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2010 Marketing Predictions and Hopes

30 December 2009 in Random Thoughts by Kate | View Comments

Well, it’s that time of year again. What did we all just DO? Where is it all GOING? Here are a few of my predictions. Most of them I truly feel will happen, but some of them I just really really hope to have happen.

Social Media will stop being a bunch of tools and will start being a legitimate strategy. We all know it, and have lamented it before. Too many people have completely ignored strategy when using social media in the past few years and have just started grabbing at the shiney new objects in front them. Social media will actually be viewed as part of your overall communications strategy, as it should be. Which means, now more than ever, if you just start clicking buttons and throwing up Facebook pages, you’ll be behind the eight ball, and fast.

Data will be huge. Not just to sit and prove ROI for your marketing department. The fact that we can measure so much more in the digital space means that we’re going to see such awesome research and data analysis on things on like behavior and social trending… just plain interesting “stuff”….we’ve only hit the tip of the iceberg.\

Social media marketing will explode in the higher ed space. We’ve felt the energy rising on this one all year, and it’s really close to spilling over. Simply put, if there’s any industry that has a pre-established and enormous audience that likes to be communicated to online, it’s higher ed. Just get there.

Social media marketing will start becoming more prevalent in the B2B space, primarily in industries we wouldn’t have imagined. Think manufacturing or construction. More people are accepting the wide-range of possibilities that fall under “social media marketing” and realizing that there really are benefits. They might not be Facebook or Twitter, or they might not be externally-facing, but they’re there.

These industries will have front runners. What I mean is that a lot of the industries mentioned in the above prediction won’t enter the space en masse, rather a small group of companies will start to play around, and they’ll gain the advantage. A lot can happen with a 6-month or 1-year head start.

Video will continue to be used widely. YouTube has been declared the Top Social Media Innovation of the Decade by Mashable.

Personal Branding is going to be very important and influential. I’ve worked pretty darn hard at personal branding, and, if I must say so myself, have done at least a reasonable job at it. But it takes work. Oh, and personal branding online and the effects of web 2.0 on personal brand management are going to be HOT HOT issues.

Cause Marketing will not only be used a lot more, but people will stop scoffing at it as a simply a marketing ploy, and actually accept that it’s still good for society and that companies can still be very passionate about social issues, whether they’re benefiting financially or not (obviously this doesn’t include extreme cases).

Happy New Year!

What do you think the next year brings?

3 things I learned about marketing in 2009

23 December 2009 in Uncategorized by Anya | View Comments

Ahh, the yearly round-up. Something about the coming New Years bash makes everyone sit down and write up summaries of 2009 and predictions for 2010. Reflection is always a good thing to start with before launching into another year, so I sat down to think over a few things I learned about marketing and social media in 2009. Here are my thoughts:

1) Measurement is essential, and really hard.

We blog about the importance of measurement frequently, and tell all of our clients how important measurement is to the success of their marketing and social media efforts. But despite the use of myriad tools and the delivery of hundreds of reports, measurement remains a hurdle. Not because we don’t have a lot of metrics and measurements in place or because the numbers are hard to calculate, but because the overall results, despite measurement, can often be a more qualitative sense of success then a quantitative and proven win. Brand perception, awareness and accessibility are not, at the end of the day, easily measured in strict numbers. So while we feel our work has helped clients make great strides, it is often hard to prove that in black and white without a shadow of a doubt. Marketing has always had this hard to pin down side, but with all the numbers that ARE available now, it is harder to say that in fact there really are some things we still can’t measure.

2) Personal branding is time consuming but very effective.

This observation comes both from personal experience and observation as well as from a good degree of reading and writing about personal branding and reputation management throughout 2009. Good personal branding involves work across many online channels as well as a lot of in-person efforts. By the time you factor in blogging regularly, keeping up with twitter, updating your Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, attending Tweet-ups and other local networking events, applying for and preparing for speaking engagements, hosting networking events and following up with contacts, your personal branding efforts can quickly become a full time job. Managing your time effectively so as to allow time for these efforts is essential though, as a good faith effort in all these areas can decidedly pay off. There is no doubt that if you’re looking for work or clients and you spend time each week working on your personal brand, that you won’t at least make some lasting and great contacts who will help you develop professionally.

