Social Episodes

A few weeks back our CTO Dave Carter released two eBooks on the State of Foursquare and the Top 10 Ways Enterprise Marketers can Leverage Foursquare.  If you haven’t had a chance to view them yet, check them out, they are both great reads.  During that same time Awareness released Foursquare Perspectives, a free tool that allows marketers to research announced new functionality that provide brands with valuable and useful insights about how Foursquare users are interacting with their physical locations. In addition, we announced that the Awareness Social Marketing Hub supports publishing tips to multiple Foursquare channels.  The message is we believe Foursquare is an underutilized tool in the enterprise and when used correctly it can be a powerful part of an enterprise social media strategy.

I have also been asked to put together a presentation that talks to the challenges and benefits of Foursquare which is below.  The presentation kind of took on a life of it’s own and has grown into an extended graphical version of Dave’s eBook. It uses some of the information included in Dave’s eBooks but goes deeper into case studies and tools utilizing other resources and references.

I’d love to hear from you with any feedback you have on the presentation.  Hope you enjoy it.

Yesterday, Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare met with Adam Ostrow at the Mashable Media Summit in New York City.  During the detailed Q&A session Dennis told the attendees about some of the astounding growth numbers Foursquare is currently experiencing.  They include:

• Close to achieving 1.6 million users
• Adding roughly 100K users per week
• Checkin count is growing by roughly 50K per week

Crowley discussed the issues associated with scaling to support a vast base of users and venues.  He mentioned that while checkins are increasing by (on average) 50K per week, some weeks are higher.  In fact one week saw a jump from 750K checkins to 900K. “It sounds like these are really good problems to have,” Said Crowley.  “But then we sit with our engineering group and these are difficult problem to solve.”

With user adoption and checkins on the rise, Foursquare has established themselves as a serious player in the social media space.  The question is how will they further engage with brands?  Ostrow probed Crowley about how Foursquare partnerships with brands and media companies work.  Crowley responded openly and honestly saying that, “It’s tough right now. A lot of what we are doing are just experiments”.  The big question remains, how can brands and enterprises leverage Foursquare as part of the marketing mix?

Crowley did hint at some ideas for brands as he discussed the underlying intention of the platform which he described by comparing his service to Twitter.  Essentially, Foursquare is for users to leave nuggets of content at locations that can be viewed anytime in the form of tips.  Tweets are more timely – it’s more about what is happening now.  Foursquare content can live in a location forever, while Twitter is more time based.  Translation for brands: Take advantage of the tip functionality to leave users helpful nuggets of content that either tie into a marketing program or relate to your brand in general.

In addition to tips Crowley discussed the “Digital Candy” concept of Badge Rewards.  This is essentially the idea of adding some type of value – monetary or otherwise – to the badges users acquire.  There is obviously huge potential here for brands to single out and reward loyalty.  The question many brands that I spoke with have is, will this system ever be automated or is this something you will need to partner with Foursquare to achieve?  For now, we will wait and see.

The full interview with Crowley is below.  My question to you, should brands be looking at Foursquare as a component of their social media marketing mix?  If so, how should brands leverage the platform?

Today Awareness announced that the Social Marketing Hub, our latest software innovation, became generally available. During the development of the Hub, Mark Cattini (our CEO) and I traveled to over 50 of the largest brands in the world to get their feedback on the new product.  We spent time collecting feedback on every aspect of the solution from functionality to pricing to market positioning.  While we spent time discussing the product we also spent a significant about of time talking with each company about their approach to social media, their objectives, their successes and their challenges.

I have to admit that I was surprised by some of the findings and was even more surprised to learn that most of the organizations we spoke with face similar challenges despite being of different sizes and in different industries.  What are those challenges you ask?  Below is a summary of what we learned.

1. Inability to scale

The inability for organizations to scale – to quickly and easily manage, maintain, and measure multiple social channels – was a top theme coming out of our meetings. Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group recently published a post that discusses the pain of scaling social media programs in more detail and breaks down the Social Media Management Software market. A real life example of this pain came very early on in our tour. We sat down with the interactive marketing team at a large retailer who explained that they needed to drop MySpace as a channel because they didn’t have the resources to manage and report on it in a meaningful way. Because it had become too burdensome to maintain, they opted to stop spending time updating and managing MySpace and, in their words, “break-ties with our 30K+ MySpace friends”.

