TechAddress

The 22 Step Social Media Marketing Plan

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 17:31:43 +0000

Peter Kim is a Senior Partner at Dachis Corporation. He blogs about social computing and marketing at Being Peter Kim.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been curating a list of social media marketing examples. The list started with 100 examples (including 35+ from Mashable) and has since tripled in size with the participation of over a hundred contributors with examples from companies around the world.

We could probably come up with 3,000 examples instead of 300 - but the current set already gives us a pretty good sample to think about. One takeaway: for now, those neurotic about missing “what’s next” can relax a bit. Consumers still use a broader set of social tools than corporations, but new categories of tools aren’t emerging rapidly today, giving brands a chance to catch up. It’s time to master the last big thing while you have a chance to catch a breath.

As corporate adoption emerges, there’s nothing wrong with learning lessons from others and making them your own. Start by making sure you have all of your bases covered with the major tools. In other words, copy and paste the items below, then fill in the blanks with your own company-driven effort.

Here’s a framework of 22 tools to consider with notable brand examples:

1. Blogs (Johnson & Johnson, Delta Air Lines)

2. Bookmarking/Tagging (Adobe, Kodak)

3. Brand monitoring (Dell, MINI)

4. Content aggregation (Alltop, EMC)

5. Crowdsourcing/Voting (Oracle, Starbucks)

6. Discussion boards and forums (IBM, Mountain Dew)

7. Events and meetups (Molson, Pampers)

8. Mashups (Fidelity Investments, Nike)

9. Microblogging (method, Whole Foods)

10. Online video (Eukanuba, Home Depot)

11. Organization and staffing (Ford, Pepsi)

12. Outreach programs (Nokia, Yum Brands)

13. Photosharing (Rubbermaid, UK Government)

14. Podcasting (Ericsson, McDonalds)

15. Presentation sharing (CapGemini, Daimler AG)

16. Public Relations - social media releases (Avon, Intel)

17. Ratings and reviews (Loblaws, TurboTax)

18. Social networks: applications, fan pages, groups, and personalities (British Airways, Saturn)

19. Sponsorships (Coca-Cola, Whirlpool)

20. Virtual worlds (National Geographic, Toyota)

21. Widgets (Southwest Airlines, Target)

22. Wikis (Second Life, T-Mobile Sidekick)

And use this username check tool to see if your brands/preferred handles are still available.

I haven’t found a single company doing all of these today. Forget divining a big, meaningful business objective before getting started - you’ll end up in analysis paralysis. Just make sure you’re making an existing business function better and get started. Today.

Image courtesy of iStockPhoto, cmcderm1

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Social Marketing and Maximizing the Post-Click Experience

Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:31:53 +0000

Source:Mashable!

At the OMMA and MIXX events last month we heard the message loud and clear – engaging users through social media is the future of marketing. The Managing Partner of Publicis’ VivaKi, David Kenny indicated never in his career has he seen a more effective medium for building brand affinity. Panel after panel mentioned the value of social marketing. Yet surprisingly few seemed to know how to ask the next question or take a next step.

The Web is shifting from a solitary experience to a social one. Today there are over 500 million members of social networks worldwide. Users spend hours engaged on social networks connecting with friends, meeting new people, viewing photos, playing games, etc.

Banner ads on social networks can still play a role in building awareness for a brand, as a broad media buy with a social network can have broad reach. But there’s a significant revenue gap between brand awareness and brand affinity.

What Happens After the Click?

Even Facebook, with its engagement ads, seems to be falling short. Less than 10 minutes into the Sheryl Sandberg-led Facebook panel at Advertising Week, when asked what the next big thing will be on Facebook, what did the group of agencies on the panel say? Branded applications.

Everyone is asking the same questions – what happens after a user clicks on my ad? What is the user experience AFTER the click?

Is the user taken to a page outside Facebook? That’s where most ads go. The problem is that most users don’t WANT to leave Facebook. So they come right back to where they were. And if you’re lucky enough for them to stay, congratulations, but you’ve taken the user out of the environment where they’re able to easily communicate and share your brand with their friends. What’s social about that?

So instead follow Facebook’s advice and send them to a brand Page. But what does the user do on the page? How compelling is the post-click experience? Without some investment the user will likely see a rather generic page, hardly differentiated or strongly branded, with little to engage with. Hopefully the user becomes a ‘fan’ of the brand, but why would the user return? How are users empowered to share brand messages with their friends? Has the Page not only built brand awareness but grown brand affinity?

