Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

When beginning the planning process for a social media presence for Brands, one truism always trotted out is the “Top-Down, Bottom-Up” paradigm.  From the beginning of our partnership with our friends at Facebook, we have heard the phrase repeated and repeated - but where was the data?

At last - recent figures from DDB Worldwide and Opinionway Research support the conclusion, and we have solid data to reference when we make proclamations like “You have to do more then just build it - they won’t come without an invitation!

On the off-chance you haven’t heard the whole Top-Down, Bottom-Up thing, I’ll summarize the basics for you.  The top-down element is explained nicely by the first bar in the chart above - showing that  75% of fans’ activity is spurred by ads from the Brand.  We call this fuel for the fire, and without it, brands are challenged to grow their fan bases on the platform.  The bottom-up element is represented by the second bar, which shows the ‘viral’ impact that brands benefit from when users interact with the brand’s page.  Their actions generate posts (”Jamie liked Cheez-It’s video”, Susan wrote on Special K’s wall), which show up in the news feeds of their friends - valuable earned media (called Friend’s Invitation above) that can drive new fans.

The secret sauce is therefore a combination of paid and earned media, where increasing your relevant presence on the platform goes most of the way towards fan acquisition goals, and ensuring that you have an active and engaged community gets you the rest of the way there.

Read more over at: eMarketer

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When you read a lot of blogs, it’s funny how often the interesting content is not in the article, but in the comments.  In an article over on MackColliers about Ford’s CMO talking about Social Media, a verbal fist-fight broke out with a poster saying that Ford was claiming social media wins that were illusory.

Now don’t get me wrong, the article itself is interesting.  Ford has done a good job of trying more and more advanced tactics to engage users online over the last year or so - but I think the headline may unfortunately make people think that social media is cheap, cheap cheap - or free (and I hope you know how I feel about that).

But it is in the comment slapfest that the forum begins debating ‘awareness’ - “[it] isn’t an absolute good” - and ‘exposure’ - “[it] isn’t the same thing as awareness.”  This is where I got really interested.  In designing digital experiences for consumers, we realize that awareness sans relevance is no help to a Brand.  Just because I think I know your product doesn’t mean I think that it has anything to do with my life.  Good digital marketing gives you a reason to interact that you relate to, and something interesting for you to do.

But to push this idea further, we have to realize that participation (the ‘do’ part) does not always mean that a deep relationship is being formed. Simply put, not everyone who plays with your Facebook application is building an emotional affinity to your brand - it’s a tempting assumption, but reality says otherwise.  And it’s important to note that this doesn’t just mean that all relationships are not created equal - but it means that we have to take real consideration about what we ask people to do in the first place in order to create participations/acts that mean something real to people.

Where the real relationships lie are in those things that Brands create/sponsor/offer that people want to subscribe to - things that your users want so much that they ask for them to be delivered over and over - or they carry them in their pocket/phone, or they set reminders to go back to.  Human Behavior in terms of subscribing to content is all about choices - pulling things that you want closer to yourself.

Homework: I’m making a map of all the distributed experiences I currently subscribe to, and I’ll bet that it forms a pretty good picture of the relationships I have with Brands. I’ll do the same thing with as many other forms of participation as I can, and see what the overlap is.  Try it yourself. You may be surprised.

Via SmartBrief on Social Media

Image: Public Art in Chicago by Pam_Broviak, on Flickr

(Oh - and The Social Network launched today in the US - Woo Hoooo!)

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In their article, Facebook Fans Valued at $3.60 Each, Mashable’s Christina Warren reports on the latest study by Vitrue (also covered in this Adweek article - hmmm this topic seems to have a lot of people interested in it…) showing that the value of a fan can be expressed in “earned media” - or impressions for updates that post to your user’s news feeds.

It’s good to know that there might be some marketers who feel they can relax a little bit now - after all, impressions at least are relatively understood. But the really exciting thing is how much of an iceberg tip it really is - since the actions by users like Commenting, Likes, and Shares are also big influences, and probably still unknown - the blog post just hints at doubling or tripling the impact!

Vitrue is pretty forthcoming about the best practices that we have seen emerge, however, regarding deeper connections and better penetration - no surprise that relevant content, rich media and engaging Acts are the traits of more successful Pages.