The issue for them boiled down to scale. They are not able to utilize and promote additional channels because managing their primary outposts – Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube – requires a huge commitment in terms of resources. They would like to be able to easily add and test new channels but don’t have the time or energy to expand on their current strategy.

2. Security & Control

Raise your hand if your organization shares passwords to your social sites via an excel spreadsheet? If you are guilty, trust me when I tell you that you are not alone. In fact, of the brands we met with only a handful were not using excel to share passwords.  In one of the more uncomfortable moments from the tour, we met with the marketing group and a representative from the IT team at a large consumer electronics company. We mentioned controlling passwords was a challenge for many organizations and they went on to explain how they share passwords through excel. When someone leaves the company they change the password, update the spreadsheet and resend to nearly 30 people who “may” need access to manage updates (this includes resending it to their multiple marketing agencies). Needless to say, the rep from IT was not happy and that resulted in a heated discussion about internal security protocols.

This example is just the tip of the iceberg for security and control. Many organizations have Facebook Pages, YouTube Channels, Twitter Accounts, etc controlled by individuals within the company, outside of the team responsible for controlling messaging. This makes it very difficult to control messaging and posts and makes it almost impossible to retract assets that may be out of date or contain obsolete messaging.  It’s also impossible to report on who published what, where and when.

3. Lack of resources and buy-in

Many of the top brands – some of which have received kudos for their social performance and strategy – are operating with an extreme lack of resources and next to no buy-in from senior execs. A contributing factor to this is a lack of meaningful reporting (see point 4) but it is still shocking that social media has not been fully accepted in the highest levels of some of these enterprises.

Take for example a large, multi-billion dollar retailer who has two individuals managing multiple twitter accts, a few Facebook pages, multiple YouTube channels and a recently launched Flickr page. The management of these channels is only a small component of their everyday jobs which makes prioritizing them very difficult.  While meeting with the social media tandem they needed to continually excuse themselves to respond to support issues on Twitter. The challenge they face is resources are difficult to get. In their words “…  from the executives perspective, we are executing on social media and doing a great job. The question we get is ‘why do you need more resources, everything is going really well’. The problem is we are working 16 hour days to make this happen and are spending large portions of our day arguing with other departments about access, controls, messaging, etc.” This is a good segue to point #4 – reporting…

4. Reporting is Ad-Hoc

Reporting on social media is the single biggest hurdle faced by large organizations because it impacts every other point on the list.  Without reporting, it’s difficult to scale, get exec buy-in, maintain control and centralize your social media strategy.  What surprised us is that pulling general reports from the big channels – Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube – is a manual process that people are spending a great deal of time on. We have seen everything – interns hired specifically to pull stats and aggregate data, marketing agencies getting paid top dollar to pull data on a weekly basis, departments forwarding weekly reports to an individual who aggregates data on specific channels and pieces of content and a myriad of other ways to resolve the issue.  The point is there is a big hole to fill around reporting. Organizations want and need a central place to collect data from multiple channels and have simple way to manipulate data to see how assets are performing and which channels are providing the best bang for the buck.

5. Centralization

Organizations are looking to centralize social media efforts across the organization. What we found is that most organizations handle social media in silos. Different departments create pages and accounts for their division and this makes it difficult to deploy a centralized strategy.  Another large retailer we met with is experiencing this issue on a global scale.  They have over 200 physical retail locations in the United States and Canada and many of the local outlets have taken the initiative to develop and manage their own social outposts to target individuals within the local geography.  The problem comes when one of the local offices decides to promote a sale too early (or not at all), promotes a new product before it’s announced by corporate, uses incorrect messaging and generally doesn’t conform to corporate guidelines.  This is a huge problem faced by not only retail organizations but also inside large multinational corporations with departments that are dispersed across the globe.  Centralizing the social media strategy is something that is gaining a lot of momentum within large companies and most are moving to bring social media to one department who controls all engagement and interactions.