3) The age barrier to social media adoption is basically gone.

For the last few years, social media and online tools as well as mobile technology have all been discussed as they relate to the younger generations. But in my experience this year, I would argue that is no longer the case. Baby boomers and even the 60-75 year-old crowd is adopting social media in droves, using mobile devices to connect and networking in places like LinkedIn and Facebook more than the teen group early adopters. While their full understanding of how each tool works may not be at quite the level of early adopters, they are using these technologies as much as younger people. This is an essential fact to know for 2010, as marketers consider what tools and technologies to address, don’t assume that the older age groups are still lagging behind.

Publish or die – marketing style

21 December 2009 in Uncategorized by Anya | View Comments

Academics hear it all the time, it’s a mantra of sorts. Publish or die. Publish research, books, articles, etc. in order to maintain your career and keep your job. As a tenured professor, you’re expected to be creating new content on a regular basis.

While publish or die has been a long standing expectation in academia, it is quickly becoming a mantra for public relations, marketing and communications professionals as well. Content creation has rapidly become a foundation for successful marketing campaigns across any and all industries. From universities to tech companies, law offices to start-ups, small businesses to international corporations, content creation is often at the core of the marketing plan.

Between blogging, twittering, updating Facebook pages, sharing on delicious, uploading to YouTube or Flickr or maintaining websites, content creation has become the mainstay of communications. In addition to being great content creators, marketers have to be creative and tech savvy, developing not only print materials and website copy, but good design standards, easy-to-use web sites and other online outposts, and video and audio content as well.

Being a good marketer is no longer simply about being a good writer and strategist. It’s about being a prolific, reliable and engaging content producer. As many marketing managers can attest, publish or die can easily be applied to our positions in any industry. I do think that in many cases, especially in higher ed programs that teach communications and marketing, this publish or die concept is rarely addressed. The focus is on more traditional and high-level marketing skills, but the core skills needed to use the new tools of online marketing are rarely taught. We should not assume that correct and effective use of these tools or the understanding of the new publish or die mantra is understood by online-savvy students. Instead, we should focus on educating a new generation of marketers who understand these tools both from a technical standpoint and from a strategic standpoint.

For example, content creation has a significant impact on SEO, and every marketer will be expected to measure and report on web traffic. When is the last time you saw a core course in SEO and SEM, google analytics and web traffic management in a marketing program at the undergraduate or graduate level? We need to teach students about publish or die standards in order for them to be successful contributors to the marketing community.

Segmenting your “Social Media Marketing” for Success

28 October 2009 in Explanation, social media by Kate | View Comments

(Note, this piece assumes that an organization has created a strategic plan for using social media, rather than having someone in a cube in the back office posting to a blog once a week).

I got into an interesting discussion in the comments section of a post about social media success over on B2B Voices with Mark W Schaefer, wherein I came to the conclusion that we were both basically saying the same thing, but looking at the process differently.

It really emphasized the importance of segmenting your overall Program in order to accurately identify success – or failure. This could be your business program, your marketing program, your sales program… in this case it’s the program that you’ve decided to supplement with social media.

It goes without saying that you should be setting measurable goals for your Program, and that they should all point towards money, whether it’s in a corporate setting or a non-profit setting or what have you. The dough may come in different forms, but let’s be honest, without it, you really don’t exist. However, the ability to bring in this money more often than not does not rest on one single mechanism, it rests on many.

All of this may seem blatantly obvious when I say it, but it really surprises me how many times I hear that social media is a failure because it didn’t sell something, or how many times people expect that a Twitter following is directly related to ROI.

The conversation should go more like this:

“The website traffic from the month of October increased by 40%, with 80% of that being from our new Twitter program. Additionally, the number of sales that resulted from our website increased by 30%. We can draw the conclusion that our Twitter program is bringing in valuable traffic to our website, which has always had a great conversion rate.”

Or, perhaps more telling:

“The website traffic from the month of October increased by 40%, with 80% of that being from our new Twitter program. However, the number of sales that resulted from our website didn’t change. Either our Social Media Program is not bringing in valuable website traffic, or our website is not structured in a way to convert viewers to customers.”

