Mobile is the Choice of Multitaskers

Are you seeing more QR codes on your TV screen and wondering who scans a code while watching TV? It could be up to 80% of the mobile Internet users who responded to a recent study by Razorfish!

Multitasking is hardly a new phenomenon, but laptops, smart phones and tablets have taken the activity to a whole new level. An earlier study by Yahoo!, which interviewed over 8 thousand Internet users and over 5 thousand mobile users, found a whopping 86% of mobile users (92% of mobile users aged 13-24) viewing mobile content related to the TV program they were watching. That is too many multitaskers to be ignored!
According to the ReadWriteWeb graphic, a fair amount of the multitasking activity is communication, specifically social networking or texting (about brands or TV programs, I wonder?). 70 percent is use of apps, many if not most of which connect to the web, and 37% is plain old web surfing. That’s a lot of people conducting a lot of potentially brand-related activity! Neither study breaks out search as a separate activity, but given the explosive growth of mobile search, I have to believe that there’s a lot of searching buried in the surfing data.

Specific types of content are also more likely to stimulate sharing. This graphic from the new Razorfish report shows what they are. I see a strong reflection of target audiences, many of them young. My hypothesis would be that young men are heavy sharers of sports news; moms are heavy sharers of food content. What about reality? Everyone, or is that sharing somewhat female also? These are questions the marketer needs to pursue for her own brand.

Marketers can direct the activity and conversation by creative promotions and learn from their results. For example:
• Pepsi gave a free bottle of Pepsi Max who shared an ad with their friends using a Yahoo! social tool called IntoNow.
• The “Old Navy Records” campaign offers incentives including free music to people who tag ads with Shazam.
• A Heinken app allows users to play along with soccer games, trying to predict who will score in the next 30 seconds.
Read more here. And while you do, notice that these campaigns use special tools/applications to create just the right context for social sharing.

There are two important take-aways:
• It’s more than just not ignoring mobile; it’s also creating content that can move seamlessly from one channel to the other, as the Timberline scan tag and mobile site I described in my previous post.
• Then it’s devising ways in which to get people to interact with programming content or with advertising.

Marketers need to follow the lead of their customers. They are sharing web content. How does the marketer make content worth sharing and participate in the brand-related conversations?

Article first published as Mobile is the Choice of Multitaskers on Technorati.

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.

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.

Falling into Social Media and Internet Marketing

Wow; it's September 1 already, in case you haven't noticed! Where did the summer go??? A hurricane that thankfully did less damage here than other places and a lot of work on a text that is coming well and hopefully will be ready for use in the spring semester. Debra and I feel strongly that the Internet is changing so rapidly that we have to keep the book as current as possible--hard as you can guess!



I'm back to thinking about social media strategy. This presentation has some updated thinking and data. I'll return especially to inbound and content marketing and metrics over the near future. In the meantime, enjoy a wonderful Labor Day weekend!

Developing social media marketing strategies

View more presentations from diy-marketing.

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.

Seminar Hey Tweet, Face the Hyve in the University of Twente

On 26 January the department ISCM organized the seminar Hey Tweet, Face the Hyve
http://www.utwente.nl/mb/actueel/110126_Seminar_ISCM_social_media.doc/
Marc de Vries, the CEO of Hyves was the keynote speaker and about 100 guests followed the event. After the seminar we had a dinner and the UT premiere of the film The Social Network" with the story about the maverick father of the FACEBOOK Mark Zuckerberg. Next to Marc de Vries another interesting presentation was given by Daan Sip of Redchocolate and also a number of colleagues including myself talked about our research in the area of the Social Media in the UT.
For those interested in the seminar there are two links with the video streams:  (My presentation in Part II)
My power point presentation  is available in SlideShare
Part I 
http://videolecture.utwente.nl/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=7f2049f9b9574514847e863685b22ab21d
Part II
http://videolecture.utwente.nl/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=1fd0ae6b2dd3473f831c2242e1d0e6111d

Social Media Lines Up for Super Bowl 2011

For those of us who live our lives in the world of social media, this Super Bowl stat is astonishing: E-Trade was the only advertiser among the 2009 and 2010 Super Bowl rosters to even add a tease to its Facebook or Twitter presence at the close of the ad, according to a study by Professors Chuck Tomkovick and Rama Yelkur quoted in Ad Age. Not so this year; in that article on Monday Ad Age headlines, “From Hashtags to Newsfeeds to Online Spots, Big Game Advertisers Tap Web 2.0 to Extend Buy.” (See also the Super Bowl coverage on their sidebar.)

