10 Technological Advances Marketers Can't Live Without
Liodice Continues His Series by Looking at the New Strategies and Tools Changing the Game for Brands
Inventions have changed the face of advertising consistently throughout history and will continue to do so, as technology evolves at an ever-increasing rate. The creation of new forms of media, from radio to TV and the internet, have caused the industry to create new strategies and tools to help brands find their own optimal media mix. This week, as the ANA hosts its inaugural Digital and Social Media Conference, we take a look at 10 technological advances that marketers of today and tomorrow cannot ignore.
HULU: Because of internet video's low distribution costs and built-in sharing capabilities, brands have been eager to produce the next viral hit.
SOCIAL MEDIA
Advertisers always sought a way to track the elusive "word-of-mouth" phenomenon that affected their brands so heavily. Social media brought the conversations that consumers were having online, giving marketers the chance to monitor, further and contribute to them in real-time. Nielsen found that while 14% of people trust ads, 78% of people trust consumer recommendations. The conversation for marketers turned from the one-way nature of traditional media to a two-way dialogue that could not be ignored. Social media has shifted the conversation so forcefully that consumers have an unprecedented level of control over brands, rapidly turning themselves into a brand's best advertisers.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
Search engine optimization is one of the most important and cost-effective ways to attract customers on the internet. Research has found that almost two-thirds of the time, people look only at the first page of their search results. They rarely make it beyond the first 10, and virtually never beyond the initial 30 results. When it comes to e-commerce transactions, more than half originate from a search listing, proving the importance of being "found." SEO is a way to ensure that those consumers using the web to search for a product or service easily find it, resulting in a more targeted lead for the advertiser and easier search process for the consumer.
INTEREST-BASED ADVERTISING (BEHAVIORAL TARGETING)
Behavioral targeting allows ads to be more relevant, valuable and thus persuasive to the consumer. This has given the marketing industry an unprecedented level of precision. This comes with a level of caution, however, as consumers are wary of being watched on the web. As such, a group of the nation's largest media and marketing trade associations including the 4As, ANA, BBB, DMA and IAB released self-regulatory principles to protect consumer privacy in ad-supported interactive media. The principles require advertisers and websites to clearly inform consumers about data-collection practices and enable them to exercise control over that information.
ONLINE VIDEO: VIDEO ON DEMAND
The arrival of video on demand and sites like Hulu and YouTube signaled a huge change in the industry. People started looking to the web for entertainment, and advertisers redirected dollars to take advantage of the growing world of online video. Because of internet video's low distribution costs and built-in sharing capabilities, brands have been eager to produce the next viral hit. Viral videos have shown potential to turn ordinary people into brand ambassadors as the clip gets instantly forwarded to friends and family. Internet broadcasting also has provided another online venue for measurable and targeted advertising in the form of attached text and pre-roll ads.
MOBILE: This burgeoning platform is seeing a meteoric rise thanks to the proliferation of cellphones, smartphones and tablet computers. MEASURING ACTIONS VS. IMPRESSIONS
Online ads originally mimicked those in traditional media, where marketers paid for the amount of exposure gained. Since the cost-per-click model has emerged, advertisers have been taking advantage of the internet's ability to measure user action, something impression-based pricing cannot match. Those using action-based systems like Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft AdCenter, and sites like Facebook, pay based only on how many people engage an ad with a click. Marketers can now see a clearer picture of ROI; consumers who interact with ads tend to be more valuable.
INTERACTIVE TV
As DVRs made their way into consumers' lives, many industry pundits mourned the end of the 30-second spot and wondered how advertisers would fare now that people could skip through their commercials. The answer was not just to formulate ads that worked in fast-forward, but to introduce interactive TV ads that worked within and in tandem with regular programming. Companies such as BrightLine iTV formed to bring the interactivity of the web to TV, and Canoe Ventures brought the first clickable ad to "receive more info" to the airwaves just last month. This area is one to watch, as consumers accept, and eventually seek, interactivity in all aspects of their lives.
BRAND-SPECIFIC COMMERCIAL RATINGS
More than $70 billion is spent each year on TV advertising. With such a large amount of funds devoted to commercials, the industry began calling for a better way to assess whether they were getting their money's worth. Where, on one hand, the digital realm was providing precise statistics on an ad's effectiveness, TV ratings were still based on the average of all commercials airing with a program. In 2007 the ANA began calling for ratings that were specific to each commercial. The industry is now starting to see a potential pathway, as a test conducted by Nielsen shows that the move toward brand-specific commercial ratings is clear.
MOBILE ADVERTISING AND PAYMENTS
According to eMarketer, the mobile advertising industry is expected to be worth more than $1.56 billion by 2013. This burgeoning platform is seeing a meteoric rise thanks to the proliferation of cell phones, smartphones and tablet computers. Apple's iPhone and iPad specifically have brought the mobile arena to the forefront, as consumers increasingly look to their phones to aid in more aspects of their lives. While the internet can tell advertisers what sites consumers visit and for how long, the iAd platform gives a detailed picture of their potential customers' everyday lives. Additionally, mobile payments allow marketers to make appeals for instant buys, and dole out coupons and other rewards.
Companies such as BrightLine iTV formed to bring the interactivity of the web to TV. MARKETING-MIX MODELING
Marketing-mix modeling provided researchers and analysts the opportunity to think more precisely about integrated marketing. Technologists found ways to create highly productive media-decision models by weaving together analyses of consumer sensitivity to a company (or brand's) media platforms. This tool gave media planners the opportunity to increase the effectiveness of an integrated marketing plan while reducing overall costs . Modeling has become more difficult with newer forms of media, the management process for conceptualizing integrated media plans remains the same. This is expected to improve as marketers and agencies better assess consumer sensitivity to digital media platforms.
AD-ID
Since 1970, advertisers, agencies and TV networks used the ISCI commercial coding system to identify TV commercials. To help bring a higher level of accuracy to the coding process and consistency to advertisement identification, as well as enable the industry for digital convergence, a new identification system was created. Developed by the 4As and the ANA, Ad-ID came into the marketplace in 2003 as a digital identifying code for advertisements. It has since been dubbed the "UPC code of the advertising industry." Ad-ID helped transform the marketing industry for the digital revolution.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
6 digital trends to watch
My colleague Steve Rubel and I wear many hats at Edelman. One of those hats is keeping an eye on the trends unfolding in real time and deriving meaning from them as they pertain to organizations and brands. Attached to this post is a slideshow where we identify what these trends are and at a high level how your organization needs to plan accordingly for them. They are:
1.Marketing in the age of streams
Your customers, consumers and employees are no longer only visiting static Web pages but participating in conversations which increasingly occur off domain in “streams” flowing from Facebook, Twitter and even apps. In order to catch them, you must be highly relevant in their streams.
2.The Googleization of media
Quality Content and potent social connections in addition to traditional keywords are influencing how visible you are to the search engines. Everyone is media.
3.The data decade
Data is increasingly becoming available to anyone and everyone. From it we can derive insights into behaviors. We must become “data junkies” to fully harness this trend.
4.Business becomes social
Moving from designated spokesperson to employee engagement at scale—business itself is beginning to look more social as organizations start to engage all stakeholders in open and mutually beneficial ways.
5.Location, location, location
Where you are is becoming the new what are you doing as multiple platforms begin to adopt the new geolocation status update generating new kinds of data.
6.Private becomes public
Despite privacy concerns, applications and behaviors which support social sharing are still going strong as what is considered private becomes re-defined as we continue engaging in networks.
We believe these trends are not future gazing but what’s happening at this very moment and that they will cause organizations to adapt to change, adopt new practices and innovate accordingly. For more industry insights, ideas and perspectives you can visit our newly created “branded channel” on Slideshare.
1.Marketing in the age of streams
Your customers, consumers and employees are no longer only visiting static Web pages but participating in conversations which increasingly occur off domain in “streams” flowing from Facebook, Twitter and even apps. In order to catch them, you must be highly relevant in their streams.
2.The Googleization of media
Quality Content and potent social connections in addition to traditional keywords are influencing how visible you are to the search engines. Everyone is media.
3.The data decade
Data is increasingly becoming available to anyone and everyone. From it we can derive insights into behaviors. We must become “data junkies” to fully harness this trend.
4.Business becomes social
Moving from designated spokesperson to employee engagement at scale—business itself is beginning to look more social as organizations start to engage all stakeholders in open and mutually beneficial ways.
5.Location, location, location
Where you are is becoming the new what are you doing as multiple platforms begin to adopt the new geolocation status update generating new kinds of data.
6.Private becomes public
Despite privacy concerns, applications and behaviors which support social sharing are still going strong as what is considered private becomes re-defined as we continue engaging in networks.
We believe these trends are not future gazing but what’s happening at this very moment and that they will cause organizations to adapt to change, adopt new practices and innovate accordingly. For more industry insights, ideas and perspectives you can visit our newly created “branded channel” on Slideshare.
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
The great survivor
Leaders.
In praise of television
The great survivor
TV has coped well with technological change. Other media can learn from it
Apr 29th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
NEWSPAPERS are dying; the music industry is still yelping about iTunes; book publishers think they are next. Yet one bit of old media seems to be doing rather well. In the final quarter of 2009 the average American spent almost 37 hours a week watching television. Earlier this year 116m of them saw the Super Bowl—a record for a single programme. Far from being cowed by new media, TV is colonising it. Shows like “American Idol” and “Britain’s Got Talent” draw huge audiences partly because people are constantly messaging and tweeting about them, and discussing them on Facebook.
Advertising wobbled during the recession, shaking the free-to-air broadcasters that depend on it. But cable and satellite TV breezed through. Pay-television subscriptions grew by more than 2m in America last year. The explosive growth of cable and satellite TV in India explains how that country has gone from two channels in the early 1990s to more than 600 today. Pay-TV bosses scarcely acknowledge the existence of viewers who do not subscribe to multichannel TV, talking only of people who have “yet to choose” a provider. This is not merely bluster. As our special report this week explains, once people start paying for greater television choice, they rarely stop.
The advantages of indolence
It helps that TV is an inherently lazy form of entertainment. The much-repeated prediction that people will cancel their pay-TV subscriptions and piece together an evening’s worth of entertainment from free broadcasts and the internet “assumes that people are willing to work three times harder to get the same thing”, observes Mike Fries of Liberty Global, a cable giant. Laziness also mitigates the threat from piracy. Although many programmes are no more than three or four mouse clicks away, that still sounds too much like work for most of us. And television-watching is a more sociable activity than it may appear. People like to watch programmes when everybody else is watching them. Give them devices that allow them to record and play back programmes easily, and they will still watch live TV at least four-fifths of the time.
Yet these natural advantages alone are not enough to ensure television’s survival. The internet threatens TV just as much as it does other media businesses, and for similar reasons. It competes for advertising, offering firms a more measurable and precise way of reaching consumers. Technology also threatens to fracture television into individual programmes, just as it has ruinously broken music albums into individual tracks. TV has endured because it has responded better to such threats than other media businesses.
One of the lessons from TV is to accept change and get ahead of it. Broadcasters’ initial response to the appearance of programmes online was similar to the music industry’s reaction to file-sharing: call in the lawyers. But television firms soon banded together to develop alternatives to piracy. Websites like Hulu, a joint venture of the American broadcasters ABC, Fox and NBC, have drawn eyeballs away from illicit sources. Gradually it has become clear that these websites pose a threat to the TV business in themselves, and that they are not bringing in as much advertising money as might be expected (which is similar to the problem faced by the newspaper business). So television is changing tack again.
With impressive speed, TV firms are now building online subscription-video services. The trendiest model is authentication: prove that you subscribe to pay-television and you can watch all the channels that you have paid for on any device. Such “TV Everywhere” services are beginning to appear in America and Canada. It is likely that Hulu will become a “freemium” service—mostly free, but with some shows hidden behind a paywall. The move from an ad-supported model to a mixture of subscriptions and advertising is tricky, but logical. It shows that it is not enough to embrace technological change. Businesses must also work out how to build digital offerings that do not cause their analogue ones to collapse.
Television has domesticated other disruptive technologies. Ten years ago digital video recorders like TiVo promised to transform the way people watched TV. The devices made it easy to record programmes and play them back, zooming through ads. The TV networks responded by running advertisements that work at high speed. Cable and satellite companies built cheap digital video recorders into set-top boxes and charged viewers extra for them. In effect, money flowed back to the television business. In Britain those boxes will soon be deployed to deliver targeted advertising, enabling the living-room television to compete with the internet.
Other outfits are learning from TV. Record labels sound terribly innovative when they talk about bundling music together with broadband subscriptions. Yet this model comes from television. For the past few years ESPN, a sports giant, has been showing games on its website. The cost is buried in monthly broadband bills. Hulu-style joint ventures are all the rage in media, too. Magazine publishers have set up Next Issue Media, which is trying to shape the evolution of digital devices to suit their needs. The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem aims to do the same for films.
That box might appear to be sitting in the corner of the living room, not doing much. In fact, it is constantly evolving. If there is one media business with a chance of completing the perilous journey to the digital future looking as healthy as it did when it set off, it is television.
In praise of television
The great survivor
TV has coped well with technological change. Other media can learn from it
Apr 29th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
NEWSPAPERS are dying; the music industry is still yelping about iTunes; book publishers think they are next. Yet one bit of old media seems to be doing rather well. In the final quarter of 2009 the average American spent almost 37 hours a week watching television. Earlier this year 116m of them saw the Super Bowl—a record for a single programme. Far from being cowed by new media, TV is colonising it. Shows like “American Idol” and “Britain’s Got Talent” draw huge audiences partly because people are constantly messaging and tweeting about them, and discussing them on Facebook.
Advertising wobbled during the recession, shaking the free-to-air broadcasters that depend on it. But cable and satellite TV breezed through. Pay-television subscriptions grew by more than 2m in America last year. The explosive growth of cable and satellite TV in India explains how that country has gone from two channels in the early 1990s to more than 600 today. Pay-TV bosses scarcely acknowledge the existence of viewers who do not subscribe to multichannel TV, talking only of people who have “yet to choose” a provider. This is not merely bluster. As our special report this week explains, once people start paying for greater television choice, they rarely stop.
The advantages of indolence
It helps that TV is an inherently lazy form of entertainment. The much-repeated prediction that people will cancel their pay-TV subscriptions and piece together an evening’s worth of entertainment from free broadcasts and the internet “assumes that people are willing to work three times harder to get the same thing”, observes Mike Fries of Liberty Global, a cable giant. Laziness also mitigates the threat from piracy. Although many programmes are no more than three or four mouse clicks away, that still sounds too much like work for most of us. And television-watching is a more sociable activity than it may appear. People like to watch programmes when everybody else is watching them. Give them devices that allow them to record and play back programmes easily, and they will still watch live TV at least four-fifths of the time.
Yet these natural advantages alone are not enough to ensure television’s survival. The internet threatens TV just as much as it does other media businesses, and for similar reasons. It competes for advertising, offering firms a more measurable and precise way of reaching consumers. Technology also threatens to fracture television into individual programmes, just as it has ruinously broken music albums into individual tracks. TV has endured because it has responded better to such threats than other media businesses.
One of the lessons from TV is to accept change and get ahead of it. Broadcasters’ initial response to the appearance of programmes online was similar to the music industry’s reaction to file-sharing: call in the lawyers. But television firms soon banded together to develop alternatives to piracy. Websites like Hulu, a joint venture of the American broadcasters ABC, Fox and NBC, have drawn eyeballs away from illicit sources. Gradually it has become clear that these websites pose a threat to the TV business in themselves, and that they are not bringing in as much advertising money as might be expected (which is similar to the problem faced by the newspaper business). So television is changing tack again.
With impressive speed, TV firms are now building online subscription-video services. The trendiest model is authentication: prove that you subscribe to pay-television and you can watch all the channels that you have paid for on any device. Such “TV Everywhere” services are beginning to appear in America and Canada. It is likely that Hulu will become a “freemium” service—mostly free, but with some shows hidden behind a paywall. The move from an ad-supported model to a mixture of subscriptions and advertising is tricky, but logical. It shows that it is not enough to embrace technological change. Businesses must also work out how to build digital offerings that do not cause their analogue ones to collapse.
Television has domesticated other disruptive technologies. Ten years ago digital video recorders like TiVo promised to transform the way people watched TV. The devices made it easy to record programmes and play them back, zooming through ads. The TV networks responded by running advertisements that work at high speed. Cable and satellite companies built cheap digital video recorders into set-top boxes and charged viewers extra for them. In effect, money flowed back to the television business. In Britain those boxes will soon be deployed to deliver targeted advertising, enabling the living-room television to compete with the internet.
Other outfits are learning from TV. Record labels sound terribly innovative when they talk about bundling music together with broadband subscriptions. Yet this model comes from television. For the past few years ESPN, a sports giant, has been showing games on its website. The cost is buried in monthly broadband bills. Hulu-style joint ventures are all the rage in media, too. Magazine publishers have set up Next Issue Media, which is trying to shape the evolution of digital devices to suit their needs. The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem aims to do the same for films.
That box might appear to be sitting in the corner of the living room, not doing much. In fact, it is constantly evolving. If there is one media business with a chance of completing the perilous journey to the digital future looking as healthy as it did when it set off, it is television.
Monday, July 19, 2010
YouTube Scores 101 Online Videos Per Viewer in May
YouTube Scores 101 Online Videos Per Viewer in May
Jack Loechner, Jul 16, 2010 08:15 AM
New data from comScore shows that 183 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month of May. YouTube.com achieved record levels of viewing activity with an all-time high of 14.6 billion videos viewed and surpassing the threshold of 100 videos per viewer for the first time.
U.S. Internet users watched nearly 34 billion videos in May, with Google Sites ranking as the top video property with 14.6 billion videos, representing 43.1% of all videos viewed online. YouTube accounted for the vast majority of videos viewed at the property. Hulu ranked second, Microsoft Sites ranked third followed by Vevo and Viacom Digital.
