”The problem with Jews is that they suck at marketing,” says Peretti.  ”It’s almost like they don’t want anyone else to be a Jew.” His point is that it is not just the quality of an idea that counts, it is how much effort you put into spreading it. via techcrunch.com.

 

Perriti posts some humorous stats on the difference between Mormons and Jews in the growth of their respective religions, and points out that Judaism may be relevantly stagnant when compared to the growth of the Mormon religion. His main message in this comparison is that while Judaism may be a high quality religion, in the viral and socially connected environment that we operate in that quality of message is not a growth strategy. Whereas, with the Mormon religion, they want you to be a Mormon, and make "Evangelism" central to their strategy, and mission. The key take away is that you need to focus not just on the idea or message, but more on the mechanics of how a message is spread in todays socially connected world.

When it comes to viral I have always hated the term “viral” as it conjures up terms in “managements” mind of “high-volume” for “no money” or worse “free advertsiing”. As Perriti points out the reality is that most successful viral business attempts have come on the heels of a large, well funded and integrated mixed media campaigns.

 I also believe that good social-viral attempts are those that ultimately give your target audience a chance to emotionally connect with your brand experience; a lesson that I think the recent Irish Spring campaign brought to light.

There are some interesting correlations in thought between Perrtti’s notion that you need to connect with the “maniacs” to the thoughts of Malcom Gladwell in that Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen are key recruits in making an idea tip into the mainstream. This is interesting to note as part of the social aspect of the Irish Spring Campaign was to produce a series of near real time tweets, but the selection of, who to tweet to, in response to the campaign was made based on the tweeters “influence”. This is an interesting notion as we see the rise of “influence”  as part of an integrated campaign with a social extension, and also interesting to note that a little “science” was used in making that determination.

In today’s socially networked world strategy and planning, leverage of key influencers, a somewhat bored audience, some good old school marketing, backed up by some decent budget seem to be what is required to make the best use of viral messaging and ideas for marketing. Most attempts will be dismal but a few will be brilliant in that they will enable the audience to emotionally engage with the brand in an entertaining and fulfilling way. Now isn’t that worth a college try?

Nuff Said.

Six Social Media Sins

Quick little post I did for Businessweek online. What other sins would you have added?

Six Social Media Sins

Posted by: Today's Tip Contributor on July 9, 2010

Social media are not intended for you to syndicate your corporate message. Social media are here to facilitate open and honest dialogue with other individuals. If you are not open and honest, no one will want to engage with you, just as in nondigital life. When using social media to promote your business, avoid making the following mistakes:

1. Believing that if you build it, they will come. Just because you brand a Facebook page, YouTube channel, Twitter feed, or blog does not mean that you are using social media.

2. Not being authentic. You will soon be sniffed out if all you’re doing is using social media tools to promote your one-sided message and make sales.

3. Thinking you are in control. If you think you can control negative comments on your blog or other avenues, you will soon learn that you can’t.

4. Not listening. Social media is about open, two-way dialogue that entails both giving and sharing.

5. Thinking social media is not work. Social media is the most unscalable tactic there is in digital media. It takes a human being on the other end of the channel to engage and converse.

6. Not knowing your audience. Lacking an understanding of what your audience is passionate about or wants to engage in will result in a poor experience both for you and your audience.

Social media is about two-way communication and engagement, so enjoy the tools that are out there that help you further engage with your key audience

via www.businessweek.com

The Ultimate Business Differentiator

A reminder to everyone in business, that in the age of user generated content, world class brand experience, from 1st touch through the entire lifetime of the customer is of paramount importance and is the ultimate brand differentiator.

 

 

Soldiers Have Crappy Printer - Watch more Funny Videos Nuff Said

Big Ed’s Top 10 B2B Marketing Trends For 2010

 
The great global economic meltdown of 2009 has passed, and we are still here and breathing, mostly a sigh of relief. It’s been a tough year for B2B marketers as many of us had to deal with decreased budgets, staff and a return to basics. Hopefully, we focused on improving our core processes, measures, and databases so we are ready for whatever the economy and market brings our way in 2010. In 2009, I put forth my Big 10 Trends for B2B Marketing, and in keeping with tradition I thought I would do it again for 2010.

