DIY Marketing

Social Apps are Equal Opportunity!

I saw Josh Bernoff’s article in Ad Age last week announcing the winners of Forrester’s Groundswell Awards. Here’s a link to the same article on Josh’s blog. When I scrolled through the list of winners, I was struck by the number of companies I’d never heard of or small companies on the list. There were relatively few large corporations in the finalists—take a look for yourself; I think you’ll find it enlightening. You can access all the submissions with reviews here.

I’m interested in the small business aspect. Before I take a look at that, it’s worth being explicit about their Groundswell model (see chapter 4, Strategies for Tapping the Groundswell). They added some categories for the contest, but the model provided the framework.

In the B2C sector:

Talking – Lion Brand Yarn

According to Forrester:
Lion Brand Yarn initially set out to build relationships with the online knitting community by talking with their customers via a corporate blog and podcast. As a result of an investment in people rather than products, they found themselves with a passionate and brand loyal group of knitters, who not only engage with the brand but impact the bottom line by buying and using products as a result of social media engagement.

Embracing – Scholastic Book Club

Scholastic (remember them from primary school?) set out to improve their already-successful classroom flyer promotion. According to Forrester:
Together with a private online community of 200 teachers and 100 moms, created with their partner Communispace, Scholastic went through each step of the product development process in 10 weeks. They developed not only a new flyer, but a new opportunity for Scholastic Book Clubs to connect with parents, kids, and teachers . . . The initial test phase of the new flyer resulted in a 3% lift in sales, which, if borne out in the national rollout, will mean millions in new revenue for Scholastic Book Clubs.

In the B2B sector:

Listening – CDW

Ok, CDW isn’t a small business. However, I submit that small retailers or distributors can follow their lead. This is Forrester’s capture of a page in the Large Companies community. Looking at their website, I’m willing to bet that CDW has communities for at least the five basic segments they list on their website, ranging from small business to health care, maybe more.

According to Forrester:
CDW continuously taps members of its private online communities for all kinds of indispensible advice on its products and services, marketing ideas, and innovation. The communities also have inspired new approaches to sales both in terms of generating leads and relationship building with prospects early in the sales process.

Spreading – MetricStream

MetricStream is a privately-held startup that provides regulatory compliance solutions. According to Forrester:
ComplianceOnline was built to serve as the premier destination for content, training, and advisory services dedicated to regulatory compliance, IT governance, and corporate risk management. Today, it attracts more than two million visitors annually, 500,000 registered member-base, and is now a strong lead engine for its parent company - MetricStream.

This is a non-random sample and it doesn’t do justice to all the information about the awards. My only regret is how few non-profits are represented. An award was given to a gutsy Australian town, Flowerdale, which was destroyed by wildfire and raised money online to rebuild.

Spend some time either on the winners page or the submissions page. I guarantee you’ll learn a lot and get some ideas. Small businesses can reach out to their customers and engage them in mutually beneficial activities. Larger businesses can show that they value the individual customer’s ideas and opinions.It's a win-win for both!

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Getting Ready for the Holidays--Target Style

As I was writing yesterday’s post on search and social media, I was trying to recall some recent news. I thought I remembered that Target had already announced free shipping for Christmas, so of course, I searched. What I found suggests a savvy marketer who understands the changes in consumer online shopping and search behavior.

I searched “Target Christmas shipping.” I didn’t have to look for a news article; I found a paid search ad from Target as well as top organic placement for their Christmas page—ugh; Halloween was just last week! But it was there, complete with a WalMart paid ad in second place. Both the pay per click ad and the organic result linked to the Christmas page on the Target site. And I was right; they have a shipping deal. Note that other sites/bloggers are already plugging the free shipping for them! I didn’t follow those to see whether it was normal buzz or whether Target was reaching out. Wonder if they have to reach out, or if they just get the buzz because they are Target . . .

It’s a well done page, but nothing particularly special. There’s email, personal pages, gift cards, and all the other holiday and gift services you’d expect from a world-class retailer. Interestingly, I didn’t see anything social on the website, so I checked out their Facebook page. Target has 567,758 fans, including some of my friends; I didn’t realize you saw people you knew when you visited a corporate Facebook page. Makes sense! No Christmas promotions, though—not yet anyway! I also looked on Twitter, but didn’t find Target there. Trying to be sure, I looked on the Target home page. No link to their Facebook page (seems like an oversight to me) and no link to a Twitter page.

I’m ambivalent about whether they’ve integrated this promotion into social media as they should. They’ve done the search, both paid and organic, well. Is it too early for holiday postings on Facebook? I think so. It will be interesting to look later in the season and see if holiday promotions begin to appear on their Facebook page and on other shopping sites; also to look at whether it’s Target doing the promotion or whether it’s their adoring shoppers writing about a retailer they love.

Also, while one role of social media is to bring consumers to the website, if Facebook, Twitter and other social networks are part of the marketing communications mix, it makes sense to put them on the home page. I’d be willing to be that there’s little activity from home pages to social nets; just call it another awareness thing.

The take aways? As the studies quoted yesterday say, search is still the main driver, but the social networks are full of brand buzz. That makes them useful in creating brand awareness, favorability and even trust in the early stages of the consumer purchase process. Also, media/channel integration is key, but integration must take into account the role of different media at different points in the purchase process. The good news from the studies I quoted yesterday is that a combination of free social media and relatively inexpensive paid search advertising can substantially increase consumers' likelihood of searching for your product, brand and, by extension, your retail store.

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Kraft Celebrates Football Season with Social Media

When I wrote about the Kraft iFoodAssistant widget recently, I realized that Kraft had more going on in social media and resolved to look into it. When you look, you find all the usual blogs pointing out coupon availability, which is ongoing for most CPG brands. It certainly is a new way of distribution though; and therein lies one social media impact.

What you also quickly see is two seasonal promotions for Velveeta cheese. Tis the season for tailgating or football on TV, and snacks made with Velveeta cheese are a seasonal item. The Kitchenistas blogger promotion has been going on since September; see the program microsite here. In fact, today is the last day of activity for the five compensated “Mommy bloggers” who have participated in the promotion.

How does this kind of promotion affect sales? Velveeta brand manager Sherina Smith admits they don’t really know:

“It’s hard to say,” Smith says. “What we do know is that this consumer is online looking for ideas for meals. We know she blogs a lot and looks to other bloggers for tips and ideas. The more that we can be where she’s looking for ideas, the more we can be top of mind when she’s grocery shopping.”

All this context seems to create warm fuzzies for the brand, and that may be all we can say at present. I’d love to know the ROI of a low-cost promotion like this, incorporating real people, compared with the ROI of, say a traditional television commercial. Yes, I’d like to know, but what is the dependent variable—brand awareness, favorable brand attitudes, what? We’re back to the difficulties of measuring attitudes and their impact on behavior. Marketers have operated on faith that positive brand associations do matter for a long time, and I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon.

Enter the Big 10 promotion, also for Velveeta and also tied in with football season. Here’s the Big 10 conference home page for today. Note a banner ad at the top by Rotel with a dish of cheese dip beside it. You probably won’t be surprised when you click through and find that most of the featured recipes feature Velveeta cheese. Rotel is a ConAgra brand with a non-corporate-looking website that pushes recipes and attitude.

Note that on the Big 10 home page there’s a square box pushing a contest for bowl tickets, again featuring Rotel. At the bottom of the page there is another banner that makes the Rotel Velveeta partnership more explicit. It’s all quite integrated—and hard to miss!

Kraft’s website, the iFood Assistant, and one guesses its relationships with bloggers will go on. Promotions for various brands, many of them seasonal, can also be expected to continue. But this is a large international corporation. What can smaller businesses learn from what Kraft is doing?

A lot, actually. First, promotions work. Second, seasonal is good. Spreading the word through local and/or relevant bloggers can be a way to get word out about the promotions. Follow the mommy bloggers link to explore issues of compensating bloggers. Finally, note that the Kraft campaign makes use of low-cost social media and relatively low cost online advertising to drive viewers to the social media and web pages for the promotions. No high cost mass media here! It’s carefully planned and targeted, making use of a variety of media to get the word out—this is the season for recipes made with Velveeta cheese! 

