Social Media Darwinism » Crowdsourcing

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!

Use Social Media to set Smart Media strategies Let’s make the assumption that you’ve successfully integrated your paid,...
How to Optimize your Paid Search with Social Media We used to learn about who our audience was...
Social Media – the Next Frontier! Many BtoB organizations these days are spending time and money...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

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.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Do you need to be an Extrovert to be in Social Media Marketing?

Paul Dunay — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 16:07:23 +0000

Great question which I found myself asking last night after I reviewed my recent Myers Briggs score. I found it interesting that my score came in as ENTJ.

For those of you who aren’t aware of the Myers Briggs test it asks you a bunch of questions from multiple angles to rate you on 4 basic scales: your Favorite World (Introvert/Extrovert), Information (Sensing/Intuition), Decisions (Thinking/Feeling) and Structure (Judging or Perceiving). The result is a 4 letter score such as mine – ENTJ – which means a person who prefers being an Extrovert rather than an Introvert who prefers Institutional Information over Sensing, that prefers Thinking rather than Feeling when it comes to making Decisions and prefer to Judge Structure rather than perceiving it.

But focusing on the Extrovert angle for a second, I began to wonder if you need to be an extrovert to be in social media. Certainly internally in your organization you need to be an extrovert if you want to organize a Tribe or movement in your company to take on social media. And for sure you need to be an extrovert if you plan on becoming a proclaimed social media expert or guru. But I never thought of myself as an Extrovert, even though I know the test is very consistent (yes I have taken it before and gotten the same score – even before Social Media existed).

I wonder if this spectrum from Introvert to Extrovert will play it’s way out on Social Media. Meaning if the 1-9-90 rule (see link to my post) will actually change over time. The 1-9-90 theory that says out of every hundred people who join a community or network – 1% actively contribute – 9% contribute from time to time – and 90% are lurkers. Perhaps as more people get comfortable being extroverted and live completely transparently then we will see a shift in that law to a ratio that resembles more of the online population.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Location is important for your Contact Center too!

Paul Dunay — Thu, 13 May 2010 16:33:59 +0000

Location Based Services (LBS) are becoming all the rage now. Start up companies like Foursquare which is a web based check in service where you can declare your location to your friends, and even popular sites like Twitter and Facebook are getting into the act and attaching location based information about your status updates.

Clearly people are becoming more comfortable and seeing reasons to allow location based information to be used. But what does this mean to your company?

I believe every single company will need to understand the power of location. And marketing need to get used to thinking location + business can equal big money.

Let’s take the combination of Twitter and location as an example. Comcast provides customer care through its Twitter account “comcastcares”. They use their twitter account to provide customer support if their cable, internet or phone service is out. And it’s become a critical piece of their support organization getting 5,000 – 8,000 tweets per week. They have a team headed by Frank Eliason, the man behind the comcastcares twitter handle with 10 people level 2 and level 3 support people working with him.

Now that Avaya has developed our Social Media Manager solution (get our new book on this) to help folks like Frank to automate what he and his team currently does which is reading tweets and other social data to find support related items. So they can begin to focus elsewhere.

Now that we have all the data about these support related tweets in our system – what if we map where complaints are coming from? Then we can easily visualize using some form of a mashup – where the company should invest in improving its infrastructure and hence their reputation.

This is really a natural extension of the next generation contact center that uses social media to provide superior customer service. We have learned a lot about how social will impact the contact center over the past few years. And I can promise you this is only just the beginning of the age of Social Customer Service.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Generating a Buyer Persona with Facebook Advertising

Paul Dunay — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 16:35:59 +0000

I am a big fan of David Meerman Scott’s work and I am in the middle of re-reading his book the New Rules of Marketing and PR 2nd edition! In the book he stresses the importance of having a “buyer persona” and his definition a buyer persona is a “distinct group of potential customers expressed as an archetypal person whom you want your marketing to reach”.

Translation – it provides a rich target for your marketing, you may even put a name or a face to it as one of his blog post detailed called How Well do you Know your Buyer Personas?

Kadient, a software as a service provider, has a number of buyer personas – 2 in fact – one named Anya and one named Luke. To compile them Kadient interviewed dozens of salespeople and then built a composite picture of their buyer into these two stereotypical people. (see photo from left to right, Heather Margolis, Director of Marketing for Kadient, Luka, Anya (both cardboard cutouts) and Jeff Ernst, Vice President of Marketing for Kadient).

So do you have buyer personas at your company? In reality few have them – some retail firms I have spoke to have them, luxury goods firms typically have them but its rare for a technology firms to have them?

