Social Media Darwinism » Inbound Marketing

How much is that Facebook Fan worth anyway?

Paul Dunay — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 18:00:15 +0000

Vitrue a social media marketing platform determined that the average value of a Facebook ‘fan’ is about $3.60 when it comes to a Media Equivalent Value (MEV) per year. This calculation is based on the brand posting to their Facebook Fan Page twice a day and that they have a million fans which equates to 60 million impressions per month at a $5 CPM (cost per thousand impressions), so 60 million impressions. This would result in $300,000 a month in Media Equivalent Value or what the brand might have to spend elsewhere to get the same eyeballs. So then the math goes $300,000 month, which is $3.6M a year, meaning with 1M fans, the average value is $3.60 per fan.

While I can understand the approach to equating it to media dollars that you would have to spend to get that same reach only .2% of Fans ever return to a Fan page and in some cases it’s more like .02% (hat tip to BrandGlue) So people on Facebook who “like” your Fan page basically never go back to it.

The true value of a Facebook fan is Zero until you can monetize them. And that’s the era I think we have all just entered. For the last 2 years we have been building our network of people that “like” the brand by creating content and engaging with them. I certainly hope you have been doing this – and its not an insignificant feat to create all this content. This is the #1 stumbling block I hear from marketers over and over again.

So the question I hear from many marketers now is “ok I have done that – now how do I monetize them?”

In reality there are only 2 ways to do this and I invite your comments on this approach – you either sell them something (hello f-commerce which is coming to a Facebook fan page near you soon) or you activate them in some other way like an “advocate” network meaning if they cant buy from you directly perhaps they could refer you a new customer which might even be better than buying something from you if you think of the Lifetime Value of a Customer (LTV).

Bottom line is I think we are exiting a phase of experimentation (what I like to call Social Science Experiments) and moving into a phase of monetization. How are you monetizing your fans?

Facebook gave us the last piece of the Earned Media puzzle A small relatively un-noticed posting on the Facebook blog...

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Microsoft’s Future in Digital Marketing

Paul Dunay — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 01:15:33 +0000

Over the weekend I got to meet with Romi Mahajan the World Wide Director of the Digital Marketing Platform Group at Microsoft. His role is to create the vision for Digital Marketing as it relates to Microsoft SharePoint 2010 for Internet Sites, and Microsoft FAST Search Server technology to create great digital experiences for its customers and leverage its extensive partner network. I was really surprised and excited to learn that Microsoft is taking the Digital Marketing place very seriously since they are one of the largest players in the space!

Below is a transcript of some Q&A that I captured with Romi …

1) What is your vision for Microsoft and Digital Marketing?

I believe digital marketing is at the center of a set of tectonic changes happening in the marketplace, across enterprise and consumer-based scenarios (which are converging quickly). Companies have a core set of common questions (How do I create loyalty in my current and potential customer base, how do I create new forms of commerce, how do I expect my brand in meaningful ways, how do I connect to my value chain (partners etc) in a seamless, efficient, and exciting way…) and in each case, digital marketing can provide either the foundation for the solution or elements of the foundation. Meanwhile, at the same time media, advertising, technology, and brand are all moving towards a singularity and, as such, digital marketing becomes the easy moniker with which to refer to all these changes. Microsoft as a company not only understands the changes afoot, but is the only company that has direct involvement in all the different aspects of digital media like paid, earned, and owned media, back end and front end technologies (from the OS to the presentation layer), and a solution for all sorts of computing devices. I see Microsoft at the forefront of digital marketing in the next 5 years.

2) How much of the Digital Marketing spectrum does the Microsoft’s Digital Marketing cover?

The Microsoft Digital Marketing suite covers many but not all of the aspects of the digital marketing. That is why the partner ecosystem (Agencies, ISVs, Integrators, Consultants) are core to rounding out the offering. In areas, we excel, in others we have “ an answer” and in some areas we rely 100% on partners. That I believe is the winning model and the only one that scales.

3) How is Microsoft helping brands to connect with customers using the Microsoft Digital Marketing suite?

Microsoft has powered thousands of dynamic websites including sites like Dell.com, Ferrari.com, Energizer.com, Chesapeake Energy.com and more. Through interactive elements on websites to the provision of winning digital experiences via mobile, Microsoft is working very hard to help brand connect to customers. I don’t want however to overstate the case. There are many great firms out there who we partner with and who help us understand the customer in new and exciting ways. There are also other great companies who compete directly with us. The key is not “who wins” but how the customers’ customer is being taken care of and served in the process.

(4) What stand out examples can you give us of Brands using the Microsoft Digital Marketing suite?

