Marketing

Rapid Fire Marketing Techniques are Required for Social Sites

The New York Times recently ran a story by Randall Stross assessing how big brands are doing with advertising campaigns on social networking sites like Facebook. The results have not been encouraging for advertisers. Top line: big brands can get consumers interested (term used loosely) using old school tactics like sweepstakes or spend gobs of money on slick interactive campaigns. Neither keeps them engaged for long. In meetings at my own company as well as monitoring conversations across the Internet I hear the same basic question posed over and over. “How do you advertise on these sites to get results that move the business?” In my humble opinion it seems there needs to be an entirely different question, or set of questions asked.

Advertisers/marketers are thinking about things the way they’ve always thought about them (for the most part). Create a knockout, break-through-the-clutter, campaign/commercial and people will flock to your product or service. It has definitely gotten more integrated over the last few years, as advertisers have moved from the :30 spot as king, to stacking several mediums to reach a more attention-fractured public. But anytime a new audience-set or demographic is discovered, the same stale old playbook is put on the field. That’s followed by a lot of money being poured into agencies and media. That in turn is followed by head scratching, research and then in many cases a pause in all activity until it can be “nailed.”

Social media sites are about humans connecting with other humans and sharing common thoughts, information and experiences. The hooks get deeper when people began allowing others a view into the window of their emotional world as well. A health challenge, work success, family milestones, etc. People used to go online for two things, to learn or to do. Now you can add to connect as the third pillar of that stool. Ads are tolerable, and perhaps even occasionally welcome under the first two scenarios, but way off limits in the third. “Don’t pollute my pristine landscape with billboards and neon, I’m tryin’ to take a picture here.”

Two decades ago the media world revolved around the :30 second TV spot. Advertising started there and then radiated out. Today the heart of that solar system has been replaced with the Web. Not a web site, the entire web. There is a difference. A television was a television was a television. Fully compatible, everyone had the same experience, one form factor. You sat on the sofa and watched. Today, with the web at the center, complexity sets in. There are browsers on computers, televisions, mobile handsets; a consumer could be anywhere. The technology is all over the map and advancing weekly. Ads are now embedded in YouTube user-generated content videos for heaven’s sake.

No one single campaign will be able to make a big enough impact any more. Hitting that big home run is tougher and more expensive, which raises the risk. In today’s economic climate brands are looking to cut back, not spend on experiments. As I’ve said over and over in this space, don’t gold plate your efforts. Instead, create dozens of small, mini-campaigns, spend as little as possible and get them out there in rapid fire fashion.

Ideate, execute, learn, repeat. Senior managers will require you to justify a $500,000 campaign, and if it doesn’t pay back, it’s curtains. But no one will really pay much attention to something that costs $10,000. Just think you could do 50 smaller campaigns for the price of one big one and avoid all that scrutiny. And, you will get more data back in small bites that can be incorporated into the next small effort. It’s iterative advertising (a term just coined by me).

We’re a long way from cracking the code here, and arguably we may never fully crack it, because it’s a moving target. TV held still for a generation. The web will always keep transforming. One thing I’m sure of. Banners won’t work in places where people go to connect.

Human + Machine = Manifesto

For purposes of the post, Human is the Marketing department and Machine is the IT department. Manifesto is my rant. Nothing should be read into the terms. I have the highest regard and respect for IT and Marketing people (I am one) everywhere.

I attended Interwoven’s annual client summit, GearUp 2008, held in San Francisco April 22-24. Interwoven is a major player in the content management software space with over 4,200 customers in 60 countries. They develop enterprise strength solutions that help companies create, publish and archive all types of content.

A software application such as this has largely been the purview of the IT department. But Interwoven has been working to expand their offerings into a tool set suite in the hopes of transcending IT and engaging marketers, by allowing them to leverage content with increased relevancy. They are re-proclaiming that “content is king” and is the single most important asset firms have to influence brand consideration and purchase. With the explosion of online community and social networking this approach makes sense, and their extremely well run conference really got me thinking.

As a marketer myself, working in the Internet space, I rely heavily on my IT department to understand what I want to do in the online channel and then execute. We come at the world from very different mind sets, which sometimes makes communication challenging. I know the following dot points are oversimplified, but I believe they make my point.

IT works in machine code and Marketing works in human code
IT has build guidelines, Marketing has information architecture
IT writes code, Marketers employ goal-directed design
IT has an instruction set, Marketing uses personas

We have a great relationship with our IT team, but are always exploring ways to make it better and more effective. In my opinion a major point of convergence is in the offing.

Companies should require regular strategic planning sessions that bring to the table the Internet solutions VP, the E-Business VP, the CIO and CMO. This will help the organization understand the breadth of what needs to get done from infrastructure to presentation layer, from database to targeting. These will be sobering conversations.
CEOs should combine marketing and IT functions into one seamless high performance team. It will be required if firms want to accelerate the return on their already significant online investment and extend its effectiveness to drive business results.
Get social or get served. This is a courage call. Think, smell, taste and breathe social (I know, duh). But not that many traditional companies are doing it for all the reasons we already know about. In order to get social, IT and Marketing must be one social team.
Set up social tools for IT and Marketing to communicate and build their unique community. If given the chance and mandate, they will find common ground. Actually I worry less about the traditional marketing areas getting clued in, as their activities will continue to get more expensive and eventually will serve to support the richer interactive channels.

It’s all about having system(s) flexible enough to be both a marketing and servicing platform. Then it’s about the teams working to connect these systems in an online ecosphere. There are very big things looming on the horizon and companies that have not set-up their infrastructure and organizations to be more agile, will not grow. Or worse, they will be overtaken by competitors who are able to do this.

Now back to the Interwoven GearUp summit. Guy Kawasaki was a keynote speaker, tackling The Art of Agile Development. Guy is now a venture capitalist, but spent several years at Apple Computer in the late ‘90’s as their software evangelist, trying to get more coders to produce products for the Macintosh operating system. I first met Guy in 1996 in Chicago. He was on one of his road shows for Apple and spoke at the Chicago Public Library. He was engaging, funny and smart, and it appears that some 12 years later, none of that has changed. Guy knows the marketing speak, but he exposes the long held marketing doublespeak for what it is, and that rings true to IT. This is an important clue to getting the two teams on the same page.

You have to see Guy in person to really appreciate what he is saying. My notes can’t do that, so I won’t even try. I don’t have the slide deck presented at the summit, but this one is very close. Catch him live if you can. If you can’t visit Guy’s blog is here.

More to come.

Social Influence Marketing – Learn or Burn

Everyone is a buzz about social networks and the impact they will have on marketing. As a marketer myself, it’s something I have been thinking a lot about lately. The world is changing, converging and seems to be getting smaller. As a result the market size and opportunity is getting larger. The science and practice of marketing will have to evolve from the tried and true (tired and flawed) linear approach that dominates today, into something very different.

Most brands are not ready. They are not organized for it, don’t understand it, lack the necessary skills, and are not courageous enough to even try. The situation is further complicated by the fact that new technologies underpin everything related to this dynamic new sphere of marketing.

Here is some of my recent thinking boiled down into everyone’s favorite medium, powerpoint.

It will be challenging as well as interesting to create new, innovative strategies and marketing campaigns over the next few years, in an effort to operate in and monetize this unique opportunity. If you are a marketer and not thinking about this, you run the risk of becoming road kill in less than five years. Not kidding. Learn it now.