Citizen Marketer 2.1

Aaron Strout

Facebook Fan: $136.38? $3.60 or $0.00?

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I’ve had this post in my head for a while. And given the fact that many of my Twitter friends were complaining about Facebook being down yesterday, I figured that this was as good a time as any to write this post about the value of a fan on Facebook.

Judy Shapiro of AdAge did a nice job this summer of summarizing the findings from two independent studies conducted by Syncapse and Vitrue (more on those in a minute). And my friend, Augie Ray who is a senior analyst over at Forrester has written a blog post about this. His assertion is that a fan is worth zero. It’s a conversation with Augie about this topic that was the original impetus for this post. And believe it or not I completely agree with him.

Before my fellow marketers decide to take me out back and shoot me, I should probably offer a little additional information. First, I don’t really believe that a Facebook fan is worth $0. And neither does Augie. In fact, it’s what the fan can do for the brand that actually makes them valuable. Without getting into all sorts of facts, figures and methodologies, let me paint a picture for you.

I’m a huge Starbucks addict. My wife and I both drink one of their iced venti Americano’s at least five times a week. Maybe more. Up until recently, both of us were mayors of two different Starbucks on FourSquare (I no longer own mine) so every time we go to the store, we let our social networks know we’re there. In fact, if you asked a number of my friends what my drink of choice was, they’d be able to answer without even thinking about it. BUT… I’m already a fan of theirs whether I’ve “liked” them on Starbucks or not. And yes, there is an outside chance I would buy more stuff from them if they gave me additional offers. But probably not.

Iced venti Americano

So I am a valuable customer. And I buy a lot of coffee from them every year. But I don’t by more coffee from them because I “like” them on Facebook. This is the fundamental “chicken and egg” problem I have with Syncapse’s methodology that pegs a fan at an average worth of $136.38/fan. I’m not valuable because I spend more money with Starbucks (my Facebook fandom is a by-product of my passion for the brand). However, I think I am worth something to them because of my network i.e. 1,700 people that I’m connected to on Facebook and 14,000 on Twitter and my blog. Especially when you consider that a lot of the people I’m connected to are like me… they too have big networks.

The tricky part is, it’s hard to put a price tag on what I or my fellow enthusiasts are worth because it all depends on how good a job the “brand” does to activate us and ultimately get us to amplify their message (or share our own versions of their message). Some sites like Atlantis Resorts (a Powered client) has done a nice job of activating their customers and the results are not only a steady growth of fans but a CEO that is now such a believer in social media that he is blogging about it on USA Today. Others like Expedia (a natural for social media) has a mere 12,853 fans (only 11K+ more than yours truly) and very little engagement on their wall. Right now, Expedia isn’t working particularly hard to engage or activate it’s enthusiasts. Instead, it’s more focused on a broadcast strategy… one that has obviously impacted their fan acquisition.

In the spirit of being prescriptive, here are a few suggestions on what companies SHOULD do to engage and ultimately activate their enthusiasts:

  • Post educational content vs. informercials. This means teach people how to scrapbook or how to take better pictures instead of telling them how great your products are.
  • Run fun contests. Black Star Beer did a fabulous job of this by giving away a dream vacation that focused on experiences versus cash value. Even I signed up for this and I NEVER sign up for sweepstakes.
  • Ask people for suggestions. My wife’s company, GenConnect, did this and they got some amazing responses on their wall.
  • Have some fun! When Dunkin’ Donuts is NOT allowing soft core pornos to post on it’s wall, they are actually doing an amazing job getting their customers involved in submitting ideas for their dream donut and submitting photos that might get them recognized as the fan of the week on DD’s Facebook fan page.
How about you? What are you worth? And are the brands that you love tapping into your full potential?

Quick’n’Dirty 55 – ‘What’s the ROI of this Tweet?’

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In the spirit of centralizing the recaps from our weekly Quick’n’Dirty podcast, Jennifer, Rich, Ken and I have launched TheQuicknDirty blog. To that end, this week’s recap is over on that site. However, for the regular readers of our blogs, we will keep lite recaps coming.

