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Friday, June 25, 2010
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Video: LEGO’s Social Media Strategy
Thanks Digital Buzz Blog
Diving into LEGO's Strategy Behind Connecting Their Amazing Network of Fans -- presented by Jake McKee from GasPedal on Vimeo.
This is a great video from Jake McKee (formally LEGO’s Global Community Relations Specialist) discussing how LEGO found, supported and incubated their biggest fans from around the world to help pull the company out of a pretty dark time to be back on top of the world, lead in part, by a strong social media strategy.
A word of warning, this is a 30 minute video, from a conference late last year (so skip the first 30 secs) and is not exactly their strategy, but more a case study of success, however, it’s well worth the time, and probably something you won’t have time to watch at your desk today so just make sure you remember to watch it later!
Jake McKee makes three really strong, but incredibly simple (how often do we see simplicity works socially?!) points.
1. Look beyond your target customers
2. Support existing fans
3. Find what works and replicate
1. Look beyond your target customers
Your target market isn’t always your biggest group of talkers. For years, LEGO was focused on kids — that is, until they realized adults had created their own community of enthusiasts. When LEGO started connecting these talkers, not only did they increase their word of mouth, they immediately helped their bottom line. Whereas kids were spending $20 a year on LEGOs, these adults were spending around $1,000.
2. Support existing fans
Without LEGO’s knowledge, adult fans had already created an online LEGO community and marketplace. LEGO approached this group by offering support and resources in the form of an ambassador program. By offering to support what these fans were already doing so well -instead of demanding ownership and control -LEGO was welcomed into the community.
3. Find what works and replicate
The enthusiasm of the adult fans helped teach LEGO how to gain more participation from their other fans- including kids. Jake says that when you find something that works with one fan group, try applying it to other groups of talkers. Because the fundamentals of great communities are the same, strategies behind one fan community can often generate similar success for another community. (via Igor on Viral Blog)
Question: What's a Facebook Fan Really Worth to Marketers?
Interesting piece from Adage
Two Social-Media Tech Companies Set Out to Answer It With Differing Formulas True to form, many of the technologies showcased during New York's annual Internet Week wowed, but what really generated attention were efforts to answer the $64,000 question: How do we measure the value of a Facebook fan, especially since Facebook is a dominant part of a marketer's toolkit?
Two Social-Media Tech Companies Set Out to Answer It With Differing Formulas True to form, many of the technologies showcased during New York's annual Internet Week wowed, but what really generated attention were efforts to answer the $64,000 question: How do we measure the value of a Facebook fan, especially since Facebook is a dominant part of a marketer's toolkit?
Two clever social-media technology companies, Syncapse and Vitrue, took a crack at answering this seemingly simple question. I say seemingly simple because, in reality, the "value" of a fan can mean lots of things such as actual sales value or value as evangelists or value as a research resource in a crowdsourcing campaign.
And given the ad hoc nature of measurement today, it's no surprise, therefore, that we see wildly divergent answers from these two companies. Syncapse, for instance, assigns the average value of a fan at $136.38, and Vitrue pegs the value of a Facebook fan at $3.60. The wild differences, of course, lies in what you are measuring. Let's take a closer look.
The Syncapse approach
I got to hear Syncapse CEO Michael Scissons present the findings from a joint, proprietary research study his company did with Hotspex. It was designed to calculate the value of a fan based on a set of attributes as described by Synapse in the study:
- Product spending -- Facebook fans spend, on average, $71.84 more than non-fans over a two-year period.
- Loyalty (meaning ability to influence and promote brand loyalty within a target audience) -- Facebook fans are 28% more likely to continue using a brand than consumers who are not fans on Facebook.
- Propensity to recommend -- 68% of fans are "very likely" to recommend a product to family and friends (as opposed to 28% of non-fans).
- Brand affinity -- 81% of fans feel a connection to the brand (versus only 39% of non-fans).
Together these attributes (and a few others) roll into a sophisticated formula which yields an average value of $136 per fan. Now, I love the idea of these metrics. I love the scope that these attributes reach for. I appreciate how cleverly they assigned a dollar value to intangible attributes such as brand affinity. And rightly, the study spends a fair amount of time acknowledging that the value is highly dependent on lots of variables.
Yet, the study requires us to take some pretty big leaps of faith since the data is self-reported -- not behaviorally tracked. This somewhat stacks the data deck – after all a fan means they are already favorably predisposed.
But even if one is willing to take these leaps of faith, what are the practical applications of this information? Does a marketer then use this measure to justify shifting dollars from one media into Facebook? Is it a "dollar for dollar" shift? Or is this information best used as a theoretical baseline for some objective measure of progress? While I like this approach because it is innovative and ambitious, its practical application remains to be seen.
The Vitrue approach
Vitrue's approach to the question, "What's the value of a Facebook community?," is to associate fan value to the value of impressions generated in the Facebook news feed. It then applies display banner advertising pricing to the number of Facebook fans (at $5 per CPM) for a value metric. The results of the study are based on Vitrue's own client data that had a combined 41 million fans. With this approach, one can theoretically increase monthly media impressions significantly so that, for instance, a marketer with a large Facebook fan base that posts twice a day can deliver 60 million more impressions/ month. Here is a recap (and many thanks to Webtechuniverse's blog post) of the formula: 1M impressions x 2 posts x 30 days = 60M impressions 60M impressions / 1000 x $5 CPM = $300,000 $300,000 x 12 months = $3.6M $3.6M / 1M fans = $3.60
This approach is valid and similar to the methodology used to assign media value to publicity received in the news. "It's important to understand that once you build that fan base, you want to make sure you're leveraging it," said Michael Strutton, chief product officer at Vitrue, and they provide a nifty tool to help you measure your value Facebook fan page.
