Communications

A Social Media Success Story from the Far North

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Lily and Hope, the famous black bear mom-and-daughter duoNow that social media has gone from being a novelty to becoming standard fare in marketing and communications programs, we’re seeing evidence as to where these tactics shine their best.

One aspect that’s become clearer over time is that the most effective uses of social media must have an underlying “hook”; it’s not sufficient simply to engage in social media as just “business as usual.”

An interesting example of this phenomenon at work is Bear Head Lake State Park in extreme Northern Minnesota. It’s located near Ely, a town that’s miles from nowhere but somewhat famous as the embarkation point for exploring Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area.

This is the most famous park you’ve never heard of. How so? Because it beat out every other national and state park in the country in winning a popularity vote on the Internet.

In a just-completed “America’s Favorite Park” contest co-sponsored by the National Park Foundation and Coca-Cola, Bear Head easily outpolled every other park in the United States by garnering nearly 1.7 million votes out of 5.7 million cast, far outdistancing the runner-up (Great Smokey Mountain National Park).

How does a park ranked just 11th in the state of Minnesota and visited by only ~100,000 people annually accomplish such a feat?

The answer lies in taking a fortuitous event and figuring out how to give it velocity through the social media world. In this case, the “hook” was a webcam that had been set up in the park by the Ely-based North American Bear Center to record the birth of a bear cub named Hope.

Hope and her mother Lily were given their own Facebook page and had attracted more than 112,000 fans, while another ~90,000 people followed the bears on the North American Bear Center’s own web site.

So when the Coca-Cola contest came along, the web site administrators went into action, asking the bears’ friends and supporters to vote for the local park as home to the research bears. They emphasized that people could vote as often as they wanted, which resulted in some friends placing dozens or even hundreds of votes for the park.

The objective wasn’t just to gain fame as America’s “favorite park.” The contest also included a $100,000 prize for the winning park. That was the big incentive in the case of Bear Head Lake, which as a small state park has an annual working budget of only ~$226,000.

Reportedly, the prize winnings will go toward building a three-season trail center, a project that has been on the drawing boards for years but never begun due to lack of state funding. “At a time when many parks are facing difficult financial and budget decisions and reducing services … this is quite an opportunity for us,” noted Jan Westlund, the park’s manager.

Lynn Rogers, a researcher at the North American Bear Center, summed up the success of the initiative this way: “None of this would have happened without our 200,000 fans.”

This one example of social media success tells us an awful lot about how to harness the power and “viral velocity” of social media as a tactic.

The key is to consider each event or opportunity that comes along and then envision what could happen if social media tactics are applied. By contrast, starting out with social media is approaching it backwards … and more than likely, mediocre results will be the result.

Signs of the Times

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Divine, aka Harris Glenn MilsteadIt absolutely had to happen.

Reports from Japan are that facial-recognition technology is now being incorporated into mall signage wherein the age and gender of passersby are discerned before displaying “demographic appropriate” advertisements to them as they walk by.

NEC, a multinational electronics firm, is experimenting with biometric technology. the ability to scan faces to detect gender and age within a range of 10 years. Not only is the technology being tested in mall signage, but also in vending machinery where “helpful suggestions” will be made to consumers based on their presumed age and gender.

And of course, Japan today means the U.S. tomorrow. In fact, other companies are already testing “gender-aware” technology for outdoor billboards and mall signage here in the United States. Intel has partnered with Microsoft in such an endeavor to design the Intel Intelligent Digital Signage Concept.

Joe Jensen, a manager at Intel’s Embedded Computing Division, sums it up like this: “As stores seek more competitive advantages over online retailers, digital signage has become a valuable technology for dispersing targeted and interactive content to shoppers.”

If gender-aware technology proves to be effective, does this mean that gin & tonics will be now offered to older consumers? At the end of a long day at the office, that could be a tantalizing option for businesspeople hitting Grand Central Station to catch the Long Island Railway home.

Or consider this picture: Legions of “Divine” impersonators (see above) descending upon malls or food kiosks, just to test how well the signage and vending machines can determine true age and gender!

Kidding aside, it’s really no surprise that digital technology with its ability to serve highly targeted, relevant content would eventually work its way into billboards and signage, historically the most “mass” of mass communications. Marketers crave statistical results, and they’re naturally going to gravitate to anything that provides those metrics – no matter how imprecise they might be.

“Necessity or not”? Pew says Americans’ views are changing.

