Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

Fantastic, Made of Plastic, Videocastic

Originally published MediaPost's Social Media Insider

Ever wonder what Barbie could teach you about social media? Maybe you haven't, but Barbie got an upgrade lately in the form of a video camera built into her necklace. In her latest incarnation,Barbie Video Girl can give a few clues as to where social media is heading.

Barbie Video Girl has attracted her share of controversy, with reactions veering from the glowing iJustine review (not safe for people who don't want to see how the dolls are made) to thealarmist TechCrunch TV discussion (not safe for most everyone else). There's little reason to fear Barbie Video Girl, as A) it's not a live webcam, and B) parents and caretakers still have a role to play in children's lives. What this doll does is open up new ways for children to play and tell stories. It's likely that as scary a video you'll see Barbie produce is this tour of 360i's Emerging Media Lab. To really see her in action though, see how she compares with a $1,500 Canon camera.

So what does she have to do with social media? Quite a bit. Here are some reasons why she's a hint of what else will be filling up your dream home.

1) She's portable. I've carried Barbie Video Girl with me in my sport jacket pocket on the subway and around airports. When I spoke at Blog World Expo and wanted to show her off, I almost forgot I was carrying her around. She's one more example of how mobile devices can take incredibly varied forms.

2) She's a Jack (or Jill) of many trades. Consumers with mobile devices are embracing convergence. If you have a phone, why would you carry a watch or buy an alarm clock? Why would you carry a camera, a portable gaming system, or a pen? GPS devices quickly went from one of mankind's greatest inventions to a free feature, especially for Android phone owners. It's hardly surprising to see toys evolve to meet these new multipurpose expectations.

3) She's made for content creators. Forrester Research reports that 48% of U.S. women ages 18 to 24 are "creators" -- the ones uploading videos they created, along with blogging, building their own websites, and other hands-on activities. Forrester doesn't track children and teens, but with college-aged women as the most active participants in social media based on the demographics provided, the general trend shows creators skewing significantly younger. These creators are increasingly honing their skills well before their tenth birthday.

4) She exists in physical and digital worlds simultaneously. Part of her value comes in the form of her physical object and part of it is the digital content that she stores. So many emerging fields now -- location-based services, augmented reality, barcodes -- combine those elements of physical and digital, and she's just one manifestation of it.

5) She is a step away from the Internet of things. The "internet of things" concept describes how any device can now access the Internet. Consider a digital picture frame that receives updates via WiFi from an online photo gallery; not too long ago, having a picture frame connect to the Internet would have sounded ridiculous. As an example closer to my heart and gut, my agency's bar in our New York office is on Twitter. Barbie Video Girl doesn't quite fit in with this group, as she has to tether to a PC (via a hot-pink USB cable) to upload her content, but it's hardly a stretch that next year's model could upload videos directly over WiFi, just as you can with Kodak EasyShare cameras and others.

6) She's a cheap date. It's easy to find her for $50, and prices during the holidays have at times dipped below $40. Can you imagine what that kind of pricing will do to give kids access to technologies like this?

Who knew Barbie was such a trailblazer?

 

Foursquare Bets Beyond The BCC Set

 

One of the most important decisions Foursquare's leadership has made was revealed last week. It's one of those decisions that could determine if Foursquare becomes a footnote or a phenomenon. The only thing more incredible is that its future now will be determined by how consumers use old-fashioned grocery store loyalty cards.

Before diving deeper, it's important to appreciate where Foursquare stands today. It launched in March 2009 and quickly sought to own the concept of the check-in, popularizing it enough for Facebook to mimic the core functionality. Foursquare stands out as a great app for both the user experience and the ease of participation for local businesses. Foursquare has achieved several notable milestones recently:

·     In October, it celebrated its 200 millionth check-in two and a half months after announcing its one millionth check-in.

·     Foursquare reached 4 million users in October, up from 3 million in August.

·     Foursquare is reportedly adding 20,000 users per day, which adds up to 600,000 per month. If it just stays at that pace, it will reach 10 million users around August 2011, and its pace of user sign-ups has been accelerating.

Still, Foursquare hardly has mass reach. If you're trying to reach New York 20- and 30-somethings to promote your new line of bacon-chocolate cupcakes filled with vodka-flavored ganache, you'll reach enough of the target with Foursquare. For most other marketers, scale isn't the selling point. There are several anecdotes and studies supporting Foursquare's skeptics:

·     Some Foursquare experiments have outright bombed. Its highly publicized "I Voted" badge was earned by a mere 50,000 users, none of whom actually needed to vote to earn it. All you had to do was say you voted. Compare that to 12 million Facebook users who declared they voted, all without any virtual reward as a motivator.

