Social Media Darwinism » Interactive Marketing

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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Marketing needs to be more Adaptive!

Paul Dunay — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 18:00:42 +0000

Ok so this isn’t the newest concept you ever heard of – but hear me out – its time we really changed a few things in the marketing organization.

So its easy to see that today’s marketing teams are not that well equipped to handle “real time marketing” as David Meerman Scott defined it. We need better systems to take in data and analytics in order to make smarter better business decisions.

I would argue that you have to have several sensing mechanisms in place – one that is a data set that is always looking backward (like a rear view mirror) so see what has been said and is always listening and watching the conversations, in addition to that you need a forward looking data set (like a windshield) to help drive decision making on what new products or services to launch, what will be the effectiveness of this campaign, what new hyper customer segments can we go after, and then of course you need a dashboard that pulls all this together in one place so you can see across multiple forms of media.

With today’s fragmented media landscape no single individual can pull together all these media channels to orchestrate and master them. And as a result you get silos of sub-optimized media.

In a real time marketing world speed will be key. So how can you even think of making a yearlong media plan? But that’s what some media planners are doing when it comes to TV and Print. As marketers we need to be optimized for speed and rapidly effective decision-making. Having said that I know we have a long way to go but anything is better than making gut level decisions or worse taking advice from your CEO on a media plan!

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Use Social Media to set Smart Media strategies

Paul Dunay — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 18:00:01 +0000

Let’s make the assumption that you’ve successfully integrated your paid, owned and earned (POE) marketing efforts across the board. You’ve cut off a lot of fat and reduced the amount of money thrown in more directions than you can pay attention to. Now what?

First, recognize that there are too many potential consumer touch-point opportunities offered by owned media channels. It’s inefficient to spend your money, time and resources trying to reach out through all those channels at the same time. Instead, be strategic and smart – use social data analysis to measure campaign effectiveness.

It’s possible to outspend a single competitor if that’s what you really want to do. But it’s impossible to outspend all of your competitors. As the advertising landscape continues to fracture into hyper-segments, both opportunities and dead ends increase. Analysis of social data can provide a different lens through which to evaluate media planning and buying. It provides the competitive advantage because it employs different metrics from those everyone else is using. Those metrics will point you toward new opportunities to prioritize and sequence the way you use and invest in POE media. Get on that track now, and you’ll be way ahead of your competitors — and end up spending the same or less than you did before.

Check out this webinar to learn how to infuse your media plan with social data in order to make smart media decisions!

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Consolidate and Coordinate your Media

Paul Dunay — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 18:00:44 +0000

Forrester has observed that advertising/PR agencies are battling each other for dominance in the digital media space. In reality, the agencies that are actively engaged in this battle are not the ones you want to represent you.

Instead, you want truly integrated agencies like the ones Kirk Cheyfitz alludes to in a recent Huffington Post article. Kirk argued that if you keep paid, owned and earned (POE) media in their current silos, you will fail. The solution is to reorganize the agency’s structure from one specialty, like PR or strategy, to doing it all.

This goes against the adage offered by Danny Kaye’s character in the old film “The Court Jester” – that a jack of all trades is the master of none. The reality is that today we lack the bandwidth to feed all of the agencies and consumer touch points available to us.

By consolidating your POE into a single agency or plan within your company, you can more efficiently coordinate your marketing efforts. This will never happen as long as you spend your time just trying to get everyone together in one room.

To learn more about Paid Owned and Earned Media – check out this Webinar with Forrester’s Sean Corcoran

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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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Social Lift is the Ultimate Rate of Change

Paul Dunay — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 18:00:19 +0000

You have a killer piece of original content that starts rippling out from its source. The two things social lift analysis can tell you are how far and how fast those ripples move. If the content ripples 900 times, but that takes 10 years, you won’t see much benefit. If it ripples 900 times in 28 days, that can be really valuable information. Those rapid ripples are an indicator of what’s happening to the things that you’re doing. They help identify valuable, highly efficient venues in which to place your brand.

Celebrities can be one good source of social lift. In using celebrities, it’s not just about the number of followers or fans someone has. That’s just a point in time.

Instead, you want to know how likely that number is to grow. The best celebrities for delivering social lift are those whose following has increased and will continue to do so over a period of time. In thinking about whether to select a celebrity, a key indicator of his or her potential is, when other types of content feature this person, how far does it reach and how fast does it get there?

Another source of social lift is TV shows. There are two types that exist today, those that are currently on the air and those that are in development. For the ones on the air today, you have to determine what happens when certain types of content, celebrities and advertising appear on that show. What does the overall social lift look like?

