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August 31 2010
IMMAP: Paid Media Priming The Viral Pump
The average Asian spends more time on…?
- Brushing Their Teeth
- Having Sex
- On Yahoo!
- On MSN
I’m not an average Asian. Nor is Ken Mandel, but he sure does know a lot about the Asian market. You know, being the VP Advertising, Sales & Marketplace of Yahoo! APAC and all.
And all? Well, more than that. People keep telling me how they’d love doing what I’m doing. Look elsewhere: I’d like to be Ken when I grow old.
His Internet & Mobile Marketing Association of the Philippines Summit keynote was, well, extremely cool. Turtleneck-less Jobs-cool.
When he talks about digital trends, we listen. I listen. Age is only a matter of perspective, but since he likes to call himself a veteran, I’ll hand him that title easily. He’s got chuck loads of expertise to share. And seven trends.
No standardized measurement
How right can he be about that one. I keep talking metrics and tracking with people I meet (one cannot fully close a loop without measuring). But if I’m not on the same page with you, there’s no way we’ll agree on objectives, be it for a campaign or for social conversations measurement.
Ken made it very simple. A big fat popcorn cup contains 37 grams of …fat. What does it tell you? Not a lot. Can you picturize fat? Are you able to evaluate what it is or what it does to you?
Well, Ken revealed, it’s equivalent to a full breakfast: two sunny-side up eggs, two pieces of toast & bacon. Or to a Big Mac.
Oh yeah, suddenly I understand the nightmare. Now, I’m not a popcorn guy. And I’m on a constant diet -friends can attest to that one. I still eat Big Macs though. I get it. Holy cow.
Take that same cup and say it is a campaign return on investment (ROI). And say the 37 grams are 37 Gross Rating Points (GRP).
Same story. How do you match that with CPC, CPA or engagement rate?
Wouldn’t it be easier to have standard measurement. To easily translate into leads, conversions, sales & profit?
Ken nailed it. For all the metrics we’re using, most clients don’t care. They want business objectives aligned with business goals. We all need to talk the same language.
Paid media has sisters now
I loved that one. Absolutely loved it. You know, I’m not from a pure marketing/advertising background. All I ever dealt with were business objectives, getting things done in a word. So when I hear people drowning themselves into the difference of Earned, Paid and Owned media, I -sometimes- scoff.
Come on, do you really think customers care about this division? No they don’t. Ken said it better than I ever could -I’m not as cool, ya know ;-)
No consumer is interested in the difference between earned, paid and owned media. It’s just media.
Get a grip, mix the three and see what works. I know what I’m saying doesn’t sound very scientific. Flame me. At the end though, it’s a trial-and-error industry. It’s an art surrounded by non-standardized metrics and bloody business objectives.
The advertising ROI is coming from a mix of these earned, paid and owned media. Yes, of course, Ken has an ad industry background and works for a major online portal, he wouldn’t dismiss what brings revenue, but he’s right. Think about it.
A good example? Ikea.
Consumers surf the stream
Oh boy, another guy who’s into surfing.
Ride the wave, not the board
➡ Jeremiah Owyang (quoting Duke Kahanamoku)
I suck at surfing. You might too. But it’s easy to understand: do not think social as a destination. It’s a dimension, for C’s sake! It’s everywhere around you. People are everywhere online. Know where they hang out, but don’t expect them to follow one pre-defined road.
Those who get that right will have success. The other will stay “social media ninjas” or old-farty advertisers.
You wanna lead those customers towards you? Be contextual, be a curator. Listen, they will listen back. Engage. They will engage back. They’ll know who you are.
In other words, customers might have ADD, the famous attention-deficit disorder, but if they don’t see your products through their streams, you’ve got a PDD, a profit-deficit disorder, most commonly known as the IDSD, I don’t sell sh*t disorder.
Digital flattens the funnel
This is very close to my definition of the Inception Loop -more on that in a later post.
There are no more clear steps. Awareness. Consideration. Purchase. They’re all in a cyclone. An extremely fast cyclone.
From awareness to purchase, it might take me under a minute on the web. I’ve got Twitter to hear about a new product. I’ve got reviews to judge it. I’ve got friends to vouch for it -or recommend it through Facebook Likes for instance. I’ve got information galore to learn about it. I’ve got portals to buy it.
And it’s real-time. It’s fast. The consumer purchase decision-making process becomes a hell lot faster. Be in the loop. Be in my loop. Or I’ll disregard you.
