Marketing’s New Frontier: The Facebook Stream

Posted on December 8, 2010 by Morgan

: Image via CrunchBase

I first heard the idea of Stream Marketing in this AdAge article, where the author explored how brands were marketing with Facebook status updates. The article looked at Oreo and other big brands who had figured out that the mundane updates were the ones that got the most engagement. And, by virtue of the Facebook social graph, also the most exposure and attention for the brand on the social network. Stream marketing is the practice of optimizing your outgoing status updates to get the most engagement (and therefore reach) with each one. It’s about being intentional in the stream, and cultivating your brand persona with well timed, and executed updates. As a social marketer, it’s imperative that you go beyond the network-presence level of social marketing, and get down into the front lines, update by update, to maximize the brand’s presence in the stream.

Stream marketing is the next frontier of online marketing. Many people and companies talk about using social marketing; but how many are actively thinking, planning and optimizing their stream marketing? It’s a huge, open field with few boundaries and rules for the road; and lots of debate about what is, and isn’t good marketing in the stream. But what does it really look like? Let’s look at that AdAge article:

As it turns out, many people in social networks don’t want to talk about your product, they just want to talk. We’ve long known that inserting brands into social-media channels requires a conversational touch, but many are surprised by just how conversational. There’s increasing evidence that the most-effective kinds of marketing communications on these websites are simple, random, even banal statements or questions driven by the calendar or the whim of a writer that may not have anything to do with the brand in question.

What are you doing this weekend? What is your ideal vacation? What’s your favorite movie or book? On Veteran’s Day, BlackBerry posted a simple holiday-related message that received nearly 8,000 likes and more than 500 comments, many of which consisted of veterans thanking the brand and posting their PINs, allowing others to contact them via BlackBerry messenger. Reaction to that update far outpaced other recent ones concerned with products or tips.

The key here is the conversational element. Being able to create a dialog around your brand or product is what drives the spread of your brand through Facebook’s social graph. Facebook’s algorithm, called EdgeRank, uses the number of comments, likes and shares of an item to determine what bubbles up to the user’s Top News feed – the default view of the News Feed for most of Facebook’s 500+ million members. Items with many comments and likes get seen by more people, driving the virtuous cycle of the viral spread of the message to your fans’ friends, and so on. Without any engagement those status updates just fly by, in a river of noise, unnoticed.

Facebook knows that brands and marketers are paying attention to their stream marketing efforts, and have started adding some rudimentary, yet valuable, stats underneath status updates visible only to the page administrators. Now with each status update you can see the number of impressions received by the status update as well as the percent feedback received for each of these posts. Now marketers can start to really see what is connecting with their fan base, and not just throw stuff against the wall to see what sticks.

The impressions number is important because it’s representative of the number of how effective that message was at propagating through the social graph of users. Getting content into that Top News feed is the best way to reach people on the network, and so the number of impressions can be used as a proxy for how effective that update was at achieving that goal. The feedback is a critical number for obvious reasons. The higher the feedback, the more engaged the users are with the brand around that update. You get all sorts of benefits from that. You have more awareness, you can drive action that’s tied to a KPI, you may get more affinity/loyalty, and you also get the Edge Rank boost as mentioned above, driving that status update into the Top News feeds of your fans’ friends and creating the opportunity to gain new fans, and build greater awareness with people not already connected to the brand on Facebook.

The status data from Facebook isn’t real time, but it is fast enough to let you make some smart decisions very quickly. For example, looking at a recent client’s feed, we realized that their fan base was very engaged around Mad Lib-type, fill-in-the-blank status updates. In fact, they were performing at 4-to-1 compared to other updates. So we made a recommendation to mix more of those types of updates into the stream. The result has been more engagement around more status items, which is exactly the goal. Of course, we also cautioned them not to overdo it, as you don’t want to exhaust a fun outlet for fans; but it was a way that they could shift their stream marketing ever so slightly to get better results.

Stream marketing requires a mix of planning and thought combined with the ability to rapidly respond and shift based on what’s working and what isn’t, all while keeping with the brand voice and persona. With such a fast-moving environment it’s easy to get off brand in a hurry, so it’s important that the people managing your stream understand the brand voice to the core and have a working playbook of ideas, themes and do’s/don’ts that keep them on brand in this fast-paced environment.

