Visa has gone social

Today Visa threw their virtual hat into the social media marketing ring by launching the Visa Business Network on Facebook. According to the press release, the network is designed to provide small-business owners with tools and tips on attracting new customers, trimming costs and other ways to make more money. Businesses that belong to the Visa network on Facebook (the social networking site already has over 80,000 business profiles) will also be able to communicate with each other to share ideas or even negotiate deals. Additionally, they will also have access to the business network’s resource center, which will provide resources such as Google Business Apps and articles by The Wall Street Journal and Entrepreneur addressing questions posed by the community.

To promote the network, Visa is giving a $100 advertising credit on Facebook to each of the first 20,000 U.S. businesses that download the Web application needed to join. I couldn’t resist. I added the app to the RelevantMind Page which added us the network and placed The Visa “Click to Connect” banner at the bottom of the page. Not too intrusive and good branding for Visa. Upon download I got an email with the details for redeeming my $100 ad credit, but I was more excited about connecting and access to the resource center.

However, after clicking around to find the actual network, I realized you can’t access the network community until you add the application to your profile page. I guess Visa wants to connect specific users to the community versus a company with multiple users. But I don’t see why you can’t register for the network when you add the app to your business page – seeming as you are more than likely trying to promote that business and you have to fill out a new profile anyway.

Regardless of the experience, the access to the network content was worth adding the app to my profile page. I’m anxious to play around with it some more to see how useful the podcasts and articles are. Only time will tell the effects this network will have on the Businesses’ growth, Visa’s brand, and Facebook’s revenue stream. But in order for the program to be a true success, everyone within the community (Visa, Facebook, Sponsoring partners, and the network) will have to win – which should be the goal of all social media programs.

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.

What is really the social media game-changer?

It seems the clients and prospects we’ve been working with aren’t the only ones who put all their social media eggs in the blog basket. In “Beyond the Blog,” the BusinessWeek (BW) cover story a few weeks ago, the publisher offers a “mea culpa” claiming the big time media publisher missed the boat by putting too much emphasis on blogs as the largest game-changing outlet within the social media landscape, stating “we focused on blogs as a new form of printing press, one that turned Gutenberg’s economics on its head, making everyone a potential publisher. This captured our attention, not least because this publishing revolution was already starting to rattle the skyscrapers in our media-heavy, Manhattan neighborhood.”

This makes sense. To BW, and all other publishers and media companies, the blog phenomenon changed the game, making 24/7 access and reporting a must have versus a nice to have. These days every major reporter (and almost every major company) has a blog, despite the fact that readership numbers aren’t very impressive.

In the article, BW points out that while blogs are important, only a small amount of consumers participate, citing a recent study from Forrester Research that states only a quarter of the U.S. adult online population reads a blog once a month.

That seems like a lot of work for very little return. And for the past two years I’ve wondered how companies can rely on a blog as their social media strategy. Again, I’m not knocking blogs here. (It would be ironic of me to knock the power of blogs on the blog for which I am one of the most frequent contributors.) I’m was just pleased that Business Week (my favorite magazine) finally realized that blogs, while definitely a player, are only one of many tools in the social media toolkit.

But the more I thought about the article, I began to feel like BW has once again missed the point. There will always be a new outlet popping up that is the “game changer” at one point or another. Yesterday it was the blog, today everyone is all a buzz about Twitter. But the winner won’t be the company or person that learns to monetize one of these outlets. The winner will be the company or person who learns how to maximize the value of the community conversations begin generated within these outlets.

When writing this blog post, I went back to check some facts/quotes to make sure I had it right. In doing so, I realized I’d missed something. In a special section within the article, BW asked two prominent bloggers to give their take on how old media will adjust to the new rules of social media.

Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine says, “next, I think, BusinessWeek’s readers will see that social media are changing their fundamental relationship with customers to be less about serving and more about collaborating. No, I don’t mean that every product will be the product of a committee. But customers who want to talk will, and smart companies will not just listen but will engage them in decisions. This will have an impact not just on PR and image but on product design, marketing, sales, customer service—the whole company. Three years from now, I predict BusinessWeek’s cover won’t be about blogs or tools but about companies as communities.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. That’s definitely the cover story I’m anxious to see.

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…

Here, there and everywhere – community platform diversity

About a month or so I was at a breakfast when someone asked me – “Do people still use discussion boards?  I thought everyone twittered now”.  Ah San Francisco!  350 million people use discussion boards, about 200,000 (weekly users) on twitter. The fact is people are not just using forums or twitter, or blogs or social networks for that matter. People tap into a combination of outlets for engaging the community for various reasons and at different stages of the product lifecycle.

Through discussions with our clients, we know that most companies are confused about how to effectively craft a social media strategy simply because they become overwhelmed by the vast amount of social media channels.  Where do you start?  Where do you engage?  How do the ground rules differ by community type or social media channel?

The RelevantMind team lives and breathes community conversations and the data extracted from these channels. This breakfast conversation got me thinking about the various ways the RelevantMind team interacts through the numerous social media channels and how we can draw on our own experiences to better help our clients make sense of it all.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been paying closer attention to the various social media channels we participate in for our own purposes. How are people interacting? What types of conversations are they having? Why did I choose this channel versus another for engaging with the community?

By taking more time to listen while participating within these channels, we’ve been able gain a better understanding of the nuances or and advantages/disadvantages that make each channel unique.

This exercise has helped us help our clients better understand the social media landscape, as well as understand that a one-size fits all social media strategy won’t drive the results they are seeking and, in fact, may do more damage than good.

Over the next few weeks, we’re going to put more of what we’ve learned about our own social media interactions out into the blogosphere. Hopefully our readers will have some of their own insights to share.

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:

 

 

Shocking – it isn’t a highway after all!

Om Malik over at GigaOm wrote an interesting post today “Shocking:  New Facts about P2P and Broadband Usage“.  In it he cites some stats from Arbor Networks and makes the following comment:

• 10 percent of subscribers consume 80 percent of bandwidth.
• 0.5 percent of subscribers consume about 40 percent of total bandwidth
• 80 percent of subscribers use less than 10 percent of bandwidth

 

  This supports the arguments made by some of the larger ISPs, including Comcast. In a recent interview, Comcast Cable CTO Tony Werner told me his company would try and deal with the tiny number of subscribers who use most of the bandwidth by slowing down their connections during peak times.         

    

  I don’t agree with the premise that the stats make a case for the ISP’s.   In fact I think just the opposite.    ISP’s like to use the highway analogy (I thought it was a  bunch of tubes) .  The reasoning goes that since bandwidth is a limited resource, like the lanes on a highway, certain entities should be given preference (access to the fast lane) while individual bandwidth hogs are regulated to the slow lane.  Unless they pay of course.  

Simple, easy to understand and with an emotional appeal.  Too bad it is wrong.  When you drive your car you degrade my experience of driving my car.  No cars on my road = good.  Many cars= bad.    If you’ve been asleep for the past 5 or so years (arguably the ISP’s have) than you may not have noticed the web went all social.  People, (i.e. users bound for the ISP slow lane), create cool content, share, mashup and generally make the whole thing a vibrant community instead of a video billboard.    My web experience is enhanced the more people that use it! Not like a highway at all, is it? 

 Aha, says my ISP – “but what about P2P?”.   And there is the really shocking part of the stats.  Turns out, at least according to Arbor, that only 20% of the total traffic is P2P (arguably a portion of which is people creating content collaboratively).  The rest is you and me creating sharing and generally making the web a richer experience. 

We see this all the time in the user communities we look at for clients –  it tends to be the 10 or 20% of the community that heavily engage that makes the whole community vibrant and alive. Yep, they use some bandwidth to do it. I think that’s a small price to pay for creativity.   I guess what it comes down to is – do you want  YouTube?  Or do you want Clown Co Hulu? 

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.