Investing millions in Web sites or social content doesn't mean they will rise above all in search engine query results or become the top sharable piece among social and publisher sites. Marketers must optimize them. InboundWriter has begun working with enterprise companies to automate the optimization process, as an onslaught of new content makes search more difficult. The company also plans to tap predictive analytics in an effort to help brands get found among the billions of Web pages indexed daily. The indexed Web contains at least 9.5 billion pages as of Nov. 15, 2012, according to Maurice de Kunder, who manages and authors the site WorldWideWebSize. The tools and optimization model released Thursday aims to help enterprises improve the performance of online content, with management, measurement and objective analytics features. The move by the company follows others, like Resolution Media's Content Continuum and Covario's Rio SEO launching services and tools to support the space. "We want to make content optimization as simple as spell check," said Skip Besthoff, InboundWriter CEO. "We can leverage analytics to know that a piece of content will or won't perform," he said. "We also can tell you the variance of a specific term that will perform." The company has also announced it has raised $2.5 million in additional funding from existing and new investors to accelerate its expansion into the enterprise market. Existing investors Castile Ventures, Rho Canada Ventures, Formative Ventures and The Entrepreneurs' Fund III have contributed to the additional investment along with new investor, Crosslink Capital. Brands realize useful content accelerates the progress of finding potential customers. In the recent Forrester Research report, The Forrester Wave: SEO Platforms, Q4 2012, analyst Shar VanBoskirk explains how SEO programs have become too large to manage manually. Google, Bing and Facebook, along with publishers, now drive marketers to engage consumers with content. As SEO budgets grow, so do programs, VanBoskirk explains, but more pages to optimize means content to create, and more tasks to manage and measure. For example, real estate listings site Rent.com tracks about 1,000 -- up from 150 -- in less time with an SEO platform versus manually.
The two social network and media sharing powerhouses on mobile platforms, Facebook and Twitter, both happened to issue significant updates to their smartphone apps yesterday. By enhancing sharing and search/discovery tools Facebook and Twitter, respectively, are bringing to their apps more of the functionality and versatility that users have expected from the full Web sites. Facebook 5.2 for both iOS and Android most significantly adds to the apps a share feature that is already available on the Web and mobile Web versions. It is easier for a user now to tap an item in their own newsfeed and quickly share it with their friends. A “Share” function has been added to the “Like” and “Comment” buttons at the bottom of every post. This adds a Twitter-like retweet aspect to the social network and could likely increase the sheer volume of material flooding people’s newsfeeds. Twitter updates its app to version 5.1 and brings to mobile a more efficient way to discover content. Using Discover button in the iOS and Android apps reveals more content from the tweet. Instead of a shortened URL, the stream will include the first pieces of content or preview images from the post. Story summaries, publication names and thumbnails will appear in the stream. “All of this adds up to fewer taps, fewer screen views and more content for you to enjoy, faster,” Twitter says at its engineering blog. Migrating more Web features and functionality to the mobile experience has become increasingly important to both of the major social networks as they see massive amounts of their traffic come from devices.
Investing millions in Web sites or social content doesn't mean they will rise above all in search engine query results or become the top sharable piece among social and publisher sites. Marketers must optimize them. InboundWriter has begun working with enterprise companies to automate the optimization process, as an onslaught of new content makes search more difficult. The company also plans to tap predictive analytics in an effort to help brands get found among the billions of Web pages indexed daily. The indexed Web contains at least 9.5 billion pages as of Nov. 15, 2012, according to Maurice de Kunder, who manages and authors the site WorldWideWebSize. The tools and optimization model released Thursday aims to help enterprises improve the performance of online content, with management, measurement and objective analytics features. The move by the company follows others, like Resolution Media's Content Continuum and Covario's Rio SEO launching services and tools to support the space. "We want to make content optimization as simple as spell check," said Skip Besthoff, InboundWriter CEO. "We can leverage analytics to know that a piece of content will or won't perform," he said. "We also can tell you the variance of a specific term that will perform." The company has also announced it has raised $2.5 million in additional funding from existing and new investors to accelerate its expansion into the enterprise market. Existing investors Castile Ventures, Rho Canada Ventures, Formative Ventures and The Entrepreneurs' Fund III have contributed to the additional investment along with new investor, Crosslink Capital. Brands realize useful content accelerates the progress of finding potential customers. In the recent Forrester Research report, The Forrester Wave: SEO Platforms, Q4 2012, analyst Shar VanBoskirk explains how SEO programs have become too large to manage manually. Google, Bing and Facebook, along with publishers, now drive marketers to engage consumers with content. As SEO budgets grow, so do programs, VanBoskirk explains, but more pages to optimize means content to create, and more tasks to manage and measure. For example, real estate listings site Rent.com tracks about 1,000 -- up from 150 -- in less time with an SEO platform versus manually.
