Citizen Marketer 2.1

Aaron Strout

It’s Truck Day

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Nearly two and a half years ago I announced that I was packing up my belongings and moving down to Austin from a place I had called home for most of my life. When I decided to head south, not only was I leaving a comfortable job as VP of social media at a company called Mzinga, I was also saying goodbye to most of my family and many of my friends that I had grown to know over the years.

Since then, I’ve had an amazing run that’s included meeting hundreds of new friends both here in Austin and all over the country; helping my company, Powered, acquire three other companies; working closely with two of my colleagues (and good friends), Joe Jaffe and Greg Verdino to launch and market their books; landing several great new clients; securing a book deal of my own with friend and co-author, Mike Schneider, to write Location Based Marketing for Dummies; and then ultimately getting acquired by social business consultancy, Dachis Group.

As you can imagine, getting acquired is not an insignificant thing. Throw in the fact that the company acquiring Powered is the largest social business consultancy in the world AND I happen to be friends with the managing director (Peter Kim) and CEO (Jeff), along with several other folks that work there and you have the potential for something pretty incredible. I tried to convey some of this excitement in the post I wrote on the day we announced the acquisition. To that end, I’m a huge believer in the power of social business design and I have been for years. But…

Yes, you knew there was a “but” coming, especially based on the title of this post (more on that in a minute). In spite of my respect for Jeff, Peter, Kate, April, Bryan and all my former Powered colleagues like Natanya Anderson, Kevin Tate, Greg Rau, Steve Kleinberg and Jen van der Meer, I’ve decided to once again pack up the bags and move my little old self over to another company called WCG. This time, the move requires a lot less distance and many fewer goodbyes. Fortunately for my family and me, WCG has one of their offices here in Austin so I’ll just be about four blocks down the street from my old office.

At the end of the day, this has zero to do with me leaving a great company with a ton of smart people and a winning game plan. Instead, it has everything to do with me joining another great company with a ton of smart people and a winning game plan… but with a personal mandate of focusing on location based marketing. And as I mentioned earlier when I mentioned my book deal, I’m very passionate about helping companies figure out how to tap into the power of mobile and location based services like foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl, Where and Bizzy to deepen customer loyalty.

With perhaps the longest preamble in history… that brings us to the topic of Truck Day. For any of you that follow baseball closely, you might know that “Truck Day” is the day where Major League Baseball Teams pack up their trucks and head south to the likes of Florida and Arizona to kick off spring training. Any of you that follow me on Facebook or Twitter also know that I am a HUGE Red Sox fan so after a long, baseball-less winter, I get really excited about things like Truck day because it means that the season is just around the corner. Seeing that today is my first day in the office at WCG, I look at this as my “truck day” or my day to kick off what I expect will be an amazing journey.

Before I forget, however, I would like to take a minute to thank the Powered team with special shout outs to Natanya, Kathy, Ron, Ken and David. You took a chance on me two and a half years ago and as a result we all had the opportunity to hold on for what turned out to be a crazy yet fulfilling ride. In addition, I want to thank Jeff Dachis and Peter Kim for being such good friends, supporting my decision and helping me through the transition. And finally, to Bob Pearson and Jim Weiss for giving me this fantastic opportunity to join the WCG team (this is also where I give a big hat tip to my friend, Greg Matthews, for helping start up the conversation between Bob, Jim and myself). Oh, and of course my loving wife, Melanie, who has been nothing but supportive through the entire process.

Now it’s time to PLAY BALL!



image courtesy http://msmaggiemoo.blogspot.com/

Weekly Social Marketing Links: Week of 10/28

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Cross-posted on Powered’s blog

Yup. It’s been a few week’s since we last posted our team’s weekly social marketing links. As some of you know, I try and do a weekly digest of the links that my team (marketing, sales and product) come up with for our recurring staff meeting. Unfortunately, (work) life just gets in the way sometimes. Here’s what we’ve got for this week:

Beth Lopez (Marketing)

Found How to Do Social Marketing in Heavily Regulated Industries to be an interesting read on how regulated industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare and Pharma should tap into social marketing and how best to do it. The thinking is that since social marketing is a “pull” technique and not a “push” technique (where traditional regulations apply), advertisers and marketers in regulated industries should focus on…wait for it…wait for it…listening to consumers on social networks to gather research and insight (doesn’t everyone say that these days?). The author also goes on to state that for pharma (look in comments), marketers should be thinking about conversations around the disease versus the actual drugs (which is where they can get into trouble). All in all, an interesting perspective.