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Pew Center for People & the Press logoThe Pew Research Center fields a Social & Demographic Trends survey on a fairly regular basis which asks Americans if they think certain items are “necessities” … or a luxury they could do without.

Included in the survey are a variety of items ranging from automobiles and appliances to communications devices.

The 2010 survey was conducted in May and queried nearly 3,000 respondents. The results of this survey were released in late August, and they reveal that landline phones and television sets are quickly becoming less essential to U.S. consumers.

In fact, only ~42% of the survey respondents feel that a TV set is a necessity, which is down 10 percentage points from just one year ago.

Here is what respondents reported in response to being asked whether they consider each of the following items to be a “necessity”:

 Automobile: 86% (down 2 percentage points from the 2009 Pew survey)
 Landline phone: 62% (down 6 points)
 Home air conditioning: 55% (up 1)
 Home computer: 49% (down 1)
 Cell phone: 47% (down 2)
 Microwave: 45% (down 2)
 Television set: 42% (down 10)
 High-speed internet: 34% (up 3)
 Cable/satellite TV: 23% (no change)
 Dishwasher: 21% (no change)
 Flat-screen TV: 10% (up 2)

Of course, landline phones and TV sets have been fixtures of American life for as long as most of us can remember. But the Pew research shows this is now changing, and it’s especially so among those in the 18-29 age bracket. In fact, only ~30% of the younger age segment believe that having a TV set is a necessity.

As for landline phones, current government data show that only three-fourths of U.S. households have a landline phone, which is down from ~97% in 2000. Not surprisingly, going in the opposite direction are cell phones; today, more than 80% of U.S. adults use them, up from only about 50% in 2000.

The Pew survey results from 2010 versus 2009 reveal several other declines in “necessities,” but those declines are only slight and may be a result of the economic downturn. Instead, it seems clear that the major shifts are happening due to technological change, not because of the economic picture.

The Pew survey results don’t reveal too much that’s surprising … but it’s important to put some statistics to our broad hunches. And those stats are telling us that certain changes are occurring rapidly.

Updating the Marketing “4 Ps”

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The Four Ps of MarketingIn business, we like our checklists and concise bullet points. It’s all part of our impulse to distill ideas and principles down to their essence … and to promote economy and efficiency in whatever we do.

In marketing and communications, it’s no different. Most everyone who’s studied business in school knows about the “4 Ps” of marketing: Product, Place, Price, and Promotion.

Today, that listing seems woefully incomplete and inadequate – even quaint. Stepping in to fill the void are additional attributes that have been proffered by marketing specialists. Several of these newer lists — one coined by Robert Lauterborn, a professor of advertising at the University of North Carolina, and another from technology marketing specialist Paul Dunay — consist of a group of marketing “Cs”: Consumer, Cost, Convenience, Content, Connection, Communication, and Conversion.

But I like a new group of “Ps” as popularized by Jennifer Howard of Google’s B-to-B market group. She offers up five new “Ps” of digital marketing, and they go a long way toward filling the yawning gaps in the original list.

These new digital marketing attributes are Pulse, Pace, Precision, Performance, and Participation.

Beyond the fact that fair dues should be given to anyone who manages to come up with an additional set of five new attributes that likewise begin with the letter “P,” they happen to be worthwhile additions to the original list, and they help bring it into the interactive era.

The new set of marketing “Ps” can be further described like this:

Pulse – active listening and attention to customer, brand and competitor insights.

Pace – the speed at which marketing campaigns are carried out is critical. “Slow and steady” usually doesn’t cut it.

Precision – assuring that marketing messages are delivered to the right customers … at the right time … and place (e.g., PC or mobile device).

Participation – creating conversations with customers via rich media ad formats and social media platforms to enable them to “join the conversation.”

Performance – meeting expectations for results that notch ever higher, via measurable and accountable marketing and media tactics.

In the world of digital marketing and e-commerce, marketers like to borrow a term from the realm of traditional retailing. It’s the “moment of truth,” and it was first coined by Procter & Gamble executives to describe those critical 10 to 20 seconds when someone is standing in a store aisle and making decisions on what to purchase and what to pass by.

In the online world, Google refers to this phenomenon as the “zero moment of truth” (ZMOT) – when a potential buyer interfaces with a brand or a product on a computer, smartphone or other digital device. Why zero? Because instead of 10 or 20 seconds, many people take only a split second to decide whether they’ll stay and engage … or whether to ditch and switch.

