Archive for July, 2012
Defining the real value of check-in apps
July 27th, 2012
Douglas Karr over at The Marketing Technology Blog has just posted an excellent link blog, which I am shamelessly re-using, it being Friday night an’all – and this is my short post for the week.
I think we’re behind the adoption curve on mobile geographic services in the UK so Doug’s view of his US experience is illuminating. I’ll admit to having approximately zero geo-marketing apps on my iPhone – maybe I should get out more but the need for proximity (and full trust) does not presently match my interests.
Doug’s right, though about the defining the real value of check-in apps. It’s a discussion we all need – businesses both big and less big. I hope it does not get ambushed by regressive marketers who see the opportunity to reinforce one-way, old-school campaigns, a fear that Shel Israel raised recently.
I’d be a founding member of the Shout-Marketing Noise Abatement Society if that were to happen 
Check out Doug’s post and the excellent infographic from Intuit.
The power of a Tweet helps J.C. Penney shares jump 10%
July 27th, 2012
We often talk about the power of social media and how reach is ever expanding, but stories like this one are a beautiful and simple example of this in action.
Reuters has announced that shares of J.C. Penney jumped almost 10% briefly on Wednesday this week after Nina Garcia, Marie Claire magazine fashion editor and judge on television show “Project Runway” tweeted about the department store’s revamp mentioning chief executive Ron Johnson.
“I’m @jcpenney’s HQ. Thank you Ron Johson (sic) for the walk through of JCP’s prototype. Get ready to shop! Its (sic) going to be a game changer!”
J.C. Penney shares rose to as much as $23.09. The stock was up 4.9 percent at $22.02 later on Wednesday afternoon on the New York Stock Exchange.
Although the link between the tweet and the rise in stock cannot be clearly made, TD Ameritrade chief derivatives strategist J.J. Kinahan immediately referenced the tweet when explaining the share spike, and there did not seem to be any other obvious contributing factors.
J.J. Kinaham said:“With that we saw the stock go sharply higher, along with increased buying in call options, a bullish play.”
Interestingly Reuters also mentioned that Garcia recently became J.C. Penney’s “Style Voice” and fashion collection curator, so it’s up for debate whether the tweet was entirely unlinked, but the point remains that an influential tweet seems to have had a huge impact on share price, and helps to prove the influencer status that Twitter can now claim.
Bradley Wiggins: the new brand for a revolution in professional cycling
July 23rd, 2012
Bradley Wiggins, winner of the 2012 Tour de France is the new brand for a revolution in professional cycling.
He has, at a (pedal) stroke, reset the Tour clock to zero. From now, pro road racing – that most benighted of athletic trades – will take its rightful place at the apex of sport. And the Tour de France will be at the forefront.
At the core of this revolution is the emotive word “cleanâ€.
Around 3.6 million people in the UK watched his ride into Paris yesterday (Sunday 22nd July) on ITV and ITV4 and many others were watching on Eurosport – a very healthy number of eyeballs, given pro cycling’s tortured history.
You’ll know by now that Bradley Wiggins is the first pro cyclist from the UK to win the Tour de France but I’m not sure whether everyone watching Bradley (@bradwiggins) understood exactly how unbelievably awesome his Tour de France performance was. Not sure if I do fully yet. I think he does, though!
I have seen some truly majestic battles in this hardest of all professional sports events since I first watched it on Channel 4 in 1987, when Stephen Roche rode the race of his life and we saw the epic finish of Stage 21 at La Plagne, which effectively won him the Tour, psychologically battering his main opponent Pedro Delgado.
In 1989, I was in France to watch Greg LeMond beat the late Laurent Fignon by eight seconds to win the TdF for a second time, less than two years after he nearly died in a hunting accident in the US.
In 1990, I covered the final time trial, which sealed LeMond’s third Tour victory, for The Observer newspaper (if I do nothing else, I will die a happy man ).
Yet Bradley’s 2012 ride was so much better in every respect than these astonishing wins and will, in my humble opinion, never be bettered.
