Social Media Welcomes a New Country

I intended to shut down the blog for the summer with a summary of some of the recent changes on Facebook. This is more important and it’s an interesting commentary on the power of the media for good.

If you missed the reporting in October when George Clooney and John Prendergrast of the Enough Project were lobbying in Washington, D.C., you need to watch this video. If you saw the reporting then, it is worth watching again to see that what they, and others, were trying to do apparently worked. Clooney’s comments about the prevention of suffering without spending money on an avoidable crisis are powerful.

Watch the video here.

The visible outcome is the establishment of the new country, South Sudan, this Saturday, July 9. There is a welcome ceremony planned on social media. You can like the Facebook page, or Tweet using the hashtag #Welcome193 (South Sudan will be the 193rd nation to join the United Nations). Or you are welcome to post a link or part or all of this blog post on your own blog. But do something, and as you do, think about the power of social media.

The blog will start up again sometime in September, roughly coinciding with the beginning of the Social Media Marketing course at Harvard Extension for the fall semester.

Have a wonderful summer!

A Real World Social Media Spin-Off

This post is from the Tweetstream of @mattrhodes from the UK agency Fresh Networks. He and his colleagues come up with things I would not be aware of otherwise, and I'm grateful!

I'm also an Anglophile and a huge fan of the National Trust and all they do, so their take off on Farmville definitely caught my attention.

What a clever concept! The idea of letting people become sort of virtual farmers and have control over this farm is fascinating. What a good way to get people involved in the production of their food and the protection of the land on which it's grown. This is also a different take on Community Sponsored Agriculture and a really engaging one. Plus who can resist a cow who looks this sweet?

All in all, it's something I'm going to enjoy following and hope some of my friends will get some good ideas.

Guest Post: Customer Experience Gets Trumped

Thanks to Mark Krumm for recounting this experience for us!

I've been interested in the trend of corporations online efforts to fund local community projects as means of attracting attention and building good will and audience. PepsiCo is a great example of a company who does this well – see the Sunchips® and National Geographic “Green Effect” and the “Refresh” project. Both projects allow visitors to vote for ideas that prospective award recipients have submitted for consideration and funding. It’s easy to vote, it’s interesting to see the different ideas. And, most importantly, people tell their friends to vote for their favorite ideas.

Then there’s Liberty Mutual’s “Responsible Sports” project… an example of how not to engage audiences. I have two boys participating in their high school sports programs and recently the boy's coach emailed me along with all parents and urged us to go to Liberty Mutual's site and vote for the school's sports programs to get a grant of $2500. You can click through the steps too (if you are a really patient person!) here's the link: www.ResponsibleSports.com.

The experience and a critique:

Landing on this page, I thought I would find a specially-created page just for first-time visitors, and that it would be simple to it to vote my support. Wrong. I found sixteen navigation choices, two of which were labeled “Community Grants”, several others that were closely related enough to make me wonder exactly where to click. I found my way eventually, but why not create an easy-to-navigate landing page for the first-time visitor?

To vote, I had to first take a test on parenting and sports. There was an online study guide I could have read to prep for the test, but I skipped that. Four clicks to get to the test and ten multiple choice questions later, I scored a 90%. Pretty good? Yes, but not quite good enough. They wanted a perfect score and sent me back to guess again on my missed question. (Is anyone really this desperate for a chance at $2500?) If I had not been just plain curious about how hard I’d have to work to vote, I would have abandoned at the failing grade of 90%. But I continued, just for my own education. Next step? I had to register with name and email. And, as expected, they needed to send a confirmation email to me to insure I’d given a real email address. I started writing this blog post while I waited for their email because it said it could take up to 5 minutes to get my verification. It took just three. Oh, and more required info about me before I could verify my email... just three more survey questions, two of which were “required”, neither had to do with my vote. How many people would have abandoned this by now? I don't even expect that any of you are still reading this account it's so long!

