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.

I came across this and it gave me a chuckle.

I don’t talk much in my blog posts about the power of search and I probably should reflect on it more. When I explain to people the power of the social media efforts we are building I always use Search as a way of grounding the conversation. It makes complete sense to everyone these days that the #1 way people find ‘stuff’ on the web is through Search. It’s logical for a marketer to want to push their messages through that channel and in most cases marketers use key word buys to get the best position possible in Search results. While this tactic certainly proves to be successful it can be very expensive. Social media outreach allows marketers to push syndicated content through the web making it more likely to be discovered virally through Search.

Here’s how it works. Joe writes a post on a forum posing a question about your product X. Your outreach efforts pick up Joe’s post because your company is investing in listening devices to monitor for mentions about Product X. Your engagement team replies to Joe’s post with the answer to his question. But your engagement wasn’t just with Joe. Not only have you solved Joe’s problem, which is traditional help and support, you’ve posted the solution out there for other people to discover. Data shows social media channels (blogs, forums, wikis) are more likely to appear in viral search results. Search crawlers like them more :) So don’t forget Search when you are pitching your social media efforts. Banner ads and home page takeovers do nothing to drive Search results or long term engagement.

Welcome to the first Windows Social Media Team update. We’ve had a lot of questions about what we’ve been up to so I wanted to provide some background on our mission, objectives and what’s coming up.

Social Media Marketing is defined by Wikipedia as a collective group of web properties whose content is primarily published by users (customers), not direct employees (brands). For a quick explanation of how social media can change businesses watch this video. We want Windows to participate in the groundswell of conversation on the web by evangelizing passionate customer conversations and participating in a transparent dialog with consumers. To do that we’ve made 3 big bets:

Bets

a) Infuse customer experiences into our marketing voice. Using the Windows Live and Windows advocate group  personalize Windows by allowing real customer to tell their stories through user generated content on WindowsLive.com [coming to Windows.com in H2]

b) Monitor, report and engage in social media conversations (forums, blogs, chat rooms) increasing share of voice and sentiment for Windows and Windows Live brand.

c) Build Social Media marketing beachheads that compliment broader Windows campaigns reaching customers in networks they are already using.

Customer Experience

People want to engage with each other, and especially with others who are “like them”.   WindowsLive.com engages and showcases a community of people who want to share experiences and insights on how they are using Windows Live services in their everyday lives. UGC brings real, authentic customer stories to our marketing voice.  Since the community launched on August 4th a few top contributors are;

o 20 year old retail sales professional at a Target store in Pennsylvania who loves the new Windows Live Hotmail

o 64 year old retired grandmother in the UK who has uncovered some of the great new features of the Windows Live Messenger beta

o 31 year old IT pro in the UK who used Windows Live Events to plan his wedding

o A Microsoft MVP in Bangalore, India who figured out how to use Windows Live Photo Gallery to “clone” people

Together, the community has contributed over 300 pieces of user-generated content (UGC) sharing personal stories and how-to tips about Windows Live. Great job community!

Social Media Conversations

Since July 2008, we have been monitoring, measuring and engaging conversations pertaining to target audiences on the web . We use a technology called TruCast to collect conversational data which we then use to guide our responses and engage with our customers. To date we have experimented with 5 types of outreach and engagements: blogs and forums, answers/Q&A sites, social networks, social bookmarking/aggregation sites, and video content sites. We measure both the cost per engagement action (cpea) and the ROI for each engagement type. Based on that data, we continue to evolve the outreach program to optimize for value and effectiveness.

Combining this data with our current marketing efforts allows us to monitor the effect marketing efforts and messages have on Windows brand perception in online conversations.  

Social Media Beachheads

As part of our ongoing conversation with consumers we have build two Windows beachheads. Earlier this month we launched a branded Windows YouTube Channel and our Windows Facebook fan page:

Facebook.com/Windows – Become a fan of Microsoft Windows on Facebook. Some features to look out for: I’m a PC Status Randomizer app, exclusive online Windows videos, Best Fan Photo & Free Download of the Week, Windows Live Messenger Themepack and much more. Over the next few weeks, we’ll collect fan photos from all over the world and feature them among our community.  Windows is also running homepage engagement ads using beta video ad units which we customized for Windows allowing users to Fan the page directly from their homepage.

YouTube.com/WindowsVideos - The Windows Video Channel became the #10 most subscribed sponsored channel of all time in just one month and is now the #1 most subscribed sponsored channel of the month. And as we expected, our customers have started to respond. They began uploading and sending us their "I'm a PC" videos, which we now showcase every Friday in the Best of YouTube Playlist.  We are working with YouTube to better understand the reach and opportunities available to tell our customer story through this large, vibrant community. Specifically, we are investigating relevance search terms strategies, improved discoverability tactics, and other beta testing opportunities.