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Widgets for Content Distribution

My fascination with widgets has been documented from the early days. About a year ago I wrote about Google gadgets and suggested that marketers check them out and see how they work; they can be DIY. Last week’s post on applications and widgets emphasized some of the large players in the space. Can a small blog/a small website use this technology cost-effectively? The answer is “yes.” “Free” is more difficult.

This aspect of the subject came to mind when I received an email from Wowzio.com about a new hosted widget service that’s the brainchild of former Yahoo! social media and software powerhouses. I was interested and checked it out. It's a hosted service, so there are charges. It’s still in Beta, so they are offering free services for personal blogs. I took advantage of their offer, requested and invitation, and took the widgets for a trial run.

The way it works is simple. You provide your blog or website address. They make some connections on the back end and send you a link to your widget page. At present, they have six widget templates from which to choose. The “Customize This” link leads you to a page that lets you size the widget and choose background colors. Then it gives you embed code. Even better if you have a blog on a standard platform like Blogger or Typepad, you simply click the button for the platform and it inserts the chosen widget on your blog. Then you configure the sidebar content as you want it. I tried tag cloud and live activity widgets and they showed up on my blog, just as Wowzio said it would. Look at the right sidebar on my blog; they are interesting, fun to look at. The content distribution issue is that, if you want to Grab This widget, you can put it on your own blog or website, just like I put the McKinsey widget on mine. Your content has just been made available to readers/visitors of other sites!

Wowzio enters a space similar to other app platforms like Kick Apps, which has been around for awhile. They have a lot of explanation about how it works and there’s a link for pricing at the bottom of the home page that gives you an idea of what these services run. I don’t see doing this one myself. It really would take a developer, but from what I’ve seen that would be a one-time cost of a few thousand dollars, depending on your location (and how busy free-lance developers are!).  Wowzio doesn’t seem to have set a price for small business customers yet, but that will certainly be forthcoming.

The critical question for a small business is whether it’s worth a hosting fee—say $100—each month plus a developer if you need one to create the widget.

I think there’s a pretty simple answer. Do you have content that a clearly-defined target audience would like to include on their own blogs or websites? That would be content that is relevant, engaging and continuously updated.

If you have great content, you may be ready for a widget to distribute it. If you don’t, you need to be working on the content. Great content always comes first!

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Kicked Up Marketing with Apps

Ad Age (subscription required) hosted an Apps for Brands conference last week that produced some interesting advice and case histories. There’s no doubt that apps for Apple’s iPhone represents market leadership with, according to last week’s email, 75,000 apps and 2 billion downloads as of today (the CNET article says 85,000 apps; I took Apple’s word for it). To marketers a more interesting issue is what other firms are doing in the space since few of us have a brand that can attract developers like the iPhone.

First, a couple of layperson’s definitions. An app (application) is software designed for end users. A widget is a graphical interface that allows users to interface (easily) with the application. In practice, the two are often indistinguishable from one another, since marketers are delivering a lot of apps, especially the mobile ones, as widgets. Examples from the conference include:

            The Kraft iFood Assistant

               Bank of America Mobile Banking

                            Benjamin Moore’s Catch-a-Color

Ad Age advises that apps must be real time and easy to use and to pay for if not free. They point out that people will pay for value if the apps are useful enough. They also point out that people are even more annoyed by intrusive advertising in the mobile environment than on the desktop as Major League Baseball found out. On mobile, click-through isn't the only metric that matters. Are people recommending your app? Or trashing it on Twitter? "We measure click-throughs, but we don't measure pissed off," said Mr. Bowman, referring to when MLB put an intrusive ad into its At Bat app.

They also point out that apps need to be part of an integrated marketing message, although people are most likely to learn about apps by WOM. Their recipe for success is utility, frequency and viral. Good advice.

Each of the apps above has a demo page; they are all worth looking at. The Benjamin Moore color app clearly wins the prize for most creative, but the other two offer genuinely useful services, and that’s really what it’s all about. The three firms above are all trying to sell a product or a service. Only Kraft charges; 99 cents.  The MLB At Bat app (see it on their home page) is $4.99 at the Apple App Store; they are offering a value-added service. Make sense?

But is this another strategy that’s only for corporations with big advertising budgets? Not necessarily—more about that in a few days.

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