Top U.S. Online Video Content Properties by Videos Viewed May 2010 (Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations)
Property
Videos (000)
Share of Videos (%)
Total Internet Audience
33,950,891
100.0 %
Google Sites
14,628,095
43.1
Hulu
1,174,844
3.5
Microsoft Sites
642,027
1.9
Vevo
430,257
1.3
Viacom Digital
346,755
1.0
Yahoo! Sites
336,314
1.0
CBS Interactive
333,189
1.0
Turner Network
331,897
1.0
Fox Interactive Media
328,492
1.0
Facebook.com
245,120
0.7
Source: comScore Video Metrix
Google Sites attracted 144.6 million unique viewers during the month, followed by Yahoo! Sites and Vevo.
Top U.S. Online Video Content Properties by Unique Viewers May 2010 (Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations)
Property
Unique Viewers (000)
Average Videos per Viewer
Total Internet Audience
182,918
185.6
Google Sites
144,550
101.2
Yahoo! Sites
46,031
7.3
Vevo
45,579
9.4
Facebook.com
45,492
5.4
Fox Interactive Media
44,266
7.4
Hulu
43,541
27.0
CBS Interactive
41,028
8.1
Microsoft Sites
39,416
16.3
Turner Network
35,307
9.4
Viacom Digital
34,572
10.0
Source: comScore Video Metrix
In May, Tremor Media ranked as the top video ad network with a potential reach of 56.2% of the total video viewing audience, while ScanScout Network ranked second with a potential reach of 54.3%.
Top U.S. Online Video Ad Networks by Potential Reach of Unique Viewers (May 2010 Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations)
Property
Unique Viewers (000)
Potential Reach
Total Internet : Total Audience
182,918
100.0 %
Tremor Media
102,787
56.2
ScanScout Network
99,290
54.3
YuMe Video Network
87,508
47.8
Adconion Video Network
86,641
47.4
Advertising.com Video Network
83,877
45.9
BBE
83,026
45.4
Break Media
80,869
44.2
SpotXchange Video Ad Network
76,734
41.9
TidalTV
69,640
38.1
BrightRoll Video Network
67,521
36.9
Source: comScore Video Metrix
Notable findings include:
•The top video ad networks in terms of their actual reach delivered were: Joost Video Network (by Adconion Media Group), BrightRoll Video Network, and Tremor Media Video Network
•84.8% of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video
•144.1 million viewers watched 14.6 billion videos on YouTube.com (101.2 videos per viewer).
•The average Hulu viewer watched 27.0 videos, totaling 2.7 hours of video per viewer.
•The duration of the average online video was 4.3 minutes.
Jack Loechner, Jul 16, 2010 08:15 AM
New data from comScore shows that 183 million U.S. Internet users watched online video during the month of May. YouTube.com achieved record levels of viewing activity with an all-time high of 14.6 billion videos viewed and surpassing the threshold of 100 videos per viewer for the first time.
U.S. Internet users watched nearly 34 billion videos in May, with Google Sites ranking as the top video property with 14.6 billion videos, representing 43.1% of all videos viewed online. YouTube accounted for the vast majority of videos viewed at the property. Hulu ranked second, Microsoft Sites ranked third followed by Vevo and Viacom Digital.
Top U.S. Online Video Content Properties by Videos Viewed May 2010 (Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations)
Property
Videos (000)
Share of Videos (%)
Total Internet Audience
33,950,891
100.0 %
Google Sites
14,628,095
43.1
Hulu
1,174,844
3.5
Microsoft Sites
642,027
1.9
Vevo
430,257
1.3
Viacom Digital
346,755
1.0
Yahoo! Sites
336,314
1.0
CBS Interactive
333,189
1.0
Turner Network
331,897
1.0
Fox Interactive Media
328,492
1.0
Facebook.com
245,120
0.7
Source: comScore Video Metrix
Google Sites attracted 144.6 million unique viewers during the month, followed by Yahoo! Sites and Vevo.
Top U.S. Online Video Content Properties by Unique Viewers May 2010 (Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations)
Property
Unique Viewers (000)
Average Videos per Viewer
Total Internet Audience
182,918
185.6
Google Sites
144,550
101.2
Yahoo! Sites
46,031
7.3
Vevo
45,579
9.4
Facebook.com
45,492
5.4
Fox Interactive Media
44,266
7.4
Hulu
43,541
27.0
CBS Interactive
41,028
8.1
Microsoft Sites
39,416
16.3
Turner Network
35,307
9.4
Viacom Digital
34,572
10.0
Source: comScore Video Metrix
In May, Tremor Media ranked as the top video ad network with a potential reach of 56.2% of the total video viewing audience, while ScanScout Network ranked second with a potential reach of 54.3%.
Top U.S. Online Video Ad Networks by Potential Reach of Unique Viewers (May 2010 Total U.S. - Home/Work/University Locations)
Property
Unique Viewers (000)
Potential Reach
Total Internet : Total Audience
182,918
100.0 %
Tremor Media
102,787
56.2
ScanScout Network
99,290
54.3
YuMe Video Network
87,508
47.8
Adconion Video Network
86,641
47.4
Advertising.com Video Network
83,877
45.9
BBE
83,026
45.4
Break Media
80,869
44.2
SpotXchange Video Ad Network
76,734
41.9
TidalTV
69,640
38.1
BrightRoll Video Network
67,521
36.9
Source: comScore Video Metrix
Notable findings include:
•The top video ad networks in terms of their actual reach delivered were: Joost Video Network (by Adconion Media Group), BrightRoll Video Network, and Tremor Media Video Network
•84.8% of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video
•144.1 million viewers watched 14.6 billion videos on YouTube.com (101.2 videos per viewer).
•The average Hulu viewer watched 27.0 videos, totaling 2.7 hours of video per viewer.
•The duration of the average online video was 4.3 minutes.
Friday, July 9, 2010
Brands Offer Incentives for Location-based Check-ins
Brands Offer Incentives for Location-based Check-ins
Published on June 23, 2010
Share Brands such as Starbucks and Domino’s have pushed the concept of location-based marketing a little further with hard incentives.
Starbucks has introduced its first-ever national “mayor special” with Foursquare that rewards consumers - specifically, mayors that have checked in to the Foursquare location-based network at Starbucks outlets - with dollar discounts on Frappucinos. In the U.K., Domino’s has a Foursquare promotion running that offers free pizzas and discounts to Foursquare users who check in at its locations.
Now other less visible brands are following suit - and stepping up the concept a bit by rewarding customers for frequenting them through these networks through formal rewards programs. Tasti D-Lite, for example, has rolled out TastiRewards, a rewards program for customers to associate their Twitter and Foursquare accounts with their Tasti D-Lite membership cards. Customers can use Treat Cards - which also double as gift cards - to earn points for purchases, but those that opt in to the social media bonuses will automatically earn additional points, Mashable explains. Their Twitter and Foursquare accounts also get updated each time the card is swiped and points are earned or redeemed.
Bigger Picture
It’s the bigger picture that is significant for marketers, Mashable says as programs like these are an efficient way to tie social media to the bottom line.
“Imagine the data that Tasti D-Lite can now collect, analyze and apply to budget discussions around allocating resources to social media efforts. Will the company get accurate accounts on the quantity of tweets and checkins with card swipes? Absolutely. Can it quantify those social media updates with sales figures? Yes. Plus, it can track change over time, as well as the influence of these TastiRewards tweets and checkins as it pertains to growth of the program,” Mashable writes (via MarketingVOX).
WeReward
Another example is WeReward, a mobile app launched by social media firm IZEA that offers money to users for checkins. Basically, users snap a picture of themselves at the site and post it on Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare. Then they get paid - usually a penny per point but businesses can set other rates. One thousand points nets $10 through Paypal. Right now it is only available on the iPhone, but next month it is coming out on the Droid, the Orlando Sentinel reports.
“Our model is everyone gets compensated with cash,” Ted Murphy, IZEA’s founder said via the Sentinel. “What gets listed is based on who is willing to pay [users] the most.” Businesses like the data the app provides such as who checked in, how much they spent, other stores the users went to and what they bought there. Businesses could even contact the person through Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare, the Sentinel says.
The app also allows products to be listed - such as Jones Soda. Uses take a photo holding a sold anywhere and get a point.
Published on June 23, 2010
Share Brands such as Starbucks and Domino’s have pushed the concept of location-based marketing a little further with hard incentives.
Starbucks has introduced its first-ever national “mayor special” with Foursquare that rewards consumers - specifically, mayors that have checked in to the Foursquare location-based network at Starbucks outlets - with dollar discounts on Frappucinos. In the U.K., Domino’s has a Foursquare promotion running that offers free pizzas and discounts to Foursquare users who check in at its locations.
Now other less visible brands are following suit - and stepping up the concept a bit by rewarding customers for frequenting them through these networks through formal rewards programs. Tasti D-Lite, for example, has rolled out TastiRewards, a rewards program for customers to associate their Twitter and Foursquare accounts with their Tasti D-Lite membership cards. Customers can use Treat Cards - which also double as gift cards - to earn points for purchases, but those that opt in to the social media bonuses will automatically earn additional points, Mashable explains. Their Twitter and Foursquare accounts also get updated each time the card is swiped and points are earned or redeemed.
Bigger Picture
It’s the bigger picture that is significant for marketers, Mashable says as programs like these are an efficient way to tie social media to the bottom line.
“Imagine the data that Tasti D-Lite can now collect, analyze and apply to budget discussions around allocating resources to social media efforts. Will the company get accurate accounts on the quantity of tweets and checkins with card swipes? Absolutely. Can it quantify those social media updates with sales figures? Yes. Plus, it can track change over time, as well as the influence of these TastiRewards tweets and checkins as it pertains to growth of the program,” Mashable writes (via MarketingVOX).
WeReward
Another example is WeReward, a mobile app launched by social media firm IZEA that offers money to users for checkins. Basically, users snap a picture of themselves at the site and post it on Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare. Then they get paid - usually a penny per point but businesses can set other rates. One thousand points nets $10 through Paypal. Right now it is only available on the iPhone, but next month it is coming out on the Droid, the Orlando Sentinel reports.
“Our model is everyone gets compensated with cash,” Ted Murphy, IZEA’s founder said via the Sentinel. “What gets listed is based on who is willing to pay [users] the most.” Businesses like the data the app provides such as who checked in, how much they spent, other stores the users went to and what they bought there. Businesses could even contact the person through Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare, the Sentinel says.
The app also allows products to be listed - such as Jones Soda. Uses take a photo holding a sold anywhere and get a point.
Hulu, Google TV, And The Brewing TV "Desktop" Storm
Hulu, Google TV, And The Brewing TV "Desktop" Storm
Tom Wilde | Jul. 8, 2010, 10:50 AM | 808 | 7
The last twelve months has been one of the most remarkable times I can remember in terms of sheer innovation and disruption in the digital video market. The long awaited “watch what you want , where you want, when you want” vision seems to be closer to becoming reality than ever before.
Whether it’s subscriptions on iTunes, the ubiquity of video on demand from cable companies, the explosive growth of Hulu, the growth of broadband and fiber to the curb, or the fervent adoption of the iPad, the confluence of all the access, devices and offerings is making video everywhere a certainty.
These various armies of video enablement are marching towards a showdown that I believe will be the next battleground where video fortunes will be decided. This battle royale that I am referring to is for the control of the TV “Desktop”.
What exactly is the TV “Desktop”? It’s what used to be in the twentieth century the “Electronic Program Guide”, the dreadful scrolling interface we have all had to endure when trying to find a program to watch on television. It still lingers, but clearly its days are numbered. Its limitations became even more obvious and unbearable with the arrival of web search. There is a better way to search, browse and discover video content, it just has not found its way to the television yet.
While browser based (online) video is the current “shiny object”, watching television on the PC still pales in comparison to the amount of television watched on traditional networks and devices, namely your cable programming viewed on television. Getting the anywhere-anytime video to the TV is the Holy Grail for publishers and broadcasters, and the destination where everyone wants to get to, but only some will make it there successfully. As the multi-platform, multi-device world arrives, finding, organizing and searching for television content becomes even more crucial, and is equally critical real estate for everyone in the TV consumption value chain. I sat down the other day and wrote out a list of all the segments and players, and I was surprised by just how many are vying to control this valuable asset:
Next Generation Services: Comcast, Time Warner Etc.
Through their “TV Everywhere” initiative, they hope to be the gateway to all your TV viewing, regardless of platform or device. They control the pipe and critical payment and account authentication gateway and have the content relationships. Comcast is aggressively investing in the platform and data sides of their business, and the NBC acquisition leaves no doubt as to their belief that access to content is vital.
Next Generation Devices:
1) Traditional players such as Motorola and Cisco.
The set top box developers own a critical piece of the value chain, but their slow pace of innovation leaves them exposed, and they lack the relationships with the content providers.
2) New entrants such as AppleTV, GoogleTV.
These players suffer from the same challenge Tivo endured. Do consumers want another box in the living room to watch TV? The reality to date is that few consumers want to have several pieces of hardware in order to watch television. This was a big part of the reason Tivo struggled, despite having such a superior product.
3) Gaming Platforms including Nintendo, Sony, XBOX.
The biggest advantage here is that consumers have already added these devices to their consumer electronics “must haves” and they are connected to televisions, and increasingly, to the Internet. Streaming video to gaming platforms is growing explosively.
4) Consumer Electronics players such as LG, Samsung, Sony.
With 30MM digital TV’s sold each year, the opportunity around connected consumer devices is real. The consumer electronics brands want more than just a one-time sale. If they can generate some annuity revenue from some combination of content promotions, subscriptions, or a-la-carte content sales, their profits could explode. For mobile, the inclusion of an HDMI output on devices such as the 4G Sprint Evo creates fascinating opportunities to view the mobile device as a form of portable set top box.
Next Generation Middleware: NDS, Rovi, Hillcrest Labs.
These players develop the applications that integrate the content and metadata into an interface that can be used on the set top box. Owning both the metadata and application know-how combined with a datastream of user behavior puts them in a unique position
Next Generation Applications: Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon, Boxee.
The subscription movie cable channels like Showtime etc are terrified of Netflix. Its brand strength, ease of use and ability to go over the top has fueled its rapid growth. The risk is Hollywood decides it has too much channel power and begins to crimp its access to first run content. The others have access to content, and have seen tremendous growth.
Hulu, however is being pressured into a subscription model, suggesting the power that the content providers hold over its destiny. Boxee has run into barriers with the content providers. ESPN3, and HBOGo are examples of content companies going direct to consumers, albeit still in cooperation with the ISP’s. In ESPN3’s case, it’s via your ISP’s willingness to pay for it on your behalf, and ESPN3 broke records with its multimillion simultaneous streams of the US-Algeria game.
The weapons in the battle for the TV Desktop are varied, and will ultimately dictate the winner:
Access to content: without content, it will be difficult to create the value proposition to the end user.
Access to consumer: Most of the contestants described above believe they have access to the consumer. Whether it’s Apple via iTunes, Samsung via TV sales, or Microsoft via XBOX, access to the consumer is critical.
Metadata: All TV Desktops of the future will rely on a complete set of metadata. This metadata will not only need to include proper titles, descriptions, actors, genres etc, but increasingly will need to include frame level metadata to unlock future advertising, search, and content recommendation opportunities.
User Experience: The experts in online consumer experience bring a lot to the table competitively, with Apple and Google obvious examples.
Channel dominance: While not providing an insurmountable barrier, channel lock certainly helps, and the cable companies and set top manufacturers will be difficult to displace.
Regardless of who wins, it looks like consumers are close to having a new interface for television that matches the experience they have come to expect on the Internet, and the value of the TV Desktop will ensure an epic battle over the next few years.
Tom Wilde is President and CEO of RAMP. RAMP is the definitive Content Optimization platform solution for major publishers, media companies, and broadcasters, which provides customers with workflow, discovery and engagement solutions to drive monetization of online content.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-coming-war-for-your-tv-desktop-2010-7#ixzz0tCU6LRop
Tom Wilde | Jul. 8, 2010, 10:50 AM | 808 | 7
The last twelve months has been one of the most remarkable times I can remember in terms of sheer innovation and disruption in the digital video market. The long awaited “watch what you want , where you want, when you want” vision seems to be closer to becoming reality than ever before.
Whether it’s subscriptions on iTunes, the ubiquity of video on demand from cable companies, the explosive growth of Hulu, the growth of broadband and fiber to the curb, or the fervent adoption of the iPad, the confluence of all the access, devices and offerings is making video everywhere a certainty.
These various armies of video enablement are marching towards a showdown that I believe will be the next battleground where video fortunes will be decided. This battle royale that I am referring to is for the control of the TV “Desktop”.
What exactly is the TV “Desktop”? It’s what used to be in the twentieth century the “Electronic Program Guide”, the dreadful scrolling interface we have all had to endure when trying to find a program to watch on television. It still lingers, but clearly its days are numbered. Its limitations became even more obvious and unbearable with the arrival of web search. There is a better way to search, browse and discover video content, it just has not found its way to the television yet.
While browser based (online) video is the current “shiny object”, watching television on the PC still pales in comparison to the amount of television watched on traditional networks and devices, namely your cable programming viewed on television. Getting the anywhere-anytime video to the TV is the Holy Grail for publishers and broadcasters, and the destination where everyone wants to get to, but only some will make it there successfully. As the multi-platform, multi-device world arrives, finding, organizing and searching for television content becomes even more crucial, and is equally critical real estate for everyone in the TV consumption value chain. I sat down the other day and wrote out a list of all the segments and players, and I was surprised by just how many are vying to control this valuable asset:
Next Generation Services: Comcast, Time Warner Etc.
