With social media moving towards the maturity phase in a number of big companies, we’re finding that more and more members are looking for formal plans from their social media teams – detailed ideas about what the team will do in a channel in a given year.

That might work (and be necessary) for TV, a channel where ad buys have to be coordinated months in advance and audience preferences don’t change too much. But for social media, where channels change near-daily and audience behavior is still in flux? We think companies should be focused primarily on experimentation and flexibility – and that plans should optimize to those goals.

Our Social Media Plan on a Page will help get you there – it’s a five-step method for creating a world-class social media experimentation strategy, one that’s grounded in enterprise priorities and audience preferences. Here’s what you’ll do:

Ground strategy in business objectives. Pick – and fully understand –  your company’s 2-5 growth priorities for the year. This guards against wasting time and money by choosing projects that don’t mesh with enterprise-wide priorities.

Assess your audience dynamics. Dig deep, and understand how and why your target audience consumes social media. Make sure you have an idea of where consumption might be headed in the future by identifying your lead users and examining their behaviors.

Identify your strategic opportunities. Explore how social media can help your company accentuate its strengths, as well as meet customer needs in ways that are difficult for competitors to replicate.

Select the highest-potential experiments. Determine which near-term experiments in social media will help position your company to take advantage of longer-term strategic opportunities in social media.

Measure your social media efforts. Use a “Return on Objectives” approach to assess if and how your social media efforts are driving business results.

MLC members, you can download the full Social Media Plan on a Page template and get started on your social plan today.

It’s a refrain we hear often from B2C marketers: their customers are just not engaged enough with the brand. “If only we could cook up the perfect e-mail subject line – that would really wow them!” or “What channel is our demographic flocking to these days? Maybe if we’re the first brand there, that’ll really drive sales!” are how these laments typically go.

But take a step back. Marketers have been on the “engagement” treadmill for probably close to 10 years now, ever since e-mail became a viable commercial channel. Yes, in the interim, we’ve gotten a good deal closer to our consumers – in some cases, giving them a seamless, cross-channel experience both in marketing communications and customer service. We can reach them via e-mail, we can reach them via SMS, we can reach them via Facebook, we can reach them via Twitter. And the cost of hitting those touchpoints is much, much lower than in the old-media world of radio, televisions, and newspapers. But at what cost?

This year, MLC’s key B2C research effort focused on how customers have responded to the barrage of branded information marketers are throwing at them, and the results aren’t pretty: rather than feeling closer to brands, and rather than feeling more sure about their shopping decisions, they’re more confused than ever. The barrage of messages and product choice has led to all kinds of indecisive behaviors, such as endemic brand-switching and “decision spirals” in grocery aisles and retail sales floors. Customers still buy, but many make sub-optimal purchases (and, subsequently, aren’t loyal to the brands they buy), and many put off buying because they’re oversaturated with brand information. Read More »

Earlier this year Wells Fargo announced its new presence in Manhattan through a ‘flash mob’, recorded for posterity on YouTube:

Read More »

Marketers have always found ways to grab consumers’ attention to get their message across.  But attention is scarcer than ever – given marketing message overload (ad fatigue), DVR uptake (ad skipping) and the rise of multi-tasking (lower attention/focus in general).

The latest tactics for breaking through increasingly high barriers to attention all have some serious limitations: Read More »

Marketing’s a complicated business, and, as such, it’s easy to tell ourselves lies – whether we know it or not. We talk to marketers every day, and here are some of the biggest, most persuasive whoppers in the bunch. Got more? Let us know in comments! Read More »

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 »