Creating Social Opportunities

Or perhaps you take the plunge, follow the advice of Publicis’s David Kenny and the agencies on Facebook’s panel, and you build a branded application to engage users in a social context. The application is viral so users naturally share with friends. With the branded application the reach of the media buy is extended as each user shares with their friends, so even after the ads stop there is an active community of advocates sharing brand messages that not only build brand awareness but build brand affinity within their social circles.

The best solution for brand marketing on social networks combines a media buy for reach with a compelling application to provide branded engagement. Applications that build on the developer platform as a marketing channel for brand messages have the power to not only grow brand awareness but also build brand affinity. Applications that provide utility and entertainment, when shared with friends, not only spread brand messages, but the social connections help brands build brand affinity within the community on the social network. Ultimately, successful applications empower users to become brand advocates, sharing their brand affinity with friends.

Kevin Barenblat is co-founder and CEO of Context Optional, a leading social marketing company providing scalable solutions for brand marketing on social networks. This year the company has worked with over twenty Fortune 500 brands such as Bank of America, Kraft, Ford, McDonald’s, Kellogg’s and Electronic Arts on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and the iPhone.

Imagery provided by iStock/kutaytanir

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NeoEdge Debuts Overlay Ads for Casual Online Games

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 16:33:27 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Casual gaming on the Web has grown over the past year or so to become a fairly substantial revenue generator. Of course, 2007 figures pegged the burgeoning online market at $2.25 billion to the Halo and WoW-enriched $20 billion for console and PC titles and the like. So, relatively speaking, online games rank somewhat on the small side. But entirely Web-based creations do appear to be worthwhile pursuits all the same.

Billions of dollars are hard to ignore, after all. The question consistently on the minds of online entertainment developers remains one of how best to grow. NeoEdge, an ad network specializing in the field of casual games, feels in-game overlays may be one lucrative way to proceed.

The company has introduced today what it calls “Brand Overlays.” These in effect deliver floating advertisement spots in a portion of a window during gameplay for up to 10 seconds that, at the choosing of a marketer and game developer, can be situated in any of the four corners of the screen, or, alternatively, within slivers of real estate at the top or bottom of the screen. Call them header or footer banners, if you like.

The purpose for these overlays is to attract more advertisers to the online gaming world who otherwise may sense that spaces around a website are not as engaging as things seen within games. Brand Overlays might be thought of as a halfway point between a literal external marketing drive and so-called product placement within the dimensions of a gaming environment; not so sly as to become part of a 2D or 3D realm, but neither completely disconnected from the interactive process.

For simple aesthetic propriety, I myself would argue that NeoEdge’s option to market items in a corner of the screen is significantly less appealing than the seemingly more common approach taken by a cross-window banner. It’s what Web users know, so to speak. But the objective for each is the same, and the choice of options may prove a better bet for NeoEdge in certain settings. Much depends on the when and where parameters for a particular stage, as well as the general graphical layout of a game. So far, NeoEdge claims “high click-through rates and no decrease in (gamer) satisfaction levels” in preliminary tests.

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Animoto Launches Mashup Service for Professional Photographers

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 14:31:23 +0000

Source:Mashable!

A person with money; a person who spends it; a person who is easily influenced: an Advertiser’s dream is to reach those individuals with targeted messages on the go. Mobile application advertising is extending the mobile advertising paradigm with new inventory, larger audiences, and more advertiser budgets to reach exactly those users.

Within the social media space, in-app advertising on Facebook has a higher eCPM than Facebook advertising. Following that model, a new breed of applications is now available for Smartphones such as the iPhone, which, at close to ten million sold, is becoming the must-have gadget of the decade. Google’s Android OS gadgets also push mobile application execution to its limits – the key will be seeing how viral the actual devices become.

A Huge Opportunity for Advertisers

According to industry reports, iPhone users have downloaded more than 100 million applications since the App Store opened in July 2008, and the Android platform is predicted to significantly raise the marketshare of Smartphones by allowing more device makers into the marketplace.

A recent forecast by Magna Global predicts that mobile media will be one of the fastest growing of the emerging media channels, estimating it to grow by 43% to approximately $300 million in 2009. That reach provides advertisers with a huge market opportunity to reach and engage with consumers in a new and scalable way by staying ahead of the curve in advertising innovation – reaching people when and where a decision is most likely to occur.

