Social Media Darwinism » Thought Leadership

Kim Kardashian Wedding – Social Intelligence Report

Paul Dunay — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 18:00:23 +0000

With the recent divorce of reality TV star Kim Kardashian, many people have started questioning the authenticity of the wedding, and if the brands involved had wasted their money. We here at Networked Insights measured the social lift around several of the brands involved to determine if they received a return in earned media value from their integrated sponsorship.

Social Lift can be considered online word-of-mouth. It’s a way to measure the ripple effect in media after an event either in conversations or the sharing of content. Download the Social Intelligence Report – Kim Kardashian Wedding to learn if brands like Vera Wang, People Magazine and Perrier-Jouet received social lift from their association with Kim Kardashian.

In this report you will discover:

The earned brand value from celebrity endorsement
Why branded conversations in social media are important
Which brand received the most ROI for their sponsorship

While brands may still be uncertain about their optimal balance of paid, owned and earned media, the value of celebrity endorsement and how it impacts branded conversations is clear. All that is left to uncover for marketers is the right celebrity for your brand and target audience as explored in our Lady Gaga Social Intelligence Report.

What do you think about celebrities and their role in branded conversations online? Submit your comments and let us know if you’d associate your brand with a reality TV star.

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Social Media Marketing and Darwin: Evolution or Irrelevance

Paul Dunay — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 18:00:03 +0000

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.” – General Eric Shinseki, former U.S. Army Chief of Staff

The media landscape has evolved tremendously over the last quarter century. Consumers have evolved even faster with the advent of high-speed Internet-enabled mobile devices and social media. Have your marketing efforts evolved with them?

Marketing at the peak of the television era was relatively simple. There were broadcast shows that could give brands tremendous reach. There were also a growing number of cable channels that allowed smaller brands to afford broadcast advertising that could be delivered to more precise audience segments. It was easy for media agencies to find your target, and almost as simple to measure the response.

Now we’re in an era of continuous messaging that ultimately is tremendously fragmenting. Everyone is clamoring for consumers’ attention, from TV and Web content they’re genuinely interested in, to an onslaught of thoughts and activities of friends and relatives, posted via every social media channel. Additionally, consumers are smarter and savvier in their use of the extensive toolset that the Internet provides to make more informed decisions.

As a marketer, how do you possibly compete for attention within this constant stream of information? The answer: You don’t.

How do you speak to consumers who don’t want to hear traditional marketing messages? The answer: Give them what they want to hear, not what you want to tell them.

Competing for attention is simply no longer sustainable. It worked when you were basically interrupting what your target audience was doing—watching TV. Marketers can no longer program consumers with advertising; instead, now your imperative is to attract people through unique content and authentic brand experiences.

As a marketer, you need to identify the various vehicles for conveying messages to consumers, and then constantly measure engagement, as defined by each brand, at multiple touch points. Are you delivering value at this point of contact? Are you establishing a connection with the customer? Are consumers entering conversion pathways that lead to sales opportunities?

To succeed, you’ll need to understand where your brand fits into your customers’ lifestyles, become a member of those conversations and/or communities, and continually evolve your advertising efforts into opportunities to engage and connect.

There’s certainly no silver bullet approach. Content will be different for every brand. But this can be quite liberating, as you’ll have to become more comfortable with who you are as a brand and how you define success for your business—standing for what you believe in and developing content that’s consistent with the product and values that will attract others.

Everything is pointing to digital technologies and social media, even in offline experiences. The next generation of retail is a blended in-store experience enhanced by digital technologies. Is your business making the necessary steps to advance to the next stage of this marketing evolution? Are you working to get in sync with your consumers?

Sound daunting? It shouldn’t. Remember: There was a time when no one was email-marketing. And it’s hard to remember when selling products online used to be a foreign idea.

Consumers led the way then, as they’re leading into mobility and Internet-enabled devices now. Wherever they’re taking these devices, that’s where you’ll need to be—learning more about your customers preferences, and using that data to inform marketing decisions. It will be survival of the fittest—you just need to get in shape a different way.

Why Your Marketing Needs Real-Time Data Another Advertising Week in New York is upon us and...

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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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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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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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Is The White Paper Dead for B2B Marketing?

Paul Dunay — Wed, 26 May 2010 16:19:45 +0000

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.” “Kill the white paper!” they are increasingly telling their clients. “We think white papers – even those in PDF form that are emailed or posted on a website – are a relic of the print days” said Bob Buday, President of the Bloom Group. And I tend to agree.

But then the question quickly becomes how do you build thought leaders?

In place of a white paper, B2B companies need to create a topic micro site – i.e., a site focused on a single topic and providing a wide range of educational content and interactivity that a white paper alone just can’t provide. Such content can include:

• A blog by the subject-matter expert(s)
• Discussion forums
• Surveys/polls that the audience can take
• A news aggregation feature
• And yes, white papers

Here is Bloom Group’s position on this http://bloomgroup.com/content/topic-microsites

Practically speaking a micro site in place of every “white paper” would be overkill and the sheer work involved in going from just a white paper to all those artifacts for the micro site is not insignificant.

