Case Study: The NHL Uses Tweet-Ups To Energize Its Fan Base And Reach New Audiences

[Posted by Nate Elliott. Follow me on twitter.]

Yesterday we published a case study that I'm really excited about, covering how the NHL used tweet-ups to create excitement for the 2009 Stanley Cup playoffs. The league worked with fans to organize a series of events that took place simultaneously around the world on the opening night of the playoffs. I had a chance to attend the tweet-up in Vancouver, and thought they were a great example of the power of both online and offline influence.

In the weeks leading up to the playoffs, fans started talking online about organizing a series of playoff tweet-ups -- and the league's Director of Social Media Mike DiLorenzo jumped at the chance to make it happen. Mike planned a big tweet-up in New York on the opening night of the playoffs, complete with food and beer sponsors and hockey merchandise giveaways -- and started promoting the event on Twitter.

To make sure there were lots of tweet-ups happening around the league, Mike reached out to a handful of influential hockey fans in key NHL markets to recruit their participation. Lots of fans also stepped up and volunteered to host events in their cities too. Before long, there were tweet-ups organized in almost two dozen cities around the world. The league supported every one of those tweet-ups by sending gift bags, coupons for discounts at shop.NHL.com, and signed hockey merchandise for event organizers to raffle.

The NHL spent only a few weeks and a few thousand dollars planning and supporting the tweet-ups, but the results were fantastic:

• Big in-person attendance. More than 1200 people attended tweet-ups in 23 cities (including events in New Zealand and Northern Ireland) for the opening night of the playoffs. Many fans organized further tweet-ups as their teams progressed through the playoffs as well
• Bigger online chatter. Those attendees talked a lot about the events on Twitter: On the opening night of the playoffs, the term "NHL" was mentioned on Twitter more than twice as often as on a normal day. And #NHLtweetup became a trending topic for the day.
• Enormous total reach. According to the league's research, as many as 240,000 people could have heard about the event on Twitter. And the tweet-ups also generated press coverage that reached millions, including a story in USA Today. 

So, what can other marketers learn from the NHL's success? We think there are a number of important lessons here:

1. Get your brand advocates involved. The NHL wouldn't have been as successful without fan participation. The fans helped develop the idea, and they did all the legwork for the local events -- including finding venues and promoting the events. If the NHL had tried to organize these events itself, it would've cost a lot more money, and probably wouldn't have worked nearly as well.
2. Give yourself enough lead time. The NHL and its tweet-up hosts had only three weeks to organize these events -- and it was a pretty hectic three weeks. The league plans to organize more tweet-ups this season, and will start planning each six to eight weeks in advance. 
3. Make sure PR is part of your strategy. The fans who attended the tweet-ups generated a lot of excitement about the playoffs -- both at the events, and on Twitter. But the mainstream press coverage provided a ton of reach. The media is still in love with Twitter, so inviting them to the events can really pay off.

There's some other great coverage of the event online -- including that at Goaliegirl.com -- and clients should read the entire case study for even more details and best practices. Congratulations to the NHL, and to all its tweet-up organizers, on a great event.

Why Are Marketers So Bad At Measuring Social Media? (And How Can They Get Better?)

[Posted by Nate Elliott. Follow me on twitter.]

Marketers don't think they're very good at measuring social media.  When my colleague Emily Riley asked marketers to rate their ability to measure the impact of their social media initiatives, the average grade they gave themselves was 4.5 out of 10. Not a great score -- especially given that accountability is one of the key selling points of interactive marketing. So I've spent a lot of time this year trying to understand why marketers aren't good at measuring social media -- and how they can do better.

The fact is, social media marketers are drowning in a sea of metrics. Every social platform and vendor offers its own metrics, and there are literally hundreds of ways to measure the success of social initiatives. With so many numbers to choose from, and so little insight into which metrics are important, it's not surprising that marketers feel overwhelmed.

