MarketingSherpa Blog

Two of the latest marketing trends–social networking and SMS messaging–are becoming routine for some marketers, and their roles are becoming more clearly defined.

Chad Hallert, Director, Ecommerce, Eldorado Hotel Casino, and his team have experimented with building and promoting to a list of SMS subscribers since early 2009. In some ways, the team uses SMS similarly to how they use Facebook and Twitter. However, they’ve found SMS messages attract more immediate attention to promotions.

The team’s tried sending channel-specific promotions to SMS subscribers and social followers, but without fantastic results, Hallert says.

“We tried stand alone offers with mobile, social and email…when you break them up to pieces, nothing really competes with email, and the other two don’t look as valuable as they are.”

Instead, the real value of SMS and social are their ability to improve the results of an integrated campaign, Hallert says. He’s seen results improved by 5% to 8% by adding an SMS alert and Facebook updates to campaigns that already included website, paid search and email promotion.

This is due in part, Hallert says, to customers subscribing to more than one promotional outlet. A person who receives a text message and email about an offer is more likely to convert than a person who receives only one of the two.

The marketing power of the team’s SMS subscribers and social followers is likely to improve as the lists grow in size in relation to the team’s email subscribers. Currently, their SMS list is about 10% of their email list in size, Hallert says.

For now, the team is seeing social and mobile marketing add more value to integrated campaigns than the channels could generate by themselves. Watch our consumer marketing newsletter for a case study describing how Hallert’s team leveraged the immediacy of SMS to take advantage of the weather’s impact on hotel bookings.

One great thing about social media networks is they’re cost-free. Sure, they can be time consuming. You might even need to hire a manager. But you won’t have to write checks to Facebook, MySpace or Twitter to be there.

Also, social networks are showing some marketers big returns. We ran a great article this week on how Threadless, an online community-based tee-shirt retailer, used Twitter to give more life to a promotion. Check out how they micro-blogged their way to a record sales day.

We spoke with Cam Balzer, VP, Marketing, Threadless.com, for the piece. Balzer mentioned that, apart from their main feed, they also experiment with different Twitter feeds. Hey, why not? Feeds are free to create. Here are two alternatives they’ve tried:

– Customer service

In November, they launched a Threadhelp feed to handle customer service inquiries through Twitter. The thread is managed by members of Threadless’ customer service team. Other companies have tried this strategy as well.

Separating customer service and community-oriented feeds helps keep the fun and useful messages apart from the frustrated customer messages. It also helps customers get the attention they need more directly.

– Single promotion feeds

For Halloween, the team set up an account alleging to be maintained by a zombie. The joke feed put some spin on a holiday promotion. Although it did not capture many followers, the feed was an inexpensive experiment that helped the team learn more about the channel.

Has your team experimented with multiple Twitter feeds? Or different Facebook groups perhaps? Let us know in the comments…

Twitter’s rapid growth this year has given the micro-blogging service a reputation as a powerful way to reach and research consumers.

I recently interviewed Craig Greenfield, VP, Search and Performance Media, Performics, about his team’s Twitter use. They use it to help promote Performics’ marketing services, as well as enhance their clients’ campaigns and research.

Here’re six ways Greenfield sees Twitter contributing to his team’s success:

#1. Improved natural search

– Content promotion – A simple tweet with a short URL link is enough to drive traffic and capture more links to content, and in turn, help search rankings.

“Depending on who re-tweets our links and how they do it…we tend to see a snowball effect that results in more and more valuable SEO links,” Greenfield says.

– Keyword research – Through Twitter’s search and the team’s proprietary tools, they are able to mine Twitter’s data to look for new keywords related to their client’s products.

#2. Capture paid-search opportunities

Twitter helps Greenfield’s team monitor trends in consumer interest. By tracking non-branded industry keywords (such as ‘jeans’ and ‘shirt’ for clothing retailers) they can see both positive and negative reactions to new brands, styles or features.

#3. Reputation management

Twitter is one of many social media sites that Greenfield and his team uses to monitor consumer sentiment around brands and products.

By using software to identify statements about a company or its products, the team is able to see whether consumers are talking about the company in a positive or negative light and respond appropriately.

#4. Landing page design

Greenfield’s team started mining conversations on social media outlets like Twitter to develop new landing page designs. They monitor conversations related to a brand or product and create a “tag cloud” based on the feedback. The team references these groups of text when brainstorming new ideas for landing pages, he says.

#5. Driving direct sales

Threadless, a tee shirt design and retail company, and one of Greenfield’s clients, has attracted more than 1.2 million followers to its Twitter feed and uses Twitter to generate sales, Greenfield says. Threadless tweets about promotions and content, and typically includes a URL link to their website.