1.    Mass Adoption of Social Media in The B2B Marketing Mix

I hope that in 2010 we will finally see an end to the monotonous message of “Why Marketers Should Use Social Media” and hopefully an end to the ubiquitous “5 Ways to Use Twitter to Improve Your Marketing”.  I think we can all say that social media officially jumped the shark when Ashton tweeted all of us a picture of Demi in her underpants.

 To that end there should be only be a few of us left that do not fully understand that social media, must become part of our integrated marketing mix in order to get our message out, and to build a dialogue with our customers. While not in such large numbers yet, marketers are beginning to understand that they have lost control of the brand experience to the customer, and that they must engage if they have any desire to partake in their brand experience. 

Are there any of us left that aren’t using social media in one form or another today? Granted some of us may be using it ineffectively, but we are using it, and therefore we are learning. Unfortunately get ready for the onslaught of the a-typical social media campaign: “take a video of how you use our product and we will show it on You Tube.”

2.    Social Media ROI Remains Confusing and Elusive as Ever

 

 

With the mass adoption of social media we will now be inundated with an ever increasing amount of articles, and blog posts on how to “Increase Leads & SEO with Social Media”. The reality is almost all of us confuse “the media” with “the social” in trying to identify measures that get us to some form of ROI. Today most of us are focused on awareness, and lead generation as noted by this recent research from Sirius Decisions.

I, for one, do not believe that social media will prove an effective lead generation tool as social media is inherently about dialogue, listening and engaging. I don’t think there are too many people, customer or otherwise, that want to be sold to in every dialogue they have with a brand. Someone once said “Social Media Works Best When it is Earned and Not Paid for”.

We will see continued ROI assertions with the “media side” of social media, but I don’t think this is the relevant measure to look at as these measures are usually short-term in their focus. Social media is inherently about value creation and, as a result, much more long-term in its value add that is ultimately reflected in trust, advocacy, and sentiment towards our brands. This is where the true ROI/Value in social media lies, but it will be a long and arduous path for most of us to realize that, let alone convincing our management. In addition we are hampered by a lack of effective and efficient tool sets that can aid our measures on these more subjective value drivers.

 

I think that we must all go through an evolution of social media learning before we can truly be enlightened on the real ROI, or better yet, value generation of social media. In my view this evolutionary curve follows a distinct path of enlightenment for B2B marketers:

· Awareness: The stage where most of us begin our journey. Here the focus is on utilizing social media channels to drive market/brand awareness and SEO. Marketers confuse Social Media ROI with media measures such as page rank, organic vs. paid search, page views, and leads (we also confuse inquires & leads but that is another issue). Social media strategy is often confused with social media tools and channels (i.e. the tactics) at this stage.

· Engagement: After awareness we realize that social media can actually be used to converse in a two-way dialogue with our ecosystem. Metrics get a little more focused and try to relate to other ongoing tactics in order to monetize the value of such efforts and convince management of the need for continued investment. For example, using a blog to gain feedback on a company’s products can be monetized against the ongoing cost of focus groups.

 

 

 

· Listening: Once we are engaged we discover the power of listening. Here we start to use social media to listen to the market, and to what people are saying about our products, brands, and engaging more directly to assist with the service aspects of the company’s offerings. Social media metrics get more sophisticated, and are viewed in a much longer time frame than media measures. This new level of social media measurement is focused more on advocacy, brand sentiment, and service experience. While sentiment and advocacy are difficult to measure, as tool sets are still emerging, advancements will be made on the monetization and measuring the service aspect of social media (i.e reaching out to a compliant heard through twitter and solving the issue via social media channels).  Comcast Cable use of Twitter  is a good example of this stage of evolution.

· Innovation: At this stage we start using social media to crowd-source, and to co-innovate with our ecosystems. This is the most advanced stage of evolution where our products and services actually converge with community and social media capabilities to foster greater and faster co-innovation. At this stage the value derived from social media can be extraordinary as smaller brands can compete effectively with larger brands. SalesForce.com and Starbucks are two companies with examples of community based innovation frameworks in place.

