Yahoo Buzz Introduces Social Media to the Masses
March 17, 2008 | 1 Comment
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Some of the latest buzz in social media happens to be Yahoo’s newest social media venture: Yahoo Buzz, which is currently in closed beta. In case you are unfamiliar: this site has been compared to the social media site Digg as far as functionality, but is particularly capturing attention in the social media landscape for Yahoo’s ability to tap mainstream audiences.
But just how effective will this site be in capturing these audiences? A recent article from ReadWriteWeb noted that “Yahoo.com has sent approximately 16 million total referrals to just a subset of the publishers in the beta during the first two weeks via “Buzzing Now” links in the Featured section of the homepage.” And yet another Yahoo Buzz review by Muhammad Saleem noted that Salon.com reached over 1 million unique visitors from Yahoo Buzz in just one day.
For the social media marketer, this means there is another site on the horizon that could prove valuable for connecting “mass audiences” with social media. However, it also means that in this buzz we cannot forget the value of niche sites like Digg, Mixx and StumbleUpon, sites which capture a highly valuable niche of members who are highly involved and highly invested in these communities.
This being said, the real dilemma we have to balance in social media marketing is this: as the emergence of social media sites like Yahoo Buzz garner more participation from “mass audiences”, clients/marketers are more likely to place more emphasis on participation in social media sites with higher overall traffic than sites that reach smaller niche audiences. Why? Because larger numbers usually suggest a higher ROI, at least in the minds of those who are comfortable with metrics of traditional advertising.
So, for those of you who are reading, I’d like to hear your personal views on overall site traffic versus overall site participation and involvement. In your current social media efforts are you involved in social media sites with larger audiences, or do you select niche sites with high levels of involvement? If you use both, which do you derive more value from?
Walmart’s Latest Social Media Effort: The Checkout Blog
March 4, 2008 | 5 Comments
I’m the first to admit that I have a track record of bashing Walmart’s previous social media efforts on this blog, but I’d like to take a few minutes to give my review on Walmart’s latest social media effort, the checkoutblog.com.
Even though I visited the site with low expectations, I was shocked to find out that it seems that Walmart has wised up to some of the basic social media rules (at least some of them).
Here’s a recap of why I think this blog just might work:
The blog uses Walmart’s internal resources. Using a blog team of 9 Wal-mart “higher level” product buyers, the blog covers the following categories of Gadgets, Gaming, Lawn & Garden, Movies, and Sustainability. The blog is basically for these employees to start a discussion on new products and create hype over products sold or released at Wal-Mart. Since finding internal resources for blogging is always difficult, this group approach will ensure the blog will be updated and maintained on an ongoing basis.
The blog recognizes the rules of social media. In the “about” section, Scobel’s Corporate Webblog Manefesto is noted. Additionally, the blog has added a very reasonable and open blog comment policy (considering what Wal-mart faces in negative blog reactions). Basically the policy notes posts are clean, on topic, and only first comments from a user have to be approved.
The blog has personality. Reading the author bios of the checkoutblog further confirmed that it is written by real people with interesting personalities. While corporate branding is wrapped around the site, the employees are the main focus. This is a smart move for Wal-mart in battling negative perceptions. After all, it is easier to hate a corporation than to hate a group of employees that are just doing their job.
Do Ad/PR Agencies Get Social Media?
February 29, 2008 | 6 Comments
This morning I came across an article written in Adweek by Brian Morrisey entitled, “Social Media: ‘Agencies Don’t Get It“, which makes the claim (based off of latest research by TNS/Symfony) that, “If social network marketing is a puzzle, agencies might not be equipped to help clients see the big picture”.
This survey polled more than 60 marketers in North America, Franc
e and the UK to find out just how these agencies are feeling about their agency’s ability to help them implement social media tactics. I’ve encapsulated the article in the following points:
1. Agencies tend to apply traditional tactics to social media. The article mentions because agencies have little experience developing social media campaigns, their clients feel they treat social media the same as other traditional tactics. The article noted that, “Clients complained that their agencies — creative, media, public relations, design and others — typically treat social channels like blogs as traditional media. In other cases, their ideas are not backed up by practical skills in the area. What’s more, one client pointed out that his agencies have little of their own experience using social networks or video-sharing sites for themselves.”
2. Agencies aren’t equipped with the resources. The survey noted that nearly 50 percent of marketers said social-media efforts needed to be handled at an executive level with “significant” resources.
3. Agencies aren’t ready to implement. While agencies may be able to sound like they understand the space, they aren’t yet prepared internally to implement. Jim Nail, the chief marketing and strategy officer at TNS/Cymfony noted that, “You get the sense that agencies talk a good game,” he said. “They put up a good presentation about what social media is, but when you get to implementing campaigns, the day-to-day management skills are not meeting the marketers’ expectations.”
