4 signs you’re a social media failure

“Think like a queen. A queen is not afraid to fail. Failure is another stepping stone to greatness.” - Oprah Winfrey Market research firm Gartner projects that more than 75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies with websites will attempt some kind of online social media initiative for marketing or customer relations purposes. Gartner also projects that 50 percent of those efforts will fail. Recognizing failure and learning from it is the nature of our business, especially for emerging channels such as social media. Repeatedly, it is a brave few who take risks while the rest point fingers and follow. When a company does dare to risk, we are quick to judge and condemn rather than celebrate. To be realistic, most of us are accountable to multiple stakeholders — brands, consumers, our own organizations, and colleagues. There are, however, ways to minimize risks, learn from the stumbles, and move forward without leaving a trail of flames. The dictionary defines failure as “the condition or fact of not achieving the desired end or ends.” Perhaps what we really need to do is to redefine success and failure as it pertains to social media. Here are four common failure scenarios to help you prepare to respond effectively and turn social media mistakes into successes.

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5 tips for evolving your digital presence

The IAB recently distributed its 2008 online advertising spending report. The gist is that online spending will continue to grow but not at the steep rate that analysts initially projected. While other advertising channels are facing dire straits, online is still poised to gain sizable share of marketers’ overall budgets. The industry has come a long way from the eras when traditional marketing channels dictated how consumers interacted with advertisers. As the digital space evolves, the way marketers communicate with their consumers follows suit. With each new platform, marketers have another option to add to their mix, but marketers should not rush onto a new platform just to mark their territory.

Marketers need to balance the pros and cons of being a part of an emerging platform. The lure of being first is enticing because the companies that are first to make an impact in a digital realm are cemented as innovators. But you can’t wait too long as the risk of not adapting to changes fast enough can be substantial as there are several industries — like print media — that are unable to gain market share because they were absent for too long. Taking both extremes into account, marketers need to exercise their discretion to identify how, where, and when they fit into trends.

Think before you act Digital marketers are always in a rush, and it’s always been this way. In the beginning, websites went live haphazardly — without much thought going into objectives, content plans or maintenance resources. Thankfully, the “build and they will come” mentality has faded, but marketers are still grappling with how to meaningfully engage with users on newer platforms. Marketers need to continue to identify points of synergies between their various advertising channels — whether it’s point-of-purchase or social media platforms. We need to continue the evolution away from the early days where campaigns were launched to keep pace with fads. These days when budgets need to be stretched, it is crucial to rely on strategy and plan executions around consumers — not just competitors.

Don’t forget: Consumers have control Anonymous peer comments now carry the same weight as a recommendation from a trusted friend. BazaarVoice sites that 90 percent of consumers trust the reviews they read online prior to making a purchase. Digital marketing is a dialogue where anyone has an equal voice. This has created an environment where content is created in response to user behavior. Marketers need to take cues from their consumer base in all areas of digital marketing as a move in the right direction. Components like SEM strategies, conversion funnels and creative executions can and should reflect consumers’ affinities –not advertisers’ — to be effective. This is one of the hardest changes for marketers to absorb, but it is the most important. In the digital realm, marketers need to interact with – instead of bark at — their users. No matter how much sense it makes at the drawing board, keep messaging user-centric.

Make digital marketing work for you For the most part, marketers are now in a state of flux where they are reevaluating and revamping their online properties. Emphasis is on creating holistic marketing plans where each advertising component augments one another to achieve goals efficiently. The goal is to create a plan where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. To keep up with consumers, marketers need to scrutinize each available platform and try to prepare for the ones on the horizon. All decisions should be made with the premise of “Are my consumers here? Does this make sense for me?” If your consumers are not on MySpace, then don’t worry about this forum and allocate resources elsewhere. Read more at www.imediaconnection.com

A Pricing Revolution May Loom, But Context And Content Still Rule

Lower-costs seem appealing in the post-recession world, but short-term savings are short-sighted. For advertisers who care about brands, these issues have to balance against cost considerations:

• Context: For publishers, there is significant value to be gained from proving and delivering the audience sought by the advertiser. Putting a great ad on low rent inventory reduces the value of your brand — even if the audience is right. People put offers in context and you want yours to be spot on. This is why a vertical ad network makes more sense for advertisers: publishers and subject matter experts are more reliable judges of quality context than any computer algorithm on its own.

• Latency: We are a long way off from individual targeting in real-time. Neither comScore nor Quantcast can offer that. And retargeting from within ads, while possible, does not ensure that the viewer being cookied fits the desired profile. Now you are pursuing someone for no confirmed reason.

