Social Media Darwinism » Buzz Marketing

Make Your CFO a Social Media Fan

Paul Dunay — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 18:00:01 +0000

Social media definitely pays off, but you’ve got to focus on the approach not the tools.

Social Media has hit the mainstream these days but the big concern on every product marketer’s mind has been how to justify the ROI? Never is that more true than at budget time. The purse string holders might harbor unspoken thoughts like: “We spend big bucks on those developers, customer support and sales engineering people. Why are you wasting the company’s money by giving them geek toys when they should be doing real work for us?

If you’re concerned about social media cost justification, you’re not along. A recent Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) survey found that only 20% of CMO’s felt social media produced measurable ROI and 62% hoped it may someday. If the CMO’s lacked ROI confidence, then just imagine what a CFO or CEO survey might have told us!

Social media definitely pays off, but you’ve got to focus on the approach not the tools. The classic product marketing approach to social media is treating it like just another broadcast media channel by posting press releases, sharing events, posting videos and expecting to see instant results like you get with other online media like banners, text links and search. All of that is a good start, but the results you need to justify your efforts will come by taking a holistic company approach.

Here are some real-life examples and I am sure you can find others when you start thinking this way.

Improved Customer Support

Social customer support can reduce customer churn and increase retention rates faster than any other program I have ever seen. Listening for and spotting a customer issue, responding to them and solving their problem in minutes using social media provides an “exceptional customer experience” which also unlocks the beauty of social media and the web in sharing stories of great customer service travel far and wide.

Collaborate with your customers

I don’t care whether you own a community or your rent one from a provider like LinkedIn Groups – but a community is a great place to create a social experience with your customer. B2B marketers often host bi-annual advisory boards or annual user group meetings and these are just screaming for a way to keep them connected via a tool like on online community. When you do that the results reported in a recent Jive report of over 2000 customers are outstanding. Lower costs, more revenue – a perfect combination!

Users
- Generated 32% more ideas
- Sent 27% less email
- Found answers to questions 32% faster
Employees
- Spent 42% more time communicating with customers, which led to better retention rate
Results:
- Support calls dropped by 28% (Lower costs!)
- Sales to new customers jumped by 27% (More revenue!)

Activating brand advocates

When you give great customer support or have a great product – why not activate the social channels to accelerate their word of mouth. See below for what happens when you do.

Find diehard fans on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
- Enlist them for your brand
- Get them to make recommendations
- Build your brand with the power of their voice
Results: 5-9X ROI (based on revenue lift) by activating best brand advocates

Increase Engagement with Professionals

Used LinkedIn recommendation ads to invite endorsements and engage target users
- Earned 2000 product recommendations
Results: 500,000 viral updates on company products

Finding intent to purchase

You may be wondering with all this great social media conversations going on – is there anyway to mine social media to market smarter? The answer is yes there are tons of ways to mine the data to improve your content creation, SEO and SEM keyword selection, media planning (from online to tv media) and for lead generation.

Analyzing social media to find leads using a variety of search terms
- Both competitive and non-competitive search terms reveal buyers such as “replace product X” or “upgrade competitor Y” – any list of competitive terms paired with the words replace or upgrade can give you a list of potential prospects

Results: $250,000 sale found using social media and completed in 14 days

By now, you should be getting the idea of ways to expand your thinking on justifying social media. When you find others, let me know!

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What Moneyball Teaches Digital Marketers About Winning

Paul Dunay — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 16:41:29 +0000

“Adapt or Die” – Billy Beane

Moneyball, a book by Michael Lewis and now a movie starring Brad Pitt, is an amazing story of how Billy Beane, the then Oakland Athletics General Manager, chose to abandon baseball’s collective wisdom and applied what many considered to be “outsider” thinking to develop a winning team. Hindered by a small market budget, Beane embraced alternative statistics, or what marketers might call “KPIs”, to find undervalued players.