 

3.    Focus On Database Accuracy

Last year I said that database marketing will be a major priority for us as the recession will require us to focus on cross-sell, and to leverage our database for more effective and efficient demand generation. Now we have a new issue at play in our databases, and that is the accuracy of the contacts. While we will always be searching for the holy grail of accuracy in the database, this issue has been exacerbated in 2010 due to the recession that has left many of these databases defunct due to the massive job losses seen. Efforts need to be undertaken to cleanse and update existing data bases this year versus focusing on adding more quantity to the marketing database.

 

4.    B2B Buyers Continued Shift to Online Sources of Information

As I said last year Print is dead. 2009 saw the continued demise of B2B print media and the large industry events have been called into greater question, as their real value became more suspect in an increasingly digital world. Influence of the virtual event and webcasts continues to grow as effective communication and lead generation channels for B2B marketers. Yet there remains a gap in how we, as marketers, view the channels that our prospects are using to conduct their buying research. Here is some recent Tech Target IT buyer research that I found particularly interesting.

When asked how frequently they use the internet to conduct buyer research IT buyers said the following:

 

Note the disconnect between Marketers and the people they are trying to reach. IT Buyers don’t view the Vendor Website in such high esteem as we do (imagine that), nor do they view conferences, trade shows, associations or editorial articles in evaluating technology as highly as we do.

 

 

 

The key point here is that now, more than ever, we truly have to understand our persona’s buying process and how they conduct and consume information in order to optimize our marketing mix across online and off-line channels.

5.    Understanding & Optimizing the Buying & Selling Cycle

While much has been written about how we, as marketers, have lost control of our brand experience, and the need to understand our buyer personas in a way to more effectively deliver content to support the buying process, very little has been written about the impact to the sales cycle. The reality is that sales has lost control over the selling cycle in the context that sales must control relevant information in order to force an engagement with the prospect, and to ensure that the sales is guiding the decision making process of the prospect. While that may have worked 10 years ago, nothing can be further from the truth today. How many times have you heard your sales team say “Don’t put that on the website. They need to come to me for that information”?

In today’s world, our prospects are getting their information including pricing, technical details, etc. from our past customers and, in most cases, now know more about the product, and the business terms than our own sales teams. This puts our sales teams into ever increasing positions of justifying their value add.

Note some recent B2B buyer research from Forrester where 70% of business decision makers prefer to develop their own knowledge online.

In short, they don’t want to engage with you until they are ready (I know. It’s a novel concept). This creates a few challenges for B2B marketers:

1.    Understanding the buyer process and personas of the target audience in order to develop an optimal content model and delivery channels.

2.    Extending Marketing programs to cover the sales process and understanding our sales persona in order to develop an optimal content model for sales that adds value to the customer buying process.

3.    Optimizing a cohesive content model that supports both the buying and selling process.

Ultimately this reinforces the notion that Content Is King, but if we don’t understand both the buying and selling process, as well as our buying and selling personas, we will be producing content for the sake of content and not meeting any of the true requirements of our customers or our sales teams.

6.    Content is King, but Comparative Content is The Kings Ransom

Content may be King but it is comparative content that your buyers want—

Content that compares how your solution stacks up against your competitors. Closely following comparative content is pricing information. These are the two most valued types of information and searches across buyers when using the internet for research, yet these two types of information are most resisted by marketers and sales alike, in an attempt to control information and force engagements with the brand.

 

2010 will see an increase in comparative and pricing content on vendor websites by aggressive marketers who want to define the competitive framework. First movers will gain leverage by introducing this content first. Do the following search:“enter your company/solution name here” vs  “enter your competitor’s company/solution name here” . You may be surprised at what comes up.

 

7.    Segment Based Nurturing

By now we have all learned that it is important to nurture, and most of us have put in place the Ubiquitous Newsletter that touches our base at least a few times a year or month. Some of us have even put into place some automated touches of emails that are sent out at predefined intervals to inquires in an attempt to get them to re-engage or push information to accelerate a buying process. Segment based nurturing is the next stage of this nurturing process where we put into place a very comprehensive communications flow whose message evolves over time based on actions taken.