It’s no secret I’ve been a supporter of President-elect Obama for several years. I was in his camp even before he and Hillary went to blows. One of the many things that drew me to him was his 21st century usage of the internet. Much as been made (and rightfully so) of the Obama campaigns use of Social Networking tools to build huge networks of support across the US with a scalable and ultimately cost efficient model.  Obama’s campaign understood the power of building a network database of contacts ONE TIME and using the base over and over again for multiple functions from fundraising efforts to getting the word out about local rally's. There in lies the long term, true impact of Social Media. It’s why my social media team isn’t build around campaigns but rather a long term, sustainable committed effort.

It will be interesting to see what Obama’s team has in mind for the social media networks they have built. I’m a member of several of the networks and haven’t heard anything yet, but he’s been busy so I’ll cut him a bit of slack. This will be where it get interesting. How will Obama continue to use this huge base his has built up? I’m really hoping he doesn’t fall into the trap that campaign mentality can lead to which is spin up a lot of effort to build awareness with mass amounts of activity, then sunset a campaign and go dark until the next campaign rolls out. People will forget about you. They will go on to the next shiny object and lose interest if you don’t continue to invest in your efforts.

Think of all the ways Obama can use these networks. He has real activists that want to help spread his word. He can build consensus among core bases and test messages like a President has never done before. And since the heavy investment in these outreach efforts is in the beginning each incremental usage lowers the cost per engagement.

This morning was a perfect example of why it’s crucial to have healthy social networks established BEFORE you need it. Hotmail rolled out some upgrades over the weekend. Unfortunately there was a bug in the upgrade that only effected Firefox users running on Linux. This is a relatively small segment of the Hotmail audience but a very vocal segment and one we want to keep happy, particularly because the bug happened to effect customers using competitor products. It was not intended to effect that group but it did so the appearance may be that Hotmail doesn’t care as much about that subset of customers – WHICH IS NOT TRUE. The best way to reach customers in a pinch is to do a blog posting. After you do the blog posting explaining the situations you can then use that blog post and link back to it when commenting on blogs that are talking about the situation. It’s not link bate if it is actually offering a resolution to the problem the blogger identified as having in the blog post. It don’t abdicate spamming blogs with your products blog link unless there is a situation where it can resolve an issue the blogger may be having, as in this case it did. But if you didn’t have a communication channel set up in advance (a blog, Twitter feed, Facebook page, etc) this would not be an option for you. If Obama didn’t have the network set up ahead of time he would never have raised money as fast as he needed to when he needed to.  Don’t wait for a crisis to build your community outreach channel, do it today so you are ready when you really will need it. And don’t think of it as a campaign, it’s the cost of doing business anymore as both Obama and McCain learned.

Starbucks is giving free coffee tomorrow to anyone that votes. I saw the ad on tv last night and was really captivated by it. It’s subtle and powerful and drew me in enough to watch the whole ad. I didn’t know until the end who or what was being advertised and was pleasantly surprised when all was revealed. I’m definitely going to claim my free cup tomorrow with pride.

Although I’m giving Starbucks a B- on the viralness of the ad. Since they only have about 36 hours to get this message out they should pull out all the ‘sharing’ guns they can find. They have a great engagement ad running on Facebook today (shown here). In the Event Engagement Ad people can rsvp for an event and then see others in their network that are planning to attend. As you see here I rsvp’ed and a few of the people in my network did so I can see who else is going. Love this. Great way to tell your network and spread the word. Engagement ads get an A.

I went to their own website hoping the get the commercial embed link so I could post it here on my blog. They are running the ad on the top hero slot but there is no embed code, so I can’t post it on my blog. They also don’t have any sharing features next to the ad to make it easy for me to tell all my friends they can get a free cup of coffee too. The first thing I want to do when I hear you can get something for free is tell all my peeps. Starbucks.com  doesn’t enable any of that sharing.  Starbucks.com gets a D.

One other beef I have with Starbucks.com is they don’t have a virtual map. Maybe I’ve never been to Starbucks before and I say to myself I want to try them today since it’s free. Where do I go? I know in some places like Seattle it’s a complete no brainer, they are everywhere. But I travel a fare bit and know they aren’t everywhere in every city. With services like Live Maps it’s very easy to do.  Would be a great addition.

Get your free coffee tomorrow and VOTE!