The two social network and media sharing powerhouses on mobile platforms, Facebook and Twitter, both happened to issue significant updates to their smartphone apps yesterday. By enhancing sharing and search/discovery tools Facebook and Twitter, respectively, are bringing to their apps more of the functionality and versatility that users have expected from the full Web sites. Facebook 5.2 for both iOS and Android most significantly adds to the apps a share feature that is already available on the Web and mobile Web versions. It is easier for a user now to tap an item in their own newsfeed and quickly share it with their friends. A “Share” function has been added to the “Like” and “Comment” buttons at the bottom of every post. This adds a Twitter-like retweet aspect to the social network and could likely increase the sheer volume of material flooding people’s newsfeeds. Twitter updates its app to version 5.1 and brings to mobile a more efficient way to discover content. Using Discover button in the iOS and Android apps reveals more content from the tweet. Instead of a shortened URL, the stream will include the first pieces of content or preview images from the post. Story summaries, publication names and thumbnails will appear in the stream. “All of this adds up to fewer taps, fewer screen views and more content for you to enjoy, faster,” Twitter says at its engineering blog. Migrating more Web features and functionality to the mobile experience has become increasingly important to both of the major social networks as they see massive amounts of their traffic come from devices.
I got the call at around 7 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 2. Sandy had just left millions without power. It was my close friend, Fred Macri, director of digital strategy and operations at the New York Genome Center, who was stranded at a friend’s place in New York City. “Sam,” Fred said, “The marathon’s canceled. We want to rally all of the runners to clean up New York. We need to come up with a killer social strategy.” Also on the line was Dr. Andy Baldwin, former star of “The Bachelor,” a Navy doctor, triathlete, and humanitarian -- and an active social media figure with 36,476 Twitter followers to boot. Immediately, we began brainstorming. The start of #newmarathon First line of order: create a hashtag: #newmarathon. “New” because it was New York, and because it was now a decidedly different kind of marathon. Andy tweeted it out. Within minutes, he garnered 58 retweets. Good sign. Next, we needed a place online for people to go -- a home for the movement. So we decided to create a Tumblr site with three simple instructions: tweet, clean up Staten Island, and donate. Once we had our digital hub, Andy sent out another tweet. This time, he got 72 retweets -- not bad. The campaign was picking up momentum. But it was still far from being a “movement.” Here come the influencers Every step counted. Andy enlisted Josh Cox, one of the world’s most best-known marathon runners, in spreading the word. PowerBar and Poland Spring signed on. Competitor magazine, a popular publication for running enthusiasts, wrote an article highlighting our #newmarathon efforts. ESPN reposted the piece on their site. Piers Morgan displayed the #newmarathon tweet on CNN. Andy started receiving messages from people in Afghanistan and all across the world. The idea was spreading. The next day -- Saturday, Nov. 3 -- Fred, Andy, and hundreds of runners went into the trenches, working side by side with relief teams in Staten Island. #newmarathon continued to gain traction. Later that evening, Alyssa Milano tweeted the campaign to 2.3 million followers. Then Troy Polamalu, strong safety for the Pittsburgh Steelers and seven-time Pro Bowlers, shared #newmarathon with his 506,675 followers. Hundreds of others started tweeting about it. Two television stations in Florida and California interviewed Andy. As the clock approached midnight, our #newmarathon idea was quickly transitioning from an inspired spark of mission-driven creativity into a veritable real-time movement across New York City and beyond. When goodwill trends On Sunday, though -- the day our Tumblr site was encouraging everyone to pitch in -- the movement became real. Andy tweeted out a powerful photo, taken by Christina Wallace, of the marathon runners in full orange uniform, wearing their colors with pride, heading to board the Staten Island Ferry. He was met in-kind with hundreds of