Outside the Fishbowl

Afraid to Ask: Just What is “Social Media”?

June 23, 2009 – 3:35 pm

Sometimes concepts become buzzwords so quickly it’s easy to lose sight of what’s really being talked about. “Social Media” is a great example. Ask different people and you’ll likely get examples rather than answers; it’s Facebook, it’s Twitter, it’s blogging, etc… Herein lies some of the uncertainty surrounding Social Media – a universal definition and set of rules has yet to be established. Brands have realized that they need to be involved in Social Media, but they can’t figure out how. They often find themselves in the position of either not fully understanding why they are doing Social Media or worse yet, thinking they are doing it when they are not.

Put simply, Social Media is people engaging, participating and sharing online. Straight-forward enough, right? Now consider that ‘people’ includes your brand. Just because your brand has a Facebook page does not mean that your brand is doing Social Media. Social Media isn’t a line item like a media channel on the Marketing budget. It’s an activity. If your brand is not actively engaged in your Social Media efforts, you are doing it wrong. By the way, having an intern monitor your Twitter account trying to increase your followers doesn’t count.

Social Media is about creating engagements with your customers. It’s not ad exposures or email open rates – it is creating opportunities for your customers to talk to and about you, preferably in an ongoing way. Ideally, in a cross-network way. Your customers should have an opportunity to engage and talk about you where they already are: Facebook, Twitter or whatever comes next, not where you just set up a new profile. Embrace and engage them where they already are. Ignite them – give them something to do - something to talk about. Give advocates rewards and recognition. Act like a host. Listen. Be interesting. Be social.

“Be social” – “Social Media” … now that makes sense; less buzzword, more meaning. But, is it too simple perhaps? What else comes to mind when you hear about brands’ successful “Social Media” efforts?

By jeremywiles | Posted in Social Media | Tagged brand evangelists, marketing, Social Media, trends | Comments (0)

IAB names Brickfish as a Best Practice

June 4, 2009 – 10:46 am

In the pursuit to define and quantify Social Media, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) created “Social Media Ad Metrics Definitions” and “Social Advertising Best Practices.” According to a recent Nielsen study, Social Media has surpassed e-mail as the most popular form of consumer communications and activities. There has also been a surge of consumer growth deriving from an older demographic (34-49-year-olds) as opposed to its traditional younger demographic. As the IAB notes, “Social Media has changed the paradigm of how people consume online media.” These documents are intended to help marketers better understand this evolving relationship between consumers and online media.

The “Social Media Ad Metrics Definitions” document sheds light on navigating as well as measuring social media. The “Social Advertising Best Practices” document outlines what elements make Social Media powerful: reach, relationships and relevance. Reach, Relationships and Relevancy are what differentiate Social Media advertising from any other medium. With the vast number of social networks and online communities, Social Media has now become the most popular form of communication, generating a reach far surpassing than that of email. As for relationships, Social Media’s strength is in the personal connections it enables, and the peer-to-peer contact it facilitates. Lastly, consumers are extremely engaged with the content and connections that their friends are creating because of its personal relevance.

We are honored to say that Brickfish has been named by the IAB as one of the top five Best Practices in Social Media Advertising. The IAB recognized Brickfish as a best practice for our continued efforts in the Social Advertising and Social Media space. The IAB featured the Brickfish program, Design a Coach Tote, as an example of the reach and power of UGC. The Coach Case Study demonstrates how UGC can enable relationships between the consumer and the brand. Additionally, the IAB comments on our technology, which tracks brand interactions across the Web and globally. The Coach campaign reached over 8,000 URL’s, which generated over 6,000,000 consumer engagements.

Brickfish is thrilled to be considered a leader in the Social Advertising space and will continue to develop programs and technology that follow these guidelines set forth by the IAB. Brickfish will also continue to set an example as a Best Practice in the ever-evolving UGC and Social Media landscape.