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We used these interviews and the information we collected as a guide to help us develop the Awareness Social Marketing Hub.  By listening to our customers we gained a deep understanding of their approach to social media and built the system from the ground up based on their needs.  With the market constantly evolving we wanted to make sure the system met the needs they have today as well as be capable of supporting needs that develop over time. We are continuing to gather more knowledge about enterprise social media needs and are always using our learnings to innovate our offerings.

What do you think?  Did we miss any challenges?  Are these the same ones that you face on a daily basis?  I’d love to hear your thoughts…

All photos used under a Creative Commons license.  Photo credits:

1. Scale: Hanson Bros. Scale 04.06.09 [96] by timlewisnm
2. Control: No Controle (in Control) by renatotarga
3. Lack of Resources:  089/365 Money…What Money by stuartpilbrow
4. Reporting: AAAARRRGGGHHH by evilerin
5. Centralize: Collegiate Church, Salzburg by andreakirkby

How do you Maximize Engagement across the social web?  That was the question I was asked during an interactive panel discussion at SXSW.  Joining me on the panel was a team of marketing and engagement experts including, David Meerman Scott, Eric Qualman, David Carter, Chris Heuer, Paul Gillin, Brian Solis and Peter Fasano.  We met at the Social Media Clubhouse to discuss this topic in detail and chat about how brands using the Social Media tools to engage with their customers.

The complete video footage is below.  Hope you enjoy the discussion!

This is an article I wrote for PointZero Magazine.  If you have a moment check it out here.  It’s a new magazine that offers a wealth of knowledge on the social media space.

In the last 18 months, Social Media Marketing has generated a lot of attention and buzz in most enterprises. From the innovative uses of social media during the US Presidential campaign of Barack Obama, to individuals creating a personal brand on blogs and microblogs, everyone seems interested in getting in on the social media hype. Mainstream media continues to point to unprecedented adoption rates of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn among others, leaving enterprises to move beyond the question of whether or not to adopt social media as part of the marketing mix, and into how they should adopt it.

Most enterprises have made attempts at dipping their toe in social media mostly by establishing a presence on what we will call the “free social web” – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.  While these social outposts are extremely important for branding and driving traffic to an enterprise’s web site or online community, they are difficult to measure and track and, most importantly, it’s difficult for the brand to own the conversations happening within the broader social web.  These sites own the explicit data (profile information, demographics data, etc) and implicit data (comments on other posts, details on connections, responses to polls, allegiance to fan pages, etc) making the information difficult or impossible to review, interpret and act on.

Leveraging and Launching Social Media
Enterprises that are at the point of expanding their social media initiatives by launching their own market facing community benefit by learning from the successes and failures of other brands. Three common mistakes Enterprises make are:

•    The “build-it-and-they-will-come” fallacy—This happens when a company focuses too single-mindedly on the tools and forgets to consider the marketing programs that are driving membership and participation in their community.  Too many brands believe once the community is launched it will result with hundreds of thousands of members out of the gate.  The truth is the launch of a community should go hand-in-hand with a well though marketing program and activities to drive membership and participation.
•    The “let’s-keep-it-small-so-it-does-not-move-the needle” phenomenon— Some enterprises seem to get into a permanent state of pilot when it comes to social media marketing programs. At some point you either need to move on and scale, or decide that social media marketing is not for you and shut it down.
•    The “not-invented-here” syndrome—This can happen when a very strong community already exists, and the company tries to create a new one and lure members to their own platform. In some cases it makes more sense for that company to engage where the community already hangs out and affiliate with them instead of trying to compete with them.

Measuring ROI – It’s both important, and possible
Earlier this year Chris Brogan (President of New Marketing Labs) and I conducted research on Corporate Trends in Social Media Marketing.  We learned that most enterprises that dipped their toes into social media were planning larger, more comprehensive strategies in the second half of 2009 that involved deploying their own customer or market facing online communities.  The primary motivation of the enterprises planning these initiatives were addressing standard marketing goals including promoting brand, increasing customer engagement and driving demand generation activities.  On the flip side, the biggest concerns of the same enterprises were around ensuring their brand image is not tarnished within a community and that they can generate high levels of participation among community members. An additional concern identified in the survey was the perceived inability to track an RIO with social programs.