The parallels between the almost ten year old book and the experience of marketing in today’s digital world didn’t escape me. Now more than ever marketers are asked to achieve increased performance (usually this quarter), prove ROI, and demonstrate how a throng of marketing activities generate sales. Linear thinking applied to what is often emotional human behavior seems to unnecessarily complicate things to me, but I digress. As brands adapt to keep pace with the changes brought on by today’s demand economy, the budgets and line items need to demonstrate the same agility in order to stay in sync with consumer trends in our growing social and mobile world.

When everyone’s way isn’t working for you, find your own path

Social media technologies, along with rich internet enabled mobile devices, have catalyzed a decade long trend of evolving digital behaviors by consumers. But when you look at the methods brands use to understand consumer behavior, develop marketing strategies, plan fully integrated campaigns, evaluate activation tactics, and measure performance, they are sometimes processes that are 50 years old. The technology and techniques marketers frequently use are outdated, broken, or unscalable. When making marketing decisions, how many of them gather information from the mountains of data that surround us about the consumer and our performance?

When you are choosing the same activity and seeing diminishing returns, it is time to embrace change. As brands shift from advertising to engagement marketing, the models to measure performance will change. Rather than looking for new standards to develop around engagement, or methodologies to build digital word of mouth, brands must develop models that work for them and their customers. You need to tailor this evolving media world to work for you and employ social and targeting technologies to deliver marketing messages that inspire action and loyalty.

“We’re card counters. We’re going to turn the odds against the casino.” – Billy Beane

The effectiveness of mass marketing methods is fading in proportion to the shrinking signal strength of media in these “social” times of the internet age. The story of Billy Beane and his Oakland Athletics inspires me to follow my heart instead of my head as I track my target consumer across digital platforms to deliver timely and relevant marketing messages. I encourage you to find your brand’s optimal marketing mix from the voice of the consumer in explicit and implicit digital data that is all around us.

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Is Lady Gaga and your Brand a good match?

Paul Dunay — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 18:00:56 +0000

Recently a client of Networked Insights approached us about exploring a celebrity endorsement and/or a product placement with the pop music star Lady Gaga. So we deployed our social data analysts to look at the Lady Gaga audience and our client’s audience to see if indeed there was a good fit for this brand. As a result we thought this data was so worthwhile that we had to share it with a broader audience in our new Social Intelligence Report on Lady Gaga.

Marketers are aware that for decades celebrity endorsements has proven to be a successful tactic for brands to influence consumer preference. And marketers have also recently seen growth in brands using product placement to influence consumers such as in the upcoming James Bond film, which contains over $45 million worth of product placement. Music videos too have grown to be about a $15 million product placement industry, allowing brands to align their products with artist that appeal to their target consumer.

So we explored the question of; Is Lady Gaga right for your Brand In our most recent Social Intelligence Report on Lady Gaga. In it you will learn more about product placements while a growing trend there are many potentially pitfalls as well. Also with the unprecedented amount of media coverage, access to information and levels of social sharing, there is an increased need for visibility in real-time around celebrities and their associations with a brand.

I hope you will enjoy this report. The world of social media analytics is opening up new vistas for marketers like never before to truly gauge the effectiveness of their marketing and optimize their spending so they can know more about their audience and sell more to their audience. Indeed we live in exciting times as marketers!

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Don’t tell Jelli there is no ROI in Social Media!

Paul Dunay — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 18:00:16 +0000

I had the pleasure of meeting the team from Jelli (http://www.jelli.com) a few weeks back. Jelli for those of you who don’t know it already is 100% user controlled radio so what Pandora is doing for music is what Jelli is doing for radio – totally crowdsourced.

The site I have to admit is so easy to use it’s addictive; within seconds of registering you are affecting the world of radio, as we know it – “rocketing” songs to the top and “bombing” songs to the bottom of the list.

Founder and CTO, Jateen Parekh explained to me how radio stations are basing their song selection on the listeners of Jelli and getting great results. In fact recently two radio stations have been completely taken over by Jelli progamming!