Most marketers fixate on easily-available measures like followers or fans -- regardless of whether those metrics are important. Many others fail to measure obviously useful numbers just because they're not on the first page of a report. A marketer focused on talking [video] should have a radically different definition of success than one focused on embracing [video]. But marketers are much more likely to tailor their social media measurement to the tools they're using than to the objectives they're trying to achieve. Have a look -- most marketers measure pretty much the same metrics, no matter what their objective:

It's obvious that marketers need more clarity into which social media metrics they should be tracking. So we've developed a simple three-step process to help marketers better tailor their measurement strategies to the objectives they're pursuing. Walking through these three steps will help you cut through the clutter on your marketing reports and measure your social media initiatives more effectively:

• Step 1: Think back to your marketing objective. Go back and find your notes from when you were first planning your social marketing effort -- and remind yourself of the objective you were pursuing. If you don't know what your goal was, you'll never know what you should be measuring, or if you succeeded.
• Step 2: Consider what types of metrics signal success. Don't think about specific lines on a report yet -- instead, think about what types of consumer behaviors and sentiments match your objectives, and focus your measurement on those categories of metrics. If your goal was energizing, success is defined as lots of people saying positive things about your brand; if your goal was supporting, you want to know if users were providing good advice to each other -- and whether it kept users from having to ask you for support directly.  Again, this isn't about specific metrics, it's about how you hoped your social initiative would change your relationship with consumers.
• Step 3: Look for that category of metric in the social technology you're using. Once you've identified the type of metric that will signal success, then you can look for ways to track those metrics within the social platform you're using. This is when you should get into the specifics of which lines on the report Facebook or Jive gives you are most important -- and which other vendors you need to use to find the exact numbers you're looking for.

In my new report, 'Three Steps To Measuring Social Media Marketing,' I offer a framework that helps marketers place social media metrics into one of six categories, shows them which categories of metrics should be used to measure which objectives, and gives examples of how to obtain those metrics from each social platform. I hope clients use my framework; I think it will make their lives easier and their measurement more successful.

But the key message of that report (and this blog post) isn't the framework, it's this call to action: We as an industry must do better at measuring social media marketing. Social media budgets keep rising, but that trend won't continue forever if we can't prove that social initiatives are effective. Perhaps more important, if we don't know which social applications succeeded and which didn't, we can't learn from our experiences and improve on future efforts. And it's surprisingly easy to measure social media effectively: we just need to focus on measuring objectives rather than technologies.

Whether you use the detailed framework in my report, or simply keep these three steps in mind as you design your own measurement strategy, I hope these ideas help you sift through all the social media metrics that are available, and find the right ones to measure your efforts.

Targeting Generation X? Try Word of Mouth

[Posted by Nate Elliott]

If you're a marketer targeting Gen X consumers (which we define as consumers between 30 and 43), and you're not using social media or influence marketing, it's time to reevaluate your strategy. Our new report, Brands Should Reach Gen Xers Through Word Of Mouth, sheds some new light on these consumers and their use of social technologies.

Although Gen X includes users well into their forties, this audience is surprisingly engaged with social media. They're more active than average on nearly every rung of our social technographics ladder -- especially as joiners, with 59% of Gen X consumers telling us they use social networks at least once each month. Best of all, many are using social influence to make product recommendations: 42% say they often tell friends about the products and services that interest them.

So if you want to leverage this sharing behavior to reach Gen X consumers (or any other socially active online audience, for that matter), what should you do?

• Give all your customers the tools they need to share. If you don't already encourage your customers to pass along your content, now's the time to start.Tools like ShareThis and AddThis make it easy to add sharing functionality to your site. And don't forget: as valuable as Twitter and Facebook can be for driving word of mouth, most people make product recommendations through private channels like e-mail and IM.
• Find -- and leverage -- your brand advocates. We're pleased to see how many marketers are working to drive word of mouth -- but we're aghast at how some of those marketers try to identify their most influential customers. More than half simply reach out to every member of their e-mail list and hope that some of them will drive influence (see Figure 7). Marketers have better tools at their disposal for finding brand advocates: mine your sales database to find your most loyal and valuable customers, and run surveys to find users who think most highly of your brand and are most likely to pass the word along.
• Don't forget the power of offline influence. Online influence can work wonders, but offline influence is both more common (see Figure 11) and more powerful (see page 18). Savvy marketers are using social media to organize offline events where customers can energize each other around products and brands, and to create and manage ambassador programs that extend both online and off. (Look for my new report on driving offline influence, due to publish in the next few weeks.)

Have you had success reaching Gen X consumers through social media or worth of mouth? If so, we'd love to hear about your experiences -- please leave a comment below.

Online Video Contests Can Help Marketers Listen To And Energize Their Customers

[Posted by Nate Elliott]

Chances are you've seen an online video contest lately. In fact, you've probably seen a lot of them: more than 20% of interactive marketers -- including category leaders like P&G, Nike, Coca-Cola and Sony -- tell Forrester they've run campaigns asking users to submit online content in the past year. I've been collecting a list of dozens of great video contests, and one contest clearinghouse site says there are 115 user-generated video contests accepting submissions right now, across a huge range of categories.