Through their “TV Everywhere” initiative, they hope to be the gateway to all your TV viewing, regardless of platform or device. They control the pipe and critical payment and account authentication gateway and have the content relationships. Comcast is aggressively investing in the platform and data sides of their business, and the NBC acquisition leaves no doubt as to their belief that access to content is vital.
Next Generation Devices:
1) Traditional players such as Motorola and Cisco.
The set top box developers own a critical piece of the value chain, but their slow pace of innovation leaves them exposed, and they lack the relationships with the content providers.
2) New entrants such as AppleTV, GoogleTV.
These players suffer from the same challenge Tivo endured. Do consumers want another box in the living room to watch TV? The reality to date is that few consumers want to have several pieces of hardware in order to watch television. This was a big part of the reason Tivo struggled, despite having such a superior product.
3) Gaming Platforms including Nintendo, Sony, XBOX.
The biggest advantage here is that consumers have already added these devices to their consumer electronics “must haves” and they are connected to televisions, and increasingly, to the Internet. Streaming video to gaming platforms is growing explosively.
4) Consumer Electronics players such as LG, Samsung, Sony.
With 30MM digital TV’s sold each year, the opportunity around connected consumer devices is real. The consumer electronics brands want more than just a one-time sale. If they can generate some annuity revenue from some combination of content promotions, subscriptions, or a-la-carte content sales, their profits could explode. For mobile, the inclusion of an HDMI output on devices such as the 4G Sprint Evo creates fascinating opportunities to view the mobile device as a form of portable set top box.
Next Generation Middleware: NDS, Rovi, Hillcrest Labs.
These players develop the applications that integrate the content and metadata into an interface that can be used on the set top box. Owning both the metadata and application know-how combined with a datastream of user behavior puts them in a unique position
Next Generation Applications: Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, Amazon, Boxee.
The subscription movie cable channels like Showtime etc are terrified of Netflix. Its brand strength, ease of use and ability to go over the top has fueled its rapid growth. The risk is Hollywood decides it has too much channel power and begins to crimp its access to first run content. The others have access to content, and have seen tremendous growth.
Hulu, however is being pressured into a subscription model, suggesting the power that the content providers hold over its destiny. Boxee has run into barriers with the content providers. ESPN3, and HBOGo are examples of content companies going direct to consumers, albeit still in cooperation with the ISP’s. In ESPN3’s case, it’s via your ISP’s willingness to pay for it on your behalf, and ESPN3 broke records with its multimillion simultaneous streams of the US-Algeria game.
The weapons in the battle for the TV Desktop are varied, and will ultimately dictate the winner:
Access to content: without content, it will be difficult to create the value proposition to the end user.
Access to consumer: Most of the contestants described above believe they have access to the consumer. Whether it’s Apple via iTunes, Samsung via TV sales, or Microsoft via XBOX, access to the consumer is critical.
Metadata: All TV Desktops of the future will rely on a complete set of metadata. This metadata will not only need to include proper titles, descriptions, actors, genres etc, but increasingly will need to include frame level metadata to unlock future advertising, search, and content recommendation opportunities.
User Experience: The experts in online consumer experience bring a lot to the table competitively, with Apple and Google obvious examples.
Channel dominance: While not providing an insurmountable barrier, channel lock certainly helps, and the cable companies and set top manufacturers will be difficult to displace.
Regardless of who wins, it looks like consumers are close to having a new interface for television that matches the experience they have come to expect on the Internet, and the value of the TV Desktop will ensure an epic battle over the next few years.
Tom Wilde is President and CEO of RAMP. RAMP is the definitive Content Optimization platform solution for major publishers, media companies, and broadcasters, which provides customers with workflow, discovery and engagement solutions to drive monetization of online content.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-coming-war-for-your-tv-desktop-2010-7#ixzz0tCU6LRop
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Don’t Look for a TV in Television’s Future
Don’t Look for a TV in Television’s Future
By NICK BILTON
Illustration by Nick Bilton/The New York TimesI have seen the future of television, and it doesn’t involve a television.
Growing up in England, I remember intently following World Cup soccer; we called it football of course. Back then, my viewing and engagement options were few. I could watch games live on the TV and follow the scoring brackets in the newspaper the next morning.
The way I have followed the 2010 World Cup is totally different — not only from my experience in England watching the 1982 and 1986 Cups, but also from any way I have experienced any other live television to date.
During this year’s games I followed along on Twitter and Facebook; on Twitter, I wrote a post, Goooooooool!!, when teams scored, and I vented about bad referee calls.
I checked in to games on Foursquare, joined chats on HotPotato and commented in real time with friends, family and strangers from here to Timbuktu, literally. I watched real time stats, graphics and professional commentary on iPhone apps, and read live blogging on The Times Goal Blog.
I also watched the game everywhere but on standard cable television: on my iPhone at a park streaming through Mobi TV, in the corner of my computer screen at work from Univision (shh, don’t tell my boss) and on ESPN through a computer hooked up to my standard TV at home.
I even watched a portion of a game from work last week while video chatting on my mobile phone with friends who were watching at a bar.
Just four years ago, during the previous World Cup, practically none of these options existed. The iPhone was a figment of the nerdosphere’s imagination; Facebook was still largely a college network; the word “Twitter” probably evoked the thought of birds; and no one was streaming live sports over the Internet, even illegally.
But now this is the way many people follow the Oscars, political debates and long-running news stories.
In 2014, during the next World Cup, the fully augmented experience of the South Africa games will likely seem as dated as 2006 does to us today. By then, products like Google TV, Boxee or Apple TV will likely replace the cable box in many living rooms with a Web-enabled viewing experience. New iterations or versions of Twitter and Facebook will exist.
The 2010 World Cup, and the sphere of digital interactivity that has surrounded it, offers a glimpse into the future.
By NICK BILTON
Illustration by Nick Bilton/The New York TimesI have seen the future of television, and it doesn’t involve a television.
Growing up in England, I remember intently following World Cup soccer; we called it football of course. Back then, my viewing and engagement options were few. I could watch games live on the TV and follow the scoring brackets in the newspaper the next morning.
The way I have followed the 2010 World Cup is totally different — not only from my experience in England watching the 1982 and 1986 Cups, but also from any way I have experienced any other live television to date.
During this year’s games I followed along on Twitter and Facebook; on Twitter, I wrote a post, Goooooooool!!, when teams scored, and I vented about bad referee calls.
I checked in to games on Foursquare, joined chats on HotPotato and commented in real time with friends, family and strangers from here to Timbuktu, literally. I watched real time stats, graphics and professional commentary on iPhone apps, and read live blogging on The Times Goal Blog.
I also watched the game everywhere but on standard cable television: on my iPhone at a park streaming through Mobi TV, in the corner of my computer screen at work from Univision (shh, don’t tell my boss) and on ESPN through a computer hooked up to my standard TV at home.
I even watched a portion of a game from work last week while video chatting on my mobile phone with friends who were watching at a bar.
Just four years ago, during the previous World Cup, practically none of these options existed. The iPhone was a figment of the nerdosphere’s imagination; Facebook was still largely a college network; the word “Twitter” probably evoked the thought of birds; and no one was streaming live sports over the Internet, even illegally.
But now this is the way many people follow the Oscars, political debates and long-running news stories.
In 2014, during the next World Cup, the fully augmented experience of the South Africa games will likely seem as dated as 2006 does to us today. By then, products like Google TV, Boxee or Apple TV will likely replace the cable box in many living rooms with a Web-enabled viewing experience. New iterations or versions of Twitter and Facebook will exist.
The 2010 World Cup, and the sphere of digital interactivity that has surrounded it, offers a glimpse into the future.
Amazon Courts Impulse Shoppers, Snaps up Snarky Woot
Amazon Courts Impulse Shoppers, Snaps up Snarky Woot
Published on July 02, 2010 | Comments: 0
Online retailer Woot, one of the first websites to sell just one product at a time until the item runs out or until midnight of the next day, has been purchased by Amazon.
Terms of the agreement were not announced. Woot will continue to be run the way it has always been run, says CEO Matt Rutledge (via Sci-Tech Today), “with a wall of ideas and a dartboard.”
Woot, which calls itself “an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap,” has about 2.75 million registered users.
Snarky Business as Usual
Woot will remain substantially the same, wrote Rutledge in a memo to employees. “From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are simply adding one person to the organizational hierarchy, except that one person will just happen to be a billion-dollar company that could buy and sell each and every one of you like you were office furniture. Nevertheless, don’t worry that our culture will suddenly take a leap forward and become cutting-edge. We’re still going to be the same old bottom-feeders our customers and readers have come to know and love, and each and every one of their pre-written insult macros will still be just as valid in a week, two weeks, or even next year. For Woot, our vision remains the same: somehow earning a living on snarky commentary and junk.”
Amazon Courts Impulse Shoppers
Amazon tends to be a destination source for people who know what they already want, while Woot is “about persuading you to buy something you didn’t even know you needed,” says Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst covering ecommerce for Forrester Research. The Woot deal will help Amazon attract shoppers that the company has so far not been able to capture, Mulpuru says.
Amazon has been Woot’s sole outside investor. Last year, Amazon purchased Zappos.com for $847 million, and in 2008 it purchased Audible for $300 million.
Published on July 02, 2010 | Comments: 0
Online retailer Woot, one of the first websites to sell just one product at a time until the item runs out or until midnight of the next day, has been purchased by Amazon.
Terms of the agreement were not announced. Woot will continue to be run the way it has always been run, says CEO Matt Rutledge (via Sci-Tech Today), “with a wall of ideas and a dartboard.”
Woot, which calls itself “an online store and community that focuses on selling cool stuff cheap,” has about 2.75 million registered users.
Snarky Business as Usual
Woot will remain substantially the same, wrote Rutledge in a memo to employees. “From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are simply adding one person to the organizational hierarchy, except that one person will just happen to be a billion-dollar company that could buy and sell each and every one of you like you were office furniture. Nevertheless, don’t worry that our culture will suddenly take a leap forward and become cutting-edge. We’re still going to be the same old bottom-feeders our customers and readers have come to know and love, and each and every one of their pre-written insult macros will still be just as valid in a week, two weeks, or even next year. For Woot, our vision remains the same: somehow earning a living on snarky commentary and junk.”
Amazon Courts Impulse Shoppers
Amazon tends to be a destination source for people who know what they already want, while Woot is “about persuading you to buy something you didn’t even know you needed,” says Sucharita Mulpuru, an analyst covering ecommerce for Forrester Research. The Woot deal will help Amazon attract shoppers that the company has so far not been able to capture, Mulpuru says.
Amazon has been Woot’s sole outside investor. Last year, Amazon purchased Zappos.com for $847 million, and in 2008 it purchased Audible for $300 million.
Email Drives Social Networking Use
Email Drives Social Networking Use
Published on July 06, 2010
Share Email can drive social networking use, says digital marketing firm e-Dialog.
Email was clearly the primary driver to social networking activities, participants in the Global Perspectives study said. Overall, 53% said email sent to a personal account was the primary thing that drove them to social networking activity, writes MarketingCharts.
Respondents also stated that they sign in directly to social networking sites (35%) and that SMS mobile messaging also drives them to social networking activity (19%). Consumers in Asia-Pacific selected email to a personal account (42%) and direct sign-in (31%) at the highest rates, while for North American consumers, these drivers were less popular, at 25% and 23% respectively.
Email-Inspired Purchases Prompt Further Research
In addition, two-thirds of consumers indicated that email-inspired purchases have prompted them to further research a brand and its products while more than half say it spurred a peer recommendation. Moreover, roughly half of consumers revealed they are willing to act as brand advocates in order to connect email content, such as special offers and promotions, to social networks. This activity is highest in Asia-Pacific where the number of consumers indicating such behavior exceeds the global norm.
This indicates a clear opportunity for companies to maximize their marketing investments by connecting email to various digital and offline communication and commerce opportunities, e-Dialog says.
Published on July 06, 2010
Share Email can drive social networking use, says digital marketing firm e-Dialog.
Email was clearly the primary driver to social networking activities, participants in the Global Perspectives study said. Overall, 53% said email sent to a personal account was the primary thing that drove them to social networking activity, writes MarketingCharts.
Respondents also stated that they sign in directly to social networking sites (35%) and that SMS mobile messaging also drives them to social networking activity (19%). Consumers in Asia-Pacific selected email to a personal account (42%) and direct sign-in (31%) at the highest rates, while for North American consumers, these drivers were less popular, at 25% and 23% respectively.
Email-Inspired Purchases Prompt Further Research
In addition, two-thirds of consumers indicated that email-inspired purchases have prompted them to further research a brand and its products while more than half say it spurred a peer recommendation. Moreover, roughly half of consumers revealed they are willing to act as brand advocates in order to connect email content, such as special offers and promotions, to social networks. This activity is highest in Asia-Pacific where the number of consumers indicating such behavior exceeds the global norm.
This indicates a clear opportunity for companies to maximize their marketing investments by connecting email to various digital and offline communication and commerce opportunities, e-Dialog says.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
NBC Fans Social Networks
NBC Fans Social Networks
NBC is extending its audience reach -- to social media -- with "Fan It," a custom-built network affinity program that rewards fans for promoting and interacting with the network's new and returning 2010-11 programs.
NBC presents its fall lineup to advertisers on Monday.
myNBC, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and FourSquare will launch on May 17 as an ongoing program at www.nbc.com/fanit. The pitch is prizes -- by just watching videos of "The Office" online or talking about "Community" or "The Biggest Loser" on Twitter, fans earn points. (NBC started a similar effort with "Community" earlier in the season.)
Users can then redeem them for various perks: exclusive access to early previews, NBC merchandise or discounts at the NBC store or big-ticket sweepstakes items, like an "Office" prop.
A social-media promotion this season for "Chuck" gave David Paul of Turlock, Calif., the chance to have his photo included in one of the title character's flash-of-brilliance sequences in the May 25 finale.
"What better way to spread the word about our shows then?with the help of our loyal fans,"stated Adam Stotsky, president, NBC entertainment marketing.?He calls the effort a "win-win opportunity" that broadens the shows' visibility.
Added Vivi Zigler, president, NBCU digital entertainment, "Fan It is a natural extension that will keep users engaged with their favorite shows even when they're not on television."?
The "Fan It" initiative extends through the 2010-11 season.
NBC is extending its audience reach -- to social media -- with "Fan It," a custom-built network affinity program that rewards fans for promoting and interacting with the network's new and returning 2010-11 programs.
NBC presents its fall lineup to advertisers on Monday.
myNBC, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and FourSquare will launch on May 17 as an ongoing program at www.nbc.com/fanit. The pitch is prizes -- by just watching videos of "The Office" online or talking about "Community" or "The Biggest Loser" on Twitter, fans earn points. (NBC started a similar effort with "Community" earlier in the season.)
Users can then redeem them for various perks: exclusive access to early previews, NBC merchandise or discounts at the NBC store or big-ticket sweepstakes items, like an "Office" prop.
A social-media promotion this season for "Chuck" gave David Paul of Turlock, Calif., the chance to have his photo included in one of the title character's flash-of-brilliance sequences in the May 25 finale.
"What better way to spread the word about our shows then?with the help of our loyal fans,"stated Adam Stotsky, president, NBC entertainment marketing.?He calls the effort a "win-win opportunity" that broadens the shows' visibility.
Added Vivi Zigler, president, NBCU digital entertainment, "Fan It is a natural extension that will keep users engaged with their favorite shows even when they're not on television."?
The "Fan It" initiative extends through the 2010-11 season.
redefining teenagers
Yes, marketers have long acknowledged that teens wield plenty of buying power. And, yes, they have given plenty of thought to their technological prowess. But Marian Salzman, president of Euro RSCG Worldwide PR North America, tells Marketing Daily that most executives are missing the bigger picture -- that these teens wield far more influence than they are given credit for.
"We always assumed that their power was the power of family budget, and we saw them as gatekeepers rather than the gate. They don't even have the vote, and look at how effectively they can shape an election, and the effort they put forward in the Obama campaign, for example. Look at the amount of content they create. They have a much more empowered role."
We asked the leading trendspotter to field a few more questions about this important demographic:
Q: What's the key difference between teens today and previous generations?
A: It's a digital divide. And sometimes people think that just means the Internet, but it's so much more. It's really important to understand that they spend much less time online than other searchers -- but they are masterful communicators. We're chained to our desktops, but they are out there in constant contact, and they are constantly getting their points of view across.
Q: So it's more than them being comfortable with technology -- it's that the technology shapes their thinking?
A: Yes. If you strip out the technicalities of the semantic Web, teens are more literate than we are in the matrixed world. Whether it is a blog or a Web page, they understand how to merge action and publishing to get what they want. We talk about cross-platforms because we see them as separate sectors. Teens don't.
Q: Are adults often suspicious of that?
A: We really make all this sound and fury about their language and their illiteracy. In some ways, the way they speak looks like gibberish to us. But they've stripped out the verbosity -- what they are really speaking is the language of implementation.
Q: Are boys different from girls in this?
A: In some ways. We see girls are more likely to broker advice, on everything from how to apply makeup to how to be a better friend, for example. But I don't know that there is much more than that.
Q: Has the recession shaped these kids?
A: Very much. If you are 16, 17 or 18, you are painfully aware of the cost of college, so maybe it is a six-year proposition for you, not four. And since you know you will have loans to pay back, maybe you are more aware that your first job may not be your dream job. You are terribly worried about earning a living, and paying back the costs of college.
Q: How else?
A: Big cities are not the same post-graduation draw they once were. (Well, Washington D.C. is, but that is because of Obama.) Both for quality of life and the high-tech factor, these kids are more drawn to places like Austin, Texas, and San Francisco -- they want to be part of that high-tech Google world. They are very aware that Mark Zuckerberg was still a teenager when he started Facebook and invented a business that changed the world.
Q: Much has been written about how close -- and connected -- teens are today to their parents. Is that overstated?
