Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

What A Camp Counselor Can Teach You about Social Media

Today's column channels some fun camp memories. I was walking through Madison Square Park on the way to work and saw a woman with two kids in matching blue t-shirts, and suddenly I was back - metaphorically - at Beth El. One personally gratifying experience in writing this was realizing how many of those memories have crystallized and how vivid they still are - even dating back to the initial orientations when I was 13.

Here's the post, originally in MediaPost's Search Insider:

What A Camp Counselor Can Teach You about Social Media

One of the hardest jobs I ever had was working as a day camp counselor, spending eight summers straight at Beth El Summer Session in New Rochelle, NY. While it's been a few years since I wore a T-shirt and swimsuit to work every day, seeing all the kids home from camp swarming around Madison Square Park this week brought back a few memories. It also made me realize how relevant a lot of what I learned in that job is to what I'm doing now.

Here are some of the lessons I still carry with me. They should be especially relevant to social marketing practitioners today.

1)   Don't feed your campers soggy chips. This is more or less a direct quote from Jack Gruenberg, who ran the Counselor in Training program with his wife Sandy when I worked at the camp. The literal meaning was to avoid giving campers anything that you wouldn't want to eat yourself. I'd amend this today to "Don't feed your clients soggy chips." Think of yourself in their situation with their specific goals and needs. You should only present them with ideas and work product that you'd in turn be happy with. And just as kids know when they're getting a raw deal, clients can smell a dud right away. In both circumstances, you risk hurting your credibility.

2)   Plan ahead. Before the summer started, counselors and parents received group schedules that had a plan for every day of the week and an overview of what the entire summer would look like. So much of social media feels reactive to the point where plans get lost too easily, but developing editorial calendars can be so helpful for just about any content-rich program you're running, whether it's a Facebook Page, Twitter, blog, video production or syndication program, or digital word-of-mouth marketing.

3)   Keep a rainy-day schedule handy. Rainy-day schedules and backup indoor activities were always on-hand. Some days schedules shifted indoors due to heat advisories (though those days, as a bonus, they served delicious fruit punch that my five-year-old campers called "blood"). It's hard to tell when New Yorkers should carry umbrellas, and it's hard to tell what brands will come under fire. Really, did you ever think that Whole Foods' CEO, a hippie who started his company in Austin, would irk liberals so much that they'd stage a boycott against his company? And the poor Domino's Pizza CEO had to publicly apologize for a brand hijack by two of his own employees, something that could happen to any business owner. As a counselor, especially when I became group leader, I had to put those rainy-day plans into action FAST -- if you've worked with a group of 20 kindergarteners, mommy bloggers seem tame by comparison. You have to have a plan for those days to make sure you can execute on it if you have to. Know who's in charge, who can respond, and what communication channels you have available.

4)   Run headcounts often. If I had 20 kids in my group, I'd probably count to 20 a hundred times a day (after a few days I got pretty good at it). What marketers need to keep track of is their assets they can use for social marketing, what 360i's Social Marketing Playbook refers to as a brand's arsenal. Know what you have to work with inside and out -- then you'll get a pretty good idea of what you can do with it.

5)   Get down to eye level. During staff orientation, Julie Rockowitz, who ran the program when I was there and still does so today, urged all counselors to get down to eye level with the children. Someone who's five-foot-something looks pretty distant and imposing to someone who's three-foot-something, but crouching down and talking eye to eye eliminates that issue. The same is true when communicating with others through social media, whether it's a customer or an influencer. You can still use your own voice and be yourself, but you need to use them in the way that's appropriate to the platform you're using, eliminating any barriers between you and your audience.

6)   Get wet. Counselors had to wear their swimsuits every day, even days that started out rainy. This rule was made partially for safety reasons, but also to encourage counselors to swim with their campers and share their experiences. Marketers and agencies similarly need to swim where their customers swim. You might not always feel like swimming and sometimes the water will be freezing, but the only way to really develop a meaningful experience is to know what it's like firsthand. Most of the time you'll find it's more fun hanging out in the pool rather than sitting on your towel.

7)   Have fun. There were so many rules and regulations as a counselor that it was easy to complain. But the job meant getting paid to run around outdoors, hang out with a bunch of mostly pretty entertaining kids, and work decent hours. Now the hours are much longer, the pay's a bit better, and some clients are every bit as demanding as the most attention-hogging campers, but it's still a fun way to make a living. Anyone who's in this field has to take a second to remember that every day, no matter how hectic it is.