I find myself doing this more and more lately because I’ve discovered I know as much as if not more about social media than the agencies I am hiring. I’m not just testing agencies that I currently work with but more often than not I test agencies I’m considering working with. If you are an agency here are a few thoughts to keep in mind. I’m just one marketer so take this for what it’s worth to you. These are some questions I ask.

1. What would you do if you were me right now? – this is probably the easiest question for them to answer because likely they have been thinking about this.
2. What’s an opportunity I have missed? – this will tell you if they’ve analyzed what you’ve done so far, or even know for that matter. Did they do their homework, are they aware of your brand history in this space?
3. What’s something you love a competitor or partner of mine has done? – this will show you if they are paying attention to current campaigns besides just their clients. Watch this one, giving standard answers like the subservient chicken would warrant a follow up question like, Why? I also set boundaries like “in the last two month”
4. Twice now I’ve been interested in contacting agencies from something I’ve seen or read. I didn’t know anyone there so I’ve sent emails from the ‘contact us’ link on their site. This has yet to get any response at all. I’ve also put out a call on Twitter to see if they are combing the web for mention of their agency. Surprisingly this hasn’t worked either. Man would I be impressed with an agency and definitely want to work with them if they picked up my mention in Twitter and responded.
5. This is not the time to play it close to the vest. I was at an agency not long ago that failed to mention a partnership they had with a vendor I was interested in working with. I had to connect the dots and bring it back to the agencies attention. This led me to feel the agency wasn’t sharing all options with me. Not sure why this was the case, but confusing for me none the less.

It’s an interesting time to be a marketer. So much to keep up on if you are in digital marketing. I see the agency/client relationship as  a partnership and as such I bring as much input to the ideas as the agency does. Long gone are the days we as clients sit back in our smoke filled board rooms (think Mad Men) and wait for creative agencies to bring the dazzle.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about our Windows Facebook presence, or lack there of. There are pages devoted to Windows on Facebook (good and bad) but there isn’t a strong presence or strategy for this platform to date. That’s where my team comes in. We are thinking a lot about what kind of a presence we want in Facebook and how to sustain that over time. We want it to evolve with our campaigns rather than be a flash in the pan presence that dies off over time.  Without devoted, ongoing support on the platform any and all investment we make will quickly diminish in returns.  We are designing the Facebook.com/Windows page now and will announce it as soon as we launch which brings me to my point of this post.

As part of a launch plan for a Facebook page you have to have a plan for how you are going to get people to come to your page. Facebook is not designed for people to discover things on their own. The only way people virally discover new content and cool stuff is through the persons newsfeeds on their new Facebook homepage. Basically if a few peeps with big networks engage in your page then their networks will see it and hopefully you can build traffic that way. One way to get people ‘in the door’ is Facebook apps. What are apps? They are the fun toys you see in Facebook. Sometimes they are in the form of virtual gifts and look like this gift below.    Sometimes they enable people to pull content from other sources through API’s. The purpose of them is to create unique engagement activities for people in Facebook to participate and pass along. But what I have learned over the pass week is this apps are not cheap! An app can cost upwards of $100K. Not all apps are that expensive but to do something relatively engaging they are going to cost a pretty penny. That would be fine if the apps had a long shelf life and the cost could be amortized over a long period of time, driving down the cost per engagement. As it stands now most apps are build for a short running campaign that has a shelf life of weeks, not months. That is going to quickly become cost prohibitive for most brands. Campaign owns are going to be hard pressed to show value for that cost in such a short period of time. The reason they don’t last long is the dazzle wears off quickly. An Indiana Jones hat may be funny for a few weeks but I’m not interested after that so it’s lost it’s appeal to be passed around.

What do to? App builders need to do 3 things

1. Get much more efficient in building apps allowing them to lower their costs. There are a few developers now who have build a ‘platform’ such as Slide where it’s cheaper to use a pre-existing application. I think app developers will either have to move to this model of pre-existing apps (think model homes) that can be tailored or find a way to reduce the man hours it takes to build them.
2. Find a way to drive desired outcomes. Apps are more like tv commercials.  They are not very useful in driving downloads, click throughs to yourdomian.com or shopping cart checkouts. Their purpose is brand engagement for a niche market.
3. Make apps more discoverable through the clutter. I’ve heard there are 10’s of thousands of apps on Facebook right now which makes discovery even more challenging. The worst thing would be to build a $100,000 app and then have no one find it. Ouch!

