Marketing today has moved

It is with both excitement and and a bit of nostalgia that I announce this will be my last blog post on www.MartyCollinsBlog.Spaces.Live.com. I started this blog January, 2007 and it has served me well for over two years but the time has come to make a separation between my professional blogging site and my personal family site. For that reason I am moving Marketing Today to www.Marty-Collins.com. There are new features I’m going to be adding on the new blog, namely a vlog series. I hope to increase the regularity of my posts with the video content.

Come join me over at www.Marty-Collins.com!

Peter Kim published a great paper that is well worth your time to read. He amassed a group of thought leaders in the social media space to give their predictions for 2009. While he didn’t invite me to add my 2 cents this year I’m going to do that here and maybe he’ll invite me next year. :)

Agencies: Social media agencies will continue to grow and add clients at the expense of the larger media/creative agencies. I talk a lot to marketers working in social media and all agree large agencies have not yet developed this muscle thought they do pitch it as a core competency in some cases. In this economic downturn my money is on the small, nimble agencies. They are hungry for this work and are regular contributors to the social media community which means they have their fingers on the pulse of what’s next. I recently hired a small agency to work with Windows’ on a 12 month roadmap for our social media team and one of my core requirements was the people at the agency HAD to be participating in the space; blogging, chatting, etc. They have to be using the technology and participating which shows skin in the game.

Apps/Widgets: The current business model for apps is broken. Apps are very difficult to discover whether it’s on Facebook or the iPhone which makes scale virtually impossible to reach. App networks are beginning to emerge where a brand can basically  ‘rent’ an app for a period of time garnering them the exposure of the apps fan base without the investments of time and resources to build the app then find the followers. This makes sense to me if the brand can find the right fit. If you are Random House and you have a new book being published an app or widget that is devoted to literary reviews or discussing books like Goodreads would be very appropriate. For a fraction of the cost Random House would get the exposure to their target audience without having to build an app that would likely never be discovered by more than a handful of people.

Strategy:  While a few of the experts in Peter’s paper predicted this would be the year for brands to build an actual strategy before chasing the shiny new object I am less inclined to agree. I’m happy to say this is in fact exactly what my social media team is doing right now and we are very excited to be working with Ignite and Jim Tobins’ group on this.

Windows Live Writer: I am writing this blog post right now on the airplane ride from San Jose home to Seattle. I love Windows Live Writer and so does just about everyone that uses it. Check out what our community has to say about it.  Writer will change the way you blog. I think Writer will get more attention in 2009, it’s a sleeper product waiting to explode.

Plus a few predictions that are a going out on a limb;

1. Second Life will finally call it quits
2. Mobile will still not make a dent in the opportunity awaiting that industry
3. Brands will continue to stumble with splashy campaigns that are less than authentic – hiring bloggers, planting UGC

I presented at the Social Networking Conference a few weeks ago and had hoped to share a video of that presentation but due to technical difficulties by the videographer there is no video to share. I have shared the slides below. I’ll be the first to admit the slides by themselves do not tell the whole story. For that you’ll just have to come see me speak at some point. But I did want to share the perspective I presented.

The Windows Social Media team is focused on maintaining an ongoing conversation with our customers regardless of whether we have a campaign in market. Our Anytime, anywhere approach is about building channels and putting tools in place to be able to constantly know what consumers are saying and have a built in mechanism to talk to them. We don’t want to wait for a campaign to talk to our customers and we certainly don’t want to wait for a special occasion to get feedback. I think of Social Media as the new CRM – and that’s how I’m explaining it to my executives.

Here’s a picture of me and a bunch of somewhat interesting data points about myself. This data could be interesting to marketers if they are targeting moms, travelers, skiers or maybe entertainment lovers. Traditional marketing says this data has to be collected, stored, scrubbed, etc if a marketing team wanting to maintain a database to reach out to their customers with coupons, offers or product information. Think monthly newsletter or DM flyers. But what if you as a brand don’t have to host, manage and maintain that database…

Here is where you can find all the data points I identified above… on my Facebook profile. Get it? People are putting the data out there in droves. And it doesn’t rely on the brand anymore to solicit, manage and store it.

So you have to ask yourself as a brand marketer, are you inviting your customer on a first date? Wining and dining them and then not calling in the morning. How do you think that makes them feel? They’ve raised their hand, right. Said they are interested in you shoe, car, bag, whatever. They maybe even did something to try and get your attention like creating a commercial or designing a new logo. Did you say thank you? Figuratively and maybe even literally. If you are a non-profit it’s even more important. Did they give you money? They are a part of your extended community now. You should absolutely have programs in place to continue the conversation with them, especially if you want to ask for money again next year.