Now I do know that there are some agencies that are exceptions to the rule, and those are agencies that dedicate staff and resources to study social media, and who interact frequently in the space. These agencies will have a better understanding of how to implement. Unfortunately, at this point in time these agencies are few and far between - mostly due to the lean nature of the business which prevents agencies from purely dedicating staff to social media efforts.
This being said, if you are a client that is on the fence of whether to go with your current agency or to work with a social media agency, I’ve listed the following questions to ask:
1. How is the agency interacting in social media? Are they involved themselves? Do they actively monitor their brand?
2. What experience does the agency have in developing true dedicated social media campaigns? How were they executed?
3. What type of messaging does the agency feel is appropriate to social media? Do they pull or do they push ad content on customers?
4. What are their processes? Will the agency have a plan to engage the community, or a clearly defined scope of work? Will they have a core team dedicated to the execution of this campaign?
5. How does the agency measure campaign success? Do they actively report and monitor social media campaign progress?
Developing an Appropriate Social Media Budget
February 28, 2008 | 3 Comments
Today I will attempt to answer my last and perhaps hardest question of the Marketer’s Foray into Social Media series, which was “What is the budget?”(for a social media campaign). For this, I will pull in points from Jim’s previous post “How much will a Social Media Campaign Cost“, and aim this direction more on how to develop a social media budget according to your individual company.
To start with, we have found as a social media agency that the a
mount marketers allocate to social media is very much dictated by a company’s confidence in social media marketing, which likely corresponds to the company’s readiness for change. Companies that aren’t far along this continuum of change aren’t likely to invest much in social media, no matter how much they spend on traditional advertising. In fact a study by Coremetrics on social media budgets revealed the following:
“Seventy-eight percent of marketing professionals polled in Coremetrics’ annual “Face of the New Marketer” survey saw that social media marketing was a way of getting an edge on their competitors. However, just 7.7 percent of their total online marketing spend was allocated to it compared to 33 percent to online advertising and 28 percent on online promotion design and implementation.”
So taking this into account, a social media campaign budget is likely to be formed out of funds that are already allocated to the digital marketing budget, as many people in marketing classify social media synonymous with “interactive marketing”. However, according to Forrester’s US Interactive Marketing Forecast of 2007 to 2012 - this pool of resources is currently only 8% of an advertiser’s current advertising spend (despite the research of the total 29% of media time consumers are spending online).
The other approach is to develop a social media budget from additional funds in the overall marketing budget - usually an amount that is set aside to “test this social media stuff out”. Either way, very rarely does a company rally for additional funds for a social media campaign; so it is likely for a company to pull a chunk of traditional budget out to dabble in the space of social media for a determined period of time.
And so as a social media agency from here we are either a) given a baseline amount and then asked what we can do with it or b) asked our recommendations and then to propose a budget amount from there. Regardless of either, the following are typical questions that we ask to narrow this down a bit (some elaborated from Jim’s previous post).
1) What are your overall objectives and campaign timeframe? If the whole objective is to achieve a drastic spike in sales or promote a limited time offer, we believe more of your budget should be allocated to advertising. Social media is a slower burn, and you will just be disappointed.
2) How much is your overall marketing budget? To put things into perspective. the average cost of TV production for a 30 second spot is around $303,000 just to make it: not to mention media costs to run it. With this in mind, you may want to produce one less spot for a campaign, and re-allocate these funds towards a very decent social media campaign with a longer life-span.
3) What tactics are you using already and how are they working? How your current efforts are working should determine how much you can reallocate to social media. Is your direct mail initiative working? What is your ROI on your current advertising model? What is the result of your interactive budget? Take a hard look at what results you are getting with traditional methods.
4) What are your internal resources? To put it simply- your internal resources will determine your social media budget amount. If you have appropriate staff that can devote time to social media, you may find that you only need the set-up and development of a social media strategy or tools to get the campaign going. If you don’t, a social media budget will likely be higher to include the actual execution.
Again, as we say over and over: a social media budget is developed on a per company basis. Beware of any agency that has set-pricing, as it likely indicates that they will also have canned social media efforts that don’t take into account objectives and target audience.
Feel free to share with us your experiences developing a social media budget, as we can all benefit from this discussion.
6 Steps to Developing Content for Social Media Campaigns
February 22, 2008 | 5 Comments
Today I’ll answer the 4th question of the “Marketer’s Foray into Social Media“, which was “How will my content be developed?”. To break down this process (which often times is the most intensive of social media campaign efforts), I’ve made the following cliff-note process of content development stages, listed below:
Step 1: Analyze Audience: This stage of content development is taking a good hard look at the target audience and analyzing its use and participation within social media. This isn’t just a look into what topics the target audience is talking about, but how they are consuming it. This will effect a company’s social media efforts greatly: giving insight into whether the audience prefers video messages versus detailed blog posts, or if the audience prefers forums over social networks. This insight also allows a company to better shape the content that it needs to communicate most effectively with its audiences.
