As they enter the work-force, millennials increasingly form an important segment group in most segmentation exercises. Some estimates suggest that 51 million US citizens are millennials, earning a trillion dollars a year – not a market to be ignored. Given their collective financial potential, and their penchant for brands, marketers have pinned their hope on this consumer group to bail them out of their recession blues.

Marketing to the millennials hasn’t exactly turned out to be the way marketers envisioned it. Despite their best intentions to cut into the millennial pie, marketers struggle to achieve predictable outcomes with millennials. There are two very important factors responsible for this: Read More »

In my last post, I suggested that the Tory Burch brand is positioning itself nicely to help its target consumers manage the torrent of information and choice in their lives. By curating experiences that are broader than the fashion category itself, I believe Tory Burch is helping to blaze a new trail for branding in the next decade.

To pick up the thread from my last post, there’s a strong parallel to the news industry and the role that a rare set of blogs are playing there.  I happen to think that Andrew Sullivan and his blog, The Dish, offer many lessons for brands that want to play curator for consumers.  Let’s unpack what makes the Dish a great curatorial blog, and then dive into how the Tory Burch brand reflects those lessons. Read More »

Gap has been experimenting aggressively with a wide range of SoMoLo (social media, mobile, and location-based) technologies for connecting with consumers.  Below are some of the main lessons from their experiments.

MLC members, for other best-in-class examples of social and mobile executions, please see MLC’s Mobile Marketing Resource Center and Social Media Showcase.

At the ANA’s Digital and Social Conference, Gap’s marketing director (Chris Gayton) and CRM director (Summer Riley) gave a very enlightening talk on their work.  Here are some of the top lessons from Gap’s approach to SoMoLo: Read More »

You’re happy when your consumers “like” your pages, and “re-tweet” your messages. But have you invited them to “check-in” to your store? Who is the “mayor” of your store? Social media has gone local, have you? Approximately 40 million people are using location based social media channels like Facebook Places, Foursquare, and Gowalla.  In the US alone, 25% mobile users use location based services – a potential audience for geo-social campaigns.

Numbers aside, location based social media is a marketer’s segmentation dream come true. Not only can you decide what campaigns and promotions you want to target to pre-defined micro-segments, but you can also customize messages by geography. You can even identify brand loyalists, through the number of people who check-in to virtual locations you own.

Assuming you’ve decided to go ahead and launch a geo-social campaign, these are 5 questions that you must ask while designing a location-based social media marketing campaign: Read More »

Last week, The Economist ran a thought provoking piece on the future of news.  As I read it, I was struck by the parallels to some consumer goods and services categories, like apparel, quick service restaurants, electronics and even some kinds of fast moving consumer goods.

If you believe that what is happening to the news industry may be playing out in these other industries, marketers should be fundamentally reconsidering the role of brands and therefore the way they do branding.

To boil down the Economist’s 14 page report on the news industry into six bullets: Read More »

My colleague Anna spent the second half of last week at the Association of National Advertiser’s annual conference, and reports back that much of the talk of social media metrics at the meeting focused on raw volumetrics: Facebook fans achieved, Twitter followers accrued, clicks on that link, time on site for this one. In short, traditional metrics of social media “engagement” still hold a lot of sway among marketers seeking to evaluate their social campaigns relative to others.

And why not? Friends and followers are the simplest social media metric we have available to us, and the one that’s most likely to track real-world engagement with a brand’s online presence. In the presence of other pros who speak the social language, they’re an easy way to benchmark a campaign’s performance.

But out in the broader business world, we’re hearing that senior executives, especially ones without social backgrounds, are finding it hard to contextualize friend/follower metrics in a way that links back to business results. Former H&R Block social media ringmaster Zena Weist explains to us the limitations of traditional social metrics:

Read More »

Dear Netflix,

After being in a relationship with you for two years, I feel as though we should take a break.  You recently increased your prices, and it’s just not working for me anymore.  I feel as though you are taking way too much and giving me too little.

For example, yesterday you announced that you will increase my monthly bill from $9.99 to $15.98.  A 60% increase is just too much, Netflix, especially since I don’t know if it will offer me anything more.  We both know that I rely on you for most of my entertainment now (you’ve helped me live without cable since we started our relationship), but even I have my limits. Read More »

A few weeks ago, to almost no hype or pre-arranged fanfare, Google launched a new social network, called Google+. On the surface, it looks and functions a bit like Facebook, but under the hood there are some important differences that could break Facebook’s unchallenged hold on the “strong-tie” social networking space.

There’s been a lot of Google+ analysis out there, some of which you’ve likely already read, so we’ll try to get at the most essential things to know by looking at the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Read More »

MLC will be at the DMA11 Conference—insights and discounts herein!

We know from recent research that the top reason consumers follow brands in social media is for discounts.  So, MLC members, here’s your bone—you can save 25% off the regular price to attend the Direct Marketing Association’s 2011 conference in Boston this October.  Interested?  You can find details here.

And, if you’ll permit us to be so self-promoting, there’s extra reason to attend the DMA conference this year.  We’re facilitating two different sessions at the conference—and we think you’ll be excited about both of them! (we certainly are)

First, I’ll facilitate a stellar panel of New Media Ringmasters on Monday, October 3^rd during the general DMA conference. The stars of the show will be: Read More »

No matter your level of interest or involvement in social media, every organization should have a social media use policy in place that quickly outlines the dos and don’ts of social media activity for employees. Putting a social media use policy in place is the quickest and easiest way to decrease the overall level of risk that social media poses for your company – and we’ve also found that it’s one of the best ways to broach a conversation with your Legal team about the risks of social media. Starting out the discussion with well-crafted guidelines can help assuage compliance and regulatory fears, while offering a starting point for your company’s engagement in the social space.

MLC has collected best-in-class social media use policies from organizations like Intel, Best Buy, Telstra, the US Air Force. For regulated industries, we’ve created a library of policies collected from companies under greater regulatory and legal scrutiny.

From studying the policies we’ve collected from the most progressive social media organizations, we’ve isolated three key elements in all effective, well-understood social media use policies: Read More »