 

In short, segment based nurturing revolves around the notion that the conversation you have today is different from the one you have next month based on level of interest, need, actions, content taken, etc. To do this well you must have the right tool sets in place (i.e. Eloqua, Marketo, Genius-I’m a customer). The tools sets are rapidly evolving and coming down in cost. If you don’t have this type of capability, you need to make 2010 the year you implement a basic marketing automation platform.

 

As I said last year, many of us that have these platforms in place are still only using them as glorified email engines, but the real power is when we leverage them as segmentation engines that happen to have email as a feature.

 

 

To realize this value we must bring together an enriched and accurate marketing database, a well designed web site, improved understanding of our content model, and its relation to the buying process, and persona requirements.  When this happens very advanced and segmented-automated nurturing can be applied. In 2010 we will see more companies move to this more advanced level of nurturing, along with increased adoption of marketing automation platforms.

 

8.    Operationalizing the Marketing Convergence of Art & Science

Is marketing an art or a science? The answer is yes. When the science meets the art in a more structured way, exciting marketing messages, creative, campaigns can and will result. More companies are realizing this benefit, and are looking to formalize the “marketing gearbox” where art meets science.

 

This may take the form of a dedicated operations role or through process where the analytics works side-by-side with the creative process. Increasingly we will see this convergence become more formalized across more and more companies in 2010.

 

9.    Social CRM Takes Root

 

 

 

The year 2009 saw Social CRM start to hit the main stage with the announcement of twitter integration into

Salesforce, Comcast Cable use of twitter to serve customers, and Best Buy’s Twelp Force. More companies, including my own, are increasingly monitoring social media channels in an effort to support customer issues, both positive and negative.  

 

2010 will see accelerated integration of these channels into CRM and service systems as it represents an ideal way for companies to have an efficient dialogue and improve overall brand and customer experience. This is one area of social media that can be quickly monetized and measured.

10.   Rise of Community Thought Leadership

Thought leadership has been around for some time as an objective for marketers to drive. In most cases thought leadership takes a more strategic approach to a company’s messaging or positioning objectives, such as “trying to educate a market”, “influence opinion makers”, “position the company’s vision as the industry vision”. In my view, thought leadership is an important part of the overall marketing mix and should be invested in.

 

However I do believe that there is a new dimension coming to thought leadership and that is “community thought leadership”. Scott Mersey of Genius.com recently blogged that the difference between Community Thought Leadership & Thought Leadership is:

“The key difference between Community Leadership and Thought Leadership is that this approach means that help and relevant content is provided freely and without strings so that any member of the community - whether or not ever a “prospect” to become a customer - comes away with actionable information and insight into how to solve their problems. It’s leadership that’s vendor agnostic and broader than a piece designed to capture leads.”

Henrik Ibsen once said that “A community is like a ship; everyone ought to be prepared to take the helm.”  This really denotes the difference, in my view, between our traditional approach to marketing thought leadership and community based thought leadership. In the traditional sense we are focused on getting our message out, and not so concerned with dialogue, or as Mersey states “Focused on Monologue”.

 

In community thought leadership we are a member of a relevant community, and focused on influencing and building advocacy for our views across many community members. In doing this we take part in meaningful dialogue, and debate where our initial thought/idea/position is subject to evolution based on input from the community.

Community thought leadership is growing more important to B2B marketers as communities are becoming increasingly important as vehicles where our ecosystem engages, and shares ideas in an increasing manner. So how does one define a successful community thought leadership effort?

1.    Become part of a relevant community.

2.    Share your ideas freely and provide information that is free of vendor speak and requirements such as registration.

3.    Have thoughtful debate and dialogue.

4.    Be willing to evolve your position.

5.    Focus on building advocacy, not monologue.

 

In 2010 we will see more push on community thought leadership as part of a comprehensive thought leadership program.

 

I wish all of you great success in 2010. Nuff Said.

