Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

The Four Best Questions From Social Week

Did you miss Social Week? Heaven forbid. It was a whole week dedicated to people talking to each other. Or maybe the name Social Media Week was already taken and Social Week touched on the same theme.

Whatever the purpose, I wound up taking part in a panel discussion hosted by the Direct Marketing Association, and it was one of the more thought-provoking sessions I’ve joined. Part of that’s to the credit of moderator David Dowd from Buddy Media, and the rest goes to the expert and candid panel.

Instead of rehashing the questions that Dowd brought up, there were a bunch of others that the panelists dove into that are at least as pressing. Here are some highlights, along with my best attempts at answers:

Does “social media” need a better name, especially in a marketing context?

Appssavvy CEO Chris Cunningham said “social media” is too broad a phrase, especially from a marketing context. He’s absolutely right that a marketer focused on managing a digital-centric community needs far different skills, tools, and tactics than one buying display media through social properties. But this isn’t a unique challenge for social. “Search” encompasses search engine optimization and paid search advertising. Buying TV now doesn’t just mean broadcast and cable, but also includes product placement and other forms of sponsorship. “Mobile” and “digital” are extremely broad catch-all phrases tying together vastly different disciplines. They still have their purpose ,though.

Chris didn’t bring up the other refrain: that social media is increasingly part of everything these days. It is true that TV, print, events, and other forms of media are becoming increasingly social, in the social media sense. Yet just as a digital marketing agency isn’t going to be the best agency for planning 30-second spots, social media is a discipline in its own right. Chris is spot-on that there are myriad sub-disciplines, including community management, social strategy, customer insights, influencer marketing, media planning and buying, creative, Web development, and others. I still like the balance that the term “social media” strikes; if anything, it’s good enough shorthand to lead to the right kinds of conversations with marketers. It’s going to stick around, but challenges from people like Chris can only help to enhance our understanding of what social media is.

Are budgets smaller for earned media than paid media?

This also came up from the vendor side. And really, it depends on how you track spending. It’s relatively easy to add up ad spending for Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, AppsSavvy, and the other major players to come up with a sense of where those dollars are going. It’s much harder to track the services side, just as search spending numbers don’t tend to include SEO. If you review the abridged list of social media disciplines above, you’ll see media’s only a part of it, even if an incredibly significant part. It’s like an iceberg where it’s unclear whether what’s visible (media) is the better part of it, or just a small protuberance.

What’s the primary role of social media monitoring?

When discussing the importance of listening, the panel got too focused on crisis management. That’s really the cost of doing business. Altimeter Group’s Charlene Li has compared it to fire insurance: do marketers ever ask for the return on investment on their insurance policies?  This shouldn’t be entirely defensive, though. There is a massive opportunity, one getting bigger by the day, to develop listening and monitoring programs to create actionable insights that can unearth marketing ideas, product improvement suggestions, and new business opportunities. Be proactive with it and it will take a much more central role.

Do only passion brands play well in social?

Hardly. It’s not about passion brands -- though of course such brands have an advantage. I’ve worked with brands that span tax preparation, disinfectant, and pest control, along with globally recognized icons like Coca-Cola and Oreo. The best of them have a lot in common: dedicated, intellectually curious marketing professionals setting clear goals with a focus on using social media to create a value exchange between their brands and their target audiences.

These four questions hardly capture the whole discussion, but it’s a start. If you ever have the opportunity, be sure to seek out David Dowd, Chris Cunningham, and fellow panelists Dave Mihalovic, David Weiner, Chris Bowler and William Martino for their answers to these questions and any others you have.

The 'S' In 4S Stands For Social

What's more social than greeting cards?

The S in 4S Stands for Social
originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

Even as the world waits for the mythical Facebook phone to surface, there’s another social phone that has done pretty well: the iPhone 4S. It may not be exclusively social, but in many ways, the 4S embodies the theme of how mobile devices are inherently designed to connect people with each other.

Fellow columnist Cathy Taylor already wrote about Steve Jobs as an unheralded social media guru. Her rationale is beyond sound, although I’m not sure if the inimitable Mr. Jobs would have associated himself with the 220 people on LinkedIn (and far more on Twitter) who have used “social media guru” as their title. Cathy looked at Apple’s broader contributions and Jobs’ legacy, but what about the 4S itself?