Because the taint of doping that has followed pro cycling around like familiar bad smell (think old wet dog) is finally gone. It’s been ‘bradleyd’.
I always thought that UK pro cycling, shattered by Tom Simpson’s drug-associated death on the slopes of Mont Ventoux, was thereafter assigned the cultural role by journalists and some publics of providing a perfect example of what happens when you let working-class people loose in sport and offer them good money to cheat.
But from my time in sports journalism and following and loving sport for nearly 50 years, I know that pro cycling has not been alone in the doping derby.
To take one personal example – a very good friend, a female discus thrower who was UK national standard, was told by her coach in 1979 that for her to compete at international level she would have to take “performance-enhancing†drugs. But he said he would not want to be her coach if that happened. She quit.
Over the years I’ve heard numberless accounts of the penetration of doping culture into most sports, attendant to the professionalisation of these activities. Cycling was the only sport I saw being systematically branded as “uncleanâ€.
I am sure that Bradley Wiggins’ Tour de France win will see a deep, lasting cultural change in attitudes to cycling. We are witness to the Birth of the Clean Age. Because of that, Bradley is the hottest property in professional sport.
In brand marketing terms, Bradley Wiggins is a new, unique form. John Reynolds over at Marketing magazine reports that Wiggo’s commercial off-track earnings value would be around £5 million. If you trebled that, you might be getting close. Long live Wiggo. Long live Clean.
Facebook Marketing 2012 review #fbkm12
July 19th, 2012
On Wednesday we attended the Facebook Marketing 2012 event (#fbkm12) at the ICO Conference Centre in London organised by Our Social Times and Chinwag.
As you can see by the agenda the line up was impressive, kicking off with Andy Pang from Facebook, and including brands such as Manchester City FC, Nokia, BBC, Guardian, Yorkshire Tea, Kraft (Cadburys), agencies such as TBG Digital, Edelman, We are Social, Isobar Social and SiteVisibility, and technologies such as Agorapulse and Tempero, as well as many more in the crowd.
You can see the presentations here.
The event, which will also be running in New York and Singapore, was jam-packed with 18 sessions developed to uncover the latest strategies, tools and insights for running Facebook campaigns, including case studies on brands such as Dove, Heinz, and Kellogg’s.
The event also coincided with the launch of two pieces of research, which were quoted during the event:
1. comScore and Facebook: European Insights About Earned and Paid Media Reach and Effectiveness
2. Facebook Global Ad Report 2012. Sponsored Story ads are now 53% more engaging than standard FB ads by TBG Digital
This was backed up by a range of learning/stats and advice from the sessions, examples of which include:
- Facebook only holds 6 months worth of data
- 66% of people follow less than 5 brands
- People don’t share facts, they share emotions. Brands that don’t measure will fail
- Most antisocial thing brands could do on Facebook is turn off comments
- videos, photos & links are “weightier” than other updates, therefore more likely to appear in newsfeeds; likes & comments add weight
- Likes are meaningless
- Japan has the quickest growing Facebook penetration percentage in the world
- A high CTR (click through rate) doesn’t equal a good ROI (Return on investment)
Each of the sessions was live blogged by Adam Tinworth (@adders) via the Liberate Media blog. If you would like to read more about any of the presentations, feel free to choose from the list below:
Andy Pang, Facebook: Facebook State of the nation
Richard Ayers, Manchester City FC & British Film institute: Facebook Strategy: How Facebook fits into a social & Digital strategy
Tom Smith and Brett Petersen, GlobalWebIndex: Facebook – Beyond the Hype
Discussion – Facebook and traffic, localisation and devices
Kelvin Newman, SiteVisibility: an introduction to Edgerank
Dom Dwight, Yorkshire Tea: Little Urn, human voice and Facebook Tea
Jeremy Waite, TBG Digital: why brands are doing Facebook advertising wrong
Discussion: the worth of Likes and Ads – Facebook Marketing 2012
Sarah Lindley, Cadbury: drives Dairy Milk engagement with a giant, chocolate thumb
Nils Mork-Ulnes & Judith Lewis, Beyond Interactive: The Science of sharing
Russell Goldsmith, Markettiers4DC: driving engagement with interactive video
Voices, real people and Black Swans: 3 case studies: Dove, Kellogg’s, XBox
Martin Belam, Emblem: leveraging the Facebook platform – Guardian Reader
Tom Ollerton, We are Social: Selling FMCG on Facebook with Heinz
Paul Marsden, Social Commerce Today: Ringing the Tills: An introduction to Fcommerce
Thomas Messett, Nokia: Nokia and Fcommerce
According to Appozite Tweet reach the crowd stretched well beyond those at the event and expanded onto the social web, as you would expect. By the end of the event 142,756 people had been reached.