• Coverage: Most data sources can only confirm about 20-40% of the impressions as fitting a particular profile. Data experts then use statistics to gross up to 100%. It’s not clear that this more accurate than trusting real editors to judge context and quality.

• High Impact Advertising: The best advertising makes an impression because it’s in context and it’s entertaining. Large publishers and vertical ad networks are uniquely capable of delivering breakthrough advertising such as roadblocks, overlays, widgets and videos, in a personally vetted context that will resonate with your audience. Read more at www.mediapost.com

7 marketing mistakes to avoid on Twitter

It is important to recognize and understand the nuances of Twitter as a communications channel. The genius is in its simplicity, but it’s still a tool that consumers and businesses can leverage many ways.

Conversations on Twitter happen quickly, and there are many benefits to your brand. Below is a tweet from Scott Monty from Ford on the value of Twitter as Ford sees it.   So how can and should your brand use Twitter? And more importantly, what are the most common mistakes and pitfalls on Twitter that could have a negative impact on your business or brand? Read more at www.imediaconnection.com

Razorfish Tries Out TV

NEW YORK Digital agencies often say they don’t want to become like traditional shops, but that doesn’t stop them from jumping at the chance to do TV work.

Razorfish, the Microsoft-owned digital agency, kicked off a TV and Web promotion for All detergent that began last night during Celebrity Apprentice. A 30-second spot directed viewers to all-laundry.com to see a pair of Internet videos Razorfish created with Celebrity Apprentice contestants Joan and Melissa Rivers. It marks the first time the 14-year-old digital agency has created a TV commercial for national broadcast.

The spot and Web videos, promoting All Small and Mighty concentrated detergent, are a tie-in with the brand-friendly Apprentice franchise. All was written into the script of the episode airing Sunday. Contestants were challenged to create a viral video for All. In a commercial at the close of the episode, the Riverses note the stress of the episode and invite viewers to visit All’s Web site to see “Rivers & Rivers: The Video Encore.” Read more at www.adweek.com

See more at www.adweek.com

You can think of social media as a set of tools that organizations can use for a variety of purposes - customer service, branding, promotion, relationship-management, etc. Just as with any toolkit, you’re not going to use every tool every time.

Sometimes the hammer fits, but if you’re trying to measure something the hammer is pretty much useless. Similarly, sometimes a blog will fit perfectly, while other times YouTube might be a more suitable tool. Sometimes (say it ain’t so!) social media outreach won’t fit at all.

Over the last two years my online toolkit has shifted back and forth as tools have come and gone. Recently, however, I’ve noticed a bit more stability in the services I use. Is this a reflection of a slightly maturing marketplace? Or just of a tough economy?

Google Reader - to aggregate and archive news and other RSS feeds from blogs and tools

Twitter - for real-time communication, connection, monitoring and learning via TweetDeck and search.twitter.com

Delicious - for sharing and saving useful sites and articles

Radian6 - for more complex monitoring solutions

Facebook - for connecting with people and brands

LinkedIn - for network building with people I know professionally

+2 2 votes What’s In Your Social Media Toolkit? by davefleet on 03/27/2009 07:15   3 comments , 2488 views Categories: Tools, Social Software, Enterprise Software, Web 2.0 Tags: social media toolkit, relationship managment, professional development social media

See more at www.socialmediatoday.com

New Chart: Anticipate Consumers’ Interests in Your Niche Content

SUMMARY: Self-produced content plays a role in every product and service niche. Whether you sell to consumers or the enterprise, you probably produce multiple pieces of content that are delivered through your website, blogs, syndication services, RSS, email and Twitter, just to name some of the most popular conduits. The pressure to be ‘thought leaders’ has become one of marketing’s basic functions at many organizations. So, to help you out, we asked content marketers, what is it that sparks a change in content?

The best reasons to update content are to be found in the middle of the pack; news, trends, events and research are all about the reader. Of course, the performance of content should also dictate whether it’s time to update, upgrade or shift gears.

See more at www.marketingsherpa.com

Who Says Everything Has to Be Monetized?

Marketers Use ‘Communication Machine’ Twitter to Engage Consumers With Their Human Side

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — There’s no end to the number of angles the Twitter story offers: the massive ecosystem of third-party apps the microblogging site has spawned, the ability to create breaking-news reporters out of ordinary citizens and, perhaps biggest of all, the still-absent revenue model.

JetBlue, for example, views Twitter as a virtual “information booth,” said Morgan Johnston, manager of corporate communications. “The ability to engage directly with our customer humanizes the brand, creating a deeper level of engagement with our customers that fosters loyalty.” JetBlue has 203,935 followers.