I’m using the 4S as shorthand here. Tens of millions of people who haven’t bought the 4S can still access any of its features through Apple’s new iOS 5 mobile operating system. Both the 4S and iOS 5 were released publicly this month, and now we can see what they can do.

Find Friends

For the purists, the original point of Foursquare had little to do with points and badges. It was all about finding friends. The 4S and iOS 5 strip away all the gamesmanship and check-ins. Instead, they automate the process of sharing locations and finding friends.

Users won’t be focused on ramping up their friend tallies here. Many friend requests will wind up being temporary. One can locate friends over the course of certain travels or an event, and then end the connection.

Other apps beyond Foursquare have tried this. Marco, for instance, debuted in March 2010 and offered temporary sharing, with the added advantage of using SMS to connect people who didn’t use smartphones. Find Friends is limiting in that all users need iOS devices. That presents new opportunities for other apps to incorporate such functionality.

Cards

There’s something wonderfully old-fashioned about Apple’s latest approach to social media. Beyond bringing people together in person, Apple now makes it easy for people to send each other printed cards. This has the potential to change people’s behavior in unexpected ways. Suddenly it becomes more important to have physical addresses in your contact list.

Tweet

One short, simple word was added to sharing options in the new iOS browser: “Tweet.” Am I more likely to tweet links now that this is part of iOS? Sure. Will people sign up for Twitter just because they can tweet from the iPhone? That’s unlikely. Mostly, it will increase the volume of posts from iPhone-wielding Twitter users. Tweeting is just one of many options now, joining options to add a bookmark, add an article to the reading list, add the link to the home screen, email the link, and print the page. There’s a lot of clutter, and any more options will require Apple to redesign the menu.

Siri

The most important new feature on the 4S that isn’t in iOS 5 is Siri, Apple’s voice-activated virtual assistant. Does Siri encourage more social behavior?

It all comes down to the beholder, or in this case, the person beholding the iPhone. Social media may make us share more, and it may remove inhibitions, but it doesn’t turn an introvert into an extrovert. Similarly, the voice commands may be so intuitive that people use their mobile devices more to call, text, email, and schedule meetings with others. Or maybe people will check the weather and stock prices more often. It depends on the user.

Apple did prove that by adding a touch interface, people would interact far more with their devices, and with the media accessible through those devices. Apple rewired our brains so quickly that people like me, who grew up with keyboards and mice, now tend instinctively to touch any computer screen. If Siri succeeds, we’ll spend more time talking to our devices too, regardless of whether they accept voice commands.

Will those commands be more social, though? It’s not likely, but it’s entirely possible. It depends how much friction Apple removes in social encounters. If it becomes so incredibly easy to locate close friends nearby, send them printed notes out of the blue, share stories with anyone interested, and reach out to people via voice-activated prompts, then it will be intrinsically rewarding to do these actions more often.

The 4S and iOS 5 are perfect symbols for where social media is heading. Apple didn’t launch some new social network, and even the most social features like Find Friends don’t directly compete with social apps like Foursquare. Rather, Apple understands that our existence is largely social, and its devices should fulfill those needs for its consumers. That’s true for all brands now, and it’s up to brand managers to best orient these brands toward their consumers’ social needs.

Facebook's Little 'M' KOs Three 'Ws'

Facebook Mobile: big things in a small package (Image via Facebook)

Facebook's Little 'M' KOs Three 'Ws'
originally published in MediaPost

Facebook takes its leadership mantle seriously. Instead of merely coming out with a new iPad app, it changed in ways that will long cement its role as the most important suite of mobile sites and applications in the world.

Lofty claims? Perhaps. But they’re warranted.

Consider Facebook’s 350 million mobile users. Facebook surely hasn’t gotten there by offering the best mobile experience to date. Beyond some of its apps being half-baked, not all mobile devices make it easy to use Facebook’s mobile services. Facebook didn’t have to be the best; it just had to meet enough of its users’ needs. 350 million people don’t voluntarily do something that makes them miserable (though a few million people do somehow keep rooting for the Mets).

