Nissan 370Z Launch

A friend of ours is looking for a new sports car and asked us to take a look at the conversations happening around the new Nissan370Z. This is a challenging time to launch a new car and our friend’s question was whether the positive press reviews (it made the NY Times top ten list) translated to enthusiast community interest.

The short answer is that it has. Here is a look at volume in November, notice the big spike around the launch:

 

The really good news if you are Nissan is that daily post volume is up, way up in fact. Through December 25th the daily volume is over 100 posts a day on more than 250 different communities – almost double what it was in October. And what were they talking about?

 

Probably not a big surprise that performance, power, and taking it to the track trump ride and comfort!

Do we really need a standard for measuring return on conversations?

For at least the past few years there has been constant buzz about online advertising measurement standards. The chatter still continues though it’s exacerbated by the additional demand for defining a social media measurement standard. Even though RelevantMind is technically in the “measurement” business, I’m not so sure there is a need for the IAB to define new standards for measurement.

Would a new standard make it easier for our sales to sell our product? Yes
Would a new standard help the majority of our customers better justify an ROI? Probably Not

Thinking about this leads me to the bigger question – Are we looking for a standard for measurement because the online advertising industry needs a standardized pricing model or are we looking for a standard that enables our clients to recognize a return on their efforts?

I’m afraid it is more likely the former, because it would be almost impossible to determine a standard for measuring all social media efforts. Why? Because not all social media communication efforts come from marketers or are directly related to sales.

The folks in customer service, product development, corporate brand, etc. we work with aren’t solely focused on sales. Of course, they’re focused on things that relate to sales, but in some cases the measurement priorities of these groups are very far before or after the sale in the funnel. (sidenote: I also think the days of the traditional sales funnel are over – but more on that another day)

This is why we take the time to better understand our clients’ objectives when kicking off an initiative – I’ve been calling this our objective-focused approach. But today I found a much better term when reading Tim Leberecht’s post, Big ideas, smaller audiences, and too many (or the wrong) metrics.

“’There is more and more emphasis by advertisers for greater return-on-objectives in campaigns, particularly in the digital space where the accountability data is so readily available,’ said Grant Prentice, Starcom USA’s director of connections research and analytics.”

Return on Objectives. It’s actually the perfect compliment for ROI (though I’m not so sure ROO rolls off the tongue as nicely). And if companies are focused on a ROO (see, sounds funny) when approaching social media then the standards of measurement will differ, but be driven by their needs as opposed to the advertising outlets’.

Hey Corporation X, it’s not all about you anymore!

It’s all about your customers. And that is scary, isn’t it?

Other than the overwhelming breadth of the social media landscape, the next big fear for companies wanting to dabble in social influence marketing comes with the realization that they will have to listen and react to the conversation. It’s always a touchy moment when a client realizes that engagement doesn’t mean forcing your message onto consumers on Facebook or via Tweets. Engagement is about having a conversation – and, for businesses, it means doing more listening than talking. This is a hard pill to swallow, as no one likes to talk more than those in marketing. And, of course, there’s also the risk of losing control of the “brand message” that they’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars crafting. But what’s the ROI on that message if it doesn’t resonate with your target audience?

In yesterday’s post – Five Plugged-in Dudes Get Fired Up About New Media at Pub Club -  Amanda Gravel, author of Social Honeycomb, offers some great commentary on the new era of corporate messaging. Quoting Mike Volpe, she says, “Mike really hit the nail on the head as he explained that there’s simply no such thing as the crafted, corporate message working anymore and that “the message” is what people are saying, regardless of what you put in a PR plan or what your client’s legal team approves.”

He’s right. We should altogether replace the term corporate messaging with community messaging since those that are “on message” will be the ones that realize it’s no longer about the corporation and are crafting their message by listening and engaging the community.

Find. Listen. Engage.