Imagine how impactful this is on brand management. The nice graphics or the funnels and all steps leading to a sale cannot be nicely schematically represented to your clients/boards/whoever-who-pays-the-bills anymore.
It’s unsettling. When surfing, you might fall. But you get up and surf again. And again. Fail fast, learn fast. No whiteboard planning will teach you that.
Mixing analog & digital
For those who stay in front of their screens, get out a bit. Not to get some Sun -well, it’s proven to do you good-, but to be analog for a while.
People keep asking me how I was able to create a network of cool people around me in such a short time. The answer is not Twitter. The answer is I went out and met them. I freaking spent hours traveling, whatever buck I could spare on paying for my own trips & full-price conference tickets. I still do that to this day. I go out. I see people.
Same for brands. Go out and play. Go meet your customers. Digital will never replace analog. Not in our lifetime anyway.
It can be with a simple gimmick, like the one Ken showed. Unilever partnered with Sapient Nitro to create a fun vending machine. One that will treat you with an ice cream if you made a great smile in front of it. And your pictures did go on Facebook, obviously (I’ll take smiles over those MySpace self-portraits any day). How would my 27″ iMac ever deliver me an ice-cream? Gotta go out
Now, I know a bit about vending machines. Well, I’ve seen plenty. Living in Japan and all, you know. Go to Shinagawa station and find those equipped 47″ OLED flat screens. Cool, heh?1
Now, the real feat here is the facial recognition software. The machine will actually suggest you drinks according to a database of stats (demographics mainly).
Male, 34, 6″5, bald. Will it recognize me as a Swiss and offer me some chocolate-based drink or as a Greek and recommend me some Ouzo?
It’s the internet of things. Machines do communicate data and play with you. The experience is not only behind your screen. It’s all around you.
LSC
Doubt this mixes well with LSD. Ken might know better. Location + Social + Commerce.
It’s been since SXSW that I’m hearing the first one. Location. Location. Location. Location. Location.
I might not be convinced of the road some location-based services (LBS) are taking on now, but this trend has legs.
The one who closes the purchase loop wins.
➡ Ken Mandel
Indeed! I don’t know which form it will take, but it will be:
Contextual. Fun. Simple. Real-time. Relevant. Predictive. Mobile
And you and your friends will be its fuel2.
In terms of campaigns, if you haven’t experienced an iAd, Ken is right, wait for it. It’s quite amazing. Makes you bow to Steve Jobs on stage in front of hundreds of people type of cool!3
Foursquare mayorships, barcode readers applications linked to a purchase call-to-action (Japan is big on QR for instance) or Dentsu’s iButterfly.
Mobile LBS + LSC indeed.
Branded Engagement
Social media is not a world in itself. We don’t call it social for nothing. People talk everything and nothing -I do a lot of nothing and chocolate myself. And people talk about campaigns when they’re great.
I mean, just look at the noise the Old Spice campaign did! Great ads4. The conversation was not sparked out of thin air. There was strategy. Investment. Work. And success at the end. Viral was only a result.
Or, as Obi-Wan said on stage:
Paid media priming the viral pump
Hell yeah.
IMMAP coverage: Paid Media Priming The Viral Pump Maria Ressa And Your Heroes Going Social With Your Brand The Corporate Culture Of Social Flickr photos
- Well, those who just said yes are just geeks: “freaking cool, a plasma screen on my vending machine, a big leap forward for mankind“.
- That was the topic of an presentation of mine last April, if you care to take a look.
- “STEVE KNOWS BEST” reacting to his own iPhone dissing in Media Magazine early ’07 LOL
- great abs too, girls, I know….
August 23 2010
IMMAP: Going Social With Your Brand
After my talk at the more exclusive workshop, things took a different scale for the Internet & Mobile Marketing Summit 2010 on Thursday.
It’s only my second time at this conference and I must say I was really impressed by how it improved in a year. I’ll do a summary in a next article when I wrap things up about thess 10 days in the Philippines, but I need to stress from the get go that you’ve got a world-class event here. Better than conferences I attend in more traditional cities like Singapore for instance.
My task on that day was to participate in a panel about how brands can become social. I was sided with George Foo, the Founder and CEO of iHub media, the Facebook Official Sales Partner for South East Asia, South Korea, Japan & Taiwan and Frederic Levy, #3 of Netbooster Asia, a subsidiary of the French digital agency, headquartered here in Manila. Good mix: a platform, an agency and a business consultant.