·     Pew Internet reported in early November that 4% of online adults use location-based applications, mirroring findings from Forrester.

The idea of checking in isn't for everyone and will only spread so far. There's more to these location apps than check-ins, though. Social recommendations are a major part of the appeal. And now Foursquare is trying to make the rewards of using such an app even more tangible with its new program with Vons, a California supermarket chain.

With the grocery program, detailed in Fast Company, VonsClub members can link their loyalty cards with their Foursquare accounts to earn special coupons. In the process, Foursquare simultaneously made the check-in both more and less important with this deal that seeks to expand the appeal of the app beyond the BCC (bacon-chocolate cupcake) set.

There are opt-in options to make the grocery program more social: participants can automatically check in on Foursquare when their VonsClub card is swiped, and they can "shout" to Foursquare friends when unlocking rewards. It's surprising to see those options, as I don't see shouting as a popular Foursquare feature, and normally the idea is to check in when you get somewhere rather than when you're leaving. There are some benefits to the approach though. Retailers and any participating brands get added exposure, while consumers don't have to actively manage their Foursquare account at all.

For users who are more active, marketers can gain far more creative ways to reach them. For instance, a beer brand could target a grocery store's customers who check in regularly at sporting events or who check in anywhere weekly after 10 p.m. Consumers who check in frequently and link this with loyalty cards will be eligible for more rewards, even if they never became mayor of their grocery store or anywhere else.

Taking a step back, there's a more important question Foursquare will need to answer: Why would people check into grocery stores? It turns out people do already. Searching foursquare.com for Vons in San Diego, I found two right away with more than 1,000 check-ins apiece. I'm able to find other stores such as a Kroger in Dallas and Food Emporium in New York hitting the thousand mark. And while this is a generalization, after reviewing a number of grocery stores in major cities with at least several hundred check-ins, most tend to have roughly a quarter to a third as many total people as total check-ins. Compare that to the number of people waiting ahead of you with 15 items in the 10-item-or-less express lane and it isn't much proportionally, but it's something.

How much of a thing will it be? That's the question worth a hundred million, a billion, or however many dollars Foursquare's founder has been rumored to have turned down lately. It's also worth quite a bit to retailers and marketers that want to figure out how Foursquare and all of its location-centric peers can bridge that legendary gap between online and offline experiences. If this VonsClub deal isn't what Foursquare users or grocery store consumers want, someone else will find a way to do it better.

Today though, it is what it is: something that matters, has momentum, and meets many parties' needs. As for the mayorship of location-based services, that title is still up for grabs.

 

Five Reminders For Social Media Marketers

Originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

 

Five Reminders about Social Media Marketing

View more documents from David Berkowitz.

When Facebook announced its new messaging service yesterday, you had to listen closely if you wanted to hear what social network founder Mark Zuckerberg said about brands.

He mentioned that 350 million of Facebook's 500 million members use its messaging system (spanning the site's email, instant messaging, and text messaging) and that there are 4 billion messages sent daily. As a footnote, he said that doesn't include messages brands share, such as through status updates and notifications. That was it.

As much as Facebook depends on advertisers, Zuckerberg reinforced the idea that it depends on people, not marketers. This is far different from Google, which has a mission to "organize the world's information" and welcomes advertisements as part of that information. On Google, ads often wind up being the most relevant results for search queries. On Facebook, where the call to action is about sharing, people talk about brands a lot but don't go there specifically to share marketing messages.

Inevitably, whenever Facebook comes out with any news at all - it could be that they're pulling up their carpeting and going with hardwood floors - people like me at organizations like mine spend the next couple hours or days ruminating on how the news impacts marketers. I didn't expect the messaging announcement to impact brands at all, but I still spent the better part of my day yesterday listening to, thinking about, discussing, and writing about the news.

It turns out, after all of the rumination, that there are two ways Facebook's news could materially impact brands. If consumers, especially younger ones, really are ditching email -- a trend not quantified but well-documented anecdotally -- then email marketing will become less useful for reaching this demographic. Taking this line of thinking further, if predominantly younger audiences are ditching email to communicate through Facebook, brands need to redouble their efforts at building their Facebook page audiences and optimizing every message that they post, as marketers' status updates that appear in consumers' News Feeds are not affected by the new messaging overhaul.

Despite Facebook's efforts to make the event all about its members, there was still something in it for marketers, and there always will be. Yet Zuckerberg and his colleagues aren't staying awake at night thinking about how everything affects marketers. We need to remember this. Social media isn't about us. It never was, and it never will be. It will always be about people, or users, or members, or consumers, or whatever you want to call them. Social media is for them; we just get to participate, sometimes, and reap the benefits when we do our jobs right.

