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Brands Need to be Prepared for Social Shopping

Social shopping has many components is expanding everyday, and has been around for centuries. Women shop socially with friends and family, and always have, so convincing them to share, participate and have fun with it is not the issue, but rather its the myriad of choices, the ever evolving applications, and the education process that goes along with all this innovation.

The problem as I see it is discovering and using the appropriate applications that will get the traction and scale required to make them valuable to both shoppers and brands alike.

Brands needs to work with companies that specialize in getting out on the front lines constantly testing, vetting and crowd sourcing to determine the viability, user friendliness, and potential long term value of new applications and how they will change the evolving social shopping landscape.

Ted Rubin

Guidelines for Group Collaboration and Emergence

I’m in the middle of taking a course on Virtual Learning Environments (syllabus here), and reading a few chapters from Adaptive Software Development by Highsmith. It approaches the team-building and collaboration process from the perspective of complex adaptive systems theory, and contains some interesting insights in evolutionary development and creating environments where emergence can occur. I’ve created a summary of a chapter that I’d like to share, as I think it can be valuable for many of us, and specifically for the community of practitioners around the junto concept.

Collaboration is an act of shared creation or discovery. (schrage89)

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The value of social media advocacy? $136.38

It’s the big question in word of mouth: what is an advocate worth?
Well, according to research Syncapse and Hotspex have just released on eMarketer, on average $136.38. The study looked at the Facebook fans of the 20 biggest corporate brands on the site, and calculated the fans’ worth from a combination of how much they spent on the products, loyalty, recommendations and earned media.

In fact, for many food and beverage brands on Facebook, fans spent more than double on the brand than non-fans.

This reiterates the findings of a study earlier this year, which showed that consumers were more likely to buy from or recommend a brand after becoming a Facebook fan or follower.

It’s an interesting start to WOM ROI, although of course the real impact of advocacy goes far beyond Facebook, to cover not just the other social media platforms but real life conversations too.

Facebook fans are a notoriously passive group, and just clicking on a ‘become a fan’ button represents none of the participation and opinion-giving that true advocacy entails. Of course, there’s an exciting implication here. If these guys earn so much for a brand, how much more valuable must the fans be who actually bother to upload photos and videos, write detailed, passionate reviews on their pages and blogs and forums, and take that enthusiasm to the dinner table and the school gates?

Working out the ROI of an individual advocate beyond a single platform is a mighty complex task, but we’re getting there. For now, research like this indicates just how powerful that proactive, cross-platform advocacy is.

Molly Flatt

BP’s PR and Lessons to Learn

When a crisis comes knocking-no matter how prepared companies may think they are-generally speaking, the first 48 hours will set the stage for how a company will respond and deal with the crisis. Clearly, in the case of BP and its recent disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, nobody was prepared for the magnitude and impact of such a horrific accident. Not only were there human casualties, the environmental and economic casualties continue to mount-likely for a long time. A few things make this crisis unique: first, it is not a single event that is over quickly like a hurricane, earthquake or on-land explosion which passes in a relatively short timeframe.

Secondly, the “fix” is miles beneath the ocean so access has proven to be challenging. It is also unique in that it will impact the Gulf of Mexico’s natural habitat with unprecedented damage to the environment-maybe permanently for some areas but it’s still too soon to tell. Finally, this crisis could have long term, devastating economic implications for the entire coastal region from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama to Florida. These states are the “coastal playground” for the entire Southeast and are dependent upon tourism, fishing and recreation.

In short, so much devastation paints a nasty picture for BP and its Top Brass. It’s what I call “bet the company” crisis communication and it requires immediate, transparent and straight forward strategies from day one. BP has done the exact opposite, waiting until last week to unfold their high profile (and expensive) ad and messaging campaign which I believe will be wasted on a large population of angry people whose emotions will run high as the consequences of the spill continue to lap onto the beaches, the marshes and wetlands and creatures of the sea.

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13 Truths About Social Media Measurement

1. If you aren’t measuring anything else, social media measurement isn’t the problem.

Measurement is a discipline, and it needs to be business-wide. If you’re going to ask about the ROI, value, or impact of social media and how to measure it, I’m going to ask how you’re going about determining those things for other areas of your business, and ask you to translate or adapt some of those practices over to social initiatives.

If you’re not measuring anything else, you’ll have a learning curve. A steep one. It’ll come complete with needing the right tools and platforms to collect data, the right people to analyze it, the buy in from management to spend the time doing all of this, and the commitment to use the measurement as a means to underscore your strategy. The social media data is available for the taking, so that’s not the problem. The *real* issue is connecting the dots. See #4.

2. Measurement is not the goal.

The goal is to derive insights that teach you something of value, and then act on them. Measurement is a waystation, a path, but is not the goal in itself. You don’t get a cookie for measuring.

