Original Source: Advertising AgeLocal pages drive 36% better results. Global results are built one region at a time. A few words to the wise from our data wizards:
Bigger is not always better and,
Regional programs perform significantly better then global ones.
This should come as no surprise; relevant local content has always performed better. For a whole host of reasons, including the perceived complexities involved with managing social globally, or the desire to maintain brand consistency, many global marketers have developed models that isolate regional marketing teams, ignore local marketing programs. This is usually "accomplished" by pushing out corporate content to a global audience from the MarCom mothership.
However, the data shows that local Facebook pages perform 36% better than global ones. Success is driven by great organizational empowerment at the local level, relevant local content, local media support and presentation in a tone of voice relevant to the targeted local market.
These results parallel many things seen in the crazy world of Web 1.0. Global websites often performed worse then targeted local ones. Local marketers often showed little support for global programs, and CRM databases performed worse as they grew bigger and lost focus.
Should large institutions consider more seriously creating a "team of Facebook pages" to leverage this? In terms of management, does it make sense to go down this less centralized route?
PP: Your company is called Domino Project. How would you describe it, as a publishing company or media outlet?
SG: Well, let’s understand that publishing has nothing to do with chopping down trees, or even printing. Most big publishers don’t own their own printing plant. Publishing has to do with taking financial and intellectual risk to bring ideas to the public, and we’re publishers. That’s what we do. We have some luxuries on our side. We don’t have to worry about returns, nor do we have to worry about long sell-ins, nor do we have to worry about significant financial risk because all our staff fit in one warehouse.
We don’t have to worry about interrupting the whole world, putting on a song and dance show every book because we have subscribers whereas very few book publishers do. So now there’s more than 25,000 people who’ve signed up to hear every time we come out with something new. That’s a huge asset that almost no publisher has, and some of our books will just be on the Kindle. Most of our books will be hard cover as well. Most of our books will be audio. Every one of our products is available in any bookstore that wants to carry it.
So, in many respects we look and act like a real publisher. The difference is we don’t pay advances because we are co-publishing, co-creating with the author, and so we are not in-charge. We are both in-charge and that means we can eliminate lots of the things in the typical relationship that drive authors crazy.
One of the classic rules of great marketing copy: Use specific, detailed facts and examples everywhere you can. “Our product is better for you” is not as good as “Our product has extra calcium to help your bones.”
Here’s a great example from the Corner Bakery restaurant:
We define fresh as having 40 types of fruits and vegetables in our kitchen each and every day.
Questions asked by Eric Brown over at Social Media Explorer about whether or not "integrated marketing plan" is the right mindset to have.
What marketing venue or platform are you going to stop doing, before you start doing social media marketing?: The best way is NOT an integrated marketing approach. Businesses simply cannot add more things. More marketing equates to spending more money. A more appropriate question would be, “What are we going to stop doing in order to allow room for worn out ways to pass and new ways to emerge?
The Future of Community
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Online community is a tricky thing, and it’s getting even trickier. We used to worry about building “a place” for people to come and communicate and share with us. But that led to “place” being all over the web. Think about how community has changed. We used to want people to come to our website, to our forum, to our blog. Now, even if they do go to those places, they also talk about you on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Twitter, and elsewhere. Conversation and community is disparate and distant, and that’s just the “locationless” web. Think about when we add location-based products like Foursquare and Facebook Places. Suddenly, community is a tricky beast indeed. That said, let’s talk about what should come from the future of community.
Community Will Be Distributed
At this point, if you’re serious about listening to your community and big enough to care about that, you must use a professional listening tool like something from Radian6 or Sysomos or Trackur or similar (There are hundreds of these.) Why? Because people refuse to talk about you all in one place. And the communication elements of community are probably the hardest thing to manage in the future. You have to be where they are. Companies are doing this. They have their communities spread out over Facebook, YouTube, and their own site. There will be more and more of this.
