Wide Angle

Last month, the Altimeter Group, a social media consultancy, released a report titled “The 8 Success Criteria For Facebook Page Marketing” – a set of common behaviors and attributes of corporate Facebook pages that they correlated with a high degree of social media success. Here are the eight criteria: Read More »

Marketing is about creativity, punchy language, and ad campaigns, right?  Not in social media. This post summarizes 5 outdated marketing beliefs and offers quick tips for adapting to the new world of ‘unmarketing.’ Read More »

I met with a retail-industry member last week that’s in the midst of growing one of their businesses from a regional brand focused on Latin America to a global brand with a strong footprint in the US and the UK.  As we talked about what it will take to enter a crowded retail space, our member expressed it this way, “we need to be very clear what are our brand standards and what are our brand standouts.”

I loved the simplicity of the statement and the depth of the insight. Given the increasing prevalence of mobile/social/location technologies like Foursquare, it can be awfully tough for retailers to differentiate, so the customer experience has never been more important.  Do you know the difference between your brand standards and your brand standouts?  If you are like most businesses, the truthful answer is “no”. Read More »

Chunky aloe vera cooler, anyone? According to a recent Reuters article, Coca-Cola is trying “drink texture” innovation along these lines, in hopes of finding the next billion-dollar brand.  In another development, earlier this summer, P&G launched its eStore, enabling it to sell everything from Fusion razors to Regenerist micro-sculpting cream (whatever that is…bet it could double as a dessert topping).

Seemingly unrelated developments—but if you look closer, there’s an interesting link in these two anecdotes that reveals an opportunity for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies to think differently about innovation.  That is, the rise of digital and social media should enable CPGs to relax some important constraints on their innovation strategies—namely, the tyranny of fixed shelf space in retail stores.

That’s where the P&G anecdote comes in.  What if you relaxed that shelf space constraint, along the lines of what P&G is doing with its eStore? If you do that, you have to worry less about giving up some of the shelf space of tried-and-true, mass appeal, high earnings products in return for stocking untried, new products that may not deliver the same earnings per-square-foot.  That’s because with a virtual storefront, warehouse space for stocking physical product is cheap and plentiful.  This opens up the opportunity for brands to increase the mix of ideas in their innovation portfolios that are of a more niche profile, because they can stock the product without the fixed shelf space constraint. Read More »

Here in Washington, the community is abuzz with news that Wikileaks, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing whistleblowers a safe place to publish sensitive information, has released a gargantuan store of documents related to the war in Afghanistan. The documents paint a picture that is decidedly at odds with more official portrayals of the war.

The same day, the Library of Congress’ Copyright Office determined that “jailbreaking” the iPhone – a process that allows users to access apps not available in Apple’s App Store – does not violate copyright laws. Apple contends that jailbreaking can harm the phone’s user experience, and leave it vulnerable to viruses; the company voids warranties of jailbroken phones. The Copyright Office, however, said in its ruling that jailbreaking is “innocuous at worst and beneficial at best.”

Regardless of your opinion on the war in Afghanistan, the ethics of leaking sensitive information to the public, or the use of products in ways that weren’t intended, these examples serve to illustrate one principle of the changing information economy: You are not in control. Read More »

Surely you’ve seen the TV ads. Ex-football player Isaiah Mustafa, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” taking his audience from a bathroom, to a sailboat, to a beach scene on horseback, all the while spouting an absurd, deadpan hyper-masculine monologue. It’s great advertising, a campaign that I think has helped shift Old Spice’s image away from “little white bottle in my grandfather’s medicine cabinet” to “cool, masculine scent that [young] women love.”

Now they’ve gone and outdone themselves, with a social media campaign that might be better than the TV spots. Last week, our Old Spice hero began making personalized videos for bloggers, Web celebrities, and a few average web users. Notable examples include a get-well message to Digg founder Kevin Rose, political punditry in response to George Stephanopolous, and a hilarious response to the Yahoo! Answers question “How many teeth do sharks have?”. Read More »

One of my favorite reads in the social marketing blogosphere is John Mack’s Pharma Marketing Blog. While John covers pharmaceutical marketing across all channels, his posts on social media present a nuanced look at the unique challenges pharma and other regulated industries face when trying to make headway in the space. Particularly interesting are the surveys he occasionally does of pharma marketers. Add him to your RSS reader, if you haven’t already; he’s also on Twitter here. 

John posted a thought-provoking interesting survey a few weeks back, asking pharma marketers what they thought the most important elements of a social media implementation plan were, particularly in the event of a crisis.  Read More »

Susan Wassel, PR Manager at Sharpie, launched a social media campaign with the help of a single fellow employee and now manages the project singlehandedly – with a $2,000 budget.  Her work exemplifies how your team can move forward even if you lack the resources necessary to bring on external support.

Video: Social Media on a Shoestring

Slidedeck: Social Media on a Shoestring

“Sharpie Susan’s” goal was increase brand loyalty by leveraging brand advocates they termed “bold expressionmakers,” who are Sharpie uber-users that gravitate toward new media.  To achieve this objective, Sharpie decided to showcase content from these “bold expressionmakers” that demonstrated creative ways to use Sharpie pens in daily life. Read More »

MLC’s survey data from 200+ companies shows that executive leadership of social media is critical to success.  Indeed, 57% of brands with CMO leaders of social media see strong returns on their social efforts, compared to just 18% of companies without CMO leaders.

The reason?

Social media enable brands to build strong customer relationships that deliver value to multiple functions e.g., new product ideas (NPD), answers to customer questions (Customer Service), or advocacy (Marketing).  Managing these shared relationships requires strong cross-functional collaboration, which only a leader with significant clout and authority can achieve.  As the customer champion, the CMO is uniquely positioned to play this role. Read More »

“I’m particularly intrigued by the competitive differentiation that needs be thought through—strategically—before you can start to think about ‘What am I doing on Twitter?’”

–Jennifer Lavelli, Group Executive, Worldwide Marketing, MasterCard

At MLC’s recent executive retreat in New York, Jennifer Lavelli put her finger on one of the key traits distinguishing social media exemplars (the 10% of large enterprises that are seeing real business results from their social efforts).  These exemplars are focusing their efforts on areas that could change the competitive dynamics in their category. By the way, “changing competitive dynamics” is not taking a category by storm with a viral hit.  Those results, while good, are fleeting.  By competitive dynamics, we’re talking Porter’s 5 Forces here.

And this goes well beyond the typical advice offered by social media pundits.  They will tell you to think through the business objective first, before determining which social media to engage with or build.  That’s not bad advice—its just that it isn’t enough. Read More »