It is the evolution of marketing from editorial calendars to playbooks. Let me use a football analogy here. In most football games, a team has its first 15 or so plays scripted. That is, right out the gate, no matter what, they’re going to run 15 plays and see what happens. These are based on their best research and planning, and allow them to test their theories about the opponent, etc. This is very much like a standard editorial calendar. Here are the items we’re going to go to market with, because based on what we know we think they’ll get the best response. But after those 15 plays are done, it’s time to go to the playbook adn call plays based on the response of the opponent.

The same is true in stream marketing. You can start with a strategy and an approach, and you can even stick to it at the start; but then you need to start adjusting and responding to what is and isn’t working if you’re going to have success connecting with fans on Facebook. And much like a football team, marketers, copywriters and community managers can call a play, but whoever is driving the feed activity is the Quarterback, and they need to be able to audible into other plays and strategies based on how their fans respond. From the AdAge article:

“When you have ad agencies or copywriters writing your Facebook copy, it ends up being promotional in nature and if you’re not inspiring feedback no one’s going to care,” said Sarah Hofstetter, senior VP-emerging media and brand strategy at 360i. “You can only talk about your product so much. Balance that with you’re not trying to be their best friend, you’re trying to achieve some marketing objective.”

So how can you be effective at stream marketing? Here are a few tips:

Create a strategy and approach to stream marketing that fits with your brand and brand voice
Create a rules of engagement document that outlines what is an isn’t on brand for status updates
Set a soft editorial calendar for the first handful of status updates to learn what does and doesn’t resonate with your audience
Create engagement opportunities by asking questions and using fill in the blank statements
Use the stream insights provided by Facebook under each item to see what works and what doesn’t work, and refine accordingly
Create a playbook of ideas for conversation starters and status updates that your community manager can go to at any time to engage the fan base
As with any online marketing effort: test, learn, refine, test, learn, refine, repeat ad infinitum.

By effectively marketing in stream you can “inspire feedback” driving the virtuous cycle of extended reach across the network, leading to better results and greater return for your Facebook investment.

Becoming a Content Mill is Not a Viable Social Strategy

Posted on November 18, 2010 by Morgan

A revolution is coming, and it won’t be televised. This, according to Michael Malone’s piece in Forbes, which is based on his research for his latest book, “How Companies Win: Profiting from Demand-Driven Business Models No Matter What Business You’re In.” Malone refers to an upcoming industrial revolution that America misses out on:

The biggest structural economic shift, the one Venky has discovered and which is the launching point of the book, is that over the last decade, the global economy has experienced a fundamental and historic shift from centuries during which supply and demand were roughly balanced, to our current situation in which supply significantly outstrips the demand available to absorb it. This is largely the result of the relatively new science of Supply Chain Management, which systematized the process of marshalling resources to bring products and services to market. The implication is that most modern business strategies are now obsolete, as the new competitive battlefield has now shifted from supply to that of finding remaining pools of profitable demand. (emphasis mine)

That alone is enough to provoke a radical change in how businesses are organized and how they behave. It suggests that most companies, including the most successful, no longer have a lock on survival because the ground has suddenly shifted beneath their feet. That, of course, is the recipe for a business revolution.

The article is eye-opening and has me thinking about the day that my son might leave the US to go work in Brazil, because “that’s where the jobs are, Dad.” But it also got me thinking about the here and now and our own information revolution that continues to shake the ground beneath our feet. Take the above quote and apply it to social media marketing, broadly defined as trying to reach consumers across the new publishing tools responsible for this flood of information, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I think the analogy of the global supply chain in producing manufactured goods applies nicely to the information economy as well.

Blog platforms, low-cost hosting, Facebook and Twitter are the Supply Chain Management pieces of the information economy. Before them, brining content to the marketplace was hard and expensive. This barrier to entry made information scarce and valuable. But the technology improved to make the supply of information to the market more efficient, turning information into, in many cases, a commodity. This isn’t news to anyone reading this of course, but it does continue to have broad implications for businesses and brands trying to reach customers on an ever-crowded Web.

And the reason that brands are having trouble is because the market of information continues to evolve rapidly. Companies are still trying to figure out how to contribute content to the marketplace so that they’re found in Google, so that they can drive thought leadership, so that they can be heard. The problem is, the market timing for that is past. The technology has made the creation of content so efficient and cheap that we’re swimming in it. Business models like Demand Media’s and other the other commodity content producers are making the content market more and more crowded and less valuable. And a traditional company can’t keep up and can’t win in that type of battle.