Some of these contests -- like Tourism Queensland's Cannes-Lion-winning "The Best Job in the World" contest, or Doritos' "Crash the Super Bowl" contest -- generate a lot of media coverage. But there are many hundreds more each year, promoting everything from steak sauce to psoriasis research, that don't get as much notoriety.

Why are so many marketers running online video contests? Because users love online contests almost as much as they love online video -- and because user-generated video contests can help marketers achieve a huge range of marketing objectives.

Video contests let marketers listen to their customers and learn about their needs -- like student loan provider Access Group, which asked law students to enter videos about their concerns and then used insights from those videos to create its "Student Loans, No Worries" ad campaign. Contests can help marketers energize users an drive a viral marketing effect -- like Servus Credit Union, which encouraged entrants to develop their own marketing campaigns to drum up votes, and found the three finalists generated as much publicity as the credit union's PR firm did. And they can give marketers access to cheap, original online video content -- like ski resort Sunshine Village, which used its contest to generate a video library of its mountain's trails and terrain.

Of course, not every video contest succeeds. They often take months to plan, they can cost anywhere from $10,000 to $250,000 or more, and they usually require the coordinated efforts of several internal departments and external vendors. And if you don't get the "three Ps" right (choosing the right premise, offering the right prize, and picking the right promotional strategy) you could fall flat on your face.

I've spent the last two months studying hundreds of contests, and have just published two new reports on the topic. User-Generated Video Contests: Best Practices For Driving More Entries And Creating Viral Impact is designed to help marketers understand which users they should target with video contests, what goals they can achieve, and how to get the most value from their contests. Video Contest Checklist: How To Choose The Right Premise, Prize, And Promotion For Your Contest contains a checklist that guides marketers through every single step in the contest process -- including choosing a contest premise, selecting a prize, planning a promotional strategy, choosing a voting structure, picking a vendor, setting a schedule, establishing a budget, getting internal buy-in, and measuring the results.

Over the next few days, I'll be publishing some of the most important lessons I've learned in my research -- including the best promotional strategies I've seen, and mini-case studies on what makes contests successful -- on my personal blog.

In the meantime, if you've been thinking of running a user-generated video contest -- or if I've convinced you it's a good idea -- drop me a line (nelliott at forrester dot com). I'd be happy to work with you on making your video contest a success.

Interactive Marketing Nears $55 Billion; Advertising Overall Declines

[Posted by Shar VanBoskirk]

I'm pleased to announce that Forrester's five year forecast is now complete and live on Forrester's site.  It feels like this has been a long time in coming from my side too! Please see the full report for detailed explanations of the trends affecting overall marketing budgets and the growth of the channel in the forecast.

You may remember we previewed our forecast at Forrester's Marketing Forum at the end of April.  If you cross reference this post to the one we posted as follow up to the forum, you will notice that the "% of all advertising spend" has changed.  The absolute forecast is still the same, we just changed this calculation to make sure it was done in the same way as in years past. See below for the most recent release:

  

This research will certainly help marketers plan their channel strategies.

• Search continues to lead interactive spend followed by display. 

• And owned social media assets (like internal blogs, community sites) are really the only emerging media getting traction in today's economic climate.

But to me, the most interesting takeaway from the research is that overall advertising budgets will decline.  Yep.  With dollars moving out of traditional media toward less expensive and more efficient interactive tools, marketers will actually need less money to accomplish their current advertising goals.   But reasonable marketers won't relinquish budget because their programs are running too efficiently. Instead, marketers will allocate unused advertising dollars into investments like innovation, research, customer service, customer experiences, and marketing-specific technology and IT staff, in order to further marketing's strategic influence within their companies. 

Interactive Budgets Are Growing At The Expense Of Offline

[Posted by Shar VanBoskirk]

During my presentation at Forrester's Marketing Forum on April 23,  I previewed Forrester's latest forecast of interactive marketing spend.  We expect marketer spend on display media, search, email, mobile and social media to reach nearly $55 billion by 2014.

  

This growth is due to marketers seeking lower cost, more accountable channels which are also widely used by their customers.  This year, we are also finding that marketers are migrating dollars away from traditional channels and into interactive ones.