retweets. More and more people started to use the #newmarathon hashtag. They told people where help was needed most, and wrote inspiring words that still make me proud when I read them today, like: “#NewMarathon – the race that will never be forgotten.” Later that day, #newmarathon started trending in New York. What we can learn from #newmarathon The tremendous outpouring of goodwill from the running community that weekend was, to be sure, a (very big) group effort. Soon after the marathon was canceled, for example, the official New York Marathon began promoting the Race to Recover. #newmarathon, despite its thousands of tweets and hits on Tumblr, was not the only reason so many runners joined the relief effort. There’s no doubt, however, that #newmarathon played a meaningful role in creating a movement of marathoners across NYC to help clean up Sandy’s devastation. And there are several points that we can take away from the effort. To wit:
There are some conversations you just have to have over and over, and somehow this seems particularly true with social media. Take, for example, the idea that companies have to be on social media simply because everyone else is. I have had that conversation a hundred times -- including in this very column -- and I can always tell when I’m in a losing battle: my customer’s eyes glaze over, she starts nodding, and then she says, “Right, right, right… So when can we get started?” Or take the idea that social media is free. It is, of course, most emphatically not free. But it has always suffered from the illusion of seeming free. Executives who didn’t have Facebook accounts and had never used Twitter assigned unpaid interns to handle their social media, and expected the work to happen in that most mythical of dimensions, “spare time.” (This strategy is, of course, only effective if the message you’re trying to send to your customers is that you care so little about them that you’re going to delegate engagement to the lowest-ranking person in the organization, and you’re not even going to allocate actual time to that person so he can do it properly.) Beyond these two eternally repeating conversations lurks a third: that each individual social media encounter has an attributable ROI, that we can or should be able to always quantify the revenue generated from a tweet or a Facebook post. We can’t. And it’s silly to assume we can. Yes, you don’t want to waste money, and yes, you need to measure overall results from all your activities, but there is a complex system at work here: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Trying to extrapolate revenue from individual interactions is tantamount to cutting open the goose that lays the golden eggs. Let’s assume you’ve gotten past all this. You’ve convinced your client to assign someone with adequate communications skills, brand comprehension, and experience to manage their social media. You’ve gotten agreement for her to spend X hours per day or per week or whatever to do it properly. And your client has finally accepted the fact that not every Facebook post will result in a fresh influx of cash. And then, just when you think your ceaseless explanations of how it all works might actually cease, Facebook has to go and introduce Promoted Posts. I understand Promoted Posts, really I do. I know we never owned the platform anyway. I know customer communications have value. I know Facebook is providing that value and I agree it deserves to generate revenue as a result. But Promoted Posts have the potential to destroy everything “social” about the way companies use the medium. Just when we’ve gotten businesses to understand that social media is no place for relentless product-pushing, the CFO is going to be wanting justification for each sponsored missive. And while many companies will simply cease using Facebook as the medium of choice for customer communication, those who remain are going to look for that justification -- by directly tying each post to a revenue opportunity. What do you think will happen to the quality of the Facebook experience when small companies can no longer afford to use it, and bigger companies resort to high-pressure sales messages to rationalize the money it costs to promote them? Did somebody say, “vicious cycle”? So here’s hoping Facebook finds another way to generate revenue and keep its shareholders happy. The risk of the current model is that the true cost of Facebook is, unfortunately, just too high.
