Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’
digital media isn’t mass media for cheap
09 Mar, 2009 • posts i've written • 2 comments
The truth is, most brands use the web in superficial ways. And our favorite place is becoming littered with pointless Facebook apps, ‘viral’ videos and widgets (whatever those are). Brands chase hits because they fundamentally ‘misunderestimate’ the power of this medium. They look for whatever sounds popular, hoping for rapid and mass adoption; the kind of curve they’re used to seeing through TV advertising.
Please drop me a comment below so I can discuss it in more detail.
And really, this deck is just an appetizer for Mike’s latest thoughts on desire paths. Give em both a read.
what’s the point?
22 Feb, 2009 • posts i've written • 4 comments
Mike just wrote an excellent post about measurement.
As budgets shrink and companies demand closer accounting of every penny they spend, “measurement” has suddenly become the hot new industry buzz word. Clients are demanding a new level of accountability from their digital agencies, and it’s long overdue.
The implications of this shift, though, go well beyond a renewed interest in metrics that the client should have been getting all along. Clients are also seeking a greater level of detail in statistics across all marketing disciplines and executions. More granular statistics can uncover a world of new insights about a brand’s health online. Best of all, tracking these additional metrics over time can give brands an incredibly deep and well-rounded long-term perspective on their overall success.
I foresee a giant tsunami wave on the horizon of back lash against social media. It’s become such an incestuous industry (and it smells a bit too much like the PR industry, for me). Accountability is the only way to survive. Undercurrent is pushing hard to lead the charge on digital metrics. We’re working with software firms, talking to major platforms, and bringing global brands together to track and measure like never before. More on that later.
But we also have to ask the question, “Why?” Why are we compiling this massive backlog of data? Nothing turns my knob like a good spreadsheet, but what’s the point? It’s impossible to connect your Facebook fan page back to your sales data, just as it’s impossible to account total sales with views of your :30 spot. We don’t know exactly how advertising works. We just know that if you do a shit ton of it, people do start to buy your product more. No matter how much data we compile, we’ll never understand, with certainty, why our products are purchased.
The problem is that consumption and culture are inextricably linked. Consumption is culture and culture is consumption. And for that reason, you have to set objectives to work against beyond selling more product. You should be asking yourself questions like, what defines culture for my audience? How is culture communicated, distorted, remixed, and made whole again for them? Where does it take place? Where do I fit in? You have to build metrics off having an impact in the places culture is communicated and defined for your audiences.
I said in a recent slideshare, a dollar spent on fans is a dollar spent on R&D, recruitment, loyalty, and longevity. It’s time to define objectives in those terms, too. You should set an objective for product innovation, hiring, share of wallet, and long term value. The more actions beyond sales we can define, the more actionable we can make our data and analysis.
Facebook’s New Privacy Problem: Groups Created Under False Pretenses
Brad J. Ward is an online communciations coordinator at Butler University. Though he hails from a small academic institution, he’s unveiled a whale of a problem going on at Facebook (read, don’t skim, for the exciting conclusion).
As high school seniors across the country are being accepted into Universities for the Fall 2009 semester, groups for 2013 grads are popping up on the popular social network. There’s just one problem. It seems that one Patrick Kelly of Plano Senior High School is planning on attending a bunch of colleges – 500 to be exact. For that is how many 2013 groups he has created.
Ward rightly points out that the big problem here is that Patrick Kelly likely represents a data collection company that could end up being lifelong “friends” of millions of incoming freshman each year.
They also control the administrative privileges for each group.
But Brad Ward didn’t stop at just blogging about this problem. He’s got people talking on Twitter, organizing via Google Docs, and submitting Flickr pics regarding the problem.
The effort has identified other names associated with the group squatting including Ron Tressler and Justin Gaither, and he even has a company suspect: College Prowler. What a fitting name!
He even found an ad by College Prowler seeking unpaid interns to set up all this, as Ward rightly deems it, “dirty work.”
But get this: College Prowler responded by pulling the fake names that are associated with their company (Patrick Kelly was not, as it turns out) and pulling the administrative privileges. That is quite impressive. College Prowler says that they see social media as essential to their college guides business, but I think most of us would agree that they could go about social media in a different way.
Here’s a solution: College Prowler could create a community around its brand of college guides by identifying their Facebook groups with their brand. The group could be “College Prowler’s Guide to Butler University Class of 2013.”
So, College Prowler, and others interested in using social media, check out these posts from Search Engine Watch and sister site ClickZ to learn how to truly leverage social media to maximize those marketing dollars (and time!):
Facebook: Get Educated on the Hottest Social Media Platform
Understanding and Aligning the Value of Social Media
SocialTwist’s Tell-A-Friend Button Enables Word-of-Mouth and Social Media Marketing
A Social Media Marketing Primer
Social Media Link Building: From Fantasy to Reality
18-34 Year Old Responds to Email Marketing Over Social Network Marketing
How Blogs Drive More Sales Than Social Media Sites
93% of Americans Expect Companies to Have Social Media Presence
Using Twitter as an Education Tool
Less is More: What Social Media and Electronics Can Teach the Establishment
Go Slow With Video Ads in Social Media
Marketers Face Steep Web 2.0 Learning Curve
by: Joseph Mann
According to a new Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG) report mentioned on MarketingCharts and in the CMO Council’s "Marketing Magnified" most marketing execs are not surprisingly still in the early, experimental phases of using and measuring social media. According to the report:
