5 Ways For Marketing Leaders to Toe-Dip Into Social Media

[Posted by David Cooperstein]

Follow me @minicooper

During what I call the “black and white” days of the internet in 1995, when email was a green screen “app”, I presented a direct mail CEO with a business plan for direct marketing online. When he voiced his disbelief in the power of digital marketing, I walked him back to his office, installed the Mosaic browser, and stood behind him while he used the mouse to navigate a few sites I suggested. In about 10 minutes, he went into a trance of amazement at the data, the content and the interactivity. He went on to refocus the company on interactive media.

Last week, I was at dinner with a client and its board of directors. For them, the topic was eCommerce and social media. But like in 1995, the question for these folks was “So how do I learn how to use these tools?”Like my earlier experience, they understood the concept of social media and online selling, but had concerns for the privacy of their station in life and the daunting task of how to make sense of the frothy new communications mode that has invaded their children’s’ and grandchildren’s lives. For them, and for others who don’t want to ask “how do I get started” with social media, here are 5 things you can do to get familiar with the power of the medium: 

1. Gain customer intelligence about your brand or product.  Search for your brand on Twitter. Go to search.twitter.com and put in the brand your represent or the name of a brand you identify with. Read what people have to say about your brand or product. Search on your competitors too. Find out where you both stand in the Groundswell of commentary without having to sign up for anything.
2. Learn more about colleagues and job candidates. Search for a friend, colleague, job candidate or lost love on Google, and click on the LinkedIn link. You’ll find that LinkedIn just shows what someone has done, not what quirky comments they make about sports, politics or their last brilliant idea.
3. Test the power of scalable intimacy with friends and brands. Use your real name on Facebook, set up privacy to keep you secure, then follow step 2. You will find a door open to your nostalgic history of high school friends and college romances. And you’ll find that you still have some things in common. Search for a brand, politician, or relative on Facebook and read their feed, look at their photos, and read what they are reading. This is how people “fan” things, voting with a click of their mouse that they like something. Similar to an email database, it allows the marketer to remind consumers who have "opted-in" of new products, new shows, or updates on social activities of their own.
4. Test the power of socializing content. Go to Wall Street Journal’s web site, and link your Facebook account to your WSJ profile. Or click on the StumbleUpon or Digg links next to an interesting article. From a New York Times article, you click on the "Share" link to connect to a series of social tools. Your connections will start reading what you read, and likely start a dialog with you on the subject.
5. Rate and review products you sell or you have used. Read product reviews for your products or the new Dan Brown book you read on Amazon or a hotel you stayed in on TripAdvisor. Put in your own feedback. Even something as simple as product reviews or hotel recommendations are part of the social web. Wherever you see voting, recommendations or comments, you are participating in social media.

As you make your way through these steps, search for me on Facebook, or follow me on Twitter (www.twitter.com/minicooper, or @minicooper in "Twexicon"). Or ask me in plain old email at dcooperstein-at-forrester.com.

For the U.S, Digital Is Now Mainstream

[Posted by David Cooperstein]

Follow me @minicooper

iPhones, DVRs, and navigation guides are thought of as devices for the early adopter. Or at least they used to be. Forrester released the results of its latest annual Consumer Benchmark Data Overview Report, which concludes that the use of digital devices has become a mainstream part of every day life. This finding, which is critical to how companies plan their product and marketing plans for the coming year, holds significant power in terms of where marketers spend their money during the rest of 2009 and into 2010.

In this year’s report, we segmented consumers by lifestage, to help marketers understand the distinct use of digital technologies to reach young singles and couples, young families, older families, and older singles and couples. This lens provides some very interesting consumer insights into how  technology behavior changes when people transition between different stages of their lives. Which devices do they own, and how many of them, what are they buying and not buying, how they are using the Internet and even how they’ve structured their digital home. .

The New York Times has a write-up of the report this morning, click here to read the article.

Read more about this report and its methodology on our Consumer Market Research blog, or if you are a client link directly to the report here. Click here to get access to some additional consumer insights related to this report.

Also, note how Marketers can put this data to use:

To get a deeper understanding of how to use this report to refine your media mix, Forrester's Marketing Leadership analysts will be applying the results of this survey to our Media Allocation Tool. For more insight into this tool, please contact me via email at dcooperstein-at-forrester.com, or @minicooper on Twitter.

Successful Integrating Marketing For Consumer Goods (and My First Doc as a Marketing Leader)

[Posted by David Cooperstein]

Twitter: @minicooper

This morning my first new document at Forrester went live since 2002. I remember the thrill of having a whole new set of things to talk about at business meetings when those reports came out. Having shed my history as a Telecom and Retail expert, I am now more firmly focused on the issues that face Marketing Leaders, as they try to marry traditional and interactive marketing efforts.

