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October 06, 2009

Don't Screw Up Your Mobile Marketing Opportunity

by Josh Bernoff

From my Marketing News column.

Mobile advertising has been the coming thing for so long that some of us gave up on it. Now it’s here. In a Forrester Research survey of 176 interactive marketers in March, one in three were currently using mobile marketing, and another third were planning to do so. Of those who market with mobile, 47% will increase their budgets this year.

Mobile marketing plans Mobile is so close to the customer (in her pocket!) that it’s pretty powerful if you do it right. It’s also dangerous to your brand if you do it wrong, especially since consumers are very aware that they pay for mobile phone and data services. So rather than just be a cheerleader, I’ll put down some advice here based on successful marketing campaigns.

Let’s start with adoption. As you might guess, the interest in mobile is driven by the adoption of Web browsing phones from Apple, RIM, and others. Around 26 million people, 15% of the mobile phone customers in the US, use the mobile Web at least once a month. That’s a juicy, young, affluent segment, and it’s growing. So it’s no surprise that marketers have gotten moving in reaching them.

And mobile marketing isn’t just mobile Web sites. It also includes banners on other mobile sites, short codes (like the codes you send text messages to when voting on American Idol), ads in phones’ video programming, and even little two-dimensional codes (like bar codes) that send mobile customers to Web sites when photographed.

Just as in developing social technology strategies, we recommend using the “POST” method (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology – and note that the choice of technology comes last). As my colleagues Julie Ask and Charles Golvin explored in a recent report called “The POST Method: A Systematic Approach To Mobile Strategy,” you have to start by assessing the mobile technologies your customers use. Even if you don’t have access to Forrester survey data, you can still learn from your customers’ behavior. For example, Sears found traffic from mobile phones to its sites growing, but those customers were bouncing off because the sites weren’t designed for mobile. If your site doesn’t recognize and reconfigure itself for mobile, you’ll see the same thing. As soon as you can prove that a significant number of your customers are mobile Internet users, you should do what Sears did, and build a mobile site.

After people, think about objectives – and note that mobile can serve a variety of different ones. For example, after Jiffy Lube used mobile coupons to drive foot traffic at one of its franchises, 50% of its new customers at that franchise came from the mobile promotion. Ford had a different objective; it wanted to generate awareness for its Ford Flex and used banners ads on mobile sites to generated 3.5 million impressions and a 1.4% click-through rate.

Your strategy and tactics will vary based on your target. Take AXE, Unilever’s personal-care brand for 18-to-24 year-old guys. AXE advertised on MTV and suggested a short code. Texting to the short-code generated a link to a site on “hair crisis relief.” That’s a tactic that works great with young men, but don’t try to get business executives texting –or you’ll find the yield is a whole lot lower.

So, how can you not screw this up? First, keep it simple. The more complex the process, the fewer the people who will follow it, and the less success you’ll have. The diversity of tools in mobile is tempting, and that’s the problem – you can get sucked into the technology and leave the marketing behind.

For example, in a recent case study, Neil Strother, Forrester’s expert on mobile marketing, describes how simple banner ads helped RIM sell more advanced BlackBerry devices. They started with ads on mobile sites for Yahoo! and The Weather Channel, since those mobile sites had experience with generating and dealing with large volumes of mobile usage. The banners were formatted automatically for the customer’s current device and one click led to RIM’s mobile-enhanced site. When RIM found success was correlated to those who clicked on the mobile store-locator page, they used that as a key metric for the program. Simple plan, simple execution, and simple measurement led to a successful campaign.

Second, integrate it with other media. Media can drive texting; if you’re advertising, think about how mobile could boost the engagement of your customers who took the time to read the ad. And if you’re a mobile marketer, ask yourself how your campaign fits into the overall media picture.

Third, follow the rules in the Mobile Marketing Association’s Code of Conduct to stay on the right side of the privacy line. You’re about to interact with people on a device they feel very personal about, so you’ll need a framework for treating their data right.

Finally, make sure you think a little longer-term than the average advertising manager. The advertising manager wants to think of mobile as a new medium to tap, and that’s fine. But the database marketing manager is lusting over the new contacts she can make with short codes and opt-ins. Unless both get what they need out of the campaign, you’ve wasted your mobile opportunity.

