Branding.

It’s been the big buzzword whether you are talking about branding through social media or traditional media.  Your image is who you are right?  We ALL thought that about Tiger, and it turns out we thought wrong.  But that’s the power of branding. (I’m not slighting him, just using his image and branding as an example.)  But what does branding do for your company?  Or for yourself (if you are a public entity)?

In many ways branding is who you or who your company is.  For instance, Microsoft might be the more successful company, but Apple’s brand sentiment is stronger, especially in the social arena: (article).  Nike relies on its branding of the world’s most recognizable athletes wearing its shoes to dominate the saturated shoe market.  Geico uses about 18 different marketing campaigns to build their brand yet somehow, they are one of the most recognizable insurance companies.  So, branding builds a perception of what you think about a company.  For the longest time, traditional media was the only way to brand and build your perception.

In 2009 we saw corporations such as Gatorade, Radio Shack and Kentucky Fried Chicken continue to utilize traditional media to incorporate their new branding scheme. 

Gatorade failed miserably early on during the NFL playoffs when it began running commercials stating, “What’s G?”.  While the commercial was engaging and the viewer wanted to know, it failed to convey the message that G was the new Gatorade name.  Further, it took weeks for them to post search links to their site explaining the meaning behind “What’s G?”  Thus when a viewer Googled this question, the answer wasn’t  there.  A week after the first airing, finally someone had written a blog explaining his theory on it and it turns out his theory was right.  It wasn’t until about 2 weeks after the commercials started to air that Gatorade finally showed up in search results for “What’s G commercial”.  So while they attempted a great viral campaign they failed to deliver on the feasibility of delivering the customer into an actionable answer. (read more about this fiasco)

Radio Shack just flat out aired commercials stating that they were now to be called The Shack.  Easy breezy right?  Except for the fact that Shaquille O’Neal might have something to say about who is, “The Shack”.  He is of course @THE_REAL_SHAQ on Twitter.  Surprisingly, to my knowledge, he never did anything with it.  (too bad for both of them, could have been a fun little sparring campaign)  It’s not surprising that Radio Shack is changing their name, since radio is an outdated technology and implies that you can only get things for radio at said store.  The fact is Radio Shack today does a decent amount of business with wireless phones and other electronics.  Unfortunately for Radio Shack, both pieces of their name have a negative connotation.  We’ve discussed why radio is bad, but a shack is not really a place I want to go to buy electronics.  I want to go to a store.  Now all I can do is go to “The Shack” if I want to buy some crappy electronics that are overpriced (IMO).  I’m actually surprised Radio Shack has weathered the storm; they seem like one of those companies that should have faded out after 2000 or at least during the economic downturn of 2008/09.

Finally, there’s Kentucky Fried Chicken, or as they are trying to be known, Kentucky Grilled Chicken, ok technically they are still just KFC but they’ve definitely made a great attempt at rebranding who they are and what they sell.  I ask you, who seriously ever went to KFC because they wanted healthy food?  Not me.  So why the change?  Probably their numbers were dropping so they opted to go with the healthy fast food craze of the last few years (Subway, McDonalds, etc have all overly marketed fresh, healthy food recently).  I’ll admit, I’m on the bandwagon of healthy food.  If I go to a fast food place I look at the calorie chart and my decision is influenced by how many calories the Double Bacon Cheeseburger has.    The difference between a Subway/McDonald’s and KFC is that they have not had to change their name to convey their healthy connotation.  Subway found Jared and McDonald’s just bombarded us with their advertising.  I have to ask though, if companies continue to do this “healthy branding” trend, what’s a company like Burger King gonna do?  They’re screwed name wise.

On the flip side in 2009 we saw other corporations grasp at social media outlets to work on their brand (not necessarily trying to change their brand but to gain some market share and / or build their brand).

Skittles tried to grasp at social media branding when the term was young and hot in late spring early summer with their Twitter and Facebook page takeover of their site. The problem was that the Twitter takeover for Skittles backfired as the community started lots of negative tweets about Skittles.  Quickly Skittles changed the takeover to a Facebook takeover which eased the negativity.  Still the site was barely interactive and really didn’t do a whole lot to improve the Skittles brand.  Jack in the Box did a good job of utilizing traditional media to garner attention to their attempt at a social media brand.  Again though the site was fairly lame and didn’t do much to build their brand… seriously, a “dying CEO” campaign?  Might have been one of Jack’s worst ideas last year.