Okay, I got to vote. And then, of course, the kicker: "Share this." Ahh, finally we reach the heart of the promotion. But are there links to Facebook or Twitter or any other social media tools? No. They will however accept my excel spreadsheet of my soon-to-be-former-friend’s email addresses -- or just hop into my various email clients to harvest all addresses for me. Or, I could enter my friend’s email addresses manually. They also interrupted their own mission with a pop-up survey opportunity – just in case I was not diverted enough. To their credit, they did have those social media options for sharing elsewhere on their site -- but not on the page where they asked me to share.

Wow. The “good” news, my vote is sure to count for a lot since it's so hard to cast a vote. But I'll have to give this a failing grade. Old techniques, hard to use, questionable value, and having completed the task, I feel anything except warm and fuzzy about Liberty Mutual! And there was no emotional attachment. Go back to the PepsiCo programs: the rules required contestants offer ideas and they responded with how lives would change for the better if they earned a grant. This was nothing more than a popularity contest. The most votes win money.

Lessons? We all know them -- make it easy (they didn't) make it of value (a random shot at $2500 is not very compelling), make me want to share it – and give me control over who I share it with… and make me care.

More lessons from the editor:

1. Mark's experience was not unique. While he was laboring over this post, his wife asked what he was doing. When he told her, it drew another "rant" about her own experience there--presumably equally satisfactory!
2. When I went to the site to get the screen capture, I got a pop-up survey. I was curious, so I started to fill it out. Look at the instructions for yourself. Isn't it perfectly clear that if you cannot think of any companies, you can leave the boxes blank? Yet, when I did, I got an error message and my progress to the next screen was blocked!

What's going on here??? Two things strike me; one is responsibility run amok. You don't need to give parents a "responsibility test" in order to let them vote for their kids' projects--in fact it strikes me as an insult!

Second, have the designers of this project ever heard of website usability? They clearly didn't do any usability testing of the site itself, nor did they do a careful review of their pop-up survey.

When I wrote about Liberty Mutual earlier, I pointed out that customer experience is the function of satisfaction at all customer touchpoints. Liberty Mutual just blew it with this one!

Pepsi's Initial Foray Into Cause-Related Social Media

One of my social media students wrote a post about the Pepsi Refresh program a few days ago. It’s on our (closed) Ning community, an interesting story itself. Mark’s post gave me an additional perspective on the program that Pepsi announced in lieu of Super Bowl advertising this year. Thanks, Mark!

It turns out there was a precursor to the Refresh program. It was a $100,000 Green Effect contest which appears to have been a partnership between Sun Chips and National Geographic.

One of the winners was Hingham High School, where Mark’s son is a student. They received $20,000 to build a greenhouse to support a multidisciplinary program at the school. I can’t embed the entry video, but you can see that they’ve got a great ‘spokesperson.’ Both the entry video and the finalist video are linked on this page. The producer is a high school student—watch them both to see what kids can accomplish and the wonderful adults behind this idea.

The marketing point is that Pepsi did a trial program on a much smaller scale before launching the $20,000,000 Pepsi Refresh program. I can’t see any major differences in the two, but I’m willing to bet that Pepsi learned things from the Sun Chips program that made them more confident in dumping Super Bowl TV advertising and launching the social media effort. Is there any way that doesn’t make sense? The program is currently active and appears to be enjoying success. There are over 1 thousand project submissions in just the ecology section this month. You still have time to vote on your choice in any one of the six categories.

Congratulations to Hingham High School (they have a vibrant web site—figures!) for having this idea and the energy to see it through. They have great teachers, great high school kids, and I’m sure they’re going to have a great greenhouse and a lot of worthwhile programs. Be sure you watch the two videos.

I think Mark summed it up well:

So, what do you think about buying your way into the social media conversation? Had you heard about either project? So far, I've not purchased a Sunchip and a Pepsi -- but then again -- I did just send a message to 40 people about it!

You can argue about how Pepsi is going to measure the success of the program. But then, we’ve been arguing for years about how to measure the success of branding efforts in traditional media! Can a program like this—a program that gets consumers actively engaged in supporting an idea for branded funding—can it be any less successful?





P.S. Here are the happy winners on the green house site.