#6. B2B lead generation

Greenfield and his team use their Twitter feed to update followers on:
o Company news
o Blog posts
o New whitepaper downloads
o Monthly webinars

The last two items are often used for lead generation, making Twitter one of several ways the team increases their pool of qualified leads for sales.

We’re planning several studies about social media marketing, and we’d like your help targeting our research on the information you really need.

We’ve set up an online form to collect your questions about social media. Let us know if you’ve got questions about social media strategy in general, or questions about specific social channels, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or MySpace.

Here’s the link:
http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/174250/smq

NOTE: This isn’t a formal survey that’s going to require a lot of your time. It’s a just blank field where you can supply as many questions or topic suggestions as you’d like.

Thanks for your input!

Google is rocking the boat in the blogosphere with its latest announcement: Google Wave. I had a chance today to check out the video of a developer’s preview of the tool. It’s long — about 80 minutes — but it’s very clear and jam-packed with feature demos.

At first glance, Wave looks like an email and instant messaging hybrid built for the browser — but that’s just the beginning. Users can take their conversations and embed them into blogs and other websites with ease — and the conversations can be added to at the blog or the users’ account page. Users have a centralized place where they can add to conversations that are happening all over the web, “which will make flame wars so much more effective,” quips Lars Rasmussen, Software Engineer Manager, Google, and co-founder of the Wave team, in the video.

The tool has many other features, including:
– Drag and drop photo functionality
– Drag and drop friends into conversations
– Reply to specific portions of conversations
– Watch replays of how conversations developed (useful for those coming late to a discussion)
– Real-time conversation capability — to the point where you can watch your friends’ every keystroke
-And there’s more

Also interesting is a comment during the presentation’s introduction by Vic Gundotra, VP of Engineering, Google, that those watching the demo will surely forget that they were watching a browser client — not downloaded software. And in my case, he was right. I was blown away when I realized that the tool is hosted elsewhere — like Gmail. The only capability that requires a download is the photo functionality, which requires downloading Google Gears.

On top of all this, Google Wave will be open sourced — allowing any developer to create new uses and features — which is huge. The feature set will likely explode after launch.

Ah, yes — launch. Did I forget to mention that this is not yet available to the public? If you’re interested, Google will notify you when Wave is ready to go live sometime later this year — as my colleague Sean Donahue noted last week.

The potential for businesses — and communication in the Web in general — is large. Businesses can have an easy, free way to communicate and collaborate on projects. And it will be much easier for the public to socialize and interact online — which might give a very large booster shot to Web 2.0 in its infancy. This is certainly worth keeping an eye on — and it’s Google — you know that ads will eventually be squeezed in somewhere.

Think Twitter is going down? Think it’s just for kids? You might want to think again. A graph from comScore shows an enormous spike in visits in January and February. Eyeballing the graph shows about 100% growth worldwide, about 5 million more unique visitors.

More recent comScore data on the US market shows a continued surge in visits to the micro-blogging site, from 2 million UVs in January to 9.3 million in March. That’s a 365% increase!

My guess is that Twitter’s most recent explosion in traffic has been magnified by the press. A search for “twitter” in Google News for the past month retrieved over 65,000 results. The same search for all of 2008 retrieved 25,500 results. I don’t understand the nuts and bolts of Google News nearly enough to consider this solid data–but I can say for a fact that I’ve heard more talk and press about Twitter in the past six weeks than I have since the site’s 2006 founding.

Also, traditional mass media typically has an older audience in the US, and this generation has been checking out Twitter–a lot. The largest portion of February’s 4 million UVs were age 45 to 54, according to comScore’s second chart on this page. The second largest group was age 25 to 34, followed by age 35 to 44. (The chart’s time period is not mentioned, but we called to check–it’s for Feb.)

What does this mean? Twitter is exploding, the media is talking about it, and people older than 20-something are checking it out. You cannot assume that the platform is insignificant and only appeals to a younger audience.

Consumers are expressing themselves in thousands of ways online, including in videos, images, forums, and blogs. The diary-like style of blogs can offer unique insight into a person’s life and opinions. And, since they’re written in text, blogs can be more easily aggregated and mined for insights than other media, such as video.

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Janet Eden-Harris, VP of Web Intelligence, J.D. Power and Associates, on this topic. Eden-Harris works in a division of the market research firm that is responsible for mining social media for market insights. Information gathered this way can, at times, be more valuable than a survey, she says.