In contrast, Target used social media to increase brand awareness about their giving / donations and actually used social media to let their fans choose who to donate to (Bullseye Gives campaign).  As gruesome and morbid as this might be, Michael Jackson’s death might have turned out the biggest social media win of the year for TMZ and maybe for MJ himself.  TMZ earned a new reputation as “the first to break the story” and MJ’s legacy soared through Twitter, Blip.fm, imeem, Facebook, etc.  MJ was the top tweeted person of the year and his popularity possibly doubled through his death and resulting buzz.   Interestingly, Tiger made the list at #8, though his name probably popped up on Twitter during any of the major tournaments during the year and well before his “accident”.

Finally, and this stems into 2010, Pepsi announced that they would NOT air Superbowl Commercials during this year’s Superbowl.  Pepsi will instead utilize the money for its Project Refresh online cause marketing campaign. (article)  This is a huge coup for online / social media since the Superbowl has been the main stage for traditional media for the last 15-20 years.  As far as branding goes, it will be very interesting.  Pepsi has been one of the key participants in Superbowl ads so there will be buzz when their commercials are missed.  Hopefully they prep for this and utilize search links to their cause campaign and explain why they are devoted to this campaign over Superbowl ads.  They could become known as the company who changed how we advertise and brand ourselves. 

Social media has proven that it can definitely help or hurt your brand awareness, so use it wisely.  Traditional media is still the main outlet for getting viewership, but is definitely losing traction.  So whether you are building your personal brand or whether you are building your company’s brand, you will have to choose which outlet is more effective for you.  My best advice is that if you think your idea is “cute” you might want to rethink it.  Traditional media allows for cute since it’s much harder to have backlash against it (though not as hard as it used to be).  “Cute” will get you killed in social media if not done properly.  If you are building your brand, decide what you want to bring to the forefront.  Is it your causes; is it your workers; is it your product; are you better than your competition at something?  Figure it out, flesh it out, test it on a small group, re-do it, test again, perfect it, then go for it!

credit: kennymatic

Calling all Analytics Agents in the Seattle Metro. Tomorrow (December 16th, 2009) is a big day Jeff and I are hosting Web Analytics Wednesday at the Spitfire Grill in Seattle from 5 -7pm (it is also my birthday!).

Our official question: “What is going to be the your biggest analytics challenge in 2010?”

Some responses from Twitter:

• JHuskamp: I’d say true multichannel integration
• RRS_ATL: Integrating even more disparate data sources. (twitter, offline, the next big thing.)
• sarahd23: I agree with @RRS_ATL and I will add multi-channel attribution to that.
• UltraNurd: Widespread adoption of noreferrer.
• TomSchmitz: Reading Web Analytics 2.0 by @avinashkaushik cover to cover & remembering/using everything

Come join us for the discussion, a drink and to celebrate my birthday. The official tags are #mmb and #waw so even if you can’t join us in person you can join us in spirit. We also have a surprise for the people who show up early.

credit: eschipul

You may have a Twitter account, but you may not know how to leverage it for your business and personal branding. Given that social media continues to explode and become an important part of all marketing in any industry, as well as impacting how customers are learning about companies and researching purchases, now is the time for you to learn some of the tools at your disposal to understand what is happening on Twitter and measure your success in social media.

This white paper gives you a brief introduction to the essentials of Twitter; discusses Twitter search then jumps into advanced query modification; discusses some key Client applications for intermediate and advanced use of Twitter; defines some metrics that you can use to determine whether your efforts were successful or not; and finally wraps everything together with an implementation plan.

credit: knittingturnip

Thanks for reading our blog!

Jeff and I have been toiling away on a white paper on leveraging Twitter that will be available in the near future.

We cover:

1. Advanced Search Modifiers
2. Leveraging Third Party Tools
3. Performance Indicators for Social Media

We also created a simple reputation portal that leverages Twitter Search to accompany the white paper to help you understand the concepts that we cover.

Until then I am providing a download of the first chapter of User Driven Change: Give Them What They Want.

Credit: D’Arcy Norman

What is the primary purpose of Google? To connect searches to content, right? Well, not exactly.

Even though most users think that Google’s purpose, and goal, is to be a search engine their real goal is to sell advertising. Now they are even selling advertising in the Local Business Search.