By afutak | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

What BRM Means For You and Your Brand

May 18, 2009 – 9:59 am

Social media is growing at an astonishing rate and the noise out there is only getting louder; brands are struggling to find the balance between what is too much information and what is not enough. To find the right balance, brands can create a Brand Relationship Management (BRM) strategy. Joe Marchese addresses this emerging term in the article “Consumers Using Social Media To Manage Brands” and discusses how BRM can be used to help manage the type of information provided in a brand’s social media efforts.

A cousin of the more recognizable CRM (Customer Relationship Management), BRM is an excellent strategy for brands to start making a more tangible connection with their consumers via social media. People are connecting more and more to brands on social networks, enabling them to pick and choose what they want to hear from a brand. In turn, brands can use this to their advantage by forming a social media communications plan that ultimately results in engagement.

Marchese states that the key to BRM is “thinking about social media connections from the consumer’s perspective, instead of from a corporate communications or media plan perspective.”

What does this mean for the brand? Effectively putting out just the right amount of information for the consumer to feel they have the right to choose which and how much of that information they want to hear. The important component is that the consumer feels that they have efficient control over their own brand relationships. Marchese says that BRM “gives consumers the ability to research brands, beginning to assign personalities to brands based not just on their appearance, but on a brand’s behavior and interactions.”

As a brand builds it social media strategy, it is important to maintain an open line of communication with its consumers. Brands also need to recognize as the conversation continues amongst consumers, while brands can listen and partake in the conversation, they cannot control it. The sooner brands recognize this and embrace this, the closer they will be to a successful BRM strategy.

By aheestand | Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (0)

Tales from the Inbound Marketing Summit

May 1, 2009 – 5:11 pm

With the theme of “Accelerating Strategy into Action,” the Inbound Marketing Summit provided the perfect platform to provoke influential panels as well as exhilarating conversations around social media. The trending topic: Social media is here to stay and is a valuable component for any brand, marketer or company using an integrated marketing strategy.

The “Innovative Marketing Programs Using New Media” panel went into depth on the guidelines for creating successful integrated marketing plans utilizing social media. The panelists; Brickfish EVP of Sales, Jamie Dicken, Founder and CEO of Find and Covert, Bernie Borges, Hoover’s Inc. Social media Manager, Tim Walker and Nowspeeds, Inc.’s Founder and Managing Director, David Reske, all brought helpful insight as to achieve success when creating such plans.

People have to trust the messenger before they trust the message.
- With social media; brands, marketers and companies have the opportunity to build relationships with their consumers where they are living on the social Web. They need to take advantage of this and nurture these relationships to create loyal brand evangelists.
Manage expectations.
- Set the goals according to the objectives. Work with the client to set realistic goals around the objectives. Success metrics can be measured by the achievement of those goals.
Don’t be afraid to relinquish control of your content or message.
- Losing control of the message can be scary, but in order to obtain transparency and be trusted, it is necessary.
- Losing control doesn’t mean that parameters can’t be set. Let consumers have control of the content, but set parameters around what they can and can’t do.

Chris Brogan and Justin Levy’s Inbound Marketing summit was filled with new marketing information and best practices, with key takeaways for all. We look forward to participating in the next Inbound Marketing Summit, Sept. 30- Oct. 1 in Boston.

By afutak | Posted in Events, Social Media | Tagged Brickfish, inbound marketing summit, marketing, Social Media | Comments (0)

What Makes Social Media Different?

April 24, 2009 – 2:53 pm

Brands are facing a new reality: they need a social media strategy. But what does that mean? They might believe they are active in Social Media because they have a corporate blog or a presence on a social networking site but that’s not a strategy. Those are just tools. This way of thinking simply does not take into account the fact that the marketing landscape has fundamentally changed. Users don’t see one-to-many, top-down broadcasting as THE way to get their content. They get content created and distributed by their peers. That’s Social Media; an active interaction among a network of peers. Period.

Social media consumers are active participants. They create the content. They share the content. They have a strong sense of ownership over the content they create. There is a natural flow to social media activity, and passive content like banner ads or ad-sponsored widgets are intrusions to that flow.