DP Rabalais (Marketing)

This article from Adweek, The Revolution Will Be Mobile, talks about how the worldwide adoption of mobile phones (61% of the world’s population has access to a mobile phone) is influencing how marketers connect with consumers. Mobile Internet usage in the U.S. has more than doubled in barely two years, and mobile communities are emerging.

According to the article, “For a brand that would like to learn more about what its customers and potential customers want, social networks via mobile are the perfect platform with massive scale. The Japanese mobile community “Mobage Town,” for example, includes 12 million people. Anyone who wants to can listen in or join discussions, and anyone who wants to sell a product or service is enabled to do so.”

Bill Fanning (BizDev)

This week’s post was written by Francois Gossieaux titled, Why Brand Communities Don’t Exist. Notice he refers to “Brand” communities, not “Branded” communities. To be clear, when we say “Branded” communities we are referring to where the community is hosted (on the brands site as opposed to Facebook or other external communities) not to the Brand being the topic of the community.

Francois makes a very important point (one that we at Powered built a business on) that people don’t participate in branded communities simply because they like the brand and enjoy their products. They participate because they are passionate about the lifestyle associated with the brand. The community gives them a place to get valuable information, interact with other people with similar interests and engage with the company. He notes several examples like the communities hosted by Harley, Jeep, Mini Cooper and Fiskars….we could add several others as well.

Good post!

Doug Wick (BizDev)

[Okay, so Doug has been up to his eyeballs with RFP’s, contracts and keeping his blogging hat on. So I’m going to include his most recent post on Powered as his entree of the week…]

Almost anyone who knows anything about interfacing with customers or prospective customers through the Networks (Facebook, Twitter, et al.) will tell you that you should start by listening.

So most marketers’ first step is to set up a monitoring tool (maybe expensive, maybe as simple as a free keyword search on Twitter). Then, the first experience that almost every media marketer (or marketer, period) has after listening to the Networks for a bit is that the brand, product, or company they are representing will be mentioned. When this happens (“just bought a Honda at Carmax, great experience!”), it will make a positive and socially important impression on everyone who views it. This is exciting because it is essentially a free media placement, a nugget of gold dropped into people’s news or Twitter feeds that didn’t cost you anything! This type of mention is often called “earned media,” earned because your company created a great customer experience that made someone tell their friends.


Jay MacIntosh (BizDev)

The Tribalization of Business Study (2009) by Deloitte and Beeline Labs.

Disclaimer: I don’t understand why anyone would refer to a group of people sharing an interest as tribes. I’ve always thought of tribes, similar to the clans of my Scottish background, as having to do with ancestry (i.e. people who came before us like forefathers/mothers). Do we really need to “dress-up” social media to get more people to pay attention to the significance of the online social phenomena? I guess so…

Anyhow, this recently released study from Deloitte paints a broad picture of where companies are at with their adoption of social media. As suspected, backed up by the conversations I’ve had with over 50 such companies the past several months, I’d say they’re at the preadolescent stage. Characterized by – beginning to care somewhat about if/how they fit in, have a rough idea of some goals, more focused on the future, beginning to care about how their appearance, etc.

I won’t go into the details (which you’ll get in the 10 minutes it takes you to look through the 28 slides), but here are a couple of the most interesting findings:

  • It looks like only about 20% of these communities have members in the thousands.
  • Approximately 60% of their company’s oldest community have been in existence for less than 1 year.
  • Stated goals (i.e. what they want to achieve) and metrics (i.e. how they keep score) are out of whack.
  • 45% plan to increase their investment in social media and online communities while only 6% plan to decrease investment.

Don Sedota (Product)

Good perspectives by Jeremiah Owyang
on the Google/Twitter/Bing deal announced earlier last week. Basically Google and Bing will now start incorporating URL tweets/re-tweets and the influence/reach of corresponding tweeters into search rankings (i.e., consumers now have a direct impact on search rankings).