So one of the best examples we have is Ferrari.com where they used SharePoint as the presentation layer and content management system. Few people know that SharePoint is one of the largest content management software’s out there, not just inside the enterprise but also outside the enterprise.

Ferrari wanted to make its Web site as state-of-the-art and captivating as the cars it manufactures! They migrated from a Java-based infrastructure to Microsoft Office SharePoint to streamline development, simplify content management, and improve the user experience. And with the new site, Ferrari has created a stronger audience connection while increasing traffic by 237 percent, with a 150 percent increase in unique visitors.

5) Where are Microsoft and Digital Marketing heading next?

The future is an exciting one for both Microsoft and for the Digital Marketing industry in general. While aspects of digital marketing have “jumped the shark,” the change is here to stay. Look for more adaptive, dynamic websites, set of services that when combined intelligently create new digital marketing platforms, a lot more ‘closed-loop’ marketing in the digital marketing space, the rise of what I call “The Gaming Metaphor” as the central “method of interaction” that dominates digital experiences, and a host of others that I’m not smart enough to predict!

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News Feed Optimization (NFO) is the new SEO!

Paul Dunay — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 18:00:25 +0000

One of the big mistakes I often see with companies when they are setting up a Page on Facebook is they spend more time planning “the wedding than they do the marriage” as I like to say. They spend all of the effort to get the page perfect and have it be in compliance with their corporate guidelines but they have no real plans for how they are going to grow their base of Fans with rich engaging content.

I often suggest to companies to put at least the same amount of time in identifying and planning for how you are going to create content for the site on an ongoing basis as you do in the planning and design of the site itself. And you would be surprised what I hear. Things like … “sure we already make tons of content, you know brochures, fact sheets, data sheets, web pages, case studies, etc” Oh my, that’s not the kind of content I meant!

It occurs to me my definition of content often differs from their definition of content. I mean content that can be used for Inbound Marketing (hat tip to HubSpot who created the term) things that can be shared socially like blog posts, eBooks, videos, podcasts, research reports. Also more advanced techniques like Polls, Promotions and Contests. All this is needed to get people to engage with your brand specifically in the form of “likeing” and commenting on it.

And the reason that this is so important is because …

Only .2% of Fans ever return to a Fan page and in some cases it’s more like .02% (hat tip to 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 it in order to get likes and comments which will help drive the amount of people that Facebook will show your page to.

It’s all based on Facebook’s algorithm called EdgeRank (see photo above). This is the algorithm that controls what you see in your News Feed when you log into Facebook.

Remember the days back in 1999-2000 when everyone was trying to get a banner ad on the homepage of Yahoo! Then came the days of wanting to appear at the top of a Google search (either paid or organically). What’s happening now is savvy marketers are creating content that gets liked a lot and commented on a lot so they will continually show up on individual homepages in Facebook. This is a new type of optimization called News Feed Optimization and it’s the next big race for all of us to embark on.

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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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Is User Generated Content building a Wall between your Brand and your Customer?

Paul Dunay — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 18:00:03 +0000

So here is a little fact that really scares me – User Generated Content has surpassed that of publisher content which means we marketers (or publishers) are the “white noise” to the User Generated Content “signal” they produce.

So let’s dive into that for a moment …

At a recent concert I was attending at Madison Square Garden – the most popular thing to do at the concert was not dancing (good thing in case you have seen me dance) but it was video taping, text messaging, and generally sharing the experience with others who were not in attendance. 20,000 people for 4 hours producing tons of content – more content than I produced with all my teams around the world in a year – they exceeded in 4 hours!

Now take that same dynamic and put that in front of your brand. If you have (lets take Microsoft for example) customers who are avid users of the brand and tend to be socially active blogging, tweeting, posting on Facebook, or posting on forums about their good and bad experiences with the Microsoft brand – then how as a brand marketer am I supposed to get my message through all that mess?

The answer is – you can’t!

The dynamic I am pointing out exists for most brands today B2C and B2B brands. They quantity of conversations are growing every day about your brand (at Avaya our brand mentions have increased 5 fold in 18 months!!) Now I am not sure it can continue at that pace but I am not 100% sure.

150 million people use Facebook everyday and access it via mobile (more than the entire Twitter registered user base!) and they are said (by Facebook) to be 2 times more active than those that only access Facebook via the web.

One thing is for sure that dynamic is going to continue to get worse as smartphones surpass internet users in the next 2 years. That’s a stat we all need to keep an eye on!

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Mapping Content to the Sales Funnel AND Buyer types

Paul Dunay — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 23:29:39 +0000

You often hear about the concept of mapping content to the sales funnel (especially in B2B Marketing) but it’s not so common in practice. I will self confess that I have ignored this one for a while. The other version of this is the mapping of content to your buyer types and this too is one I have ignored for a while … until now!