We are looking at 2 apps to launch our Facebook page with. They aren’t too complicated and I’m making sure they have strong viral components so they can easily be passed on and show up in people’s newsfeeds.  We aren’t starting with a gift simply because they are too expensive with little track record for success to date.

Estee Lauder's Breast Cancer Awareness Campaign is the best example I’ve seen yet of a smart online campaign using social media to reach a targeted audience with high impact. The campaign launches today and you can already see pieces on sites like BrickFish. What makes this campaign stand out in the sea of other online campaigns coming to market everyday? They are going to where the peeps are.

There is a fundamental difference between the ‘old way’ and the ‘new way.’

‘old way’ = build it and they will come ala campaign focusing on yourcompany.com. If you build a campaign on yourcompany.com you now need to bring peeps to you. Past history has told me that outreach programs will garner you eyeballs from your fan base. You will shake your normal trees down and get your regular fan base to come see what you are up to – engagement marketing. But to reach outside your echo chamber requires a lot more media spend – acquisition marketing. Now we’re talking banner ads. Hmm… expensive and increasingly less and less effective. You are in the cycle of heavy lifting up front to build the campaign followed by heavy lifting of getting traffic to your site.  Ready to try something new?

‘new way’= go to where the people are. What if we flipped the thinking around and instead of driving people to yourcompany.com you went to where the people are already going everyday, social networking sites,Q&A sites and blogs. Take BrickFish.com a site designed to allow people to express themselves through multiple different marketing campaigns. It gives each campaign a complete report of campaign traffic and engagement as well as a really cool viral map and geo map. When you engage with highly trafficked blogs you can run a very targeted campaign. It’s not enough to run banner ads on sites, people don’t see them anymore. Go to where your customers are. Save yourself the time and resources it takes to build a landing page and find your audience online.Then figure out ways to reach them in the activities they are doing everyday.

On a personal note, today begins breast cancer awareness month. Please, please talk to your wife, sister, mother, friend. Breast cancer is over 80% curable if it is detected early. I have an aunt and grandmother who have battled this disease. I get checked regularly (going today) but 70% of women diagnosed with this disease have no family history. So call the women in your life today. Tell them you love them, then ask them if they've had an exam this year. It’s the difference between life and death.

I have had the pleasure over the last few months to develop from the ground up the Windows Social Media team. It’s been really interesting to explore the different opportunities for marketing within the Social Media channels.  There are two teams in particular that we work very closely with; the media buying team and PR. It’s been important to draw a clear distinction between what the Social Media team does and what these other marketing groups do. 

1. The Social Media team is responsible for online engagement that doesn’t cost any money. This was an easy way for us to break out responsibility with our online ad buying group.  Take video syndication as an example. The Social Media team is responsible for syndication on YouTube, Soapbox, Metacafe, Yahoo video, etc. Anywhere it’s free to post a video is done by us. The media buying team is responsible for any video advertising that we have to pay for, for example banner ads and TubeMogul.
2. The Social Media team is responsible for any conversations between marketing and customers. A segment of our social media team is set up to engage in conversations in the blogosphere where we can help customers find solutions and answer questions where appropriate. We are responsible for the masses, how people talk about Windows online as it relates to our customer strategies. PR, on the other hand, is responsible for communication with a select group of press and highly influential blogger's. They seed stories through press briefings and we monitor and engage once the story is covered and people begin to respond. PR does not respond to comments on blogs, the social media team does.

Beyond making clear distinctions about what role the social media team will play as a vital part of the all up Windows it was important to define roles within the team. There are three of us on the team and we are organized like this;

Social Media Strategist; Me. I am the team lead. I manage the team members and agency relationships. I find budget as well as evangelize our work to execs. This is a very important part of our teams success because social media is still in the beginning phases. Success metrics are still being determined. We are trying several different strategies as a part of our overall outreach plan. Some things work great and some don’t catch on. It’s important to keep telling our story to execs and proving our results. I send weekly high level activity reports to my management so they are aware and informed about our outreach activities. This is crucial for when I need to go back and ask for more funding.

Community manager; Marcus. He is responsible for our community efforts. We launched the Windows Live community this summer and he will be responsible for the health and well being of the community as well as growing the community to include Windows. Some very large problems he will be solving this year include; how do we grow the existing community focused on Windows Live to include Windows? How does customer support and help and how to relate. Many issues in a community come up as a response to a support question someone has. What is the most effective way to bring forums and discussion boards online and what platform should we use, internally built or external?

Social Media Marketing Manager; Ali. Ali is new to Microsoft and is a recent college grad. She has been using social media as a college student for years and is intimately familiar with how the younger generation is now getting the majority of their marketing messages though peer to peer engagement.  She is going to take on managing marketing campaigns within Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites. She will work with our social media agency and TruCast, our blog monitoring tool, to build dynamic marketing campaigns.