Engaging With Customers

So far we’ve talked about how to listen to our customers and how (and whether) to respond. The next step I suggested in an abbreviated strategy development process is to engage. This is hardly a new subject; I found some good case examples not long ago.

Since I believe it’s important to have a common understanding of what we’re talking about, I searched “definition of customer engagement.” I got 150,000 hits, pretty much what I was expecting. The Advertising Research Foundation’s 2006 definition is widely accepted; here is a good article with an elaboration of the definition. The common thread in the subset of the 150,000 definitions I read is that we want to encourage interaction with our customers—real give and take that adds value to the customer’s brand-related experience.

A recent publication from Alterian quotes some statistics. Note particularly the second one. Customer service experts have long known that resolving a problem for a customer can make that person more loyal than the person who has never experienced a problem. It also supports my hypothesis that the customer experience concept--if it did not grow out of what we know about customer service management--is at least a first cousin. Contemplate the steps recommended by the Opinion Research Corporation. They say the goal is a differentiated customer experience. The strategic questions are:

1. How well do our employees deliver on our brand promise?
2. What are our customer’s expectations of experiences with our organization?
3. What is the gap between our brand promise and the customer experience/customer expectations?
4. How consistent is the delivery of our brand promise across all channels of customer interaction?
5. What are we doing to deliver a differentiated experience from that of our competition, and/or in comparison to other non-competitive organizations?
6. How is all of this information utilized by our organization to close the gap between the promise and the experience to ultimately enhance the overall customer experience?

The focus on brand promise is the unifying theme—the one marketers want to embed in all communications channels, at all customer touchpoints. While this makes sense to me, it’s more operations focused than interaction focused. Getting customers to interact with us seems to be the goal; it’s not enough that they just go away satisfied.

Let me give you two quick examples. I went shopping over the weekend. I had a few staples to pick up at Macy’s; of course that led to browsing other departments and, of course, that led to buying some stuff that I only needed marginally, if at all. But I was having fun. Sales associates were being nice to me; two of them stretched the definition of “red” to give me the discount for the “Go Red” AHA promotion (note more cause-related marketing here). One associate wrote her name on the register receipt and encouraged me to evaluate my experience. I got good service everywhere I went, so I did write a review when I got home. I thought that would be the end of it, but a couple of days later I got a thank-you email from Macy’s. It’s nice to be thanked and I was interested to see my review was being forwarded to the local store. Too bad they had to spoil it with a lame subject line! But overall good try.
The second is what’s becoming the ubiquitous video contest. This one does seem to tie in well with the brand promise. You probably know Flo, the terminally perky sales rep who sells insurance “packages” for Progressive on TV. Now, apparently, Flo needs help! You can send in a video in a contest for a live tryout, presumably for a lucrative ad contract. You can watch the “tryouts” but I don’t see that viewers get a vote. They certainly are encouraged to “share.” Progressive is clearly serious about it; there have been two days of tryouts in New York already and they are taking the road show to Miami next week. The program, of course, has a Facebook page and is being promoted by Tweets from the Progressive account. As I said, these contests are becoming ubiquitous, but when the campaign needs refreshing can you think of anything better???

Macy’s tried, and I did appreciate being thanked. However, there was no real encouragement to try to get me to interact further. I do expect to get more emails though! Progressive will probably come up with another cute spokesperson—is “young” part of the strategy, I wonder? And what will they do to ensure that all the contestants go away happy, if not richer? And will they use the entries to build any kind of relationship? Keep an eye out.

And if you ever believed in “build it and they will come” forget that now. It all takes persistent effort. That’s what builds a social media strategy!

Marketers Prep for Super Bowl XLIV

The Friday before THE BIG GAME always brings bloggers out in force. Just as in the game itself, there are two opposing forces. One is the group who care about the football game; the other is the group who care about the ads. I count myself a member of the latter!

So here’s an update to what I wrote earlier about Super Bowl ads and Pepsi substituting a social media program. Coke has 3 ads; I thought one of them was going to be pushing their Expedition 206 program. Apparently not; it appears they are trying to get more fans on their Facebook page—as if they need them. There is apparently going to be a Living Positively theme to the ads and the charitable tie-in. Read about Coke's social media program (including the video about how Coke’s top-ranking page came about) on another recent post.