  • Social app of the week: SCVNGR – “a game about doing challenges at places”
  • Guest of the week: Forrester sr. analyst, Augie Ray – focused on whether or not our addiction to Facebook was good or bad, the death of Google Wave and the ROI of social media.
  • Twitterer of the week: Mike Schneider – VP at Allen Gerritsen. Humble, smart, LBS genius.
  • Point / counterpoint: Can Google do “social?” Special guest co-host, Kyle Flaherty and I took off the gloves on this one.

Listen to the recording of this week’s episode. Or download it on iTunes (go to iTunes and Search for Quick’n’Dirty). And if you want the full recap, head over to our new TheQuicknDirty.com site.

Weekly Social Marketing Links: May 25, 2009

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Each week, the members of Powered’s marketing, business development and product teams pick a news article, blog post or research report that “speaks” to them. With that article, they need to come to our weekly staff meeting prepared to give a 120 second update on what the article was about and why they found it useful. Links are below:

Beth Lopez (Marketing)

Found the article, The One Word You Can’t Say, quite amusing given how we have always advocated the need to view social marketing as a long-term strategy. Seems that it’s starting to become a mantra at all of the social marketing events and tradeshows. Per the article, the word you can’t say is “campaign” when referring to social marketing…preferred alternatives include terms like “program,” “initiative,” or even “conversation.”

DP Rabalais (Marketing)
Great article aimed at CEO / CMO level. Do You Need a Social Media Marketer? Measurement & analystic seems to be the big reason more companies aren’t embracing social media / social marketing. Another reason we need to continue to plug our analytics/insights capabilities at Powered. To that end, I called out a paragraph from the article that drives our point home:

A recent survey of 110 of the top CMOs by recruiting firm Heidrick & Struggles in Atlanta seems to echo Schwartz’s point. The report found that social media was a relatively low priority—ranked in the bottom third. “Mostly it’s because of analytics,” said Lynne Seid, a partner at the firm. “The things that are measurable are a top priority. Most marketers see [social media] as an experiment.

Bill Fanning (Business Development)
This weeks article is titled Social Media vs. Social Responsibility, written by Reid Carr (president of Red Door Interactive). It’s an interesting look at Social Media being the great equalizer to the companies who over the years have behaved more like magicians trying to trick people into buying their product or service rather than honestly marketing and selling their products and services.
His premise is that this behavior has lead to a severe distrust with consumers and social media allows consumers to have a powerful vioce, finally balancing the power that traditional businesses and media outlets once owned. He notes that it’s our responsibility as consumers to not only support our favorite businesses by purchasing from them but also by talking about them in various social media outlets. Likewise, it’s our duty to responsibly talk about the poor experiences we’ve had with businesses.

Jay McIntosh (Business Development)
On a self-appointed hiatus this week.

Doug Wick (Business Development)

A very short article about the brand innovation behind Cereality, a café concept based on our favorite cereals. This article struck a chord because of the way that they developed the idea for Cereality, by building on the brand equity of popular cereal brands and focusing on a food category that is both ubiquitous and taps into brand passion. The approach put forth is similar to the process behind the conception of branded online communities, which tap into passion points and truly put the consumer at the center of the experience.
A salient quote from Cereality’s founder – “When you hit that zeitgeist and people are excited and find it relevant to their lives, they start a conversation and you have to be at the center of that conversation.”
Don Sedota (Product Management)
This week I picked a report written by Forrester analyst, Laura Ramos, titled Effective Customer Reference Management Anchors B2B Community Marketing Efforts, that might be helpful to our program managers in the context of setting up community customer reference strategies for our clients and/or for our own corporate marketing efforts. Hopefully validates/supplements our current strategies in both arenas.