Measuring ROI in social media is something everyone involved in the space is trying to capture. While there are many different opinions on the subject no one has established an industry standard. One of the primary reasons behind the lack of a standard ROI definition for social media is because, as we learned in the survey, there are many different objectives for social media programs. For example, while page views may be a compelling metric for a UCG campaign, it may indicate poor performance in a peer support community.

Without standard metrics, organizations need to know whether or not social media programs are making an impact. As companies adopt and enhance social programs they need to be sure that the vendors they select to support the technology component of the social program understand the differences in business objectives companies have and have the appropriate metrics in place to track an ROI. With the right platform and tools in place, measuring ROI is easily possible.

Here is a segment of my session at Web 2.0 – The Elephant in the Room: Social Media ROI.  While the session was on Social Media ROI this segment focused on the 7 Misconceptions of Social Media (Truth be told, this could have been be a session in itself).  I had a blast delivering it and heckling some of local Yankees fans.  All I can tell you is when a group of Yankees fans can appreciate a Sox fan has to say about social media you know all is right with the world.  I hope you enjoy it as well.

The top 7 list mentioned in my presentation are:

1. Build it and they will come
2. Use social media to BROADCAST, not listen
3. What if it all goes wrong?
4. It’s FREE!!!!!
5. We only use the FREE social web
6. We are tracking the wrong stuff
7. We have no plan or objective

What do you think… Are there any misconceptions I missed?

Tracks by Stefano Liboni

This may be something many of you are already doing but it’s been an effective strategy for me so I wanted to share.  I get a lot of questions around how I track our marketing activities on social media and which metrics are the most important.

The approach I have taken is to track our activities in three distinct buckets – Social Yield, The Social Effect and Social Results.  This makes it easier to manage and understand the results.  What most marketers already know is that many of the things we track in social media are not tied directly to the bottom line which is why calculating ROI on the social web has been so challenging.  What you probably also know is that while all the metrics don’t make a financial impact, they all play a role in understanding the success or failure of your social media marketing campaigns. The buckets I use actually came from a marketing class I took in grad school (special thanks to Dr. David Gulley from Bentley University).  At the time there was no such thing as social media so the buckets were used to track traditional programs (print, email, banners, etc).

• Social Yield is a return against a specific target.  For example, it could be the number of members you sign-up for a community against your stated objective or the number of twitter followers you gained vs. your goal. There are couple of keys for this bucket.  First is to not be afraid to put a stake in the ground and set a realistic objective.  You can do this based on previous experience or a SWAG (or a Silly Wild Ass Guess).  Either way it’s critical to establish something and stick to it.  Second, be sure to make the objective time driven.  It’s not good enough to simply state that you want to have “1000 new community members.”  Establish the goal and put it on a time line for achieving it (e.g. In <1 month, in Q1, next year> we will increase community membership to 1000).Some things to consider measuring in this bucket include number of Facebook Fans, number of new community members, number of Twitter followers, number of retweets, number of YouTube subscribers, or number of LinkedIn group members over a given period of time.

• The Social Effect is the performance delta from social activity.  This could be as simple as a change in the number of retweets since beginning the social media program in general or around a product launch (e.g: retweets increased 120% during the week of our product launch).  More sophisticated organizations will track a change in the bottom line such as sales or customer service inquiries (e.g: Since Oct 2009 when we launched on Twitter, inbound service requests declined from 500 the previous month to 250).  Benchmarking key metrics like that up front will get you on a path for tracking an ROI.
• Social Results are how social media met or missed the stated objectives.  For me, the key to the results bucket is they are always tracked against metrics that make a financial impact.  They could be marketing metrics like impact on cost per lead or lead conversion rates but the most important are those that impact the sales pipeline, closed opportunities and customer service incidents.  Using the example above, “Since Oct 2009 we reduced inbound service requests by 50% resulting in savings of $15,000 in deflected inbound calls and emails”

I’m really interested in hearing what you think.  Is there anything I am missing or things I should be tracking?