In case this needs to be hammered home any further, here are five reminders you can tape on your wall:

1) You don't acquire customers. You earn their trust.

2) There's a difference between being liked and being loved. Yes, a consumer may like you on Facebook and follow you on Twitter and subscribe to your YouTube channel or RSS feed. While that gives you a way to continually communicate with such consumers, those consumers aren't thinking about you 24 hours a day. For every consumer, though, there are a handful of brands for which he or she will be an advocate.

3) Social media is about people connecting to people. Brands play just a small part in people's lives.

4) Your competitors in social media are often not your traditional competitors. Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks are competitors online and offline, but when it comes to social media, Dunkin' Donuts must also compete with Coca-Cola, Oreo, Skittles, Victoria's Secret, and other brands that have a knack for staying connected to their audiences. Your biggest competitors, however, are consumers' friends and other people they trust. See the previous reminder.

5) You can't control the conversations. You can listen and participate. You can influence and inspire. You can empower advocates and defuse detractors. That's a lot more than you could do before, but you'll never have control. That's a good thing. How well would you react if someone was trying to control everything you said?

If you want to save these reminders or know someone who will need them, I uploaded them as a one-page PDF on Slideshare. Share your own recommended reminders in the comments. I'll read them and might even respond, but I know better than to attempt to control what happens from here.

 

So You Want to be a Social Strategist. Now What?

Update: I embedded the report below.

Thanks to a heads up from Jeremiah Owyang, I was able to review Altimeter Group's new report, "Career Path of the Corporate Social Media Strategist," with enough time to share a few thoughts now that it's released.

Who should read it:

Anyone who is a social media strategist (especially at a large corporation), reports to one, has one reporting to them, aspires to be one, or plans on hiring one will get something out of this report. 

What you'll get out of it:

This depends on your vantage point, of course. The best served here are hiring leads or those who have social strategists reporting to them. The "10 standards for hiring and managing your social strategist" offers the most actionable material for any organization.

Social strategists, again - namely those at larger corporations, will be most intrigued to benchmark themselves against the criteria in the report. 

Who's underserved: 

There's a lot of talk in here about corporations with plus or minus 10,000 employees. People who have social marketing roles at small to medium sized businesses may not be able to relate quite as well, especially if social is a large but not entirely encompassing part of their job. Also, as a social strategist at an agency, I couldn't relate to too much of the report in practice, but it does strike a chord with what I deal with at clients. Granted, agency social strategists may one day work on the client side, so it's still an important read in that regard.

Biggest relief:

100% of social strategists have Twitter accounts. Whew. Median number of followers is 745.5, so you don't have to be some social celeb to succeed here. 

What's missing:

I was hoping that there were action items for the social strategist akin to the top 10 takeaways for hiring leads and managers. There aren't. Tough noogies, social strategists.

What stat should NOT be taken out of context:

The executive summary stated that 41% of social strategists were located in the marketing department. I was REALLY confused. That's it? I know social media's bigger than marketing, but come on. Then the report noted later that another 30% fell under corporate communications, which should be noted up front, as the two are too interrelated. If you cited the summary and said that only 41% of social strategists worked in the marketing department, you'd be accurate with the quote, but it's misleading. Looking at more of the data, other disciplines where the role can full include "web/digital," and "social media/social strategy," both of which often fall under marketing. 

A false dichotomy?

The report spends a good amount of time looking at the career decision point where social strategists can take a proactive role to create scalable social business programs, or a reactive role where they become a "social media help desk." Clearly route A is very good and route B is very bad, but I'm not convinced the paths diverge that neatly. I'd be hard-pressed to imagine any social strategist who is so proactive that he or she anticipates every need before it arrives and allows every business unit to be entirely self-sufficient. There will always be new business units looking to do more than they are, even if the architecture for social strategy is well established, and there will always be new people joining these organizations. Being only reactive can clearly be detrimental, but being only proactive doesn't exist. 

Parting thoughts:

There isn't enough written about the field, and this is a great resource. Altimeter interviewed some of the best people in the field. There's just a lot more to say about the subject, and a smaller subset of the audience that would be interested in the report will be especially well served by it leaving others more marginalized. Kudos to Altimeter for putting this out there and advancing the conversation about social strategists' roles.

 

Report: Career Path of the Corporate Social Strategist: Be Proactive or Become Social Media Help Desk

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

How Xbox Puts Connecting Into Kinect

Originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

Throughout Friday, the comments kept piling up on my Facebook photos:

Sister: Dave...what is going on over there??