Here’s the deck:

Busy two days in Miami. I began my day yesterday presenting at The Social Networking Conference. The session itself I think went well (according to some nice folks who came up to me afterwards).  The topic of my session was “Anytime, Anywhere Social Media Marketing.” I had the session recorded so I’ll post it here once I get the file. The topic of the presentation was how we’ve built our social media team based on the concept of continual engagement with our customers vs. campaign mentality which ebb and flows. If a social media engagement is build around a campaign that campaign will sunset, ending the engagement with the customers.  Most brands walk away from the customer base they have build up; Facebook fans, YouTube views, UGC submissions. What we are focused on is how we maintain a regular conversation with customers outside the confines of a campaign start and stop.

I am happy to say I met 4 great social media counterparts today, 3 at the conference.  IBM @adamclyde,  JetBlue @jetblue, Ford @ScottMonty and one ala a mutual agency connection, Intel @Britopian. JetBlue and Ford are definitely focused on regular conversations with their customers. Scott at Ford is building out individual experiences with their different brands depending on the customers interests (@  FordDriveOne @ FordDriveGreen @ FordCustService @ FordMustang @ FordTrucks @ FordRacing @ FordRacing_ITO @ FordAPA). He recognizes someone interested in their Green initiative isn’t going to be interested in the same topics as someone who is passionate about his/her Mustang. I’m not a car gal but I certainly understand customer segmentation and this makes complete sense to me. It’s a massive undertaking but one that I’m sure Ford will benefit from. I plan to do a podcast with Scott in the coming weeks and will post it here. Really interesting stuff.

JetBlue is famous for their amazing Twitter conversations. Morgan is the main guy running that program. I was amazed how responsive he is committed to being on their Twitter feed. The number one question he gets asked is “Why is my flight delayed?” I love where Jetblue is going with this engagement model. What I also love is they have drawn the line with ‘virtual extortion’. They get contacted fairly regularly from bloggers wanting free tickets to events, etc. Bloggers will of course give them a shout out on their blog but JetBlue has to put up the free ticket first. This is a really grey area that can get quite sticky. I think it’s still a case by case basis depending on the corporation. IBM has a policy they don’t fly reporters anywhere or pay for anything. JetBlue has created a policy that is comfortable for them that they adhere to. At Microsoft we are unable to accept any gifts over a few $100’s. I was actually invited twice to Sundance this year and respective declined both offers. While it was very kind and generous of both companies to invite me and I’m quite sure my husband I would have had a great time MSFT has a strict policy on accepting gifts from partners or even potential partners.

IBM’s perspective is a bit different. They are adapting social media to work within their company culture. They are not a consumer business so running a Twitter account for customers isn’t probably the best use of his resources. They use social networking to connect their over 300K employees around the world. They have wikis, twitter feeds, virtual meet ups, etc all focuses around building internal awareness to a global company where people on the same teams may be on other sides of the world, and maybe not even speak the same languages. Adam does a great job explaining here.

Love learning from others!

I love this post by Tom Humbarger. It goes directly to the point I made here that if you are using an agency to build, manage, create, and strategize your social media work you need to ask yourself, are they doing as good or better than you? Forrester released their report on community platforms last week, you can get a copy from Telligent. As part of their criteria they measured how active the vendors are in the social media community. How engaged are they in the dialog? Do the company leaders blog, vlog, tweet, and generally participate and contribute to this vibrant community. I think this is absolutely a fare assessment criteria. I sent out an RFP last month to find a social media agency for Windows and my first filter on whether or not I invited an agency to participate is if they had a compelling blog. You can have a company blog, but if it’s updated every 8 weeks that just doesn’t count. Your agency needs to be a regular contributor. Why? Because if you don’t walk the talk how can you truly be the best?  If I am planning to train for a marathon am I going to look for advice from someone that runs them regularly and know intimately the pitfalls and workarounds or am I going to take advice from someone that’s never actually run a marathon but thinks it looks really fun. And I don’t just mean the top head honcho guy. If the head honcho ‘face’ man is the one engaged with the community that experience is likely not going to trickle down to your project team. I had an agency submit a response to my RFP last month and list their top brass as team members. That sets the expectation that those people are going to be day to day contributors to my project team and I didn’t have confidence that was going to be the case. Are your front line people engaging? What better way to learn that real life. Novel idea.

We had a BIG launch this weekend. Okay, it was supposed to be Friday but after some technical bumps the Win7 beta became available for customers Saturday morning Seattle time. You can download it here. My social media team was monitoring and engaging all weekend. They were using TweetDeck, I use Monitter.  Most of the conversation was focused on people trying to download the beta. Twitter helped us escalate a few issues very early. We found out within about 15 minutes of the launch that there was a bug with Firefox. Customers could only download if they were using Internet Explorer. We were able to escalate this issue much quicker because it was brought to our attention right away through Twitter.