Many of the sessions were also reported on by titles such as Marketing Week and eConsultancy, examples of the stories can be seen below:
Econsultancy:
Man City’s social strategy is about engagement, not traffic
Cadbury’s shift to social means no more drumming gorillas
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F-commerce doesn’t work, according to Nokia and Heinz
Marketing Week:
Cadbury adopts ‘social first’ strategy
BFI to use digital to tap into film fans
The conversation didn’t finish at the end of the event either, as debate continued both online and in the pub.
Facebook Marketing 2012 was a huge success and Chinwag and Our Social Times should be congratulated for bringing together such an impressive line up and pulling it off.
Fcommerce: lessons and basic concepts – Facebook Marketing 2012
July 18th, 2012
Paul Marsden, Social Commerce Today
Fcommerce is just selling with Facebook.
There’s ecommerce on Facebook – buying things on Facebook, selling fans things via Facebook
Facebook on ecommerce – Facebook Open Graph buttons on your commerce site. Want, Puchase and Donate buttons are all coming. And then you can combine the two, by embedding a shop into Facebook – but with a twist. You buy with a Like or a share…
Facebook in-store – fitting rooms with Facebook terminals, so you can get shopping advice from your friends. We’ll see that flipped, with in-store events shared into Facebook.
Brands think deals are low on the list of what people want – but actually they’re right at the top. What people don’t want is “engagement”. Â ROI is just the revenue from Facebook, divided by the amount spent. The simplest way to prove it is to shift stock. But to do it, you have to be remarkable – something that’s a first, unique, that creates word of mouth.
As you dig deeper, three things drive success in selling on Facebook:
The brands that succeed are offering a social value proposition: social utility – helping people solve problems together.
It helps you solve the “does my butt look big in this” problem – it harnesses social intelligence. A wise man learns from the experience of others. Collaborative group buying hasn’t really happened on Facebook yet.
Burberry helps its fans stand out with pop-up stores, giving them early access to new products – that’s social status. Fitting in? Heinz’s get well soup gift store helps people bond socially via gift-giving.
So, the social utility emerges when you help people solve these problems:
- social intelligence
- social status
- social bonding
Thomas Messett, Nokia
That graphic of what people want on Facebook? Rubbish. Think of that Henry Ford quote about asking customer what they want, and getting the answer “a faster horse”. Yes, you can do social commerce. Yes, you can use Facebook as a tool to drive valuable sales – but you don’t have to give things away cheaply.
Blindly driving up engagement is pointless – we need a bottom line. How can we find a middle line? Most people will never visit your page after they Like it. The interaction happens on the news feed. People share stuff – all the time. Everywhere.
This is about social proof and sharing.
We don’t sell product to consumers. We sell via partners. What we need to do is drive consumers to our partners. We can’t drop a pop-up shop into our Facebook page. The time people are most excited about our products is when they’ve just bought it. How can we make it easier for them to share that excitement? And if they do share it, and a friend clicks on that link and buys a phone, shouldn’t the original sharer be rewarded?
