Timberland Aces Social Media

Timberland’s Sundance Film Festival Night Out events add to the company’s already deep experience in social and mobile. They’ve had a mobile site since at least 2009 and are leaders in social in aspects from their interactive Facebook page for this promotion (see the Photo Contest tab also) to their use of 2D bar codes. Note that their “Go Out and Be You” tag line appears throughout the material, one way in which they integrate their marketing communications.

The event came to Boston last week and store manager Sara Keneally was gracious enough to include my social media marketing students in the invitation-only event. They went, they saw, they bought, and they came away with a host of ideas that can be applied by other organizations, large and small. They’ve posted videos; the Boston video gives a good sense of what happened there from DJ to the stylist outfitting attendees in Timberland merchandise to the photographer snapping their pictures.

The next day they sent attendees a thank-you email. It included their picture taken the night before (good system at work here) and encouraged them to go to the promotion’s Facebook page, upload their picture, and register for the Girlfriend Getaway Sweepstakes in which the winner and three friends get to attend the Sundance Film Festival. Entering, of course, requires that applicants Like the Timberland Facebook page. It has over half a million Likes at the moment.

For attendees and non-attendees alike they produced a print publication featuring merchandise and promoting the events and the sweepstakes. Old media, you say? The print document has a Microsoft tag on the final page. When you scan the tag, it takes you to a mobile landing page. The landing page has a video, encourages the viewer to Like the Facebook page, and links through to the Women’s page on the Timberland site, nicely optimized for mobile. Try it yourself and see. The only drawback is that you have to download the Microsoft Tag Reader if you don’t already have it. They give the link in the promo, but it would really be nice to have standardization in the 2D barcodes so we don’t have to have separate apps.

The centerpiece of this promotion is the Girlfriend Getaway Sweepstakes. I count media channels that include website, mobile website, special Facebook page, a partnership with the local-oriented Lucky style magazine, PR of various kinds, the live events, email followup, outreach via print and the web to women who didn’t attend the live event, and I’ve probably missed some. I didn’t see any encouragement of live Tweeting the event or a related hashtag. Would that have extended visibility or would it have detracted from the fashion focus of the event? They also don’t seem to be using Foursquare aggressively, another option; but again, in this instance, would it have been worth the extra effort?

And that’s the final point. There were many working parts in this promotion and it required professional PR support. Integration was key. But marketers large and small can study this promotion, learn from it, choose the pieces they want to focus on, integrate them, and DIY their own SOLOMO (social local mobile) promotion. The pieces are all there; it’s a matter of creativity and effort, and Timberland excelled at both.

Article first published as Timberland Aces Social on Technorati.

Social Media Marketing Isn't a Popularity Contest

For social media marketers it must be about monetizing their social media activities. Part of the inspiration for this approach comes from Wilson Kerr who made a stellar presentation last week on the subject of monetizing mobile media—more about that later. David Carter’s presentation the week before, based on the Social Funnel ebook from Awareness, laid the groundwork. In my blog post I quoted Jeremiah Owyang as saying not to show engagement metrics to C-level executives; they are interested in business results, not a popularity contest.

I watch social media marketers in all markets struggle with this issue. So I decided to pick out one case study each from B2B, B2C and NP. I’ve intentionally chosen small, not terribly well known companies. It may sound easy for Dell to make sales with its Twitter program and Taco Bell to sell chalupas and burritos with coupons distributed on its Facebook page, although it’s less easy than it sounds. But my point is that small companies, even individuals, can do important things in social media if they keep their eyes on the prize—monetizing their activities.

The biggest monetization opportunity in B2B is far and away the generation of qualified leads. Breaking Point is a cyber security firm who says its products “harden the resiliency of vulnerable converged networks and train cyber warriors” to prevent and deter cyber attacks. Are your eyes glazing over already? It’s incredibly important but at first glance it may not seem to be a candidate for social media marketing. Using a corporate blog, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts and a revamped PR strategy, they joined in the online conversation, staking out a position as a respected industry source. After 6 months, 75% of their leads were coming from the inbound traffic generated by these social media activities. Their blog is well organized—a video, a list of topics, the appropriate social media chicklets, and posts that only an IT security professional could love. That is their target audience, after all! Read the details and 5 other excellent B2B case studies in the HubSpot/Marketing Sherpa presentation.

Depending on your age and gender, you may be equally unmoved by the funky shoes that Canadian B2C entrepreneur John Fluevog sells online and from a growing number of retail stores in Canada and the US. According to Australian marketer Ginger, whose blog is credited with this captivating image, Fluevog reported that sales increased 40% in 2009, the year of their entry into social media marketing. If you search the corporate name, John Fluevog Boots & Shoes Ltd., you’ll find an array of social media activities including reviews and a lot of local marketing using Google’s Places. If you look at their Facebook wall, you see a few administrator posts but mostly customers showing off their shoes and loving them. On their Twitter page they cross promote offers seen on the Facebook page and actively respond to customer questions and issues. This nicely integrated social media program (see the links on their wall page) takes time, but not a lot of money. It’s within reach of any small business.

