Having a national social media campaign through Facebook is great, but when it comes to selling high-end mobile sound and video systems, it’s important to have a local advantage as well. In a first-of-its kind offering, JVC Mobile Entertainment has created a network of 84 Facebook pages that link the company’s national product lines with local audio and video dealers. The pages will be a resource for JVC fans to learn about not only JVC products and promotions in their area, but also lifestyle topics like music, action sports, body art and fashion, according to Chad Vogelsong, general manager of marketing for JVC Mobile Entertainment. “Every brand has a national page, and they talk about what they’re doing on a national level” Vogelsong tells Marketing Daily. “We thought, ‘Why not create a community of local dealers?’” JVC and its agencies (PR company American Rebel and ad agency e2amp) will be responsible for posting content to the 84 sites every day (as well as to the company’s national Facebook page), though the ultimate goal will be to connect with local businesses (such as music venues and tattoo parlors) in the 84 markets to have their Facebook updates and promotions appear on each local page as well, Vogelsong says. “Other than the tech stuff we put up once a week, the rest of it is content from these local areas,” he says. “It becomes a truly regionalized community.” Granted, setting up the network was no easy task. First, the endeavor is the first of its kind for any national brand, Vogelsong says. So much so, that Facebook initially shut down 84 separate JVC Mobile Entertainment pages until the company explained what it was trying to do. Another issue is the nascent nature of social media among JVC’s local dealers. “We noticed a lot of our dealers had not embraced Facebook,” Vogelsong says. To maintain each regional page, JVC is encouraging dealers to either interact with the pages independently, or to send photos and promotions and JVC and its agencies will update them daily. The payoff, according to Vogelsong, is a deeper level of communication with potential customers and fans to engage with on a daily basis on terms that they’ll find meaningful. “It’s an 84-page magazine that I get to fill with whatever I want,” he says. “It’s a daily news machine that we take to the local level.”
Also known as “word of mouth,” what’s the secret to a successful earned media strategy? Traditional paid media, according to Tracy Stokes, principal analyst at Forrester Research and former senior director of global brand marketing at Timberland. Born from traditional public relations, Forrester defines earned media as “a message about a company passed between consumers as a result of an experience with the brand.” And thanks largely to an explosion in social media, earned media is on fire. But “earned media cannot be treated as a stand-alone sideshow to the main event of building the business,” according to Stokes. Rather, chief marketing officers “must demand that it is integrated with online and offline paid media as part of a holistic brand-building strategy, with success measured in terms of business results, not just Facebook likes.” Indeed, as an anonymous social media vendor told Stokes, “for every wild success, someone has paid someone something to get it started -- it just doesn’t happen by itself.” For example, Stokes cites Old Spice’s hit social media campaign -- the one with the horse. Sure, it garnered high levels of earned media in social networks, but it launched with a traditional high-ticket Super Bowl TV ad. Furthermore, Stokes finds that new technologies are fusing together earned and paid media. In particular, Facebook and Twitter ads have built-in sharing capabilities to amplify fan bases, while American Express uses Buddy Media to scale and track brand engagement programs throughout the paid, earned, and owned media ecosystem. In a second example, Kraft Foods used Kontera to give a social boost to its Ritz Crackers’ Glee promotion by embedding a contextual text ad into online editorial about the show, Stokes recalls. How should marketers evaluate earned-media programs? Well, PR has traditionally been measured by counting gross impressions, and social media has followed suit by counting the number of likes or fans. According to measurement analytics expert ThinkVine, however, “just because it can be counted, doesn’t mean it is important or relevant.” According to Stokes, discussions with social media agencies and vendors reveal that many marketers are trying to quantify the return on investment of their social media by asking, “what is the value of a like?” Others, meanwhile, are starting to move beyond counting the likes to try to understand outcomes on two levels: first by measuring how a campaign affected their bottom line and then by using that data to predict what the results of a future campaign might be.