Posted by Josh Bernoff at 03:17 PM in Marketing, Marketing News, Mobile | | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

June 26, 2009

To Use Social Technologies In Ad Campaigns, Get The Rhythm Right

Marketing news 6_15_cover By Josh Bernoff, from my Marketing News column.

Social technologies take a while to build, but last a long time. Think about the effort it takes to get people reading your blog, following your Twitter feed, viewing your YouTube videos, joining your community, or friending your Facebook page. They all start with zero viewers, but the more they grow, the more powerful they become.

Ad campaigns move at a faster pace. More importantly, they have a beginning and an end. You rent a chance to get some attention for a few months, then you see whether you moved the needle.

Since advertising people often get responsibility for social elements of marketing, this creates a fundamental disconnect. Marketers who tap into these two forms of communication can get whipsawed – the social builds too slowly, and the campaign ends too quickly, to make it easy to synchronize them. Even when they do succeed, there’s huge waste. If you’ve assembled 100,000 customers into a community behind your brand, what happens when you’re done with them? Send them a thank you email and say good bye? That’s a tragic waste.

The answer, as my colleague, Sean Corcoran, discovered in the research behind his report “Using Social Applications In Ad Campaigns,” means thinking of social fans as an asset that you can build with a campaign and then tap over and over again. To do this, you must also make sure you connect with and feed them between campaigns, to keep them interested.

For example, Starbucks has 1.2 million fans on Facebook. So when it launched its first instant coffee, VIA Ready brew, those brand loyalists got to tag whether they liked it, and to share it with their friends. And H&R Block took its 2008 tax-time promotions on MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter and turned them into 1,700 Facebook fans and 2,300 Twitter followers that they regularly check in with as tax season approaches.

Marty Collins, a social marketer at Microsoft, has figured this out. She supported Microsoft’s “I’m a PC” campaign late last year with short-term social tools, so people could contribute their own content to the campaign. But now, Marty spends 75% of her time with continuous online discussions to make sure the company has an engaged audience to tap into for the future.

Here’s how to master the rhythm. First of all, you need a launch plan. Sometimes, this means identifying key fans and tapping into them early, so they can help you build a community, spread buzz, or make the contributions that will attract more people to your offering. It may also mean starting the online portions of your campaign early, so it has time to grow. If you must start your online social campaign concurrent with your other ads, be aware that most of the impact will come weeks or months into the campaign, when the momentum and word-of-mouth has time to build.

Second, during the campaign, pay close attention to customer participation. Social applications need fuel. You may need to plan events over a period of weeks or months to keep people coming back. And don’t be afraid to make mid-course corrections in your social campaign, based on what’s working and what’s not. Most importantly, your company has to participate. Since you’re tapping into brand fans, the feedback from you is the fuel that will keep things going. You can’t spin up an online community and expect it to continue on its own.

Finally, you’ll need an exit strategy. What will you do when the campaign winds down? If you’ve named your Twitter account after your ad campaign, you could have a problem – maybe it’s better to name it after something more permanent, like your brand. And do you have the budget to keep the community going in a maintenance mode? You’d better budget for that, because this community could well generate the ideas for your next campaign.

In the end, companies that have built up fan bases this way will have an advantage. For one thing, as this trend picks up, the socially active consumers will be getting serenaded by every brand in America. In this environment, Nike, Coca-Cola, and Scion are all direct competitors – better to sign them up to your dance card before another brand comes along to romance them.

Of course the real challenge here is for agencies, who tend to get paid on their short-term efforts. Partly because of this short term focus, clients are reaching out to digital agencies like imc² and PR firms like Edelman and Fleishman Hillard to build social applications, often keeping them out of the hands of traditional ad firms. Agencies who wish to play here will have to adapt to these long-term platforms, which means a new set of skills.

They’ll also have to find ways to get paid for efforts that pay off in the long-term. To that end, marketers ought to consider paying by the number and enthusiasm of fans recruited, rather than by the impression. That’s the only way the agency, the campaign, and the social media will ever end up in sync.