Not any more …

What if I told you that you could compile a buyer persona in 30 days with a minimal investment? A persona that would tell you what their favorite movie was, what their favorite music was, what their favorite TV show was, what their favorite books were, even their average age and marital status. How … Facebook!

As you may be aware I co-wrote the book Facebook Marketing for Dummies (Wiley) and I am in the middle of working on Facebook Advertising for Dummies (Wiley) right now. And I stumbled upon this concept while working on a Facebook Ad campaign. Do you know when you get over 1000 people to click on your Facebook ad that you can get a report that will tell you the most common Music, TV shows, Movies, Books, Age and Marital Status among the people who clicked on your ad was.

Frankly that’s buyer persona gold for free from your Facebook Ad campaign. Let me know if you have tries this and how it worked out for you – who knows you might even be a case study in my upcoming book!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Social Media is not a campaign it’s a commitment!

Paul Dunay — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:47:04 +0000

A while back I created a post called – There is no “campaign” in Social Media because when marketers use the word “campaign,” it tends to suggest an initiative to get a message out to a targeted group of constituents. It also implies there will be a beginning and, somewhere down the road, an ending.

And I still believe that is the case …

And despite a number of comments I got about that post both positive and negative – I think I stopped short of really nailing the issue which is – social media is more than a campaign it a commitment!

Its a commitment to your organization to be more open and transparent, its a commitment to your customer to listen and respond, its a commitment to your community to always be there when you need them, its a commitment to be open to developing new products and services that take input from your community, its a commitment to take the high road when issues arise (as they always do) and most of all its a commitment that tells everyone in your company that this is the way things are going to be and we are going to be part of this – good bad or indifferent.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

What you can learn from Mister Splashy Pants?

Paul Dunay — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 16:19:38 +0000

Ok so what does a humpback whale have to do with marketing? Check out this campaign from Greenpeace for the answer.

Greenpeace was hoping to raise the awareness about humpback whales that were being threatened by the Japanese Fisheries Agency’s plan to kill 50 humpback whales.

They started with an online competition to name the humpback whales that Greenpeace were tracking via satellite in the Pacific. They originally received 11,000 submissions in the competition to name the humpback whales they were tracking on their migration to the Southern Ocean, and then they narrowed it down to the final 30. Some of the names we very thoughtful like Shanti or expressive like Libertad. And then of course there was Mister Splashy Pants.

Mister Splashy Pants quickly became an internet meme, and later the subject of a TED talk by reddit co-founder, Alexis Ohanian. On December 10, 2007, Mister Splashy Pants was announced the winner of the competition. 150,000 people reportedly voted, and ‘Splashy’ received 119,367, over 78 percent of the votes. The nearest rival was Humphrey at 4,329 votes, or less than 3 percent. reddit alone was responsible for 20,322 of the votes.

But even better than that because Mister Splashy Pants was so popular and a viral sensation the Government of Japan decided to abandon plans to kill humpback whales in the Southern Ocean before Greenpeace even left the dock!

Advertising guru Russell Davies praised Greenpeace’s handling of the campaign as “one of the defining moments in New Media marketing.” And the name has since spawned clothing, logos, flashvideos, and the slogan “Save Mister Splashy Pants.”

The lesson to be learned from Mister Splashy Pants is: Crowdsourcing works but only if you let go and are open to the results. Initially Greenpeace was hoping one of the more thoughtful names would be chosen so they left the competition run for a week longer hoping that would change the result – but it only made the results stronger in favor of Splashy.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Going Green with Facebook

Paul Dunay — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:42:00 +0000

Environmental concerns are not new and Green IT efforts are gaining ground at many companies, both big and small. Of course, Green IT solutions are available to companies, but what else can businesses do to become more green? BearingPoint is searching for some new thinking on the topic.

We launched a contest on Facebook to gather the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ on how businesses can become more environmentally conscious in their operations. Facebook users can contribute their ideas and pass them along to their friends and the larger Facebook community to vote on by Nov. 15. (And yes, the winner gets a green prize!)

While a contest or giveaway on Facebook is not new, the use of Facebook as a method of crowdsourcing is. The contest hopes to unearth some new approaches that businesses can take to increase their environmental efforts while also increasing their bottom line.

Here is how you can contribute your ideas on how businesses can be more green.

Full Disclosure – I work for BearingPoint and this is a campaign I am working on – wanted to expose my audience to this concept and would love for you to participate but only if you wanted.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.