Radio stations both small and large are crediting Jelli with increasing their ratings. For example – 94.5 PST out of the Philadelphia area is reporting – increased ratings, increased impressions and best of all increased revenue for the WPST night show by 12X!

Jelli listeners have proved to be 100x more active then Pandora listeners and make 300 actions on average per month (actions are defined as Likes, Dislikes etc) which is easy to imagine since its so easy to use.

So I like to classify this ROI in Social Media as an approach that leverages the data of social media. Much like you are able to optimize your media spending based on social media data, or optimize your keywords selection based on what’s trending in social media here is an example of serving up what your audience really wants to hear (in real time) and having it affecting market share and revenue. Now that’s a real ROI in Social Media!

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The End of Traditional Marketing

Paul Dunay — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 18:00:46 +0000

Paid, owned and earned media. Those three words, often shortened to “POE,” have bounced around for years. And, like the contemplations of communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, they have taken on new meaning with the collision of traditional and digital marketing strategies.

In 2009 Forrester issued a report that outlined the world of interactive marketers in the digital space. Since then the volume of “conversation” has increased dramatically over the entire social landscape — to the tune of BILLIONS of posts each year.

The effect of this growth is far more than a dramatic increase in possible consumer touch points and increasing consumer participation in social media. It’s about the death of traditional marketing. And, ultimately, it’s about using social media analysis to make your spending more efficient in both digital and traditional media.

Social data analysis can help you improve media strategies and spending because it can reveal new ways to prioritize, sequence and invest in POE. Done properly, social data analysis can help you make your million-dollar media budget perform like a million-five, two million or more.

And that’s the point Forrester was making in its report: measuring earned media and shifting resources from paid to owned media is what will empower your brand in today’s world – not hanging on to traditional media planning and buying strategies.

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Paul Dunay joins Networked Insights as the CMO

Paul Dunay — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 18:00:40 +0000

Almost 5 years ago I started this blog with the notion exploring the changing definition of Buzz Marketing in light of this new thing I saw on the horizon called “Social Media”.

I remember questioning where all this blogging was going to take us. I even asked others in my podcast series like Douglas Karr from the Marketing Technology Blog, who built strong following on his blog record time, where are we going with all this blogging and where will it take us? The answer was – neither of us knew!

Like Doug I was experimenting with this new technology in all of its forms from RSS, blogging, podcasts, videos, twitter, social networks, Facebook applications, mobile, location based applications and as you have seen me speak about before I think the role of marketing is changing to one that is becoming more like a Marketing Technologist. But it always felt like we were on 2 paths – our day job of running marketing and our night job of experimenting with these technologies to find something we could then add into the mix of our day job.

Well fast forward to today 5 years, 7000 tweets, 413 blog posts, 78 podcasts, 21 awards, 4 “for Dummies” books and numerous eBooks later and I am happy to announce that I have finally converged the 2 paths I was on into one meaningful path that really makes me happy.

After 2 years of developing a strategy to deal with various types of social media conversations within Avaya we finally got the monitoring and routing of those conversations to be institutionalized within the firm. No small feat by any means but I just couldn’t imagine that the sum total of social media in B2B was just about monitoring and reacting to tweets all day. I felt there had to be more we can do with the social data that we just cant get out of monitoring. So I started looking at the social media analytics space for social technology that can provide real insights. You can read about all of my findings in my post on Monitoring vs. Analytics [Infographic].

During the process of looking for the next big thing in social media, I ending up finding some really exciting technology at Networked Insights. Having owned both Radian6 and Networked Insights side by side I realized there was a big difference between “data and insights”. Data is reporting on what has already happened, Insights are ideas that come from the data that allow you to find new market opportunities, new ways to place media and new ways to find customers who exhibit purchase intent, which is why I hired Networked Insights in the first place!

I believe there is a vast sea of unstructured social data about everything you can imagine out there which can be used to help pre-inform your decision making in marketing, its up to the marketers to harness the insights of what the data is telling us to challenge the norm and transform marketing into the revenue generating center it should be!

