Twitter handle? Registered—and tweeting who knows what. Facebook fan page? Created—and desperately seeking fans. Now what, exactly, do these things do for my brand?

Plenty of companies rush into the social-media space, if only to “be there.”
They suffer from what we call “techno-ecstasy,” a supreme love of newly developed technology. It’s a constant obsession with the newest, shiniest online toys combined with the fear of being left behind. Most often, it’s the technology itself people are enamored with, not the business problems these advancements could solve. These platforms come and go, and the graveyards of lost applications build up, but our business goals get put on the back burner.

We no longer ask if tactics make sense for our brand, if they’re beneficial to our consumers, or if the enterprise is capable of delivering on the promise.

Now more than ever, we’re seeing brands rush head-on into the social-media space, staking their claim on their Twitter,Flickr and Facebook kingdoms, excited about what can be done versus what should be done. In the case of microblogging there are huge differences between brands that do and do not get it. The successful ones engage users on an individual basis and humanize the company with various levels of participation within the organization. On the other hand, some brands deliver mostly broadcast messages regarding promotions or announcements, with little interaction among followers.

But how do you know if you’ve been afflicted with techno-ecstasy? Start by asking these questions:

1. Am I focused on using the social realm to listen to and learn more about my consumers, or am I more focused on executing a fan page?

2. How much participation is required to make a difference on my brand? Does adding 4,600 “friends” have any impact on this goal? Is this scalable to the level I need?

3. Has my company trained CSR, legal, HR and sales on our social-media strategy, or has only the marcom department received a social-media 101 session?

Trust me, I’m not discouraging the appetite to keep up with new innovations. They’ll undoubtedly effect profound changes in how our brands start and continue relationships with customers. But there’s no need to be blinded by techno-ecstasy.

To help you navigate the social-media space, here are four phases of a social strategy:

1. Listen. The most important thing to remember brings us back to marketing basics: Listen to your consumer. Social media is the perfect place to leverage what your audience is already saying. Executing a pretty fan page won’t do your brand any good if you aren’t listening to what consumers are asking for.

This should be the first and most supported phase. Even if you have to stop there, it’s OK.

2. Understand. Social media is not necessarily a popularity contest. Your friends or followers may have zero impact on your brand if they’re not the audience you’re seeking. Instead of racing to add more friends, focus on developing meaningful one-on-one relationships with your existing, most loyal fans.

Back up and ask yourself if your goals within social media (e.g., adding fans) are aligned with the business, brand and consumer goals.

3. Participate. Social media is not simply a marketing channel to broadcast campaigns and promotions. It’s also an invaluable relationship building tool, given the individualized nature of the medium. People spend time on social networks to connect with other people so engage your consumers as individuals, not a mass voice. Customers respond more to brands that have real transparency and act as brand ambassadors.

4. Harness. The place to focus your presence in social media is to graph your fan base. We’re not talking about painting word clouds or counting tweets. We’re talking about a serious deep dive into what your consumers think about your category and your brand. Although social media is the product of technology and we’re used to quantitative metrics in the digital space, you’ll get more out of analyzing this realm with a human approach. After all, how does one quantify the feeling and emotion abounding from a conversation? We’ve even mined the human conversations occurring in social media with the methodology of a cultural anthropologist.

Engaging in social media will likely spark customer service and, potentially, legal issues. Make sure your enterprise is involved to ensure every point of the customer experience is positive.

Social media isn’t just another marketing channel; it can be an effective CRM tool as well. If you really want consumer advocates, be ready.

Paul Gunning is CEO of Tribal DDB Worldwide. 

Source: Adweek

A primary theme of the high-energy general session on Day Two of the Nielsen Consumer360 conference was encouraging attendees to use the current recession as a learning opportunity, in order to build better relationships with consumers and/or reinvent business models.

From Nielsen’s James Russo, there was talk of the fact that great companies such as GE, Disney, Microsoft, and HP were started during economic downturns. And, he felt that consumers may soon be spending more, albeit with some restraint. Signs of the recession were everywhere, from a global reduction in out of home entertainment expenditures, to canning and freezing supplies being a top growth category, to a slowing of growth in health and wellness and organics. Home has become the new “center.”