Animals seem to be big again this year. What’s even more interesting is the number of teaser ads that have been released (see some of them here)—that’s part of the traditional practice of building buzz before the game itself. Ads themselves will certainly be posted on YouTube and other sites during and after the game.

Read all about it in Ad Age’s special section. The one that interested me most was the article about marketers moving to ‘platforms’ and Garrick Schmitt describes some interesting ones. I prefer the explanation that Harry Gold of Overdrive Interactive gave in my class last night. It’s all the channels marketers are using to reach out to audiences—and more. Your blog has to integrate with your Facebook which has to interact with your Twitter—and on and on. These interconnected channels are the ways marketers “broadcast” these days; they are just on the web, not on the tube. Except maybe on Super Bowl day!

Not a football fan? I’m sure you’ll find counter programming. Ad Age had an article about the Puppy Bowl on Animal Planet. I checked some of the other usual suspects and didn’t find anything interesting—perhaps they don’t have a schedule that’s as easily searchable as Animal Planet’s! Note that the Subaru ad for the Puppy Bowl also has a charitable tie in. That’s social media in action also!

In other words, it’s a BIG DAY—for football, and also for social media. Enjoy!

Social Media Readies for Super Bowl 2010

Social media efforts for Super Bowl XLIV are already in full swing. It’s not news to advertisers that there’s lead time for all marketing programs. But there’s a difference in traditional ad planning and execution from social media planning and execution; you have to start earlier in social media if you want customer engagement and participation leading up to the big day.

This chart shows the online viewing of ads, which totaled more views than people watching the game live according to Ad Age (subscription required). The impact of social is interesting as is the difference between industry segments. In case you missed the article here are Ad Age’s recommendations for getting maximum benefit from your Super Bowl ads (assuming you’re planning to spend the $2.5 to 2.8 mil necessary to run one):

• Capitalize on pregame buzz
• Build virality into your creative
• Buy smart search terms
• Think real time
• Don't forget the call to action

It doesn’t take much thought to realize that all of this is aimed at leveraging the impact of a 30-second ad—and that most of it involves social media. The real-time issue I find the most fascinating. Listen to Ad Age:

Gone are the days when a CMO can enjoy an uninterrupted game in the network's luxury box. Today smart marketers will be talking on Twitter, tweaking search campaigns and leaving no rock unturned in their quest to drive impressions. Like E-Trade's baby, the star of H&R Block's spot, Tax Guy Murray, turned up on Twitter and actively reached out to people talking about the ad or taxes -- during the game. "My prediction is this year you'll have armies of marketers fanning the flames of their ads on Twitter," said Pete Blackshaw, exec VP, Nielsen Digital Strategic Services. "'Did you like it? Check out this link. Thanks so much for the high five.'

Oh, those poor CMOs!

One big piece of news is that Pepsi pulled out of the Super Bowl this year. They are concentrating their money in social media—in a cause-related program that’s almost guaranteed to generate engagement. Augie Ray has interesting commentary on the Forrester blog with good background links. The upshot of it is that Pepsi is spending $20 million on a program to support community-level projects. They are accepting proposals each month during 2010, starting January 13, 2010. Take a look at the top and bottom sections of the project home page. Have they forgotten anything for either project sponsors or the general public which is to vote on submissions?

They’ve also got some interesting things going on. One is that each category has an “ambassador,” one of whose roles seems to be to support applicants in that category. Some are also blogging; I’ll bet all of them will before it’s over.

The other is that there was a lot of buzz last week about initial glitches in the submissions. Apparently some people had problems submitting and others didn’t get a confirmation. Pepsi’s response is a textbook example of community monitoring and response. TechCrunch was quite critical, even though the Facebook page captures they published showed that Pepsi was all over the problem on the 13th, the day the site went live. Even better, go to their Facebook page. The last entry as of this writing is Jan. 15 and at the moment it has 86 comments. Read through them. Some applicants are still having problems, some are seeing their submissions going in properly. Applicants are talking to one another. Pepsi is talking to them. Pepsi is confirming some submissions directly to the Facebook commenter; they are promising to get back to others. They are listening—and responding! I’m not sure it gets any better and the applicants seem to be pretty happy and accepting of the fact that technology, especially in the beginning, can go awry. What’s important is that the marketer pays attention and fixes it, keeping users informed along the way!