Comcast uses it as a quasi helpline, listening for Twitter users who have an issue with the company and then reaching out to see how it can help. In doing so, its Twitter evangelist, Frank Eliason, has started to markedly shift the poor customer-service perceptions that the company has battled for years.

Slam dunk The National Basketball Association provides its 140,000 followers, amassed in just two months, with up-to-the-minute news and updates.

The concept is simple: Users sign up for an account, collect followers and build out their own network of Twitterers worth following. When a person “tweets” a message, all of his followers instantly receive it on their phones or computers. Those followers can choose to forward — or “retweet” — the message, and so on, and so on.

Multi-purpose tool For Southwest Airlines, which launched its Twitter profile in July of 2007, the tool has become, in the words of the airline’s lead Twitterer, Christi Day, a multipurpose communication machine. She uses it for media relations, customer service, relationship building and to promote specials and deals. “It has evolved into what our followers want, a place to get news and promotions,” said Ms. Day, whose official title is emerging media specialist. “And it helps us keep tabs on what our customers want and are saying, in real time.” Read more at adage.com

AT&T’s sponsored site MarchTweetness, with tweets about the March Madness basketball games, and Microsoft’s ExecTweets, a collection of tweets from executives, were unveiled last week after months in development, from idea to execution. Both sites were stored on a staging server behind passwords, so developers could “bang on them to make sure they were solid and could withstand the traffic, which has been many times more than we anticipated–and we anticipated quite a bit,” DiPietro said.

“These programs are partnerships between Federated and Twitter in which we are sharing revenue,” he said, declining to provide details. “I would stop way short of saying this is Twitter’s business model. They are fast-growing and I know they have plans to try many different things. This is one piece.”

These “experimental” campaigns don’t offer metrics to prove a return on investment other than the amount of traffic flowing to the sites, but companies like Microsoft and AT&T are all too eager to give it a go.

For AT&T, the idea came from a major initiative to find new and innovative ways to participate in the social Web after meeting with Twitter execs, according to Steve Governale, executive director for Interactive and Innovation at AT&T. The discussion turned to talking about the phenomenon that happens on Twitter during TV events and even prime-time shows where the viewing audience exchanges Tweets about the program,” he said. “We began to think of ways we might bring that type of conversation to the Twitter community in a way that wasn’t previously possible.”

See more at www.mediapost.com

Revenue Growth Slows for Online Advertising

U.S. online-advertising revenue grew 10.6% in 2008 to $23.4 billion, the slowest rate of growth since 2002, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers report.

In the fourth quarter of 2008, growth slowed to 2.6%, to $6.1 billion, from a year earlier. In the same period in 2007, online ad revenue had jumped 24 %, to $5.9 billion.

Research firm eMarketer on Monday halved its growth projections based on the new data. The firm now projects that online ad spending will grow 4.5% in 2009, reaching $24.5 billion. Previously, eMarketer predicted that it would increase 8.9%, to $25.7 billion.

Several categories of marketers notably pulled back their online ad spending in 2008. Retail advertisers, the largest category of online ad marketers, accounted for $5 billion in revenues in 2008, down 7.4% from $5.4 billion in 2007. Financial-services advertisers accounted for $3 billion in online revenues in 2008, down from $3.2 billion in 2007.

See more at online.wsj.com

CBS Says Internet Ad Revenue for NCAA Tournament May Rise 30%

Online ad revenue will be about $30 million, up from $23 million a year ago, and Internet ad inventory is almost sold out, said Jason Kint, senior vice president and general manager for CBSSports.com. The network is in the seventh year of an 11-year, $6 billion contract that gives it broadcast and online rights for the NCAA tournament.

General Motors Corp., AT&T Inc. and Coca-Cola Co. are among the online marketers of this year’s tournament, known as “March Madness,” even as companies scale back spending with the economy in recession.

Advertisers spent $643 million overall on the tournament last year, up 24 percent from $520 million in 2007, the Wall Street Journal said, citing TNS Media Intelligence, a unit of ad holding company WPP.

CBS’s March Madness on Demand gives online viewers free access to live and archived National Collegiate Athletic Association men’s tournament games. The tournament is a single- elimination tournament featuring 65 college teams.

Comcast Corp., the largest U.S. provider of cable service, agreed to sponsor the CBSSports.com Web site’s “boss button,” which lets viewers at work hide their viewing from supervisors. The button received 2.5 million clicks last year, Kint said.

See more at www.bloomberg.com

Facebook Sending More Traffic Than Google to Some Sites

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Marketers spend billions to attract search traffic from Google, but late last year Facebook started becoming a bigger source of traffic for some large websites, according to analytics firm Hitwise.