A: No, I think this is a great time in that way -- there is all this openness between teens and their parents. And so many of the really awkward conversations can happen other ways -- text messages, or ICQ, for example. Mothers and daughters, dads and sons are in constant communication.
"We always assumed that their power was the power of family budget, and we saw them as gatekeepers rather than the gate. They don't even have the vote, and look at how effectively they can shape an election, and the effort they put forward in the Obama campaign, for example. Look at the amount of content they create. They have a much more empowered role."
We asked the leading trendspotter to field a few more questions about this important demographic:
Q: What's the key difference between teens today and previous generations?
A: It's a digital divide. And sometimes people think that just means the Internet, but it's so much more. It's really important to understand that they spend much less time online than other searchers -- but they are masterful communicators. We're chained to our desktops, but they are out there in constant contact, and they are constantly getting their points of view across.
Q: So it's more than them being comfortable with technology -- it's that the technology shapes their thinking?
A: Yes. If you strip out the technicalities of the semantic Web, teens are more literate than we are in the matrixed world. Whether it is a blog or a Web page, they understand how to merge action and publishing to get what they want. We talk about cross-platforms because we see them as separate sectors. Teens don't.
Q: Are adults often suspicious of that?
A: We really make all this sound and fury about their language and their illiteracy. In some ways, the way they speak looks like gibberish to us. But they've stripped out the verbosity -- what they are really speaking is the language of implementation.
Q: Are boys different from girls in this?
A: In some ways. We see girls are more likely to broker advice, on everything from how to apply makeup to how to be a better friend, for example. But I don't know that there is much more than that.
Q: Has the recession shaped these kids?
A: Very much. If you are 16, 17 or 18, you are painfully aware of the cost of college, so maybe it is a six-year proposition for you, not four. And since you know you will have loans to pay back, maybe you are more aware that your first job may not be your dream job. You are terribly worried about earning a living, and paying back the costs of college.
Q: How else?
A: Big cities are not the same post-graduation draw they once were. (Well, Washington D.C. is, but that is because of Obama.) Both for quality of life and the high-tech factor, these kids are more drawn to places like Austin, Texas, and San Francisco -- they want to be part of that high-tech Google world. They are very aware that Mark Zuckerberg was still a teenager when he started Facebook and invented a business that changed the world.
Q: Much has been written about how close -- and connected -- teens are today to their parents. Is that overstated?
A: No, I think this is a great time in that way -- there is all this openness between teens and their parents. And so many of the really awkward conversations can happen other ways -- text messages, or ICQ, for example. Mothers and daughters, dads and sons are in constant communication.
Capturing $5T in Female Spending
Capturing $5T in Female Spending
A new “female economy” will drive $5 trillion in incremental global spending during the next several years, according to [pdf] a new book from Boston Consulting Group.
“Women Want More” advises marketers that 1 billion women work worldwide, more than half of college students are women, and women control more than half of the wealth in the US. The book provides the following suggestions on major challenges affecting women, the six different female consumer archetypes, and categories which do and fail to meet the needs of female consumers.
Time is Biggest Challenge
Women typically feel a lack of time in their lives and pressure to contort time to complete all their necessary tasks. The time challenge can be divided into three segments:
1. Too many demands. Almost half of women surveyed said there are too many demands on their time.
2. Too many conflicting priorities. Not only are there too many demands, but many of them directly conflict with one another.
3. Not enough time for me. Women have a lack of leisure time. “Not enough time for me” was the top time-related concern of 45% of women surveyed.
Six Female Archtypes
Boston Consulting Group categorizes most female consumers as belonging to one of the following six broad archetypes:
■Fast Tracker: A high-driven perfectionist who wants to make the most of everything she does.
■Relationship Focused: A woman who may live with a romantic partner and spends most of her free time with them.
■Managing on Her Own: A divorced professional who likes being independent but hopes to marry again someday.
■Pressure Cooker: A married mother with a full-time job who lacks the time to manage everything in her life and the resources to obtain help.
■Making Ends Meet: A low-income woman who may have health problems and struggles with frustration and debt.
■Fulfilled Empty Nester:A married homeowner with grown children who no longer live at home.
Socio-economically speaking, fast trackers tend to be of upper middle, upper or elite economic class and single, married without kids, married with kids or empty nesters. Fulfilled empty nesters and managing on her owns tend to be middle or upper middle class, with fulfilled empty nesters being empty nesters and managing on her owns being divorced.
Pressure cookers can be anywhere from lower to upper class, depending on whether they are struggling for stability or successfully multitasking, but are usually married with kids. Relationship focuseds tend to be lower, lower middle or middle class. They are usually single or married without kids, but are more likely to be single at the higher ends of their earning scale.
Making ends meets are usually lower or lower middle class and either single, empty nesters or divorced.
Categories That Serve Women Well
Food: Food is both a pleasure and challenge for women. Worldwide, they perform most food preparation and want supplies to combine healthy choices, convenience and affordability. Women see food as adventure and education.
Fitness: Women want to be thin but healthy. Twice as many think they are overweight as actually are. Women constantly work to manage health, weight and fitness and look for better ways to do so.
Beauty: Women seek beauty that combines physical appearance, fitness, health and wellness. They always hope the next product will provide a better answer and want companies to reach out to them.
Apparel: Suppliers that provide a “fit” guide will earn loyalty and save time. The growth is in fashion that is affordable. Women are always looking for the “next” thing.
Categories That Frustrate Women
Financial Services: Women do not care about money for itself, but as a means of caring for their families and selves and improving long-term security. They are not interested in complex money-manipulation methods. They are most interested in solutions that help manage daily and monthly household finances.
Health Care: Women value health second only to love, but are dissatisfied with health care. Appointments are difficult to make, doctors are overbooked, multiple appointments are often required even when not really necessary, and women generally pay 30-50% more for health care than men of the same age.
How Marketers Should Appeal to Women
Marketers targeting a female audience need to understand the critical difference between men and women, according to Dr. Bob Deutsch of marketing firm Brain Sells. Namely, women cycle and men consummate.
About the Data: “Women Want More” is based on a 2008 global survey of 12,000 women with a wide range of incomes in 22 countries conducted by Boston Consulting Group.
Deutsch further defines this key difference between as the sexes as females being oriented toward the conceptual, underlying dynamics, the relationship between things, and to stability over the long-term. The female understands and sees patterns over time.
In contrast, males are oriented toward the present, the concrete, the visual, winning, and themselves. Evolutionarily speaking, the male must “bring home the bacon.” Above all else, males are pragmatists.
A new “female economy” will drive $5 trillion in incremental global spending during the next several years, according to [pdf] a new book from Boston Consulting Group.
“Women Want More” advises marketers that 1 billion women work worldwide, more than half of college students are women, and women control more than half of the wealth in the US. The book provides the following suggestions on major challenges affecting women, the six different female consumer archetypes, and categories which do and fail to meet the needs of female consumers.
Time is Biggest Challenge
Women typically feel a lack of time in their lives and pressure to contort time to complete all their necessary tasks. The time challenge can be divided into three segments:
1. Too many demands. Almost half of women surveyed said there are too many demands on their time.
2. Too many conflicting priorities. Not only are there too many demands, but many of them directly conflict with one another.
3. Not enough time for me. Women have a lack of leisure time. “Not enough time for me” was the top time-related concern of 45% of women surveyed.
Six Female Archtypes
Boston Consulting Group categorizes most female consumers as belonging to one of the following six broad archetypes:
■Fast Tracker: A high-driven perfectionist who wants to make the most of everything she does.
■Relationship Focused: A woman who may live with a romantic partner and spends most of her free time with them.
■Managing on Her Own: A divorced professional who likes being independent but hopes to marry again someday.
■Pressure Cooker: A married mother with a full-time job who lacks the time to manage everything in her life and the resources to obtain help.
■Making Ends Meet: A low-income woman who may have health problems and struggles with frustration and debt.
■Fulfilled Empty Nester:A married homeowner with grown children who no longer live at home.
Socio-economically speaking, fast trackers tend to be of upper middle, upper or elite economic class and single, married without kids, married with kids or empty nesters. Fulfilled empty nesters and managing on her owns tend to be middle or upper middle class, with fulfilled empty nesters being empty nesters and managing on her owns being divorced.
Pressure cookers can be anywhere from lower to upper class, depending on whether they are struggling for stability or successfully multitasking, but are usually married with kids. Relationship focuseds tend to be lower, lower middle or middle class. They are usually single or married without kids, but are more likely to be single at the higher ends of their earning scale.
Making ends meets are usually lower or lower middle class and either single, empty nesters or divorced.
Categories That Serve Women Well
Food: Food is both a pleasure and challenge for women. Worldwide, they perform most food preparation and want supplies to combine healthy choices, convenience and affordability. Women see food as adventure and education.
Fitness: Women want to be thin but healthy. Twice as many think they are overweight as actually are. Women constantly work to manage health, weight and fitness and look for better ways to do so.
Beauty: Women seek beauty that combines physical appearance, fitness, health and wellness. They always hope the next product will provide a better answer and want companies to reach out to them.
Apparel: Suppliers that provide a “fit” guide will earn loyalty and save time. The growth is in fashion that is affordable. Women are always looking for the “next” thing.
Categories That Frustrate Women
Financial Services: Women do not care about money for itself, but as a means of caring for their families and selves and improving long-term security. They are not interested in complex money-manipulation methods. They are most interested in solutions that help manage daily and monthly household finances.
Health Care: Women value health second only to love, but are dissatisfied with health care. Appointments are difficult to make, doctors are overbooked, multiple appointments are often required even when not really necessary, and women generally pay 30-50% more for health care than men of the same age.
How Marketers Should Appeal to Women
Marketers targeting a female audience need to understand the critical difference between men and women, according to Dr. Bob Deutsch of marketing firm Brain Sells. Namely, women cycle and men consummate.
About the Data: “Women Want More” is based on a 2008 global survey of 12,000 women with a wide range of incomes in 22 countries conducted by Boston Consulting Group.
Deutsch further defines this key difference between as the sexes as females being oriented toward the conceptual, underlying dynamics, the relationship between things, and to stability over the long-term. The female understands and sees patterns over time.
In contrast, males are oriented toward the present, the concrete, the visual, winning, and themselves. Evolutionarily speaking, the male must “bring home the bacon.” Above all else, males are pragmatists.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
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A new generation of tech entrepreneurs in the city is trying to overthrow old media and build a better New York�with the help of their iPhones. Are they dreaming? Definitely. But in a good way.
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By Doree Shafrir
Published Apr 18, 2010
On any given day in New York City, there are usually close to a dozen, if not more, �meetups� for people who work for tech start-ups. There are NY Tech Meetups, monthly events that can attract nearly a thousand people to an auditorium at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where developers have five minutes to demonstrate what their technologies do and then get to network with the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs and bloggers and assorted hangers-on in attendance afterward at Black Door, a bar on West 26th Street. There are breakfasts for Women in New Media and for entrepreneurs in North Brooklyn, poker games at the apartment-slash-office of a start-up in Harlem called SpeakerText, Ping-Pong nights at SPiN New York, and dinners for the residents of a Union Square incubator called Dogpatch Labs.
And of course there are the myriad smaller gatherings of 27-year-olds who talk knowingly of series-A rounds and angel investing at places like the Scratcher, the bar on East 5th Street that has seen legions of 27-year-olds come and go, and Destination Bar on Avenue A and 13th Street, which is co-owned by a founder of an online product-development firm called Hard Candy Shell that shares office space with the geographical social-networking company Foursquare and the mini blog empire Curbed, in the building on Cooper Square that also houses the Village Voice.
Even in a city as large as New York, it’s not hard to figure out where anyone in the tech scene is at any particular time, because they have usually �checked in� to their location on their iPhones using Foursquare, which allows users to accumulates points and earn �badges� based on the number of places of the same type they go to in a night. (The person who has checked in the most to a location becomes the �mayor.�) Foursquare is also useful if you want to let everyone know that you are, for example, at the offices of Union Square Ventures, perhaps meeting with Fred Wilson, the venture-capital firm’s co-founder, to discuss funding your start-up, or that you’re having lunch at the Breslin, the restaurant in the Ace, with, say, Ben Lerer, the 28-year-old angel investor and founder of the men’s e-mail newsletter Thrillist, whose father, Ken Lerer, co-founded the Huffington Post. Foursquare is essentially an urban network of hipsters, their favorite haunts, their favorite food and drinks�a marketer’s dream, in other words.
Foursquare�which now has close to a million users�has been around since March 2009, when it launched at South by Southwest Interactive, the annual tech conference in Austin, Texas, that attracts a combination of tech entrepreneurs, journalists, bloggers, and social-media consultants for five days of panels and parties. These early adopters brought their Foursquare badges back to New York City, where the service began spreading a new way of experiencing the city�using the web to amplify the urban experience, making it richer, deeper, more fun. It’s the opposite of the canard that technology is ultimately alienating, that it has turned us into a nation of pale, hypnotized Second Life denizens who have forgotten what it’s like to interact in real life. Using New York as their laboratory, Foursquare�and Meetup and Yipit and Venmo and Hot Potato and dozens of others� facilitates and documents urban interactions, usually in real time, often with an eye toward building communities of users. While consumerism is at the core of the business model for many of these start-ups, that’s only part of the point. The entrepreneurs behind them have a sense that the city belongs to the rising generation, not some Wall Street guy or old-media geezer or other antiquated gatekeeper. In a way that can, at times, seem overly idealistic, even naïve, they believe in a sort of golden rule of Internet behavior, one that chooses trust over suspicion, optimism over skepticism, hope over doubt. And for the time being, hope seems to be winning.
Three weeks ago, while in Silicon Valley for the Where 2.0 Conference, Foursquare’s co-founder Dennis Crowley took a grand tour of its richest companies�chronicled, of course, by his own company’s app. He checked in at Apple, Twitter, and Square (Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s new start-up), so all of New York’s tech world could note his progress. There were rumors�spread with excitement using these tools and eminently believable�of a possible $100 million deal with Yahoo. If the future of the web is social media conducted through mobile devices, Foursquare could be very useful to a company like Yahoo. But the fever over the hypothetical deal had a lot to do with a larger sense of what it implied: The West Coast tech world, for once, was at least sipping New York’s Kool-Aid. Foursquare and its brethren are, for the moment, on the cutting edge.
Next: Wasn’t New York the place where misanthropes and cynics flocked?
Go to a party for an �old� media company, and there can often seem to be a cloud of doom hanging over the proceedings. It can seem like half the guests have been laid off and the other half fear they still could be. The talk is of cutbacks and making do with less and paradigm shifts whose conclusions are, inevitably, the death of the industry.
And so, to spend a couple of months immersed in this new culture of optimism was, mostly, refreshing, if startling. Wasn’t New York the place where misanthropes and cynics flocked? Wasn’t New York the place for people who thrived on knowing, and never revealing, the secret phone number for Keith McNally’s restaurants�not the one for people who held open networking parties for anyone who wanted to attend? Wasn’t that so very uncool? But that forbidding, closed version of New York has, for this new generation, itself become uncool.
�Start-up culture is about really changing the world,� says Scott Heiferman, the 37-year-old co-founder of Meetup. �I know that’s a cliché. But Si Newhouse never wanted to change the world.�
At a recent party for a literary magazine, I was talking about social media to an editor�in his late thirties, though seemingly of an earlier generation�at one of the more august publishing houses in town. He had never heard of most of the companies I mentioned. �I guess they just really do fundamentally believe in the power of technology to improve people’s lives,� I said, completely unironically.
He rolled his eyes and laughed. �Oh, come on.�
The Interactive Telecommunications Program�or ITP, as everyone calls it�is an NYU Tisch School of the Arts graduate program in art and technology housed on the fourth floor of a university building that takes up most of a city block, from Broadway to Mercer Street and Washington Place to Waverly Place. I’m there on a warm March afternoon with Crowley, the 33-year-old co-founder of Foursquare, who is a 2004 graduate and sometime instructor. Crowley’s first company, Dodgeball, a kind of Foursquare precursor that was sold to Google in 2005, was developed here with a fellow ITP student named Alex Rainert.
ITP feels like an Alice in Wonderland version of graduate school. There’s a piece of wall art that, Crowley points out, is actually a mirror; stand in front of it, and the wooden slats move. Crowley�who is wearing turquoise Adidas, jeans, and a gray long-sleeved sweatshirt�gestures to several innocent-seeming plants hanging from hooks near the big windows overlooking Broadway. �Those are Botanicalls,� he says. �When they need to be watered, they send you a message on Twitter that says, �Water me, please.’ I have it hooked up with one of my plants at home.� There’s a vending machine that, next to Twix and salted almonds, sells Photocell 200K light sensors for $1.25. The machine doesn’t take cash�you pay online, and the machine automatically registers it.
Crowley, who majored in communications at Syracuse, had been laid off from Vindigo, a city guide for Palm-device users, in 2001. He was planning on applying to business school when a friend invited him to �this weird art show.� It was one of ITP’s twice-annual student shows, and Crowley felt at home. �There was a girl who had a project that was just three robots following each other around. I said, �I need to be here playing with this stuff. This is where I belong,’ � he says.
In the lounge, a bunch of students are sitting around tables on their laptops. �See that foosball table?� Crowley asks. There are four guys playing what looks like an intense match. �That was my first project at ITP. I put sensors in the goals. When you started playing, you swiped your NYU I.D. on the table and your stats got shown on the screens behind it. If you scored a goal, it would show.�
�I wanted to make the foosball table smarter,� he says. �My professor��Internet-culture guru Clay Shirky��said to go analyze a source of social data. I had all the data from the foosball table, and I started thinking, What do friendship circles look like? Who are the outliers? Who doesn’t connect to other folks? I was trying to wrap my head around it.
�To make a foosball table smarter isn’t that different from �Let’s make a city smarter,’ � he says.