Let’s revisit the initial premises. One is that you either do traditional broadcast advertising or you do social media. Wrong. You waste your money on traditional broadcast in this rarefied environment unless you do effective lead-up and post-game work. A lot of that is online and much of it may be social. It’s not one or the other.

The other is that a wise social media investment may pay greater long-run dividends than even a blockbuster Super Bowl ad. That remains to be seen. But stay tuned throughout 2010 to see how Refresh Everything goes. It’s certainly been exciting so far!

Repower America's Video Wall

As the climate summit began in Copenhagen I received this email from Repower America. While none of the supporting activities are strikingly new, some of them are interesting.

Their communications in and from Copenhagen center around a wall created just for the purpose. It’s worth either watching the video or going directly there. Videos on walls are nothing new; a video wall is new to me. So much for the technology. The content blends contributions from corporate promoters of efforts to halt climate change with the submissions of well-known people in the field and of the general public. That alone is interesting. The corporate activists are interesting; some are acting in terms of their mission, some clearly in self interest, and others were something of a surprise to me. You can mouse-over the wall and see for yourself.
It took effort to get the wall up and provisioned with a credible number of videos in just a month. I’m sure that they did a lot of reach out; here’s how some of it went in the blogosphere.

This is a little different from the usual cause-related marketing in which one corporate sponsor usually plays a leading role, whether or not there are multiple sponsors. I was going to use Komen Race for the cure as a good example; I see they’ve gone beyond a single major sponsor plus many lesser sponsorships. Their sponsorship page is fascinating. It links to a page with 5 questions corporations should ask when considering cause sponsorship. The questions are excellent; they provide a useful framework for non-profits that are considering a major sponsorship push.

I’ll make the point again. Cause-related marketing not only is a heavy user of social media, it is part and parcel of social media strategy. Corporations are searching for ways to relate to and engage customers and potential customers in a way that does not mimic the intrusiveness of traditional media advertising. Cause-related marketing presents one superb solution, aligning the corporation with a worthwhile cause and providing visibility and support for the cause. Everybody wins!

Rock the Outdoors!

Some of my best post ideas come from friends as is the case with the Nature Rocks campaign from The Nature Conservancy. Thanks!

This is a complex, highly-integrated campaign that’s rather difficult to pick apart on two levels. The first is The Nature Conservancy program itself. The second is its relationship to a program sponsored by another national environmental organization.

TNC itself is sending the welcome page (left below) to its own email list. I didn’t get the original email, so I don’t know whether they sent the page itself or a text link to it. The welcome page is the home page of a campaign microsite. The objective of this campaign is explicit; empower parents to enjoy the outdoors this summer with their children by giving them necessary tools. The page has a user-submitted image that changes daily and the opportunity to submit your own nature pictures. When you click through you find a robust content page (right below).
The main campaign page lists outdoor activities in the left bar and more in-depth planning resources on the right bar. I looked at some, not all, of the Nature Activities. There’s lots of information and some interactivity (a carbon footprint calculator). Their newsletter is described as the Great Places Network; interesting but a bit confusing.

In terms of integration, look at the nav bar at the top of the Nature Rocks page and the TNC home page, right. The TNC nav bar graces the top of both pages. (No icon for Nature Rocks; the My Nature Page takes you to the campaign page).

In one sense, the duplication of the nav bar is good integration. It, however, makes it rather difficult to navigate around the Nature Rocks site. From most of the activities page you can use the back button (once you discover that Home takes you to the TNC home page!) to get back to the Nature Rocks main page. On the newsletter signup page I couldn’t get back at all. I had to close out and that closed me out of the entire site. This could easily have been fixed by a Back to the Nature Rocks Home Page text link at the top of each page. Simple usability testing! But overall, a great site with a succinct mission statement at the top of each page.