The social commerce marketplace is booming, and broadcast radio -- with its extensive local sales presence and audience reach -- is a natural promotional partner. Clear Channel Radio has signed a deal making LivingSocial the exclusive provider of daily deals for the radio giant, reaching over 80 million listeners per week via 500 Clear Channel stations in 90 cities nationwide. As part of the partnership, Clear Channel radio personalities will promote the LivingSocial daily deal for their local marketplace, featuring discounts of at least 50%. The information will also be available on each station’s Web site. Clear Channel will also promote non-local LivingSocial offerings, including LivingSocial Escapes (“vacation-in-a-box” getaways) and Adventures packages. Clear Channel Radio is just the latest big media company to hop on the group commerce bandwagon. In July Gannett Co. launched DealChicken, a group discount platform drawing on the company's considerable local sales force, which Gannett expects to introduce to over 40 additional markets by the end of the year. McClatchy Co. has gradually rolled out its new Dealsaver program, reaching all local markets served by the newspaper publisher in September. Also last month, the Associated Press and 40 of its largest newspaper partners have moved to enhance ad circulars by integrating mobile advertising, including location-specific offers and interactive tools. In March, an industry forecast from the Local Offer Network, which aggregates daily deals, predicted that the U.S. group-buying marketplace should increase from $1.1 billion in 2010 to $2.7 billion in 2011. While a few big players still dominate the field -- most notably Groupon and LivingSocial -- analysts agree that it remains highly competitive as new players emerge at the local, regional and national level.
Having a national social media campaign through Facebook is great, but when it comes to selling high-end mobile sound and video systems, it’s important to have a local advantage as well. In a first-of-its kind offering, JVC Mobile Entertainment has created a network of 84 Facebook pages that link the company’s national product lines with local audio and video dealers. The pages will be a resource for JVC fans to learn about not only JVC products and promotions in their area, but also lifestyle topics like music, action sports, body art and fashion, according to Chad Vogelsong, general manager of marketing for JVC Mobile Entertainment. “Every brand has a national page, and they talk about what they’re doing on a national level” Vogelsong tells Marketing Daily. “We thought, ‘Why not create a community of local dealers?’” JVC and its agencies (PR company American Rebel and ad agency e2amp) will be responsible for posting content to the 84 sites every day (as well as to the company’s national Facebook page), though the ultimate goal will be to connect with local businesses (such as music venues and tattoo parlors) in the 84 markets to have their Facebook updates and promotions appear on each local page as well, Vogelsong says. “Other than the tech stuff we put up once a week, the rest of it is content from these local areas,” he says. “It becomes a truly regionalized community.” Granted, setting up the network was no easy task. First, the endeavor is the first of its kind for any national brand, Vogelsong says. So much so, that Facebook initially shut down 84 separate JVC Mobile Entertainment pages until the company explained what it was trying to do. Another issue is the nascent nature of social media among JVC’s local dealers. “We noticed a lot of our dealers had not embraced Facebook,” Vogelsong says. To maintain each regional page, JVC is encouraging dealers to either interact with the pages independently, or to send photos and promotions and JVC and its agencies will update them daily. The payoff, according to Vogelsong, is a deeper level of communication with potential customers and fans to engage with on a daily basis on terms that they’ll find meaningful. “It’s an 84-page magazine that I get to fill with whatever I want,” he says. “It’s a daily news machine that we take to the local level.”
Also known as “word of mouth,” what’s the secret to a successful earned media strategy? Traditional paid media, according to Tracy Stokes, principal analyst at Forrester Research and former senior director of global brand marketing at Timberland. Born from traditional public relations, Forrester defines earned media as “a message about a company passed between consumers as a result of an experience with the brand.” And thanks largely to an explosion in social media, earned media is on fire. But “earned media cannot be treated as a stand-alone sideshow to the main event of building the business,” according to Stokes. Rather, chief marketing officers “must demand that it is integrated with online and offline paid media as part of a holistic brand-building strategy, with success measured in terms of business results, not just Facebook likes.” Indeed, as an anonymous social media vendor told Stokes, “for every wild success, someone has paid someone something to get it started -- it just doesn’t happen by itself.” For example, Stokes cites Old Spice’s hit social media campaign -- the one with the horse. Sure, it garnered high levels of earned media in social networks, but it launched with a traditional high-ticket Super Bowl TV ad. Furthermore, Stokes finds that new technologies are fusing together earned and paid media. In particular, Facebook and Twitter ads have built-in sharing capabilities to amplify fan bases, while American Express uses Buddy Media to scale and track brand engagement programs throughout the paid, earned, and owned media ecosystem. In a second example, Kraft Foods used Kontera to give a social boost to its Ritz Crackers’ Glee promotion by embedding a contextual text ad into online editorial about the show, Stokes recalls. How should marketers evaluate earned-media programs? Well, PR has traditionally been measured by counting gross impressions, and social media has followed suit by counting the number of likes or fans. According to measurement analytics expert ThinkVine, however, “just because it can be counted, doesn’t mean it is important or relevant.” According to Stokes, discussions with social media agencies and vendors reveal that many marketers are trying to quantify the return on investment of their social media by asking, “what is the value of a like?” Others, meanwhile, are starting to move beyond counting the likes to try to understand outcomes on two levels: first by measuring how a campaign affected their bottom line and then by using that data to predict what the results of a future campaign might be.