Personally I am taking the angle within my organization of more eBooks rather than white papers. Aspiring to the World Wide Rave theory from David Meerman Scott which says to give away your content rather than lock it up behind a registration form. I also like to use the eBook to point to a landing page with some more Premium content (research, analyst paper) as well as many of the other artifacts that I can muster on a single topic. Trying not to let the eBook or white paper for that matter be the only artifact you create from your efforts. An eBook should spawn 3-5 other items that can be used to reach out to potential clients like a couple of blog posts, an email blast, a podcast perhaps and several factoid tweets that can point to your landing page.

But the purpose of a topic micro site is to help a firm show it has deep expertise in a given subject and to help potential customers think about that issue and the best way to solve it. A topic micro site – if positioned as a firm’s current and future expertise on an issue, and if continually refreshed with good, new, multimedia content (including content from viewers) – can be a tool to keep prospects and customers returning to a piece of your website.

What’s your view on this? We would love to hear from you.

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Using Content to Build Trust in B2B Marketing

Paul Dunay — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 16:31:22 +0000

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. Which was an interesting statistic no doubt for many of us in business today.

But for me – the real story was buried on page 7 of the report (see graphic) which talks about the number of times your message needs to hit target in order for it to resonate! The question is – How many times do you need to hear something about a specific company to believe that the information is likely to be true? A brilliantly phrased question from which comes the answer – 3 to 5 times.

To me this is the story for any content marketer like myself. Using a multichannel approach that leverages traditional and non traditional channels like Social Media is the key. And Social Media can actually help accelerate this stat for you because of the viral effect. Bottom line this is great news for us content marketers.

Say you are going to do a launch of a new technology product (like I am in June). It’s great to know your target audience is going to need to hear about 3 to 5 times to “believe the message”. And I think this goes for all of your constituent audiences in my case: buyers, partners, internal employees, resellers etc …

If you know this going into the launch plan – then its just a matter of how you are going to sequence those messages (for example do you send out the eBook first with a link to the video second and the press release third with the virtual event forth and the blog/twitter buzz fifth?) And then what is the timing? How much time do you give each of them to “soak” in the market – like cooking you start with the hardest vegetables first that take the longest to steep – so perhaps you start with more traditional channels first since they have longer lead times to get to market and then start hammering the market later in the campaign to crank up the buzz.

The choice is really yours but at least you know how to plan for the proper amount of content. And I would also argue that a single individual needs to hear your message 3 to 5 times but don’t forget there is some “breakage” in the system – not every message you send hits every target every single time. So a good rule of thumb would be – double it and plan for breakage along the way.

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B2B Marketing Content: Lure or Lasso?

Paul Dunay — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:43:39 +0000

I picked this saying up from Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book called Crush It.

I really liked the idea of content having dual purposes and not just the purpose of posting to your website or blog.

The lure part is really about a steady stream of content that is consistent in its frequency which is why as people come to depend on it brings people back to your site time and time again. You can call it Inbound Marketing (like the folks at HubSpot do) or you could call it Content Marketing (like the folks at Junta42 do) but whatever you call it its the basis for all your online activity.

The lasso part is really about an “away game” for your content. Gary defines in the how to build your personal brand sense of commenting on blogs and inserting yourself in to conversations. Which is a space that everyone can improve upon because it engages a new audience with the way you think. But also you can think of this as where you can use your content in other social spaces. Perhaps on Facebook, or syndicated to another group blog, or just other places to get you exposure.

The hard part is creating the content – the fun part is finding ways to get it seen by others and have them drive back to your site or blog and engage with you!

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The 4 C’s of B2B Marketing

Paul Dunay — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:30:02 +0000

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”. The term “marketing mix” became popularized after Neil H. Borden published his 1964 article, Concept of the Marketing Mix.

I would argue this killer combo of marketing is mainly for B2C marketing and thus it is best applied to the marketing of products, especially mass retail products.

So let’s take a look at another more contemporary framework for B2B marketing – the Four C’s. This framework is newer, and in my opinion, more applicable to a wider range of today’s marketing challenges.

The 4 C’s of B2B Marketing are:

Content – the creation of a steady stream of engaging content
Connection – connecting with the audience you wish to attract
Communication – communicating with them in an ongoing conversation
Conversion – and then converting them at the illusive moment of need

Since B2B Marketing is arguably more of a marathon than a sprint in marketing – you need to always have your 4 C’s engine going – creating the best content, finding the connecting with your target audience, sustaining the communications pattern until they are ready to convert – this way you have a fighting chance at making all your marketing efforts count toward one goal – Sales!

In the next post I will show you the new 4 S’s for Social Media Marketing …

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