you have been weighed and measured

21 Apr, 2010 • posts i've written • 2 comments

and it makes absolutely no damn sense

I probably shouldn’t even mention this, as it only gives it voice, but Vitrue (a social media management company) recently released their estimation for the value of a Facebook fan to a brand – $3.60. And it couldn’t be more preposterous.

For the sake of brevity, I’m just going to list all of the reasons why you should ignore valuing fans in this way:

• Vitrue’s primary assumption in divining (and I mean divining) this figure was that each wall post by a brand is seen by the same number of people as they have fans (have 60k fans? then 60k people will ‘see’ your wall post). Vitrue says that they arrived at this figure from ‘sampled data across varying pages.‘ I can’t question that data because they don’t provide it, so I’ll just go by the rules of reality and patently call that bogus. B-o-g-u-s. If you’ve ever administered a fan page, you know this smells rotten. Even with the best social spread, 1:1 is incredibly rare.
• Then they go on to multiply those impressions by a CPM figure of $5 – I’ll leave the vitriol here to my mate Mike who put it frankly, “just the fact that they consider themselves to be a social media marketing solutions company, and yet they think it’s a good idea to measure the value of a fan in display media terms seems like enough to write them off to me.” Ouch. Just for clarification, Mike is the nice guy in our office. He’s right though, it’s a trap to frame metrics using a standard that is as flawed as it is incongruous to this relationship.
• A universal monetary valuation of Facebook fans is foolish and dangerous. I get frustrated by these attempts because it does more to distract our clients from setting real objectives for social spaces than inform them. Facebook fan counts were already empty-calorie filled Pokemon for our clients to chase blindly – now here’s a nice shiny dollar figure that I’m sure to see in an excel sheet or powerpoint presentation soon enough. This is not an ROI measurement, it is quicksand. A small but active Facebook fan group can be much more valuable to a brand that an enormous one that ignores you.
• The question of value around the technological relationship of a Facebook fan (or liker, now?) is an important question – but we won’t be able to truly decipher it until Facebook steps up and offers more than their shallow reporting metrics/capabilities. I’m more interested in the ‘value’ of those fans that come to a page organically vs the ‘value’ of fans that brands buy through display media. Who is more likely to buy your products or recommend them to friends? We won’t be able to explore that until Facebook allows you to re-target those purchased fans (and only those purchased fans) a week later and serve a poll or other interaction that would garner some level of insight. Facebook has said that their ‘normal benchmark’ for retargetting is 100,000,000 impressions. Thus, to even consider using their ad platform this way, the brand has to pay for at least 100MM impressions. Ultimately, it’s prohibitively expensive for most of the brands I’ve worked with, and I’ve worked with the biggest brands around. Until Facebook steps up to offer better reporting, it’s little more than a casino for brands. The money you spend there is a gamble. Brands need to exert financial pressure on Facebook to offer better reporting.
• Setting an explicit value for a relationship inherently changes the function of the market. Once you assign a value to a fan, you cannot avoid the implications of that valuation. The glut of ‘free’ labor by fans/consumers/people has been taken for granted by brands and we should all consider shutting up about a monetary value for that up-to-now free behavior.

Ultimately, Vitrue produced a piece of linkbait and not a unit of measure … which is the game more people seem interested in playing when talking about social media and business objectives. Perhaps we should do as the saying goes: hate the game, not the player.

My colleague Clay had his say about this as well, and he thoroughly geeks out over sports statistics, you should check it out.

obama to postpone state of the union for lost season premiere

11 Jan, 2010 • posts i've written • No comments

Just last Thursday I blogged about the importance of Lost Season 6 as an opportunity to study the power of a niche fan community.

Well, Lost fans just swayed the most powerful man in the world. How’s that for power?

Fans came together on Twitter and Facebook to state their case – and according to White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, they were heard.

Of course, the real challenge for brands and networks is in monetizing this kind of power… any ideas?

lost season six: solely for the fans?

07 Jan, 2010 • posts i've written • 1 comment

Lost season 6 begins Tuesday, February 6th.