We all know what the marketing game is. A 30-second Super Bowl ad has hovered around $3m for the past several years. That’s a lot for even the usual suspects like Anheuser-Busch, Pepsi, and Intel. The companies go all out to “create buzz,” with increasing intensity during this, the week before the big game. They prolong it as much as possible with post-game critiques that rival that of the sports programming itself. Getting the most mileage out of those expensive TV ads by leveraging other media made sense in years past. It still does; it’s just that social media has been added to the mix.

See the video here

According to Ad Age and this good video on CNBC, there will be more ties to social media this year. Pepsi is running its usual Doritos “Crash the SuperBowl” contest. Pepsi Max has purchased a spot, after a year off for cause-related marketing and joined in the “Crash” contest. They are joined by Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen and even the Anheuser Busch Clydesdales and the ETrade baby. In reporting on this year’s advertising (with a good link to past ads), MSNBC says, “It’s a risky proposition for companies. A social media campaign has the potential to make your loyal customers even bigger fans, or draw in new customers. But companies also have to be prepared for the fact that they can’t control what people will write or tweet about them, positive or negative.” With due respect to MSNBC— big DUH!!! Any brand marketer who doesn’t already know that—and know how to deal with it—isn’t ready for the big leagues!

Coors Light is using mobile to hype its advertising using a Snap Tag on its in-store packaging. They’ve been testing this technology since spring and find it ready for the big game. It’s all about a mobile phone, a special icon, text messaging—and, of course, the ability to enter a contest and win a big prize. This article gives a good overview of how it works.

On the other hand, some brands are using the event to their advantage without actually buying an ad.

Papa John’s, who advertised last year, is taking a different approach this year. It’s giving away pizzas on game day. Of course, you have to register on their Facebook page to be eligible! But if what they told CNBC holds true and they spend about half a million dollars to put pizzas into 100,000 homes, is that a better expenditure than $3m for a TV ad? You call that one! And very important, how many fans will they add to the 1,501,026 they have now?

Bing is running a National Tailgating Championship that will culminate in Dallas this week. The first prize is “the coveted Golden Grill.” Oh, yeh? Actually, the whole thing is great fun with lots of snarky commentary like a set of contest guidelines (linked to the main contest site) full of legalese that essentially says that the judges will decide on the winner. Good for Microsoft and the Bing marketers for not taking themselves too seriously!

And most of all that master of Internet buzz The Old Spice Guy. He’s back and he’s watching the buzz about it on the web. One Super Fan will receive an early copy of the ad to be debuted the day after the Super Bowl. Oh, wow! That’s so delightfully arrogant that I’m watching for it. Stay tuned!

And I’m sure I’ve missed some other interesting or creative—or not—approaches. What else should we look for on Sunday?

Survey reveals that Social Networks play a limited role in the customer's decision making process in Holland

I came across a very interesting study just conducted by Fleishman-Hillard on December 2010 titled “The Digital Influence Index Study: ‘Understanding the Role of the Internet in the Lives of Consumers in the Netherlands”. The conclusions of the study:

1: The Internet is by far the most influential medium for Dutch consumers. Influence is defined as a combination of the time consumers spend on a medium and the relative importance they attach to it in their daily lives.
2: The internet is used mainly as a means to research decisions and to find supporting evidence for the decisions made. Search engines are key in the decision making process while social networks are, as of yet, hardly used. In particular when it comes to making decisions regarding durable goods and services, the Internet is viewed as the most important information source.
3: A particular remarkable conclusion is the marginal role social networks apparently play in decision making processes. The strength of social networks seems to be in emotional brand bonding rather than giving clear advice aimed at purchase decisions.
4: In general, the Dutch trust the information available on the Internet, in particular information provided by the government. The extensive amount of information available online makes it easier to learn quickly and makes it possible to make well-balanced decisions.
5: When seeking advice from others, the Dutch place a high value on the advice of friends, family and colleagues. Remarkably the majority of the respondents state that they only partly trust advice from strangers while conceding that the usefulness thereof is most likely high. The trustworthiness of content produced by sponsored or paid bloggers is extremely low.
6: Dutch Consumers are very familiar with micro blogs such as Twitter. In general the opinion is that people share too much uninteresting personal information. Consumers are also very aware of the possible implications of sharing personal information which could potentially harm their career.
7: Companies who make use of micro blogs to listen and anticipate consumers interests are appreciated more than those that don’t. Having a company keep their own micro blog is seen as less relevant. (Source: Fleishman-Hillard)

From all these findings nr 3 is particularly interesting. Social Networks play a marginal role in decision making processes. Attention here because they talk about Social Networks and not about Social Media. Is there a difference between Social Media and Social Networks? Indeed a big one since Social Networks are only one of the (five according to me) Social Media types. Since there are four more other Social Media categories I can imagine that all these together play indeed an important role in this process. This is evident if we look to conclusion nr 1 in combination with nr 5. Advice from friends, family and colleagues can be verbal or provided through social networking; In this point the study does not make any distinction and probably consumers do not see the online conversation with friends and family as social networking. No one can be sure and more research is necessary in this point. Regarding the advice from strangers this is by all means provided online: in online communities, online forums and influential blogs. There is also a discrepancy here namely that while in general consumers say that they do not trust strangers they recognize that the usefulness of strangers advice is most likely high. This means to me that in the end the social media and the information provided online plays a critical role in the consumer’s decision making process today (see also conclusion 1). The study reveals also interesting facts on media consumption trends in Holland and several other countries, underlying the need for more serious research in this area. The study also confirms something I wrote some time ago warning about excessive euphoria regarding the Social Media phenomenon.

One week in Greece Part III (final)

After a week in sunny and warm Greece back to Holland with cold and snow as you see in this picture taken the other days from my office window (this is the university central plaza)

 The time in Thessaloniki was very interesting; I found out that the interest about Social Media Marketing is in Greece as intense as everywhere else. All of my lectures in the University of Macedonia and the CITI College (picture below) were visited by many students and also people from the field with very interesting and challenging questions.

For me it was especially challenging to give two lectures in Greek for the first time!! In any case things went well. I also had a lot of interesting discussions with colleagues and PhD students; we discussed various ideas for future cooperation.

From this blog I would like to thank once more all persons who contributed to a very nice and useful week in Greece for my students and me. My students just sent me the link for their film from Athens in YouTube

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

Nokia's Vision for Social Media Marketing

Nokia generally shows up on lists of the top global brands. This year it was 8th on Interbrand’s annual survey. The report describes today’s consumer as “skeptical, social and savvy” and has good content on branding in that environment. Nokia’s response on their Conversations blog is also worthy of note by social media marketers.
It’s Nokia’s vision for what’s really their integrated marketing communications strategy, not just their social media strategy, that I find compelling. Their emphasis on getting away from isolated campaigns (“big bangs”) in favor of continuous engagement in earned media represents clear understanding of communications in a global, connected world. Forrester defines “earned media” as customers becoming the channel as a result of a sustained and well executed social media strategy in paid and owned (branded) media.

But even if you are a big brand with a lot of resources things will sometimes go wrong as they recently did for Nokia. However, they managed to turn a distinct negative into something reasonably positive.

It’s a story of a sports blogger being approached by Nokia’s PR agency with incentives for participating in one of a set of sports events as part of an outdoor-themed campaign. There’s more to it and you should read it for yourself, but the bottom line is that the promises to the blogger were simply not kept. Is that more likely when the campaign was outsourced? You can decide that for yourself.

