Category: Digital

  • Social Media – beyond strategy

    Unilever CMO Simon Clift, at Ad Age’s Digital Conference, spoke about the increasing role of social media in brand management, and said that the internet allows consumers to hijack conversations inspite of the huge money spent on advertising. From Unilever’s experience with Dove also comes the understanding that its not just the communicated parts of a brand that comes under scrutiny, but also the corporate’s entire set of credos – sweatshops, impact on environment are a few things he mentioned. Unilever has prominent corporate signatures in its advertising in UK. He also spoke about the increasing penetration of mobiles, of “marketing program with social benefits”, and a product centric approach.

    In essence, it reiterates the decline of one way communication, consumer participation, of brands being ‘deeper’ than the marketing that is done for them. But it was good to hear it from a leading FMCG corporate. The most interesting part of the article for me, however, was this, from the author of the post

    Social media is not a strategy. You need to understand it, and you’ll need to deploy it as a tactic. But remember that the social graph just makes it even more important that you have a good product. Put another way: The volume and quality of your earned media will be directly proportional to the impact and quality of your product and ideas.

    I think that nails it. All this while I was considering social media as strategy. Now I think its more than that – its something that will make the organisation really focus on what they’re delivering to their consumers, how they are doing it – not just from a delivery platform/operations pov, but also from how socially and environmentally conscious and responsible they have been. In Mr.Clift’s words “enlightened self interest”. The ways and means of communication – brand advertising, promotions, PR etc, will follow much later.

    Meanwhile, the Marketing Pilgrim asks an interesting question – does social media really have the pulse of the people? It cites the Johnson & Johnson Motrin ads that had raised the hackles of mom bloggers a while ago, and caused them to remove the ad. Apparently a research was done later that threw up some interesting stats – 90% of women had never seen the ad, and when they did see it, 45% liked it. It also speaks of the Skittles – Twitter experiment, and a research in which only 6% of 300 people sampled had heard about it. Those on Twitter would’ve heard about both these, but the Pilgrim asks whether these voices resemble those outside at all, and how much of influence do they have outside.

    I, for one, still think social media is a good microcosm of the real world. It does give varied perspectives, and the key is in evaluating the perspectives, digging further where required, and deciding on a course of action that fits larger objectives, and not knee jerk reactions. Wonder if there would have been different results if J&J and Skittles had attempted to carry the community along in their efforts.

    But the bigger opportunity, I have always felt is that it allows brands to experiment with segmentation. On one hand, the net allows extremely targeted communication to a core segment, and on the other hand, cheaper distribution allows the brand to also communicate with different segments of the long tail of consumers. It means that brands can play different roles according to the consumer’s interests, and varying with the context, by tweaking its communication, even while sticking to its core objectives. There are new monitoring tools being developed that will aid of this.

    Most importantly, it allows brands to find evangelists in each segment and work with them to improve and communicate. Consumers who find a product interesting and appealing will communicate it on their own, adding their perspective and giving a human touch of ‘interestingness’. I’m increasingly seeing posts about marketing ideas that have differed from the norm – Penguin India’s ‘Blog a Penguin India Classic’, which I wouldn’t know about if Karthik didn’t mention it on Twitter or his blog (though I do think they could’ve done it better by using social reading lists like Visual Bookshelf – on Facebook as an app too, Shelfari etc to reach Penguin readers – can easily find that through book titles), product placement ideas for Nestle evolving from the “Mad Men” on Twitter. Cisco’s comic book experiments via Chris Brogan’s post (Webex in Marvel Comics), and Kara Swisher on All Things Digital ( The Realm, an entire comic series). All appealed to me as a marketer, and one as a bibliophile too. Social media is not one thing – the channels vary in audience, kinds of interaction etc – Facebook, Twitter, You Tube all allow new ideas ( I thought Volvo’s Twitter stream inside a YouTube banner ad was very interesting) and fresh engagement rules, and ways to break advertising and brand communication stereotypes.