Thank you Julie, Jack, Sandy, the hundreds of other staff I had the pleasure of working with, and the children in the Barracudas, Whales, Sunfish, Blue Jays, All-Stars, and Batmen. You all taught me far more than I could ever capture here.

Your Vote Can Send This Emerging Media Guy to Austin

Of all the causes out there that are worth promoting, what better one to feature here than a really, really important one, like getting me on a panel at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin next March?

Okay, it's not the most important cause you'll ever participate in, but your votes do go a LONG way to determining if I get some time on stage to publicly pontificate on either of my two favorite topics: food and tech vendors.

Below's post is borrowed (okay, ripped entirely) from 360i's blog. And if you are proposing a session there, please note that in the comments so I (and others who see this) can check out your session.

We’re officially in the running to lead two exciting panels at this spring’s SXSW Interactive Festival. If you’re in the mood to help send everyone’s favorite Sprinkles cupcake-loving Emerging Media Director, David Berkowitz, to Austin, please check out our panel suggestions below and vote at the SXSW PanelPicker before voting ends on September 4. Note: You’ll have to register to cast your vote, but it should take you all of 30 seconds – we promise.

1) Tasty Conversation: Social Media + Food Brands

Bring your appetite to this fireside chat-style panel. David Berkowitz joins a lineup of top food and beverage brands that are harnessing social buzz to spice up their real world presence. What are these brands cooking up across the social landscape? And what can we learn from them?

Some questions this panel will address:

• How can brands transfer social buzz to their real world presence?
• Who’s doing it right?
• What are some pitfalls to avoid when using social marketing to achieve offline objectives?
• How can marketers make sure brand loyalty translates into sales and/or real world advocacy?
• How tasty are Sprinkles cupcakes?*

*Not an actual question, but we can tell you, they are very tasty.

Click here to vote for “Tasty Conversation: Social Media + Food Brands.”

2) How Startups Can Create Buzz Without Selling Out

David Berkowitz will lead panelists in a discussion about how start-ups can catch the eye of brand marketers who have the power to provide added credibility, cash and buzz. How can you make your service marketer-friendly while keeping your integrity?

Questions this panel will address:

• What kinds of partnerships are available for brands and technology providers?
• What are some examples of successful partnerships?
• What is the best way to showcase my technology to marketers?
• What are marketer-friendly revenue models beyond standard cost-per-impression or cost-per-click ad buys?

Click here to vote for “How Startups Can Create Buzz Without Selling Out.”

Thanks for checking out the sessions, and if you're going, I look forward to seeing you in Austin.

Debating Guy Kawasaki on Whether to Retweet Yourself

Guy Kawasaki talks about the value of retweeting yourself on OPEN Forum. He writes about the traffic he’s been able to drive by retweeting, or reposting the same link several times periodically over a couple days. He notes:

Fast forward to today. While there is still kumbaya going on via Twitter, many people are now using Twitter as a twool. They’re not trying to have a one-to-one conversation. At best, they want a one-to-many conversation if not out-and-out broadcasting in the advertising and marketing sense.

Here’s how I responded on Guy’s blog:

Your advice makes sense for marketers, but there's a major difference between Twitter accounts run by people who are being people, and those run by people (or feeds) who are being marketers and only marketers.

If you tweet primarily as a person and say the same thing over and over again, people will tune out. But if you're a marketer, as you are here, it's okay - no one will fault Cadillac [a brand he references on OPEN Forum] for running the same commercial several times a day. 

There's nothing wrong with being Cadillac. But if people think you're a person and you start sounding like Cadillac, your followers aren't going to know who you are, and that's not what you want when you're trying to foster relationships - and not just get clicks.

So, what’s your goal? Is it clicks or relationships? Twitter can be really good for both, but you need to figure out what you’re trying to get out of it. If you’re Guy and you have over 160,000 followers, clearly you’re doing something right – and anyoen can learn from what he’s doing.

Killing the Killer Conspiracies

This guy's a killer. Facebook is not. via Wikipedia

From today's MediaPost Social Media Insider

Killing the Killer Conspiracies

Cue the movie trailer voice: You thought it was just a social network. Little did you know it would go on a murderous rampage, killing everything in sight. You can run, but you can't hide because Facebook's coming after your friends -- and then it's coming after you.