There’s an overthrow-the-overlords spirit at work in the tech world now. �Here we were schlepping around, protecting the power of gatekeepers and publishers and Barry Diller,� says Heiferman. �Fuck that. We really have to look at ourselves�the Internet is reinventing and rejiggering everything. We need to see ourselves as making a new New York.�
Next: How Dodgeball was in many ways ahead of its time.
Venmo, a mobile-payments company co-founded by 26-year-old Andrew Kortina, allows users to pay for goods and services via text message and also encourages people to trust vendors (the first one in New York is the Simple Kitchen, a café in Chelsea) to take the money owed to them directly from their accounts. The idea, says Kortina, is �it feels good to be trusted.
�I think everyone wants to be a regular somewhere,� Kortina says. �It’s more poignant in New York than elsewhere�there’s an innate desire to connect with real people. Say you’re going to the coffee shop every day. It feels good to know the people who are on the other side of the counter. It feels good when they know your name. If we can help make it easier for people to establish that connection, I think it just makes people feel good.� The technology is being used to enrich urban face-to-face interactions�a better New York, if you, as a New Yorker, can believe that.
Crowley’s original start-up, Dodgeball, resembled a primitive version of Foursquare. When users checked in to a location, their friends received a text message; the premise was that people would be going to multiple places in an evening and their friends would want to meet up with them at different spots along the way. But Dodgeball was in many ways ahead of its time; it came out not only before the iPhone but also before Twitter and the Facebook explosion. The idea that people would want to share, constantly, the minutiae of their lives was not one that had permeated much beyond the early-adopter crowd; Crowley estimates that Dodgeball had 75,000 users at its height� barely a Facebook rounding error.
But the promise of location-based social networking was appealing, even then, to a company like Google, which had launched a beta version of Google Maps in February 2005. Crowley and Rainert had started trying to get venture-capital funding, but instead sold to Google in May 2005 for an undisclosed sum and went to work at Google’s New York office. The idea was that Google’s software-engineering prowess would help bring Dodgeball to the masses, but almost from the beginning it seemed like a bad fit. Crowley’s reluctant to talk about it, but he says, �It was just after their IPO. The New York office had just opened. A couple weeks into it, we were like, �Where are those engineers?’ We were hoping to have more of a team, but it was hard to get engineers.�
By April 2007, Crowley and Rainert were gone, and Google announced it was shutting down Dodgeball in January 2009. Two months later, Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, a 27-year-old, launched Foursquare. (Rainert recently came onboard as the head of the product team; he’s also an original investor in the company.) People in the tech world have decidedly mixed feelings about Google: How can something that big not be at least a little evil? At the same time, there’s no denying that having those 1,000 engineers here has led to a ripple effect, by establishing that New York�not just Silicon Valley�is a place that’s hospitable to technologists. �They’ve taken the Silicon Valley culture and infected hundreds of engineers with it, and those engineers are not likely to want to go work for Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs,� says Union Square Ventures’ Wilson. �It’s not in their DNA. That’s not what they’re going to do. They’re more likely to go into one of our start-ups.�
And then the city itself becomes a draw. �There are people who wouldn’t move from San Francisco to, say, Pittsburgh or Austin, but they would move to New York,� says Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake, who sold Flickr to Yahoo in 2005.
�The stuff is, first and foremost, meant for our friends,� says Crowley. We’re sitting with Selvadurai in the lobby of a Cooper Union building, across the street from the Foursquare offices, one afternoon. �The same thing happened with Dodgeball. We were just building tools that were making New York more efficient for twenty of our closest friends. A lot of the ideas we shoot within Foursquare are also themes that I think already existed in Dodgeball. We’re just bringing them back to life in new ways, with smarter phones. At the time, Dodgeball was a New York application. It was meant for people to start off with 25 friends who could easily jump to five places in one night, which is definitely an urban type of experience. Foursquare has been changed so that it rewards a one-player experience�it gets more interesting as you add friends to it, but it’s definitely a better one-player experience. And it’s designed to work in New York, and then we kind of tweak it so it works everywhere else. I think it works best in really dense urban areas.
Next: Have any of the latest wave of social media companies made any profits?
�New York’s been critiqued for a long time,� he continues. �The critique is that you can’t do stuff like this here, but I think part of the reason that our product is interesting and special is because it came out of New York. It was designed to solve problems in that context, and those solutions tend to work in other parts of the world pretty well. I think the product is better because we’re based here.�
Crowley’s experience with Google in some ways exemplifies the complicated relationship that many in New York’s tech community have with the technology behemoth. Chris Dixon, the 38-year-old co-founder (with Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake) of Hunch.com, recently blogged, �Whenever I see a brilliant kid decide to join Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, or Google, I think to myself: a start-up just died, and as a result our world is a little less wealthy, innovative, and interesting.�
In early March, Foursquare redesigned its app and also announced plans to launch a dashboard for businesses that would make it easier for them to take advantage of the data Foursquare was accumulating about their customers. Occasionally, when you check into a location on Foursquare, you’re informed that there’s a special offer where you are or one nearby; these are generated almost entirely by users, often the �mayor� of an establishment, who encourages the owner or manager to set up a deal for Foursquare users.
�Usually what will happen is a user becomes the mayor somewhere and asks the manager, �What do I get for free?’ � says Crowley. �The manager at first is usually like, �What are you talking about?’ They’ve never heard of Foursquare. Eventually, the manager will break down. It’s an opportunity for us to start turning users not just into evangelists but also salespeople.
�So the venues win�anytime someone checks in, it’s like a mini-ad. With the stats tools, you can find out who the most valuable users are to local businesses, like who’s sending their check-ins to Twitter. Maybe the owner wants to reach out to that person.�
Foursquare also allows anyone to use its software�or what’s called its API, the application-programming interface. So Yipit, which was launched a couple of months ago by Vinicius Vacanti and James Moran�both twentysomething Harvard grads and finance-world refugees�uses your location and your preferences to send you the best daily deal at area shops, restaurants, spas, and other businesses. And if you’re a Foursquare user, it pulls in everywhere you’ve checked in and lets you know whether there’s a deal at any of those places. When I signed up for Yipit, it informed me of two deals I hadn’t been aware of�including a happy hour at the bar I’d been to the night before. Depending on which deals I click on in the future in my daily e-mails, my Yipit account will get smarter and start recommending deals that will, theoretically, be tailored to my tastes. �New York is the perfect place to test new, local products, just because of the demographics and the density,� says Vacanti. Moran left Blackstone around the same time that Vacanti left Quadrangle, in July 2007; since then, they’ve been living off their savings. �In New York, people are constantly moving into the city. It’s such a confusing city, getting your arms wrapped around everything.�
Eventually, Yipit will get smart enough to know that if you’re interested in wine-tasting deals, you’re probably also interested in artisanal cheese. But these deals encourage social interaction; they take a DailyCandy or a Thrillist, both e-mail newsletters, one step further. Vacanti says that one of the most popular shared deals in New York was one that went out on February 18, less than three weeks after Yipit launched, for an $18 ticket to the �Taste of 7th Street� festival. At the time, Yipit had only 500 New York subscribers (currently they have 7,000)�but 40 clicked on that deal, and ten forwarded it to their friends. Tiny, tiny numbers. But imagine if, as they say, they’re scalable.
At this point in the game, not many of the latest wave of social media have any profits. This is the fun and messy business of collecting eyeballs, which then�somehow, some way�can be monetized. They don’t talk about it as much as, say, a Goldman associate would. Yet alongside their tech idealism is often an ecstatic vision of a liquidity event, the sale to Yahoo or Google or Facebook�at which point the tech dreamer becomes a guru, someone who can then mentor and invest in start-ups him- or herself.
Other companies�including Art.sy, a soon-to-launch online art service that will connect galleries with collectors�are living their arts-communitarian ideals. Kickstarter� which launched in April 2009, is a kind of community funding site for creative projects. One afternoon, I’m at their Lower East Side office, where they’d recently moved. Their eight-person staff is working at one large table in the front room. The floor-through office itself is badly in need of renovation�it looks like a long-neglected apartment�and some friends of Kickstarter’s two New York�based co-founders, Perry Chen and Yancey Strickler (a third founder, Charles Adler, lives in Chicago), are going to be taking on the project; in the back room are tools and plywood.
Next: Kickstarter's biggest project funded so far.
When I went to Kickstarter, the projects that were seeking funding included everything from a documentary on Asian-elephant conservation and a project that will cover the funding to send journalist Ted Rall to Afghanistan to a pair of Brooklynites who make artisanal soda. People can put up whatever they want, and the people behind the projects agree to give their funders something from the venture. So if you give $10 to the artisanal-soda folks, you get a coupon for two free sodas, but if you give $50, you’ll get a printed tote bag, a mix CD, a coupon for four free sodas, and a handprinted card with one of their soda recipes. Give more than $500 to Rall and you’ll get personally thanked in the acknowledgments section of his book plus signed copies. People set a funding goal for their projects, and funders don’t get charged unless a project reaches its goal. It’s a way of not only encouraging creativity but also making consumers feel more connected to the things they buy. (Kickstarter takes a commission of 5 percent of all projects that get funded.) The biggest project funded so far was for $85,000 for a book of Obama-campaign images, Designing Obama, by Scott Thomas, the campaign’s design director.
�The value is in the exchange,� says 33-year-old Chen, when we go down the block to Schiller’s for a snack. Chen looks like a surfer, with shoulder-length black hair; he wore a navy hooded sweatshirt over a T-shirt. Born and raised in New York, he spent a few years in New Orleans and still owns a house there. �I think that’s how you create an economy, and a commercial market that is sustainable, rather than seeing donor fatigue enter into it.�
Chen sees the power in returning control to the creative producer, the way it could upend much of the way culture is produced. �If you’re in music and you have a record label, if you’re in fashion and you work for a studio, you are giving up the mass bulk of your intellectual property right off the bat,� he says. �And with Kickstarter, you keep 100 percent of your own intellectual property.�
To certain superannuated people�anyone over, say, the age of 35�all of this manic optimism can summon a queasy sense of déjà vu. After all, by the end of 2001, Silicon Alley lay in ruins, littered with the detritus of now-forgotten companies like Kozmo.com and Inside.com. The bubble �got birthed in the craziest kind of hyper period,� says Union Square’s Wilson, who has invested in companies like Twitter, Etsy, and Tumblr. �So when the bubble burst, it came crashing down, like everything did. But when Silicon Valley came crashing down, there were lots of big companies that weren’t going to go away, like Sun and Cisco and Oracle. In New York, that wasn’t really true.�
Worse, New York has historically lacked what people in the tech community call �start-up culture.� To Meetup’s Heiferman, it comes down to the need for a shift in worldview. �In Silicon Valley, when an Apple or a Google happens, it inspires tons of people to not just be entrepreneurs or founders of start-ups,� Heiferman says. �It encourages people to just work in the industry because they know if you’re an engineer for a company that does really well, then you do well. New York does not have its great success stories that become the stuff of legend and lore and myth.�
Heiferman is an evangelist-slash-contrarian in New York’s start-up scene. He’s got the history�he worked at Sony as its �Interactive Marketing Frontiersman,� then co-founded the first online ad agency, i-traffic, which was acquired by Agency.com, and the photo-sharing website Fotolog�and a vision for the tech scene that, appropriately for a contrarian, rubs some people the wrong way. He hates the idea that some of New York’s start-ups seem to exist only to support the so-called legacy industries of the city. �Madison Avenue ain’t gonna be the heart of New York anymore. Wall Street’s not going to be the heart of New York anymore. Media’s not going to be the heart of New York anymore,� he says. �New York is actually really hot. We’re inventing the shit that the world is using! This is a first. The fact is that New York didn’t create any great companies in the first tech boom. The closest thing was DoubleClick�but that was about making what old advertisers need.�
In San Francisco, start-ups have cachet that they’ve never had in New York. It’s in part because of these legacy industries, the Condé Nasts and Goldman Sachses that have historically served as shiny, aspirational baubles for 22-year-olds and have long driven the city’s gestalt.
Next: How the recent economic climate has been a boon for start-ups.
�I think it’s partially the Wall Street mentality,� says Wilson. �This is a very merchant town, a very commercial town.� He points out that compared with Boston and Silicon Valley, New York still has relatively few early-stage venture-capital firms. �My partners and I make a decent living, but we manage $275 million. I have friends who are my same age who are partners at Goldman Sachs, or who are running their own hedge funds, who make ten to a hundred times more money than I make. I’m not upset about it, because I love what I do. But in New York, it’s about making money.�
The economic climate of the last couple of years has been a boon for start-ups. Costs, especially real estate, are lower, and it’s easier for entrepreneurs to hire engineering talent. �You’re seeing a lot of people who are very talented get laid off,� says Justin Smithline, 36, the co-founder and president of a music service called Instinctiv that’s sort of an enhanced iTunes Genius�it’s a mobile player that uses your musical taste to determine what you’d prefer to listen to and offers easy media synchronization and concert tickets�that’s received $1.6 million in financing.
�In the past eight years, the finance world sucked up all the technical talent. That’s stopped, so it’s rational again,� says Hunch’s Dixon. �In the past, you’d just get the idiosyncratic M.I.T. grads who happened to not want to make a million dollars on Wall Street or whatever. Now you can actually compete with them to some degree. And now you see kids coming out of college and just starting companies in New York.�
�Today, Amazon has their hosting platform, Amazon Web Services. Facebook has their identity platform, Facebook Connect,� says John Borthwick, co-founder of Betaworks, which builds and invests in start-ups. �If you want to build something now, you can build it on top of these building blocks. What it means is the cost of development goes down. The cost of entry goes down.�
And founders don’t necessarily have to be engineers, either. It’s easier than ever for someone without a hard-core engineering background to start a company�which bodes well for the development of more tech companies in New York. �The skill set required to build web technology is no longer an elitist skill,� says Boxee’s Zach Klein, co-founder of Vimeo.com.
Take SpeakerText, a company that links transcripts with videos that debuted at the NY Tech Meetup in January. If you copy and paste a section of a SpeakerText transcript onto your blog, the link will take people back to that exact portion of the video. It was founded by a 29-year-old Columbia grad, paramedic, and former journalist named Matt Mireles with no engineering background; the idea came to him because he thought it would be a better way to tell stories on the Internet. (Mireles is currently seeking funding.)
That being said, Betaworks won’t consider investing in a company unless at least one of its founders is an engineer, Borthwick says: �Three guys like me who are trained M.B.A.’s, they’re probably not going to get a meeting with us.�
�You ask yourself, is this guy a winner or not?� says Thrillist’s Lerer. �Is this guy going to figure out how to make this thing work, or isn’t he? It’s driven by people. I go from my gut. Do I really like this guy? Do I want to be partners with this guy?�
It’s this default use of the term guy that can grate for women in the scene. �Men refer men,� says 29-year-old Elizabeth Stark, a Brown and Harvard Law grad who teaches law and technology classes at Yale. �You have to directly address the problem, or you won’t change it. So if we just keep it status quo, for all the reasons defined in these self-reinforcing networks, they will stay self-reinforcing with the white, geeky, male, Stanford/Harvard-dropout types. And that’s who a lot of the V.C.’s are investing in. If I had a bunch of money, I would start a firm for women tomorrow.�
As a general rule�and there are exceptions, like tech investor and commentator Esther Dyson; Hunch’s Caterina Fake, who is also an angel investor in her own right (she sold the photo-sharing site Flickr to Yahoo in 2005 and was recently named one of the country’s top angel investors by BusinessWeek); Dina Kaplan, one of the co-founders of the web-TV distribution site, blip.tv; Emily Gannett of Klickable; Alexis Maybank and Alexandra Wilkis Wilson of sample-sale site Gilt Groupe; Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Carter Fleiss of the Netflix-for-couture site Rent the Runway; Ann Baldinucci of the neighborhood-finder site NabeWise; and Brooke Moreland of fashion-advice site Fashism and Marissa Evans of the similar Go Try It On�the founders in the scene tend to be male. (I encouraged several single female friends to start going to tech meetups, promising them a ratio of approximately ten men to every woman.)
Next: Why Foursquare isn’t fully equipped to manage yet.
�We have a two-year program here, and we try like hell to hire women into that program,� says Union Square Ventures’ Wilson (whose office, except for his assistant, is all male). �We tell the world we’ve got this opening, and anybody who’s interested can apply, and it’s 90 percent men who even bother to apply. I mean, I don’t know what the problem is.�
The first time I visited Foursquare’s office, the company had six people. In a matter of months, it’s ballooned to sixteen. (Still, Crowley says, it’s not enough: �We just need to hire more folks. But if we hire more folks, we need to get another desk and some chairs.�) Everyone is leaving the following day for South by Southwest. The walls are covered with whiteboards and sheets of paper with various checklists; one says �SXSW Knocklist: Badges, XP, Venues, Design.� Also hanging on the wall is a framed quotation that says, �It’s not a bug, it’s a feature�; a single-speed bicycle leans up against a table. On the inside of his left forearm, Crowley has three temporary tattoos in the shape of Foursquare badges; one is special for SXSW. It’s a hookup badge, Crowley explains, for stops at three or more hotels in a night.