The social commerce marketplace is booming, and broadcast radio -- with its extensive local sales presence and audience reach -- is a natural promotional partner. Clear Channel Radio has signed a deal making LivingSocial the exclusive provider of daily deals for the radio giant, reaching over 80 million listeners per week via 500 Clear Channel stations in 90 cities nationwide. As part of the partnership, Clear Channel radio personalities will promote the LivingSocial daily deal for their local marketplace, featuring discounts of at least 50%. The information will also be available on each station’s Web site. Clear Channel will also promote non-local LivingSocial offerings, including LivingSocial Escapes (“vacation-in-a-box” getaways) and Adventures packages. Clear Channel Radio is just the latest big media company to hop on the group commerce bandwagon. In July Gannett Co. launched DealChicken, a group discount platform drawing on the company's considerable local sales force, which Gannett expects to introduce to over 40 additional markets by the end of the year. McClatchy Co. has gradually rolled out its new Dealsaver program, reaching all local markets served by the newspaper publisher in September. Also last month, the Associated Press and 40 of its largest newspaper partners have moved to enhance ad circulars by integrating mobile advertising, including location-specific offers and interactive tools. In March, an industry forecast from the Local Offer Network, which aggregates daily deals, predicted that the U.S. group-buying marketplace should increase from $1.1 billion in 2010 to $2.7 billion in 2011. While a few big players still dominate the field -- most notably Groupon and LivingSocial -- analysts agree that it remains highly competitive as new players emerge at the local, regional and national level.
According to the 2011 Chief Marketer Social Marketing Survey, 73% of respondents say they now incorporate social messaging into their campaigns, up from 64% who said the same thing last year. A further 15% say they expect to launch social initiatives in the coming year, leaving only 10% who say they will not be social 12 months from now, or who are not sure. 78% of respondents representing B-to-C companies say they now use social to reach their audiences, and another 13% say they plan to incorporate social in the next year. 68% of B-to-B respondents also say they now use social media in their marketing, with 15% planning to do so soon. Those levels are still higher than the overall figures, B-to-B and B-to-C, recorded last year. Current Social Marketing % of RespondentsSocial Marketing20112010 Currently integrate into campaigns 73% 64 Plan to integrate in coming year 15 22 No plans for next year 8 10 Don’t know 2 2 Source: Chief Marketer, October 2011 The ability to reach customers at multiple touchpoints rather than simply through one channel remains the most often cited benefit of social marketing, according to 85% of this year's respondents (81% in 2010). 60% of those polled say they're involved in marketing through social media because their target customers are spending increasing amounts of time in those channels, compared to 59% who said the same last year. The viral effect of social media as one of its key benefits is important; 59% named it as one of the three key assets of social marketing. Other reasons for including social in the marketing mix include a transition to one-to-one messaging, customer expectations, cost efficiencies and the chance to reach previously untapped audiences. Reason for Social CampaignsReason% of Respondents Reach customers at multiple points 85% Customer on social networks more 60 Take message viral 59 Conversational marketing 47 Customers expect presence 46 Cheaper/cost effective 46 Reach new demographic 45 Segment customers 19 Corporate leadership expectation 15 Source: Chief Marketer, October 2011 Facebook is the most common channel for social marketing among the total response group; 91% of those who say they do social marketing run campaigns there, either on their brand pages or via apps or ads. In 2010, only half of total respondents said they were currently using Twitter as a marketing channel to reach their audience, with another 15% planning to incorporate it in the next year. This year's survey found 77% of marketers claiming to tweet for marketing purposes. After LinkedIn and YouTube, channels turn niche, with only 15% of those polled using location-based or geo-social services such as