Twitter just introduced me to an article on Google’s Data Driven Design Philosophy. To put it bluntly their design philosophy is consistency; make all the products the same so you can try all the new products easily. Google is a Juggernaut with millions of views per day and large design and development teams at their disposal. They have had the capacity to improve their user experience over the years, but instead have generally put their design efforts into cross-promotion of periphery services that sell ads. When Google makes a data driven decision they are using engagement of advertisements and sign ups to ad supported services (not engagement of search).

This is an important point. Don’t forget that your website likely has multiple purposes: your goal and your customers’ goal.

Read our book to learn more about connecting your data to human behavior.

Typically Mom & Pop shops, or rather the one-off boutiques / local stores have a very high brand loyalty. They generally build a very close knit small community of shoppers, and typically provide that good old fashioned customer service that we’ve all grown to love.   However, it seems like every day another one of these small shops goes out of business.

Why? Many times they are too specialized, and thus they are a one-off experience, or maybe a once in a while type of experience.  Thus return / repeat business is seldom.  Second, while the community may be a strong one, it’s not necessarily a large community so the traffic funnel much smaller.  As well, these stores often rely on word of mouth marketing as their main source of generating traffic and orders. Thus, the well sometimes runs dry for any number of reasons.  (note: No, I don’t live in the 90′s. I know that many small businesses have websites and advertise through multiple channels. However, typically their ‘best’ customer base comes from word of mouth, and as well many these ‘websites’ are not ecommerce enabled)

Twitter and Facebook are very much a bunch of micro-communities where word of mouth is golden.  Thus, these forums are a golden opportunity for them to build their word of mouth marketing. Twitter and Facebook don’t drive a ton of traffic to major websites right now (although this rapidly changing, and I imagine that they will soon be great referral websites), however smaller sites typically deal with a lower amount of traffic. So, if you can generate 50-100 visitors a day to your website, you might double your exposure online.

Your contention might be that, as I’ve already stated, many of these boutiques do not have an ecommerce enabled site, so what’s the point?  Twitter and Facebook’s primary function isn’t creating orders right now, so ecommerce enablement is not entirely necessary for them to be helpful.  You can market your unique product; bullet point your company philosophy or maybe your lenient return policy; or even list some client testimonials.  All of these will be well accepted via Twitter and Facebook visitors.

At the very least, the small businesses can create a Facebook/Twitter page for their business.  I’m not an SEO professional, but it is my understanding that if, by chance the small business website only has contact information, and maybe an about us, these pages typically aren’t weighted as high as other web pages might be.  Twitter and Facebook pages seem to garner a lot of attention from crawlers. Thus, the small business’ Facebook or Twitter page might be more likely to be found in search than their own website (make sure you link to your site from Twitter/Facebook though).

More importantly is the power of the crowd to influence their peer group to take notice of said small company’s Twitter / Facebook page. They can tweet about happenings and will be retweeted by their followers and as well, their followers will mention them and this will be retweeted (and with Facebook, Fans will update status about their experience at small business, and or comment on Fan page of business).

My point is that these specialty boutiques rely upon a community for their business and social media is an ever expanding arena for marketing to new customers and at the very least getting the word out about your company. As well, users are using these forums to find out about unique places like these boutiques that they can visit or find out more about.  So, Social Media sites like Twitter and Facebook, can not only service a branding and customer service perspective for large businesses, but they can also serve a more tangible need in driving highly qualified traffic into the small businesses and Mom and Pop can stay in business a little longer.

Social Media is this year’s buzz word by far. Every body’s doing it and every company is getting into it. The nice thing about social media is that it’s mostly free. The bad thing about social media is that it’s mostly free. Thus, there are resounding questions of whether social media is monetizeable. Facebook is trying to make money, MySpace too. Twitter is far behind, and most other sites all fall in the same boat. (Please correct me if I’m wrong)

I don’t have the answer to whether social media is monetizeable, but I do have some thoughts on why it might not EVER be monetizeable.