Since our first meeting, Foursquare has been busy�and growing. There were deals with several big companies and brands�including Starbucks, Bravo, Lucky magazine, the New York Times, and Marc Jacobs�that encouraged people to check in to places associated with them and earn special badges or get �tips�; Crowley sees this as a potentially important revenue stream. But with only one employee doing business development, it’s one that the company isn’t fully equipped to manage yet. �We have all these companies calling us, and it’s a little bit problematic�we have so much inbound business development that we can’t capture it all,� he says. Foursquare, he says, could eventually turn into not just an app that tells you how many bars your friends went to the night before but a more ambitious project about social relations. �You build a game of it,� he says. �The first person to do ten crazy things wins. It expands it beyond consumption. Maybe you get badges for meeting people or bringing people together.� So on Foursquare, based on the bands you saw in one week, maybe you met more people, and so maybe your happiness and your productivity is higher. So check-in is just the first part of this story.�
Crowley wants to build a whole community�the consumerism embedded within it is an afterthought. Of course, Foursquare’s utility increases with the number of users it has, and its 900,000 or so users don’t come anywhere near Twitter’s 100 million or Facebook’s 400 million. (Crowley says it’s projected to hit 1 million users on April 21.) There’s still a psychological barrier that Crowley has to encourage people�not just early adopters�to cross. When I first joined in January and asked Foursquare to search my Gmail contacts to see who was registered, a relatively paltry 80 people showed up, most of whom were business contacts who don’t necessarily need to know the bars I frequent and where I get manicures. At a dinner party recently, I asked the ten other guests�none of whom worked in anything related to tech�how many were on Foursquare. None of them was, and only four had even heard of it. �Look, I could check in to your apartment building,� I said to the party’s host, showing him my iPhone as the name of his building�a high-rise in midtown�came upon Foursquare’s list of locations. He looked horrified.
Foursquare’s success is breeding imitation. Facebook is expected to launch a feature this month that will allow users to share their locations with their Facebook friends. �There’s enough of a unique user experience within Foursquare that I don’t think someone can come along and replace it,� Crowley responds. �It’s a different type of sharing. When Facebook changed its status updates, it didn’t kill Twitter. It might make us a little more focused.�
Focused, indeed. With Twitter now running sponsored tweets, everyone seems to be getting more serious about the search for a business model�selling ads, selling to Google, earning a living by any means necessary. The wide eyes of the tech romantics�seeing a world where everything is changing, drinks are free, and a hangover at 11 a.m. is a small price to pay for being young in New York City�are evolving into the gimlet eyes necessary to survive in the long term. Working for free is about as popular as it ever was.
Foursquare’s first round of investors included Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Silicon Valley angel investor Ron Conway, Union Square Ventures, Digg founder Kevin Rose, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Crowley is currently considering a second round of funding�reportedly for about $10 million, which might value the company at as much as $80 million. When I ask Crowley about the Yahoo-acquisition rumors, he doesn’t deny, them, exactly. �We’re trying to figure out what the best thing is for us going forward,� he says. �We’re raising financing and meeting with tons of different companies. Don’t read into it too much.�
They’re not necessarily opposed to selling, Crowley says�but �it’s a business that can be a real business.� In the last boom, companies that were barely out of diapers were rushing to IPO, which led to the nasdaq’s becoming a graveyard of start-ups that peaked too soon. Today, people seem wary about selling too soon, as though they need to prove�to themselves, to the world�that they can create a viable business that actually affects people’s lives. Sure, everyone wants to be a millionaire, but to be a millionaire while also saying that you fundamentally changed the way people interact and engage with one another is, if you take their word for it, perhaps an even bigger badge of honor.
�We could make it work as a stand-alone business, or it might turn out that there are other companies that would find us valuable,� says Crowley. �The future is rosy.�
A new generation of tech entrepreneurs in the city is trying to overthrow old media and build a better New York�with the help of their iPhones. Are they dreaming? Definitely. But in a good way.
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By Doree Shafrir
Published Apr 18, 2010
On any given day in New York City, there are usually close to a dozen, if not more, �meetups� for people who work for tech start-ups. There are NY Tech Meetups, monthly events that can attract nearly a thousand people to an auditorium at the Fashion Institute of Technology, where developers have five minutes to demonstrate what their technologies do and then get to network with the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs and bloggers and assorted hangers-on in attendance afterward at Black Door, a bar on West 26th Street. There are breakfasts for Women in New Media and for entrepreneurs in North Brooklyn, poker games at the apartment-slash-office of a start-up in Harlem called SpeakerText, Ping-Pong nights at SPiN New York, and dinners for the residents of a Union Square incubator called Dogpatch Labs.
And of course there are the myriad smaller gatherings of 27-year-olds who talk knowingly of series-A rounds and angel investing at places like the Scratcher, the bar on East 5th Street that has seen legions of 27-year-olds come and go, and Destination Bar on Avenue A and 13th Street, which is co-owned by a founder of an online product-development firm called Hard Candy Shell that shares office space with the geographical social-networking company Foursquare and the mini blog empire Curbed, in the building on Cooper Square that also houses the Village Voice.
Even in a city as large as New York, it’s not hard to figure out where anyone in the tech scene is at any particular time, because they have usually �checked in� to their location on their iPhones using Foursquare, which allows users to accumulates points and earn �badges� based on the number of places of the same type they go to in a night. (The person who has checked in the most to a location becomes the �mayor.�) Foursquare is also useful if you want to let everyone know that you are, for example, at the offices of Union Square Ventures, perhaps meeting with Fred Wilson, the venture-capital firm’s co-founder, to discuss funding your start-up, or that you’re having lunch at the Breslin, the restaurant in the Ace, with, say, Ben Lerer, the 28-year-old angel investor and founder of the men’s e-mail newsletter Thrillist, whose father, Ken Lerer, co-founded the Huffington Post. Foursquare is essentially an urban network of hipsters, their favorite haunts, their favorite food and drinks�a marketer’s dream, in other words.
Foursquare�which now has close to a million users�has been around since March 2009, when it launched at South by Southwest Interactive, the annual tech conference in Austin, Texas, that attracts a combination of tech entrepreneurs, journalists, bloggers, and social-media consultants for five days of panels and parties. These early adopters brought their Foursquare badges back to New York City, where the service began spreading a new way of experiencing the city�using the web to amplify the urban experience, making it richer, deeper, more fun. It’s the opposite of the canard that technology is ultimately alienating, that it has turned us into a nation of pale, hypnotized Second Life denizens who have forgotten what it’s like to interact in real life. Using New York as their laboratory, Foursquare�and Meetup and Yipit and Venmo and Hot Potato and dozens of others� facilitates and documents urban interactions, usually in real time, often with an eye toward building communities of users. While consumerism is at the core of the business model for many of these start-ups, that’s only part of the point. The entrepreneurs behind them have a sense that the city belongs to the rising generation, not some Wall Street guy or old-media geezer or other antiquated gatekeeper. In a way that can, at times, seem overly idealistic, even naïve, they believe in a sort of golden rule of Internet behavior, one that chooses trust over suspicion, optimism over skepticism, hope over doubt. And for the time being, hope seems to be winning.
Three weeks ago, while in Silicon Valley for the Where 2.0 Conference, Foursquare’s co-founder Dennis Crowley took a grand tour of its richest companies�chronicled, of course, by his own company’s app. He checked in at Apple, Twitter, and Square (Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s new start-up), so all of New York’s tech world could note his progress. There were rumors�spread with excitement using these tools and eminently believable�of a possible $100 million deal with Yahoo. If the future of the web is social media conducted through mobile devices, Foursquare could be very useful to a company like Yahoo. But the fever over the hypothetical deal had a lot to do with a larger sense of what it implied: The West Coast tech world, for once, was at least sipping New York’s Kool-Aid. Foursquare and its brethren are, for the moment, on the cutting edge.
Next: Wasn’t New York the place where misanthropes and cynics flocked?
Go to a party for an �old� media company, and there can often seem to be a cloud of doom hanging over the proceedings. It can seem like half the guests have been laid off and the other half fear they still could be. The talk is of cutbacks and making do with less and paradigm shifts whose conclusions are, inevitably, the death of the industry.
And so, to spend a couple of months immersed in this new culture of optimism was, mostly, refreshing, if startling. Wasn’t New York the place where misanthropes and cynics flocked? Wasn’t New York the place for people who thrived on knowing, and never revealing, the secret phone number for Keith McNally’s restaurants�not the one for people who held open networking parties for anyone who wanted to attend? Wasn’t that so very uncool? But that forbidding, closed version of New York has, for this new generation, itself become uncool.
�Start-up culture is about really changing the world,� says Scott Heiferman, the 37-year-old co-founder of Meetup. �I know that’s a cliché. But Si Newhouse never wanted to change the world.�
At a recent party for a literary magazine, I was talking about social media to an editor�in his late thirties, though seemingly of an earlier generation�at one of the more august publishing houses in town. He had never heard of most of the companies I mentioned. �I guess they just really do fundamentally believe in the power of technology to improve people’s lives,� I said, completely unironically.
He rolled his eyes and laughed. �Oh, come on.�
The Interactive Telecommunications Program�or ITP, as everyone calls it�is an NYU Tisch School of the Arts graduate program in art and technology housed on the fourth floor of a university building that takes up most of a city block, from Broadway to Mercer Street and Washington Place to Waverly Place. I’m there on a warm March afternoon with Crowley, the 33-year-old co-founder of Foursquare, who is a 2004 graduate and sometime instructor. Crowley’s first company, Dodgeball, a kind of Foursquare precursor that was sold to Google in 2005, was developed here with a fellow ITP student named Alex Rainert.
ITP feels like an Alice in Wonderland version of graduate school. There’s a piece of wall art that, Crowley points out, is actually a mirror; stand in front of it, and the wooden slats move. Crowley�who is wearing turquoise Adidas, jeans, and a gray long-sleeved sweatshirt�gestures to several innocent-seeming plants hanging from hooks near the big windows overlooking Broadway. �Those are Botanicalls,� he says. �When they need to be watered, they send you a message on Twitter that says, �Water me, please.’ I have it hooked up with one of my plants at home.� There’s a vending machine that, next to Twix and salted almonds, sells Photocell 200K light sensors for $1.25. The machine doesn’t take cash�you pay online, and the machine automatically registers it.
Crowley, who majored in communications at Syracuse, had been laid off from Vindigo, a city guide for Palm-device users, in 2001. He was planning on applying to business school when a friend invited him to �this weird art show.� It was one of ITP’s twice-annual student shows, and Crowley felt at home. �There was a girl who had a project that was just three robots following each other around. I said, �I need to be here playing with this stuff. This is where I belong,’ � he says.
In the lounge, a bunch of students are sitting around tables on their laptops. �See that foosball table?� Crowley asks. There are four guys playing what looks like an intense match. �That was my first project at ITP. I put sensors in the goals. When you started playing, you swiped your NYU I.D. on the table and your stats got shown on the screens behind it. If you scored a goal, it would show.�
�I wanted to make the foosball table smarter,� he says. �My professor��Internet-culture guru Clay Shirky��said to go analyze a source of social data. I had all the data from the foosball table, and I started thinking, What do friendship circles look like? Who are the outliers? Who doesn’t connect to other folks? I was trying to wrap my head around it.
�To make a foosball table smarter isn’t that different from �Let’s make a city smarter,’ � he says.
There’s an overthrow-the-overlords spirit at work in the tech world now. �Here we were schlepping around, protecting the power of gatekeepers and publishers and Barry Diller,� says Heiferman. �Fuck that. We really have to look at ourselves�the Internet is reinventing and rejiggering everything. We need to see ourselves as making a new New York.�
Next: How Dodgeball was in many ways ahead of its time.
Venmo, a mobile-payments company co-founded by 26-year-old Andrew Kortina, allows users to pay for goods and services via text message and also encourages people to trust vendors (the first one in New York is the Simple Kitchen, a café in Chelsea) to take the money owed to them directly from their accounts. The idea, says Kortina, is �it feels good to be trusted.
�I think everyone wants to be a regular somewhere,� Kortina says. �It’s more poignant in New York than elsewhere�there’s an innate desire to connect with real people. Say you’re going to the coffee shop every day. It feels good to know the people who are on the other side of the counter. It feels good when they know your name. If we can help make it easier for people to establish that connection, I think it just makes people feel good.� The technology is being used to enrich urban face-to-face interactions�a better New York, if you, as a New Yorker, can believe that.
Crowley’s original start-up, Dodgeball, resembled a primitive version of Foursquare. When users checked in to a location, their friends received a text message; the premise was that people would be going to multiple places in an evening and their friends would want to meet up with them at different spots along the way. But Dodgeball was in many ways ahead of its time; it came out not only before the iPhone but also before Twitter and the Facebook explosion. The idea that people would want to share, constantly, the minutiae of their lives was not one that had permeated much beyond the early-adopter crowd; Crowley estimates that Dodgeball had 75,000 users at its height� barely a Facebook rounding error.
But the promise of location-based social networking was appealing, even then, to a company like Google, which had launched a beta version of Google Maps in February 2005. Crowley and Rainert had started trying to get venture-capital funding, but instead sold to Google in May 2005 for an undisclosed sum and went to work at Google’s New York office. The idea was that Google’s software-engineering prowess would help bring Dodgeball to the masses, but almost from the beginning it seemed like a bad fit. Crowley’s reluctant to talk about it, but he says, �It was just after their IPO. The New York office had just opened. A couple weeks into it, we were like, �Where are those engineers?’ We were hoping to have more of a team, but it was hard to get engineers.�
By April 2007, Crowley and Rainert were gone, and Google announced it was shutting down Dodgeball in January 2009. Two months later, Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai, a 27-year-old, launched Foursquare. (Rainert recently came onboard as the head of the product team; he’s also an original investor in the company.) People in the tech world have decidedly mixed feelings about Google: How can something that big not be at least a little evil? At the same time, there’s no denying that having those 1,000 engineers here has led to a ripple effect, by establishing that New York�not just Silicon Valley�is a place that’s hospitable to technologists. �They’ve taken the Silicon Valley culture and infected hundreds of engineers with it, and those engineers are not likely to want to go work for Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs,� says Union Square Ventures’ Wilson. �It’s not in their DNA. That’s not what they’re going to do. They’re more likely to go into one of our start-ups.�
And then the city itself becomes a draw. �There are people who wouldn’t move from San Francisco to, say, Pittsburgh or Austin, but they would move to New York,� says Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake, who sold Flickr to Yahoo in 2005.
�The stuff is, first and foremost, meant for our friends,� says Crowley. We’re sitting with Selvadurai in the lobby of a Cooper Union building, across the street from the Foursquare offices, one afternoon. �The same thing happened with Dodgeball. We were just building tools that were making New York more efficient for twenty of our closest friends. A lot of the ideas we shoot within Foursquare are also themes that I think already existed in Dodgeball. We’re just bringing them back to life in new ways, with smarter phones. At the time, Dodgeball was a New York application. It was meant for people to start off with 25 friends who could easily jump to five places in one night, which is definitely an urban type of experience. Foursquare has been changed so that it rewards a one-player experience�it gets more interesting as you add friends to it, but it’s definitely a better one-player experience. And it’s designed to work in New York, and then we kind of tweak it so it works everywhere else. I think it works best in really dense urban areas.
Next: Have any of the latest wave of social media companies made any profits?
�New York’s been critiqued for a long time,� he continues. �The critique is that you can’t do stuff like this here, but I think part of the reason that our product is interesting and special is because it came out of New York. It was designed to solve problems in that context, and those solutions tend to work in other parts of the world pretty well. I think the product is better because we’re based here.�
Crowley’s experience with Google in some ways exemplifies the complicated relationship that many in New York’s tech community have with the technology behemoth. Chris Dixon, the 38-year-old co-founder (with Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake) of Hunch.com, recently blogged, �Whenever I see a brilliant kid decide to join Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, or Google, I think to myself: a start-up just died, and as a result our world is a little less wealthy, innovative, and interesting.�
In early March, Foursquare redesigned its app and also announced plans to launch a dashboard for businesses that would make it easier for them to take advantage of the data Foursquare was accumulating about their customers. Occasionally, when you check into a location on Foursquare, you’re informed that there’s a special offer where you are or one nearby; these are generated almost entirely by users, often the �mayor� of an establishment, who encourages the owner or manager to set up a deal for Foursquare users.
�Usually what will happen is a user becomes the mayor somewhere and asks the manager, �What do I get for free?’ � says Crowley. �The manager at first is usually like, �What are you talking about?’ They’ve never heard of Foursquare. Eventually, the manager will break down. It’s an opportunity for us to start turning users not just into evangelists but also salespeople.
�So the venues win�anytime someone checks in, it’s like a mini-ad. With the stats tools, you can find out who the most valuable users are to local businesses, like who’s sending their check-ins to Twitter. Maybe the owner wants to reach out to that person.�
Foursquare also allows anyone to use its software�or what’s called its API, the application-programming interface. So Yipit, which was launched a couple of months ago by Vinicius Vacanti and James Moran�both twentysomething Harvard grads and finance-world refugees�uses your location and your preferences to send you the best daily deal at area shops, restaurants, spas, and other businesses. And if you’re a Foursquare user, it pulls in everywhere you’ve checked in and lets you know whether there’s a deal at any of those places. When I signed up for Yipit, it informed me of two deals I hadn’t been aware of�including a happy hour at the bar I’d been to the night before. Depending on which deals I click on in the future in my daily e-mails, my Yipit account will get smarter and start recommending deals that will, theoretically, be tailored to my tastes. �New York is the perfect place to test new, local products, just because of the demographics and the density,� says Vacanti. Moran left Blackstone around the same time that Vacanti left Quadrangle, in July 2007; since then, they’ve been living off their savings. �In New York, people are constantly moving into the city. It’s such a confusing city, getting your arms wrapped around everything.�
Eventually, Yipit will get smart enough to know that if you’re interested in wine-tasting deals, you’re probably also interested in artisanal cheese. But these deals encourage social interaction; they take a DailyCandy or a Thrillist, both e-mail newsletters, one step further. Vacanti says that one of the most popular shared deals in New York was one that went out on February 18, less than three weeks after Yipit launched, for an $18 ticket to the �Taste of 7th Street� festival. At the time, Yipit had only 500 New York subscribers (currently they have 7,000)�but 40 clicked on that deal, and ten forwarded it to their friends. Tiny, tiny numbers. But imagine if, as they say, they’re scalable.