Social has always been social. Spotify have ruined Facebook for frictionless sharing. He’s scared of the app because it will ruin his Facebook feed. How do you encourage people to share without being pushy? You have to be really, really clear in allowing people to opt out. Yes, there are ways to incentivise people. Can you digitise the refer a friend mechanic? They’re trailing that in a couple of markets.
Remember: it’s platforms + apps, not stores and pages.
Tom Ollerton: Selling FMCG on Facebook with Heinz – Facebook Marketing 2012
July 18th, 2012
Tom Ollerton, We Are Social
Tomato Ketchup is a thing that splits people – dippers or smotherers.
Heinz wanted to sell 1,000,057 of the Balsamic Vinegar limited edition flavour – and We Are Social came up with the idea of selling them through Facebook. Bur they didn’t have enough fans, and the relationships with true supermarkets are a problem. So, they dropped their sights – and persuaded the brand to take the hit on postage. They teased the campaign. They launched entirely within Facebook.
But they had technical issues – they confirmed the sale in Facebook, but not vie e-mail. But people were ridiculously excited to get their bottle, and shared photos with it on Facebook… It spread to Twitter and eBay…
Learnings… housing it within Facebook put people off. People don’t trust Facebook with commerce. It was unfortunate that the page was going live on the Saturday – and The Grocer were due to publish an exclusive on that day. But they put it in their Friday e-mail, and they had to change their community management approach, as people already knew what it was. And they didn’t consider Twitter enough.
They followed it up with Get Well Soup. There’s nothing inherently interesting about FMCG goods like soup and ketchup. They have to pedal hard to stay interesting. Research showed that people associate soup with being ill – so they got the idea of allowing people to buy personalised soup tins to end to sick friends. They used PayPal – a trusted brand – for the transaction, which took longer, but which people were happier with.
They had some interesting requests: “Get well soon, Big Fat Gay.” The buyer pointed out that her girlfriend was big, fat and gay and she could prove it…
You have to give people something they can’t get elsewhere, and you need to create a social object that they’ll want to share.
Martin Belam: leveraging the Facebook platform – Facebook Marketing 2012
July 18th, 2012
Martin Belam, Emblem
The Guardian on Faceook – launched as one of the first batch of social apps. Was built in five weeks, and they were surprised by the level of traction. You can read, watch and listen to Guardian content in Facebook. Any shared link is “hijacked” and pushed to the app – but there is a clear opt in. There’s a sharp change in attitude to installing the app and sharing at 25. The older people wouldn’t install the app.
Some reaction was negative… somebody said they would happily kill the children of the people who designed it. Bit unfair on Martin’s daughter…
77% of the referrals from Facebook to The Guardian pre-app bounced back after reading one page. The Guardian team’s premise was that was because reading the article interrupted their Facebook experience. If you allow people to stay in Facebook, they might consume more. They also wanted to change what related content they showed. In Facebook you had more freedom to show trivial content as the next step after a more serious read.
That wasn’t the metric that got changed. They actually shifted their demographic downwards. The average age of their Facebook apps users is 29 – against 44 for the paper.
It was an experiment – and one they could do cheaply because the Guardian has an API. They only had two developers on The Guardian side. Adoption was so fast it looked like they could have more traffic in the app than on the proper site. Any page could go viral, of whatever age. It taught them to be more active in managing archive content and how it appears. A good story is still a good story, whatever its age. A 2009 story on female body image was read over 1m times in Facebook. It’s not an issue that goes away. They had over 1000 new comments in Facebook. The comments on the main site had been closed two years ago.
There was some editorial snootiness. X-Factor content was popular. So were short football clips. It’s not journalism, but then neither are TV listings. So what are the digital equivalents of TV listings? Over a third of the views of a video of a young man being racially abused by a policeman were in Facebook – it was the perfect demographic to share a video like this.
At one point The Guardian got more referrals from Facebook than Google – something Martin never thought would happen in his lifetime. People cutting and pasting headlines into search rather than using the app? Great – brought people to the site. And they saw that in the metrics.
