frankly speaking

Winning at Social Media

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 20:33:00 -0700

“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

- Vince Lombardi

There’s been a lot confusion recently about how to properly define winning at social media. Some people like to use platitudes like engaging users, social influencers, quality versus quantity posts and pointing at engagement as an indirect way to grow revenue. Forrester even went so far as do an entire blog post about how companies should look at more than just the dollar ROI to measure the real return on a social media campaign.

This is all great, and important, but to me, misses the point. Let’s be clear - the focus for ANY marketing channel is to drive revenue. In order for the channel to be successful, the revenue generated from this channel must be more than the cost of generating the revenue.

Think about it, if you went to an investor and told him “Well, our company gets a lot of traffic, and people sure do like us, and they blog about us alot and we talk with them about products on facebook and twitter, but unfortunately, they don’t seem to be buying a lot and we missed our revenue target for the quarter.” Do you really think the investor is going to give a damn about how many users you engaged on Twitter or Facebook, or the fact that you were able to get Kevin Rose to retweet your blog post? The short answer is no, he’s really not going to care. He will care, very much so, that resources weren’t allocated better to channels that were driving revenue.

I’m not saying that engaging customers and potential customers, reaching out to social influencers, blogging, participating in forums and using video isn’t important, because it is, it’s very important. But, at the end of the day, all of those things don’t pay the bills, nor do they increase shareholder value.

So, what does it take to win at social media? Like any marketing channel it takes testing, analyzing the data and making the appropriate changes to see what delivers the maximum amount of value for the least amount of cost. Engaging users, working with influencers, blogging, creating a viral app or video all help with taking your social media and marketing programs to the next level.

Badge not included. (via ThinkGeek)

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 18:15:40 -0700

Badge not included. (via ThinkGeek)

brycedotvc: nav-chatterji: Tina Fey

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 18:58:07 -0700

brycedotvc:

nav-chatterji:

Tina Fey

Eating crow about foursquare. Now they just need to make this...

Mon, 05 Jul 2010 13:15:13 -0700

Eating crow about foursquare. Now they just need to make this happen all the time.

digital-marketing-diva: The 10 levels of intimacy in today’s...

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 19:39:16 -0700

digital-marketing-diva:

The 10 levels of intimacy in today’s communications

(via si-ashwin)

Everything Zen. Six Senses Destination Spa - Phuket. More here

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 19:35:20 -0700

Everything Zen. Six Senses Destination Spa - Phuket. More here

This is how Mercedes is taking things to the next level. More...

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 19:27:00 -0700

This is how Mercedes is taking things to the next level. More here

This is a good deck on assessing the ROI of social media. The...

Sun, 06 Jun 2010 17:59:00 -0700

This is a good deck on assessing the ROI of social media. The thing that I think is missing is on slide 26 as it implies that in order for one to get a full understanding of ROI on a company’s social media activities, you need to take into account interaction and influence. I couldn’t disagree more.

While interaction and influence are important at the end of the day, they probably did not close the sale (though, you can rightfully argue that they helped lead to the sale, which leads to the age old problem of value attribution in the digital space).

Return on Investment for any channel in the digital space is easily measured by knowing the dollar value of sales generated for every dollar invested in advertising. It’s that simple. While I think social media is valuable and at some point in the future may be even more valuable than search (in terms of ROI/ROAS), right now it’s still under-performing for a lot for a lot of companies in terms of driving actual sales.

Checking Out of Foursquare...

Sun, 30 May 2010 17:31:00 -0700

Look, I like foursquare a lot. It has added a lot of value in the way customers and small time merchants interact with each other. As I posted earlier this year, it’s a marketing tool that rewards customers for their loyalty - you check in enough, you become the mayor, and possibly get a discount at the merchants store - easy, peazy. But, as I tweeted earlier this week, I’m starting to get over it.