Social Media presents an opportunity to identify and influence behavior by eliciting conversations and deriving opinions and attitudes about your brand. The full value of using Social Media to market is the ability to intitiate a dialog, contribute to it and track the evolution of a brand’s message and reputation among existing brand evangelists and their spheres of influence. That’s what makes Social Media so different – it’s about what your customers create and think, with or without you.

By jeremywiles | Posted in Social Media | Tagged brand evangelists, marketing, social, Social Media, trends, user generated content | Comments (0)

Embrace UGC, Create Brand Evangelists

April 3, 2009 – 12:12 pm

As traditional marketers examine where their audience is going, they are starting to look at the Social Web and its abundant and ever-expanding amount of User-Generated Content (UGC). UGC is quickly becoming the name of the game in the social media and marketing spheres. UGC, a plentiful and often untapped resource, can be a powerful marketing tool if used correctly.

In a recent Ad Age article, “Most Define User-Generated Content Too Narrowly”, Jimmy Wales and Andrea Weckerle discuss how UGC enables brands to interact and engage with their customers on an unprecedented scale. What brands need to learn is how to utilize this resource. Instead of focusing on “chaotic, disorderly, and unrestrained message boards”, brands should turn to “well-cultivated spaces such as wikis and blogs that are monitored by the community”, and therefore have some genuine caché. These spaces will enable legitimate and extensive opportunities to build your brand, all at a comparable price versus traditional brand advertising venues.

Wales and Weckerle present compelling case studies of UGC campaigns that successfully generate buzz. The takeaway: create a simple yet engaging platform and your users will come, create, and spread the word. So what does this mean for brands?

Companies should address and embrace UGC venues and incorporate them into their overall marketing strategies. Brands are recognizing that their consumers are living on the Social Web and that they need to create marketing strategies around them. By leveraging the power of UGC, brands encourage their consumers to create, discuss, and evaluate the brand, and the consumers ultimately become the brand’s evangelists.

By aheestand | Posted in Social Media | Tagged brand evangelists, Social Media, UGC, user generated content | Comments (1)

From Inside the SXSWi Walls

March 26, 2009 – 4:32 pm

As a first-time attendee of South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), I was not sure what to expect. The attendees were a mix of big brands, bloggers, social media and PR professionals. In the same vein of easygoing Texas, everything was very laid-back and comfortable, from the venue to the attendees. Despite the current economic state, the Austin Convention Center was packed. With attendance up twenty percent this year, everyone was eager to learn about the new ideas in digital media from their peers.

The emerging message: The time to try new media is NOW.

In a recent CNet article, Caroline McCarthy quoted Patrick Moorhead, director of emerging media at the Microsoft-owned ad firm Razorfish, from a panel discussion about innovation during a recession, saying,

“Our belief is that if you stick with what you’ve got, that’s a bigger risk than taking a risk on emerging media and testing something new that could potentially teach you something.”

With the insurgence of popularity among social networks, brands have the opportunity to connect with their consumers where they are living—on the Social Web. Twitter was the most buzzed about at SXSWi, with more and more brands creating a presence on this micro-blogging site. In my conversation with Morgan Johnston, manager of corporate communications at JetBlue Airways, he said, “We consider our Twitter account akin to an information booth.”

In addition to JetBlue, other brands such as Starbucks, Best Buy and Comcast – to name a few – have joined the Twitter craze. Big brands are beginning to test the waters with the new media and are willing to put advertising dollars towards it. In a recent Mashable article, “Social Media Marketing Budgets on the Rise,” Adam Ostrow points out that, “Once best practices are established, those remaining tepid about the medium at the moment may jump in, and overall spending should continue to grow. Perhaps, at that point, we can even conclude that social media is indeed an industry.”

The big takeaway from this year’s SXSWi is that social media is no passing trend. Both big and small brands are undertaking new media initiatives, but simply having a presence on the social web is not enough. Social media is just like any other marketing avenue and requires a thoughtful strategy. By partnering with companies that know the space, brands can successfully launch social media efforts that compliment their overall marketing strategies.