They added an Agree / Disagree button, built with Facebook people in the US, and launched over flaky hotel WiFi. As soon as they launched, the algorithm grabbed hold of it as something it had never seen before, and gave it the hero treatment. Open Graph reads are at the bottom of the Facebook resonance curve. Is there an opportunity to add more just above it?
Would he do it differently now? They ended up taking a lot of stuff out that seemed important to the newspaper at the start – what section something came from, they moved the byline. etc. The most important thing thing for a publisher using the Open Graph is to stop thinking about being a publisher. One guy in the US can make a tweak to the Facebook code that will have more impact on how your content looks than you will ever have…
Voices, real people and Black Swans: 3 case studies – Facebook Marketing 2012
July 18th, 2012
Kellogg’s
Katie White (Isobar Social)
What is community? A group with community ownership or participation – and perhaps similarity or agreement. Kellogs moved away from trying to build their own communities around their brands, to participating on Facebook. But they’re competing with compelling personal life events in their news feeds – weddings, babies, entertainment brands. How do you move cereal from an impulse purchase to a place on the shopping list? They’ve used humanised images in the past: Tony the Tiger, the iconic red dress woman for Special K.
Using a humanised approach was their first concept, give it tone through content, and maintain and evolve the community over time. For example, the idea of obsession around Crunchy Nut led naturally to shareable images of obsession. With Rice Crispies Squares, the positioning is around lies – because they’re not actually square. A sample asset was a photo of a Square with a lottery ticket hidden inside. With Special K, they’ve built a community around the positive feelings after weight-loss. The ideas are around confidence and joy, as well as practical recipe sharing.
They have a framework for tone of voice for each brand – how they might talk and behave in social spaces, what sort of relationship they might be.
Dove
Emma Gannon (Edelman)
Dove is all about the community. They have 8.5m women globally with the same point of view on beauty. Edelman have an “amazing” relationship with Facebook. Everything they do and show begins and ends with real women. So how do they adapt that idea to a new platform? Both are about real people and conversations. Success will always be the community driving the conversation – the community managers should just be facilitating. Timeline was a dream for them, as the brand has a 54 year history. It’s an amazing brand with an amazing heritage. They put the fans into the timeline – they were trying to tell the story of the women rather than the brand itself.
The beautiful moments app draws together the moments you’ve shared with a friend, that creates a card you can send to their wall.
They’re now working on bringing their community managers more to the fore – because they’re real women, too. They want to talk to their community like a friend, Mum or sister.
The Black Swan Strategy
Maurice Wheeler (Doco London)
Black Swan events – those we have no way of predicting, don’t expect, but often post-rationalise. They tend to happen in systems that are highly complex, interconnected and emerging. The problem is that we actually believe that we’re good at predicting the future. Beware the false prophet who tells you he has the map of the future. Have a vision, but don’t draw a map.
You want good Black Swans – but you can’t predict them. So you need to keep trying new things. Create things that are safe to fail, not things that are failsafe. You need to think like a DJ, not a filmmaker. Be flexible, not structured. Most of all, know your audience.
Kill your bad Black Swans as soon as possible. Don’t make the intern the one responsible for implementing on the front end. You need a skilled experience person, who can sense what is happening and deal with it as soon as possible. Make sure all the people involved are highly interconnected.
Questions
Q. Can you really work like this if clients take three weeks to turn around status updates?
Maurice: It’s not easy and not every client is ready – but we have hopes and dreams we should strive towards. But it’s very dangerous to say to a client that a campaign is going to be successful. It’s very hard to predict what will and won’t. We’ll be able to solve the problem through iterating and testing.
Q. How does Dove measure success?
Emma: We have a benchmark across all markets for content. We do a lot of qualitative via quantitative. We’re very into sharing at the moment. They’re moving from writing things to images that get passed on. Buddy Media, Facebook Insights…
Q. Do we still need planners?
Maurice: We do need planners – but what my role is will change. I won’t be writing year-long comms plans, but I will be helping clients understand their audience day to day. A small, tactical team.