Gawker posted the video with the following text,

A good refresher for devotees, but novices will be, well, completely lost. Good, this final season is only for full-fledged fans! Is it February 2 yet?

Which reminded me of this extract from my post, fans: lead users,

In Fanning the Audience’s Flame, (Ford, Jenkins, and others) the team writes that fans are often lead users for media properties and that “lead users are valuable to understand because their tastes anticipate untapped potentials within the marketplace.” (p 23) The team explains how fans and their efforts have helped science fiction programs like Lost which work on long and complex narrative threads sustain themselves when sci-fi was once entirely episodic.

As we ramp up for the sixth and final season, the activities of the Lost fan community (of which I consider myself a member) will either demonstrate an incredible ability at amplifying conversation, tune-in, ancillary revenue, and recruitment… or not. It’s an important time to be watching and studying fan behaviors and their affect on cult media properties.

fans: the rising tide

08 Jul, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

Plenty of brilliant folks have carried the banner of fans long before I jumped in – and I’m beginning to see more mainstream (or simply more popular) voices echo the sentiment: fans are the future of digital marketing.

Two posts on fans today, the first from Seth Godin, asks “how big is the gap between customer and die-hard fan? In other words, between engaging and loving, between attending and craving?” (alright that one might be less about fans, and more in the normal Seth vein of saying ‘you could go status-quo, or you could be super awesome fantastic’)

The second post, from MediaPost, really hits the goomba on the head:

What makes top brands so valuable? It’s not just that they sell a lot of volume. The most valuable consumer brands are successful because of the relationships they form with their customers.

And while ‘relationship’ is the promise of the social Web, most brands have missed the boat when it comes to their social marketing initiatives. Instead of investing in relationships, brands have largely invested in a token presence on Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace. It’s no wonder they haven’t seen an ROI.

….

It’s clear why this matters to brands and should matter to you: your biggest fans are your most valuable and authentic social marketing vehicle. If you invest in a true relationship with them, you’ll be able to move and react quickly to their ever-changing needs, and even ask them for help. It doesn’t take much to keep them happy – just creating a special and honored place and engaging in honest dialogue. When you invite them in, you unleash their willingness and desire to recruit other fans that will gush and rave online with them.

Well said.

fans: arrested development, the documentary

19 Jun, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

Arrested Development was to comedy what Lost is to sci-fi. The show demanded your attention, and rewarded it with incredibly intricate layers of jokes. It took the Seinfeld formula and put it on PCP. And then it went away.

Fans have created a documentary about the show, featuring interviews with what looks like the entire cast. And the movie is still in the works. Fans didn’t save the show from being canceled by Fox – but they surely have kept the episodes on air at HGTV and G4 – along with driving strong DVD sales. The actors may have moved on, but fans haven’t.

fans: rise of the machines

13 May, 2009 • posts i've written • 1 comment

You see those trending topics on Twitter? Those are fans talking about things they love, to their friends, and anyone else that will listen.

Oprah mentions Twitter and registrations surge. That’s not the power of Twitter, that’s the power of Oprah’s fan community. CNN and Ashton go at it for new followers. Again, that wasn’t Twitter, it wasn’t a virus, it was fans acting on a leader’s nudge, and to connect to each other to share information and social currency.

You don’t scan your tweets every day because of Twitter either. You’re looking for people you know, friends, and also people you’re a fan of. Twitter can connect anyone: you to Ashton, Ashton to your third grade english teacher, and so on. Twitter is a bit of technology that better enables what fans want and need to do: connect with each other, express their fandom/define their identity, gather information, and feel more connected to what they love.

Fandom makes or breaks technology. Meetup.com took off because fans of beanie babies needed a place to swap and collect. Friendster cracked down on fakesters and it reduced a way fans could engage. Facebook is the center of a brand’s digital world because users can now ‘fan’ things.

Still think focusing on fans is too narrow? Or do you mean, ‘we just don’t have any fans?’ Those are two separate things: one is bullshit, the other is fixable. One is kidding yourself, the other is killing yourself (or at least resigning yourself to a slow extinction, better hope for no meteor showers). Brands should be out there courting and supporting these vocal fan communities. They’re right there, they aren’t hiding; in fact they’re doing very much the opposite.

fans: format magazine on fan made films

11 May, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

Right now, Format Magazine has a great post on fan made films about our favorite comic book heroes.

fans are the future of digital marketing

29 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • 10 comments

Thanks to everyone that commented and shared my posts last week. I hope I sparked a few thoughts.