Twitter Helps Latest LA Food Sensation Gather Its Tribes

 Kogi is the latest phenomenon in LA dining. Chef, at world famous restaurant, decides to forgo glitz and glamour and create a unique fusion of Korean and Mexican food and serves up these delectable concoctions in roving catering vans all over LA.

I’m not making this up folks, and it’s the stuff that Hollywood is made of. I’m sure the food network is already doing a show on it. While I’m a foodie at heart, the real story is one of a relatively unknown (until recently) mobile catering truck that used Twitter and awesome food, to create a following, and help lubricate word of mouth in America’s 2^nd largest city and now the world.

As Kogi is a mobile business, and a small one at that, it needed a way to tap into the following that it had created, and who was already talking about Kogi on Facebook, other social networking sites and blogs. Kogi’s brand director, in a recent Reuters article, stated that they decided to use Twitter as a way to communicate with their “tribe” and facilitate gathering places based on the trucks location. Kogi turned to Twitter. Today you and Kogi’s 23,000 followers can be found on Twitter at twitter.com/kogibbq.

This shows the amazing capability of utilizing a social media tool to facilitate a small business with a large following, and an excellent product. So let’s look at Kogi’s ingredients for success:

1.      Great Product: Kogi obviously has a tremendous product. Social media success and for that matter any business, starts with an amazing product or service.

2.      The Tribe of Kogi: Kogi’s customers wanted to talk about their experience, and in fact had became a tribe. Seth Godin writes that “a tribe is any group of people connected to each other through an idea or experience”. In this case, Kogi’s customers had become a tribe, but we’re missing a leader. When Kogi stepped in, and utilized social tools Kogi become the leader of its own tribe. A place where a brand wants to be at the end of the day.

3.      Honesty: The social community in this case is honest. Kogi delivers an amazing product, people want to talk about, and others want to experience it and Kogi facilitates this. Kogi’s goal is not about selling or hyping, at least not yet, and let’s hopes it stays that way.

4.      Word of Mouth: WOM is the best advertising around. This is as old, as the hills, and still true. Kogi couldn’t buy the brand awareness it has now, and is getting through the facilitation of communication across its tribe. Social Media can help any small business if the intent is to converse with the community of customers and prospects; not sales or advertising.

5.      With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility: Kogi must now realize the importance of its brand experience, and promise that its customers have come to expect. Any degradation in service and experience will travel at the speed of light in Kogi’s social universe.

6.      Innovation: While Kogi’s responsibility to its brand experience is now much greater it has an amazing community of people to listen to, and engage with, and in doing that develop new innovation in its business.

This story shows how small businesses can take advantage of building and tapping into their community. Today, McDonalds and Burger King do not have Twitter accounts and Domino’s only recently started one to help combat the recent wave of bad publicity. Why haven’t the brands, with all the resources in the world, tapped into the tools that help them engage with their customers? Probably because they are still strategizing, and trying to figure out the ROI of a conversation. Nuff said.

Reducing Your Content Friction

  Recently came across a tweet from Chris Brogan referencing a post on Shannon Paul’s Blog on how to take your marketing content from available to sharable to social. I’ve referenced Shannon’s 5 ways here:

Five ways to encourage online sharing of your content:

1.      Allow the URL of the image to be copied and pasted in addition to making smaller sized images available for download, too. Sure, magazine publishers will appreciate the large, high-resolution files available for download, but nobody posting online will appreciate such large files.

2.      Video and audio clips should also be embeddable. Don’t make me go to your website every time I want to watch your video. Let me post your video where I want.

3.      Continue to e-mail text versions of press releases when it makes sense to do so, but have an extension of your website dedicated to sharing content that includes SEO versions of your press releases.

4.      With each item you post in your shared content space, include ShareThis or AddThis buttons to encourage direct posting of your content to social networks like Facebook and Friendfeed, and social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg.

5.      In addition to posting current content, also share company background information, executive bios, logos, video and audio clips, images and external links to relevant information.

The words “available to sharable to social” are very poignant. In a web world you must think about making your content available for people to syndicate and share. It’s not enough to make the content sharable or downloadable but to reduce the friction and make the content embeddable and inherently sharable.