Changing the Subject (Line)

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One of the reasons e-mail marketing has become so huge is because it’s so darned cheap. Compared to postal mail, e-mail costs just pennies. That means most marketers can achieve a better ROI for just a mediocre e-mail campaign compared to even the most successful direct mail effort.

However, a common complaint about e-mail versus postal mail is visibility. Since most viewers choose not to have their preview pane feature turned on, they must physically open an e-mail before they can view any of its contents.

This “one-step removed” dynamic means that many people never get to see and read a marketing message that would otherwise stand out if it showed up in someone’s postal mail delivery as a postcard or self-mailer promo piece.

In this scenario, the e-mail subject line becomes a huge “gatekeeper” element. What the subject says and how it’s said can make a difference in e-mail open and clickthrough rates. But just how much?

A new E-mail Marketing Metrics Report from MailerMailer, a firm providing e-mail marketing and newsletter services, provides some interesting clues. MailerMailer has been producing these reports since 2003. This report, the tenth one issued, was developed by analyzing a sampling of ~900 million e-mail messages sent through MailerMailer throughout the year 2009.

Among the elements tracked were the words used in e-mail subject lines. MailerMailer found that the most popular terms contained in the subject lines were:

 Coupons
 Daily
 Free
 News
 Newsletter
 Report
 Today
 Update
 Week (weekly)
 Year

Notice how each of these terms conveys a sense of WIIFM (“what’s in it for me?”) and/or a sense of time sensitivity. Interestingly, despite a prevailing concern that using the word “free” in the subject line risks more spam filtering, MailerMailer found that this term was one of the ten most popular terms used in subject lines during 2009.

And what about subject line length? The report found that shorter subject lines (containing less than 35 characters) outperformed longer ones. That’s generally just four or five words along with the corresponding spaces between them.

And the difference MailerMailer observed was significant: E-mails with shorter subject lines experienced an average open rate of ~17.5%, while those with longer subject lines had an open rate of only ~11.5%.

The same differential was found with clickthrough rates. For the e-mails with shorter subject lines the average clickthrough rate was ~2.7% … versus ~1.6% for e-mails with longer subject lines.

The MailerMailer report concludes that while composing shorter subject lines may be difficult to do (well), going through that exercise is well worth the extra effort. The results from ~900 million e-mails prove it.

How the B-to-B Sales Process is Changing

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In my 20+ years in industrial, commercial and other non-consumer marketing communications, I’ve witnessed more than a few “big trends” affecting the nature of the selling process in the business realm.

One of the biggest of these is the approach that customers take when evaluating products and services they might be interested in purchasing. Recent research findings about these behaviors has been published that sheds more interesting light on where things are at the moment.

A survey of ~300 B-to-B managers was conducted in late 2009 by e-Research for Marketing (E-RM) for Colman Brohan Davis, a Chicago-based marketing organization. This survey, which was limited to respondents age 35 or younger, found that only a few of the 13 tools used to research products and services represented “traditional media” – print-based resources, trade shows, or consulting with industry colleagues by phone or in person.

Furthermore, the study found that even these four tactics are losing their importance compared to the use of online social networks, which were exploding in usage.

These survey results reminded me of a comment made by Adam Needles, director of B-to-B field marketing at Silverpop, an e-mail marketing company based in Atlanta. “Somewhere around age 30 to 35, you can draw a line in the sand between people who are used to calling around to get everything and [where it’s been] all about relationships face-to-face.”

In contrast, Needles has this to say about younger staffers who conduct a great deal of the buying cycle online: “You have people whose expectation is that companies should put everything on their web sites; they should be getting real-time feeds and information, and companies should be totally integrated into … the blogosphere.”

Younger staffers tend to be influencers more than decision-makers. But this is not to diminish their importance, as they are the ones charged with conducting the research and drafting investigative report summaries and preliminary recommendations. Ferreting out information through resources like webinars and social platforms such as Twitter and blog posts, while it may seem exotic and less consequential to older colleagues, is not at all foreign to these staffers.

And we shouldn’t forget that today’s “influencer” at a company is very likely tomorrow’s “decision-maker.”

Which gets us back to the ER-M study. One big takeaway from that research was that customers are looking into all the corners of offine and online communications to find the information they feel they need to make risk-averse and “CYA” decisions that are also the successful ones that pay off well – hence building their reputations inside their company.

