Blog

Enterprise Social Media 2.0 Conference Highlights: Lego and Ramon DeLeon

2010-02-17T12:11:57Z

By Niland Mortimer

Social media as a standard marketing discipline has expanded how brands communicate both within their corporate cultures and with their constituents, customers, and consumers. From tightly controlled internal communications to the most forward looking approaches to open branding, social media platforms are creating new channels to solve traditional marketing and business problems.

A couple of weeks ago in Amsterdam we attended an Enterprise Social Media 2.0 conference that included speakers from companies ranging from Lego, Kodak and L’Oriel, to Vodaphone and Nokia, to Google, SAP, Airbus,, Swift, and Dominos Pizza. Their uses of social media were as remarkable and as diverse as the companies themselves, with each providing instructive lessons in creativity and social media best practice.

Common to all was the assumption that social media is grounded in strategy that supports overall marketing goals and objectives. It’s another tool in the marketing team’s tool-kit to drive business and add value. It’s not a stand -alone activity for the sake of participation in a new media.

Two examples stand out for their different embrace of social media. The first is Domino Pizza, or more correctly, six local Domino Pizza shops in downtown Chicago managed by one owner-operator, Ramon DeLeon. It would be wise to remember this name, because what Ramon has done with social media in his shops is nothing less than revolutionary.

Ramon uses Twitter, YouTube and Facebook the way most fast food retailers use coupons, POS, and standard local promotions. Actually, he uses these new mediums to greater value than the old tried-and-true models, both as a lower cost replacement as well as an enhancement. As Ramon says “I cannot make money selling pizzas for One Dollar, but I can make money off the conversation it generates.” Echoing the common sentiment, Ramon goes on to say that social is made up of tools you can use in addition to your core business plan. “It is not meant to replace it.”

For instance, imagine walking into a Domino’s to pick up your order and being encouraged to become a fan on Facebook, or Tweet your experience, or upload a video, right in the shop while you wait! Or watching an apology on YouTube for a late pizza delivery only a short time after the event. One such apology, made personally by Ramon and his stop manager, has had nearly 50,000 views. Ramon follows his Twitter stream daily using Monitter.com so he can Tweet back in real time with suggestions, thank you’s, or corrections to any error one of his six shops might make. As he concluded, “Conversation is the new online currency! Twitter is a Goldmine of Conversation.”

The second example is how Lego from Denmark uses brand communities to foster long term value creation. Specifically, Lego looks at its audience as segmented communities of users who each contribute to the brand in ever more significant levels of brand involvement. Theirs is one of the best examples of “open branding” among large consumer marketing companies, based on acutely understood customer behaviors starting with the purchase of products and services and ending with creation and co-creation with the brand.

Using social media crowd sourcing, Lego gives users the opportunity for actual product development. Users submit their proposals online, in which they generate new product ideas or customize existing Lego products. Once a certain item receives 1000 votes by other users, Lego Group will consider it for manufacturing. If selected, the proposer receives royalty payments based on sales revenue.

Lego sees it business as a value creating and value capturing eco-system involving both the company and its consumer base. The dynamics of Lego’s consumer affinities are impacted by both the relationship between the company and its users and the connectivity and relationships among the users. It’s a win-win scenario for all parties.

Social Search: Modeling the user as a content generator....

2010-02-03T13:01:08Z

By Aaron Mann

Social search engine Aardvark just published a very interesting white paper: "Then Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine".

I found this a fascinating read. It expresses search as a social "village" model as opposed to the keyword driven "Library" model. We have all been trained to think in keywords for search, but there are many questions that just don't fit in a few keywords. The combination of natural language nuance plus contextually relevant people to answer your question is a powerful proposition.

Of course this type of social search happens all the time. We often join or create sub-networks with a particular interest area so that we can scope our natural language queries to the right audience. If you are a parent in Berkeley you might join Berkeley Parents Network; if you are a cyclist, Road Bike Review; a foodie, Nourish Network and so on. We then adjust our question to the relevant network, group, or sub-set of friends. Or you just blast it out to all your followers, friends and connections. The promise of social search is to make this process much more efficient. Does it work? According to Aardvark:

87.7% of questions sent to Aardvark got answered (very high answer rate!)
75.0% of users who asked Aardvark a question also answered a question for someone else (very high participation rate!)
70.4% of answer feedback had a rating of ‘good’ as opposed to ‘ok’ or ‘bad’ (high quality!)