So why not just mobile advertising? Why mobile application advertising? By integrating into an application, you have much more control over the type of advertisement and the level of interaction available with users, as opposed to the mobile Web where ads are generally static banners. This mobile application platform provides an infinitely engaging and accessible device for targeted advertising, but if social networks are still untested waters, advertisers are still wary of this new environment. And just like social media, when you get past the education, advertisers really just want to know - “How can we make money there and how much is it costing me for a new customer?”

Creating Revenue

The good news is: many of the tenets of social media and mobile marketing apply to Smartphone application marketing, and there are several ways to approach it to ensure you walk away with some real value.

Smartphone application marketing connects brands with their target audiences no matter where they are. Ads on iPhones, Android-enabled devices and other Smartphones have the ability to deliver high-impact interactive rich media to an engaged, targeted, self-selected audience and the new breed of application analytics companies help measure the success of campaigns, interaction and brand recognition.

More visibility. Brand awareness. High impact creatives. Mobile applications and Smartphone technology allow advertisers to extend their imagination to the path of reaching targeted audiences. Users can interact with a brand by tilting the phone and using the built in accelerometers, poking and playing with the product, or getting location-based advertising. Essentially, for the first time consumers become a part of the advertisement springing open the advertiser wallets.

Mobile Application Analytics

Applications only drive higher revenues if advertisers can identify the users consuming those apps. This has opened the door for many mobile application companies focused on identifying who the users are, what they do in the application, and what devices they are using.

Analytics provide application developers with granular insight into how users interact with applications, helping them identify user experience challenges and improve the overall performance of their applications.

What Are You Waiting for?

Smartphone applications are starting to make waves in the digital advertising world, but advertisers need not be daunted by a new platform. These apps operate in essentially the same ways as social media, targeted display and mobile marketing models. However, they offer deeper engagement, more sophisticated analytics, and a great way to broaden reach beyond the computer — significant opportunities for advertisers to boost revenue and build consumer relationships in a unique personal way.

Mobile advertising has the potential to exceed not only Internet advertising, but also the four traditional pillars of advertising as well: TV, radio, print and billboards. We are only in the first phase of the real mobile application market and this is a significant player that’s here to stay.

Former BlueLithium co-founder and general manager Krishna Subramanian has spent a 10-year career on the forefront of emerging technology. He is currently focusing on creative and inventory optimization, predictive targeting as well as scaling and monetizing social applications. Prior to BlueLithium’s acquisition by Yahoo!, Krishna led corporate and product marketing initiatives, positioning BlueLithium as the leading behavioral ad network; launched the first national online/offline social network, MingleNow, and led BlueLithium’s strategic acquisition of 123out.

Source:Mashable!

Animoto is a mashup tool that allows users to make movies from the images and music they already have on their hard drive. Over the last year they have introduced a variety of features and functions. The latest of these is Animoto for Photography.

Animoto takes the pictures as slide show concept a bit further than most by incorporating a kind of artificial intelligence into the process. This twist means that the movies you get often seem more like trailers than home videos. Over the last few months they’ve applied this approach to a variety of things, from creative music mixing to business videos and everything in between.

This new feature, Animoto for Photography, enables photographers to use Animoto’s interesting technique to make their photography into a video. Animoto makes it easy to create these photography-based videos, freeing up a photographer’s time by reducing the amount of time spent futzing with the computer.

How is this different from the existing Animoto mashups for music, business and more? The company has added adjustable speed to the image display. Formerly the “intelligent” Animoto program would match the images to the tempo of the song they were being displayed with, now photographers can make the images appear at the intervals they design. they can also let Animoto match images to the song tempo still, if that’s what they want. Animoto for Photography gives them the choice.

The other feature Animoto has added is a button at the end that can call viewers to action. This makes Animoto a new way for photographers to market their work and services. Photographers who have tested the software seem to love it as a sharing and marketing tool:

“Animoto is a perfect fit for professional photographers,” said award-winning wedding photographer, Linda Jennings. “I can quickly upload my photos, pick just the right song, and Animoto automatically creates a show-stopping video. And when the video is complete, I can easily share it in more ways than ever before: email, blogs, my own website, Facebook, iPhone. The possibilities are endless with Animoto.”

Animoto for Photography is not free. It will run you $99 for three months or $249 a year. The subscription does allow photographers access to a library of music that is licensed for public use, which is a great benefit in addition to the other features subscribers get access to. Animoto’s claim to fame is that its artificial intelligence (aka Cinematic Artificial Intelligence) ensures that no two videos are ever the same, even if you use the exact same images and music.

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Is Social Advertising a Safe Haven for Marketing Budgets?