Foursquare and Gowalla, and 13% using social bookmarking platforms such as Digg. MySpace captures 4% of the social marketing usage. Among B-to-B marketers polled, LinkedIn edges out Facebook (86% vs. 85% of respondents in the category). Twitter use is more widespread than the overall average (81%), while YouTube is slightly less important to B-to-B marketers than to the response total (59%). Social Channels UsedChannel% of Respondents Facebook 91% Twitter 77 LinkedIn 68 YouTube 61 Source: Chief Marketer, October 2011 The most often cited strategic aim for social marketing is simply to drive traffic to a brand website or other microsite. Two-thirds of respondents named that among their top-three goals for social marketing in 2011, compared to 56% in 2010. On average, respondents to this year's survey get 15% of their web traffic from social media, compared to only 7% a year ago. Interestingly, a larger proportion of those polled cite “generate leads or sales” as a strategic goal compared to last year. At the same time, amassing total followers fell off as a stated aim, from 34% in the 2010 survey to only 26% this year, behind driving opt-ins and monitoring brand reputation. Fan counts is giving way to more hard-edged indicators of social marketing success, especially those that drive to the bottom line, says the report. Social Marketing GoalsObjective% of Respondents Drive traffic to website 66% Generate leads/sales 48 Address brand fans 47 More targeted messaging 29 Monitor brand reputation 27 Amass total followers 26 Source: Chief Marketer, October 2011 60% of those polled in the 2011 survey say the number of fans, followers, friends and likers they can get to sign on still counts as their top metric, virtually the same proportion that cited head counts as the primary measurement tool last year. “Even in social media, you need an audience before you can start marketing at scale,” one of the respondents noted. 39% of respondents say they gauge success by keeping watch over the rate at which their social content gets shared or retweeted, followed by qualified leads coming from social channels, user engagement, and incremental sales attributable to social. While 42% of respondents cited brand awareness/favorability in 2010 as a way to evaluate their social efforts, this year it was named by only 18% of those polled. Social Marketing Measurement of SuccessMeasurement% of Respondents Numbers linking 60% Sharing, forwarding, retweeting, posting 39 Qualified leads 35 Visits with branded content 30 Incremental sales 25 Brand awareness/favorability 18 Source: Chief Marketer, October 2011 Marketers are aware that their efforts to measure the impact of social marketing fall short of their aims. About 13% say they (or their agencies) are “very effective” at measuring social success; just less than half say they are “somewhat effective,” but 40% admit that they are either “not very” or “not at all” effective when it comes to figuring out how well their social marketing is delivering results. Measurement EffectivenessEffectiveness% of Respondents Very 13% Somewhat 47 Not very 28 Not at all 12 Source: Chief Marketer, October 2011 Problems of measurement figure prominently in the list of top social marketing pain points, says the report. Respondents cite the difficulty of calculating an accurate return on investment (ROI) as their main problem, with the inability to track sales or attribute other conversions to any engagements customers might have had with their brands' social content. Social Marketing Pain PointsDifficulty% of Respondents Accurate ROI hard to calculate 52% Tracking/attributing results 42 Too much staff time 38 Inadequate content 28 Inadequate followers 20 Unsure of what content to create 18 Source: Chief Marketer, October 2011 Complaints aside, spending on social marketing is on the increase for a plurality of marketers, though those increases come on fairly small numbers. The average respondent to the 2011 survey reportedly will spend about $166,000 on social marketing this year. Almost half say they expect their outlay for the year to be under $5,000; those low levels are offset, however, by the 11% who say they will spend more than $100,000 in the channel this year. Social Marketing Budget Change in 2011Budget vs. 2010% of Respondents Increased 45% Same 36 Decreased 1 Don’t know/NA 18 Source: Chief Marketer, October 2011 For additional information about the report from Chief Marketer, and access to the PDF file with charts, please visit here.