What kind of questions do people ask:

The concept of modeling users as content generators really struck a cord. Socialarc uses a lot of database modeling and parsing techniques to accurately identify what targets are most likely to be receptive to an outreach message. Making sure the "offer" is contextually relevant (and value-add) to the audience is a key to a successful social media campaign. Aardvark, and other social search engines, take that much further - to the level of the individual question and user.

You can read a summary on their blog and download the paper white paper here. And we added a poll question on the side - tell us how you would find the latest cool local restaurant!

What’s going on in the lab…

2009-11-30T14:47:12Z

By Aaron Mann

It has been a busy November at socialarc, so here are some quick updates. This seems somehow appropriate on cyber-Monday!

Among a lot of great campaigns we are working on, here are two that are holiday-focused to help with your gift-giving this season:

We were very busy on Black Friday doing Just-in-Time℠ Twitter outreach for the Visa Holiday Deals site, part of a much larger campaign covering both US and Canada:

Make sure to take the Quiz – shareable and very funny!

We are also working on the Claire’s Secret Santa Circle campaign, especially great for the teen girls in your family!

We’ve been doing listening deep dives for Bosch, Grant’s Distilleries (Glenfiddich, Hendrick’s, etc.) and Fosters. And we have done some interesting top-level “issues” work, which is always a great learning experience.

Finally, we have been doing a lot of testing (aka playing) with new tools as well. Google Wave, Klout, social bookmarking, Netvibes Wasabi, Video Distribution tools (many), and some new listening technologies too.

Getting a chance to work with great clients and constantly use new tools makes life at socialarc very exciting!

Twitter Lists, a brief guide...

2009-10-31T14:12:16Z

By Evan Woods

Twitter's new list function has been in beta for a few weeks, and yesterday Twitter made it available to all users. So what are lists?

Lists are a really interesting new way to organize people you like and to get other people to notice you (like everything on twitter). You can see people’s lists that they give titles too, and when you click on these lists you see the members who are part of that list and their tweets. In this way, a list is sort of like a microcosm in which only the people on the list can tweet (these are the only ones seen). You can view lists on another users homepage or also on your home page. Following someone’s list does not mean you follow them, or the people in the list.

Everyone also has a “listed” count on their twitter home page (as seen above), showing how many people on twitter have listed them. This is essentially very similar to followers: the more people who list you, the more popular you are/the more you are liked. The goal is to have interesting lists, get listed as much as possible, and subscribe to lists that share your interests.

You can also look at other people’s lists to follow people of a similar category. Here is what a list looks like on someone’s page:

Check out Listorious for a growing directory of Lists.

Homedics launches Restore – water, the way it should be.

2009-10-15T12:32:15Z

By Aaron Mann

My hydration arsenal is extensive – a 1-liter Nalgene bottle I refill two or three times a day; 36 ounces of water bottles on the bike; various camelbacks for hiking/climbing; and coffee (98% water). I drink a lot of water.

Up till now, I used tap water. Our water in the Bay Area is generally quite drinkable, a big contrast to my time in southern California where even the plants want filtered water. I don’t buy bottled water because it is both expensive and the bottles are hard on the environment.

Homedics just launched Restore, a new state-of-the art and innovative in-home water purification system that combines filtration and UV Clean Technology.

Socialarc is thrilled to be helping them on this launch. Restore rocks and here are some recent reviews:

mommygoggles.com

sweetiesswag.com

thegreenhead.com

Maybe the best endorsement I heard came from a friend who is a civil environmental engineer. She has worked on recycled water for the last 20 years and said the plants keep adding more chlorine or longer UV exposure to compensate for the aging infrastructure from plant to tap. She hasn't used other water filters because “they only filter for taste and solids, not removal of anything harmful enough that would cause me any concern”. She loved this “plant in a pitcher” and wanted one. One Christmas gift checked off the list!

Restore is California certified for microbiological water purification, a first for a water pitcher utilizing UV technology and is Gold Seal Certified to National Sanitation Foundation standards by the Water Quality Association.

