Wide Angle

Launching a new product and want customer advocates to help spread the word for you?  See what you can learn from National Instruments’ LabView product launch (a software program for engineers).  The launch campaign, which won MLC’s 2009 B2B Marcomm Awards, generated more than 2,000 customer tweets and 80 customer blog posts in just one month.

What was their secret?  Building platforms and content around customer needs – not their own product launch.  Read More »

Perhaps you’ve seen episodes of Name That Tune on the Game Show Network (or maybe you’re old enough to remember when it was a hit in the 1970s).  Regardless, contestants competed to identify a song by listening to as few notes as possible.  I was reminded of that show while watching commercials during the Olympics last week.  Within the first few seconds of seeing a new ad, I knew it was for McDonald’s.  There were no golden arches or kids eating French fries to help me; there was just a vibe, an emotional connection that immediately made me recognize the ad as McDonald’s.

In an age when brands are identified by an icon like a duck or gecko, a recognizable sound like the deep voiceover of Morgan Freeman, or a celebrity spokesperson, I found it refreshing to see an ad that relied on none of those but still made a lasting and memorable impression. Read More »

The post title is cheeky, yes; but this one incredibly true. The more we see members implementing a social media strategy, the wider the gap grows between success and failure – and along with that, the attendant risks of failure. For those looking simply to make the social media case, failure means another year lost while consumers and technology forge ahead. For those making social media a central part of the customer experience, failure means massive personnel costs that could have been spent on tried-and-true techniques. So without further ado, the top ten list: Read More »

The economic outlook has forced most marketers to make some of the toughest resourcing decisions of their professional lives. But this is all going to get easier next year, right? Not really. Findings from our 2009 Marketing Investment Benchmarks Survey reveals that marketers do not expect their companies to loosen their purse strings in 2010.

Results from our tenth annual survey show that in 2009, spend on channels conducive to driving consideration (website, social media, direct mail, PR) held flat or grew; while spend on channels that primarily drive awareness (broadcast, print, online display ads) declined in comparison to 2008. The question we asked was what is driving this trend? Read More »

Global warming be darned, it snowed in Dallas last week and temperatures never reached 50 degrees.  While I had the ‘pleasure’ of braving the elements for the week, I had the sincere pleasure of visiting with members as diverse as airlines and beauty products to discuss the impact of social media on their respective competitive landscapes.  It occurred to me that the current state of social media for most organizations is the Heisenberg principle in action: marketers can’t determine both their competitive position and relative velocity (social media adoption) with the same degree of certitude.  And right now, the equation is weighted toward velocity – everyone knows the speed (forward and fast) but very few have stopped to find their current position. Read More »

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A social media strategy without metrics is like Thanksgiving dinner without turkey, truly missing a core ingredient. A social media strategy with the wrong metrics serves the turkey with pasta sauce rather than gravy. Sure, it adds flavor, but it completely distracts from the purpose of the meal. Here’s my point – in marketers’ rush to prove that social media investments produce the required ROI, our social media plans trumpet metrics that may have little relation to what we’re actually trying to accomplish.

In delivering the results of our Social Media Maturity Diagnostic to multiple members over the past month, I sense two problems with social media measurement schemes (and trust me, some are more scheme-like than your local bank heist): Read More »

My New York Giants didn’t play this weekend – that’s one way to end a losing streak. I hadn’t enjoyed four consecutive losing Sundays of gesticulating wildly at my TV to no avail. But Fox, CBS, NBC, or ESPN didn’t quite care – I was watching.

As were about 17.2 million others any given Sunday, helping the NFL to their highest TV ratings in 20 years, a 15% uptick over last season. That’s an increase far beyond the 2% decline in stadium ticket sales, so much so that NFL national sponsorships are up. The pattern extends to baseball as well – World Series TV ratings were up 42% in 2009, which we can’t attribute solely to my Yankees’ return to dominance.

Clearly, we’re seeing not just changing consumer behaviors, but new, never-before-seen behaviors. A 15% viewership increase isn’t just former fans returning to TV. Our latest research on consumer behavior tells us that today’s winners are somehow helping consumers satisfy emerging desired outcomes – not the outcomes consumers say they want, but the latent (often emotional) ones that ethnographic research could uncover. Read More »

Last time, I wrote about how marketers should choose the right social experience—one that accentuates unique strengths—to put at the center of integrated communications.  We’re now at a spot where we can structure and assign roles to our other touchpoints so we can scale that social experience.

To get started, break touchpoints into two categories: secondary touchpoints (the outer circle in the graphic below) and supporting touchpoints (the middle circle):

Click Image to Enlarge | Secondary and supporting touchpoints establish a mental link and then drive the target audience to the social experience focal point.

1.  Secondary Touchpoints link the social experience to your brand for the target audience.  They’re often mass in nature—TV, out-of-home, print, and so on.  Best Buy’s TV ads showcasing Twelpforce are one example of such a secondary touchpoint.

2.   Supporting Touchpoints drive the target audience to the desired social experience.  Targeted banner ads, paid search, and direct marketing often do well here.  Best deployed, these touchpoints will:

• Engage a target audience at moments when they are susceptible to or desirous of the social experience
• Enable easy entry to the experience. Read More »

Intriguingly, Best Buy is putting Twelpforce at the center of its big communications initiative for the holiday season.  Looking at data from the 125 companies that have taken the Council’s social media maturity diagnostic, we know that only 11% of marketers have built social media into their integrated communications planning processes.  That got me to thinking…

Most B2C marketers take the “tonnage” approach to touchpoint planning.  They work back from growth goals and volume targets to plan their touchpoint mix—their mix models tell them how much money they need to dump into broadcast, out-of-home, print, promotions and the like, to hit those volume targets.  Social and experiential touchpoints play second fiddle, at best.  Read More »