In a society where women have such an importance1 what a relief to see one moderating the panel: Crisela Magpayo-Cervantes, the head of ABS-CBN Interactive, the biggest multi-media conglomerate and TV broadcaster in the Philippines.
Whew. Lots of great minds around me. Let’s take a notepad and my favorite Mont-Blanc ballpoint pen which never leaves my side.2
The panel took cues on what Jeremiah Owyang, Maria Ressa and other speakers presented before us and built upon it, in a slightly more interactive way (hey, we’re talking social, right?), the public being able to ask questions and get varied answers from three cool guys.
Interactive is not social
Is social good for all brands? That was the first question.
My starting point, which is kind of becoming a motto now, is that interactive is not social. These are two different approaches. In interactive, there’s a people to machine and machine to people interaction, while social is a people to people platform -I sometimes call that C2C in the pure business sense.
The dynamics are different. I think it is key to understand this, especially with many agencies in the audience. Campaigns and discussions are linked, one can empower the second, but while campaigns tend to limit themselves in time, people go on with their lives and have on-going conversations -including those about products and companies.
It’s no different here in the Philippines than elsewhere.
The Philippines social numbers
With the staggering 79% YOY growth, reaching the 17m mark, the Philippines now stands as the 7th biggest Facebook market in the world in terms of active users. Up to last September, Friendster was still the top social networking platform here and seems to be going down the drain everywhere else in South East Asia too -it’s former last stronghold.
Extrapolating on the recent ComScore numbers, Twitter is reaching 2m users here, the 6th biggest Twitter market worldwide with a reach of almost 15%. Not bad. Not bad at all -and again, what a striking difference from the time I was living here when Plurk was leading.
Interestingly enough, while mobile data is still limited in the country, AdMob ranks it 10th for mobile usage [pdf], based on ad requests. Add to the mix that it is the texting capital of the world -I’d say over 1.5bn SMS with a subscriber base of slighlty over 50m- and you’ve got a pretty interesting picture: social networking + mobile = traction.
Now, the most important numbers, in terms of social strategy, are still lacking in the Philippines: What are people exactly doing online.
How long, where, when, how? Which demographics is where? What are they doing? Social games like Farmville -hint, they tend to drive a big female demographic? Are they on Tumblr? Are they active during the week and not the weekend? One needs to survey the market with all those questions. The absence of these more ingrained numbers limit the creation of valid strategies for brands here.
I’m sure that, by this time next year, those will have appeared on the market, though. It’s an absolute certainty. Jeremiah hit the nail multiple times.
Research, Strategy, Preparation
Coming back to brand strategy, going social is first about knowing where your customers and prospects are & what they do. It’s fashionable to open Facebook Pages, Twitter accounts, but it is often done without doing research, without preparation. This is step two after intent. Research, strategy and preparation.
To quote myself: “there’s no such thing as a Facebook strategy, only business strategies”
The lack of deep demographics and online behaviors -the point I just made above- is limiting the research. But Filipinos brands haven’t waited, obviously.
In all cases, lack of strategy creates more problem than it solves. A very simple example: my airline of choice, Emirates. I don’t have any insider information on their strategy -or lack thereof- but opening a Twitter account then abrubtely stopping it (last tweet was on Jan 6th) shows a lack of long term planning.
On the other hand, look at Air France, the airline I used to fly the most when I was a resident in Tokyo, which offers great customer support through its social tools. When, as a customer, I was reacting on Twitter to the fact that my miles card didn’t get accepted in one Singapore hotel, they went as far as sending me an email within 24 hours, explaining them the differences in hotel miles rewards across continents. They couldn’t send me a direct message on Twitter -one needs to follow an account to get those direct engagement-, so they went and looked my email up in their database. Good stuff!
Nice for Emirates that I only have good things to say about them. Imagine the contrary. No one would have reacted. This is how stories like the Montrin Moms against a brand go in overdrive.
Negative comments are usually an overblown matter. I estimate they don’t surpass 20% of the comments -or reviews of a product. They act as validation for the positive ones -is there such a company or product that really gets 100% of satisfaction rates? Dream on-.
More importantly, and this is a motto of mine, by humanizing your brand, since going social is a people to people business, forgiveness is higher.