As Aaron mentioned in his last post, the social media landscape spans far and wide and changes so quickly it’s hard to keep up. This is why most of the folks we talk to choose to either launch a blog and call it their social media strategy or ignore social media altogether because it is too overwhelming.

It’s understandable. Community is our business and we are sometimes overwhelmed by the variety of ways people congregate and communicate online. Aaron gave some great examples of how he uses different channels for different reasons within the bike communities.

I’m an executive on the University of Georgia’s NYC Alumni Board. You’d think that communicating with that audience would be easy – coordinate some social events and game watching on fall Saturdays and send some emails, right? Not so easy. We have over 20,000 people in our database – ranging in age from 20 – 94 and anywhere from 400 – 800 alumni come out on football Saturdays to watch the game together. We do use our list-serve for a majority of communications. And Facebook. And the telephone for the older generation that don’t use the Internet at all. This isn’t too difficult for disseminating information to the group. What’s challenging is finding all of the other places where members of the group connect and share information and find the appropriate way to engage them based on the “rules of engagement” within that particular outlet.

Just this past fall we learned that a significant amount of our loyal alum hated the location where we regularly meet to watch football. How did we find out? From a UGA alum who found a NYC DAWGS message board that we didn’t even know existed when he was searching for information on Google. Not such a good first impression, huh?

If this were a business, we (the executive management) would have learned that a majority of our customers were unhappy from a prospect. Not such a sustainable business practice, but it probably happens more often than we think.

Luckily, despite the means of discovery, we were able to use the same medium where people were connecting to rant to better understand why they were unhappy and get their input in finding a new location. Once we found a new location, we used the influencers (the folks with the most involvement within the community) to become advocates for the new location to help us get buy-in from the crowd. I’d be lying if I said everything worked out perfectly. Of course, there are some folks that are still unhappy with the new choice and others that LOVED the original place. But at least they are expressing their displeasure within a forum where we are listening and engaging.

1 Interest = 4 Social Platforms

Let me share some personal pain.  I like to ride my bike.  So I am a member of several cycling related communities.  And lo and behold, they are all different in form and function.  Here is a quick list, along with my personal pluses and minuses:

Bikeforums and roadbikereview – These are two active discussion boards.  How active? About a combined 180,000 members with about 8 million posts and growing by thousands of conversations a day.  Heck, I just looked and between the two there are 5,331 people online right now (in the middle of the work day go figure). Interesting to note these communities are both owned by public companies, Internet Brands and  Invenda respectively.  Plus: With that kind of activity you can get detailed information pretty much anytime of the day.  Post a question and watch the replies roll in.  Connects to a national and sometimes global community, and also has local discussions and meetups by region.  Minus:  Sorting through the volume to get the information you want can be a pain, board search functions in general are among the worst.  The intensity of the community can be off putting for new members.

Bikewire – A social network, primarily profile based, sort of a cycling specific Facebook.  Plus: Well designed, intuitive and easy.  Leaderboard keeps you coming back for more.  Makes connecting with local people easy.  Supports individual blogs. Minus: Oh no, not another profile. Not really a conversation platform so not the best place for asking questions and like many social networks you have to join before being able to see much.

Mail List –One of my local cycling groups, Grizzly Peak Cyclists, uses the old mail list.  Plus: I don’t miss a ride alert or change.  Minus:  Oh so many. Having 400 people treat the mail list as their personal discussion is like being subscribed to every thread and blog comment.  Way too much off-topic emails and would not even consider if it wasn’t local.  BTW, yes I could subscribe in digest version but then it just gets buried in my inbox and I delete it without reading.

Touchstone Cycling Blog – My local climbing gym sponsors a cycling team and just went to  using a blog to connect the community. Plus: Nicely integrated into my netvibes page I never miss an important post. Minus: Sometimes the comments are important, but I don’t want to clutter my feed by subscribing to them so I have to remember to look.  Biggest minus is that it becomes informational only, not the place to pose a casual question to the community.