I’m not letting anybody in on some big secret when I say that social media is the next great communication channel. We email marketers love it because it reminds us of our inbox comfort zone in so many ways: it is inexpensive and scalable, provides immediate response and feedback, is able to be managed by our existing in-house resources, and promises tremendous ROI. Social is also similar to email in that it is permission-based. As email marketers, we already have the skills needed to earn an audience over time, develop content strategies to keep them involved, and suffer the consequences of abusing the attention our audience has given us. Sure, the tactics we employ to do all this in social media are very different from the ways we operate in email, but the strategy and skillset are the same. Combining email and social media has become a sort of Holy Grail quest for marketers and the vendors who support them. It is an apt analogy. Combining the conversation and social spreading power of social media with the analytics and visibility of email would lend some much needed accountability to social media, increasing its adoption among companies that rely principally on email and earning it a protected line item status in the budget. As marketers, it’s easy to love the potential of social media, but hard to quantify what resources to allocate to it until metrics comparing email to social are available. These analytics tools to integrate and measure email and social are now starting to appear on the market, and I expect the conversation will quickly turn from SWYN and “Use email to grow your social audience and vice versa” towards a new round of engaging tales of integrated communications. We could all use some guidance on what to look for and how to use these new tools, so I’d love to write that helpful article. The only trouble is that I can’t -- I don’t know yet what tactics will work well, and which won’t bear fruit because the tools are so new and the metrics they provide are unprecedented. Instead, maybe it’s worthwhile to spend some time on what email and social integration will not look like, so we don’t look like Monty Python in our quest for marketing’s greatest treasure. Here are some things that we can’t do with the next round of email + social integration: Improve customer engagement intelligence. Social analytics can provide a lot of intelligence on what messages are generating responses, but fall well short of email in their capacity to identify who in particular is responding. Yes, you can see who on your page and feed is liking this or retweeting that, but this amounts to anecdotal information, not institutionalized learning in the way our subscriber email metrics show up. There is no automated way to identify who from your email list is interacting (or even following) you socially, or vice versa. If you want to tag social activity back to a customer database, you need to do it manually. For most marketers, this means it won’t be done. Combine email’s targeting with social’s warm brand-fuzziness. One challenge with social media is that targeting is difficult. It’s true that on Facebook you can restrict status updates to custom segments of a page’s fans, but other than geography, how do you go about and create meaningful segments? With email, it’s easy to segment based on previous message responders (or non-responders), past customers, or any other attributes you collect and attach to a record. In social media, there is no such record you have access to. And if you did, would you use it? Targeting in a social context is tantamount to filtering, or limiting the number of people who can interact with your message and spread it around. For most marketers, that outcome truncates the whole social value proposition. So, no, this isn’t part of the email + social Holy Grail either. Analyze the same metrics across all channels. It would at least be great to compare social media using the same metrics we’ve grown accustomed to in email, like delivery, open rate and click-through, right? That’s not on the near-term horizon either. Of that list, only click-through is a common denominator across the inbox, Facebook and Twitter. (Facebook’s Insights are improving with respect to communicating how many people are seeing content, which is a suitable proxy for Email Opens. But I don’t know if this will be available through an API for external integration.) By using a tracking URL for each channel that ties back to an integrated analytics platform, it is possible to see how many clicks for a given message are coming from email, Facebook and Twitter respectively. But even here marketers have to think of the channels differently. With email, each recipient gets a unique tracking URL, so the aggregate metrics are a roll-up of all the activity around a given link or message across all subscribers. With social media, it is a single tracking URL per channel, whether there are 10 fans and followers or 10,000. There is no way to know how many of the clicks come from unique DNA, or how many come from outside the fan and follower base. It’s worth pointing out that nobody ever found the Holy Grail. (Indiana Jones doesn’t count, and Monty Python isn’t exactly revered for their marketing best practices.) Similarly, we should focus on the new possibilities email + social integration do open up for us, instead of hunting for a treasure that will never be found. I don’t know about you, but when it comes to marketing, I’ll take good tactics over a hidden treasure any day.