Tactics like direct mail marketing may seem old-hat or even quaint, but they can still be quite effective, while e-mail marketing, while fast and cheap, elicits resistance from some because they feel inundated with marketing materials that are irrelevant to their needs.

I guess it’s yet more challenging news for already-fractured marketing communications program tactics that continue to be under tight budget constraints.

An About-Face on Facebook?

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Facebook logoThis past week, social networking site Facebook trumpeted the fact that is signed up its 500 millionth member. That’s an impressive statistic — and all the more so when you realize that Facebook had only about 100 million registrants just two short years ago.

And the site is truly international these days, with ~70% of Facebook users living someplace other than the USA.

But there are some interesting rumblings in cyberspace these days that suggest the bloom may be off the rose for Facebook. After having climbed to the #1 perch in terms of registrations and site traffic, there are some intriguing new signs that all is not well in Farmville – or elsewhere in the land of Facebook.

Inside Facebook, an independent research entity that tracks the Facebook platform for developers and marketers, is reporting new Facebook registrations dropped in June to ~250,000. That may still seem like a lot of people, but it’s a far cry from the ~7.7 million new registrants in May.

Furthermore, looking at age demographics, Inside Facebook has concluded that in the critical 26-34 age group, the total number of U.S. users active on Facebook actually declined during the month of June.

Are these people being swayed by the privacy debate that’s happening concerning how much visibility Facebook postings are being given on Google and other search engines?

That may be one explanation for the decline, but there could be other forces at work as well. The latest American Customer Satisfaction Index report from ForeSee Results, a web research and consulting firm, places Facebook’s ranking near dead-last on a list of 30 major online web sites in terms of customer satisfaction with site design and utility.

Who scored highest? Dowdy old Wikipedia. Even boring government sites like the IRS scored better.

It’s evident the issue goes far beyond privacy concerns. There’s also confusion or irritation with Facebook’s ever-changing user interface. As Aaron Shapiro wrote recently in Media Post’s Online Media Daily:

“The truth is, Facebook isn’t fun to use anymore. It’s become a chore, just one more place that busy people have to log in to stay up-to-date. And Facebook is making the goal of staying up-to-date harder and harder to achieve. There are so many apps like Farmville producing status updates, as well as people using Facebook as their repository for passing thoughts and private/public conversations, I have to sort through tons of what I don’t want to read before I get to something I want or need to know.”

Back in its early days, the beauty of Facebook was that it provided such an easy framework to stay connected with family and friends. It was a way to share photos and other personal information quickly – and almost effortlessly – with far-flung contacts all over the world.

Those attributes seem to have gotten buried in all of the “spammy” hi-jinks and gimmicks that characterize so much of today’s Facebook.

Considering the growing dissatisfaction with Facebook, ranging from things like privacy (mis)management and ubiquitous advertising to confusion with the site’s ever-changing design and irritating lack of utility, some industry watchers are predicting that users will begin seriously looking at alternatives. Despite Facebook’s huge presence and large pool of registrants, they may find simpler, purer sites out there that are more to their liking. Several that could be beneficiaries of the “Facebook fall-off” are Diaspora and Collegiate Nation.

Novelty Reigns at Allure Bays (er … Microsoft)

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Microsoft Office 2010 logoMicrosoft SharePoint 2010 logoIn the drive to “engage” customers, some companies are going to pretty great lengths to try something new and novel.

Take Microsoft and its soon-to-be-released Microsoft Office® 2010 and SharePoint® 2010 versions. Burned by the negative customer reaction to some of its earlier introductions (Vista®, for example), the company is trying some new tactics this time around.

Will they succeed? You be the judge.

You can start by visiting www.allurebays.com. This is a “pretend” site put up by Microsoft’s direct marketing agency-of-record (Wunderman), and attempts to generate awareness for the new Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 versions without ever mentioning the products by name.

“Allure Bays Corporation” is a fictional company whose name is a riff on the Internet meme all your base are belong to us from an erroneous English translation in a Japanese video game that spread throughout the web in the early 2000s. The bogus site offers infomercial-type videos and other content. Special hidden clues are peppered throughout the site, with content that only alludes to the Office and SharePoint products and their feature/benefits.

What’s going on here? Jerry Hayek, a Microsoft marketing group manager, reported that the company wishes to reach an audience of developers that he characterizes as “jaded”: “It’s a fairly jaded audience. There are a lot of companies that want to talk to them,” he said.