This first report is a quick study on how low consideration brands, like soap, snacks, and sinus meds can be relevant online with some case studies from brands -- like Suave and SunChips

-- that worked with consumers (clients, see the report here: “Integrated Marketing Strategies For Low-Consideration Brands“). It builds on a theme that Forrester calls “borrowed relevance” in which brands can become relevant provided the message ties well with the content and the medium it is presented in – be that television, banner ads, branded content sites or social media efforts. The key is to integrate marketing carefully across channels, so that indirect marketers of consumer goods can engage their consumers in discussion and brand promise, and still drive them to the store to purchase. The right integrated message will drive interest, and ultimately sales, if crafted correctly.

GM Spins a Cautionary Tale For Microsoft and All Marketing Leaders

[Posted by David Cooperstein]

Follow me on Twitter @minicooper

Around the dinner table in upstate New York this past weekend, and again during a long bike ride, the same conversation arose amongst some friends regarding the parallels between GM in the 1970s and Microsoft today. I was intrigued, not only because of the great discussion we had, but because we had been driving around in a 1973 Buick Centurion (see me and my Hungarian Vizslas in that great 35 year old beauty, below). It was built the same year as the Arab oil embargo that led Congress to mandate fuel economy standards. GM's market share was still a dominant 40+ %, and imports were small and noisy or unreliable.

The analogy is poignant as Microsoft announced in July that revenues fell for the first time since their 1986 debut as a public company. This is a cautionary tale for Microsoft -- and all marketers at large companies, regardless of industry - that is foreshadowed in GM's decades of woe and how to avoid them. In the context of the perception of Microsoft today versus GM in the 1970s, marketers should remember that:

• Competition starts small, so watch all comers. From a competitive perspective, Microsoft faces some of the same competitive pressure that GM missed in the past. Apple is to Microsoft what BMW was to GM: a premium priced product with an intensely loyal following. Google and Zoho today present the same challenge Toyota and Honda did in the 70s: they present a more nimble, iterative approach to the mass market. Perceptions relative to these competitors are critical to marketplace success. Whether you market software, hand soap or apparel, the hot competitor to worry about is probably already invading your space, but not in a way that you have yet anticipated. Look for them, learn about them, and prepare to act.

• Products should be reinvented, not iterated. GM barely iterated their engines and designs, letting other companies lead the charge on SUVs, sports sedans and minivans. Only recently has Cadillac invested the money to completely reinvent their image. Why is Apple, like Cadillac, a design leader in the computing world today? Because they broke their own, buggy mold to create a consumer friendly offering when they released OS X and the iPod. Conversely, Microsoft let the competition drive feature creep, which resulted in the issues with Vista. Windows 7 promises to be a reinvention, and should be presented as such. Marketers should always include the customer in their discovery, design, and deployment of new offerings to minimize the likelihood that they will introduce one of the 80% of new products that fail (for clients: "CDI: Defined But Not Adopted").

• Put customer perspective into the product.The Pontiac Aztek was a great example of a car that had corporate dysfunction designed right into it.  For most companies, customer experience is highly correlated with loyalty, something Microsoft - and all marketers - need to stay on top of (for clients: "Customer Experience Boosts Revenue"). In theory, Windows 7 will fix what broke in the Vista effort. But Microsoft marketers should have insisted on easy upgrades from XP, which 86% of corporations stuck to with when Vista proved to hard to use (Forrester clients, see "Corporate Desktop Operating System Trends, Q3 2008 To Q2 2009"). The upgrade path to Windows 7 is so daunting, even Walt Mossberg says to just buy a new computer (WSJ: "For Some, Move To Windows 7 Will Be Tough" -- subscription may be required).

• Expand channels clearly and carefully. GM is starting to break down its monolithic and intransigent channel -- dealers -- with shut downs and partnerships like their new eBay Store in California. Putting Bing on the Yahoo! network is a step in the right direction for Microsoft in the fight for share with Google (see our Interactive Marketing blog, no subscription required!). Will it run the risk of GM's "badge engineering" (marketing the same car under different nameplates) that began in the late 70s and early 80s, and eroded rather than grew their market share? Microsoft will benefit from usage of Bing as an additional channel, and not cannibalize its own potential. As marketers should know, distribution channels are expensive to replicate, but must provide additional market share to be worthwhile.

Do you see commonalities between your business and the trajectory GM blazed starting in the 70s? Comment here, or email me at dcooperstein [at] forrester.com.