To summarize:

Pros:

Great tasting water

Easy to use

My Nalgene bottle stays a lot cleaner (no more of that fuzzy stuff building up every single week)

My 5-year old loves the colorful UV light.

Cons:

For years I used the coffee carafe to fill my coffee maker. Now I use the Restore pitcher. Meaning about 75% of the time I forget to empty the carafe and get a horrible mix of old and new coffee. I’ll work this out in another couple of years.

Find out more here: http://homedics.com/restore

Privacy Versus Transparency: the New Rules of Social Media

2009-10-13T21:25:08Z

By: Niland Mortimer

The recent flap over some M.I.T. students developing a methodology using Facebook data to predict whether a person is gay raises many issues about how we protect our privacy and the true relevance of this online discovery.

I remember when The Wall Street Journal published Jeffrey Zaslow's November 2002 article "If TiVo Thinks You're Gay...." many saw this as a gross invasion of privacy and the end of home DVR systems. All it became was a joke.

The sorry aspect of these stories is that we live in a world where sexual orientation is something many want to hide. It's telling that the M.I.T. students didn't, for example, develop a model that by investigating a person's friends they could predict the likelihood of that person being a vegetarian or a dog lover or a Mets fan. "Gaydar" has an immediate draw for the media, hence the widespread publicity.

But personal privacy is a concern that everyone should take seriously by making a decision what to reveal or not, and to whom. On Facebook, it's perfectly easy to limit the information you provide: you can select what to share and with whom to share it--friends, friends of friends, everyone. Allfacebook.com has a great rundown of the privacy options on Facebook.

Everyone should be conscious of their choices and fully aware of the open sea of social media into which they're wading. While It would appear that young people are less troubled with privacy concerns, I recall my son telling me when he was in 10th grade that he and his friends frequently warned each other about what content they put on their Facebook pages knowing that college admissisons departments looked at them.

That being said, the rules that apply to brands and businesses are very different. Best practice for business is to be open and transparent in all online engagements. This is can be a hard shift from the days where information flow was highly controlled; a one-way series of press releases and advertisements. But it is a new mindset that is essential to adopt, and required in today's environment. At Socialarc we manage our online conversations with objectivity and full disclosure, ensuring that our clients' goals and authentic voice are respected.

Be honest, be true, be aware. But also be purposeful with the information you put out for all to see. Bill Bernbach once observed that great advertising helps a bad product fail faster. With social media, this maxim holds true at light speed. Walmart learned this the hard way with their MySpace-like offering aimed at teens that failed in less than three months due to over-control and lack of authenticity.

The rules of caution and transparency apply to social media marketing, too. Consumers understand and accept marketing messages. They reject marketing messages that pose as something else. Connections should be clear and aims out in the open. Then it's win-win-win for all involved.

Dancing with the social media stars!

2009-10-01T00:25:18Z

by: Randy F. Price

Our clients, potential customers and the brands they represent continue to challenge the notion of social media marketing. I believe this is a good thing, keeps us on our toes. There is an ongoing discussion (similar to the internet and web marketing circa 1999) relative to Social Media Marketing’s (SMM) significance in the marketing mix, ROI and about which department, agency or functional team is best qualified to manage this new hybrid of market research, CRM, PR/Outreach,word of mouth and advocacy marketing vehicle, channel or platform. . Take your pick of definitions du jour. Oh, and if you didn’t partake of this month’s survey, please do, love to get your take. But I digress.

Here is the logic flow of a presentation recently made to a billion dollar company that asked about the engagement value of social media marketing.

Customer Behavior

The research shows that consumers who research options online are social media participants and by the way that channel yielded the highest number of applicants (lead generation). Customers (current or potential) trust “someone like themselves” to the tune of 68% (vs. 30%, radical change in 2 short years) as reported by Edelman.

Research from London School of Economics and Bain Consulting documented that the brands with the most recommendations online in its category grow 2.5 times the category average. This key research is the fundamental underpinning of the Net Promoter Score systems.Clearly the goal (at least one of the most significant ones) of social media marketing is to inspire and lead positive conversations, engagements and ultimately recommendations.

These “discussions” also impact search results especially if accompanied by a relevant link, and not mention the straight forward approach of providing compelling call to action, measurement and optimization analysis.