Make sense? Would love to hear your thoughts.

Facebook announced this week the first of it’s kind engagement advertisements. What are engagement ads?  Forrester goes into the full details but the gist of it is they are ads that people can do something with. Traditional banner ads are designed for people to click on and then they are taken to the landing page the brand wants them to see. Engagement ads are designed so people can take some sort of action with the brand. There are 3 different type of ads; comment style ad, virtual gift ad and fan style ad.

Comment style ad’s allow viewers to comment on the product right in the ad for other people to see. This is an interesting idea, but in my opinion pretty risky. I’m thinking about a GM ad where environmental groups could really go to town on bashing the gas guzzling trucks GM is selling. Any type of company that is at all polarizing (and I work for one) should think about how they are going to monitor these types of comments.

Virtual gift ads seem pretty straight forward. If you haven’t used Facebook before virtual gifts are ‘pretend’ items friends can virtually throw at each other for fun.  I’ve been telling everyone I know that I would love to see a virtual Ugg so I could throw it at my friends. I’m a big fun of Ugg. This is a fun, easy engagement ad that gets people using their network to promote their favorite products to people they know.

Fan style ads will be great to build awareness for fan pages in Facebook. Rather than sending people off to the brands corporate webpage off Facebook this ad would link to the brands fan page.  This ad requires the brand have a fan presence already established on Facebook.  This would be a great way to make more people aware of a brand’s fan page. We are working with an MVP partner on our Vista fan page which has tripled in members over the last 3 weeks. I would definitely consider buying fan ads to send traffic to my Vista fan page.

Very interesting concept. I think Facebook was the right social network to lead the way on this. Will be interesting to watch.

Monday was the launch of our Windows Live community. The whole experience has been amazingly positive along with huge lessons learned. I figured it would be valuable for readers of this blog who are interested in how to build a community to hear some of the biggest questions I get asked. I’ll continue to update this blog as the community grows. To start here is a list of the most frequently asked questions I get:

Q: How did you recruit the community?

A: First we send out an email to our 10,000 most engaged Windows Live users. We got a good response from this but with email open rates being as low as they are we didn’t feel like we reached enough people with this initial outreach. The next thing we did was put a post on our product blogs. The post on Spacecraft got picked up by LiveSide and between the traffic from the blogs and the mention on LiveSide we got a lot of interest.

Q: How did you communicate with the community?

A: We set up a private Space then community members ‘friended’ the Space and all updates and correspondence with the group was through the Space. They would get updated on the What’s New feed in Spaces so they would know when there was new content to look at.

Q: Will Microsoft censor any content created by the community?

A: There is a terms of use statement that all community members agree to. This terms of use covers guidelines against inappropriate and disrespectful, offensive material. Other than respecting those guidelines Microsoft will not edit or remove any material by the community regardless if it is less than positive for Microsoft products. This is meant to be an open conversation with our most engaged users about the great things they like as well as opportunities we have to do things better.

Q: How will you handle offensive material?

A: As part of the design, the community has the final say in what content gets pushed live to WindowsLive.com. The community votes in the Clubhouse on content created by members and content that gets 3 good ratings gets pushed live. Any content that is offensive or not appropriate for WindowsLive.com as decided on by the community will not ever be seen by the public. There is also an offensive material button in the Clubhouse so any members can flag content they feel is offensive. Offensive content will be pulled down and the community member warned.

Q: What platform did you use?

A: We didn’t. The technology is built on an aggregation model. Our agency Avenue A/Razor Fish built the web site using  RSS feeds to pull content directly from community members Windows Live Space. Anything community members post to their Space and tag with the appropriate tags will show up in the Clubhouse for the community to vote on. 

Q: Why the confusing tagging? How do people know what to tag?

A: Tagging isn’t always the most intuitive thing but it was the only way we could pull content directly from people’s Space. It seemed a better trade off than having to ask community members to re-create content on a separate domain. We have a detailed tagging guideline document that outlines the steps to take posted in the Clubhouse as well our community manager Marcus  helps members one on one when they need it.

Q: What is your goal for the community:

A:We really want to connect people who are doing cool things with Windows Live to other people who may be inspired to try creative things of their own. By giving engaged customers a place to share their experience and knowledge we hope to inspire others while recognizing those that have been great customers. In addition to inspiring people we will look to the community for product feedback to help us continually improve our products. The main goal is to simple get closer to our customers.