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10 Best Posts of 2010

Paul Dunay — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 18:00:29 +0000

Far and away one of the best blog posts I wrote this year was on the new 4′c of B2B Marketing – it was read over 15,000 times and 3X more popular than the next most read blog post of the year. This inspired me to do a quick 10 Best Posts of 2010 as we slide into the New Year.

I hope you enjoy it …

4 C’s of B2B Marketing – We’ve all heard about the four P’s of marketing: Product, Price, Placement, Promotion. The four P’s were created mainly to describe the ideal “marketing mix.”
4 P’s to Social Media Marketing - Ok ok – based on the great response I got from my readers on my last blog post The 4 C’s of B2B Marketing I thought I would try to apply the same principle to Social Media Marketing.
Fire your Director of Social Media! – At a recent ANA conference I was interviewing Brian Wallace VP of Digital Marketing and Media for RIM when I heard him say “2 years from now- if I still have a Director of Social Media – I should be fired!”
Is The White Paper Dead for B2B Marketing? – In a recent conversation I was having with the Bloom Group they believe “the practice of publishing white papers must come to a close because of the utter proliferation of white papers, and the poor content contained within so many of them.”
Customer Service is the New Marketing – Zappos was founded in 1999 and sold to Amazon for $1.2 Billion Dollars just barely over ten years later. Zappos is powered by its customer service and was built on the premise of WOWing each and every customer.
Using Content to Build Trust in B2B Marketing – In the recent Edelman Trust Barometer report they detail out how trust is rebounding in a handful of Western countries especially in the United States where trust in business jumped 18 points to 54 percent.
LinkedIn Search Optimization (LSO) Critical for B2B Marketers – Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via natural search results.
Social Media Budget Ratio in B2B Marketing – In my new advisory role for the members of MENG I have been getting a bunch of questions from the members that are making great fodder for blog posts.
How to Choose a Social Media Listening Platform for B2B Marketing – In the last post we covered how to create a Social Media Lead Flow. And once you have identified the conversations where you think a sales opportunity …
B2B Marketing: Trust + Community = ROI – Trust is not a new thing when it comes to marketing and communications as evidenced by one of the most awaited studies in the communications world is always the annual Edelman Public Relations Trust Barometer.

4 C’s of B2B Marketing

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What a Trifecta of a Year!

Paul Dunay — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 18:00:11 +0000

Last year I wrote about how some weeks are hard to top and how lucky I was to have launched my first book – Facebook Marketing for Dummies (Wiley) with my co-author Rich Krueger, and I was nominated for BtoB Marketing Magazine’s (a Crain’s publication) list of the Top 25 BtoB Marketers of the Year 2009. And appeared on the Facebook Halloween episode of HubSpot TV (my favorite web TV show) all in one week! I was in awe of what you can accomplish, I was even more touched when I heard my 16 year old son say “I have no idea how Dad does it all” (thanks buddy)

But this year is going to make last year look like I was slacking off …

Each year I set goals (written ones – because you would be amazed at how the mind works when you write goals down!). So here they are … I wanted to create a social product for Avaya, I wanted to write another book, I wanted to win a Social Award, I wanted to win an industry award,, and I wanted to get nominated for BtoB Marketing Magazine’s list of the Top 25 BtoB Marketers of the Year again.

Not a shabby list. Unfortunately I not only “Achieved Expectations” on that list … I actually “Exceeded Expectations”!

In January I started on a product with the Avaya Labs (formerly Bell Labs) team to create what is now known as the Avaya Social Media Manager. It’s a gateway server and software that works with popular listening engines and applies our own Natural Language Processing (NLP) to the “stream of data” coming out of the listening engine to find Support related Tweets, Facebook Comments, Blog posts, Forum posts and pushes them into the Contact Center where they can be answered and tracked with all the other support related issues. In the process I found that this was the BEST place to get an ROI in Social Media. This was so well received by our clients that we have more demand than we can handle for this product (a High Class problem as I like to say!).