I’ve been a steady user of foursquare for about six months now and have become the mayor of more than a few establishments. However, the only time I benefited from a Foursquare check in was when I happened to tweet my check in to a local coffee establishment and it was picked up by the establishment’s social media team on Twitter. Sure, foursquare has scored deal after deal with merchants willing to run social media campaigns and promotions through it, yet, even in the middle of Silicon Valley (where I live) I have yet receive any reward for multiple check ins to a location.

So why isn’t it working? A couple things come to mind, first, most offline merchants, while very business savvy, don’t understand the life time value of their customers and can’t manage it effectively enough to know how to run a mobile marketing campaign that targets their most loyal users. Sure, it’s easy to target mayors, but why not target users who come and check in to your establishment multiple times. And, maybe it’s not that they don’t know how to value that customer properly, or even to run the campaign, maybe it’s just that they don’t have time.

Secondly, where’s the value to the end user? Even if I’m the mayor of my local frozen yogurt shop, who cares if it doesn’t get me $1 off of my next purchase? What is the point of checking into a location, if said location does not reward my loyalty? Further, people use foursquare to let people know where they are. Can’t I let those same people know where I am via SMS, Facebook or Twitter (odds are more than pretty good that my foursquare followers are also my Twitter followers and Facebook friends).

Finally, foursquare is also missing the boat online. There’s tons of potential on allowing people to tell their friends where they’re shopping and what kind of deals they are finding. Sure, companies like Blippy and Swipely are trying to jump on this, but foursquare already has all the credibility, brand recognition and the technology in place to make this happen, cheaply and effectively for both online merchants and consumers.

I’m not saying I’ll never check in again, but for the time being, if you want to find out where I’m at, hit me on the text or twitter.

Come ‘on Gilt Groupe - get your retargeting together....

Sat, 22 May 2010 16:53:36 -0700

Come ‘on Gilt Groupe - get your retargeting together. #retargetingfail

I would call this a branding error.

Sat, 22 May 2010 13:48:44 -0700

I would call this a branding error.

Jay rockin’ SNL

Sun, 09 May 2010 16:39:06 -0700

Jay rockin’ SNL

How the young’ens roll… (via Gawker)

Wed, 05 May 2010 17:05:00 -0700

How the young’ens roll… (via Gawker)

New Twitter Business Model - Yeah, I called It...

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 14:47:15 -0700

Twitter announced their new business model last week. Basically, it’s a sponsored tweet model where advertisers can sponsor tweets that will be inserted when someone does a search on twitter. Eventually, sponsored tweets will be integrated into users normal feeds that they look at on a daily basis.

Interestingly, I guessed that this would be their model almost a year and a half ago. Want proof? Well, let’s take a look.

Initially, John Battelle posed the following question via twitter:

I, in turn (and probably many others) answered with the following response:

Wow, sometimes I amaze myself. Wondering if twitter now owes me a rev share…

brycedotvc:

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 17:51:02 -0700

brycedotvc:

10 Essential Rules for Brands in Social Media

Sat, 03 Apr 2010 11:04:59 -0700

10 Essential Rules for Brands in Social Media:

Taddy Hall (former chief strategy officer for the Advertising Research Foundation) posted an article in AdAge - 10 Essential Rules for Brands in Social Media.

I liked his 10 rules, so I thought I’d shorten and re-blog:

1. The 1% Rule
A small fraction of site visitors are responsible for a…

This HP takeover of ESPN.com is awful and useless. The...

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 20:18:23 -0700

This HP takeover of ESPN.com is awful and useless. The Call-to-Action across the top just takes the user to a little game that HP is sponsoring deeper in ESPN’s site. The 300x250 graphic on the middle right is confusing, has no Call-to-Action, the font at the bottom (in gray) is unreadable and the logo doesn’t mesh well with the background.

This yacht would get the ugliest of pirates (or geeky tech...

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 17:58:00 -0700

This yacht would get the ugliest of pirates (or geeky tech billionaire) laid. More here

Unilever going for the total cleanse in the UK.

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 14:48:47 -0700

Unilever going for the total cleanse in the UK.

I think this Mad Men thing may beginning to jump the shark. Via...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:59:27 -0800

I think this Mad Men thing may beginning to jump the shark. Via Gawker