This conversation is entirely dependent on the goals you’ve set out for your Social Media Program, and then how they are linked to your other programs. The process looks like this:

Identify overall Program Goals
Identify Components that will go into this Program to achieve those goals
Determine the goals of each separate Component and how each of those goals is connect to your overall Program Goals.

So, if our social media program brought in more qualified leaders to our website (Component Goal), which was restructured to funnel any traffic to a new sales team (Component Goal), who would then convert them to users (Component Goal), we profit (Program Goal). If one of these fails, it doesn’t mean all of them are failures.

Of course, if you set up your social media program to get direct sales, and that’s not happening, then yes, social media is a failure. But just because your sales are not increasing when you start using social media doesn’t categorically mean that your Social Media Program is a failure. If you haven’t touched your website in 5 years and you were never getting sales from it, and you’re hoping to increase website traffic with social media, your problem is probably not social media, it’s your website.

A couple of scenarios to consider:

Social Media Success + Sales Team Success = Program Success

Social Media Success + Website Failure = Program Failure IF the website was in place to convert viewers to buyers

Social Media Success + Website Failure = Program Success IF the website was in place to actually convert without the website (therefore you’re really running two separate programs)

Social Media Success + Customer Service Success = Program Success (this is an implicit one that addresses the Lifetime Value of the Customer, and assuming that with happier customers, you will get continual long-term share-of-wallet from them)

Social Media Failure + Sales Team Success = Program Failure IF social media was meant to bring increased leads to the Sales Team

Social Media Success + Product Failure = Program Failure (more accurately, this would be Business Failure, since nothing can support a lousy product)

I could go on with various scenarios, but I’ll stop….

The focus here is on the Component level and the fact that, far too often, people draw too-direct a connection between a Social Media Program (which, at first glance, can seem quite qualitative) and money coming in the door. By highlighting a series of connections, you’ll be much better equipped to account for success, measure for it, and build an effective overall Program that is illustrated in stages, rather than “If I build a Facebook, when should I expect to see money in the door.”

This is why it’s so important to think strategically about what a social media program really means for your company, and how it fits into a Program that has been well thought out, and is well-measured. Don’t go out and hire social media guru and expect him to move mountains unless you plan on allowing them access to your overall business processes and make darn sure that he is capable of making the above links and laying out effective goals that support your Program.

Wrapping Your Head Around Social Media (slideshare.net)
8 biggest mistakes made in social media (lansner.freedomblogging.com)
Are You Expecting Social Media To Help You Sell? (wealthyways4you.com)

What’s in the word “social” anyway?

22 September 2009 in Explanation by Kate | View Comments

Over on the Econsultancy blog, they interviewed Jeremiah Owyang (who I’m a big fan of), who had a lot of really great answers to questions on his new role at the Altimeter Group what a personal brand means to him. I had a quick thought that I wanted to share with you.

One of the questions – or rather, his answer – that popped out at me was:

So you don’t want to use the ’social’ word anymore?
Social is here today, and brands are wrestling with how to harness it. However, there are more technologies coming, and we don’t want our clients to be blindsided by the next wave of tools that will empower customers and leave brands behind. Mobile, location based cloud services are all on the horizon. It’s more than social.
There was a knee-jerk reaction with social: “Quick, establish a work team.” But social is just one tool set. We’re looking at the broader set of emerging technologies and on boarding these technologies. We want to get companies ready with the roles and process to onboard these new technologies and conduct experiments where failure is acceptable. Rather than having the knee jerk reaction like they did in social. It used to be that all of a sudden, a CEO would mandate they must have a blog but not truly understand why and how it fits in to the corporate strategy. Most companies don’t have a way to allow new technology to come in. Most importantly, employees and customers can adopt these technologies without the CIO involved at all. If management allows for experimentation to happen, the successful elements will come through. Right now they happen in skunk works that are not sanctioned by management.

I love this answer because it’s how I and the rest of the crew here at the Other Side feels about using the word “social.” We don’t consider ourselves to be a social media firm, and never have. While we certainly do most of our work in that space, we also consider the “social media” part to be a set of tools.

We do marketing. We feel strongly that marketing is a larger function in which social media components exist. Online is a channel that marketing should be developed in, and, as Jeremiah points out, not a knee-jerk reaction to an industry trend. Facebook could be gone tomorrow. Strong development of your brand in a place that people – your customers – are going to continue to go to is where the long-term value resides, and being able to navigate that landscape is the important part.