I even wrote another Dummies book (well booklet) about it that Wiley custom published for us called Social Media and the Contact Center for Dummies which you can get a FREE digital copy of at the link above or email me.

I also contracted with Wiley to do another book called Facebook Advertising for Dummies. This just came out on November 16, 2010 according to Amazon. But we were working on this book for the better part of the first half of the year.

But wait that’s not all!

Starting in November I had a 9 day streak of winning and accepting awards from 3 different organizations. November 3rd was the ITSMA Marketing Excellence awards where my Avaya team won an award for Sales Enablement, followed by November 10th where I made this years list of Top BtoB Marketers for 2010 and accepted an award at their gracious ceremony in New York with my wife, my mom and long time supporter and former colleague Diana Butler Buxton by my side and then on November 12th I accepted an award for the work we did in supporting customers using social media – this was the Social Advocacy award from AMI Partners.

With the year rapidly winding down I am almost afraid to set any goals for next year! But who knows what next year will bring but it is my sense that it will be great!

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11 B2B Marketing Predictions for 2011

Paul Dunay — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 18:00:43 +0000

Around this time last year I wrote about the 10 B2B Marketing Predictions for 2010 and while I would say 7 out of 10 have already materialized and the others are on their way. So that begs the question – what’s on the horizon specifically for B2B Marketers next year?

Here are 11 concrete ways I think the environment in which B2B Marketers operate will evolve in 2011.

Enjoy!

Facebook Advertising – will continue to improve and unfortunately get more expensive. After 9 years of Search Engine Marketing – I think it is safe to say any keyword you are going to buy is maxed out when it comes to the Google AdWords auction process. So people are looking for an alternative and that’s Facebook Advertising. I even wrote a book this year on just this topic called Facebook Advertising for Dummies (Wiley). And as more people find out about this gem of an advertising experience CPC and CPM prices will continue to march upward – I have already begun to see this in my own ad buys!
Mobile Marketing – I know I said last year was the year of mobile marketing but I just saw a stat from a Mary Meeker presentation that smart phones will eclipse PC sales in 2012 (that’s just a year away) which will lead us to more mobile usage than PC usage so you better start your Mobile Marketing program now. Keep in mind we all start in the same place and that’s at ZERO! Mobile it totally optin and you need to start building your mobile optin list now.
Facebook will move into Mobile Ads – having said what I just did about us marketers not having a good mobile optin list – its just so natural for Facebook to ask you (you will ask us first Mark right?) if he can extend his advertising into your mobile device which he already has (if you put it on your profile). I have been thinking about this play for Facebook for a while – glad I am getting it down on virtual paper for my grandkids to see!
Social Media Strategists will become Chief Customer Officers – ok so you know I am also @Avaya_Support on Twitter so perhaps this is a closet fantasy for me but it may just come true – perhaps not this coming year but in years to come. Think about it marketers have been given this gift of Social Media which is reinventing areas of your company on the fly. In my company alone we have seen it touch Product Development and R&D, to Billing and Finance, to HR and Recruiting, to Customer Service and the Contact Center. You need someone to own the customer experience now in all those external channels and your internal channels as well!
Ecommerce will hit Facebook – Next year the deal that Facebook has with oodle.com for the Facebook Marketplace will be over. My predication would be they cut the cord there and open up a marketplace of their own. Startups like Payvment, and Alvenda will help companies large and small to open up shop in Facebook. Delta, Levis and 1800 Flowers are already there – can Victoria Secret, Brooks Brothers, and Godiva be far behind?
NFO is the new SEO – that’s News Feed Optimization on Facebook. Basically .2% of fans return to a fan page and in some cases it’s more like .02% (hat tip BrandGlue) So people on Facebook who “like” your Fan page basically never go back to it. So stop thinking of it as a micro site and making it all fancy. What you need to focus on is the content and optimizing the content to get comments and likes which will help you drive amount of people that Facebook will show your page to. It’s all based on Facebook’s algorithm called EdgeRank.
Advocate Marketing comes into Focus – you know all those people we are delighting with great customer service using Twitter – well they have become a strong voice for our brand. Now we are looking at ways of collecting and harnessing them. Tools like Zuberance are helping to do just that and allowing firms to do special things with their advocate base like provide them special events, invites to live events etc. We are just scratching the surface on this one but I can tell you its going to be big!
Reputation Management emerges in organizations – Toyota, United Breaks Guitars, Dominos Pizza, Motrin Moms, Dell Hell – we have had some major disasters all brought on my lack of speed in this market. Many firms are listening now for their brand (I know I spoke to 50 of them this year about this issue) but I don’t think they are ready for a crisis. I did a Reputation study on this topic two years ago and it proved how many companies lack the infrastructure then – we have come a long way since but do you really have a process to react quickly?
Real Time Marketing makes headlines – ok so I am reading David Meerman Scott’s latest book called Real Time Marketing but you know what – he’s right! He’s got tons of examples of firms that capitalized or failed to capitalize on Real Time issues (United Breaks Guitars!) We all need a lesson on how to be more real time – it’s a great book, I can’t put it down – I have read every book David has published and I can tell you – you need to read this one!
Someone better win the SmartPhone Application race soon – I can’t keep building 4 versions of the same application in order to cover the SmartPhone market – Blackberry aps, iPhone aps, Android aps (what the growth rate on Android) and Windows aps. Ok yes HTML5 should help this but throw in iPad and various other tablet aps and marketers are starting to look like Technologist which brings me to my next prediction.
The Rise of the Marketing Technologist – Marketers for the last few years have been closet techno geeks and its time for them to rise up – companies need digitally fluent marketers who can apply technologies to help make marketing more measurable and scientific. Then we can really change the dynamic from marketing as a cost center to marketing as a profit center!