You probably need to spend three times as much time and effort evaluating and acting on your data than you do collecting and formatting it. Why? Because the analysis is what yields direction, plans, action steps, you name it. You START with the data. You need to end up with a course of action, or the act of measuring (and all the time you spent doing it) is wasted.

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Video Interview: Social Media in the Supply Chain

Happy to have the opportunity to share with all of you the video of an interview I did with SupplyChainBrain on Social Media in the Supply Chain recorded at the Aberdeen SCM Summit in San Francisco.

Even if you’re not in supply chain directly, many of the concepts discussed on employee engagement and empowerment can equally be applied in many industries and large organizations. As well one of my favorite topics lately which can also be generally applied is functional integration and this represents a key benefit to be gained through companies using social media.

This speaks to functional integration both within your own company but social media also facilitates the ability to more easily functionally integrate across company lines back to your suppliers and downstream to customers as well.

Once you’ve watched the video I’d be very interested in your sharing comments here and on the You Tube channel of how this resonates with you or any related experiences and successes you can share.

Cheers

Jeff Ashcroft

@TheSocialCMO

Maybe it isn’t too late to reverse the slide?

I first saw this video a month or so ago during a web presentation on UstreamTV and asked the presenter via Twitter DM where he got it with unfortunately no reply.

Pleased to say I’ve come across it again and this time was able to score the embed code below to share it with you in case you haven’t seen it yet.

Sad to say it appears we’re from the Lost Generation but with thoughts and deeds like this video one can only hope the next generation with our attention and support can reverse the slide!

Jeff Ashcroft
@TheSocialCMO

How to “win” with social media

Wherever I go to speak, entrepreneurs and corporate marketing professionals come up to me afterward and ask, “But what do we DO with social media?”

So, forget all the fancy plans; forget the ever-unsatisfying pursuit of ROI. Please just let this video sink in. Let this one thought permeate all that you do on social media. If you will, I guarantee you that you will discover exactly what you should DO on social media.

Here’s the foundational principle at work on social media:

  • everyone wants to be heard
  • everyone wants to be understood
  • everyone wants to know his or her life matters.

You START that process by paying attention. On Twitter that starts by following the people who are following you. Period. It is just that simple. The next step is making social media about them, not you. And that starts by acknowledging their presence.

[Whenever I say something like this, someone with 250 followers will try to tell me they follow only people who add value to their own social media experience. I won’t tackle the challenges with that argument in this post, but I would encourage you to seriously think through the value system that would produce such a conclusion.]

Please watch T.J. Thyne’s famous video and then notice the people around you: acknowledge & affirm—it’s how to win with social media and in real life, too.

Trey Pennington

PS. You are AWESOME!

Refuse to Live in a Box!

Live outside the box! Let’s say it again. Live outside the box and dare to no longer be defined by the “confines of a box.”

Why is it that so many people today are defined by the proverbial “box” and quite frankly seem to like to stay in the comfortable confines of a box?

Think about it.



Most people sleep on a “bed/box” talk on a “phone/box”, email from a “blackberry/box”, type on a “laptop/box”, eat from a “drive thru/box lunch”, drive to work in a “car/box”, and then set their AM wake up call to be made from a “alarm clock.box” etc. No wonder people are so comfortable with box type thinking.

Organizations are no different than people– as organizations are made up of people.

I challenge everyone who seeks to be a leader to “live outside the box.” Furthermore, look at 2010 as it is, and see our organizational problems for what they are… etc instead of looking at them as worse than they are.

Lets focus on seeing things that others do not see and being a leader who is not adverse to trying new ways of doing things. Let’s work to find a better way to do things… and then work to make these things a reality.

Living outside the box, is uncomfortable to many who love their simple, black and white (no gray), four walls up… and “box oriented” world.
However, to compete now and the years ahead– the box has to go away and the four walls must come down to allow free energy, creativity, and unbridled ideas to occur.

What box do you face? Do you like the confines of your box?

Ryan Sauers

What is the true value of a Facebook to a Marketer/Brand

I believe many are looking at this in too narrow a fashion. Everyone is trying to assign a dollar value to a Facebook fan or Twitter follower instead of addressing the fact that it is the engagement and interaction that takes place in these mediums that is incredibly important to a brand.

Building a relationship with existing and future customers is the true value and strength of social media/marketing. ROI is certainly incredibly important whenever investing, but companies have to start looking at ROR, Return on Relationship, when planning, strategizing and most importantly evaluating social marketing.

A new study shows that those who are fans or followers of a brand on Facebook or Twitter, respectively, are significantly more likely to buy products and services or recommend the brand to a friend.

Specifically, the study by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies found that consumers are 67% more likely to buy from the brands they follow on Twitter, and 51% more likely to buy from a brand they follow on Facebook. Moreover, they’re 79% more likely to recommend their Twitter follows to a friend, and 60% more likely to do the same on Facebook.

Welcome to the “Age of Influence,” where anyone can build an audience and effect change, advocate brands, build relationships and make a difference.

Ted Rubin