The social media space can be productive for non-profit (NP) marketers also. Dave Morin’s birthday wish is a great story of what a single individual can accomplish. His wish on October 14, 2010 was to raise $10,000 for the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital by the end of the year. He actually raised the $10k within 24 hours! The fundraising continues, with almost $14K to date and mention of a new initiative focusing on children’s health worldwide. In the interest of full disclosure, Dave Morin is hardly a novice. He was a Facebook executive and headed their Causes fund-raising function, which now operates separately. One can assume that he had a large network of Facebook friends and LinkedIn connections with whom to share his message. If you look at the list of contributors, though, most of the $14K has come from small donors. As you can see on the Causes page the largest donor is $1K and I only saw two of those. Reaching many small, often new, donors is the power of online fundraising. I look forward to the day when I see a case history of a NP who used traditional methods to grow social media small donors to traditional large donors and bequests. That should happen over time for NP organizations who harness the power of social media marketing.

There it is—a three market perspective on monetizing social media marketing. Questions, comments and links to other case studies welcome!


Article first published in condensed form as Social Media Marketing Isn't a Popularity Contest on Technorati.

Understanding the Business Value of Social Media Marketing

Last week David Carter, Founder and CTO of Awareness, provided insights about how the field of social media marketing is maturing. We are a long way from completely understanding the business results for social media efforts and an even longer way from fully integrating them into a single-source set of marketing metrics. But real progress is being made in understanding and communicating business outcomes.

Awareness has a new ebook, with the lengthy but descriptive title “The Social Marketing Funnel: Driving Business Value with Social Marketing.” That is, after all, what we as marketers want to do, and we have to link our efforts to actual revenue generation, not just to having a bunch of people who like us! This is the funnel; the entire book is well worth reading. Note that they start with what is essentially segmentation. Their definition of a social profile is the “aggregated interests, comments, and overall behaviors of a fan, follower, or RSS subscriber to a branded social network platform such as a brand’s Facebook fan page, Twitter profile, or blog.” The definition alone is challenging; it requires a full view of the person’s behaviors in social channels which is a big order for the social media metrics capabilities of most firms at this point. However, in order to influence, the marketer must first listen to what the customer is saying. That’s a keystone of SMM strategy.
Next, the marketer must have clear goals that impact the business. Those can range from qualifying and nurturing sales leads to providing excellent customer service and more. Then there are a variety of engagement strategies that marketers can use including engaging in conversation and collecting feedback. Most marketers will find that they need to use all these engagement strategies at one time or another. Which they use will depend as much on the stage of the customer’s relationship with the firm (customer lifecycle) as on the marketing campaign or on the product. This all fits nicely with the organization of Awareness’s social media hub software—publish, manage, measure and engage.

In his presentation he talked about these stages:
• The first is a robust content marketing strategy, deploying (and “repurposing”) your content widely across the web. A large firm will need a robust content management system to both facilitate and control the content marketing process.
• It is essential that the marketer first listen, then engage in the conversation the customer wants to have—not the product-oriented conversation the marketer wants.
• Collecting feedback required monitoring and, carefully done, leads to the social profile.
• Then measure results that can be linked to business outcomes.
The presentation represents reflections on the state of our art from a respected practitioner. Take a look.

My Slides from speaking to Harvard's Social Media Marketing class

View more presentations from Awareness Inc.

In it he asks the question that all marketers must keep asking themselves—for their corporate SMM strategy as a whole and for each campaign they run: what stage of the customer lifecycle do we need to impact? If you buy my argument that all SMM is lead generation, then the practical question becomes “what is the definition of ‘conversion’ for this particular SMM activity?” Is it a fan for our Facebook page, a qualified lead for our sales force—what exactly? Can we link it directly or indirectly to our SMM activities? Those two questions help focus the mind of the social media marketer.

It also leads me to my favorite quote from the ebook. Jeremiah Owyang says, “Don’t give engagement data to executives, as it doesn’t measure the actual effect on business goals.” Ouch; I wonder how many of us have made that mistake.

Social media marketing is moving in the direction of proving its actual business value. It has a way to go, however, and all of us should play an active role in moving it forward.

New Source for SMM Best Practices

Recently a social media marketing colleague asked me for a good source for best practices information in this space. When you know that question is coming from a small business that probably cannot afford much subscription research, it’s hard to answer. It’s information that many businesses are willing and able to pay for, so it’s usually paid content.