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Facebook’s Like Button adds Life to your Content

Paul Dunay — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 15:00:54 +0000

Like it or hate it – the Like button is here to stay. In the first week of its launch 50,000 like buttons were integrated on various websites and more than 1M “likes” were registered within 24 hours of its introduction. At last count well over 100,000 websites integrate some form of Facebook’s social plugins (including my site!).

Research is showing that we will use the Like button for many things because its is one of the easiest social actions (easier than share) and can signify you like certain content, show you like a certain product, approve of an advertisement, or share your feeling for a video. Whole activity streams are being created around the use of the Like button.

My favorite is Levis use of the Like button to create a social shopping experience. They’ve integrated the new Like feature with every product on the site so at a quick view, you can see the number of “Facebookers” who Like the item and maybe even cast your own vote. On individual product pages, it even pulls in pictures of your friends who’ve Liked the item. The best part is website extends the Facebook integration out to create a “friends store” which essentially customizes the entire experience to be Facebook friend centric and also allowing you to invite all your friends into that shopping experience! Hello affiliate marketing – I love it! If you haven’t seen it you can check out the store at store.levi.com.

In the future you should be able to Like books on Amazon that you read for only your friends to see, Like search results on Bing to give your friends a heads up on the best result, perhaps even use the Like button to vote on the outcome certain TV shows (my favorite idea is to use the Like button for Reality TV shows such as The Apprentice, Top Chef, Survivor, or Project Runway and actually create the outcome of these shows).

Still in its infancy the Like button holds a lot of promise for Facebook as their march continues to making all interactions both web and mobile more social. In fact if Google’s mission is to “index the worlds information” perhaps Facebook’s mission is to “Socialize the worlds information!” (but I digress …)

For marketers the like button holds some significant promise for extending the lifespan of your content. A recent statistic showed that with Liked content you can expect click thru rates to improve by 3-5 times compared to content that does not have a Like. In an age where there is more User Generated Content than Publisher (or marketer) Content – here is one way that B2B Marketers can ride that user generated wave to make your content stand out and live longer than it does today.

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