Fortunately cyclists haven’t embraced twittering while riding yet…

Tastebook – User generated publishing…

Our friends over at Tastebook asked us to test their new widget.  We are happy to help out, but I thought I’d also take a step back to reflect on the significance of what they are up to.  This is a really good example of a company that “gets” the big picture we have talked about in previous posts.

When I first saw Tastebook I thought “Okay, that is pretty cool”.  You make your own cookbook by remixing your favorite recipes from places like Epicurious and Simply Recipes along with your own.  Playing book DJ is fun and the end result is a beautiful collection of your favorite recipes.  Julie created a great Tastebook which is a good thing because my cooking knowledge is limited to toast and quesadillas (unfortunately that is not an exaggeration).

Then I started really thinking about what it meant and the implications behind what they are doing are significant.  Social media is all about giving people the tools, platforms and creative license to create a web experience “their/our way”.    And sometimes you want a physical expression of that, something you can hold in your hands or give to other people wrapped in actual gift-wrap.  Speaking for myself, when I do that I want just as much control as I have in the virtual environment.   The idea behind Tastebook is just that  - user control over my physical experience of a book.  Well done!

Now, hopefully they’ll expand to things I actually know something about, like travel. Check it out especially if cooking is your thing:

 

 

SeaWorld San Antonio Gets Social Influence Marketing

This report by Shel Israel for Global Neighbourhoods TV gives a quick overview of how  SeaWorld San Antonio used social media channels to launch the “Journey to Atlantis” last Summer. You can also find more details about the initiative here.

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Congrats SeaWorld San Antonio on a successful launch and an outstanding social influence program! The google search for”Journey to Atlantis” alone shows the popularity of user-generated content surrounding the campaign.

Do Social Shopping Sites Have Enough Traction to Stick Around?

Today iMedia Connection featured an article “Get in on the Social Shopping Craze” by Denise Zimmerman. It was interesting to read as it explores some of the same concepts we’ve been talking about with our clients and on the RelevantMind blog.This article provides a good commentary on  the social shopping landscape, but it sites Forrester as having the opinion that social shopping lacks staying power because low traffic numbers will impede its growth and market value. I could be taking this statement out of context. And I have yet to read this research, so I’m wondering how the research giant is defining social shopping as it relates to this claim. I rarely disagree with Forrester, so I imagine they aren’t including social shopping sites like Polyvore into this category as we’ve seen in our research that those sites are catching up to retail sites in terms of traffic volume. I’ll dig a little deeper and let you know what I find out. 

Amazon + Facebook = Strong Social Shopping Relationship

The news this week made it really easy to bring the discussion back to my social shopping series with all of the talk about Amazon’s social shopping deal with Facebook. Amazon is now offering two new applications to Facebook users – Amazon Giver and Amazon Grapevine.

Amazon Giver helps you buy gifts for friends off of their Amazon.com Wish Lists or from gift recommendations based on their Facebook profile interests and favorites.

Amazon Grapevine helps you get the word out to your friends about what you are doing on Amazon.com. Let your friends know when you add items to your public Wish List, write reviews, or tag products on Amazon.

I’ve downloaded both apps and I’m excited to test them out from a user-experience stand point, though I’m sure they’re pretty tight since Amazon rarely misses the mark. What I’m most interested in is the recommendations feature. Apparently the system uses its recommendation engine to allow users to view product recommendations generated by Amazon based upon what the other person has listed as their likes and interests on their own Facebook profile.

This is huge and depending on the integration, the Facebook application may solve my number one issue on Amazon.com – relevancy. Naturally, the recommendations on Amazon.com come from items I’ve browsed and purchased – which includes items for me AND friends and family.  Recommending I pre-order the new National Album – relevant. Recommending I buy a collection of children’s books – not so relevant. However, if properly implemented, the recommendations from Facebook should be relevant my interests and, therefore, relevant to my purchase intent.

Let’s test it out. Find me on Facebook and buy me something based on the recommendations! I’ll let you know if I like it.