That's the kind of image that comes from a number of news headlines over the past week. MediaPost had its share of morbid entries. On Aug. 12, its Around the Net in Online Marketing newsletter led with the headline, borrowing TechCrunch's phrasing, "Google 'Knol' No Wiki Killer." TechCrunch reads like a first-person shooter game, with other references last week to Microsoft Zune as an iPod Killer, Apple developing a FriendFeed killer, and two references to Facebook "Lite" as a Twitter killer. When Mashable covered "Lite," it mentioned a "direct assault on Twitter." That's a little less gory, ratcheting down the mayhem from "Summer of Sam" to "Law & Order."

My colleague Cathy Taylor continued coverage of the bloodshed, referring to Twitter getting "thrown under a bus" in her most recent piece. It sounded like the movie "Speed," where Keanu Reeves wound up under a bus, though that was more of his own volition. She reviewed some of the carnage in detail, though I'll give my own highlights here:

• Facebook acquired FriendFeed. Body count: Twitter (and arguably FriendFeed).

• Facebook allowed anyone to search all public posts. Body count: Twitter, Google, and Bing (and maybe FriendFeed).

• Google demoed its new search upgrade, dubbed "Caffeine" that more rapidly and prominently indexes social media content. Body count: Facebook, Twitter, Bing, and some real-time search engines like OneRiot.

• Facebook "Lite" launched for people with slow connections, but its simplicity seemed to resemble microblogging. Body count: Twitter and MySpace, even though MySpace launched its own simplified version in April.

• Facebook banned sponsored status updates. Body count: anyone that would attempt to make a business model out of this (yay!).

Why must something new always kill what exists? Can't the new Facebook search be an asset for the social network without heralding the death of Twitter? A trip to the grocery store is a helpful reminder that new products don't inherentlykill off the old ones. Dreyer's wasn't killed by Haagen-Dazs, which wasn't killed by Ben & Jerry's, which wasn't killed by Weight Watchers. I can't find a SINGLE result in Google that matches the exact expression "Haagen-Dazs killer." But "Facebook killer" has 372,000 (and another 2,000 in Google's "Caffeine").

Much of the problem comes from the linear thinking of technology pundits and journalists. Here's how it works: if Google debuts "Caffeine" at noon and Facebook widely rolls out its new search functionality at 3 p.m., then Facebook's move is seen as a response to that. If it happened in the reverse order, Google would be seen as responding to Facebook. And if over the course of those three hours Twitter was suffering outages, both would be seen as a way to cripple Twitter right in its moment of weakness.

Really, Facebook didn't spend $50 million on FriendFeed the way someone spends $50 on pants. And someone at Google didn't just say they had to overhaul their search engine, the biggest and most consistent revenue source in the entire Internet economy, and then launch a new trial version that day. Silicon Valley would not be such a hotbed of innovation if everything that happened was in response to what's posted on TechCrunch.

The "killer" cliché has been tortured so much that it deserves to be put out to pasture. Yes, it's another act of violence, but it's a killing to end all killers to come. Rest in peace.

New Forecasts, Animated Maps on Google Trends

I just saw Google’s latest Facebook update that Google Insights for Search has some new features. They include keyword forecasting, shown in the first example, and a way to watch global search interest trend over time. The top example here is for “prom dress” while the bottom one is for “twitter.”

Update: the top graph doesn’t embed the forecast. You have to click through to see it. Very crafty, Google. Grr.

Free online screen recorder

The Social Graph Ad Targeting Buyer's Guide

Social Graph by Rafiq Phillips via Flickr

From today's Social Media Insider in MediaPost

The Social Graph Ad Targeting Buyer's Guide

The "what's next" in ad targeting is well upon us: targeting consumers based on their social graphs.

If you're an advertiser or you represent one, you may have tried targeting consumers based on when they were born and their chromosomal makeup (demographic), where they live or happen to be at the moment (geographic), what they're viewing on a Web page (contextual), what other Web sites they've visited (behavioral), or what keywords they're entering in a query box (search engine marketing). Yet now it's possible to target consumers based on their associations with each other.

This new form of ad targeting may not have a great name yet; last week I brought up one idea for a social naming convention and we'll probably need others. The concept revolves around targeting consumers based on their social graph, or the map of who they're connected to. The theory is that if I expressed interest the movie "Bruno," then some of my closest connections would also be interested, and they should be targeted in turn. In that case, if the advertiser targeted my friend Don Steele and my dad, two people close to me in my graph, it would have found a receptive audience. Granted, the advertiser might not have done so well targeting my wife and mother-in-law, who were not as keen to see a movie about the self-described "biggest Austrian celebrity since Hitler."