Ok so I took a look at my sales funnel and started to take the content my team produces and map it against the funnel – for simplicity sake I like to use Awareness to Consideration to Purchase as my 3 major stages of the sales funnel.

For Awareness I like to use broadly appealing content that can be shareable (the new KISS as I like to call it – Keep it Shareable Stupid). This would include eBooks, Research, White papers, etc. Not all of these have hooks for gathering download information (that’s just not acceptable these days). We use 2 distinctions – Premium content and Non Premium content – the latter being free and the former being behind a registration page.

For Consideration I like to use more in depth tools like webinars and live/virtual events – derived from the lists of folks who downloaded and have been interacting with us on a particular topic. These are typically better than the broad brush webinars because we can have a real consideration discussion that includes such things as use cases, ROI modeling and even self funding ideas.

And then for Purchase I like to use case studies, customer references, press releases on new wins etc. This gets to the final decision makers desk and helps out the sales force immensely since they can never seem to have enough of these in their toolkit.

So then I flipped to another chart where we started to map the content we create to the buyer types and for simplicity sake I like to use End User, Influencer, and Buyer/Executive as my 3 major buyer types.

What we realized pretty quickly was the content we were using to attract Awareness – was the same content we would use to attract End Users (now I always hope to get an influencer or a buyer in there) but in reality when we look at the leads we are nurturing we are seeing more end users which is ok since we have a ton of end users in the 200,000 customers we have!

For the Influencers – we like to use the same content we have for the consideration stage – webinars, live events, virtual events and so on. Here is where we see more influencers show up to get the detailed info that they need to make a recommendation for a major technology purchase.

And finally for Buyers/Executives – we see we need the same type of content we need for the purchase end of the funnel – since they have the recommendation from the end user and influencer but they need evidence that this is going to work and that they are not the first person to buy which is why case studies, customer references and new win stories really help speed the sales process.

What’s been your experience with mapping content to the sales funnel or buyer types? I would love to know.

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3 More ROIs in Social Media – Conversations Leads and Advocates

Paul Dunay — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 15:00:41 +0000

If you follow me you know I talk a lot about the ROI of Social Media since I happen to have stumbled on a great ROI using Social Media in providing support for our customers at Avaya.

Social customer support I would argue is the single best place to focus your social media efforts since it can reduce customer churn and increase your retention rates faster than any other program I have ever seen before thereby delivering a strong ROI. Listening for and spotting a customer issue, responding to them and solving their problem in minutes using social media not only lets you conquer social media but delight your customers in the process.

But I think there are 3 more ROIs out there where you can build a great business case with Social Media

Conversations – PR needs to move from publications to conversations and if you take that concept and really track and engage in conversations where you brand would fit – I could see that leading to an ROI over time – similar to the way the long tail works for books or movies – this is the long tail of conversations and it would be like having 100s of ads out there for your brand that were all relevant and in context. Which leads me to my next ROI …

Leads – Listening for mentions of your brand or product or even competitors brands is a great way to find leads – evidence I have when listening for the competitors of Avaya – if I hear someone say “replace Cisco” – don’t you think that’s a conversation Avaya should be engaged in? Grant it there haven’t been a ton of those conversations but if you add up all your competitors and your own brands product lines it becomes meaningful.

Advocates – Here is the last one where we have had some success as well. How are you building and taking care of all those really avid followers on Twitter or die hard fans on Facebook – perhaps if you were able to harness them like some companies are doing now with service like Zuberance – you can get them to make recommendations and build your brand with the power of their voice. We are seeing some success with this but some clients of Zuberance are really killing it with this one strategy.

Dell has been talking about how they made $3 million dollars off their Twitter site – how did they do it? With a Coupon Code! – We have plenty of tools both old and new at our disposal to measure and track so many things on the web – so much so – that I have lost all patience for the concept that “we cant measure social media” – if Dell can measure with a coupon code just think what can you be doing to track the flow of social media with special 800#, special email addresses, special landing pages.

That’s how we did it at the beginning of the web – I don’t see why this time is any different!

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Understanding the Value of Social Media Data

Paul Dunay — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 15:30:10 +0000

There is a big difference between data and insights. Technology may have given us access now to endless amounts of data from every corner of the world. But the real challenge is making sense of all this seemingly disconnected data. Data by itself is generally valueless which is why for the most part it takes human gray matter applied to the data to make it into actionable insights.

When it comes to Social Media data the same holds up to a point!

There is clearly a spectrum of Social Media data that can be collected by any listening platform like a Radian6 or a Networked Insights. But in reality it’s what you do with that data that makes the big difference.