Now here it is, my fan week round-up…

Today, brands must learn how to earn fans. This begins with courting existing communities to earn (not fabricate) credibility. After that, brands must provide the means to connect fans and give them something to do. After all, a dollar spent on fans is a dollar spent on R&D, retention, recruitment, loyalty and longevity.

- a week dedicated to fans and the future of marketing

here’s my rule of thumb for the question, “is it worthy of earning fans?” How many existing communities can you identify as being ‘courtable’ and demonstrate fandom? As Henry puts it, communities aren’t created, they’re courted. And if everything new is constructed from bits and pieces of pre-existing stuff (as Faris says), then you should be able to measure anything new by investigating which communities could be courted based on the stuff inside your new product or show.

- fans: will we earn any?

The mantra of web 2.0 has always been, “ask not what your users can do for you, ask what you can do for your users.” Mike Arauz, a fellow Strategist at Undercurrent, likes to say, “if I choose to tell my friend about your brand, it’s not because I like your brand, but rather because I like my friend.” So the mantra of our brave new world might be, “ask not what people can do for you, ask what you can do for their friends.”

- fans: will they go along for the ride?

When I urge clients to look more closely at niche fan communities, I’m urging them to study the actions and social norms within these groups in order to identify any lead user behaviors that could go mainstream. Fans are creating unanticipated connections between technology, social groups, and media that will reward our attention. And the pace of the web demands we stay focused on centers of innovation, and more often, fan communities represent the undersea chimneys which give life to the next evolution of species.

- fans: lead users

Fan communities are indeed “self-organizing groups focused around the collective production, debate, and circulation of meanings, interpretations, and fantasies in response to various artifacts of contemporary popular culture.” Moreover, fan communities mobilize around unanswered questions.

Advertising is made for people who care… to pay attention. Fans care. Fans pay attention. But most messaging doesn’t create the tension that activates full fan communities. We’re still stuck on saturating a crowd of unwilling participants instead of mobilizing a community to create and spread a conversation.

- fans: mobilize a conversation

Images from my posts: (click the image to read the full post)

Quotes from more brilliant women and men: (click the image to read the full post)

And finally, if you’re interested in more fandom, get to know Joshua Green:

fans: piracy

24 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

I’ve argued here that piracy often reflects market failures on the part of producers rather than moral failures on the part of consumers. It isn’t that people will turn to illegal downloads because they want the content for free. My bet is that many of them would pay for this content but it is not legally being offered to them. We can compare this to the global interest generated by Ken Jenning’s phenomenal run on Jeopardy: Jeopardy was already syndicated in markets around the world so when he generated buzz, he drew people back to the local broadcaster who was selling the content in their markets. They could tune in and see day by day whether he stayed in the game. Right now, everyone’s still acting as if Susan Boyle was only one video but they will wake up tomorrow or the next day and discover that lots of those people want to see what happens to her next.

- Henry Jenkins, How Sarah Spread and What It Means (2009)

Part of my week of posts dedicated to fans and the future of digital marketing. Tell your friends.

fans: types of players

23 Apr, 2009 • posts i've written • No comments

In 2006, while studying ARGs, Ivan Askwith defined the different roles that players take on:

Organizers network with other players, collecting and redistributing resources and keeping track of progress.

Hunters uncover new clues, often spending hours scanning game resources for fresh hints.

Detectives break code, solve riddles and determine the meaning of clues.  

Lurkers observe the community’s progress, often providing statistical evidence of interest in the game.

Askwith was studying how fan communities manage knowledge in complex game scenarios like the current Star Trek ARG and Terminator Twitter Game. But these roles are not limited to complex games; they may pertain to all unanswered questions within media properties. Consider these roles the next time you’re building a larger narrative or campaign online – if you can garner fan involvement, have you offered enough things to do to occupy this entire spectrum.