The theory of targeting the social graph is based on some established research, such as a landmark 2006 study from Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania Professor Shawndra Hill. Knowledge@Wharton reported in 2007: The study examines the influence of social networks by studying a large telecommunications firm that was marketing a new service. '"Network neighbors -- those consumers linked to a prior customer -- adopt the service at a rate three to five times greater than baseline groups selected by the best practices of the firm's marketing team," the study finds. "In addition, analyzing the network allows the firm to acquire new customers who otherwise would have fallen through the cracks, because they would not have been identified based on traditional attributes."

The study had its limitations, though. The network effect was much stronger for a new technological service the firm was promoting than it was for a new pricing plan. One theory is that the network effect is much stronger when the product or brand promoted lends itself to organic word-of-mouth buzz. Far more research is needed across more verticals to provide a clear understanding of what's happening. Hopefully more will come from Professor Hill and others in academia, but certain social graph ad targeting companies could help fill in some gaps.

I've met with a number of such companies recently, including 33 Across, Media 6 Degrees, Lotame, and Socialmedia.com. Unfortunately, I've given so many verbal non-disclosure promises that I can't share too much dirt about any one in particular, especially in this secretive and competitive field. The good news is that I can offer you something better: a buyer's guide, with ten kinds of questions you should ask when incorporating social graph ad targeting into your campaigns. There aren't always right answers, but this process will help you better understand how this advertising works.

• Does the targeting work better for branding or direct response? Which verticals have performed best to date? Which verticals or types of campaigns haven't worked as well? Certain targeting technologies are designed more for transaction-based marketers, while others are much better for branding.

• If it works better for direct response, what kinds of responses can be measured? Is it more about clicks and Web site visits, or can actions be tracked straight through to conversions?

• If branding is the goal, what metrics are involved? Are they engagement metrics like interactions and time spent? Can branding studies measure factors such as awareness and purchase intent?

• Is retargeting involved? In other words, do marketers need to place a pixel on their site to track its visitors? Several forms of social graph ad targeting incorporate retargeting, which can be valuable for the marketer. It's still a notable difference from a standard ad network buy.
  
• Where does the social graph data come from?
  
• How transparent are the targeting and placements? Can certain types of consumers or placements be excluded?
  
• What research has the company done to show how social graph ad targeting compares with other methods like demographic or geographic targeting?
  
• What kind of scale is possible while still achieving the most pronounced effects for social graph targeting?
  
• If a campaign works well and a custom segment or group was created for this kind of targeting, can that same segment be used repeatedly? How applicable are the learnings from one campaign to the next?
  
• How aware is the consumer of what's happening? What's the consumer experience like? Is there a way for consumers to opt out of this? What privacy protections are in place?

I'm sure once you start approaching to these companies and others in the field, more questions will come up, but this should get them talking, and it should give you a good idea of what you'll get out of social graph targeting.

A Couple Quick Thoughts on Facebook's FriendFeed Acquisition

I'll save writing a custom post on this as I'm on the road at an event at the moment (surprise), but between some train rides and cocktail hours I managed to share a few thoughts in Ad Age and BusinessWeek. 

In BusinessWeek, I basically make FriendFeed sound like search crack for marketers. I think the quote's accurate.

More effective search of current conversations and popular topics could lead to more profits for Facebook, which has taken criticism for focusing more on growth in the number of its users than in generating revenue. "Being able to get a taste of what consumers are doing on 50 different sites can be very powerful," says David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client strategy for digital marketing agency 360i, of FriendFeed's search. By contrast, he says Facebook's search tools have not been as effective for marketers.

In Ad Age, I go into greater detail about what this means for marketers. Here's an excerpt, but the full post is much longer.

After a late 2008 growth spurt, FriendFeed's audience leveled off, according to Compete data, hitting 902,000 unique visitors in January 2009 and attracting 918,000 in July 2009. During the same span in 2009, Compete says Facebook added 54 million U.S. visitors. That growth has led a lot of marketers to ignore FriendFeed, and it's hard to blame them for fishing where the fish are.

Aggregating social identities
It's a shame, though, because FriendFeed is a valuable service, and it will only be more valuable as consumers participate with more social-media properties. On FriendFeed, users can aggregate updates from 58 services including Facebook, Twitter, Digg, SlideShare, Pandora and Amazon. Those users can follow each other across the range of those services to get all of their updates in one place.