When you look at the share of voice (actual social media mentions or conversations) split out by competitors, correlated against social media spending,, it strongly indicates (and validates) impact.

Spending is not the only criteria, compelling content is also critical. And of course, determining if those conversations achieved the desired result is important and should be defined upfront.

It should go without saying that benchmarking and optimizing should always be a key performance goal and a fundamental objective of any SMM initiative. If you believe, as we do, that this is just the beginning of a new interactive and truly 1-to-1 dialogue with your customers, then establishing real empirical metric targets for success measurement is critical.

To be clear, ultimately sales is the goal. However, building a model that allows for evolutionary precision as well as a variety of key performance indicators which take into account how the social media tactics you are using are impacting your business objective is always part of the roadmap to success with any innovative approach.

Being a fan of K.D. Paine, I found this podcast interview with her to be spot on and does an excellent job of articulating the symbiotic relationship between objective and key performance metrics.

Randy's ERA Presentation - Twitter, complete with Samurai!

2009-09-24T19:32:14Z

By: Aaron Mann

Twitter ERA socialarc innovation lab RFPrice

Randy was a speaker last week at the Electronic Retailing Association (ERA) Direct to Consumer conference in Las Vegas. He gave a terrific (and very well attended) presentation (above) on Twitter - from the basics to a lot of best practices. I loved the "Twitter Samurai". Check it out above, well worth a look!

Social Media and Marketing 101

2009-09-22T00:59:41Z

By: Niland Mortimer

Is social media changing the way businesses market or are marketers employing social media to achieve traditional goals? Forrester reports that 85% of interactive agencies are using social media to help their clients reach customers. These same clients, however, deploy social media tactics for a variety of reasons, from a variety of sources, often without a defined understanding of what is to be achieved. Too often we hear experienced marketers ask "What is our Twitter strategy?" or "What are we doing on Facebook?"

These are relevant questions, but the key question marketers should be asking is "How can social media help us achieve the goals we have set for our business?"

New technologies create opportunities to engage in the experience of being alive in ways we never expected. They don't change the fundamental principles of living.

Taken down to driving success in a business, whether at a start-up or an established global enterprise, new technologies provide ways to engage with customers, sell product, or enhance a reputation in ways barely dreamed of twenty years ago. But they haven't changed the fundamental principles of business success.

Social media marketing tools are in their infancy. We can anticipate, with technology known today, that reaching customers directly, in real time, with more relevant propositions, will be available with the precision and speed direct marketers will come to demand. With new predictive models, marketers will be able to so finely tune and target their messages that the customer experience will be intuitive, a part of the day's flow, integrated into the fabric of their lives.

With this marketing opportunity comes great responsibility. Companies today are finding that social media is a blessing and a curse, if not handled with skill and strategy.

This gets us back to the original question posed in this post. Social media is a new tool to achieve old goals. Every Mom & Pop corner shop wants to engage their customers in interesting and relevant conversations, sell their products, make a profit, enhance their reputations, be a good member of their community, pass on a legacy to the next generation. We have moved from one to one, to one to many, back to one to one. Only today, it's one to one times many millions of conversations. At social-arc we call this "intimacy at scale." This demands new organizational models, a collaborative strategy for deploying to new social media tools, enforced from the top, new governance policies to control and manage the dialog, freedom to innovate, and a real lack of fear of engagement. Effective conversations engender goodwill, whether in person or online. Goodwill builds trust and loyalty.

Another lesson in social media marketing is that these efforts aren't one-offs. Conversations with customers don't adhere to quarterly budgets or seasonal plans. They started a long time ago and will continue long after the "social media initiative" ends. In the 90's companies grappled with issues surrounding their CRM strategy. Software platforms were developed to manage CRM. New tools for old challenges. Customer relationships have always been the key driver of business success. The new use of social media tools is another way to enable, engage and enhance these relationships. But, as with all human interactions, automation will only make the process more efficient. It can't make the conversation more intelligent. This is where sound marketing strategy, with the right people to implement the tools, makes its entrance. Smart practitioners will use the tools wisely, building best practices over time. Social media will become embedded as one of the tactics employed to drive success based on sound marketing strategy. Not the other way round.

Spam vs. Ethics vs. Value

2009-08-24T13:19:53Z