In considering shows that are yet to air, you should assess the overall reach of the show concept by finding corollaries to it. What is the overall reach of this type of content? What is the overall reach of celebrities that appear in those shows?

Want to learn more? Read: “Social Lift: How to make your media plan go further.”

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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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Facebook gave us the last piece of the Earned Media puzzle

Paul Dunay — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 18:00:55 +0000

A small relatively un-noticed posting on the Facebook blog gave marketers who use social media one of the greatest gifts I have seen in marketing in quite a while.

Take a look at the original posting below …

Improving Facebook Page Insights
by Facebook Pages on Tuesday, November 23, 2010 at 7:48pm

Facebook Pages are a great way for admins to learn about their audience and view Facebook Insights about people connected to your Page. We are launching a new feature for all Facebook Page owners and Facebook Platform developers that will provide additional metrics around your Page content. All Page admins will now be able to see per post impression counts for each story posted on your Page after June 25, 2010. Per post impressions will be collected in raw format and all impressions will be counted toward the impression total. Unique impressions are not available at this time.

The true meaning of this post is Facebook has given us the ability to track the impression count of an individual piece of content posted on your Facebook Page. This was previously only allowed for Pages with more than 10,000 fans/likes.

This is significant because now you can measure impressions across all your ”earned” social media such as your Facebook Page postings, YouTube Views, Twitter, Blog Impressions etc. And if you can officially measure impression data across all of these forms of media then you can attach a CPM to that number and define the Media Equivalent Value (MEV) you can get by participating in Social Media.

Some clever firms saw this and immediately launched Social Media dashboards that can derive a MEV for you such as SocialEye by Overdrive Interactive and SocialSenseFB by NetworkedInsights (both of which I am currently test driving). Which means you can now truly measure your progress daily, weekly, monthly in social media. And better than that you can report back to your executive team how much media value you were able to drive for your company by using social media, giving you a nice tidy way sum up all your media value backout the cost of your social media program and show an ROI.

Marketers have been typically looking for a tool to measure ROI in social media but because the metrics were so different (fan, followers, views of videos etc) it was impossible to “normalize” those metrics to create a single measurable metric which was why it was so hard to measure the ROI in social media. Ultimately all marketers will be heading to a place where we can monitor spending across all forms of media – Paid, Earned and Owned in order to know where to place our very next dollar of media spending. Furthermore I think you will see this type of media analysis emerge more this year. So little did we know in the quiet of an evening in November just 2 days before Thanksgiving, Facebook gave marketers something really to be thankful for on Thanksgiving!

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The Marketing Technologist: Time has Come!

Paul Dunay — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 18:00:28 +0000

In a recent Brandweek article I saw a quote from Lynne Seid, a senior partner at Heidrick and Struggles – one of the top recruiting firms in the world – in which she said: “We’re seeing the emergence of the chief digital officer reporting into a global CMO.” This explains many of the calls I have been getting from recruiters also looking for someone just to do “all that digital stuff” for the CMO. Said differently, I think they are looking for Marketing Technologists!

This got me thinking about an idea I’ve had for the past year about the need for a new role in the marketing organization: Marketing Technologist.

In researching the concept further, I came across the Chief Marketing Technologist blog by Scott Brinker. Brinker recently published an article in Advertising Age titled, The Case for a Chief Marketing Technologist (September 29, 2010), in which he states:

“Marketing has become deeply entwined with technology. This didn’t happen overnight; it’s been sneaking up on us for a while. But because technology had been so tangential to marketing management for most of our history, the organizational structure of marketing has been slow to adjust to this new technology-centric reality. But we’ve clearly reached a tipping point. To fully reap the benefits of this Golden Age, marketing must officially take ownership of its technology platforms and strategies. And the first step of such ownership is to appoint someone to lead it. Enter the chief marketing technologist.”

I know for my own team we are building things we never did before like: iPhone aps, iPad aps, Android aps, as well as implementing various SaaS applications like Salesforce.com and WebTrends, and marketing automation applications like Aprimo but what is odd is that we have never had to talk with the CIO. In fact I get a little worried that the CEO of one of these companies will one day meet our CIO and thank him for our business and he won’t even know who they are!

I also like to think about the traditional path that the CMO has taken into the C Suite is changing. Typically the modern day CMO takes Marketing 101 in college, gets a Masters in Marketing, works for a major brand like P&G as an entry level marketer, becomes a brand manager then rises up to eventually become the CMO. Well today’s marketers are growing up digital – they create aps, they make Facebook pages, they test mobile ads and design augmented reality games – all before lunch!

So while the idea of a Marketing Technologist probably didn’t make sense for many organizations five years ago, it’s hard to imagine that major B2B companies won’t be operating without one in the very near future, as evidenced by the recruiting demand.

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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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