Saturday and Sunday the conversation on Twitter was coming through at an average of 1 post per 5 seconds. This morning we are seeing rates of posts 1 every 2 seconds. The volume is amazing. But what’s proving to be most valuable to us right now is the real time feedback this is providing. We are able to escalate issues almost instantly has they get posted on Twitter. For example, a few customer have had problems with the feedback channel. They have posted screenshots of errors they are receiving. I’m escalating those error messages to our product team to investigate. We are defintely staying on top of customer issues and taking feedback real time. There is no other mechanism besides Twitter that allows us to get such instant customer feedback.

Thanks Twitter!

Happy New Year. I’m easing back into the working world today. I have 2 big presentations this month, one internal and one external so I’m fast and furiously getting my brain back from the mush it was in with two weeks of eating, skiing, reading and movies. (You MUST see Curious Case of Benjamin Button!) I did see a data point this morning that is interesting to me as a Social Media gal… Facebook saw their highest traffic ever on Christmas Eve. According to Hitwise on Dec. 24, 2008 Facebook reached 2.18% of all U.S. Internet visits compared with a 1.42% average for November 08.

Traffic to the site increased 41% on Christmas Eve 2008 compared to 2007. Traffic also increased 41% on Christmas Day 2008 compared to 2007. The site reached a ranking of 5th among all categories of Web sites. What does that say? Wow! Go where the people are. Both my husband and I were off for the holidays but one of the few sites we still visited frequently was Facebook. It’s there, good economy or bad, holidays or not.

Brands are still in the very early stages of figuring out how to use social networks to sell product. Much has been made of brands dipping their toes into Facebook and MySpace. There is a clear distinction to be made here, are we talking about advertising or Customer Relationship Management (CRM). I don’t think most brands have yet figured out how to use social networking for marketing. Most brands are trying to wrap 'traditional’ tactics (digital banners)  into the new mediums and it’s not successful. No big surprise there. Marketers have yet to think of social media as a CRM program, which is exactly how we are thinking about it in Windows.

Yes we collect friends and fans on our Windows Facebook and YouTube pages but for us that’s just the beginning, for many brands that the end. Think about adding friends as the same thing as developing a database in CRM terms. You spend a certain amount of time and resources to create these databases of customer information. But creating the database is only the first step. If you never do anything to reach out to that database and inform your customers what is the value of that database? $0. CRM  programs are focused on reaching out to the customers on a regular basis, offering valuable information, moving customers through the product life cycle and hopefully reselling them and keeping the cycle going. We have someone on our team who is responsible for customer engagement on those pages. If you don’t have resources to manage and maintain your communities on these social networks, don’t build them. Would you build a database of customer information and then have no plans to actually use it? No. If you build a brand page you are doing the same thing. If you build it they may very well come. But when they get there who’s playing the game? Is it worth watching? It matters.  And is it interesting enough for them to stay?

I spoke at a panel dinner last night at the Seattle Direct Marketing Associations Social Media networking dinner and had a good time. The panel was 3 agency people and me – the brand. One of the questions that got discussed was where does social media fit into an org chart. Who’s responsibility is it? PR, marketing, customer support? I thought I’d pass along my answer because it seemed to resonate. The short answer is it depends…. on what? On what your goal is. Each of these departments focus on different business objectives and solve for different use cases. PR is about exposure, how many publications picked up the story and what was the reach of those publications. It’s about exposure through influential's. PR is interested in a 1:few scenario where the outreach is targeted to key influential's that will then trickle down their message to the masses. If this is your teams strategy then it makes sense to put social media engagement in your PR plan. Xbox and Zune drive their social media activities from their PR teams.

Customer support is about solving customer problems. The metrics are based on solve rate, lowering support costs and customer satisfaction. If your business needs are driving by customer sat numbers and decreased support costs then build a social media engagement program in your customer service department. Dell and Comcast do this.

The third option is the marketing team. This is where I sit. When I started the community/social media plan it was driven by a few precise business goals, increase brand favorability and likelihood to refer and lower customer churn for Windows Live. I knew if I exposed Hotmail users to what can be done on Messenger I had a better shot at increasing customer attach rate to our services, thereby lowering customer churn. My business objectives are rooted in marketing performance indicators so it makes sense I’m running this program from the marketing team.

It goes back to being articulate and concise about what the goals are for your company’s social media program. Your objectives will tell you where it should live.