It seems inevitable that, given Facebook's sheer scale (180 million registered users and counting), it would at some point start referring a lot of users to some sites, but the development is surprising. Web users go to Google to figure out where to go next; they go to Facebook to, well, hang out.

Facebook gets a little more than a third of Google's unique visitors in the U.S. (50 million vs. 149 million in January, per ComScore); since last summer, registered users have been growing at a double-digit rate.

Where they're going But since the beginning of the year, Facebook has become a bigger referring site than Google to a number of sites, including gossip sites PerezHilton.com and Dlisted, mom site CafeMom, Evite, video site Tagged.com, and, yes, Twitter.

See more at adage.com

While older generations are experimenting more online, younger early-adopters are maturing with regard to online usage. Unfortunately for marketers, that means an increasingly sophisticated, selective, and even-harder-to-reach 18- to-25-year-old consumer.

Consumers of all ages are also demanding an increasing level of personalization, and from e-tailers in particular. To meet this demand, Razorfish suggests deploying tools such as digital in-store signage, coupons delivered via mobile devices, and interactive store floor-plans and merchandise directories.

Razorfish identifies several hot trends in digital media that one might have assumed were past their prime. For one, the budget that marketers are setting aside for paid search continues to grow. In 2008 alone, it grew to 36% from 31% in 2007.

“As the economy began to soften toward the end of the year, we witnessed a renewed focus on search because it delivers a stronger ROI than many other tactics,” said Sarah Baehr, vice president and national media lead at Razorfish. “We also saw a continued shift in digital ad spending toward niche sites as clients realize the value of targeting precise audience groups.” Read more at www.mediapost.com

Case in point, high school social network, myYearbook has just launched a new premium gifts offerings complete with an in-network “Lunch Money” economy. Before you scoff and dismiss the news, take note that within the first 24 hours of offering premium gifts, myYearbook users went into virtual shopping overdrive, resulting in more than 1,000,000 Lunch Money purchases getting swapped between members.

Premium gifts start at L$25,000 (L$ = Lunch Money) for a cup of coffee and sky-rocket up to L$2.5 million for a private jet. There’s currently over 300 gifts available, including items like lingerie, jewelry, candy, and holiday or birthday themed gifts. Since each gift can be custom gift-wrapped and virtually unwrapped, myYearbook’s premium gifts are perfectly targeted towards their site’s young audience.

Perhaps the overwhelming and instant success is partially related to the fact that text-happy teenagers can purchase Lunch Money via the mobile phone that never leaves their side. Through a seamless integration with mobile payment service Zong, high school goody goodies and goofballs alike can complete transactions with nothing more than their mobile numbers. Sounds like a parent’s worst nightmare (charges are passed on to the carrier - yikes!) and a major win for the savvy social network that is keenly tapped into the needs of their user base. Read more at mashable.com

Report: Leibowitz Next FTC Chair

If so, online ad companies should expect continued scrutiny in Washington. In the last few years, Leibowitz has emerged as one of the most outspoken critics of some online ad practices. Among other issues, he has cast a sharp eye on behavioral targeting — though, as of today, he doesn't appear to support new laws regulating the industry.

But two weeks ago, when the FTC unveiled its suggested self-regulatory privacy guidelines, Leibowitz wrote separately to take the industry to task for prior practices. “Despite a spotlight on e-commerce and online behavioral marketing for more than a decade, to date data security has been too lax, privacy policies too incomprehensible, and consumer tools for opting out of targeted advertising too confounding,” he wrote. “Industry needs to do a better job of meaningful, rigorous self-regulation or it will certainly invite legislation by Congress and a more regulatory approach by our Commission. Put simply, this could be the last clear chance to show that self-regulation can — and will — effectively protect consumers' privacy in a dynamic online marketplace.”

Three years ago, when bad adware installations were viewed as an urgent problem, he proposed publicly naming companies that used adware in Web marketing. While Leibowitz wasn't exactly out on a limb in criticizing the practices of adware companies, few other regulators were openly discussing marketers' responsiblity for the problem.

See more at www.mediapost.com

Trying to get a handle on this fast-growing micro-blogging platform? Here are some useful tips for getting started and making the most of your time and connections.

So, if you're like me and simply trying to make sense of the hubbub, my goal here is to provide you with the top tools that will make your time worthwhile, and you may actually get some value. You can quickly play catch-up to the biggest thing online in the last six months. (Seriously, check out this trajectory.)