By afutak | Posted in Events, Social Media, Uncategorized | Tagged marketing, Social Media, SXSWi, trends | Comments (0)

Taking South by Southwest Interactive by Storm

March 23, 2009 – 11:46 am

Have you ever heard of SXSW? My friends in the music business always claimed it was THE place to be. Then, all of my interactive friends started talking about it. Not quite sure if it was a trade show, convention or just an excuse for a party – I decided I needed to head to Austin and check it out for myself.

After spending the week in New York and Atlanta, I hopped on a plane to Austin. The flight was oversold and everyone on board was headed to SXSW.

The first day was a rainy Friday 13th. Unfazed by this notoriously unlucky day, I excitedly headed to the Austin Convention Center. The Convention Center was huge and the festival program was incredibly difficult to navigate. I was off to a rocky start, but Saturday more than made up for it.

Before heading to the Convention Center Saturday morning, I was able to meet with Social Media vet, Chris Brogan, to discuss our upcoming sponsorship of his Inbound Summit and the current state of Social Media. We chatted for over an hour about everything from how to make Social Media brand safe to how brands can integrate Social Media into their traditional media plans to stories about life on the road. We then headed to the Convention Center together. When we arrived, BlogTalkRadio had an area set up for live Podcasts, and Chris asked to interview me with David Meerman Scott. I was thrilled at the opportunity to talk with such great thought leaders in Social Media. Both Chris and David acknowledged the need for a Social Media Solution like Brickfish—a platform that has the ability to reach people where they actually live on the Social Web. I discussed our Coach case study and they were floored by the results.

With the morning off to a great start, I braced myself for a full day of meetings and panels. I learned a ton from all of the amazing experts. My favorite was Tony Hsieh from Zappos. His vision is “Whatever you’re thinking… think bigger.” As part of a company that is structured as a team working toward a common goal, he reiterated a quote from Al Gore:

“If you want to go quickly – go alone. If you want to go far – go together.”

Now that I have been at SXSW, I actually “get it”. It’s more than a bunch of panels with crazy names and it’s more than just a party. It’s a chance for the people who are in this space together to meet, to share ideas and to get the conversation started. Hope you can join me for some Bar-B-Q in Texas next year!

By jdicken | Posted in Events, Social Media | Comments (0)

How Can Brands Break Through in Social Media?

March 10, 2009 – 10:14 am

What can brands do to reach their consumers through social media? With more and more people living online, an engaging online marketing strategy is more important than ever. According to a new Nielsen Company report [1], social networks and blogs are now the fourth most popular online category – ahead of personal email. Time spent on social network and blogging sites is growing at more than 3 times the rate of overall Internet growth.

Some key points:

two-thirds of the online population access social network or blog sites
time spent on social networking sites now accounts for 1 in every 11 online minutes
the demographics for social networking is rapidly getting older and broader [2]

What does this mean for brands? Clearly there is a need for a strategy to address this growing trend in online behavior. In the same way that brands cannot afford to not have a direct outreach solution (e.g. direct email, newsletters, etc), they cannot afford to ignore the social media space. Bottom line: brands need to engage with their consumers living online.

The report cites one key reason ‘traditional’ advertising on social networks hasn’t been as successful as in some other areas: ownership. In a traditional model users are simply consumers of content supplied by publishers. In the social media space, however, users are both suppliers and consumers of content. As such they feel greater ownership over the content they provide and are far less inclined to accept advertising around it.

So what can brands do to break through? They must embrace the space and identify ways to participate and add value. Social networks are all about relationships and how those relationships add value for the participants. Adding value can take many forms; co-creation of content, special offers, exclusive previews, etc.

Social media marketing must be engaging. Rather than simply pushing ads out to social network users advertising needs to be about participating in a relevant conversation with consumers. Social media has brought word of mouth back to the forefront so authenticity is essential. Successful advertising in this space is about creating opportunities to have relevant conversations with consumers and engaging them in a dialogue about their brand.

Links:

[1] Nielsen Report: Global Faces and Networked Places
[2] Social Networking’s New Global Footprint

By jeremywiles | Posted in Social Media | Tagged marketing, media, nielsen, social | Comments (0)