The story was published on the British Econsultancy blog on October 12. Nokia’s response wasn’t fast (see the October 20 comment), but when it came social media director Mark Squires took responsibility for the fiasco and made it clear that Nokia tried to make up for the failure. When you screw up, that’s about the best you can do.

The good news is that it seems to be a relatively rare screw-up by a company that generally does its social media marketing well. In fact, the early October interchange with Econsultancy appears to have resulted in a late October interview with Mark Squires that’s worth reading for insights into how Nokia’s strategy has evolved within the organization.

While researching this post, I came across an interesting conference presentation by Molly Schonthan who was then head of social media for Nokia in North America. The section on their complex and apparently effective program at SXSW2010 is especially interesting. If you don’t have time for the 30-minute video, page through her presentation for more interesting insight into a company that takes social media marketing seriously.

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?

Social Media Marketing on the rise

After almost two months of silence - due to an extremely busy schedule - I am back to blogging. A lot of interesting things have happened in the meantime. I survived teaching three classes Marketing Management in 1/2 semester and tomorrow the students should demonstrate what they have learned in the mid-semester exams. With our new International Bachelor BA course things were very excited since the group assignment of this year was a bit different than usual: The students must analyze the current online presence of the New Acropolis Museum and design a new one. The museum direction was very helpful and even made a special video for the occasion. The faculty offered a trip to Athens to the winning group and our University newspaper published a nice article about this.
Furthermore my NIKOS colleagues and I have survived another relocation of the department, inside the UT campus this time. I try to cope with the (accidental) formatting of the hard disc of my notebook and the avalanche of interest about Social Media marketing. Last week I enjoyed very much speaking to the ACCENTURE Social CRM Master Class in Amsterdam. Last month I participated in a Social Media Seminar organized by BothSolutions in the Venture Lab Twente and in November I will give two seminars on Social Media Marketing to the University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki. Other exciting news is that one of my BA students finished his BA thesis with subject the potential of Social Media as instruments of higher education marketing (see NEW PUBLICATIONS). Very interesting findings on the online social behavior of future university students in The Netherlands. A lot of interest already for this study since it was presented in the 2010 Student Research Conference in The Hague a few days ago; It is a good basis for a couple of scientific papers (the conference paper is available at request). This is part of research we do in online behavior of Social Media users.


So far so good but that’s not all; many exciting things have happened recently (and keep happening) in the Social Media domain. In the next weeks I will try to present some interesting cases of Social Media marketing in reference (whenever possible) to my Social Media Marketing Model - based on my 2008 JDDDM paper - that despite its age is becoming more and more actual. Those interested stay tuned.

Social Media Research Day in Utrecht

Last week our Social Media Research Center (SOMERE) in cooperation with SOGETI organized the SOMERE Day that takes place every half year. We were guests of the Crossmedia Lab of the Hogeschool Utrecht. Many of the students doing research in Social Media in the University of Twente and many students from Utrecht as well as people from the field attended the session. The afternoon meeting included a short speech of the Lab Lector Harry van Vliet and my colleague and initiator of SOMERE Sjoerd de Vries. I must say that the work of the colleagues in Utrecht is impressive and their web site (fully in English) was a surprise for me. I gave also a short presentation about my research, together with two of our students who spoke about the findings in their Master Thesis on social Media and knowledge management and politics. A representative of the ABNAMRO bank told us about the banks plans to introduce Social Media as knowledge management platform and a presentation of Erik Hekman about the Lab’s research on cultural heritage and Social Media. A panel discussion followed moderated by Menno van Doorn from SOGETI. A very interesting day indeed.