It’s a cool time to be working in marketing - and a cool time to be working with clients to determine what the value of participation in the social space means for Brands and their consumers.

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A recent study by core metrics shows that German marketing decision makers are more into cost/benefit analysis of their online spend than their counterparts in the rest of Europe. Culturally speaking, this shouldn’t be a big surprise. We are talking about Germans, after all.

However, what is interesting is that the study says that the reason for this is to get a sense of transparency in the time of a looming crisis, and that it is hard for Online Managers to really measure the success of online tactics across multiple channels, and how different channels influence each other.

In other words, no one really knows if online media is actually really working if you take a look at campaigns as a whole.

This is a problem we have we’ve noticed as well. After years of promising real-time ROI numbers in online media, it turns out that it’s not what it was cracked up to be. In fact, it might be wastful use of marketing budgets.

There are the following difficulties we see, plus recommendations to avoid them:

a) to start with, most online campaigns are set up badly for ROI measurement to begin with, even when it comes to just measuring online online media activity. Clients still think: hey, it’s digital, so it’s faster. It’s not. Sometimes it’s even a lot slower.

Set up your metrics and measurement strategy in the very beginning.Not only does it help in having results you can tie back to objectives, it also helps in identifying objectives for the communication strategy of how to build the digital (non-media) experiences that follow after the Click-Through.

b) secondly, yes you can measure more stuff online, but most brands don’t use or understand what you can measure and how these data influence each other. Because of this people don’t look at more than reach and click-through or time spent. There is little to no integration even between the different types of digital metrics in campaigns. Mostly, clients get numbers back on CTR and such from the media agency, but no one considers the effect on the user interaction afterwards, even though tools are readily available to integrate media traffic data with site usage information.

In the end, what you measure online shouldn’t just be the traditional reach and GRP numbers, or time spent. This an interactive medium, so your ROI needs to have data points from which you can infer the effectiveness of the digital experience, not just the ad message, you give people.

c) Online media plans suck 70% of the time. We’ve seen some outrageously boiler plate media plans, obviously made by media people, who, even if they work in an online media, don’t really know what they are doing online. We’ve even seen the SAME exact media plan for 2 totally different campaigns for 2 different brands with 2 totally different target audiences. This sounds harsh, but it’s really frustrating. If the media plan isn’t right, you waste money and the chance to activate the right people with your digital creative platform.

Make sure you get either a pure play digital media agency, or have your creative agency (the people who actually create the digital platform strategy and digital experience behind the banner), have a sanity check run over it, or both. There are exceptions where traditional media agencies also know their stuff, but it varies from country to country.

d) Another phenomenon is the tendency to forget your CRM program. Oftentimes, CRM Programs run alongside campaigns with little integration, or an after-thought. This is a shame not just because you could have optimized the overall campaign based on database insights and created awareness through DM or e-mail, but also because you missed the chance to generate more names.

Call up your database guys: sometimes they can even throw a piece of budget at you because they haven’t thought about how to use the names yet or if they have, they didn’t have money for a bigger campaign. And alas, suddenly, you have more data points from direct response elements.
d) And finally, to address the cross-channel measurement issue: the biggest reason for not being able to achieve comparability is the different types interaction (or lack thereof in traditional channels) people can have in different channels  (i.e. banner vs microsite vs widget vs print ad) and the target’s context (ie Bustop vs. sitting at home in front of the PC). The numbers are channel specific because the medium is a different one, and also their meaning is different from the user experience point of view. Communication objectives of a print ad campaign don’t sync up with numbers you get from how much traffic you got on a website because maybe you didnt need to measure the reason to believe of your message but the reason to interact on your flash app.

When intending to achieve comparability between channels to measure effectiveness you should start with a measurement plan that includes all channel measurement opportunities (meaning every data point you can get in all channels) first, starting with the most complex channels first. Then you define Channel specific measurement that achieve communication or interaction objectives in THAT channel. Then you define commonalities between channels (e.g. a bus stop ad could have a measurement commonality with an iPhone application, simply because the person’s context is the same) which should inform and validate your measurement strategy overall and in the end you KPIs overall. There will always be a grey area of interpretation necessary, but if you have measurement integrity on the channel commonalities, you can make a lot more sense out of the data for your overarching KPIs than when you take boiler plate KPIs first and then try to find them in each channel. They just don’t map.

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