Community Will Be Mobile
We are so close. You remember those old Reese’s peanut butter cup commercials? “You put peanut butter in my chocolate!” “You put chocolate in my peanut butter!” That’s how I feel about location-based applications like FourSquare. It needs something more. And one thing it needs are the tools to make mobile community of like-mindedness happen. Interestingly, it’s been around in some protoforms for a while. I wrote about Trent Reznor’s social network back in 2009. We need these kinds of tools. I want to be able to identify with other members of Third Tribe Marketing out and about.
Community Will Require REAL Loyalty
Oddly, loyalty programs of today push the reverse of loyalty: sign up and we’ll beat you with even more mail than people who casually swing by. Sign up and we’ll bother you until you buy. Sign up and we’ll share your data with other people. This has to shift. This has to be more of a shared value experience. Loyalty in community has to be the new “feeling like you’re on the inside” and the new “because we’ve got deals with you, we now have deals with you and you, too” from the individual’s side.
Community Will Be Action-Minded
Putting a bunch of people together to love Snickers bars isn’t all that interesting. Putting people who love Snickers together to work at a soup kitchen to feed the homeless would be a lot more interesting. If companies and marketers are going to hope to make communities happen, they’re going to have to build some action and value into their efforts. Causes matter.
Community Will Be Require Identity-Crossover
We are being asked to join so many social networks and so many groups. We’re being asked to recreate our social graphs all over the net. Most of us who’ve been at it for years are sick of “refriending” all over the place. Instead, more people will seek to use Facebook Connect and similar identity-sharing tools to allow us to port who we are between sites. There are some pluses and minuses to this, but I am starting to feel that there will be more positives than negatives. Especially, and this is what I hope happens, if we can have certain elements of our identity exposed or hidden per the kind of site we’re using it with. For instance, if I’m on the bourbon lovers’ community, I don’t think people need to know my LinkedIn profile, unless they want me to help them drink, er, market their product. Make sense?
Community Will (MUST!) be Even More Two-Way
Lots of community sites exist to say “You there, peasants: talk amongst yourselves in our little platform.” Others exist to say, “Hey, the big guys don’t seem to want to talk with us, so we’ll make our own.” Companies must invest resources in having conversations at communities. Without this opportunity, things will go poorly for other efforts to build relationships and sell. To me, this is probably the most difficult part of how bigger companies (well, even smaller companies have their issues) will use social tools to build business relationships. Why? Because there’s a lot of time and effort involved, and it’s not directly tied back to obvious or instant revenue. (This, to me, however, is the best part of social tools, and gives companies the best possible chance of success.)
What’s Your Take?
How do you see community evolving? What matters to you in these regards? What are you doing to make any of this future come true?
Related posts: - You Cant Just Have Peanut Butter
- Feeling the Community
- The Future is in Doncaster
- Community Can Be SO Powerful
- The Future of Work
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The Future of Community via @chrisbrogan
There seems to be a number of great discussions going on regarding how or where organizations can start their analysis or engagement with their customers, prospects or influencer. This is such an interesting topic and there are some really great suggestions out there. I’ll review the few that I have found:
- Demographics – Looking at audience details and attempting to map characteristics of a particular group to different types of purchasing behavior. Look at this interesting post from Michale Maoz Could Your Best Customer Spend No Money with You
A client was modeling their findings that, if they were able to graph the customer’s set of connections, and then track the purchases of those connections, and the delta change of those connections, then they could determine customer ‘value’ as a function of the degree to which they impacted sales.
- Social Media Platform – New studies are revealing different behaviors that are more common on specific social media platforms. For example, Brian Solis references this study in his Social Media Engagement, Has It’s Own Rewards post
February 2010, market research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey along with iModerate Research Technologies, surveyed over 1,500 individuals online as well as conducted one-on-one discussions to contextualize social media behavior.
The study found that an astounding 60% of individuals who “like” pages dedicated to brands on Facebook are more likely to recommend the brand than those unaware of the company’s presence within the network. Perhaps even more incredible, is that 79% of consumers who follow the brand on Twitter have stated that they too, would refer peers to those companies they follow.
