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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.

5 Things to Make Your Website Links Linear and Logical

18 December 2009 in Toolkit by Kate | View Comments

I was on a website today (I won’t say which)…. but I left the website probably before I wanted or needed to. Why? I just plain got lost. And the problem was linking… way too much of it! I know, I know… it helps your SEO, but there’s a point at which you’re degrading user experience by leading them on a wild goose chase for what they want.

I’d get to one page, wanting to read about products, and I’d follow one of the page links, which had more links and soon I couldn’t remember what the heck I was looking for to start out with. I got tired of this quickly, so I just left.

So, I thought it’d be a good opportunity to offer a few ways to think about your website when you’re putting it together or planning the content.

Think linearly. When gathering information, people usually want to follow a linear and logical path to get that info. Sometimes it’s from big-picture to details. Sometimes it’s being led through the process your company takes with its customers. Sometimes it’s a look at groups of offerings. Whatever it is, think about how to lay your site out in terms of information-gathering.
Make sure the internal link makes sense. Don’t add a link for the sake of adding a link. It doesn’t do any good to be having your readers move between disjointed pieces of information, as it makes it more difficult for them to put the whole picture together. From a technical standpoint, having your readers feel disjointed will also likely increase your exit rate (in other words, the leave your site!).
Make it very easy for your readers to get back to the original page they were viewing. Much in line with #2, your readers came to a particular page to read about that facet of your company. If they came to your services page, they want to know what you have to offer. They probably want to know about everything you’ve got before moving on, and of course you want them to know that too. Make sure they can get back there to get that info.
Don’t forget your blog and/or your social media assets. Directing someone towards a blog post or two can be a great idea. Ideally (if you’re blogging right) they hang out there for a little while, engage in your contact, and get to know your company more. Without overdoing it, this can be a great way to add an internal link that follows the above guidelines, but also has the possibility to really hook your viewers and supplement your content.
Think about lead conversion while you’re at it. When you’re putting together a logical path for your readers to follow through your website, think also about how that goes into converting them to customers. Would adding a particular internal to your services page add the “right” type of info for them to get out their chequebook?

Any other tips for people to think about?

How to Find Content for Your Business Blog (buildabetterblog.com)
Tips for successful link building (va4growth.com)

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)

A discussion on crowdsourcing: Interview with Matt Johnston Part II

16 October 2009 in Interviews by Kate | View Comments

This is the second half of our two-part discussion on crowdsourcing with uTest’s VP of Marketing and Community, Matt Johnston. The first installment of our interview is here.

So, you’ve gathered a bunch of information and data from your users. How do you address issues of IP and who owns the content, both from the perspective of your client companies and from your users? How do you protect the rights of both of those groups? Do either of those groups give certain aspects up by using your model that they may not have to otherwise?

That’s a legitimate issue for crowdsourcing companies who are creating something new – for example, in categories like copy writing, design, development and animation. In such instances, companies like Guru, crowdSPRING or GeniusRocket have to think carefully about fairness and address these issues head on and up front. Clear communication (and consistent enforcement) of the rules is vital to maintaining a level playing field in a B2B crowdsourcing model.

In the case of uTest, we don’t have to worry about issues of IP ownership because the customer created the apps and simply wants to test them with our community. The IP issues that are sometimes a concern for new customers are around IP protection.

Again, in this case our job is to establish the ground rules that protect everyone, and then to communicate them clearly and consistently. In the case of uTest, the client created the app and they own it. Testers have no rights to the app or to any of the bugs that they discovered within that app. Beyond that, companies can require testers to sign an NDA and testers are forbidden from sharing any information about customers, their apps, or any bugs outside the uTest platform (including blogs, message boards, Twitter, Facebook, etc.).

You’ve spoken about 90-9-1 Rule, which says that 90% of your community will be passive users, 10% will be active and engaged, and 1% will be the “stars.” Can you shed some light on these numbers and how each group can add value to the process?

We had a great discussion about this at the recent TiE event! The 90-9-1 rule states that 90% of community members will be “lurkers,” 9% will be part-time contributors and 1% will fully adopt and become “super users.” While the math changes from crowd to crowd, the underlying premise does not: the vast majority of the contribution or participation will come from your top users. This isn’t just true in crowdsourcing, it’s true on message boards, social networks, blogging services, and most online user bases.

If you’re building an ad-based revenue model, you may not care, because even “lurkers” generate page views. However, if you’re building a transaction-oriented revenue model like uTest is, you need participation in order for a community member to make a direct contribution.

Thus, one of uTest’s keys to success is to identify those future “stars” early on so we can nurture them along the path to success. We recognize that some testers join our community because they want to use their testing skills to earn money, while others join because they want to network with their peers and consume the educational content that we provide. We welcome all testers into our community, but we make a special effort to engage those who want to participate in projects.

We talk a lot about “inside-the-transaction” vs. “outside-the-transaction” types of participation. The former refers to testers who are participating in projects, reporting bugs and getting paid (as well as building their reputation). The latter refers to those who don’t participate in projects, but could still make meaningful contributions. This could be by subscribing to our newsletter, commenting on our blog, participating in our forums, or contributing content, ideas and expertise to other members of our community. Both types of participation are valuable to uTest’s long-term future, but the wants and needs of these two groups are unique, so we cater to them as such.

Your company didn’t just come to the decision to implement crowdsourcing one day, you actually built the entire company on that model specifically. It’s in the name – uTest. Do you feel you could have gotten similar results had you been offering the same end-products through more traditional methods of production/testing? Would they have been worse? Could things be better using a different model?