    I wonder about the role of strategy in a social media landscape where many things are still unfamiliar. The standards, processes and even objectives are in most cases, hazy, and evolution is happening on a regular basis. In such a scenario, perhaps organisations should first take a long look at themselves and their customers – current and potential, and start by setting goals that go beyond social media.

    until next time, lab time

    Bonus Reads: Social Media tools popular among marketers (via Digital Inspiration)

  • Google noose?

    The A.P. will work with portals and other partners who legally license our content and will seek legal and legislative remedies against those who don’t. We can no longer stand by and watch others walk off with our work under misguided legal theories.”

    That’s what Associated Press Chairman William Dean Singleton said, in what is obviously a salvo against news aggregating services like Google. The ‘misguided legal theories’ here refer to the ‘fair use’  legal doctrine that news aggregators and search services have been using to use snippets of articles. AP’s concern is that many of these services have been making revenues out of packaging these stories. Also, while AP does have deals with Google and several other engines for some of their content, apparently search throws up material not covered by these agreements.

    Interesting to note that AP had sued MoreOver (Verisign) for snippeting and linking to its news, and Google had signed a deal with AP 2 weeks prior to that. That case was settled, though I have not yet been able to get details. AP now has plans to launch own news site – a “new search pages that point users to the latest and most authoritative sources of breaking news”.  It suggests a system to track content – one that would create, in effect, “fingerprints” of content that could track usage and links. Journalism Online is another entity that wants to help newspapers and magazines charge for their content online.You can read the interview with Steven Brill, who has started it with two others, here.

    Google’s contention is that they’re directing a lot of traffic to the news sites, and any newspaper that doesn’t want to be part of Google News can do just that. Scott Karp says at Publishing 2.0, Google has played to its strength and wrested control of the distribution of news. Interesting comments too. Google allowed users to find content that they wanted, and became the start page when people wanted to find something on the web. That’s something media companies still aren’t doing right, and in between, Google managed to push in the ads, and make a few dollars. Erick Schonfeld, at TechCrunch has an interesting take on this – he points out that (in the US) Google News is behind Yahoo News as well as the sites of the NYT, and Google is actually exposing news, and helping other sites make money too. He argues that while Google does play a part in getting traffic to sites, ultimately it is the content that gets readers and sets the price. Jackie Hai explains how the “The AP syndication model works in an economy of information scarcity, whereas the web represents an economy of abundance.” I recently read about Google Web Elements, which allows Google products to be added to any website. That includes Google News and takes distribution to a whole new level.

    Though the AP issue is mostly an American one, there are similar sentiments being echoed in Europe too. According to NYT, Belgian Danish and British newspapers want Google to reach agreements with them before using their content. Though each country will have its own dynamics as far as news distribution and maturity of media platform goes, these cases are sure to set precedents.

    The media landscape is changing. Its not just that old media is changing rules to figure out revenue models. Its about an airline becoming a content ‘publisher‘, individuals becoming advertising mediums, services like TwitterGrep popping up to utilise the instancy of Twitter… and so on. As Jackie Hai mentioned in his article, the participatory web has blurred the lines between content producer, distributor and consumer. We play all three at different times.

    The measures that newspapers have or are making to earn revenues on the web seem to be insufficient. That includes online advertising, micro payments etc. I increasingly feel that a repair might not be enough. Perhaps a complete overhaul is the ask. The fingerprinting does spark a thought about the role of individual journalists, and the importance they should have in the new system. The web is increasingly becoming a relationship based medium where personal equity and trust are currencies. Perhaps the corporate newspaper needs to be replaced with a more human and humane network, perhaps it should create a core competency on the web in specific news sections – these could be geography based, maybe there is an opportunity for an aggregator in the challenges of hyperlocal news.  Perhaps it can even be category or genre based. Traditional concepts, but built with a social web perspective. Perhaps they should build a legion of citizen reporters who are paid according to the quality of their contributions . After all there is always a need for quality driven and trustworthy news and analysis. The need remains, but the readers’ wants of delivery platform, timing etc have changed.