While most brands and mobile companies scramble to leverage the location-based strengths of mobile marketing, Ben & Jerry’s, as usual, is developing a new flavor of LoMo. In an inspired campaign involving Instagram, it is drafting on its brand loyalists’ love of recording their ice cream passion using the Instagram app. The company has over 123,000 followers on the image-sharing network already. But the #CaptureEuphoria programgoes local in an interesting way. Ben & Jerry's lovers are encouraged to create images related to their ice cream passion and upload to their Instagram accounts with the #CaptureEuphoria tag. They are immediately entered into a contest that will put their images into local advertising. As their demo shows, they already surprised a loyal customer by putting her and her Instagram image on the back cover of a local city magazine. Others may show up on neighborhood billboards. This is a deft campaign that reminds us of the obvious. Local is not just about “targeting.” It is also about the brand being local, finding ways to use the technology to become a part of the local reality in which all of us live. People do still live in neighborhoods and think of themselves within a certain context. So far as I can tell from the entry details, the only winnings this program offers customers would be local fame. And that is no small thing. Who doesn't tell all of their friends that their name appeared in the local dead tree-and-ink newspaper? Or who doesn't tape the local TV news episode when a reporter sticks a mic in their face for comment? Local reputation is the reputation that all of us occupy. And we love how in its video description of the program, Ben & Jerry's even acknowledges there is somethign slightly fun/creepy about having your Instagram image plastered around where you live. The first subject, Megan, is taken aback by appearing on the back of her lcoal magazine. What a cool way for the brand to embrace the unanticipated weirdness of using UGC in advertising and telegraphing to entrants what may be ahead for them. Equally interesting is how in its illustrations of the program, Ben & Jerry’s use some of the oldest of analog media to broadcast the Instagram images -- magazine advertising and billboards. This marriage of global social network with location, digital user-generated content with analog reach really is inspired.
Not long ago, the relationship between a customer and a corporation was relatively static and one-sided. Companies’ advertisements and press releases were completely controlled by their marketing and management teams. Today’s consumers, however, have usurped much of that power, catapulting the shift into “Social Consumers” evident today. These “social consumers” seek out information through sites like Twitter and Facebook, trust only relevant, value-added information and expect a conversation with brands – one that is truly personalized to this specific customer and their ask. This shift in consumer behavior has forced traditional Customer Relationship Marketing to evolve into today’s social CRM. Collecting and managing customers’ data has become insufficient. Now, companies are empowered to utilize this data to create strategies focused on customer engagement and advocacy. CRM was once a company-centric process managed by specific departments, used defined channels and specific criterion during set business hours. Marketing messages that were sent out focused predominately on generating sales. Now, with customer-centricity an imperative for most companies, it’s the customer that dictates the channels, the requirements and “hours” of operation for brands. CRM has evolved into a customer-dictated process managed by everyone throughout the organization. While messages go in and out, the primary focus is on creating interactions and building a brand story and personality. Social media has become the go-to technology platform for organizations to engage with their consumers. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ are enabled to transform businesses in order to cater to the wants and needs of consumers. But what does this mean for traditional CRM tactics? Is there still value to non-social, traditional customer-centered, CRM tactics? One company that effectively uses traditional methods is Zappos.com, the online accessory and clothes retail giant. One of the most notable differences between the customer service of the online shoe and apparel shop and most other companies is their call center. Unlike most call centers that have been outsourced abroad, Zappos houses their entire customer service department of 500 people located in an office in Las Vegas. Customer service employees are trained for seven weeks with a heightened focus on customer satisfaction. They are never given a script. Instead, they are encouraged to offer exceptional services like buying shoes at a competing store just to make sure the customer receives an item that Zappos does not have in stock. These conversations are typically handled offline; however, through the excellent customer service that Zappos offers, these memorable and unique CRM tactics often make their way to social media in a positive manner. Sprint Nextel is also sticking to traditional tactics to connect with their customers. Every Thursday they send out handwritten letters to their customers to thank them for doing business with Sprint. They feel that in today’s digital world, customers notice and appreciate that they are taking the time to offer a more personalized experience. Let’s face it – how often do you get a handwritten letter from a company with a real person’s touch attached to it? The renowned Ritz-Carlton hotel chain also utilizes CRM in an innovative and personalized fashion. Similar to other hotel chains, the Ritz uses CRM software to collect data about their guests; theirs, however, is customized to always include past customers names as well as their specific preferences based on previous stays. Employees are encouraged to always provide impeccable services while striving to make the impossible, possible. Finally United Airlines has a department that specifically looks out for the needs of their frequent fliers. They keep track of habits and strive to make trips as easy as possible. They call their frequent fliers to inform them about delays and, if possible, book them on an earlier flight out. Despite talk about the declining value of managing CRM through traditional media, traditional channels don’t necessarily need to be replaced by social channels. Instead, they should be viewed as a new set of communication options – an enhancement that is more precise and personalized. The question shouldn’t be on which channel you’re managing CRM, but rather how you’re approaching the customer experience holistically in order to build long-standing brand affinity.