May 7: Weekly Content/Social Marketing Links

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Each week, the members of Powered’s marketing, business development and product teams pick a news article, blog post or research report that “speaks” to them. With that article, they need to come to our weekly staff meeting prepared to give a 120 second update on what the article was about and why they found it useful. Links are below:


Beth Lopez (Marketing)
Will the IAB’s Social Media Metrics Definitions Help Crack The Engagement Code?   Found this article interesting particularly since we are solidifying our measurement framework and how we define ‘engagement’.  The IAB published social media metrics definitions yesterday and while they aren’t different from what you expect, it does help advertisers and marketers that are struggling with measuring their social programs demonstrate the value of it.  This would be good for all customer-facing folks to learn these as the IAB is regarding as the standard in defining how to measure online programs/advertising.
Here are a few of the things the IAB doc defines:
  • Application and video installs.
  • The number of relevant actions, including newsfeed items posted, comments posted, uploads, poll votes, and so forth.
  • Conversation size, which measures the number of content relevant sites and content relevant links, and the monthly uniques spread across those conversations.
  • Site relevance, which measures the density with which phrases specific to a client concern are brought up among relevant sites.
  • Author credibility, such as how relevant the author’s content is and how often it is linked to.
  • Content freshness and relevance, which defines how frequently an author posts.
  • The average number of friends among users of a specific application.
  • Number of people currently using an application.

DP Rabalais (Marketing)
Keeping in line with my commitment to alignment with our Sales Plan, I selected REI as the company to do a search on this week. My post this week is by Albert Maruggi, founder and president of Provident Partners and host and producer of the Marketing Edge podcast. I chose it because I feel like it builds a strong case to support REI as a strong prospect for Powered.
Bill Fanning (Business Development)

Jay McIntosh (Business Development)
My weekly share is actually not an article but a few tidbits from a recently released study by Razorfish entitled “Digital Mom.”

  1. Women control the majority of spending in the US and the world. To that end:
  • Consumer spending accounts for approximately 70% of GDP in the U.S.
  • Women a.k.a. “Chief Purchasing Officers” control 85% of household buying decisions in the U.S. and the majority handle family finances.
  • On the business side, women have accounted for 70% of all privately held start-ups over the last 15 years.

Marketers want to engage with people who buy things…women.

  1. Women, by and large, are much more “communal” than men. Think about it, women often turn to others for guidance, recommendations, etc., and they love to share (i.e. tell others about their experiences). Guys, we tend to be more independent and hierarchical. We hate to (i.e. won’t) ask for directions, we compete with each other in almost every- and anything, and usually prefer to conduct our own in-depth research rather than listen to someone who may have “better” research than us. Anyhow, the full report is about 37 pages and talks about a LOT of things, however, the three key takeaways that I found most interesting and relevant to us are the following:
  • Mom’s areas of interest are lifestyle categories…duh!
  • Their purchase decision funnel behaviors fit really well with what Powered does.
  • The highest value information sources for moms are a lot of what we provide in a Powered community.
Doug Wick (Business Development)
My post this week is from “Social Media Insider” written by David Berkowitz of 360i (cross-posted on the Agency’s website).
David does a nice job of offering his experience in running a self-service Facebook targeted ad campaign, including the results he saw. Many of his results are confirming of what we’ve heard – in a pretty targeted campaign he saw very low clickthrough, and he notes that FB must find another way to monetize if it expects to live out its large valuation. The upside is that Facebook ads are extremely cheap to test, and he predicts (I think rightly) that there may be ways to reach very specific, segmented audiences with compelling content-based ads – so he encourages people to test and see.

Don Sedota (Product Management)
A recent Forrester article called, Four Essential Components of Successful Innovation Initiatives, caught my attention due to the fact that, well I’m in the product innovation business ;-). The first two components, “Creating and getting executive support for an innovation strategy” and “Use central management and coordination to carry out the strategy” are pretty straightforward.

The third component, “Use individual contributors to feed the innovation function” struck a chord because it’s something we’re currently trying to implement more effectively for the internal product strategy process. Examples of this include Dell’s Ideastorm and IBM’s annual Innovation Jam. In fact, we’ve been tossing around the idea of creating an internal Ideastorm where employees can go to submit ideas and fellow employees can comment on them and vote them up/down. This could also tie into Yammer so that everyone gets notified when a new product idea is submitted. As far as I know this actually wouldn’t be that difficult to implement internally.

The fourth component, “Ties to community bring objective insight and can deepen relationships” has to do with using community (external resources) to inform product strategy. This struck a chord because it’s something that’s come up recently in the context of our product roadmapping discussions due to interest from Clinique and Sony. This form of product strategy “cro
wdsourcing” is becoming more and more popular.

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