Category: Brand

A plus cases on Twitter

Last week, @aplusk beat @CNNbrk in the race for one million followers. In plain English, Ashton Kutcher, an actor, challenged CNN on Larry King Live – who would get to a million followers first – to prove a point that an individual could have a reach equal to a large network on Twitter. Twitter joined in the fun, because unlike the norm, users couldn’t unfollow either of the parties, of course smart tweeps found a way out anyway. Point taken, AsKu, though the irony was that until a week back, the CNN account was not run by them, though for sometime they’ve been managing the account through the person who created it.

For more than two years, the CNNBrk account (for breaking news) had been created, maintained and run by a 25-year-old British Web developer who just wanted a way to beam short news alerts to his cellphone.

And that’s the beauty of this user driven service. Something that I fear might change with the ‘mainstream’ spotlight and the rush of real celebrities. Its only a matter of time before a new celebrity thinks of a new stunt. But it is to be noted that Kutcher is donating 10000 mosquito nets worth $100000 to a charity. In fact, one week before that, I’d read about Hugh Jackman’s donating AUS $100,000 to charity via Twitter, the charity to be selected via Twitter pitches.

Now, I’ve always maintained that users should figure their own comfort levels and use the service accordingly. But I also feel that a sudden influx of people with no intent other than rooting for a celebrity might be the kind of inorganic growth that will work against the service and its more regular users. This could range from a disruption of the service due to the load to a change in the ‘culture’ of the service.

Kutcher’s point was about getting a reach higher than a media giant. I’ve always had a problem with numbers – followers, updates etc as a means of measurement on Twitter. I find it a paradox for a place which became popular because of a qualitative measure – conversations. CNN will deliver breaking news regularly, and (as someone suggested on Twitter) Kutcher followers will just have to wait for those occasional Demi photos. Reach has been an index to sell traditional media space, is that the benchmark Twitter wants to take forward?

There was a very interesting post on Tech Crunch on whether Twitter should remove its follower count. Like I tweeted, I’d agree. Once upon a time, it was a medium to share an instant – something you thought/read/saw/felt to make others smile/think/share their own expressions. With growth came the ‘how a tweet might cost you a job’ and ‘5 ways to increase sales with Twitter’ theses, and the instant was lost. Perhaps you will ignore that as a subjective grumble. But think of the times you see the ‘need 5 more followers to get 500. please RT’ and what you feel then. What happens when that’s the norm and the service changes to accommodate and encourage that culture because that’s what helps them make money. [Note: I’d love for Twitter to make money, but I’m sure they’ll find better ways]

While on celebrities and Twitter, closer home Gul Panag has been quite active on Twitter the last few days. The Twitterverse has had its share of imposters and has been trying to ensure there’s no ‘identity crisis’ this time, so much that poor GulP might have one soon. This tweet of hers caught my attention. (Oh, okay the dimples too!!)

Spicy Jet news. Poor them. It reminded me of a post I’d written sometime back on ‘Social Ambassadors‘ – what would happen when the transparency of social media met celebrity bloggers? In this case, micro bloggers. In fact, micro blogging is even more ‘dangerous’ since the interaction is real time, and not like a PR draft that can be posted on ths site, and replies given in a few hours or even days. This becomes all the more important if celebrities use social media as a personal broadcast medium to their fans. Of course, brands can use the media to their benefit too – for example, create conversations between celebrities (a Twitter conversation between Aamir and Gul basis their Tata Sky TVC would be fun), use celebrities to communicate beyond the obvious advertisement etc.

The challenge is for celebrities too. Perhaps it will also make celebrities more responsible when making endorsement choices. (It would be fun to ask SRK/Aamir why they switched soft drink brands in between.) Also, can celebrities retain their ‘interestingness’ when they are in touch with the fans all the time, unlike a traditional system when news about them was less abundant?

On an aside, when celebrities move to direct-to-crowd platforms, what happens to the go-between media for whom they were the news makers, and we were the news consumers? And what happens to the micro celebrities on Twitter? 🙂

until next time, when twitter streams meet mainstream

April 23, 2009
The brand…behind the scene

The advantages that social media has to offer are best derived by participating. When brands understand that, we get to see Facebook pages (or profiles) and twitter accounts. While these might display the brand name, the interactivity of social media makes it seem like communicating to a person. As far as social media tools go, compared to Facebook pages/ a YouTube account, a Twitter account is perhaps more difficult to handle, thanks to the real time interaction required (though it’s possible on Facebook too now). That perhaps explains the rising instances of ghost twittering – where a personality or a brand pays someone else to tweet on their behalf. While many examples have been cited, from Obama to Britney and 50 cent, I’ll focus on the companies/brands.

In these early days of social media, there are very few companies which have an organised social media strategy. (a good global list, and the Indian version of brands on Twitter) In the global list, it can be seen that the organisations are represented by their own employees, and in many cases they belong to the marketing function. But what’s interesting are the handles – some use the brand name, some use the person’s name and some others use a combination of both.

In my last post (partly) on this topic, I had supported the usage of the brand name with the account being handled by “multi functional teams which can communicate with consumers on different aspects with authority and domain knowledge”, but it’s obvious that no ‘one size fits all’ policy works in social media, especially when people value dealing with other people more than impersonal brand logos.

I am still not sure of the person representing a brand with his/her own name, since I wonder how both the personal and brand personas can coexist in one account, especially if they have differing personalities. Also, like I’ve said earlier, one also has to wonder how long the employee will stay in the organisation and when he/she leaves, who owns the equity generated thus far. (even in the absence of a social media strategy, there is always the typical case of the lone enthusiast bringing his brand on to twitter only for the account to lose steam after he/she leaves) In a one to one marketing scenario, will marketers’ personal brand equity on services like Twitter also be of value to future employers? I quite like the idea of a combo handle (person and company). It allows a whole lot of customising – different people for different domains within the organisation, replacing users etc, while still giving the human touch to the account.

The other scenario which interests me is an agency handling the brand’s social media strategy. Would they handle the twitter account after disclosing that they are only speaking for the brand? What impact does that have on the one-to-one conversations that the brand is supposed to have with its consumers on social media? Does it make a case for agencies to stop at monitoring and ensuring that the spokesperson is still an employee of the brand?

All of this is keeping in mind that a twitter account is only a part of the social media strategy and thus the role of an agency could possibly be justified for many other reasons. But at a broader level, if a lot of social media is going to be one-on-one marketing, it would make sense for organisations to figure out who would be the “one” representing them, and how much he/she/they would be empowered. Of course, it also makes sense to figure out whether they should be on Twitter at all.

until next time, handle it

Update: Just saw a term for this – Brandividuals

April 20, 2009
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.

April 16, 2009
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

April 13, 2009
“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.
April 10, 2009