On the blog Web Ink Now David Meerman Scott makes reference to Neighborhood America’s online media room as a great example of making content available. They go a long way to making the content sharable but I would have liked to see them go one step further, and make the content more shareable by making the actual HTML code available for embedding the content in other venues such as blogs.

In any event kudos to a Neighborhood America for a job well done. In our recent ebook launch we actually make available a logo-icon with embeddable html code available to anyone who would like to embed our ebook in their blogs.

In catching up with some former SAP colleagues they informed me of a recent initiative where they make the content sharable via buttons that bring up several logos of various book marking sites like Digg etc. This has increased the # of inbound links tenfold, and improved their SEO rankings thus enabling a more efficient allocation of pay per click spend. So as an old school marketer I look for the selfish self interest and I have found it.

Remember you must reduce the friction surrounding for your publishable content in this day and age. Doing so can not only increase your syndication of message, but also nets a positive return for your marketing efforts in enhanced SEO and reduced pay per click spend. Nuff Said.

Eating My Own Social Media Dog Food-My First Ebook

So I’ve finally taken a page out of David Meerman Scott's playbook and developed an ebook. But we didn’t do an ebook for the sake of doing an ebook. We actually had a few marketing challenges. How does a growing software security company like Lumension Security establish a thought leadership position around its brand and raise the security discussion across the CXO suite. An ebook seemed like a perfect solution for the following reasons:

1.       We could communicate a more strategic message

2.       We could use this vehicle to start a conversation with bloggers, and other communities relevant to our message

3.       We could make it viral and extend our message for little cost

4.       We could leverage our communications investment to drive a PR campaign around our message

5.       We could add in rich media to add new dimension to our message and increase our content relevancy across various communities and search engines

In developing the ebook we put some investment into it. We worked on our message, we hired a professional writer, we interviewed customers and analysts, we utilized secondary research and we had a designer add the finishing touches. We also wanted to add rich media to the ebook. Why not take advantage of the digital platform to have rich media embedded into the ebook. So we did a series of videos related to key ebook topics.

  

There was extensive debate over registration and if we should put the ebook behind a registration all. I took a page out of David Meerman Scott’s playbook and said no to registration. Can you believe it? A marketing guy saying no to inquiry generation, especially an old school marketing guy like me. We did this as we wanted the ebook to be accessed without any barriers or friction. Again to go back to our goals. Our goal was not a demand gen goal, but rather a thought leadership and messaging  goal. So why add barriers to the message getting out.

We did however want to ensure we leveraged as many opportunities as possible to get our message and relevance enhanced. For example we created a YouTube channel and this is where we host our ebook videos. Our ebook videos actually pull from our YouTube channel. As the videos are played our video on content gains more relevance on YouTube and Google. We also embedded the same videos on our website so our web now has rich media and our SEO gains additional relevance. We created a special video with our CEO just on the topics within the book and this already has 156 views in one week on our channel without any launch of the ebook itself. Okay so it’s not 1M, but its more than 1.

We did a prelaunch of our eBook to bloggers first and then did a soft launch within our company newsletter. Our official launch doesn’t start until next week. Again no request for bloggers to post or comment just wanted to share our message and thoughts.

We will be doing a social media release next week, and will include the html code to a special ebook badge should people want to place the ebook on their blog or web page. It’s a great content offer and we want people to share it and use it. In fact we even placed a Creative Commons license on the ebook. We will also tie into a extensive communications campaign through the 3^rd QTR and leverage our CEO to expound on his message. It the tie in of social media and traditional communications is where a little new school meets some old school. But who cares if it’s great content lets leverage all our channels more effectively.

Our metrics are # of downloads, # of blog posts, # of interviews, # of mentions. The metrics tend to be more towards the communication side of the house as this initiative was really about the message getting out and not demand generation.

So there we are. We focused on creating a conversation, we’re reaching out, we’re web centric, we didn’t use registration pages, and we created a powerful message vehicle for not a huge amount of investment. In fact there is no media investment within the ebook. Stay Tuned and Nuff Said.