  

Direct mail and print are suffering the most loss to interactive tools.  According to our survey, 40% expect to cut direct mail budgets, while 35% will decrease newspaper spend and 28% will slash magazine money in order to spend more in interactive media.

 

I'm actually currently at work on Forrester's full forecast report detailing the growth trends around each of the channels itemized in this forecast.  Look for that report -- which will include additional data and explanation -- on our site around the first part of June.

The Future of the Social Web: In Five Eras

[By Jeremiah Owyang]

Expect the Groundswell to continue, in which people connect to each other --rather than institutions. Consumer adoption of social networks is increasing a rapid pace, brands are adopting even during a recession, so expect the space to rapidly innovate to match this trend. Clients can acces this report; but to summarize what we found, in the executive summary we state:

Today’s social experience is disjointed because consumers have separate identities in each social network they visit. A simple set of technologies that enable a portable identity will soon empower consumers to bring their identities with them — transforming marketing, eCommerce, CRM, and advertising. IDs are just the beginning of this transformation, in which the Web will evolve step by step from separate social sites into a shared social experience. Consumers will rely on their peers as they make online decisions, whether or not brands choose to participate. Socially connected consumers will strengthen communities and shift power away from brands and CRM systems; eventually this will result in empowered communities defining the next generation of products.

We found that technologies trigger changes in consumer adoption, and brands will follow, resulting in five distinct waves, they consist of:

---

The Five Eras of the Social Web:

1) Era of Social Relationships: People connect to others and share
2) Era of Social Functionality: Social networks become like operating system
3) Era of Social Colonization: Every experience can now be social
4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content
5) Era of Social Commerce: Communities define future products and services

---

Timing of the Five Overlapping Eras: It's important to note that these eras aren't sequential, but instead are overlapping. We've already entered and have seen maturity for the era of social relationships, have entered social functionality but haven't seen true utility, and are starting to see threads of social colonization with early technologies like Facebook connect. Soon these federated identities will empower people to enter the era of social context with personalized and social content. The following diagram demonstrates how we should expect to see the eras play out in the future --with social commerce the furthest out.

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Interviews with 24 of the top Social Companies: Research isn't done in a vacuum, that's why we conducted qualitative research to find out what we should come to expect. We came to these conclusions based on interviews with executives, product managers, and strategists at the following 24 companies: Appirio, Cisco Eos, Dell, Facebook, Federated Media Publishing, Flock, Gigya, Google (Open Social/stack team), Graphing Social Patterns (Dave McClure), IBM (SOA Team), Intel (social media marketing team), KickApps, LinkedIn, Meebo, Microsoft (Live team), MySpace, OpenID Foundation (Chris Messina), Plaxo, Pluck, Razorfish, ReadWriteWeb, salesforce.com, Six Apart, and Twitter.

---

How Brands Should Prepare What's interesting isn't this vision for the future, but what it holds in store for brands, as a result, companies should prepare by:

• Don't Hesitate: These changes are coming at a rapid pace, and we're in three of these ears by end of year. Brands should prepare by factoring in these eras into their near term plans. Don't be left behind and let competitors connect with your community before you do.
• Prepare For Transparency: People will be able to surf the web with their friends, as a result you must have a plan. Prepare for every webpage and product to be reviewed by your customers and seen by prospects --even if you choose not to participate.
• Connect with Advocates: Focus on customer advocates, they will sway over prospects, and could defend against detractors. Their opinion is trusted more than yours, and when the power shifts to community, and they start to define what products should be, they become more important than ever.
• Evolve your Enterprise Systems: Your enterprise systems will need to connect to the social web. Social networks and their partners are quickly becoming a source of customer information and lead generation beyond your CRM system. CMS systems will need to inherit social features --pressure your vendors to offer this, or find a community platform.
• Shatter your Corporate Website: In the most radical future, content will come to consumers --rather than them chasing it-- prepare to fragment your corporate website and let it distribute to the social web. Let the most important information go and spread to communities where they exist; fish where the fish are.

---

This project took a team effort, and I'd like to thank Josh Bernoff as a guiding force in my career, Emily Bowen who kept the project going, Cynthia Pflaum for the quantitative data, Megan Chromik in our editing team for the polish, and Jon Symons in our PR team for the media outreach.

This was cross posted on the Web Strategy Blog.