In a over saturated market, putting more supply out there is like pushing on a string. You can do it, just don’t expect anything to happen because of it.

While it’ll always be important as a company to communicate with the market, just creating content is no longer enough. When your social strategy is based on content creation, you’re sure to fail; because consumers aren’t looking for content – they’re looking for content they want.

This is where Malone’s premise provides insight on how to succeed in our new information marketplace. It’s not about adding to supply, it’s about identifying areas of the conversation that still have profitable demand. And that’s why most traditional marketing advice about reaching customers on the social web is dead wrong. It’s not enough to create blog posts, videos and infographics if they don’t address some remaining or untapped demand in the marketplace. And this is where marketers need to do a better job. As a marketer in the social web you have to look at areas where demand still exists, and if you don’t find any you have to test and probe until you find it. Because your company will only win when it finds and leverages that untapped demand.

So how do you find that demand? That’s the tough part, as often the market doesn’t know what it wants until it sees it; and as a brand you have to continue to test and learn to find it. But there are a few constants that always are in demand, in one shape or another. Looking at how your brand can aid people in achieving the following is a way to suss out potential opportunity.

Making people’s lives easier
Making people happy
Making people feel good about themselves
Making people successful

Those are the areas of continual demand in our information economy. As a social marketer you should be looking at your programs and determining if what you’re contributing is advancing the above goals of the people you’re trying to reach. If you’re not doing any of the above, it’s likely that you won’t tap the demand that will drive your business success.

The information revolution has brought us the technology that has made delivering content to the marketplace efficient, 140 characters-efficient, but too many of us are still seeking for success in a market which doesn’t have much room for stand outs. Instead of focusing on the tools and technologies we should focus on finding the untapped demand, putting our time and effort into creating the messages and products that will make people’s lives better, easier, happier and more successful. Only then will we find the success in our social marketing programs – viva la revolucion!

Establishing a Social Media Presence: Degrees of Difficulty

Posted on September 3, 2009 by Morgan

Note: This is a working argument, not a polished piece. I appreciate your help in shaping this thinking further.

Between upcoming speaking gigs, new marketing efforts at work, and my past history as a one-man blogger in a niche, I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences between establishing a social media presence for different types of people and organizations. For example getting Twitter followers may be exceptionally easy for Ashton Kutcher because of his pre-existing celebrity status whereas a small handmade bike manufacturer in Portland may find it extremely difficult to establish their presence on a service like Twitter. This fascinates me. How do the challenges and effectiveness of the medium change as you move across different organization/individual types? In other words – does who or what you are determine how difficult it is to achieve success in creating a valuable and meaningful social media presence?

I think it absolutely does, with a few caveats. Success of course, is relative. There is no question. The bike shop above doesn’t need the 2 million followers that Ashton has, rather they need a small set of passionate bike fans, preferably in the Portland area who are engaged and advocates for the company. That population number is obviously much smaller. And of course, meaningful and valuable are highly subjective as well. However, I think there may be some interesting patterns that arise from establishing a social media presence that point to different degrees of difficulty for different individual/company types/focus areas.

It becomes increasingly difficult to effectively establish a social media presence that creates value for you and your stakeholders the further you get from either an individual pursuit or from a consumer-focused business model.

To help me get my head around this I created a crude little bell curve with some markers/placeholders to help me think about the types of businesses and the overall difficulty in establishing a mutually-valuable (to company and customer) social media presence. Note: I’m strictly talking establishing a presence. When you look at managing a social media presence this bell curve gets tossed quickly.

How to read this thing

The bell curve’s y-axis is difficulty in establishing a valuable social media presence for any entity. Person, corporation, non-profit, etc. The x-axis is existing market footprint. Defined as existing share of mind or awareness that is latent in the online audience. This can be either via other marketing, a well-known brand, celebrity achieved elsewhere, etc.

Individuals

So for example, on the continuum social media for individuals is rather easy. Setting up profiles, finding friends, and engaging and connecting with your network is a relatively easy way to use social media, and is, by definition, the way it is used the vast, vast majority of time. While it’s easy it leaves you with very little in the way of a market footprint, and usually that doesn’t matter; but to some it does.