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:31:30 +0000

Source:Mashable!

As we watch the economy do what economies do - have growing pains and adjust to challenges - it becomes ever more apparent that doing things the old way just won’t work anymore. That is true of many of the old ways, especially when it comes to how companies advertise and grow their business.

It is my opinion that the return on investment (ROI) for traditional advertising will continue to shrink, even as companies using traditional advertising methods continue to throw money at ads in hopes that their company will survive these choppy financial seas. Instead of panicking and clinging to the deflating lifeboat of old ideas, now is the time to stand firm and innovate.

Evaluating the Situation

Before a company can find success in branding and marketing through non-traditional means like social media, companies and entrepreneurs need to reevaluate how they define ROI. Sure, there is always investment, but instead of thinking of this investment solely as monetary, also consider the investment you can make in time, staff, creativity, participation, and other less tangible resources. In this economy “investment” could be replaced by innovation, inspiration, involvement, or interaction for a different and fresh form of ROI.

Social media is often accused of taking a “touchy feely” approach to advertising, marketing and brand management. In a sense this is true. The ways of measuring ROI in a social media campaign are much more indirect than a cost based traditional model. In part this is because the cost of social media to grow your company is relatively low and consists mainly of intangible things like proper use of your time.

If the company is large enough, it may entail the cost of hiring someone to manage your social media efforts. If the company is a small to medium business or an entrepreneur or sole proprietor, most will find that after an initial training session with a good social media guide they can use existing staff to manage social media campaigns. This is a huge cost saver that can be carried over into a reduction in traditional advertising expenses as well.

Measuring ROI

One of the most tangible ways to measure ROI is site analytics. If you have a site that is starting a social media campaign, make sure to get a good analytics program installed, like Google Analytics. As you start each campaign, make sure to associate it with tags and key words you can track in your analytics program.

You can do the same for on-site CPM advertising, like the ever popular Google Adsense. By associating each ad block with key words and campaigns, it makes it easier to measure where the money and visitors are coming in from. Coupled with a great stats program like Mint or similar, there is no reason you can’t develop your own in-house ROI study as you embark on your first social media campaign.

Enhancing ROI

One of the many ways to enhance your ROI from social media campaigns is to consider transparency. Since it is very hard to hide behind an image these days (go ahead and Google your company name plus the word “sucks” or “stinks” or other negative connotations and see if anything comes back), the more transparent a company and its top level staff can be without giving away company secrets, the better.

A fantastic example of transparency helping a company’s numbers is that of BuzzAgent. They were so invested in the idea of changing how they approached their brand they did a 90 day experiment that showed measurable gains (and other interesting data) through openness and interaction.

Additional Benefits

If you aren’t sold on the idea of fully embracing social advertising, consider the intangible benefits of a brand campaign as well, including how social media can save you money indirectly. By becoming more involved with your brand and embracing both the negative and the positive (realize you no longer control the conversation about your company) you can stop problems before they start.

By giving your customers access to you through social media and using it to channel everything from customer support to sales and hiring, you will find that you are gaining income and stopping some tradition areas of corporate monetary hemorrhaging. All without spending vast amounts of extra money on ads no one stops to watch, listen to or read anyway outside of Superbowl Sunday. I’d say that’s pretty good indirect ROI, wouldn’t you?

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Create a Wow Technology Conference With Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:36:04 +0000

Source:Mashable!

This is a guest post written by Jennifer Leggio, who writes about enterprise trends around social media, including security, privacy and reputation issues, for ZDNet.

You’re a thought leader in your industry. You want to convene other thought leaders in one place to share ideas with each other and with those hungry to learn. Perhaps you want to showcase some technology. And you want to make some money. Your vision unfolds as a conference, to which you can attract vendors, sponsors, media and attendees. Then you think about the huge events you have attended during your career – Black Hat, DEMO, Interop – and you think there is no way you can create such an event without the backing of a major corporation or media outlet. Wrong.

The era of Web 2.0 has created a freedom for entrepreneurs that never before existed – though that freedom is not without its risk. That said, all you need to get your conference idea off the ground is a nest egg investment, a good “hub” location, a strong network that you can tap for sponsors, speakers and attendees, and the power of word-of-mouth marketing (WOMM) – which is exactly what it sounds like. And, while unconferences such as BarCamp, PodCamp and WordCamp are impressive, I’m talking about a bona fide technology conference.