In order to spark visitor engagement, a leaderboard on the “Allure Bays” web site allows registered users to compete for the honor of finding all of the 45 hidden clues on the site. So far, the site has attracted ~25,000 registered users.

“When we look at the developer audience, getting an engagement of 150,000 to 200,000 (spread across several videos) … is a win,” Hayek noted.

What’s the reaction of visitors? If the comments left by viewers of the “Allure Bays” video channel on YouTube are any gauge, it’s mixture of criticism and confusion. To wit:

 “This is one big, expensive, utterly failed attempt of Microsoft to go viral. Please thumbs-down this video.”

 “AYBABTU is a cornerstone of Internet culture. Microsoft appropriating it to hawk the newest version of their bloated Office Suite is loathsome. Anyone up-voting any of these videos should have their Internet license revoked.”

 “I don’t get it … is it supposed to be funny?! Or what the h*ll is going on here?”

“It could be the new TV show like Lost or Fringe or Fantasy Island 2?”

 “WTF.”

Sheri McLeish, an analyst with Forrester Research who covers Microsoft, reported that she found the “Allure Bays” site confusing. “I’m not sure what it’s supposed to do. But maybe there’s something I’m missing.”

In the end, whether or not this initiative will be declared a success depends on how the folks at Wunderman and Microsoft view the results in terms of before/after awareness, audience engagement, and positive product perception.

But the early indicators don’t look all that promising.

Microsoft’s “next of Kin”? None, evidently.

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Microsoft Kin logoPeople say that today’s digital world has dramatically shortened the business and product development cycle. But even so, the amount of time it took for Microsoft to pull its Kin social phone off the market – a mere six weeks after its launch – has to be a record, or close to one.

For those who missed this eye-blink of a product introduction, the Kin was supposed to be a major component in Microsoft’s efforts to become a player in the mobile market, in response to the success of Apple’s iPod and iPhone, as well as a variety of new smartphones that are powered by Google’s Android software.

The New York Times has reported that this latest development “is the latest sign of disarray for Microsoft’s recently reorganized consumer products unit.”

Amazingly, for a product that was in development for several years and reportedly represented a resource investment of well over $1 million, Microsoft sold only a relative handful of units during the Kin’s star-crossed six-week introduction. Reports of sales volume vary – from a few thousand units on the upper end to as few as 500 on the low end. Either way, it’s a stunning defeat for a company that up until a short time ago, seemed well on its way to being an important player in the field.

What was Kin’s problem? In a nutshell, consumers didn’t like the product nor the way it was being sold. Verizon, Microsoft’s service provider partner, priced Kin service agreements like a smartphone – at ~$70 per month when combined with the mandated voice plans. But many people felt that the platform was mediocre and didn’t possess anything near the functionality of a smartphone. “A feature phone, not a smartphone,” was the common complaint.

Some people are wondering if there’s a bigger story afoot: whether or not Microsoft is still committed to its Windows Phone 7 platform. It’s fallen so far behind iPhone and Android, what are its chances of success now?

And that’s not all the bad news for Microsoft on the consumer side of the business. Gizmodo is reporting that Microsoft has also cancelled a project to develop its Courier tablet computer that would have competed with the iPad.

This is just the latest in a string of Microsoft consumer initiatives that have basically fallen flat – Money, Encarta, and now the Kin and Courier.

Once, Microsoft would have hung in there for the long haul. It doesn’t seem so today.

Smartphones surge … and phone apps follow right behind.

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Smartphones surge in the marketplace ... phone apps right behind them.Media survey firm Nielsen is reporting that as of the end of 2009, about one in five wireless subscribers in the U.S. owned a smartphone. That’s up significantly from the ~14% who owned them at the end of 2008, and adoption is only expected to accelerate in the coming months.

So what’s going on with phone apps, now that a larger chunk of the population is able to download and use them? Nielsen is seeing about 15% of mobile subscribers downloading at least one app in a 30-day period.

Perhaps not surprisingly, those who own iPhones are more apt to download apps compared to people who own Android phones, Palms or BlackBerrys. Far more apps have been developed for the iPhone, although Android is feverishly trying to catch up.

Which apps are most popular? It goes without saying that games – free and paid – are quite popular. But the four most popular apps are Facebook, Google Maps, the Weather Channel and Pandora.

And where are the news apps in all this? Not even on the radar screen, it turns out.

… Seems people are getting more than enough news blasted out to them 24/7/365 without needing to sign up for a special app to deliver more of it — thank you very much.