Step 2: Set Content Creation Goals: This is the stage that makes or breaks content. Effective content should be created with the audience in mind, but should also help the company achieve its objectives. In an excellent post about strategic content development, Copy Blogger outlined the following questions that are important to ask in this phase:
* Who should be reading, listening to or watching your content?
* What do they want, need or expect?
* Should you be producing content in another format?
* Where can you find more of the right readers, listeners or viewers?
Step 3: Review Internal Resources: Once the audience is discovered and we begin content goal-setting , we always take a look first at internal resources. The three main internal resources we look for are:
- Experts/”Star’s” of the Industry or Company: An internal person who has an interesting voice or expertise that can connect with external audiences.
- Created Content: Surprisingly, most companies have a wealth of information that they simply aren’t distributing via social media. This is where we take existing content and make it easy to share and easy to retrieve.
- Repurpose-able Content (if that is a word): This type of content is content that we feel that can be re purposed and still used effectively for social media. This type of content can be internal training videos that can be edited into videos for customer support or existing newsletter articles that can be changed into blog posts, etc.
Step 4: Define Content Needs: This step is the time to define what the company isn’t saying that it should be saying - or what customers are talking about in the social media space that the company isn’t participating in. This is where companies have to look at what content resources they have, versus what content resources they need to meet objectives.
Step 5: Arrange an Editorial Calendar: An editorial calendar is essential to an ongoing social media effort. It may not be a detailed month by month schedule, but it needs to define what the content strategies are, and how frequently content will be published. A good rule of thumb is to arrange this with regular content, and allow it to be flexible enough to update with time sensitive content.
Step 6: Assess Content: By assessing content during the campaign, and keeping an eye for the audience, you can see changes that need to be made to content strategy by noticing the topics that get an audience engaged, and listening to what they want to hear more of.
And finally, the question you may be asking is “Does this take time? You bet. While content creation is often times the most valuable social media effort, it is an effort that requires companies to take a realistic look at its internal staff and resources. Though it isn’t impossible for a company to manage internally, we have found our role as a social media agency is often times to work with these companies and provide our expertise and staff.
Any more steps you would like to add? Feel free to continue this conversation in the comments….
Social Media Club for Wednesday…
February 18, 2008 | 1 Comment
Hi everyone, it’s Lisa.
Just wanted all of you to know that this Wednesday I regretfully won’t be able to make it to the social media club (or TIMA’s awesome event!). Ignite just got a new client and we are hitting the runway tommorrow morning at 7 am on a flight out to L.A. Just got word today, and as you can imagine we are thrilled!
But no worries - Lee White and Jeff Tippett are going to run the show and are going to do a great job with it, so I hope all of you make it out to it and enjoy a drink on my behalf 
Oh, and twitter us with updates!
How Flickr Helped Confirm my Honeymoon
December 18, 2007 | 2 Comments
For those of you who don’t know, I’m getting married this June on Flag Day (that’s June 14 for those who don’t keep up with random holidays).
So in the pursuit of getting all of my to-do’s crossed off, I’ve recently been on a hunt for a honeymoon location with the following criteria:
- Out West
- A cabin
- As close to mountains and lakes as possible
- Far away from human civilization but close enough to things to get a hamburger and some fries.
As you can imagine, this isn’t your typical honeymoon criteria. It’s not to an all-inclusive resort, I’m not looking for a champagne glass hot-tub (although those are pretty sweet), and I don’t want to stay in a cheesy honeymoon suite in a hotel.
I guess I had always imagined that when the time came to look for a honeymoon location, I would simply type in “honeymoon out west” and there would appear every related search at my fingertips. Instead, I’ve experienced HOURS of painstaking searches on the internet in which I find myself hunched over my computer at 12:00 at night thinking, “why is this so hard?”.
However, by luck I eventually found this cabin in Tetonia Idaho, which from the website photos appears to be a dream. But before I was willing to confirm the first thing that I wanted to know was “What is this going to be like?”, and “What’s nearby”, and “What activities can we do?” and so forth.
That’s when I visited Flickr, which had pictures geotagged with “Tetonia Idaho”. While I was there, I actually could see pictures taken from other honeymooners and some of the activities they did while they were there. After seeing the beautiful mountains, the plane ride they took over the range, and some of the sunsets - I was immediately hooked. My fiancee and I sent the deposit the very next day.