It starts with tracking and measurement. Currently, most companies control their marketing links directed toward their sites and as such they ‘encrypt’ them with a tracking key which tells their analytics provider referring site, date/time, specific link clicked amongst other things. With Social Media, companies have less control over links directed towards their site. Thus tracking is much more difficult. Yes, you can simply look at your referring site list and get a lump sum of traffic from Facebook, Twitter, Meebo, etc but this is fairly imperfect. I highly advocate that your company ensures that at the very least the links that they are blogging/tweeting/updating have the proper tracking codes in the URL so that your analytics program can tie the data back to them.

Second, we hear it quite often that Social Media is a conversation. As such, the current thought is that the only measurable KPI’s are branding KPI’s: mentions/buzz, brand index vs. top 100 (for example), and influencers. While I think these are great KPI’s to track, they are again, not easily quantifiable. The bigger problem is this: if companies accept that these are the KPI’s that analysts should monitor, then we’ll only continue to hinder the possibility of Social Media being able to monetize itself. If the only thing that companies care about with social media is ‘buzz’, instead of traffic/conversion/orders/sales, they’ll be less apt to pay the social media sites for anything.  (Traffic seems to be a luke-warm metric in relation to these ‘branding metrics’ for SM)

Other questions out there are: if social media begins charging companies for the right to use their accounts, will that lessen the trust that users have in said accounts? Will that cause less of a conversation because companies are charged on a per X basis? Additionally, what if social media sites begin charging even nominal fees to users. Will traffic to these sites die because of this?  Would you continue using social media sites if there were a fee?

A final note is this: if I were to set up metrics to measure, I would want to know the following: my index to benchmark on major social media sites; mentions/rate on major social sites; top influencers by site/account; traffic referred to my site; and orders placed. These metrics are ranked in descending order, thus I would place less emphasis on traffic and even less on orders placed, but I would not discount them.

: | Rodrigo Basaure |

Recently the Internet has been all atwitter about social media and real-time search–especially in the wake of celebrity deaths. I want to highlight a very important issue of Twitter and its social media compatriots. Social media is very short lived. After about 30 days any event, and the knowledge surrounding it, are lost to the flood of information. The short time frame and cache value that come from introducing popular concepts or good deals to these communities make these communities best suited for Spontaneous and Competitive customer types. This fast pace and high turn over leave the more methodical customer types, Researchers and Humanistic, under served.

Because they act more slowly Researchers and Humanistic Buyers are more likely to leverage legacy information. Legacy information is best served through, blogs, forums and static content that the users can return to. However there are ways to introduce these users to content that engages them: one is to include action points for human interaction or research in your social media landing pages; the other is to monitor media streams to contact these searchers when they are trying to recreate the information that the Twitter stream has purged.

Consider leveraging URL shorteners and your analytics URL tags to separate out how your media stream engagement is different between active campaigns and one-off responses. Just because real-time media is ill suited for the more methodical types does not mean that there are no opportunities there.

Yesterday I attended a lunch presentation on Social Media one of the speakers, Kevin Urie of Social Media Club Seattle, said something that rubs me the wrong way.

“I don’t follow people [on Twitter] that don’t have an @-reply on the first page of their account. Twitter isn’t supposed to be a broadcast medium.”

(For those that don’t know you use the @ symbol and the persons username to indicate you are responding to someone. So, @userdriven is you want to talk to us)

I perked up immediately when I hear this. What do you mean Twitter isn’t a broadcast medium? Twitter description of itself from its home page implies broadcast:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

What am I doing? “I am writing a blog about how Twitter’s brand has been taken over by people that have reinterpreted it’s function.” That sounds like broadcast to me. Even if I am sending a high signal tweet that includes the link of a blog I am reading or music that I am listening to I am still broadcasting.

Well, these days the rampant use hashtags (e.g. #journchat) and replies (e.g. @inflatemouse) have pushed the concept of conversation so far that anyone that uses Twitter for the services explicit function is considered noise.

Twitter is now like a piecemeal BBS or a public IM session. The “conversation” is multi-part, free flowing and if you aren’t using @ and # many people feel you are doing wrong. It is now surprise that Twitter has a low retention rate. The most successful accounts on Twitter by conversation standards are not even people, they are robots and co-tweet brands. There are now meta-accounts that rebroadcast compartmentalized information to compensate for the change from personal circle following to the following of 1000′s to see the conversation. These meta-accounts scrape search and retweet tweets that contain buzzwords. For example I tweeted that I was looking for a party on Cinco de Mayo and Seattle City Search responded–that is great but I was only interested in the responses from the people I know. These types of accounts have a high signal metric because they @ frequently and send links but they are turning Twitter into an echo chamber.