Find people First, find people to follow. That was my big introduction to the space. First, find your friends and follow them. Then, learn who is using Twitter well and follow their lead. From them you can learn the nomenclature and idiosyncrasies of Twitter culture. If you really don't know who is doing it well, then ask around. But often it is easy to see. Read posts. If you like what they have to say, follow them. Here's a way I recommend you find people:

Learn the protocol and lingo RT, DM, @reply… I am not going to do a better job explaining these here than what you can find in the Twitter support area. If you're dedicated to learning the right lingo, take a few minutes to read it. But, a few things to keep in mind that you may not read there is that it is important to be respectful. Answer the simple question of “what are you doing?” and be diligent based on the expectations you've set for your followers. In other words, if you post daily about a particular topic, keep up with it and stay true to it. Otherwise, you will lose followers. Grow into your ambitions. Don't start fast and furious only to sputter and change your tone.

Post stuff Join the conversation. The only way you can do that is to start your monologue. Find your voice or your platform. What do you want to communicate? Banter with friends, spout your expertness, or provide solid links to smart writing — just start talking. I already mentioned TweetDeck, which has been a timesaver for me, not just in posting, but in organizing as well. But here is another that lets you prepare to communicate:

See more at www.imediaconnection.com

We all giggled when Microsoft's investment in Facebook back in late 2007 gave the social networking site a valuation of $15 billion. Well, most of us did, anyway.

At the same time, I see great value in Facebook. Much of that value is wrapped up in how much of the typical Facebooker's life is intertwined with the social network. But I think there's tremendous advertising value, too. Apparently, founder Mark Zuckerberg doesn't think there's a future in monetizing Facebook in the same way as Google, but I do. Back in October, he said “I don't think social networks can be monetized in the same way that search did.”

As a Facebook user, I see a lot of value in Facebook Ads. Those are the targeted ads on the right side of the pages that are based on profile information. Since many of my interests are stated in my profile, I tend to get a lot of Facebook ads that have more of an impact on me than, say, a run-of-site skyscraper that appears out of the blue.

According to Facebook's own Facebook Ads interface, which I checked just a couple minutes ago, Facebook has the potential to reach 50 million U.S. profiles corresponding to people age 13 and older. Assuming each of those profiles visited Facebook an average of five times a month (probably conservative given the several-times-daily usage I'm used to seeing), that's at least 250 million opportunities to serve a targeted ad every month.

See more at www.imediaconnection.com

3 Ways to Reinvent Yourself with Social Media

With record job losses and a flailing economy, how can a mere mortal survive these fickle tempests and reinvent himself? Chances are, if the car companies can't go it alone, you probably can't either, and you don't have to. Just follow these easy steps:

1. Convene Your Own Advisory Board “We are all stupid,” wrote Mark Twain, “just on different subjects.” So with that little nugget of wisdom to get you started, begin by asking yourself who the top 10 influencers in your life are and list them. Next reach out to each one individually in their medium of choice. Using easy networking tools like facebook, twitter, linkedin etc. can save time and energy as you rally your troops. Whatever the means used, ask each person on your list to be on your personal advisory board then schedule a meeting and start taking notes because the network knows what you don't know.

Reinventing your career path at a time when most are fighting to save theirs might seem incredibly naive but where others remain paralyzed by the fear of change and uncertainty, Daniels began to connect the dots of his life and sow the seeds of opportunity. His first step was to convene an executive committee which consisted of academics like Jeremy Kagan- Strategy Consultant and Professor, Internet Marketing, Columbia Business School, as well as a bevy of forward thinking digital entrepreneurs like NUE: Agency's Jesse Kirshbaum, Mashable's Adam Hirsch and Tumblr's David Karp. (In full disclosure, Daniels even asked me to join his executive committee to celebrate 33 Million People in the Room, a book about leveraging social media to build social and cultural capital.) Read more at www.huffingtonpost.com

Local ads have accounted for some of the fastest growth in Internet advertising in recent years, as small businesses from car-repair shops in Dallas to bakeries in Charlotte, N.C., have taken their marketing online.

This year, growth in the local-ad market — which represents about a third of total online ad spending in the U.S. — is expected to shrink, according to one key estimate, challenging the ad and media-buying shops that rely on the local Internet market.

And there won't be as much gold to go around as the prospectors had hoped. Online spending by local U.S. advertisers, which grew by 45% in 2008 to $12. 7 billion, is expected to see growth fall to 5.4% in 2009, according to media-research firm Borrell Associates. Total U.S. online ad spending is expected to be about flat, declining 0.3% to $36.9 billion in 2009, compared with growth of 8.5% in 2008, Borrell says.

See more at online.wsj.com