While this approach is more focused than the Syncapse approach (though less strategic), even within the more limited scope, here too we must be willing to take a leap of faith, which is that all impressions perform equally irrespective of environment within which those impressions are delivered. And then the inevitable "Now what?" problem also raises its head because we are not clear on how to apply this learning in the real world. Does this suggest that a wholesale dollar shift will deliver comparable results? (I'd love to hear from the Vitrue folks on this point.)
Conclusion
I fully appreciate the need to put an ROI face to the question (pun intended), and I much applaud the efforts by these companies to give guidance. But it seems fair to step back for a moment and ask ourselves a bigger question: "What is our Facebook marketing investment worth?" The way to answer that bigger question might be, in fact, to reframe it within the context of specific marketing campaigns like direct marketing rather than looking at this problem in a "monolithic" sense. As David Armano, senior VP, Edelman Digital, observed in a session on Facebook; we would do well to think of Facebook as part of a larger marketing "ecosystem" where there are practical and actionable set of measures like customer lifetime value, acquisition costs and sales.
The way forward
There is a rising chorus of voices demanding a coordinated industry approach to metrics and methodology used in the measurement of social media that integrates the disparate trade organizations' efforts while introducing the best thinking from innovative companies like Syncapse and Vitrue. This will allow the industry to come up with an accepted standard set of metrics that provide true actionability. It's time we roll this initiative out in earnest -- so if you have a voice or want to help, feel free to e-mail me.e-mail me
So what did I learn about the value of a Facebook fan in the last week? At least I learned enough to say, "It all depends..."
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR | |
| Judy Shapiro is chief brand strategist at CloudLinux and has held senior marketing positions at Paltalk, Comodo, Computer Associates, Lucent Technologies, AT&T and Bell Labs. Her blog, Trench Wars, provides insights on how to create business value on the internet. | |
Gatorade’s Social Media Command Center
Now this is monitoring the social web... thanks mashable
Inside Gatorade’s Social Media Command Center
In the realm of marketing, Gatorade is probably best known for splashy commercials featuring some of the world’s most famous athletes. However, a new effort behind the scenes of the PepsiCo-owned sports drink maker is putting social media quite literally at the center of the way Gatorade approaches marketing.
The company recently created the Gatorade Mission Control Center inside of its Chicago headquarters, a room that sits in the middle of the marketing department and could best be thought of as a war room for monitoring the brand in real-time across social media.
Mission Control
The room features six big monitors with five seats for Gatorade’s marketing team to track a number of data visualizations and dashboards –- also available on to employees on their desktops — that the company has custom built with partners including Radian6 (
) and IBM. Below are a few of the visualizations that we got to check out in an interview last week:
This monitor is a visualization of tweets that are relevant to Gatorade; the company is tracking terms relating to its brand, including competitors, as well as its athletes and sports nutrition-related topics.
This monitor measures blog conversations across a variety of topics and shows how hot those conversations are across the blogosphere. The company also runs detailed sentiment analysis around key topics and product and campaign launches.
This video from Gatorade shows all of the different types of data being monitored from Mission Control.
Mission Control in Action
While certainly impressive visually, the first question that came to mind when being introduced to Gatorade Mission Control was how it’s actually being used on a day-to-day basis, and if its lead to product and marketing changes at the company that might not have happened without it.
Gatorade’s Sr. Marketing Director, Consumer & Shopper Engagement Carla Hassan offered a few examples, starting with the company’s monitoring of its “Gatorade has evolved” campaign. The commercials featured a song by rap artist David Banner, which, Mission Control quickly saw was being heavily discussed in social media. Within 24 hours, they had worked with Banner to put out a full-length version of the song and distribute it to Gatorade followers and fans on Twitter and Facebook, respectively.
On a day-to-day basis, Gatorade’s tools are also being used for more conventional marketing tactics –- like optimizing landing pages and making sure followers are being sent to the top performing pages. As an example, the company says it’s been able to increase engagement with its product education (mostly video) by 250% and reduce its exit rate from 25% to 9%.
The Future
The goal of the project, says Hassan, is to “take the largest sports brand in the world and turn it into largest participatory brand in the world.” To that end, the company’s not only monitoring its brand on social media, but giving its fans increased access to its athletes and scientists.
During the Super Bowl, for example, Gatorade let fans interact with a number of its NFL starsUstream () as they tested out the new Gatorade G Series Pro. More recently, Hassan told me the company has been doing more regular small-scale live events, such as having a sports nutritionist answer questions from fans through Ustream and Facebook. through
If that strategy is successful, expect to see the Mission Control approach applied to other businesses within PepsiCo says Bonin Bough, director of global social media at the company. “We believe what we’re building here is an example of a sandbox of tools and processes we can use across the organization,” he said.
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