Don’t believe me? Look at Defcon as a historic example. The U.S.’ largest hacker con is said to have launched in 1993 out of a BBS that its founders and initial attendees were a part of and grew to more than 8,000 people this year. Defcon is an institution in the security community, and while its sister conference Black Hat is now owned by CMP and also provides Defcon a bit of a captive audience, thousands make the trip to Las Vegas for the hacker con alone.

WOMM is said to have a more credible feel than other more saturated marketing attempts, and what’s great for conference founders is that you can carry the passion that made you launch the event in the first place with that word-of-mouth. Below are three examples of conferences borne of a small idea that have grown successful via WOMM. While all three are somewhat regional, all have attracted a nationwide audience and speaker roster:

Gnomedex – Though more business than technology focused, Gnomedex is an example of how someone with a strong personal brand grew a conference out of primarily WOMM. According to founder Chris Pirillo, his entire marketing model is based on WOMM. “If something I do doesn’t catch on WOMM, I consider it a failure,” he said. For example, Pirillo said that in 2001, Gnomedex was marketed through his Lockergnome mailing list, which still has more than 100,000 subscribers. As social media presence grew, i.e. legitimized blogs and the birth of podcasting, so did Gnomedex’s WOMM vehicles. According to Pirillo, “2005 was our breakthrough year – largely being embraced by an ad-hoc community of bloggers.”

Twiistup – In doing some crowdsourcing, Twiistup came back as the most prominent answer when I asked which conferences have the best WOMM. Twiistup, founded by Mike Macadaan, markets itself as an “alternative” to traditional networking events. On a small scale, it rivals DEMO in that it features several startups selected to debut their products to an audience of media, technologists, venture capitalists and potential angel investors. What it has going beyond DEMO is its more “Webby” feel and almost cocktail party atmosphere.

SOURCE Conference – SOURCE Conference is the parent of security conferences in Boston and Barcelona. It launched via SOURCE Boston in March of this year as the first security conference to combine application security practices with the business of security. Due to my background in security, I’ve worked with the SOURCE team and I saw firsthand how the event grew from zero to a few hundred participants in its inaugural event, through 90 percent WOMM methods, making significant use of social networks such as Twitter. Founder Stacy Thayer did not have the personal brand power of Pirillo when she launched SOURCE, but what she does have is an impressive network of contacts in the security industry that she leveraged to build an advisory board and bring in impressive speakers – both making the WOMM that much easier.

You’re a thought leader in your industry. You want to start a conference. What’s stopping you?

[Disclosure: Jennifer Leggio does pro-bono communications work with SOURCE Conference]

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How to Know if You Should Fire Your Social Media Consultant

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:33:57 +0000

Source:Mashable!

Company Name

Soshiku

20-Word Description

Soshiku is a powerful tool that manages your school assignments. It can even notify you via email and SMS.

CEO’s Pitch

Aimed primarily at high school and college students, Soshiku is a simple but powerful tool that manages schoolwork. You can add assignments directly from email or your phone via text messaging, and you can also receive due date notifications via email or text messaging. For assignments that require partners, Soshiku also lets you add partners to your account so you can collaborate on notes, assign tasks, and share important documents. Having Soshiku available to students can have a serious impact on students’ grades and performance by always keeping them up-to-date on schoolwork.

Mashable’s Take

Soshiku was launched recently by Definitialize and its 17-year old founder, Andrew Schaper. The idea was born out of frustration with not being able to keep track of all of his school work assignments. He couldn’t find a service that addressed this common dilemma, so he decided to create it himself.

Even though the service is geared towards high school and college students, there’s no reason younger students and their parents couldn’t use it as well. The ability to add courses and homework assignments with mobile devices via text messaging and email is extremely useful. However, receiving reminders and notifications of upcoming due dates on your cell phone is the most important part of this service.

The other impressive thing about Soshiku is the feature that lets you collaborate with others on assignments. Many school projects and assignments require students to work with others as teams, so being able to invite others as partners on your account is very useful. Students working on the same assignment can then share notes, tasks and documents related to the project, all centralized online and updated in real-time.

I was surprised that such a simple and useful idea like tracking homework assignments wasn’t already a service. Yes, there are countless sites that allow you to track tasks and appointments but none of them are dedicated to school work assignments and students. It’s no surprise that it manages everything so well considering the fact that its creator probably uses it himself on a daily basis. He graduates from High School soon so we’ll see if he continues to use it at college. In the meantime, students can stop using that old excuse about the dog eating their homework. This service will make sure they don’t miss anymore deadlines.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.