While there are many lessons for the travel industry in this story, and many applications for social media (which I will cover this week), this for me, has revealed the true value of user-generated content. While a traditional website sparked my interest, it was the social media that closed the deal.
Why I’m Voting for Ed in 08…
December 14, 2007 | Leave a Comment
I’ve officially decided that I’m voting for Ed in 2008. And yes, I admit that this decision is primarily on the premises of the campaign’s marketing and social media efforts. But let me explain….
So with this being said, I encourage you to check it out and see a great example of a campaign that merged social media marketing tactics with traditional marketing tactics. And if you visit the site my teacher friend advises you to order a kit - if nothing else for the “sturdy and reliable” box.
Does the”Blog Council” Understand Blogging?
December 11, 2007 | 3 Comments
Yesterday I discovered an excellent (and rather humorous) post by B.L Ochman discussing the “Blog Council“. What is the Blog Council you may ask? The site describes it as the following:
“The Blog Council is where the people who run large companies’ blogs share best practices and new ideas.”
Upon reviewing the site - there is so much to say. Below are the three things that I just can’t help but notice. These things really make me wonder if this so called “Blog Council” really understands blogging:
1) The “Blog Council” ironically does not have a blog anywhere on it’s site. And if you want to give feedback? Well you better either write it on your own blog or send an email.
2) The Blog council is all about the “sharing” of information, but only with those involved in corporate blogs. Seems like these companies could also use the help of those who have specific expertise and solid understanding of social media, but perhaps I’m biased.
“By joining this movement, you share ideas, opportunities, and energy with a peer group that understands exactly what you are going through. You meet great people. You do big things. You make a difference.”
3) Finally, the council states that it does not, “represent vendors, agencies or individual/small business blogs. We also don’t represent big businesses that aren’t blogging yet.” So basically the council is after large corporations with large budgets. Sounds like a good business opportunity for somebody involved….
Any Blog Council members out there who would like to shed some light? I’d love to hear your point of view.
Target’s “Off Target” Social Media
December 3, 2007 | 8 Comments
With mine and Jim’s previous posts about Wal-Mart’s missteps in social media, I couldn’t resist the temptation to share a little about Target, who has recently been caught as it is learning its lesson on transparency and disclosure. 
To get a feel for what happened, you may want to read this article by Jackie Crosby over at the Star Tribune which gives a pretty good encapsulation of what happened. Basically, to put it in a nutshell, Target reached out to a group called “The Rounders” ( a group of students who receive discounts and products from Target to share with friends and to provide feedback) to promote its Facebook page.
This in and of itself is a valid effort - reaching out to advocates and promoting other social media efforts is always a smart move in my opinion (after all - that’s how Jim gets Facebook friends…). However, Target decided to tamper with the lines of transparency within social media and specifically encourage these Rounders not to disclose their affiliation with the program.
In fact, according to the Star Tribune article, the newsletter sent to this group stated the following:
“Your Mission: Try not to let on in the Facebook group that you are a Rounder,”
“We love your enthusiasm for the Rounders, and I know it can be hard not to want to sing it from the mountaintops [and in the shower, and on the bus]. However, we want to get other members of the Facebook group excited about Target, too! And we don’t want the Rounders program to steal the show from the real star here: Target and Target’s rockin’ Facebook group. So keep it like a secret!”
From this messaging, Rounder Rosie Siman (who I now want to hire by the way), posted her personal concerns of this request on Facebook - a concern regarding the ethics of asking paid/compensated advocates to specifically hide this information in a fan-related forum.
From there, after Siman’s posts were mysteriously archived/deleted, Target was forced to play a typical corporate crisis communication plan of action - including displacing blame to other affiliated parties and vendors, making vague corporate statements, and making it seem like they had no idea of how something like this happened. Target’s response was as follows:
“An e-mail from a company employee, identifying herself only as Laura, told Siman that her concerns “were completely founded” and that the newsletter urging Rounder members to stay anonymous “was not endorsed by Target.”
“Clearly it was a mistake from this vendor, and that’s why they did the follow-up,” said Target spokeswoman Amy VonWalter. Target’s intent, VonWalter said, was not to ask Rounder members to hide their affiliation, but to discourage them from dominating the Facebook site and making it feel like an exclusive, members-only club.
Now - I’m not sure either if Target wrote this newsletter or it’s vendor - or the exact details to how something like this happened- but it blows my mind how 1) a company like Target can claim that something clearly branded to their advocates is “not endorsed” by their company (in my world if you farm something out you are ultimately responsible for it) and 2) how whoever was responsible didn’t think that “it’s our little secret” sounds outright sketchy and unethical and 3) how large companies like Target and Wal-Mart haven’t hired a dedicated social media agency.
That’s all I’ve got to say. If anybody has answers to this please let me know!