    The recent (and sometimes) drastic measures taken by Indian newspapers shows that its not as impervious as it was considered. That gives more reason to prepare for a changing landscape. To start figuring out consumption patterns ,  multimedia possibilities, cost implications, distribution dynamics and revenue streams on digital platforms. Maybe they’re all waiting for PTI to fight Google, or is it Yahoo Buzz 😐

    until next time, a new sprint

  • More delicious stuff on the horizon?

    Social Median has been a pending site in my things-to-do list for such a long time that guilt no longer describes the feeling enough 🙁

    I’ve liked the concept of the site a lot, and while I’ve been following developments there, and have added the bookmarklet to the browser, and though I’ve started several groups (example) I’ve just not managed to become a regular user. The SM bookmarklet has been idle. But more importantly, while the site sends me updates every single day, I rarely manage more than a cursory look at the shared items.

    Why am I so bothered about my non usage? To put it as simply as possibly – it brings together the link sharing capabilities of Delicious, the voting of Digg, topic based groups in which you can add sources and stories get pulled automatically, commenting on shared stories, ranking keywords and topics, and most importantly uses collaborative filtering through people with similar interests to serve you content you should read. A compelling proposition and I don’t have a logical explanation for my non usage.

    So, what’s the context? A few days back, I got a mail stating that Social Median has implemented Facebook Connect, and I feel that’s really big news. It essentially means that you can sign up for Social Median with your Facebook account and share the stuff with your Facebook contacts!! While I do admit that the newsfeed is a complete mess after the redesign, I’m also looking at the enormous data of user preferences that Facebook will now gain, and how Facebook can leverage itself as a news sharing source much more now. In future, this could reveal tons of data on news consumption patterns and interests. Facebook Connect’s importance is something I’ve been stressing on for quite sometime now, and this strengthens that thought. I wonder what this does to Digg’s Facebook Connect plans though.

    Another ‘link’ based service – Google Reader (okay, feed based), one which I use a lot,  has also done a small tweaking and added a commenting feature, though its utility The debate on that is still on. There is a feeling that it will become the place of conversation and take comments away from the source (blog/site). Also, as The Inquisitr mentions rightly, the implementation is quite clunky, and if a full feed is published it takes away most of the reasons for the reader to visit the site. I hope that at least a plugin similar to the Friendfeed one (where the conversation is synicated back to the original source) will be developed soon, but since there’s been no API release, they’d have to do it themselves. Doubtful.

    Friendfeed has been around for sometime now, and though its a perfect place to have threaded conversations based on links shared from practically anywhere on the social web, it is still deemed to be a geek service. I wonder if a tags feature to categorise all imported data makes sense. Speaking of Friendfeed, I also read about a new service launched recently called Streamy. According to TechCrunch, “Streamy is a personalized news service and social network that combines elements of Google Reader with FriendFeed.” Streamy does boast of an extremely good interface and suggests interesting stories to you, which you can then share with friends on supporting networks from Streamy itself. And its implementing Facebook Connect. So, a package with potential. (RWW has a comprehensive post on the service)

    Now the social bookmarking service I use regularly is Delicious, though its via the browser add on, and its been ages since I visited the site. But while they were one of the pioneers of social bookmarking, they really haven’t developed further. They could easily build conversations around the links shared by different people, make it easier to create communities around topics of interest – all the stuff that Social Median is doing, and definitely make it easier to share the links on say, Twitter – the reverse traffic of Twitticious, like what Krumlr is doing. I think enabling BOSS to pull stuff (history and top tags) from Delicious is a good step in the right direction. I have just started using a Firefox plugin called tweecious. What it does is go through your tweets, find those with links and post them to your delicious account. Pretty neat, though it would help if it gave me more control over what data needs to be transferred to delicious. (eg: I tweet a lot of posts from my blog,  and perhaps some topical news from news sites, I wouldn’t want that on delicious, so a feature to ignore links from a particular domain?)