Posted by Josh Bernoff at 12:38 PM in Advertising, Josh's posts, Marketing, Marketing News | | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

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May 08, 2009

Social Strategy for Exciting (and Boring) Brands

By Josh Bernoff

(From my Marketing News column.)

Cover April 30 There are two kinds of brands in the world. If you are a marketer, you know what I mean. There are brands people like to talk about, and brands they don’t.

Brands of the first kind – the brands that marketing thinker Rohit Bhargava calls “talkable” – are uncommon. Apple’s iPhone is a talkable brand. So is Harley-Davidson. If you market a talkable brand, you have the luxury of tapping into customers who love you, but you’ll have to be careful – those customers have already decided what the brand stands for, and woe unto you if you go against their wishes.

Brands that people don’t like to talk about – I’ll call them “boring” brands – are everywhere. If, like most marketers, you market a boring brand, then you’re really earning your living as a marketer. That’s because you are trying to get people interested in something they don’t really care about.

I’ve been analyzing social strategies for both kinds of brands, and they form an interesting contrast.

 

Favorite brands Let’s start with the talkable brands. In a recent survey [Forrester report "The Social Tools Consumers Want From Their Favorite Brands"], we asked online consumers whether they’d like to interact with various forms of social application with their favorite brands. Forty-two percent said they would, but the types of interactions they preferred were varied. About one in four consumers would interact with these brands in a discussion forum, one in five would watch videos, and one in six would be interested in connecting with them through a social network profile, like a Facebook page. Only 12% want to read a blog about the brand, which reinforced the earlier research we’d done, showing that blogs are the least trusted form of communication between companies and customers.

What does this mean for the marketer? It means connecting with those enthusiasts is going to be more than a full-time job. First, examine the applications they’ve already set up on their own – their discussion forums, their blogs, their own videos and social network groups. Figure out what you want to join up with, and what you want to create. And you’ll have to create multiple applications, because as this research shows, your customers don’t agree with each other about where they’d prefer to connect with you.

As a result, you’ll probably have make sure they all to those social network profiles, communities, and videos connect with one another, and with the sites your fans already have. We recently worked with a B2B company that faces this exact problem – its customers use its products, love them, and have already set up user groups online. The good news: whatever the company does, it will have active participation. The challenge is not messing up the relationships already percolating in the existing user group.

The boring brands have different problem, but social applications can help them, too. [Forrester Report: "Social Technology Strategies for 'Boring' Consumer Brands".] The key with boring brands is to get people talking about their problems, since they won’t talk about your brand. In advertising, you can force messages on people watching other things. In a social context, this fails miserably.

Applications that talk about customers problems create “borrowed relevance,” since you generate talk they care about, then make yourself a part of it. American Express (credit cards are boring, face it) created the Members’ Project, a contest to choose deserving charities, since it realized that charity would generate more passion than credit cards. And in perhaps the most dramatic example, Procter & Gamble knew girls wouldn’t talk about tampons, but would talk about music, cliques, and school, so it created beinggirl.com as a vehicle to deliver (very quietly) the occasional feminine care products message.

Borrowed relevance is a versatile strategy. Liberty Mutual (in another boring category, insurance) wrapped itself in relevance by creating The Responsibility Project, a community about moral decisions. Johnson & Johnson built a Facebook page for mothers of ADHD kids – because, as with all medications, its ADHD drug is boring but its sufferers generate interesting problems. Doritos invited its customers to make ads in the 2007 Superbowl, since an ad contest is more exciting – and more social – than a corn chip.

Regardless of whether your brand is talkable or boring, as you launch these social applications, you’ll generate something very valuable – people who care about your brand, or at least the problems it solves. I’ve begun to ask brand marketers a question: who are your most engaged customers? I don’t want an answer like “women 25 to 34 with at least one child.” I want an answer like “Emily DiBernardo, she lives in Kansas and she just can’t stop talking about us.” With social applications, you’ll find Emily.

If your brand is talkable, your social efforts will surface the brand enthusiasts who have the most influence. If it’s boring, your social applications will help you find your rare but valuable brand enthusiasts, or even generate a few. Pay attention to these people. Because as advertising clutter rises and word of mouth becomes more important, they’re about to become some of your most important corporate assets.