Kraft’s Nick Sorvillo said his company has multiple online consumer panels that tell them that consumers are looking for control and security in their lives. They have discovered new priorities and advantages from living simpler lives—Sorvillo called this “brightsiding.” As 72 percent of shoppers surveyed said they will continue using new shopping strategies when the economy improves, Kraft has gone about reconnecting with consumers and becoming a dependable, valuable source of help—providing recipes by e-mail, recipe widgets, and an iPhone assistant app that, having launched ten months ago, is in the top 50 iPhone apps.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of “The Tipping Point,” “Blink,” and his new book, “Outliers,” said that the recession offers us a chance to rethink assumptions and bad habits accumulated over many years. To him, successful people are aware of their limitations and work harder to overcome them. He noted that some things that we see as advantages, such as small school class sizes, are not necessarily so. For example, many Asian countries that have great educational systems have large class sizes. In essence, one of this theories is that making it too easy for people spoils them and actually inhibits success. In that light, he sees the current poor economy as perhaps providing a highway to creativity—nothing like a crisis to focus the mind.

Ken Romanzi discussed the revitalization of Ocean Spray, as over the past few years the company has jump started sales by educating consumers that their products taste good, and are good for them. Ocean Spray embarked on a heavy P.R. and marketing campaign to reintroduce the cranberry to U.S. consumers, showcasing their products’ heritage, and linking their products to various holidays and celebrations.

Nielsen’s Chairman and CEO, Dave Calhoun, said he has been amazed at the resilience of consumers, as their spending on food and fuel held up until the liquidity crunch of last September. He sees another 12 months’ or so of turmoil and said an important signal will be what consumers are going to do about saving, as so far most of the growth in savings has been involuntary, due to the reduced availability of credit.

All in all, it was an enlightening and entertaining morning—with every bad economic statistic seemingly offset by the notion that the current downturn was eventually going to go away, and until then we have an opportunity to rethink how and what we’re doing. It was also great to see many speakers at the conference using video and audio clips of consumers—giving us much more than just charts and statistics.

Many of the videos of the sessions at Consumer 360 are available on demand at Consumer360.com.

Source: Nielsenwire.com

Home sales have bounced back from the extraordinarily low levels recorded during the winter months,” said Cameron Muir, BCREA Chief Economist. “Improved affordability and less uncertainty about the future are the main factors driving home sales higher.”

“The combination of stronger consumer demand and fewer homes for sale is stabilizing home prices in many BC markets,” added Muir.

Year-to-date, MLS® residential sales dollar volume was down 31 per cent to $11.7 billion over the same period last year. A total of 26,359 units were sold in the first five months of 2009, down 26 per cent from 2008, while the average MLS® price declined 7 per cent to $443,252.

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“Downward pressure on home prices has eased considerably,” said Cameron Muir, BCREA Chief Economist. “An increase in consumer demand combined with fewer homes for sale has trended the market near balanced conditions.” The number of homes for sale through the Multiple Listing Service (MLS®) fell to a twelve-month low in April, on a seasonally adjusted basis.

MLS® residential sales dollar volume in BC declined 25 per cent to $3.1 billion in April, compared to the same month last year. Residential unit sales declined 20 per cent to 6,918 units during the same period. The average MLS® residential price in the province was $449,372 in April, down 6 per cent from April 2008. Year-to-date, MLS® residential sales dollar volume was down 41 per cent to $7.8 billion over the same period last year. A total of 1,889 units were sold in the first four months, down 35 per cent from 2008, while the average MLS® price declined 9 per cent to $433,246.

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Scotia Economics_Real Estate Trends

Here are some highlights:

- The national new-listings-to-sales ratio averaged 2.2 in March, down from a cycle peak of 2.7 last November (about 2.0 is considered balanced)

- In contrast to the pickup in home sales, residential construction is being reined in even faster than anticipated, with builders quick to respond to falling new home prices, rising inventories and greater resale competition

- In Vancouver, 50% of homeowners opting for multi-unit dwellings — double the national average. 