    Reports indicate that Twine, another service which i have not used much, (despite L Bhat sending me an invite and taking pains to explain it 🙁 ) could soon challenge Delicious, in terms of unique visitors, and with the kind of work it seems to be doing in the semantic web space, would easily become a more useful tool. I also got a mail a few days back announcing a Twine bookmarklet, with which you add content to Twine as well as tweet it to Twitter!!

    until next time, linking in

    PS. While on links, check out the following too

    BackTweets, a very useful resource to see who’s tweeted links to a site

    OneRiot, a new Twitter search engine which shows the links shared on a particular keyword (instead of tweets)

    Twazzup – another Twitter search engine which shows the regular search results as well as trends , popular tweets and links, with more visual appeal

    Fleck, a social bookmarking service, which has a bookmarklet for FF and IE, it also allows you to import bookmarks from browsers and delicious, and gives you the option to share links on twitter

    ambiently, which calls itself the web’s first discovery engine.  – it’s a search mechanism with a bookmarklet, which you can add to your browser. Now, when you’re on a particular page, and you click the bookmarklet, it opens up an ambient page that lists web links related to the page you’re currently in.

    PPS. The post feels a bit incomplete without Digg. Since I’m not a regular user of the service, I have not attempted to draw comparisons. However I do know that the latest on that front is the Diggbar. You can catch the action here.

  • The Facebook age

    Facebook’s redesign continues to make news on a regular basis. With a whole lot of vociferous users making the 237 Ways To Get Free Publicity ir dislike quite clear, with the help of a layout poll, it was interesting to see that a lot of advice was given to Facebook to not just blindly give in to the crowd –Rex Hammock, Michael Arrington, to name a few. While I’m still not a fan of the new design, I agree with that advice, in fact this is exactly what I’d thought brands in social media should do, so no reason why Facebook shouldn’t apply the logic to itself.

    But Facebook did address the concerns of the users, and made modifications without changing the core thoughts of the new design. Meanwhile it was interesting to note that a fair amount of users found their own Greasemonkey way of getting rid of those annoying quizzes. 🙂 (Check this out for more interesting scripts)

    In spite of this excellent thought provoking post on Facebook’s  strategy and execution, and not discounting Twitter-envy, I reckon that Facebook sees at least a few elements of the new design as the fundamental way forward, the one that can contribute to revenue. Real time features, fan pages redesign all seem to be steps towards dollars. This is perhaps why Facebook has played a balancing act and ‘conceded a battle’, since it wants to pacify users as well as be on track for monetisation. (Facebook is also working on a virtual currency system) I actually wonder if this was just a testing of waters before they attempt some massive changes.

    When I’d written about the Facebook redesign earlier, I’d mentioned that the ‘always on’ usage of Twitter was helped by the horde of applications that can be used from the desktop/browser to connect to Twitter. Well, there have been two developments. Seesmic released a dedicated Facebook application a few weeks back, and Tweetdeck, a popular Twitter app, released a new beta version which also integrates Facebook updates, and has already raised questions on the privacy of the Facebook network. You can check out a few more apps here.

    Another interesting thing to note is Facebook pushing private groups for families. You can share things without it going to your public stream (except Events). This is bound to increase the base – a teen audience as well as the over 50 audience. While Facebook’s largest set of users is in the 18-25 age bracket, the maximum growth these days is coming from the >35 crowd. This age skew would have quite some influence in all the changes that Facebook plans to bring about in the future, and it makes me wonder whether there’ll be a much larger balancing act required between the largest segment of the user base and the monetisable user base. Will they be the same? Will the usage patterns on Facebook change a lot because of the influx of a different audience segment? How will that affect monetisation? What would be the levels of accuracy that advertisers would be able to get in such a diverse system? Will changes in design polarise the users? Will this then result in the rise of new networks? What do you think? Maybe the Masters in Social Media can answer that in some time. 😀

    Meanwhile, with shrinking ad revenues and huge growth adding to costs, Facebook is attempting to raise capital this year. Going by this, Google should be interested. Interestingly Google values FB at $2 billion, and thats a far cry from its self worth of $15 billion.  🙂

    until next time, ‘Like’ ? 😉

    237 Ways To Get Free Publicity

  • “Bridging the Social Media Divide”

    There’s this hashtag on Twitter – #bsmd, which stands for “Bridging the Social Media Divide”. The first meeting was hosted by Pinstorm, and discussed (according to the Pinstorm blog) “how marketers and social media enthusiasts can work together and forge ways of advertising via Social Media that are not intrusive while being RoI driven”. Again, quoting from the post

    While the social media enthusiasts believed that the medium required a change of mindset on the part of the marketers, the latter believed the medium needed more metrics and case studies to highlight that it was RoI driven.