If we tried to do this with a traditional model, the results wouldn’t even be close to what we’ve achieved to date. It would be impossible from a logistics or financial perspective for us to have built the level of testing coverage that we have today. We’re doing testing for some of the top software companies in the world in our first year of operations – no small feat. And we couldn’t do it without our community and our investment in our community.

The testing needs in the world of software have become exceedingly complex. Companies now have to test their apps across locations, languages, operating system, browser, as well as handset makers and models, and wireless carriers. This is a prohibitively expensive task for even the most mature and sophisticated companies. And crowdsourcing is uniquely suited to meet the challenges of software testing. That underlying belief is what prompted our co-founders to build uTest based on a crowdsourcing model – and what led me to join the company.

About uTest

uTest is the world’s largest marketplace for software testing services. The company provides real-world testing services through its community of 20,000+ professional testers from 158 countries around the world. Hundreds of companies – from web startups to global software leaders – have joined the uTest marketplace to get their web, desktop and mobile applications tested. More information can be found at http://www.utest.com or the company’s Software Testing Blog at http://blog.utest.com.

If you were to put your blog audience in a presentation hall……

24 September 2009 in Explanation by Kate | View Comments

Illustration by Henry Blackburn in the New York GRAPHIC, Nov. 5, 1873 from the Dave Thomson collection.

I was explaining how to think about framing blog content as a thought leader to someone the other day and used the following analogy, which, at least in this particular case, proved effective.

Think of being able to have two different speaking opportunities, each one with a different section of your core audience, and each one with different goals. Allow me to elaborate.

Audience One:

Larger sized audience of people with a broader range of interests. Your role is to offer education at a level that many people will be able to find value in it, and most of them will want to hear more about it.

Audience Two:

Smaller sized audience of well-informed individuals and decision-makers. Your role here is to demonstrate your leadership in an area directly related to their needs, and to your solution. Your subject matter will be much more focused and in-depth.

Example: You offer a tool that greatly enhances the online fundraising capability for non-profits specifically on Twitter.

To Audience One you might talk about the role that social media plays in increasing support for your organization and allowing for more opportunities to donate.
To Audience Two you would talk specifically about the power of Twitter in general, and how that tool can be leveraged to enhance fundraising efforts. [Please note, I'm not discussing whether your language is sales-y or not... it never should be, but that's for another discussion].

Ideally, you have a series of speeches to Audience One, educating large numbers of people enough that you can convert them to a position where they might join Audience Two, and address Audience Two (converts from Audience One along with those who would have already been Audience Two candidates) in a few targeted speeches.

Translation? In general, a blog strategy works pretty well if you have your overall direction be focused on Audience One (most of your posts) and have a few posts strategically placed that target Audience Two.

How do you think of your blog strategy?

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.

The Facebook “@” reply and what it means for business

16 September 2009 in Toolkit by Kate | View Comments

Anya and I have been excessively excited for the “small” change that Facebook made the other day that allows you to use the Twitter-esque “@” symbol to add contacts, pages, groups etc to a conversation pretty much anywhere you would normal post content on Facebook.

For example, on our Facebook page, you’ll see that once I inputted “@,” a drop-down menu pops up where you can choose from your contacts, your groups, your pages, etc. I was posting up Anya’s post on academics having open access to scholarly work and wanted to attribute it to her, and I also got to let her know that I did so. You’ll then see the prior post, citing Adam’s thoughts on social media ROI, and his name has been tagged.

Since I’m pretty interested in what this means for viral capabilities, I was playing around with the Walls today. Here’s what I’ve seen so far just using Wall postings.

Personal Profile:

You can post a status update with a contact name and/or a public profile (businesses/organizations) and your update will show up on their or its news feed. [Note: It does not seem to update on a group page]
If it’s a contact, they will be notified via email, just as they would if you had tagged them in a photo in your own album (assuming they’re set up for email notifications). [Update: if you go to our FB page now, you'll see that Adam has already commented on the link we posted. Most likely because he was notified that we posted it.]
Your tagging allows people to click on the contact/group/etc directly from your newsfeed, or their own home feed.
You can only link to contacts that you’re friends with, groups that you’re a member of or pages that you’re a fan of.

Business Public Profile/Page:

Much the same as a Personal Profile.
You can post an update or a link with the same information as above, and tag someone you’ve mentioned. Again, groups do not seem to be affected.
It it’s a contact, they will be notified that they’ve been tagged.
Other fans of the page are able to click directly through to the tagged party, whether it’s the author of a posted link or a group that was mentioned.
Any fan can post something that is tagged with a contact/page/group that they are connected to.

Implications for business:

You are in front of more people, in places more removed than your page. Being tagged allows you to reach people one layer out, by being able to be mentioned in a way that’s interactive on profiles and pages that are not your own. Because your fans also have these capabilities, anytime you’re mentioned by them, you’re exposed to all of their contacts in the same way.
It draws people back to your page more easily. If your page is tagged “somewhere else” it is much easier for new eyes to connect to your page, click, and be there. No one has to actually interact with your page directly for that to happen now. If a person is tagged on your page, they’re notified of that discussion, which isn’t directly on their profile. This will ideally bring them to your page. All-in-all, you’re drawing people back to your content from further away and in an easier manner.

Still playing around, I’ll update when/if I find new features.

Did I miss anything? Any other cool features you’ve come across that increase virality? Do I have anything wrong?