Friend: Huh?

Colleague: What are these? I saw other people posting this kinect stuff today as well...

Friend: Holy crap. THAT IS INTENSE!!!

Colleague: My form is impeccable.

Colleague: I think this requires further explanation. Must say, I was curious why you were doing karate kid moves in your office all day!

Spouse: Shouldn't you be working? :)

Friend: What I want to know is, how many things or people in the office have been broken/hurt so far.         

And so they continued. It was all in response to my day of testing out Microsoft's Xbox Kinect, the controller-free console gaming system that's designed not just to get players off the couch, but to put their whole bodies in the game. For instance, the Kinect Adventures game that comes with the hardware has a series of handball challenges that allow you to palm, kick, and headbutt your way to victory.

The game system is remarkable on so many levels. I've used the controller-free activities on the Wii, and this is infinitely more immersive. That's not why I bring up Kinect, though; you've already seen that covered in the Gaming Insider, and you'll likely hear more there.

One of the biggest surprises about Kinect is how well it includes social media as part of the experience. For instance, during Kinect Adventures, when you play any game, it takes three photos of you -- and anyone else in the camera's range. All the photos are stylized in a Polaroid-esque frame with Kinect branding and an auto-generated caption that relates to the scene. The photos are accessible on the Xbox, and they can be uploaded individually to Kinectshare.com. You can then log in to Kinectshare online (using your PC, not the Xbox) with your Microsoft alias, and then connect that to your Facebook profile. You can then post the photos you upload from the Xbox to Kinectshare over on your Facebook profile. This creates a new album called KinectShare.com Photos; you can see dozens of the photos on my Facebook page, even if we're not friends.

Kinect is an especially social gaming system. Provided you have enough room -- and my office stretches the definition of "enough room" -- you'll want to play these games with others. Kinect is a magnet for making friends. I returned to my office following a meeting and found a small crowd there jumping, dancing, and headbutting away (three activities I don't do in a typical workday). Once you upload photos of others, you'll want to tag them, and then their friends will see the photos as well. It's the embodiment of viral media.

In this case, it's clunkier than it needs to be. Why can't Microsoft, a major Facebook investor to boot, allow you to upload photos to Facebook directly from Kinect? That will have to come in the future. Given how reliably the camera catches two players simultaneously midair, these are photos players will be compelled to share.

Thinking bigger, though, it's a sign of how social media is becoming pervasive across all kinds of devices. As more devices go online and more digital media usage revolves around social media, more devices will find ways to make social media a core part of their experience. Xbox already had this with Xbox Live, its own network for gamers where there are millions more people who have earned badges than who have ever tried Foursquare. With Kinect, Xbox broadens the reach, as players can share a bit of the fun with people who don't have an Xbox.

It will go much broader than gaming. Keep an eye on Wi-Fi Direct, which allows WiFi devices to link to each other directly. More mobile, living room, and in-store devices will be digitally connected, invariably with social sharing coming as part of that. If you're only looking at social media as it's accessed via PCs and mobile phones, you're about to miss a big part of the picture. 

 

 

12 Smart Things about "Empowered" by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler

I finished reading the book Empowered by Forrester Research's Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler a few weeks ago, maybe longer, and I've been meaning to blog about it. At the time, it was information overload, and it was a bit hard to totally separate it from Bernoff's previous work Groundswell and Charlene Li's tome Open Leadership released earlier this year.

Then I returned to my old habit of writing book reports. I keep a journal with write-ups on every book I've read, going back a number of years. Some books get a paragraph, some get pages. For Empowered, I had a big repository of notes, or at least highlights... on my Kindle. If you go to kindle.amazon.com, you can review your highlights, along with the most popular highlights from other readers (see the popular picks from Empowered here).

Reviewing the highlights made me appreciate the book far more. Okay, I had a few bones to pick with it. For instance, there were those moments of Forresterspeak. My favorite example of this is the "effort-value evaluation" or "EVE," which is really just a cost-benefit analysis, but Forrester analysts never met an acronym they couldn't rename.

Ultimately though, it proved to be a valuable read, both the first time and in review. Here are some takeaways, culled from my own Kindle highlights, not whatever hoi polloi thought.

1. Empowering employees is critical. "To succeed with empowered customers, you must empower your employees to solve customer problems."

2. Business models are changing. "Companies that made their money from having better information than their customers are now out of luck."

3. Employees can be empowered in the same way customers are thanks to four technologies:

- "Smart mobile devices extend connected experiences everywhere, independent of location"

- Video has increased the depth of the "media experience" online

- Cloud computing allows any device to tap into the Internet's computing power and network

- "Social technology has exploded—more than ever, people can influence and draw power from their peers.