Media Agencies Want to be Media Technology Companies

Last week I was treated to sit in on a major agency pow-wow hosted by The Advertising Club and sponsored by ad exchange ADSDAQ, to address the latest trend in media buying science: Agency Demand Platforms. Each of the four major holding companies, represented by WPP's MediaCom, Omnicom Digital, Publicis' VivaKi and IPG's Cadreon – sent a senior representative from their media business to talk about the move into managing online buys through the construction of demand management platforms to manage online display inventory. The panel was hosted by none other than “the Wenda” who examined the issue of Art vs. Science when buying media at the IAB’s annual conference back in February. As always, she poked and prodded and uncovered the following:

• Media agencies are not technical, but want to be. Agencies are investing in technology platforms to create defensible value for their media clients. But only WPP has taken the giant step of buying a major ad serving company 24/7 Real Media. Smart money should be invested with technology companies that can customize their interface for the agencies, and provide clients a continuous state of the art experience.
• Display advertising’s time is still yet to come. The ringer on the panel was Ross Sandler from RBC Capital Markets, who indicated that online display advertising would continue to take a back seat to search for at least another 18-24 months. During that time, targeting and buying behavior will change dramatically as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo launch and update their buy-side interfaces, along with Quantcast and others.
• Audience-driven media placements will ride alongside content-driven buys. Clients will still demand familiar content alongside which they will get perceived brand value. As display and search continue to work for, rather than against, each other, audience buys will start to merge these two mechanisms for reaching consumers.
• Media-driven creative is not here yet. Not surprisingly, these media execs agreed that the creative folks still drive the media decisions. That’s fine for TV, but for online media there is growing need to align the message with the medium in real time.

For online media to grow from pseudo-science to art and science, these topics must be pounded out. For a call on Agency Buying Platforms, stay tuned to research from Emily Riley and Michael Greene in August. From a marketers perspective, how do you feel about an automated media placement process? Are attractive CPMs a motivator, or should your media be handled with kid gloves?

Email me at dcooperstein@forrester.com, find me on Twitter @minicooper, or post a comment on this blog entry to let me know what issues you grapple with the most. 

A New Voice With a Ring of Familiarity

This is my first blog post as a Principal Analyst at Forrester, but not my first time writing for the company. When I left Forrester in 2002, blogs were just getting on the radar, Facebook was still based in Cambridge (and you needed a .edu email) and Interactive Marketing, eCommerce and Broadband were dirty words as the Internet Economy was in mid-January of a nuclear winter. My cell phone at the time was a pre-RAZR with limited internet access, and Apple had not yet introduced OSX. They were grim times.

We are again in the midst of a recession, this one is caused by issues beyond the domain of the tech industry, which is on relatively solid ground. But I have chosen this as the perfect time to return to Forrester as a Principal Analyst for the Marketing Leadership Role. The reason for my return is the optimism I have, and many share, toward the dynamic changes occurring between marketers and consumers because of technology. Those who have embraced more modern versions of the technologies mentioned above and changed the way marketing functions. This is a great thing for all of us who want to sell more, connect more, and establish a greater awareness in the minds of consumers. But changes to the way marketing operates are not as easy as the tools make them seem, since there are branding, advertising, budget, product and feedback issues that make CMOs and Marketing Leaders grimace.

For example, AdAge’s Meaghan Meehan posed this question last week of how to connect with less predictable market segments that can be reached by a mix of traditional and new-fangled strategies here. She, like me, thinks that the generation that will be moms and dads in the near future need to be embraced by advertisers, not just visible to them, as they make substantial brand choices in their early 20s that stay with them as they build families. But how to reach them involves more activity driven marketing and less commercial spots. But what mix? And what level of effort? And what is the ROI?

I return to Forrester to answer these questions after serving as a CMO myself at the online ad network company Burst Media. In that role, there was a balancing act between enabling our business to sell online ad space to marketers and the agencies that represent them, but also to help the company understand the issues that a brand-owning CMO faces regarding where they place their brand. So the issues that I grappled with – for the company to grow and for our customers to succeed – were similar. Is my audience really seeing the marketing I put in front of them? Is the web site strategic or tactical? Is our agency strong enough to execute our message? Can I get more money from the CFO? Do Sales and our customers value the message we are putting into the market place? Finally, does my marketing intuition and execution mate well with the demands of the rest of the senior team.

So what is my research agenda now that I am looking at the role from the outside? That is the question I want to pose to you as an audience. I have my ideas, having been a public company CMO and a start up exec, as to what I would want Forrester to help me with in those roles. But tell me – what is hard, and what is easy, about the changes occurring in managing marketing in today’s environment? Is it process, or is it mindset, that require change? Is it managing the concept, or getting buy in from senior executive peers that is more frustrating? Do agencies provide the services required to move into this new marketing era?

Email me at dcooperstein@forrester.com, find me on Twitter @minicooper, or post a comment on this blog entry to let me know what issues you grapple with the most.