Why should retailers pay more attention to social shopping on Polyvore?

In my last post, I ran through the basics of Polyvore’s site from a user’s perspective. Today I’m going to give my two cents on why retailers should be paying more attention to Polyvore and the social shopping trend in general.

First, who doesn’t love viral free referrals?

As I outlined last week, when I publish a set I can manually share it with my friends in many ways. But once the set is published, I’m also sharing it with my virtual “friends” – the other 135,000+ registered users – who can access to it through search or stumble across it through the many ways of exploring the site. They can see what I’ve put together and where (read: free referrals) the items came from. They can also use any of the items I’ve clipped in building their own sets which is when the connecting with strangers starts happening.

For example, I don’t know MIZZ*TIFFANY in real life – but we are best friends forever on the site because we have similar taste. Not only do I use a lot of the items she’s clipped (and vice versa) when building my own sets, but she’s introduced me to three retailers I’d never even heard of before. Thank you, MIZZ*TIFFANY for showing me three new online stores! Those retailers should be thanking her too, as I’d never have found them (and then made a purchase) on page 20 in Google search results. It makes me wonder. Do these retailers even know about Polyvore or, if so, are they using their analytics tool to track traffic coming from it?

My guess is probably not. But if I were a retailer – especially of fashion – I’d build a campaign in my analytics tool that aggregates site visits coming from any of the polyvore URLs. In doing so, they should be able to identify the influencers who are advocating for their brand. And if there is a significant amount of traffic coming from the Polyvore, they may want to run a promotion on the site.

Check out this recent promotion from American Eagle (ended last week) calling for Polyvore users to create their own sets using AE clothing. Brilliant – they’ve found a great way to engage with their target audience in a manner that isn’t disruptive and actually contributes to their social shopping experience.

And that is the key to any successful social shopping initiative. Finding the communities where your target audiences are connecting and implement a strategy that inserts you into the conversation to further their purpose, as well as promote your product.

Secondly, I firmly believe that it’s a new era for online commerce and behaviors are changing. 

Polyvore has a large, yet targeted audience of users who have come together to essentially create fashionable photo stories. And the audience is growing tremendously month over month. Check out this graph comparing the traffic rank of Polyvore to Abercrombie, The Gap, and J. Crew. Not too bad for a site that’s not even a year old.

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Not only is the traffic stacking quickly, but the average user spends 8 minutes on the site per session. And if I had to guess that number will only increase as greater interactivity is offered leaving less time spent on a retail site. In fact, as more people learn about (and use) social shopping sites like Polyvore, I’m guessing (er – hoping) that retailers start to take these new behaviors into consideration when making user experience and design decisions on their own sites. Retailers need to view the shopping experience outside of their closed-loop online experience because I firmly believe that more and more “shopping” is going to occur within sites like Polyvore, with the retail stores serving as merchandise repositories and transaction outlets. I’m not recommending that retailers start editing their online stores based on the latest and greatest Internet applications, but they do need to understand how these other sites work relative to their own sites.

For example, most retail sites currently offer zoom and/or color change features on their images – which over time has increased conversion and become a best practice in retailing. However, these images are most often served through a flash plug-in, which doesn’t allow the clipper to grab the image. So the images look fantastic and are perfectly merchandised on the retailer’s site, but consumers can’t clip them, meaning they can’t share them within other social shopping environments. And when consumers are spending more time on social shopping sites versus retail sites – they’ll be sharing (read: promoting) the products that are easy to share – which aren’t the ones served up in flash.

This is only one example of how I think the growth of social shopping sites will change the game for retailers. It will change how they communicate promotions, how they design customer acquisition campaigns, and how they evolve their own user experiences on their sites. It will be interesting to see which retailers change their strategies based on these quickly emerging trends. The only thing of which I’m certain is it won’t be the ones who view social media as a new fad and start paying attention after it’s too late.