Accelerating the echo effect are sites like ReTweetist that actually spur competition for who is most retweeted. Can you imagine this kind of behavior of high response high retweeting counts if everyone was using Twitter for its intended purpose?

I am making a nacho mountain.

RT@someone I am making a nacho mountain.

RT@someone_else RT@someone I am making a nacho mountain.

Many social media marketers are taking the stance that this new phenomenon is great for your business because it is putting you in the conversion. But, where is the conversation?

The reason that Twitter has grown so well is that they have let people use the service in the way they want, A+ for flexibility. But, the mob-ocracy that they have created leaves many people feeling unhappy with the social pressure that is created. Twitter’s brand has been taken over by the users. Like Digg and Reddit Twitter will probably drown in its culture as their unspoken motto shifts from: “What are you doing” to “Do what the mob wants.”

User generated content is frightening for many businesses because they fear getting a review like this one for a wolf t-shirt on Amazon:

This item has wolves on it which makes it intrinsically sweet and worth 5 stars by itself, but once I tried it on, that’s when the magic happened. After checking to ensure that the shirt would properly cover my girth, I walked from my trailer to Wal-mart with the shirt on and was immediately approached by women. The women knew from the wolves on my shirt that I, like a wolf, am a mysterious loner who knows how to ‘howl at the moon’ from time to time (if you catch my drift!). The women that approached me wanted to know if I would be their boyfriend and/or give them money for something they called mehth. I told them no, because they didn’t have enough teeth, and frankly a man with a wolf-shirt shouldn’t settle for the first thing that comes to him.

I arrived at Wal-mart, mounted my courtesy-scooter (walking is such a drag!) sitting side saddle so that my wolves would show. While I was browsing tube socks, I could hear aroused asthmatic breathing behind me. I turned around to see a slightly sweaty dream in sweatpants and flip-flops standing there. She told me she liked the wolves on my shirt, I told her I wanted to howl at her moon. She offered me a swig from her mountain dew, and I drove my scooter, with her shuffling along side out the door and into the rest of our lives. Thank you wolf shirt.

Pros: Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women
Cons: Only 3 wolves (could probably use a few more on the ‘guns’), cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed, wolves would have been better if they glowed in the dark.

For established companies this kind of review seems counter-productive, maybe even damaging to the brand. Look through some of the reviews of the page currently there are 200+ reviews that range from the one above to a one-star review that is equally tongue-in-cheek:

So I got this wolf shirt because of, you know, the sweet wolves on it.

However, having owned this shirt for three weeks now and having tried it out in a variety of situations, both formal and informal, I’m beginning to believe that some of the benefits —- as described by other reviewers —- are exaggerated. For example, not ONE supermodel has approached me. Some of you may be used to having supermodels approach you on a regular basis but, believe me, I am not: I would notice one should she appear in my vicinity.

Similarly, I have not been invited to a vision quest, even though I wore my wolf shirt in New Mexico.

There is one thing, though, and that is that whenever I wear the wolf shirt I have a lot less issues with involuntary urination. I have not studied it long enough, however, to establish a cause/effect relationship.

Once, however, while wearing the wolf shirt I was mistaken for Schneider, the building superintendent on “One Day at a Time.”

So I guess the jury is still out.

The company selling this t-shirt has many different shirts–most only have one or two reviews. The Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt has hundred, but why? Because, people like to be entertained and like to show off. Today alone I have received three e-mails about this wolf shirt. I found it funny so I passed it along on Twitter. Actually, hundreds of tweets reference the shirt.

There will be a consumate stream of traffic for the next couple of days, but what will it accomplish? Sales? Links? Maybe a few of both. It also buries the real reviews–which can be good or bad (depending on your situation). Even though theses reviews seem silly they are not going to hurt Amazon or the selling company. Watch over the next few days to see how frequently this meme reappears and likely for someone outing it as a paid social media campaign.

–

Note: I stand corrected. This Internet meme has skyrocketed the Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt to number one in apparel sales on Amazon.

At Amazon, “the Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt is currently the No. 1-selling item in our apparel store, recently moving up 2,300 percent in sales rank,” said Russell Dicker, senior manager of community content.

So, this kind of viral customer review humor can have a very nice effect on sales.