Handling negative comments in social media

8 August 2009 in Customer relations, Random Thoughts by Tyler | View Comments

A recent blog posting on ReadWriteWeb about why we tweet shows that many of us use Twitter for purposed-based activities, such as obtaining news, information, or work-related activities, rather than just for fun.

The fact that people are actually using Twitter as a resource and are paying attention to the information is a double-edged sword for businesses: you have the opportunity to hear what your consumers are saying, but you have to be willing to listen and hear what they are saying as well.

Generally when a company enters a social media platform, they are capitalizing on the opportunity to tap into the wants, ideas, and invaluable feedback from your consumer base, and realize that it outweighs the damage control that is involved when a problem is brought to light.

Recently, a Twitter user was sued by her management company for an allegedly “malicious” tweet. Of course there are two sides to every story, but I am going to look at it how it was perceived, which is all that really matters in terms of CRM and publicity.

The management company was reported to have said “We’re a sue first, ask questions later kind of an organization,” as the Twitter user was reportedly not contacted about her tweet. I will not begin to get into the ethics and standards of whether or not tweets should be held to journalistic standards, or if they are just an extension of our free speech, but I will point out this reaction caused that tweet to be exposed to millions of people, rather than just the 20 or so people following.

In terms of brand management and customer relations, social media should be used as a tool to help improve a business. This situation is a perfect example of how a social media presence could have been used for a proactive valuable exchange, being that the woman’s tweet wasn’t directed at the management company, and the company found it of their own accord.

A social media presence is not about keeping track of what is being said about your company, and quickly squashing anyone who speaks negatively; it is about keeping track of what is being said, and if negative comments are found, using it as a competitive advantage to see how to resurrect the situation, and also how to prevent it in the future.

There will always be nay-sayers and bad-mouthers, and part of collecting valuable feedback is also dealing with some difficult people and situations. I think brand management via social media can be best utilized by appreciating any and all feedback in order to improve future interactions, not by forcefully silencing any negative comments.

How should companies manage negative comments? How proactive do you think a company’s brand management plan should be?

An evening with Mayor Menino and Boston World Partnerships

4 August 2009 in Conferences & Events by Kate | View Comments

Last night I had the pleasure of joining a group of proud Bostonians at the Liberty Hotel for an event hosted by the Boston World Partnerships. Aside from being able to mingle with Melissa over at Shoestring Magazine (and a BWP Connector), Rachel from The Community Roundtable, Dave from BWP, and Joseline from Boston TweetUp (as well as meeting some other really great people), I ultimately walked away with an even more assured recognition of how great a place Boston is.

Let me clarify. Yes, I think Boston is great period. I’m biased, of course, but I do. However, in this case, it’s abundantly clear that it lives up to the standards that an organization like BWP is holding it to – “an international capital of innovation, a city where top-tier talent clusters together, driving business growth.”

Part of BWP’s mission is to:

“help business leaders worldwide understand and access Boston’s competitive advantages. Our members help us gather and share compelling information relevant to Boston’s economy, and they benefit by plugging into our global network of high-caliber business people.

Monday’s event drew a fair number of people. This is not remarkable, per se. However, the caliber of people is what’s remarkable. I continually met supporters involved in companies, organizations and sectors that are key to achieving the goals of BWP – government, biotech, investing, economics, marketing, non-profits, international relations, business…. The list is endless, but incredibly valuable.

One of the keys to success for the BWP initiatives is to have buy in from all of these sectors, and it’s icing on the cake that the buy in is coming from some of most influential people in these sectors.

Of course, BWP knows this. Their entire model revolves around connecting people.

bwp It only makes sense that they would seek out the most influential and effective connections. But I would venture a bet that each and every one of the influential – dare I say powerful – people that they have sought out has excepted a role in this organization whole-heartedly. I would actually be quite surprised if anyone has said no (Has anyone??). And that is the remarkable part, and why it would unimaginable that this initiative were to fail.

I’m happy to be part of this organization and look forward to continuing my support, whether I’m here, or across the globe. As I said, I do love Boston…..