- Interests – some thought leaders are suggesting interests drive purchase behavior, and you can’t directly infer interests from a demographic, especially when social media provides mechanisms for people to self-identify their own interests (The Social Enthusiast, 2010). Take a look at this great post from Traacker about post-demographic targeting and measuring and this post Target Interests, Not Demographics from the Social Enthusiast
Each perspective is such a unique way of analyzing customers or prospects, especially the one about monitoring an individual’s connections and their behaviors. So, where do you start?
Of course, before you begin any sort of campaign or outreach program, you’ll define the goals and outcomes you intend to analyze and measure. But another piece to consider is perhaps constructing your understanding of your audience from the existing information you’ve gathered in your SCRM or BPM systems:
- what information do you already know about your customers or prospects
- what gaps exist in your understanding of your audience
- how do you intend to fold in new audience details and use that detail for appropriate outreach strategies.
Of course, you still want to focus on identifying potential customers or advocates. But understanding what you know about your audience today within the context of ongoing analysis may help you create different outreach approaches, where the goals and outcomes may differ but can still have a defined idea of success.
Ulimately, you may find that you have several ongoing efforts, each organized around a specific demographic, expressing an interest or intent in your product or service, using a unique social media platform. How’s that for integrating “best of breed” ideas??!
For example, some of your analysis may focus on a social media platform based on your understanding of the level of interest or intent expressed by the audience using it. If you know the bulk of your customers use message boards or support forums, then a strategy that addresses this unique environment may be more appropriate than a general outreach program on Facebook depending on your goals.
I think I may have muddied the waters a bit on this but this is such an interesting discussion around segmenting audience behavior, interest and type that I wanted to share.
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Okay, so it sounds a bit contradictory to social media but everyone thinks about this whether they admit it or not; even the purists wonder if it’s possible. This is actually a panel discussion next week in San Francisco where myself, Tony Lee (VP of Marketing, TiVo), Becky Brown (Director of Social Media Strategy, Intel and Rob Fuggetta (Founder/CEO, Zuberance) will be discussing brand advocacy. Anthony Ha, Assistant Editor for VentureBeat will be moderating.
Here are the details if you are interested in attending. It’s free and it should be a lot of fun.
If you follow my blog or know me personally, you know that I talk/write quite often about advocacy and its importance to marketing. And just to clarify, when I talk about advocates, I am not referring to influencers. Some people use them synonymously but there is a huge difference. Take for example the tech industry. Some very influential blogs would include Engadget and Gizmodo. In the startup world, a few influencers that come to mind are Michael Arrington from TechCrunch and Robert Scoble. Influencer outreach is an excellent tactic to consider when pitching a new story, product leaks, launches and upgrades; events, etc. In other words, it’s good for short term promotional opportunities. It doesn’t really drive long term business value, unless you can turn the infuencers into advocates.
Advocates, on the other hand, may not have as much influence as influencers but they love your brand/product/services nonetheless. Shoot, even if you pay them no attention at all, they still tell others about your brand. Imagine if you showed them a little love, just a little. They don’t need to be incentivized or pitched either. Now, take the aggregate reach of your target influencers and compare it to the aggregate reach of ALL of your brand advocates; and I would argue that the advocate reach blows the other out of the water.
Now let’s talk about trust for a moment. Every year, Edelman releases the Edelman Trust Barometer which measures the level of trust people have in various channels. People trust people. They don’t trust marketing, PR and advertising. The trust employees (another form of advocacy) and people like themselves. It’s actually common sense if you think about it.
Bottom line is this. Customer advocacy should not be ignored; its one reason why President Obama was elected. Think back to the 2004 Presidential Election. It wasn’t about how many Facebook Fans or Twitter followers Obama had within his social circle. It was his ability (or staff’s ability rather) to empower and mobilize his fans to take action … volunteer, donate and ultimately vote. Same principles apply here with brands.
Come check out the panel next week. It should be a lot of fun!
Oprah. CNN. Sport Illustrated. All of these are iconic media outlets in their industries. They worked their way to the top by reaching a mass audience through traditoinal media, such as magazines and television. On the other hand, the blogging world is filled with successful niche content that appeals to specific audiences. Has making niche content changed the language of media?
Check out more at the HubSpot Blog
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