Start-Ups

Again for start-ups it’s relatively easy to jump in and start using social media. Without a large customer base, working with early adopters and people who are willing to forgive you for your mistakes as a young company, and without the restrictions of brand police and established marketing you’re free to dive in and start developing your voice from day one inside social media. It makes presence building the easiest possible for an organization. Starting from the very beginning is always easier than trying to transpose a message/voice/brand on to a medium that is built for individuals. Again, though as a start-up you’re dealing with a typically small market footprint which makes your mistakes generally more forgettable and experimentation at establishing your presence in social media.

B2C Focus

As you start to move across the footprint size x-axis your difficulty increases. The bigger your footprint more often than not, the more you are constrained by things like brand standards, messaging, corporate communications policy and other legacy media structures that make establishing a valuable presence in social media very challenging. Add to the fact that most established companies with a decent footprint (think regional firm, or a company that has solid revenue or subscribers or whatever metric you want, without the brand recognition of the Fortune 100+) have more than one stakeholder involved in the communication process. PR firms, advertising agencies, internal marketing, customer service, etc. etc. all have responsibilities with social media. Establishing an appropriate and effective social corporate strategy is critical to achieving success.

These barriers inherent in many of the world’s organizations make social media implementation much more difficult than that of an individual.

B2C companies get a bit of help because as a consumer-facing entity their customer/potential-customer base is large and are (for the most part) independent actors who are governed by their own set of decision-making criteria many of the people they want to engage with are on social networks representing themselves and are free to act as they see fit. This, I argue makes establishing a social media presence far easier for these B2C companies than for B2B companies as we’ll discuss next.

B2B Focus

The curve falls apart a bit here because there is no reason why a B2B firm should move further along the x-axis (i.e. their market footprint) compared to a similar-sized B2C company. But the change in difficulty on the y-axis is quite a jump from B2C. In fact, I argue that a non-branded B2B company has the biggest challenge when it comes to implementing a social media presence that is valuable enough for the company to officially support. You’ve got a few things working against you as a non-brand B2B company in social media.

As a B2B entity your customer/potential-customer base is far smaller than a B2C play.
Many of your customers (the other “B’s”) probably have very limited social media presences themselves.
Employees of your customers are typically using social media primarily in a personal capacity and not as representatives of their firms in the space.
B2B relationships are often defined by communication structure (e.g. the CEO talks to the CEO, etc.) that can’t hold in the social space.

And I’m sure there are more. But the point being that this type of social media presence creation/implementation is the most challenging of all because the audience is limited and their accessibility and engagement on these platforms is restricted by their own corporate policies/practices. These make the opportunities for B2B much smaller in number than in the B2C space. While the quality may be higher, it is exceptionally difficult to prove the return on the social media investment for B2B companies when so few business to business relationships function across the medium.

Big B2B & B2C

In the diagram I argue that the B2B v. B2C dynamics of difficulty hold for big brand companies and establishing a social media presence (say a company like Paychex vs. Best Buy) but the difficulty begins to comes down due to the brand recognition already obtained by the presence of their large market footprint. Continuing with the two companies I’ve chosen it’s much easier for Best Buy to connect with their customers online because there is hardly a person in America who isn’t familiar with the company and brand. Paychex also can leverage their reputation to more easily implement a social media presence than other companies less well-known, even though they have a B2B acquisition model. Small businesses are familiar with Paychex and would be more willing to connect with them in a social media setting than another unbranded, smaller company in the same space.

Celebrity

And celebrity is just the combination of the ease of creating and using social media in a personal setting combined with the massive market footprint created by outside activities. The confluence of these two factors make establishing a valuable social media presence the easiest for celebrities out of all the groups that I’ve identified so far.

What’s the point?

The point is that there is a lot of one-size fits all social media theory and strategy bandied about daily by people who don’t consider the implications of the person or corporate realities that impact their execution in creating a new social media presence. The circumstances are different and therefore the execution, expectation and effort levels need to be different as well. I implore all “experts” talking on the subject to consider where your audience/clients/readers lie on this continuum before dispensing generic advice. Building a social media presence for a regional B2B manufacturer is completely different from McDonalds, Britney Spears or Morgan Brown (humble author, individual). The challenges are different, the expectations are different and the difficulty in creating value out of a new social media presence is certainly different.

As I said at the open, this is an in-process framework that I’m using to sort through some of these issues as I address different audiences. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how to represent and think about these challenges and any thoughts you have on the concept in general. Thanks.