Consider how Facebook keeps its app users within its own environment. If a friend posts this column on Facebook and you tap the link from a mobile device, you’ll be able to read the full column on MediaPost while remaining within Facebook’s mobile app. Others have done this, including some Twitter clients. It matters far more on Facebook, though, not just because of the reach but because Facebook has always owned its own mobile experiences.

Consider how Facebook now directs its app users to other apps, as long as they tap into Facebook. This is the most significant mobile update Facebook has announced this week, and perhaps ever. Let’s look at it metaphorically: Mr. Zuckee is the most popular ice cream man in the neighborhood and has more kids lining up at his truck than he knows what to do with. To corner the market, he lets all the other ice cream shops in town accept Mr. Zuckee loyalty cards, but in return he gets the shops’ customer lists. That’s what has been happening all along since Facebook Connect launched. Now, with the new updates, Mr. Zuckee says that as a perk for being in the Zuckee network, he’ll drive kids to any other Zuckee affiliate. In more literal terms, Facebook will send its own app users to other apps on their devices, and will even direct people to those apps’ iTunes Store download pages.

All of this makes Facebook function more like an operating system than a publisher. It doesn’t control the whole experience yet. For instance, there are limits to how Facebook Credits can be used, largely to stay within the bounds of Apple’s policies. But Facebook now cements itself as the best portal on any mobile or portable device.

It’s very different than the portals we used to know. though.  The old Web portals used to be about delivering news, sports, and weather, with a side dish of email. Facebook is instead focused on delivering links and updates from friends, content from brand pages that users opt into, and quick access to their favorite apps, with a side dish of instant communication. Perhaps the weather and a few sports scores will be thrown in over time.

What’s also fascinating is how different these announcements are from what happened at f8 in late September. There, to much fanfare, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the Timeline, a revamped profile page customizable with more multimedia and actions. Yet the Timeline has one massive flaw: It doesn’t work well on mobile devices. It’s a two-column format with rich images and a modular layout. Mobile profiles, however, default to a linear, more rigid format.

Zuckerberg seems to know the future of Facebook is all about mobile usage. Along with the new apps, Facebook is enriching everything it can at its mobile site, m.facebook.com. In time, the mobile experience will be the focal point of Facebook, and this may well have been the last f8 to not issue important mobile announcements. In time, the PC-based site will be where people go to tinker with their profiles and where brand managers administer pages, but for most people, Facebook will be an overwhelmingly mobile experience.

Here are Timeline updates I’d love to see from Mark Zuckerberg. “September 22, 2011: announced Facebook’s Timeline.” “October 10, 2011: effectively killed off Facebook’s Timeline.” Sometimes even those making the future happen to get blindsided by it.

Your Google+ Strategy Calculator

Your Google+ Strategy Calculator
originally pubished in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

When brands are invited to participate in Google+, it's going to get weird. Marketers will face challenges they've never had to deal with before in social media. Without knowing specific details of what Google+ brand pages will look like, enough of the variables are known so that you can create a formula that works for you. Here's a primer.

Addition: The biggest change marketers will encounter is the addition of search engine optimization to their social media strategies. Yes, I know social media optimization has been around for years, but it's had a relatively minimal impact on community management so far. Just look at Facebook's one-pager on SEO; it's using best practices established a decade ago. That will change as Google incorporates users' +1 activity to further refine, reorder, and personalize search engine results pages. Marketers focused on SEO who never cared about community management will evaluate the opportunity that Google+ presents. This is a major shift, and it's quite possibly the most significant change to community management since the practice as we know it was founded in the past decade or so.

Multiplication: The challenges of managing communities on Google+ are bound to multiply. Is it a community with SEO benefits, or is it SEO developed through community engagement? What if it's both? Imagine if every status update from a brand will require both a community manager and an SEO manager working together to optimize each word. Like any dance, someone will have to lead.