His key takeaways include:

  • Companies must focus even more on listening to make sure PR flare ups and the like on Twitter are quickly extinguished
  • It’s becoming increasingly important for companies offer easy social sharing (e.g., via Twitter) for site content. (Also of note is that Facebook will be offering public status updates to Bing so sharing via FB/FBC becomes more valuable to companies from a search results perspective)
  • Companies must continue to develop in-house influencers on Twitter in order to juice the search rankings of corresponding tweets (URLs)

How about you? Any good articles/posts/research to share? We’re always looking for fresh inspiration.

Weekly Social Marketing Links: Week of 9/21

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Cross-posted on Powered’s blog

Oh how quickly the time passes. As some of you know, I try and do a weekly digest of the links that my team (marketing, sales and product) come up with for our recurring staff meeting. A series of all day meetings and the usual travel have conspired against me. Fortunately for you, that doesn’t change the quality of the content/links that the team found.

With that as a backdrop, let’s see what we’ve got…

Beth Lopez (Marketing)

(9/16) My article submission for this week is called The Great Trust Offensive. It appears the top 100 brands (as ranked by Interbrand) have fallen out of the trust tree with consumers. Edelman conducted a phone survey and found that only 44% of Americans stated they trusted business, down from 58% in the fall of 2007. As a result, many of the top brands are now focusing their advertising and messaging on re-building this trust with consumers and joining the “conversation”. The article goes on to provide case examples of McDonald’s, Ford and American Express and has CMO’s of these companies quoted throughout.

You can also view the 100 Best Global Brands 2009 in a slideshow format which provides a snippet of their marketing strategies. I’ll see if I can download the full report and provide to everyone. Here’s the link to the slideshow.

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(9/4) Joe Marchese throws down the traditional vs. social marketing gauntlet in the blog post,
The $1 Million Social Media Marketing Challenge, which starts with “I think there is an inherent conflict in the following statement: “We can’t measure social media ROI. But when we buy television in large amounts, we know it works.” He goes on to state the problem with marketers comparing social media and TV and issues a challenge: If the ROI from social media is not equal to that from traditional media, his company will deliver free media until the difference is made up.

Interesting read to say the least.

DP Rabalais (Marketing)

(9/16) As I mentioned in our meeting, I thought it would be of value for all of us to become more familiar with Net Promoter Scores, since many companies place such a high value on them.

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(9/4) The title is Social Net Branding Fails to Sway Women and the article was published today on brandweek.com. A study by ad:tech Chicago and Q Interactive that analyzes how women engage online with brands finds that 75 percent of women reported that social networking sites have little bearing on their purchasing decisions.

Sites have “somewhat” of an influence over 21.9 percent and greatly influence only 3.3 percent of users.

Only 10 percent of women said that participating in brand-related activities, such as finding information (8.7 percent) and writing reviews (1 percent), was their most common social media activity. Sending private messages to peers (34.6 percent), sharing photos (13.4 percent) and chatting (12.8 percent) ranked as women’s top-three social media activities.

Bill Fanning (BizDev)

(9/16) I actually have two articles to share. The first is post on Eyecube blog titled, Congratulations TGI Friday’s, Now the Work Begins and the second post was written by Greg Verdino and posted to his blog titled, Social Media Marketers are a Shallow Bunch. Both posts highlight the latest campaign by TGI Friday’s to drive Facebook fans but are curious about what’s next. Now that they’ve blown out the goal of reaching 500,000 fans (875,170 fans as of this morning) how do they plan to keep them engaged. They’ve got a real opportunity to drive ongoing lasting relationships with their consumers and, quite frankly, revitalize an otherwise stale brand. Will they capitalize on it? We’ll keep watching and hope for the best. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to my free burger… I think.

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(9/4) This week’s shared post is from Jason Falls’ blog Social Media Explorer, titled, Brands Are People. It’s short and simple but powerful. He refers to a message he received from a friend who worked in the Golden Age of the Advertising Industry and a WWII fighter pilot. He says “It seems we got into the idea that ads were a lot easier than relationships.” I’d agree and we’ve been saying this for a while, but it just seems more credible coming from someone who actually lived and worked during that time.