Two other notes: 

1) I'm on Facebook at www.facebook.com/dberkowitz and FriendFeed at www.friendfeed.com/davidberkowitz

2) Read more about FriendFeed's value for marketers in 360i's Social Marketing Playbook (in the Arenas chapter)

My New Rules for Contact Management

I've been noticing in my Outlook contacts that there's a lot of dead wood - namely, people who I have no clue who they are, or who I think it's extremely unlikely I'll speak to again (if I do, we can exchange business cards (or Poken, perhaps - I ordered one on Rohit Bhargava's suggestion).

Tim Sanders recently wrote about "dropping a few email pounds," a great visual, and he noted how bloated Outlook gets. I've been trimming the fat here.

In case it's helpful, here are the criteria I use:

• Some contacts just have an email address, no name. Nearly 100% of these were scraped from some contact management software like LinkedIn's plugin. I delete almost all of these, though a few I do edit and file properly.
• Sometimes I just have the name and email address. I delete the vast majority of these - they're people who I never bothered to even enter a company name.
• Sometimes I forget how I know people and there are notes, or a link to their LinkedIn profile denoting we're connected. I keep almost all of these.
• There are a handful of people, such as distant college acquaintances, who I'm not in touch with and don't plan to be, so however complete their contact information is (it's likely outdated), I can afford to let those go.

Based on these criteria, I've cut a couple hundred contacts in recent months, and I've cut far more than I've added - which feels good right now, as it provides some focus on people who I should remain in touch with.

Do you do this contact paring? Have any rules to share?

CPSA (Cost Per Social Action): The New Pricing Model for Social Media?

Originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider. I'd love your comments below.

CPSA: The New Pricing Model For Social Media?

What's the best way to price social media advertising or marketing programs?

That's one of those questions that screams for the ever-honest "it depends" answer. Maybe that's because we need a new pricing model. Let's first take a look at some current options and review their strengths and weaknesses in this context:

Cost Per Impression (CPM): It's great for branding, which is the overarching strength of social media. But the value marketers get from social marketing isn't just exposure -- it's something deeper.

Cost Per Click (CPC): The model that made Google what it is won't do the same for Facebook, at least not on the same kind of scale. CPC is tailor-made for direct-response marketers, while social media is centered on building relationships. This is the classic "square peg/round hole" issue.

Cost Per Action (CPA): We should be able to put this to rest easily, as marketers shouldn't be driving a relationship-building vehicle on a conversion track.

Cost Per Engagement (CPE): This gets closer, as some engagement metrics translate well to various social marketing programs, such as time spent with a widget or percentage of a shareable video viewed.

When you want exposure, traffic, conversions, or interactions, each of these four pricing models comes in handy. But social marketing, when done right, achieves something much different: relationships. How does that fit in neatly with these pricing models?

To that end, I'll throw out a fifth model: Cost Per Social Action (CPSA). It's for any action with a distinctly social quality that leads to either new relationships (such as through "viral" referrals or acquiring new followers and fans) or deepening existing relationships (such as through "likes," comments, responses, and ratings).

The main benefit of CPSA is that marketers know they're paying for something social and relationship-oriented. More importantly, marketers know they're not specifically paying for exposure, traffic, conversions, or interactions (though those can all provide additional value). It's an acknowledgement that social media is something else, so it's deserving of a new model, one that stresses relationships above all else.

There are downsides too, and I'll spend even more time on these:

It's a new model. The alphabet soup is too crazy already. There are others too, like CPL (Cost Per Lead) and CPS (Cost Per Sale). So now marketers have to learn another?

Look at the publisher or vendor side too - they now have to sell yet another pricing plan? Then again, some publishers like VideoEgg have used Cost Per Engagement pricing to differentiate themselves. Could some differentiate themselves by promoting CPSA?

There are too many letters. Come on, at least simplify it to three letters so it stands a chance. Though you could argue that to stand out, maybe the four-letter version will differentiate it.

It's vague. A social action can mean so many different things. Just looking at Facebook alone, can you really say that the same pricing structure can be used to cover everything from the number of fans accumulated to the number of virtual gifts sent? Then again, CPM covers everything from an impression on a portal's homepage to an impression that's highly contextually relevant on a blog. Similarly, CPC is used for search and contextual marketing, two very different approaches.

There are already even more specific social metrics, such as CPI -- a Cost Per Install model for widgets. CPSA doesn't account for enough of the intricacies of social media that are already being addressed directly.

What's a social action worth anyway? The further anyone veers from reach and sales, the harder it's going to be to tie this into marketers' traditional metrics.

I'll leave it to you now: is CPSA needed? Are some already using a version of it? Is this latest version of alphabet soup past its expiration date? Share your thoughts in the comments to address CPSA the way it should be: socially.