26% of marketers willing to invest in Twitter

The Twitter hype is growing fast: According to BizReport quoting WebBizIdeas.com 265 of marketers are willing to commit marketing budgets to Twitter (43% were unsure and 31% said no). Interesting views indicating the booming interest of marketers about the Social Media. My humble opinion however is that these marketers should start working with the Social Media as marketing tools in a more simple yet important way namely by creating the proper organizational infrastructure that will tap the online customer voice before they start adding their own voice to it. Even better if they also try  to learn bit more about these customers, an issue not covered by the study. In the paper we submitted to the HTSF 2010 Conference we will present the results of a market segmentation of the Social Networking Sites users in NL.

Crowdsourcing: What is this?

My attention on the potential of crowds as business asset dates back to 2005 when I read the book of James Surowiecki "The Wisdom of Crowds" . (Visitors of this blog have also read about this subject here.) My interest in Crowdsourcing has been increasing ever since and Crowdsourcing has become one of the standard elements of my model (where I describe it as "Tapping Customer Crestivity) outlining the role of the Social Media as marketing tools. One of my recent research projects is an effort to understand the origins and limits of Crowdsourcing by means of a thorough literature review in cooperation with one of my graduating students. A working paper will be hopefully available in spring.
For those who would like to have a taste of what crowdsourcing is all about I advise the Crowdsourcing Examples blog and an introductory video by Jeff Howe, journalist of the WIRED Magazine, and author of the book Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business

Social Media Marketing Case: the Dominos Pizza Effect II

The Dominos Pizza Effect is on of the favorite posts for many new visitors of this blog for some reason. Maybe because the search term "Dominos Pizza" is popular (see the advantage of using the right labels!). Today another story of Dominos Pizza and Social Media: it is about how Ramon DeLeon, a social media savvy Dominos Pizza manager in Chicago turned a potential (social media) publicity disaster to a textbook social media marketing case study. 
It all started when a customer in Chicago (who happened to be none less than Amy Korin also known as Interactive Amy) received the wrong pizza after an hour delay. The details of the story you can read in the Social Media Examiner ; the video of Ramon setting the record straight is quite interesting. For those of the blog visitors who have followed my lectures on Social Media Marketing the situation must be familiar. (Remember the Passive and Active ways of engaging Social Media as Marketing tools?).
My thanks to Sander Duivestein for his post that put my attention to the case.

Mediterranean Conference of Information Systems (MICS)

I am just back from the 4th MICS, a fast growing new conference in the already crowded IS conference domain. The conference was held in Athens Greece and attracted about 250 participants (from just 65 two years ago). Maybe the Mediterranean destinations are attractive but I met very few participants from N. Europe and none from any other continent. Athens had for us a very nice weather and the conference offered to the participants an excellent dinner in the foot of Parthenon.

Very good organized by the Athens University of Economics and Business (AUEB), the university I graduated 30 years ago! I was glad to give a lecture in the place I followed lectures as student back in the 70s. Many interesting sessions and presentations. The program was including a visit to the amazing new Acropolis museum ( below me standing on the terrace of the building). The missing (or rather stolen) "Elgin Marbles" are replaced by copies that will be removed if the originals will ever return to Athens. Many in Greece and abroad hope that some day this act of cultural vandalism will be reversed; the 150 million Euro museum was build also to put more pressure to the custodian of the sculptures the British Museum to return them to Greece.

My presentation for those interested is available in SLIDESHARE. The paper is available at request!

Virtual Touch and virtual Scent: Next steps in Virtual Reality?

Looking for killer apps? This can be the Touchable Holography developed by researchers of the University of Tokyo. If this really works (and it seems from the YouTube videos that this is an interesting area of research) and in combination with virtual scent could bring the e-shop a step closer to the consumer who wants to touch and smell before buying. I will keep following and update on this.

Social Media Marketing: Twitter as promotional tool

Twitter becomes more and more a promotional tool rather than a personal communication tool as I predicted some time ago. Twitter is a new (and most probably effective) way of reaching customers with low airline fairs by Jetblue (that as you maybe remember I found to be the most "social" airline) and United Airlines . A quick test confirms that Jetblue is still far ahead of United as to its social presence, with micro-blogging (in fact Twitter) being the reason for this.