Posted by Josh Bernoff at 01:48 PM in Marketing News, Social media | | Comments (13) | TrackBack (1)

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April 10, 2008

Marketing News column: Are Your Customers Ready For Social Applications?

by Josh Bernoff

Marketing_news_2Concurrent with the release of Groundswell, I've begun writing a column in Marketing News, the magazine of the American Marketing Association. I'll share these columns with you as a regular blog feature.

Here's the column from the April 1 issue. If you're reading Groundswell, you'll recognize these three people from Chapter 3.

Are Your Customers Ready For Social Applications?

As I take over this column from my colleague Brian Kardon, I thought I’d start by challenging you with a question I ask all the marketers we work with at Forrester Research: do you know what your customers are doing? Do you know whether they’re active with social applications? How active?

Most marketers I speak with don’t know. And that’s partly because the question is pretty complicated.

Eric_kingsley_7 I recently saw a vivid application of this as I investigated how the Lego company markets its products to adults. Lego makes most of its sales to kids, but Tormod Askildsen, a senior executive there, recently told me he estimates that 5% to 10% of the company’s sales go to adults – the so-called AFOLs, or adult fans of Legos. AFOLs have a thriving online community going at LUGNET.com (that’s the Lego User Group Network).

I recently met three of these AFOLs at a model train show, where they were showing off an incredible Lego town and train model they had created. And as I interviewed them, I could see in microcosm how their participation reflects the varied elements that make up social media.

Joe_comeau_3 Eric Kingsley was the most active of all the AFOLs I met on social networks. He posts frequently and uploads photos to LUGNET and maintains three Web sites, two of which are dedicated exclusively to Lego. He’s a major force in the Lego community.

Joe Comeau, another AFOL, buys $4,000 of Lego a year. But his online contribution tends more toward reacting to the contributions of others, in forums, for example. “When someone comes up with a new idea, you build upon it,” he told me. “Before you know it, you are building at a level far surpassing what you ever thought of.”

Linda_dallas_plus_centerpiece Linda Dallas, a quiet woman who recently married another member of the local group (their centerpieces were Legos), reads the online postings and forums avidly, but rarely makes contributions of her own.

If you were Tormod Askildsen, you would need to pay attention to all three of these types of customers. In every communication, you need to think not just of the Eric Kingsleys, who will take your messages and spread them far and wide, but to the Joe Comeaus who will react to those messages, and the Linda Dallases, who will read and be influenced by them.

Let’s take a look at what this means in your world.

In the United States, as of about 6 months ago, 56% of all online consumers had participated in some sort of social application in the last month. (This comes from an online survey we conducted on social applications in 2007.) But this single number hides a complex set of behaviors.

Only 18% of those online consumers had actually gone to the trouble of publishing a blog or Web page, uploading video or music, or posting articles or stories online. We call these people (like Lego enthusiast Eric Kingsley) Creators, and this group – less than one out of five – are creating the content that drives the whole social phenomenon. 

But what makes the social world online is that people can participate in so many ways. Not every has to be a Creator. In the classification we use with our clients, 25% are Critics, reacting to content from others by commenting on blogs or online forums (like Joe Comeau), posting ratings or reviews, or editing wikis. Collectors, who organize the social content in by compiling content feeds (RSS), “tagging” content, and voting on sites like digg.com, make up 12%. People on social networks like Facebook – Joiners – include 25% of the online population. And nearly half – 48% – are Spectators at least reading or consuming some form of social content (like Linda Dallas). These groups all overlap, of course. 

Before building a social application, you’d better look into what your customers are doing. For example, when Chevy wanted to market its Aveo vehicle to college students, it wisely leveraged their participation in Facebook and MySpace, since a majority of college students are Joiners. It started with people – its customer base – and built a program that matched what those people were doing.

What are your customers doing? You could survey them, or you could make reasonable estimates based on their demographics – we’ve got a social profile calculator up at groundswell.forrester.com if you’d like to try it. But building social applications for your customers without knowing their profile is like mounting an expedition in strange country without a map – you may not end up where you were planning.

Posted by Josh Bernoff at 12:01 PM in Groundswell, Josh's posts, Marketing News | | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

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