As you can see from Jeremiah's post below, our 2009 Marketing Forum is up and running in Orlando, Florida,  with Shar VonBoskirk kicking off proceedings with (after lifting the audience with a resounding rendition of “M I C K E Y M O U S E!” – well, they are at the Disney Resort!) a keynote addressing how marketers affected by the recession, across the globe, need to treat their online planning and strategy teams as core parts of their business planning, taking account of the advantages of more accountable marketing channels. She urged marketers not to be stifled by the idea that a recession is a bad time to innovate; on the contrary, as interactive marketing channels continue to grow strongly, now is a great time to take innovative steps to reach consumers across online channels, with far less risk than many marketers perceive.

More experts from the likes of Microsoft, Starbucks and iProspect take the stage on Friday to share their insights into how to get the best value out of interactive marketing in a recession.

The Forum is being held in the US, but the recession is an equal reality in Europe, and European marketers are faced with the same challenges – how to get the best out of their marketing spend, how to take advantage of the flexibility and measurability of interactive channels, and how to best reach and talk to consumers also feeling the bite of the downturn. Marketers struggle with understanding how they can identify key consumers in their European target countries, what technologies to use to reach them, and how to innovate, say using social media, to make a brand stand out from the crowd?

We at Forrester talk to hundreds of European clients a year about these, and other, marketing problems. For example. we have recently worked with a major European online brand about repositioning the brand in the light of consumer’s changing online behaviours, looking at both consumer behaviour data from our own Consumer Technographics surveys as well as strategic insight into how consumers use online content, and how they research/buy products online.

If you are a marketer looking for help with such issues, please do reach out to me here at rjennings@forrester.co.uk. We have analysts in Europe, the US and Asia, ready to help.

 

Baby Boomers Use Social Media Too

 “We all know that young consumers, both in Europe and the US, have adopted social media avidly. But what about their parents’ generation – the Baby Boomers (those aged 43 to 63)? How are they using social media? Well, I’ve just finished a piece that looks at the Baby Boomer generation in Europe and their social media activity, and found that this audience are also starting to integrate social media into their daily lives.

For example, more than one-third of European online consumers ages 43 to 63 already read social media such as blogs and forums on a regular basis, and around one-tenth are already uploading their own content — such as videos and music — onto the Web. Overall, 47% of Younger Boomers (online adults ages 43 to 52) now engage with social media on a regular basis, and 41% of Older Boomers (those ages 53 to 63) do. Boomers in the different European countries exhibit different behaviors, just as their younger compatriots do – for example, 69% of Dutch 43- to 52-year-olds (and 60% of 53- 63-year-olds) use social media on a regular basis, whilst only around a third of German Boomers do.

What does this mean for you? Well, many marketers targeting this audience, especially those who see themselves as market-leading, should be looking at using social media techniques to do so -- for example, Vogelberscherming Nederland, the site for the Netherlands Society for the Protection of Birds, hosts a number of blogs and encourages supporters to respond to posts with easy-to-use technology.

The full report can be read by subscribers on our website here. If you’re interested in how your particular online target audience has adopted social media in Europe,

let me know at rjennings@forrester.co.uk and I’ll let you know how we can help. Some of our Technographics data on adoption is also available on the GroundsWell blog here for your interest too - we have data from the US, Europe and Asia Pacific. And if you have any examples of marketers targeting Boomers, please drop me a line! “

Ongoing Lessons

[Posted by Christine Overby]

Last week, Jeremiah Owyang, an analyst on the Interactive Marketing team that I manage, caught flak for comments that he made on his personal blog about the community vendor Mzinga. As you might expect, we both have been communicating with Mzinga's Chairman Barry Libert and other members of his team. At the same time, Jeremiah has been reflecting on the conversation begun by the post. So have I.

 

All of us at Forrester have learned from this. We have a blogging policy. I’m using this as an opportunity to reinforce these guidelines with bloggers on my team. So are other Research Directors. Forrester will continue to update these guidelines regularly as we gain new insights. Treat your social media policy as a living, breathing thing – I think these are good words for analyst firms and clients alike.

 

I am thinking too about the relationship between our research – which is, well, highly-researched and planned – and our social media contributions which are more informal. Should an analyst refrain from stating opinions in social media because it’s more organic? I don’t think so. But can we modify our tone and conclusions to reflect the more spontaneous nature of social tools? Absolutely.

 

Analysts will continue to participate in the Groundswell. At the same time, we’re still learning like everyone else here. As such, I welcome the dialogue and your comments.