We, humans, do forgive others for their mistakes -unless too grave or repeated. I don’t want to forgive a machine or a brand. I don’t care. But I can forgive a humanized brand. Negativity is soothed by this process -unless you really have a crappy product, that is.
Training
Preparation does also mean not giving these social tools to the new hire, just because he’s young and Facebook is a “teen thing” or whatever. First, it’s not a “teen thing”. Second, it leads to the Nestle brandjacking debacle, where the employee, while maybe not a new hire, had no clue about crisis management. You don’t say to people to shut up. Imagine Nestle telling you to shut up. This is not communication on a professional level. Lack of training which led to a backlash against Nestle that got the world headlines.
Social media is a serious matter. It’s a job. With skills, both soft -empathy, sensibility- and hard -crisis handling being one. It requires both carefully choosing the pool of talent that will represent you online, but also training them on a on-going basis, while offering support (the Nestle Facebook page employee could have gone and ask what to do about it -he might have, again, I don’t have the specifics).
That, with the previous point, answers one of the question Crisela asked us: how to minimize the risks of social media.
Fred made an essential point there: life comes with risks. I’d add: deal with it. But I’ll advise: prepare yourself (with the risk of repeating myself).
This also applies in the choice of community managers, probably one of the most sought-after profile companies will get for in the coming years. Chose carefully. Pick a good listener. Think diplomacy.
Social Media doesn’t scale
Social media doesn’t scale. Repeat that in your head. Do that again, repeat it. Churn on it. You will never be able to follow the amount of conversations -including criticisms that need attention- especially with the high growth rate of social platforms adoption. You need tools to monitor, prioritize and group. Social CRM, in analysts’ talk.
Whether you’re a small company or a big corporation, this is tantamount. This requires investment. People’s investment. Money investment. You cannot escape this.
This would require a full analysis by itself. It was a 45 minutes panel -and I tried not to keep talking at the expense of my two great co-panelists-, I only touched the surface.
I however quickly mentioned the Apple case. Besides an App Store Facebook page, the Cupertino company seems absent on the social networking platform. Really?
Do you really think Apple is not listening the online chatter? Do you really believe Apple reacted to the recent antenna-gate issue because some big newspapers started talking about it. Apple listens. You can listen without being present. That’s your choice. Not always a wise one, but in case of Apple, they addressed the mounting complaints with a official press event. They were listening.
Being social is about being a good listener first. Not about babble skills.
Feedback loop
Listening with the appropriate social tools also allows a brand to measure the success or failure of a campaign. And it’s immediate. The campaign can be refocused -let’s say on the part that click with people, abandoning what doesn’t resonate. Quickly.
Use the feedback loop to full effect.
Listen, measure, track, rinse. And restart.
Use what people are telling you to get better, to evolve. Whether it is during a campaign or not.
Interactive can become social
Ken Mandel, head of Yahoo! South East Asia, said it best during his keynote: “paid media priming the viral pump”. Yes, an interactive campaign can generate conversations -and great ones. This is why I talked about interactive and social in terms two different approaches: they are still part still of an ecosystem. This was a main point in my keynote on day two, I’ll write about it on a subsequent post.
Going Agency or not?
This question comes a lot when I talk to clients. Coca-Cola is using an agency to run its Twitter, so it’s not something only small companies do because they don’t have the right staffing. The advantage, as my presentation on the corporate impact of social pointed out, is the professionalism. The disadvantage is the disconnect.
An agency, when it comes to listening and engaging in conversations, is not as passionate as you. It’s, at least, difficult that it will reach the level of knowledge you have for the brand that you do. Moreso the passion that you do have as you can imagine. Agencies are still, for the most part, in a broadcast culture, not in this C2C world I’ve mentioned. Beware. Only a handful of agencies understand this.
A very small amount compared to the massive presence of “social media experts” -you can replace that last word with gurus, rockstars, etc.- and to phony agencies -adding a social page to an existing agency website is easy, even famous ones do.
Be sure you get an agency that knows what it’s talking about. It should have done its homework. It should have deployed -it’s so easy to fake the appearance of seriousness and expertise.
Ask for credentials. Be social: ask around you. Why not create a Filipino website with reviews of agencies, that’s surely a good opportunity for someone!
I’m sure I’m missing lots of what has been said during these intense 45 minutes. I hope I gave you a good overview though.
More to come about this IMMAP experience in the days to come.
- this is actually something I realized when I was living here last year, impressive, I love it
- thanks to Leah Valle for the nice pics
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