I didn’t set up a My Nature Page, although I’m a huge fan of personal pages and content feeds. What it reminded me of, though, is a classic question from CRM. When groups get too enthused about the concept I ask, “Do you want to have a relationship with your ketchup?” In the traditional context, most people answer “No.” Web 2.0 has changed that; think back to the Heinz promotions. But it hasn’t changed the basic premise. Each of us, individual or family, has the time and energy to manage only a few relationships. When we set up a personal page and invest time and effort in it, will we want to change? Think first mover advantage here, although better ideas can always trump.

When I searched to find out what kind of PR they were getting I discovered a whole other aspect of the campaign. Briefly, it’s a national campaign sponsored by The Children and Nature Network. The objective of the campaign is to provide local grassroots organizations with tools to help children experience the outdoors. It links to a Nature Rocks main page, which lists TNC, REI as well as C&NN as the partners in the endeavor.

By now, are you confused? Probably! Unless you follow the links, you don’t see how it all fits together. That’s the marketer perspective—and when you take the trouble to tease it out, both the C&NN and TNC programs have clear objectives, my signal that there’s a significant underlying strategy. Each is one piece of the puzzle, and there obviously are others.

The visitor doesn’t care. There’s great information on each site. The sites link together to provide more good content; they provide a pretty good user experience, and they really do offer tools to parents who are challenged in terms of outdoor experience for their children.

A word about REI. I saw their partnership in the first press release I found. I couldn’t find anything else that touted their involvement—including anywhere on their web site. REI does a lot of good things. Why fail to promote one of them? I’ve written a lot lately about cause-related marketing because I think it's a great way to create positive brand associations while doing real good.

This is a great program and any parent can find tools for successful outdoor experience. A lot of parents will find it valuable. Kudoos to TNC and other organizations who are getting the word out about these tools!

Cisco Engages B2B Customers in Idea Generation

In my early days writing about the web, I remember my editor saying that I just had to read a book entitled Net Ready that focused on Cisco Systems’ thoughtful use of the web, especially connecting its customers to provide support to one another. That was easily a decade ago but the title well describes Cisco’s continuing innovation of Internet marketing programs.


Cisco recently launched a promotion for its WebEx conferencing system that makes good use of both social media and cause-related marketing. Called Pass the Ball, it asks people to submit ideas that can help change the world and to rate the ideas of others. Each time an idea is submitted or rated, Cisco makes a donation to Teachers without Borders.

I count 10 categories of ideas ranging from Education/Innovation with 117 ideas currently to Sports/Entertainment with 26. (What does it say about their target audience that Arts/Culture has more ideas than Sports at 36? Some of the other categories have a predictably high level of activity, but that comparison is fascinating!)

They are working the promo aggressively with activity on Facebook and Twitter, especially. The Twitter “ad” on this page appears to be a live feed instead of a “safe” static capture as is sometimes done.

In looking for information, I ran across their recent Connected Life campaign. It had a different scope (it didn’t seem to focus on a specific brand, but instead on their corporate theme) and it attracted over 600 entries from a selected set of countries. I don’t know what their success metrics are, but 600 entries looks pretty good to me. The implication is that Cisco knows how to involve and engage their totally B2B audience, and it seems reasonable to assume this benefits their brands like WebEx.

It also suggests another issue. I read somewhere recently that one social media practitioner disputed the idea that there are social media programs/campaigns (I use the 2 terms interchangeably). The argument was that social media involvement is an ongoing process, not a campaign with a beginning and end. The Cisco programs seem to illustrate the issue.

Corporate social media involvement has to be an ongoing process; you just can’t turn it on and off, you have to stay involved. Equally important, corporate marketing departments have to learn from each social media foray and practice continuous improvement. At the same time, there can be individual programs like these two from Cisco that have distinct beginnings and endings. The skill then becomes integrating these promotions into an overall, long-term social media strategy.

Another important integration issue—interesting, isn’t it?