“People go to their blogs, to message boards, chat rooms, and forums, really, to talk to one another. And they talk spontaneously about products, services, and their lives… You’re not prejudicing them by asking a question. You are listening in, or overhearing conversations that are taking place spontaneously.”

Well-read bloggers also tend be very passionate and knowledgeable about a specific topic, she says. “These are the people that you very likely want to listen to most because they are more or less your thought leaders and opinion leaders.”

Eden-Harris and her team gather data from publicly available social media sites across the Web. They do not gather information from any sources that require a password, such as Facebook. Other social media sites, such as MySpace, do not always require a password. The team is not concerned with the gathering information about specific bloggers, she says. Instead, they are concerned with their topics and opinions.

“Essentially what we’re doing is collecting [this information] into a database, and we mine millions of posts every week and continually mine them,” she says. “It goes beyond demographics. It goes into what motivations do people have for buying or using a product or responding to a trend.”

Her team uses Natural Language Processing, a branch of computer science, to scan the posts for insights. NLP can be used to analyze text for subject matter, sentiment, and assumptions about a person’s background, such as sex and age. By scanning millions of posts, the team can uncover who is saying what about products and companies, and create reports.

Types of Reports

There are four main categories of information that companies ask J.D. Power to research that can involve mining social media, Eden-Harris says. They are:

1. Brand monitoring – This is the most common type. Marketers want to know what consumers are saying about their companies and their competitors. Marketers could survey their own customers, but it is much more difficult to survey their competitors’ customers themselves.

2. Trend analysis – Marketers also ask for analysis on the current trends in a market, and where the market is heading. It can be difficult to pick up on trends in surveys, but you can often pick up on them through blog and social media research, Eden-Harris says.

3. Customer information – Marketers also ask for more information about their current and potential customers. Blogs provide particular insight in this category since many consumers will identify themselves as a customer in one post, and talk about their personal lives in other posts. The posts can also provide information on the best language to use when communicating to customers.

4. Unmet needs – it is also possible to collect information about what products consumers wish they had. “Consumers are classically not particularly good at coming up with product innovations, but, boy, are we good at saying what annoys us and what we wish we had,” Eden-Harris says.

Think of all the organizations that have a single, powerful purpose that drives them. Google aims to help people find what they’re looking for online. AARP aims to enhance the aging population’s quality of life. Kohler aims to transform everyday commodities into art.

Purpose should drive social media efforts as well. It worked for the Brooklyn Museum, which won the 2008 Forrester Groundswell Award for “Social Impact.” The museum created a Facebook application called ArtShare, hosted a crowd-curated exhibit online, and put its entire collection online.

ArtShare allowed any museum or artist to share artwork on the social networking site. It allowed any Facebook user to display selected artworks on their profiles. The application attracted 3,007 active monthly users. The crowd-curated exhibit got 400,000 votes from the public.

And it was all driven by the museum’s purpose “to serve its diverse public as a dynamic, innovative, and welcoming center for learning through the visual arts.”

This might be a small example, but it’s one worth noting because these efforts raised awareness about the museum while perpetuating the museum’s mission.

Eric Anderson, VP of Emerging Media at White Horse,  made some interesting points about what social media metrics marketers should and should not be measuring based on what he sees going on in the marketplace.

Here are some pointers I gleaned from his webinar, “The Only 3 Social Media Metrics That Matter:”

1. Don’t over quantify

Tools that measure social media are taking a cue from the web analytics industry. The problem is a company’s true social media presence is far too nuanced to be captured by measurement software.

2. Don’t focus on direct response

Marketers shouldn’t be looking at direct response actions that can be driven from social media. It destroys the real potential of social media. The purpose should be engaging with people in places they like to be, not turning them off by trying to make them go somewhere else.

3. Don’t freak out about ROI

He doesn’t mean don’t measure ROI. Marketers need to acknowledge that the ROI is much more complicated than anything that can be measured, Anderson says.

It’s important to recognize that social media – when considered a component of marketing – is so relatively inexpensive that it does not require the ROI metric.

So, what does he think is the right kind of metric for social media? Impressions!

Pretend that each social media interaction is an impression.

If measured that way, it could tell you: Will this program extend my message to more people than if I didn’t engage? If I add a social media component to my campaign will it add more impressions than if I did not?

Is there a way to measure the ROI of social media?

I ask this question all the time and rarely get a concrete answer because it’s just one of those tactics that’s difficult to measure.

Research from MarketingSherpa’s new Social Media Marketing & PR Benchmark Guide suggests that 43% of marketers rank the inability to measure ROI the most significant barrier to social media adoption.

I still don’t have the answer, but here’s one example of a way social media can impact an Internet marketing campaign:

Read more…