Classic social media monitoring with a listening platform like Radian6 involves a stream of data centered on a search for specific word like “Avaya”- it’s very tactical and mostly used for reactive purposes such as social customer support or brand/crisis management. Advanced versions of this tactic include taking the resulting stream of data from that search and applying technology to it such as Avaya’s Social Media Manager solution which will actively look for support opportunities from that stream of data and push the relevant ones into the contact center (see my new book Social Media and the Contact Center for Dummies for more info).

Moving up the chart from monitoring into analytics is where you see higher value from all that monitoring of your social data. Using a tool like Networked Insights you can take that data and start to understand where the conversations about your brand are happening most, and what the tone or sentiment of those conversations are. Better yet are you more or less involved in those conversations and what share of voice do you have around the conversations that are most relevant to your brand. Advanced versions of this tactic include tracking those places that conversations are happening most and using the words from those conversations in your SEO as well as choosing to advertise in those places that frequently mention your brand or the conversations you want to be a part of.

Finding data about your brand in easy when it comes to social media, there are a variety of social tools that you can use to get a glimpse of your brand ranging from free to paid. But using the tool for what its best for and matching your strategy to the tool that you are using is where you can best see the value of that tool.

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Wayne Gretzky was an Inbound Marketer

Paul Dunay — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 16:12:23 +0000

A few years ago in every presentation I made I had a slide at the front of each presentation that featured Wayne Gretzky. It was affectionately called the “Wayne Gretzky School of Marketing” slide and it was basically a photo and a single quote that said “Skate to where the puck is going not to where the puck has been”.

The inference of this slide years ago was to remind my teams, my peers and my clients that we need to create forward thinking content. Content that would attract the type of audience that we wanted and develop the SEO that we needed on the major topics we wanted to be known for.

Years later we have terms like Content Marketing (created by Junta 42) and Inbound Marketing (created by HubSpot) that advocate the same type of approach. The idea being rather than do outbound marketing to the masses of people who are trying to block you out, why not do inbound marketing where you help yourself “get found” by people already exploring and learning more about your industry.

But there is a subtle difference with my hockey analogy that isn’t covered in the definition above and that is … creating content on a topic that is forward thinking. Nobody wants to read the 1,000th post on a topic that everyone has heard about before. For example who cares about CRM these days so writing about the benefits of CRM wont help your cause but writing about whatever is the next big thing in CRM will help distinguish you from the masses and attract those potential customers who are looking to learn about the absolute latest in CRM.

In reality Wayne Gretzky wasn’t a marketer but he was a very intuitive and successful hockey player. And in business if you want to stand out from the crowd and the very best way these days to distinguish yourself is to create content that is differentiated and that people want to read by applying what I am now calling the Wayne Gretzky School of Inbound Marketing!

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Customers don’t care about Channels

Paul Dunay — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 16:31:21 +0000

Let’s face it at this point social media has gone mainstream. Customers are not only surfing the web looking for information but more and more they are relying on social media to get their information.

Your customers can seamlessly move from web to social to call center to your front door. But do you treat them the same in each channel? Do the owners of each channel interact with each other? I didn’t think so.

We need to start to think about an Integrated Experience Management (IEM) play so this experience is equally as seamless for on the management side of this equation.

Meantime here are 5 things to think about when it comes to using these channels

1) Customers just want to be heard – no matter where they are interacting with you from the call center to the twittersphere – they just want to be heard and have you acknowledge them. The same tone and transparency should be applied here equally which is not always the case with the contact center.

2) Customers will tell you where you need to focus your attention – if something is broken with your organization you can bet it will surface on the social web first. Be thinking about issues you hear about socially, how you can get them acknowledged fast and get them fixed even faster.

3) You must be ready to respond – if you are going to listen to the social web you better be ready to respond. The issue here is much the same as email (the more email you send the more you get back) so if you start responding on the social web – it will likely lead to more opportunities to respond. Some firms are seeing volumes in the 10s of thousands each week! You will need to scale your response mechanisms before this happens. Integrating social media with the contact center is a great way to do that (click here to get a FREE copy of my next book Social Media and the Contact Center for Dummies)

4) Respond like a person, not a company – try to resist the urge to automate the responses. Some companies are telling me their volume of social media mentions are getting to high and they are considering automating a response to a Twitter DM. I say – don’t do it! A good response is one that comes from an individual not a company. You can tell the difference instantly.

5) Never forget the customer can vote with their feet – and finally customers have choices not only of the channels they use but the company they keep. Be sure the experience you give your customers and prospects reflects the spirit of working with your company or you’ll never get a second chance to make a first impression!

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