At this point in the game, not many of the latest wave of social media have any profits. This is the fun and messy business of collecting eyeballs, which then�somehow, some way�can be monetized. They don’t talk about it as much as, say, a Goldman associate would. Yet alongside their tech idealism is often an ecstatic vision of a liquidity event, the sale to Yahoo or Google or Facebook�at which point the tech dreamer becomes a guru, someone who can then mentor and invest in start-ups him- or herself.
Other companies�including Art.sy, a soon-to-launch online art service that will connect galleries with collectors�are living their arts-communitarian ideals. Kickstarter� which launched in April 2009, is a kind of community funding site for creative projects. One afternoon, I’m at their Lower East Side office, where they’d recently moved. Their eight-person staff is working at one large table in the front room. The floor-through office itself is badly in need of renovation�it looks like a long-neglected apartment�and some friends of Kickstarter’s two New York�based co-founders, Perry Chen and Yancey Strickler (a third founder, Charles Adler, lives in Chicago), are going to be taking on the project; in the back room are tools and plywood.
Next: Kickstarter's biggest project funded so far.
When I went to Kickstarter, the projects that were seeking funding included everything from a documentary on Asian-elephant conservation and a project that will cover the funding to send journalist Ted Rall to Afghanistan to a pair of Brooklynites who make artisanal soda. People can put up whatever they want, and the people behind the projects agree to give their funders something from the venture. So if you give $10 to the artisanal-soda folks, you get a coupon for two free sodas, but if you give $50, you’ll get a printed tote bag, a mix CD, a coupon for four free sodas, and a handprinted card with one of their soda recipes. Give more than $500 to Rall and you’ll get personally thanked in the acknowledgments section of his book plus signed copies. People set a funding goal for their projects, and funders don’t get charged unless a project reaches its goal. It’s a way of not only encouraging creativity but also making consumers feel more connected to the things they buy. (Kickstarter takes a commission of 5 percent of all projects that get funded.) The biggest project funded so far was for $85,000 for a book of Obama-campaign images, Designing Obama, by Scott Thomas, the campaign’s design director.
�The value is in the exchange,� says 33-year-old Chen, when we go down the block to Schiller’s for a snack. Chen looks like a surfer, with shoulder-length black hair; he wore a navy hooded sweatshirt over a T-shirt. Born and raised in New York, he spent a few years in New Orleans and still owns a house there. �I think that’s how you create an economy, and a commercial market that is sustainable, rather than seeing donor fatigue enter into it.�
Chen sees the power in returning control to the creative producer, the way it could upend much of the way culture is produced. �If you’re in music and you have a record label, if you’re in fashion and you work for a studio, you are giving up the mass bulk of your intellectual property right off the bat,� he says. �And with Kickstarter, you keep 100 percent of your own intellectual property.�
To certain superannuated people�anyone over, say, the age of 35�all of this manic optimism can summon a queasy sense of déjà vu. After all, by the end of 2001, Silicon Alley lay in ruins, littered with the detritus of now-forgotten companies like Kozmo.com and Inside.com. The bubble �got birthed in the craziest kind of hyper period,� says Union Square’s Wilson, who has invested in companies like Twitter, Etsy, and Tumblr. �So when the bubble burst, it came crashing down, like everything did. But when Silicon Valley came crashing down, there were lots of big companies that weren’t going to go away, like Sun and Cisco and Oracle. In New York, that wasn’t really true.�
Worse, New York has historically lacked what people in the tech community call �start-up culture.� To Meetup’s Heiferman, it comes down to the need for a shift in worldview. �In Silicon Valley, when an Apple or a Google happens, it inspires tons of people to not just be entrepreneurs or founders of start-ups,� Heiferman says. �It encourages people to just work in the industry because they know if you’re an engineer for a company that does really well, then you do well. New York does not have its great success stories that become the stuff of legend and lore and myth.�
Heiferman is an evangelist-slash-contrarian in New York’s start-up scene. He’s got the history�he worked at Sony as its �Interactive Marketing Frontiersman,� then co-founded the first online ad agency, i-traffic, which was acquired by Agency.com, and the photo-sharing website Fotolog�and a vision for the tech scene that, appropriately for a contrarian, rubs some people the wrong way. He hates the idea that some of New York’s start-ups seem to exist only to support the so-called legacy industries of the city. �Madison Avenue ain’t gonna be the heart of New York anymore. Wall Street’s not going to be the heart of New York anymore. Media’s not going to be the heart of New York anymore,� he says. �New York is actually really hot. We’re inventing the shit that the world is using! This is a first. The fact is that New York didn’t create any great companies in the first tech boom. The closest thing was DoubleClick�but that was about making what old advertisers need.�
In San Francisco, start-ups have cachet that they’ve never had in New York. It’s in part because of these legacy industries, the Condé Nasts and Goldman Sachses that have historically served as shiny, aspirational baubles for 22-year-olds and have long driven the city’s gestalt.
Next: How the recent economic climate has been a boon for start-ups.
�I think it’s partially the Wall Street mentality,� says Wilson. �This is a very merchant town, a very commercial town.� He points out that compared with Boston and Silicon Valley, New York still has relatively few early-stage venture-capital firms. �My partners and I make a decent living, but we manage $275 million. I have friends who are my same age who are partners at Goldman Sachs, or who are running their own hedge funds, who make ten to a hundred times more money than I make. I’m not upset about it, because I love what I do. But in New York, it’s about making money.�
The economic climate of the last couple of years has been a boon for start-ups. Costs, especially real estate, are lower, and it’s easier for entrepreneurs to hire engineering talent. �You’re seeing a lot of people who are very talented get laid off,� says Justin Smithline, 36, the co-founder and president of a music service called Instinctiv that’s sort of an enhanced iTunes Genius�it’s a mobile player that uses your musical taste to determine what you’d prefer to listen to and offers easy media synchronization and concert tickets�that’s received $1.6 million in financing.
�In the past eight years, the finance world sucked up all the technical talent. That’s stopped, so it’s rational again,� says Hunch’s Dixon. �In the past, you’d just get the idiosyncratic M.I.T. grads who happened to not want to make a million dollars on Wall Street or whatever. Now you can actually compete with them to some degree. And now you see kids coming out of college and just starting companies in New York.�
�Today, Amazon has their hosting platform, Amazon Web Services. Facebook has their identity platform, Facebook Connect,� says John Borthwick, co-founder of Betaworks, which builds and invests in start-ups. �If you want to build something now, you can build it on top of these building blocks. What it means is the cost of development goes down. The cost of entry goes down.�
And founders don’t necessarily have to be engineers, either. It’s easier than ever for someone without a hard-core engineering background to start a company�which bodes well for the development of more tech companies in New York. �The skill set required to build web technology is no longer an elitist skill,� says Boxee’s Zach Klein, co-founder of Vimeo.com.
Take SpeakerText, a company that links transcripts with videos that debuted at the NY Tech Meetup in January. If you copy and paste a section of a SpeakerText transcript onto your blog, the link will take people back to that exact portion of the video. It was founded by a 29-year-old Columbia grad, paramedic, and former journalist named Matt Mireles with no engineering background; the idea came to him because he thought it would be a better way to tell stories on the Internet. (Mireles is currently seeking funding.)
That being said, Betaworks won’t consider investing in a company unless at least one of its founders is an engineer, Borthwick says: �Three guys like me who are trained M.B.A.’s, they’re probably not going to get a meeting with us.�
�You ask yourself, is this guy a winner or not?� says Thrillist’s Lerer. �Is this guy going to figure out how to make this thing work, or isn’t he? It’s driven by people. I go from my gut. Do I really like this guy? Do I want to be partners with this guy?�
It’s this default use of the term guy that can grate for women in the scene. �Men refer men,� says 29-year-old Elizabeth Stark, a Brown and Harvard Law grad who teaches law and technology classes at Yale. �You have to directly address the problem, or you won’t change it. So if we just keep it status quo, for all the reasons defined in these self-reinforcing networks, they will stay self-reinforcing with the white, geeky, male, Stanford/Harvard-dropout types. And that’s who a lot of the V.C.’s are investing in. If I had a bunch of money, I would start a firm for women tomorrow.�
As a general rule�and there are exceptions, like tech investor and commentator Esther Dyson; Hunch’s Caterina Fake, who is also an angel investor in her own right (she sold the photo-sharing site Flickr to Yahoo in 2005 and was recently named one of the country’s top angel investors by BusinessWeek); Dina Kaplan, one of the co-founders of the web-TV distribution site, blip.tv; Emily Gannett of Klickable; Alexis Maybank and Alexandra Wilkis Wilson of sample-sale site Gilt Groupe; Jennifer Hyman and Jennifer Carter Fleiss of the Netflix-for-couture site Rent the Runway; Ann Baldinucci of the neighborhood-finder site NabeWise; and Brooke Moreland of fashion-advice site Fashism and Marissa Evans of the similar Go Try It On�the founders in the scene tend to be male. (I encouraged several single female friends to start going to tech meetups, promising them a ratio of approximately ten men to every woman.)
Next: Why Foursquare isn’t fully equipped to manage yet.
�We have a two-year program here, and we try like hell to hire women into that program,� says Union Square Ventures’ Wilson (whose office, except for his assistant, is all male). �We tell the world we’ve got this opening, and anybody who’s interested can apply, and it’s 90 percent men who even bother to apply. I mean, I don’t know what the problem is.�
The first time I visited Foursquare’s office, the company had six people. In a matter of months, it’s ballooned to sixteen. (Still, Crowley says, it’s not enough: �We just need to hire more folks. But if we hire more folks, we need to get another desk and some chairs.�) Everyone is leaving the following day for South by Southwest. The walls are covered with whiteboards and sheets of paper with various checklists; one says �SXSW Knocklist: Badges, XP, Venues, Design.� Also hanging on the wall is a framed quotation that says, �It’s not a bug, it’s a feature�; a single-speed bicycle leans up against a table. On the inside of his left forearm, Crowley has three temporary tattoos in the shape of Foursquare badges; one is special for SXSW. It’s a hookup badge, Crowley explains, for stops at three or more hotels in a night.
Since our first meeting, Foursquare has been busy�and growing. There were deals with several big companies and brands�including Starbucks, Bravo, Lucky magazine, the New York Times, and Marc Jacobs�that encouraged people to check in to places associated with them and earn special badges or get �tips�; Crowley sees this as a potentially important revenue stream. But with only one employee doing business development, it’s one that the company isn’t fully equipped to manage yet. �We have all these companies calling us, and it’s a little bit problematic�we have so much inbound business development that we can’t capture it all,� he says. Foursquare, he says, could eventually turn into not just an app that tells you how many bars your friends went to the night before but a more ambitious project about social relations. �You build a game of it,� he says. �The first person to do ten crazy things wins. It expands it beyond consumption. Maybe you get badges for meeting people or bringing people together.� So on Foursquare, based on the bands you saw in one week, maybe you met more people, and so maybe your happiness and your productivity is higher. So check-in is just the first part of this story.�
Crowley wants to build a whole community�the consumerism embedded within it is an afterthought. Of course, Foursquare’s utility increases with the number of users it has, and its 900,000 or so users don’t come anywhere near Twitter’s 100 million or Facebook’s 400 million. (Crowley says it’s projected to hit 1 million users on April 21.) There’s still a psychological barrier that Crowley has to encourage people�not just early adopters�to cross. When I first joined in January and asked Foursquare to search my Gmail contacts to see who was registered, a relatively paltry 80 people showed up, most of whom were business contacts who don’t necessarily need to know the bars I frequent and where I get manicures. At a dinner party recently, I asked the ten other guests�none of whom worked in anything related to tech�how many were on Foursquare. None of them was, and only four had even heard of it. �Look, I could check in to your apartment building,� I said to the party’s host, showing him my iPhone as the name of his building�a high-rise in midtown�came upon Foursquare’s list of locations. He looked horrified.
Foursquare’s success is breeding imitation. Facebook is expected to launch a feature this month that will allow users to share their locations with their Facebook friends. �There’s enough of a unique user experience within Foursquare that I don’t think someone can come along and replace it,� Crowley responds. �It’s a different type of sharing. When Facebook changed its status updates, it didn’t kill Twitter. It might make us a little more focused.�
Focused, indeed. With Twitter now running sponsored tweets, everyone seems to be getting more serious about the search for a business model�selling ads, selling to Google, earning a living by any means necessary. The wide eyes of the tech romantics�seeing a world where everything is changing, drinks are free, and a hangover at 11 a.m. is a small price to pay for being young in New York City�are evolving into the gimlet eyes necessary to survive in the long term. Working for free is about as popular as it ever was.
Foursquare’s first round of investors included Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Silicon Valley angel investor Ron Conway, Union Square Ventures, Digg founder Kevin Rose, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Crowley is currently considering a second round of funding�reportedly for about $10 million, which might value the company at as much as $80 million. When I ask Crowley about the Yahoo-acquisition rumors, he doesn’t deny, them, exactly. �We’re trying to figure out what the best thing is for us going forward,� he says. �We’re raising financing and meeting with tons of different companies. Don’t read into it too much.�
They’re not necessarily opposed to selling, Crowley says�but �it’s a business that can be a real business.� In the last boom, companies that were barely out of diapers were rushing to IPO, which led to the nasdaq’s becoming a graveyard of start-ups that peaked too soon. Today, people seem wary about selling too soon, as though they need to prove�to themselves, to the world�that they can create a viable business that actually affects people’s lives. Sure, everyone wants to be a millionaire, but to be a millionaire while also saying that you fundamentally changed the way people interact and engage with one another is, if you take their word for it, perhaps an even bigger badge of honor.
�We could make it work as a stand-alone business, or it might turn out that there are other companies that would find us valuable,� says Crowley. �The future is rosy.�
Monday, May 10, 2010
10 signs it's time for a social media makeover
10 signs it's time for a social media makeover
In the year of the social media revolution, we've seen many brands, organizations, and individuals jump in and make a concerted effort to expand their presences online and establish their social media footprints. Some of these brands have done a great job and really understand the importance of social media in getting people aware and engaged -- while others are latching on to the newest trend and, perhaps, going through the motions to keep up with the Joneses.
Among the more than 3 million businesses creating Facebook pages and groups -- not to mention millions of special-interest and community-driven blogs, up to 70 percent of which blog about brands -- many have failed to connect the dots in terms of how to use these platforms effectively. Many brands fail to leverage social spaces to drive awareness and engagement among their customers and fans. They simply aren't having conversations about their brands in the places their audiences share most.
Stay informed. For more tips on enhancing your brand's social marketing initiatives, attend the iMedia Brand Summit, June 12-16. Learn more.
To provide a little background on me: I run a social media marketing agency (KARMA Media Labs) that helps organizations and individuals connect with target audiences and build word of mouth in the communities where they live. In my time working with partners to outline social media strategies, I've seen many assumptions and preconceived notions about social media -- what it is, how to use it correctly, and how it fits into a brand's overall marketing and media strategy.
So how do you know your brand needs an extreme social media makeover? Here are some top signs, misconceptions, and pitfalls I've encountered when diagnosing a social media emergency.
Your social media marketing campaigns are short term.
I've seen a lot of brands and partners make the mistake of planning a social media marketing campaign for the same window of time as they would an online advertising campaign. To really benefit from social media marketing, it has to be a long-term commitment.
Social media marketing has a large residual value because the content posted by influencers stays online for long periods of time, and interactions with this content continue to accrue over time. Ultimately, the longer the content stays up, the longer your audience has to engage with it, and the longer search engines have to find it. Social media campaigns should last longer than a few weeks. You should start the process by listening to what is being said about your business or brand, connecting with those having conversations and building trust, and fostering long-term relationships and word of mouth.
Takeaway: If your social media campaigns are short term, you might want to rethink your strategy.
A Facebook page and Twitter profile is the extent of your social media strategy.
Many people equate social media with social networks. While it's important to harness the word-of-mouth nature of social communities, social media marketing is so much more than how you're represented in social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Tapping into the power of influencers, bloggers, and tastemakers who specialize in your cause or subject matter is something that is equally important. Those who place their stamps of approval on your brand generate awareness among their readerships. Likewise, it's important to tap into the power of conversation and, when possible, engage in dialogues with consumers who are talking about you or your brand.
Takeaway: If blogger relations, influencer outreach, and conversational marketing are not being considered in your social media strategy, you might want to think again.
You're not using social media because it might open the door for negative feedback about your brand.
As long as social media continues to grow and become a mainstream mode of communication, negative comments about your brand are inevitable -- and most likely already taking place. Fear of negative feedback holds many companies back from using social media, but what many fail to realize is that addressing those comments -- and doing so quickly -- shows your customers that you're listening and that you care. Managing your reputation is the key to connecting to your audience.
Takeaway: By listening and responding to your customers, not only do you demonstrate that you care, but you also take advantage of a huge opportunity to turn a negative into a positive.
An intern handles all your social media efforts.
Does a company really need senior level involvement or outside help to execute social media marketing, or can a team of interns do it? While it might not be a bad decision to have junior-level staff managing your Facebook and Twitter updates, reaching your target audience requires focusing on more than just how you're represented in social networks.
Tapping into the power of influencers, bloggers, and tastemakers who specialize in your cause or subject matter is something that requires an element of skill. You're up against a lot of clutter and competition when it comes to getting your messages and calls to action heard. Thus, it's wise to have a strategic game plan that defines where your brand will be represented, how consumers will engage with you, and the likelihood they will spread the word. From a day-to-day execution standpoint, interns can absolutely have a role in updating content and making sure your audience is engaging with your brand and content through social channels. But higher-level strategy is required.
Takeaway: From a strategic standpoint, it's important to involve skilled senior-level marketing specialists who understand the nuances of social media and how it fits into the overall business plan.
Your competition generates more online buzz than you do.
Are you listening to what your customers and fans are saying about you online? Are you measuring and incorporating this feedback into your overall marketing plan? Putting your ear to the ground and assessing your online buzz is not only important in assessing brand sentiment, but it also helps identify opportunities where you can get your message in front of people who are likely to share your message with others.