The rise of TV as a mass marketing media was certainly a major contributing factor that widened the relationship gap between consumers and companies. We live and work in an amazing time where the rise of the internet has provided consumers a media that will require companies to break down the walls that divided them and re-learn how to build real relationships with consumers. The companies who choose to embrace the new media and master it will have a leg up on those who don’t.

Who knows…maybe in 30 years our kids will be watching a show like Mad Men where they act out the lives of today’s Social Media movers and shakers. If the characters are based on the folks I’ve seen speaking on Social Media panels over the last couple years, it’s bound to be funny but not nearly as classy!

Jay MacIntosh (BizDev)

(9/16) What Powered does is game-changing for marketing.

At the end of last year as I was becoming more familiar with social media marketing and our company, my intuition was that speaking with customers on their terms (i.e. things that they care about, when they’re interested and with people they trust) was the golden ticket for marketers. The disconnect for me was the lack of available data to support my intuition. What I had from our client programs, or third party sources, wasn’t quite complete or reliable enough so the results story often came up short. I think that’s recently begun to change due to a number of factors including our improved measurement & reporting capabilities as well as other practitioners publicly sharing their results.

Let’s look at one key marketing metric related to engagement – click through rate (CTR). This article from MediaPost Tuesday Super for Facebook Brand Pages talks about a study that found the avera
ge CTR on Facebook brand pages to be 6.76%. It goes on to say that certain days of the week perform multiple times better than other days of the week. Tuesday being the best and Friday being the worst. It’s encouraging to see that the Facebook 6.76% CTR kicks butt on other forms of marketing such as email (CTR 3.9%) and banner ads (CTR 0.2%). And what about Powered’s CTRs? For content our CTR is 50 friggin% – talk about kicking butt? For HP’s HHO site the CTR to their ecommerce is 7%. That’s kicking some serious booty.

And what about other ways marketing is measured like conversion, net promoter score (loyalty & advocacy), customer insight? What we deliver in these areas is also game-changing. So why aren’t more marketers going for the golden ticket? Is it lack of knowledge, understanding, familiarity, budget or something else they fear? I’d love to hear y’alls thoughts on this.

Don Sedota (Product)

(9/16) Although this probably isn’t groundbreaking insight to the team, I thought this article “When Facebook Fans Turn Ugly: Examining The Honda Accord Crosstour Page” was an interesting synopsis of a recent PR snafu that Honda had to deal with regarding their new FB page to promote the Accord Crosstour. After numerous comments from users about the ugliness of the car, a Honda rep (posing as a regular Joe) chimed in to give his support. Once he was outed, Honda had to do some quick damage control (some good, some not so good). The bad – removing the comments from the Honda rep which further enraged fans. Anyways, a good quick read that hits on some of the do’s and don’ts of containing a negative social media storm.

On a similar note, I have to feel kinda sorry for the Intuit reps that are trying to keep up with a hoard of unhappy Mint customers after Intuit acquired the financial site earlier this week. Ouch!

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(9/4) Here are a couple of pretty entertaining articles that I found this past week.

The first one from David Berkowitz’s blog called, When Augmented Reality Goes Social talks about a few applications of augmented reality (when digital is layered over real-world experiences to “augment” the experience) and social. My favorite example is a Yelp application for the Android platform which is apparently still pretty buggy but allows you to walk down a street and through your camera lens you can view Yelp overlays in the appropriate spots to show different restaurants and their ratings (really cool). Apparently more applications like this are coming down the pipe.

The second one is social related but entertaining more than anything else. It’s a blog post by Jonathon Fields called PR Gone Bad. How to Anger Bloggers and Hose Your Client. Jonathon details a back and forth exchange he had with a PR firm who was trying to get him to review a new book for their client. The PR tactics are extremely traditional and impersonal and the ensuing exchange of emails between Jonathon and the PR rep is a classic example of how certain people still don’t get the fact that social marketing is changing the way PR firms and the like have to conduct their business. Well worth the read if you have a few minutes.

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