Russell Goldsmith: driving engagement with interactive video – Facebook Marketing 2012
July 18th, 2012
Russell Goldsmith, Markettiers4DC
Headstream research shows a very different pattern of behaviour around different forms of content on Facebook, as against what is created. Very little video is created – but it’s highly shared.
With Carphone Warehouse, they’d did what they claimed was the first concert streamed only on Facebook, with Eliza Doolittle. With Pampers, they had a baby sleep expert in their studio, and created a live web chat between 8 and 8.30. The “Submit your question” link was overlaid on the stream, and you could enter a competition for a year’s supply of nappies, too. They also created an event and streamed the show into the event. Over 800 fans had said they would attend before the actual show. A video ad ran purely between 8 and 8.30 – the time of the show. When you clicked on the ad, it opened up a Facebook “snowbox” where you could interact with the content. It wasn’t driving traffic to the page.
Stephanie Conlon, MEC
A livestream for The Dictator: Stream from a page reached less than 8,000 people. Through an ad? Millions. Again, the snow box model rather than driving people to a page: 3.5 million unique users within a two hour period.
Russell:
Joanna Lumley livestreaming for M&S on Facebook: 1m fans on the Facebook campaign. They had access to Joanna for an hour. In years gone by, they’d have tried to get radio interviews. Now they had the chance to talk directly to the audience.
Now, can you drive offline purchase through interactive video? There are lots of people developing this type of content. A Jaeger campaign saw a 300% increase in items going into a shopping basket through interactive video. But that’s clothes. How about shampoo? They worked with P&G on Pantene, with makeover videos, with products highlighted. Not a great success – the overlays were an afterthought – and maybe the product was too small for impulse purchases. Consumers prefer it as part of the big shop. So how about couponing?
They targeted Febreze – a small community page with around 15,000 Likes. You watch the video, click on the hotspot, and fill in your details for a coupon – within the video player. And that can work in the newsfeed – and be shared with friends. 92% increase on couple benchmarks. They hit 50% printing coupons. Later campaigns have hit 67% with 55% redemption rate – and they can track that entire process. At the moment you have to buy media space to get your coupon out. You rely on people cutting it out. However if people are actively printing it out, they’re more likely to actually redeem it.
The science of sharing – Facebook Marketing 2012
July 18th, 2012
Nils Mork-Ulnes & Judith Lewis, Â Beyond Interactive
Facebook represents over half of all sharing – 52% – 4bn pieces of content shared every day. Why do people share? If we understand what motivates them, we can more easily activate them to become our advocates. The largest number of people are altruists – doing it to help: 39.6%. Selectives is the next group, at 26.1%. Most people share on Facebook, but different motivations dominate on different platforms. It’s not just Facebook people use to share – but it plays a hugely important part, and attracts the widest range of sharers.
Shoppers are exposing themselves to nearly 11 pieces of content before a purchase decision – up from 5.4 a year ago. High sharers are three times more likely to recommend a product. They make up 20% of the online consumers.
The good news? People do want to friend brands. They’re especially willing if they’re bribed a little bit. 60% will share information in return for a discount. It makes Facebook a good place to reward loyalty. 53% have interacted with a brand on Facebook. People who are exposed to brand content on Facebook buy more in store than those who aren’t, based on figures from Starbucks and Target (ComScore/Facebook research cited in AdAge). Focusing on getting clickthroughs might not be the right approach.
43% pf people are prompted to purchase after an online interaction in the UK. That’s higher then the 31% in the US.
What might the future be of sharing on Facebook? If you map age of Facebook account against the amount of activity you find that the longer most people are on Facebook, the more they login. BUT – sharing drops off after three to six months. That could be one of the reasons Facebook is pushing frictionless sharing. 67% of people they talked to have used or been exposed to it – it’s already very pervasive. 61% were annoyed by the application…