    Here’s another post that captured the entire discussion. My earlier post on Maggi and the social media opportunity compelled me to write this.  Let’s start with the disclaimers – the following are IMHO, as a brand manager and a reasonably zealous social media user. I have linked to a few earlier posts because these points have been made before,  no sense detailing them again. 🙂

    • The concept of internet itself wasn’t sold to marketers in a day, how old is social media? Just because social media is real-time now, does not mean the buy in has to be.
    • With the single digit penetration that India has, at a basic internet connectivity level, there’s bound to be skepticism, especially when the concept does not adhere to the principles of RoI which have been followed religiously so far
    • Its only with the kind of penetration that the US has, that it’s been able to provide the kind of social media examples it has – and that’s across multiple services – YouTube, Facebook, Twitter
    • As the cliche goes, India is a very different market. Case studies from the US can at best, offer us perspective. What works in that market quite likely will not find acceptance here, unless there is some basic commonality
    • Perhaps the sellers should attempt to show Indian examples of how brands are being talked about in social media, with a context that the marketer can relate to – it may be the same category, same audience demographic, or if its possible, his own brand.
    • The sellers should also realise that the internet is still being sold as a commodity with measurement criteria that the industry has agreed upon. Unfortunately, its difficult to separate social media and internet.
    • Perhaps 0.0/1.0 to 2.0 cannot be a single leap, and has to have at least a 1.5 in the middle, since it might even shifts in organisational culture. (earlier post)
    • Even social media enthusiasts are still grappling with the media. Besides, increasingly, all of social media is becoming a one-to-one, real time conversation mechanism. The contexts differ, and each conversation is unique. So, shouldn’t each marketer should have different metrics, basis his requirements rather than hope for  generic spoon fed criteria.
    • The seller should monitor not just talks about the brand in social media, but what the brand is (and has been) doing across media, and figure out how social media can fit into these plans, then the measurement criteria might emerge more easily.
    • Social media might be a revolution, but the ‘mindset’ that the enthusiasts speak of is an ‘evolution’. How many times has a marketer been encouraged to use/increase his usage of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc by the agency? For a ‘full contact sport’ medium whose understanding is usage based, isn’t that a must before a social media sales pitch happens?
    • The social media sellers could try to work with not just the marketer but also the ad agencies, MR firms, PR firms, and any other entity associated with the brand
      • How about ad agencies being able to use social media and the precise demographics it offers to do pre  testing of campaigns, and have consumer feedback while presenting to the client – helps them make a better case
      • How about PR firms adding ‘conversations in social media’ as part of their targets?
      • How about brand tracks having an internet component? Online brand salience and equity? Or separate brand tracks online if the brand’s target demographics warrant it? After all, isn’t everyone claiming to be a youth brand now?
      • This also comes from my view that social media is a strategy, and not a campaign or one that fits into Brand/PR slots. It can fit into all parts of the product life cycle, and be used for various , if not all sub domains of marketing. Where, and to what degree is useful depends on the brand and its internal and external dynamics.
    • Marketers, look closely at the metrics you follow in other media, and you can barely count those where you’re not just basing the entire spend on reach.  (my earlier rant on the subject)
    • Social media might be a good way to test out the long tail of brand communication. (my post, and the  link to the original paper here)
    • Social media works if it is an investment, not a spend. There is a difference, think about it. (an earlier related post) Once the difference is established, the perspective on returns might change
    • While on the subject of spend, we all know how much it ‘costs” to make a FB/Twitter/YouTube account, a WP blog etc, the actual costs are for maintaining a lively interaction. So sellers, please bill accordingly. 🙂
    • Finally, what is the value that a seller brings to the brand manager who handles these accounts perhaps with the help of other evangelists in the organisation?

    until next time, keep the faith

    PS. A good read – Social Media ROI.