The good news for you is that money is not a barrier, which means that marketers of any size can play. But the rules are different, as they always are online.

Because media is free but attention is not (this is flipped from TV world) you need to make a different sort of ad for a different sort of audience.

1. Assume that the viewer has the attention span of an espresso-crazed fruitfly. That means slapstick, quick cuts and velocity.

2. Find a word or phrase that you can own in Google, that fits in an email, and that comes up in discussion at the cafeteria table or in the playground.

Castrol gets both rules right in this inane commercial.

3. Length doesn’t matter. 10 seconds is fine and so is five minutes. Media is free, remember?

4. Challenge the status quo, be provocative, touch a social nerve or create some other sort of interesting conversation. In other words, a commercial worth watching.

Dove does both in this now-famous commercial.

Because of the power of free media, I expect to see a whole host of commercials that would never be deemed effective enough to spend big media money on, but that generate huge views online. Look for plenty of irrelevant slogans and catch phrases and off strategy content… anything for an eyeball.

Also, understand that this is out of your control. Once launched, what happens, happens. One commercial I know of caught fire and ended up with millions of views. The client then called the producer, screaming in anger. He wanted to be able to turn it off, to decide how it got used, who talked about it, etc. You can’t. Once it spreads, it belongs to the community, not to you.

The biggest shift is going to be that organizations that could never have afforded a national campaign will suddenly have one. The same way that there’s very little correlation between popular websites and big companies, we’ll see that the most popular commercials get done by little shops that have nothing to lose.

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The standard response from many people on Twitter this week to the news that Ashton Kutcher wanted to get a million followers was thinly veiled (or not-so-thinly veiled) disgust. Long-time Twitter fans were outraged that anyone — let alone a two-bit TV actor — would be so blatantly egotistical, and trivialize such a great social-media tool in that way, just so he could get on the Oprah show. Shane Richmond said that it wasn’t clear who was the bigger “Twitter tool,” Ashton or Oprah. All of these comments, of course, ignored the fact that Kutcher was using his campaign to raise money for malaria relief efforts, and has in fact raised a total of almost $1-million, according to a recent tweet.

So Ashton is more or less using Twitter as the 21st-century version of Jerry Lewis’s telethon for muscular dystrophy. That isn’t the interesting thing about his use of the social network, at least as far as I’m concerned. Far from being just an egotist who wants to take advantage of a medium to promote himself — although there could well be an aspect of grandstanding to it, as there is for many people — it seems clear that the actor has thought fairly seriously about the implications of Twitter from a media-industry standpoint (my friend Andrew Cherwenka seems to agree). And as a celebrity who is in the public eye almost all the time, he also has a somewhat unique take on the media industry and how it is being transformed.

In his video discussion with Oprah about Twitter, for example, Kutcher says he believes that “we’re at a place now with social media where a single person’s voice can be as powerful as an entire news network — that is the power of the social web.” (although obviously it helps if that one person is a celebrity). He then talks about how his life is “somewhat on display anyway, and not always by choice… so instead of them publishing pictures and videos I don’t like, I can publish pictures and video of myself… that I’m happy with. If there’s some sort of fallacy that’s out in some magazine or that some blogger has written about, you can respond to it, and you can actually respond to it in a genuine way, directly with your fans, as opposed to having to go through the whole rigamarole of publicists and so on.”

I’ve heard and read similar thoughts expressed by actress Brea Grant, one of the stars of Heroes, and others. Social-media tools allow them to go direct to their fans, just as it allows musicians to connect directly with fans, avoiding the PR machine and all the distortions that it produces. This is the same kind of media-channel disruption that allows people like billionaire Mark Cuban to post the transcripts of media interviews on his blog when his comments are taken out of context — and that allows anyone involved in a news event to tell their own version of the story, rather than the one that is constructed by the media. Ashton Kutcher may be a two-bit TV actor, and he may goof around on Twitter posting snapshots of his wife’s backside now and then, but that doesn’t mean he is wrong about how media is changing.

http://mashable.com/2009/04/13/social-media-gimmicks/

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