I had already used and cited the usual suspects. Marketing Sherpa does good executive summaries of its benchmark reports, Forrester releases some information on its blog, and Altimeter is following an open research policy. I’m sure there are others, but for the type of information I’m looking for, those are my usual go-to sources.

Consequently, I was pleased the other day to get a notice—blogger outreach, I assume!—of a new venture that is going to operate in that space. It’s not social media per se as best I can tell. Gleanster says it “benchmarks best practices in technology-enabled business initiatives.” That would seem to include any aspect of Internet marketing and quite possibly some initiatives that play out in the physical world.

Their early publications suggest considerable focus on the social media space. For readers of this blog the summaries of their Social Media Monitoring and Online Customer Communities research are well worth downloading. The communities paper contains a case study of Best Buy that makes my point about their focus. I’ve written about Best Buy and its retail Twelp Force campaign which uses Twitter to provide customer support for their retail customers. More detailed paid reports are the basis for these summaries.

I’ve been tagging posts with “best practices” when it’s relevant, so I hope I’m making a contribution to this important discussion. Maybe a good resolution would be to make more best practices posts; it’s a topic of concern to all of us!

Social Media Marketers Prep for the Holiday Season

Have you already walked into a retail store and thought, “Christmas decorations and gifts already—and it’s not even Thanksgiving!!!” If you haven’t, my guess is that you haven’t been shopping for the last couple of weeks. It appears to me that as soon as Halloween decorations went out, Christmas merchandise came in. Whether you like that or not, it is time for retailers, large and small, to get serious about planning holiday promotions if they are not already in high gear. See a good article from Ad Age Digital (free registration required).

I recently ran into a good post on how to prepare your social media channels for the holiday season. Here are the recommendations:

1. Give your social media profiles a makeover. That includes making sure your profiles and maps are complete and correct on Google Places and Yahoo! Local Search.
2. Build your followers and connections. They are valuable themselves; they also offer connections to their networks.
3. Get more reviews. Product reviews are incredibly important, whether on your site or on third-part review sites. Encourage your followers to review your products or services and to share them.

4. Special offers for your followers. What can I say? The Target site already has offers up. Many of these are appropriate to both large and small retailers. It’s interesting that they seem to be focusing on Cyber Monday instead of Black Friday.
5. Engage in the conversation. Do you have a Facebook page? Are you responding to customers when they complain or ask for information? Take a look at some of the recent traffic on the Hanes Wall on Facebook. They answer information requests, apologize for things like out of stock items and thank people for compliments. All good!
6. Integrate social media with other marketing. That’s essential, whether it’s your website or broadcast or print advertising, or some combination. Integration is key to getting the message out and experiencing positive results.
7. Commit to creating some quality holiday content. I was in a local retail store over the weekend and heard a video featuring Ming Tsai, one of my gurus. I think he was promoting a line of cookware. The one-unit local retailer has a good website, but I didn’t see any evidence of product videos. My guess is that Ming would have been glad to have them link to or upload his promotional video. Make use of whatever good content is available and create your own when necessary. This store also has some acceptable local TV advertising; no ad videos seen on the site. Opportunities missed!

Also be sure to inventory your search marketing, whether optimized pages or PPC. According to a recent report:
• More than three-quarters of respondents search to learn more about a product or service after seeing an ad elsewhere. • Before moving on to a different information source, searchers will modify their search and try again (89%), try a different search engine (89%), and go through multiple search results pages if necessary (79%)

Is this all worth the effort? According to Ad Age:

Nearly 80% of consumers plan to do at least some of their shopping online this season, according to the National Retail Federation and BigResearch. One-sixth will do more than half of their holiday shopping online.

That’s a target audience worth cultivating!

Still looking for advice? Here’s a helpful report on holiday email marketing and two more good recent articles.
• Retail Email Holiday Guide
• Holiday Hit List
• Get Prepared for Q4 2010

Can We Define Social Media Marketing?

There’s still a lot of confusion among marketers and managers in general about what social media marketing really involves. We all know that some businesses (and non-profits) are seeing great successes in social media while others are merely nibbling around the edges, and still others remain firmly skeptical.

With that in mind the other day, I searched for a definition of SMM. I didn’t find many and what I did find was a bit disturbing. It boils down to the fact that most of the definitions were platform oriented. Everyone who “gets” social media marketing strategy understands that platform should be the last decision when planning a campaign, not the first.

So, in my usual fearless fashion, I developed my own. Here it is. I’d welcome all comments and suggestions!

Social media marketing is business use of selected social media channels to understand customers and to engage them in communication and collaboration in ways that lead to the achievement of ultimate marketing and business goals.

Agree?