Division: Get ready to divide and conquer. What will the division of labor look like? Some of it is clear up front, with SEO leads best suited for organizing the overall structure of the page, and community managers owning day-to-day posts and interactions, ideally with training and regular review from the SEO team. It won't always be clear, though, especially for some SEO-driven marketers that are laser focused on +1s and don't care about any of the other benefits of relationship building.

Subtraction: It's time to subtract silos from your community management. This is a classic case of addition by subtraction, as your social program should wind up stronger when SEO experts are involved. How many other silos can you subtract? Who else in your organization isn't yet benefiting from what you're doing on the community front?

Geometry: Marketers will have to understand Circles inside and out. The biggest question marketers will have is how well they can create Circles of consumers to target them specifically. Ideally, some Circles will be auto-generated, such as Circles of people by geography or age, since Google encourages users to create rich profile data.

Trigonometry: Trigonometry is the study of angles. Marketers, what will be your angle on Google+? What will make you stand out from every other brand page? What value will you provide? You'll need your own angle going into it, but you can also triangulate some aspects by plotting your positioning in conjunction with Google's offerings and what your fans respond to.

Calculus: I don't remember much about calculus, largely because once math started dealing with imaginary numbers, I found it very hard to pay attention. Aren't real numbers confusing enough? Marketers will become well acquainted with imaginary numbers when they start operating on Google+. What do all these +1s mean anyway? When top brands start getting added to the Circles of more than one million people, how will that help the overarching strategy? As a marketer, you should pressure Google and your agencies to figure out why this matters for you.

Chaos Theory: I can only predict so much. A safe bet is that when SEO starts driving social media strategy, brush up on chaos theory -- because anything can happen from here

How The North Face's Customer Service Ensures Happy Faced Shoppers

I haven't posted much about customer service in awhile, but The North Face's service has been so repeatedly astounding that I've got to spread the word.

Full disclosure: The North Face is not nor has ever been a client anywhere I've worked (to my knowledge), nor have they resorted to any form of blogger outreach or influencer marketing to this blogger in particular. They have, however, taught me a few things that are worth sharing. Here's why The North Face is as good as it gets:

1) After a couple years of traveling around with a North Face backpack that I bought from eBags due to its great reviews, the zipper on the main pocket started getting stuck, and in time it got so bad that I couldn't use it. I figured I'd check to see if they could fix it. I wrote them through their website, "I have a North Face Surge backpack and one of the zippers is now busted. Can I get this fixed at a North Face store or do I have to send in the backpack? I have a store near me (the SoHo store in Manhattan) and can return it in person. I purchased the bag March 2009 via eBags. Thanks. - David". I sent this late on Saturday and by the time I woke up Monday, I got a response via email.

2) The North Face first shocked me with the response: "Thank you for contacting The North Face. We're sorry to hear that one of the zippers has broken on your Surge backpack.  Our bags have a lifetime warranty, and we will repair that zipper for you free of charge.  Please fill out the warranty return form and send the pack to the address at the top of the form.  The Soho store can also send this on your behalf." I had no clue about this warranty when I ordered the bag. Guess which bags I'll be ordering in the future?

3) I stopped by the store and they quickly processed the bag, giving me an easy way to track it.

4) A couple weeks later, I was surprised to get a FedEx from them. It turns out that The North Face wanted to replace my bag, but the exact item wasn't available. Instead of sending me the next best thing, they sent a gift card for the value of the equivalent new backpack - over $100 (and about the price I paid for it in March 2009). The card was redeemable in-store or online. Remember, this was all for something that broke after a lot of normal wear and tear, probably due to my own fault, and I was expecting to pay to fix it in the first place. (See the image below. The big red icon is the envelope for the gift card.)

 
5) I went to shop the North Face site. I appreciated how it tapped into Facebook so I can see products that were especially 'liked.' This isn't anything that special, but not enough retailers are doing this. I liked a product I planned on buying and it instantly showed up on Facebook.

6) I saw some weird size on a ski mask I was checking out - LXL. Fortunately, they had live chat late on Sunday night and explained it was extra long, which is great for a big headed guy like me.

Soon enough, I'll have my ninja balaclava and Etip windstopper gloves. Thanks Jessica, Judy, Amanda, and everyone else at The North Face who helped along the way.