4. There's a four-step process for delivering 'groundswell' programs going by the acronym "IDEA": "identify mass influencers, deliver groundswell customer service, empower customers with mobile information, and amplify the voice of your fans." "Find the people who love you, and boost the impact they have on their peers."

5. Focus on customers above all else. "The closer you get to making customers more empowered and happier, the easier it will be to justify your project."

6. Consumers are vocal, and their influence adds up. They create 256 billion impressions talking about products and services in social networks. In blogs, forums, and review sites, consumers generate 1.64 billion posts and over 250 billion impressions (60% from discussion forums, ratings, and reviews), adding up to over half a trillion impressions in the US. "People receive roughly one-fourth as many impressions from each other as they do from online advertisers. Which ones do you think they pay attention to?"

7. You have to pay attention to people who influence others online. "Make no mistake: mass influencers are a channel. You can let them say whatever they want... and then react. Or you can work proactively to get them sharing messages in line with your strategy."

8. Young adults are especially influential in social networks and share disproportionately. They're 12% of the online population but account for 30% of influence impressions in social networks, and create 16% of influence posts in blogs, forums, and reviews.

9. A sale is just the beginning with today's marketing funnel. After the fact you can make customers feel good about doing business with you and generate advocacy. "Influence begins after the sale."

10. Influential consumers are mobile. "Mass Connectors and Mass Mavens are almost twice as likely to use the mobile Web as other consumers. Conversely, when we look at mobile Web users, they are far more likely to have influence. They’re an attractive and influential group of consumers, from nearly every perspective."

11. Fan base cultivation is like brand building - it's a long-term process that never ends.

12. "Customer service is marketing." 'Nuff said.

Are Mobile and Social Best Practices the Same?

Originally published in MediaPost's Social Media Insider

It's getting clearer by the day that mobile marketers can learn a lot from social marketers. This never struck me as much as it did last week while watching OMMA Mobile's keynote speaker, Andy Graham, who leads mobile strategy at Adidas.

On occasion I worry that I embody the adage that when you just have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I am coming from the vantage point of someone responsible for both social media and mobile marketing strategy, so it's natural that some similarities will stand out. With Graham's presentation though, while he was talking entirely about mobile, I could have easily assumed he was referring to social instead.

Below are his five best practices for mobile marketing, with my thoughts on how they apply to social marketing. Graham's list is from my notes rather than direct quotes, but they should be true to the spirit of his talk.

Here are Graham's top five mobile takeaways, and why they're my top five for social:

1) Offer unique, personal, functional value: Mobile devices are extremely personal -- Pew Internet & American Life Project reported this year that two-thirds of adults sleep with their phones on or next to their beds. Yet what's more personal than your social graph, the web of everyone you're connected to? Social marketers need to respect that and elucidate the value exchange between the consumer and marketer. Or, in layman's terms, always ask, "What's in it for the consumer?"

2) Gain individual consumer insights and trust: I'd argue these are two very different points fused into one. Consumer insights, especially those culled from social media, should inform any marketing program. Building trust is a major goal for any program that involves a two-way dialogue with consumers.

3) Enable end-to-end service journeys: Mobile is that proverbial bridge between online and offline experiences, so this takeaway is especially important for mobile. Yet marketers using social media shouldn't just think of social experiences that involve consumers who happen to be accessing Facebook or Twitter or a blog at a given moment. Marketers should think about how consumers discover their products or services, research information and competitors, decide on the purchase, share their experiences with others, and consider when and why they would repeat the experience. Social media can fit in with all of these stages.

4) Engage in ongoing one-to-one brand conversations: With both mobile and social, literal one-to-one marketing doesn't scale well, but the potential is even better for social, where marketers can talk to consumers as individuals and address their specific needs. While marketers can treat channels like blogs and social networks as broadcast media to blast out messages, marketers should embrace the conversational nature of social media to encourage brand advocacy.

5) Make your key objective lifetime, valued relationships: Not every mobile banner ad will achieve this, nor will every tweet. The overall goals need to be set higher though, and this will put all these other best practices into context. When you tap consumer insights to provide value through end-to-end journeys built on engaging one-to-one conversations, you have to measure the long-term results of those relationships.

I'm still left wondering if Andy's really a social marketer in a mobile marketer's body. Or maybe there's a lot more we can all learn from each other. 

 

* * *

An aside: for more on where mobile and social media intersect, view (and freely download or share) the presentation below, posted several weeks ago:

Why Mobile Social Media Matters - Statistics, Trends, Technologies

View more presentations from David Berkowitz.