As mentioned in my earlier article ("Social media tools that marketers shouldn't miss"), there is an abundance of social media tools -- some paid, some free -- that can help you get your arms around the level of buzz surrounding your brand, as well as your competition.
Takeaway: Don't let your competition beat you in the social media game. By incorporating social monitoring into your marketing strategy, you'll have a better sense of consumer feedback and an opportunity to expand word of mouth.
You've allocated a large portion of your marketing and media budget to social media.
Many people assume you have to spend a lot of money to generate awareness through social media. This isn't necessarily true. While some campaigns and tactics do require larger budgets than others, you can actually spend very little money -- as compared to more traditional media -- to make a big impression. Many of our brand clients that have managed traditional and online media buys have a preconceived notion that the same kind of budget and media dollars is required for social media marketing. But visibility through social media and word of mouth doesn't have to be bought.
Takeaway: If you're effectively leveraging your assets and information, the currency you need to gain visibility isn't money -- it's content.
Your company does not have a social media policy.
Social media has become a mainstream mode of communication; thus, companies need to recognize that not only are their customers talking about them online, but their employees are as well. When companies set up their social media programs, they also need to establish corporate guidelines for communicating in the online social space.
It's up to companies to recognize that the social web has new implications for their brands. Every person within the organization has a personal brand, and those personal brands become folded into the company's brand. And yet, it's not something you can fully control.
Takeaway: Companies should train their employees on best practices and effective use of social tools.
Your video strategy consists of repurposing your 30-second spot.
Brands need to understand that telling engaging and compelling stories is what works on the web -- not hard corporate sells. Your customers are more likely to engage with and share interesting videos, and this type of content can live forever, continually promoting your brand.
Whether you're a part of a larger company, a standalone brand, or just a start-up company that believes in itself, make a video about the work you do, what it means to you -- and get it to as many people as you possibly can. If the concept for the video is clever enough, there's no end to how many people might see it across the globe -- and pass it along to their friends.
Takeaway: People love a good story, so why not get your story out there?
All interactions with your video occur on your website.
Nothing frustrates me more than when I see brands and entertainment properties pushing content on their websites and stripping that content off of blogs and communities. By limiting viewing options to a corporate website, brands are limiting the potential for fans to engage with the content in popular social channels. Engagement on social channels creates more conversation, word of mouth, and potential for tune-in. At the end of the day, while consumers might or might not view your content on your website, it's equally -- if not more -- important to make sure the content reaches them where they engage.
Takeaway: It's not about more traffic on your properties -- it's about more traffic in the minds of your consumers, regardless of the channels they're using to consume your brand.
Your social media efforts are minimal because they can't be measured.
Not a week goes by that I don't see yet another article or blog post bemoaning the fact that social media marketing cannot be measured. Such articles and blogs usually tout a new "revolutionary" way of measuring word of mouth.
Social media marketing can be measured, and most campaigns can be evaluated on an ROI basis. The biggest reason why social media isn't measured properly is because companies do not take the time to define what their social media goals are in measurable terms that enable them to determine what their success metrics are. Word of mouth, social media, and non-traditional online marketing analytics are just as accurate as traditional offline and online analytics. However, because the marketing methods themselves are new, their measurement has not been standardized as it has with more-traditional types of media.
Takeaway: You cannot manage what you do not measure, and you cannot measure what you do not define.
In the year of the social media revolution, we've seen many brands, organizations, and individuals jump in and make a concerted effort to expand their presences online and establish their social media footprints. Some of these brands have done a great job and really understand the importance of social media in getting people aware and engaged -- while others are latching on to the newest trend and, perhaps, going through the motions to keep up with the Joneses.
Among the more than 3 million businesses creating Facebook pages and groups -- not to mention millions of special-interest and community-driven blogs, up to 70 percent of which blog about brands -- many have failed to connect the dots in terms of how to use these platforms effectively. Many brands fail to leverage social spaces to drive awareness and engagement among their customers and fans. They simply aren't having conversations about their brands in the places their audiences share most.
Stay informed. For more tips on enhancing your brand's social marketing initiatives, attend the iMedia Brand Summit, June 12-16. Learn more.
To provide a little background on me: I run a social media marketing agency (KARMA Media Labs) that helps organizations and individuals connect with target audiences and build word of mouth in the communities where they live. In my time working with partners to outline social media strategies, I've seen many assumptions and preconceived notions about social media -- what it is, how to use it correctly, and how it fits into a brand's overall marketing and media strategy.
So how do you know your brand needs an extreme social media makeover? Here are some top signs, misconceptions, and pitfalls I've encountered when diagnosing a social media emergency.
Your social media marketing campaigns are short term.
I've seen a lot of brands and partners make the mistake of planning a social media marketing campaign for the same window of time as they would an online advertising campaign. To really benefit from social media marketing, it has to be a long-term commitment.
Social media marketing has a large residual value because the content posted by influencers stays online for long periods of time, and interactions with this content continue to accrue over time. Ultimately, the longer the content stays up, the longer your audience has to engage with it, and the longer search engines have to find it. Social media campaigns should last longer than a few weeks. You should start the process by listening to what is being said about your business or brand, connecting with those having conversations and building trust, and fostering long-term relationships and word of mouth.
Takeaway: If your social media campaigns are short term, you might want to rethink your strategy.
A Facebook page and Twitter profile is the extent of your social media strategy.
Many people equate social media with social networks. While it's important to harness the word-of-mouth nature of social communities, social media marketing is so much more than how you're represented in social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Tapping into the power of influencers, bloggers, and tastemakers who specialize in your cause or subject matter is something that is equally important. Those who place their stamps of approval on your brand generate awareness among their readerships. Likewise, it's important to tap into the power of conversation and, when possible, engage in dialogues with consumers who are talking about you or your brand.
Takeaway: If blogger relations, influencer outreach, and conversational marketing are not being considered in your social media strategy, you might want to think again.
You're not using social media because it might open the door for negative feedback about your brand.
As long as social media continues to grow and become a mainstream mode of communication, negative comments about your brand are inevitable -- and most likely already taking place. Fear of negative feedback holds many companies back from using social media, but what many fail to realize is that addressing those comments -- and doing so quickly -- shows your customers that you're listening and that you care. Managing your reputation is the key to connecting to your audience.
Takeaway: By listening and responding to your customers, not only do you demonstrate that you care, but you also take advantage of a huge opportunity to turn a negative into a positive.
An intern handles all your social media efforts.
Does a company really need senior level involvement or outside help to execute social media marketing, or can a team of interns do it? While it might not be a bad decision to have junior-level staff managing your Facebook and Twitter updates, reaching your target audience requires focusing on more than just how you're represented in social networks.
Tapping into the power of influencers, bloggers, and tastemakers who specialize in your cause or subject matter is something that requires an element of skill. You're up against a lot of clutter and competition when it comes to getting your messages and calls to action heard. Thus, it's wise to have a strategic game plan that defines where your brand will be represented, how consumers will engage with you, and the likelihood they will spread the word. From a day-to-day execution standpoint, interns can absolutely have a role in updating content and making sure your audience is engaging with your brand and content through social channels. But higher-level strategy is required.
Takeaway: From a strategic standpoint, it's important to involve skilled senior-level marketing specialists who understand the nuances of social media and how it fits into the overall business plan.
Your competition generates more online buzz than you do.
Are you listening to what your customers and fans are saying about you online? Are you measuring and incorporating this feedback into your overall marketing plan? Putting your ear to the ground and assessing your online buzz is not only important in assessing brand sentiment, but it also helps identify opportunities where you can get your message in front of people who are likely to share your message with others.
As mentioned in my earlier article ("Social media tools that marketers shouldn't miss"), there is an abundance of social media tools -- some paid, some free -- that can help you get your arms around the level of buzz surrounding your brand, as well as your competition.
Takeaway: Don't let your competition beat you in the social media game. By incorporating social monitoring into your marketing strategy, you'll have a better sense of consumer feedback and an opportunity to expand word of mouth.
You've allocated a large portion of your marketing and media budget to social media.
Many people assume you have to spend a lot of money to generate awareness through social media. This isn't necessarily true. While some campaigns and tactics do require larger budgets than others, you can actually spend very little money -- as compared to more traditional media -- to make a big impression. Many of our brand clients that have managed traditional and online media buys have a preconceived notion that the same kind of budget and media dollars is required for social media marketing. But visibility through social media and word of mouth doesn't have to be bought.
Takeaway: If you're effectively leveraging your assets and information, the currency you need to gain visibility isn't money -- it's content.
Your company does not have a social media policy.
Social media has become a mainstream mode of communication; thus, companies need to recognize that not only are their customers talking about them online, but their employees are as well. When companies set up their social media programs, they also need to establish corporate guidelines for communicating in the online social space.
It's up to companies to recognize that the social web has new implications for their brands. Every person within the organization has a personal brand, and those personal brands become folded into the company's brand. And yet, it's not something you can fully control.
Takeaway: Companies should train their employees on best practices and effective use of social tools.
Your video strategy consists of repurposing your 30-second spot.
Brands need to understand that telling engaging and compelling stories is what works on the web -- not hard corporate sells. Your customers are more likely to engage with and share interesting videos, and this type of content can live forever, continually promoting your brand.
Whether you're a part of a larger company, a standalone brand, or just a start-up company that believes in itself, make a video about the work you do, what it means to you -- and get it to as many people as you possibly can. If the concept for the video is clever enough, there's no end to how many people might see it across the globe -- and pass it along to their friends.
Takeaway: People love a good story, so why not get your story out there?
All interactions with your video occur on your website.
Nothing frustrates me more than when I see brands and entertainment properties pushing content on their websites and stripping that content off of blogs and communities. By limiting viewing options to a corporate website, brands are limiting the potential for fans to engage with the content in popular social channels. Engagement on social channels creates more conversation, word of mouth, and potential for tune-in. At the end of the day, while consumers might or might not view your content on your website, it's equally -- if not more -- important to make sure the content reaches them where they engage.
Takeaway: It's not about more traffic on your properties -- it's about more traffic in the minds of your consumers, regardless of the channels they're using to consume your brand.
Your social media efforts are minimal because they can't be measured.
Not a week goes by that I don't see yet another article or blog post bemoaning the fact that social media marketing cannot be measured. Such articles and blogs usually tout a new "revolutionary" way of measuring word of mouth.
Social media marketing can be measured, and most campaigns can be evaluated on an ROI basis. The biggest reason why social media isn't measured properly is because companies do not take the time to define what their social media goals are in measurable terms that enable them to determine what their success metrics are. Word of mouth, social media, and non-traditional online marketing analytics are just as accurate as traditional offline and online analytics. However, because the marketing methods themselves are new, their measurement has not been standardized as it has with more-traditional types of media.
Takeaway: You cannot manage what you do not measure, and you cannot measure what you do not define.
Word to your mother
Word to your mother
May 5th, 2010
By Melissa Chapman
I remember growing up with a mom whose ear was usually tethered to a phone. As she cooked dinner or packed our lunches and the long squiggly cord would traipse behind her, often wrapping itself around her legs, my sisters and I would fashion it into a jump rope. My mother was enamored with that phone — or so I thought at the time. Looking back now, I’ve come to understand that phone was not so much a distraction as a lifeline to other grownups, who could understand and reassure her in a way that four small children could not.
Social media is to me what the telephone or playground was to preceding generations of moms: It’s my lifeline to peer support. This virtual playground enables me to make an immediate connection with other like-minded people who will offer me their honest feedback and help me through those moments of motherhood that can be by turn both frustrating and terrifying.
When I first started using Twitter, I was dealing with a very difficult family situation, and having a virtual community that I could turn to (no, it’s not all lollipops and pixie dust) was incredibly important to me, especially during those sleepless nights and early mornings.
Am I surprised that the percentage of women who use social media far outpaces that of their male counterparts? Absolutely not. I think women have an inherent need to discuss, analyze and share, and social media facilitates that desire seamlessly. And in my case, it’s also an extension of the way I communicate in real life.
Social media is also the great equalizer: The women I follow and interact with online are from different races, religions and ages, but we can still come together to share our experiences as mothers. This online sisterhood runs deep and erases differences that tend to stratify people in the offline world.
Of course, I’m disappointed by the statistics that show women lagging behind men in the technology sector. But I also like to think that it is only a matter of time until women rise to positions of power in Silicon Valley. Case in point: I’ve got a 9-year-old daughter who can code HTML with the best of them. In this ever-changing virtual world of ours, I’m betting that she and her friends will make their bones and establish themselves as forces to be reckoned with. In fact, I’m banking on it!
May 5th, 2010
By Melissa Chapman
I remember growing up with a mom whose ear was usually tethered to a phone. As she cooked dinner or packed our lunches and the long squiggly cord would traipse behind her, often wrapping itself around her legs, my sisters and I would fashion it into a jump rope. My mother was enamored with that phone — or so I thought at the time. Looking back now, I’ve come to understand that phone was not so much a distraction as a lifeline to other grownups, who could understand and reassure her in a way that four small children could not.
Social media is to me what the telephone or playground was to preceding generations of moms: It’s my lifeline to peer support. This virtual playground enables me to make an immediate connection with other like-minded people who will offer me their honest feedback and help me through those moments of motherhood that can be by turn both frustrating and terrifying.
When I first started using Twitter, I was dealing with a very difficult family situation, and having a virtual community that I could turn to (no, it’s not all lollipops and pixie dust) was incredibly important to me, especially during those sleepless nights and early mornings.
Am I surprised that the percentage of women who use social media far outpaces that of their male counterparts? Absolutely not. I think women have an inherent need to discuss, analyze and share, and social media facilitates that desire seamlessly. And in my case, it’s also an extension of the way I communicate in real life.
Social media is also the great equalizer: The women I follow and interact with online are from different races, religions and ages, but we can still come together to share our experiences as mothers. This online sisterhood runs deep and erases differences that tend to stratify people in the offline world.
Of course, I’m disappointed by the statistics that show women lagging behind men in the technology sector. But I also like to think that it is only a matter of time until women rise to positions of power in Silicon Valley. Case in point: I’ve got a 9-year-old daughter who can code HTML with the best of them. In this ever-changing virtual world of ours, I’m betting that she and her friends will make their bones and establish themselves as forces to be reckoned with. In fact, I’m banking on it!
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Twitter: No matter what Hollywood thinks, it's totally uncool for kids
Twitter: No matter what Hollywood thinks, it's totally uncool for kids
May 4, 2010 | 6:18 pm
Paging Ashton Kutcher: Do you know who's really following you on Twitter?
When I had a little downtime with this year's Summer Movie Posse, I asked them how they kept up with the buzz about movies. As you might expect, they spent a lot of time online, which gives them a chance to look at trailers or hear word of mouth about upcoming movies on their friends' Facebook pages or sites like Slashfilm.com or Comingsoon.net.
But when I asked whether they kept abreast of things via Twitter, they all looked at me like I was crazy. Rajiv Rao, who's 17, said "I don't know one high schooler that uses Twitter." His friend, Arya Zarifi, also 17, added: "It's something for adults who feel like it makes them hip or something."
Yalda Chalabi, 17, was especially dismissive of actors and celebrities who use Twitter as a self-promotional tool. "I hate it when they say, 'Follow me on Twitter,' as if we're interested in every little thing they have to say," she explained. "It's just an adult thing. Our music teacher kept saying that she would put stuff up for us to follow on Twitter until one day she said, 'OK, who's following me on Twitter?' And no one raised their hand. You keep hearing people talk about it, but I don't know anyone my age that uses it."
I guess that won't stop Mr. Kutcher from having a million followers on Twitter, but it won't make any celebrity an iota more hip just because they know how to tweet about where they're going for dinner tonight.
May 4, 2010 | 6:18 pm
Paging Ashton Kutcher: Do you know who's really following you on Twitter?
When I had a little downtime with this year's Summer Movie Posse, I asked them how they kept up with the buzz about movies. As you might expect, they spent a lot of time online, which gives them a chance to look at trailers or hear word of mouth about upcoming movies on their friends' Facebook pages or sites like Slashfilm.com or Comingsoon.net.
But when I asked whether they kept abreast of things via Twitter, they all looked at me like I was crazy. Rajiv Rao, who's 17, said "I don't know one high schooler that uses Twitter." His friend, Arya Zarifi, also 17, added: "It's something for adults who feel like it makes them hip or something."
Yalda Chalabi, 17, was especially dismissive of actors and celebrities who use Twitter as a self-promotional tool. "I hate it when they say, 'Follow me on Twitter,' as if we're interested in every little thing they have to say," she explained. "It's just an adult thing. Our music teacher kept saying that she would put stuff up for us to follow on Twitter until one day she said, 'OK, who's following me on Twitter?' And no one raised their hand. You keep hearing people talk about it, but I don't know anyone my age that uses it."
I guess that won't stop Mr. Kutcher from having a million followers on Twitter, but it won't make any celebrity an iota more hip just because they know how to tweet about where they're going for dinner tonight.
Monday, May 3, 2010
7 Actionable Facebook Tactics for Marketers
7 Actionable Facebook Tactics for Marketers
By Heidi Cohen, ClickZ, May 3, 2010
Share Facebook has grown too big for marketers to ignore. Over 117 million Americans visited Facebook in March 2010 and the average visitor spent almost seven hours during the month on the site, as tracked by Nielsen. According to comScore, from March 2009 to March 2010 Facebook's unique visitors increased about 90 percent and its average minutes per visitor increased almost 50 percent.
To show that there's been a tipping point, traffic to Facebook has exceeded traffic to Google since the week ending March 13, 2010. From a marketing perspective, it's important to note that Facebook, like Google, has become a major referrer of traffic. For example, Starbucks has over 7 million Fans (or, in Facebook-speak, "people who like it"). Furthermore, Facebook is the most searched term across search engines, according to Experian Hitwise. Marketers should also note that Facebook is becoming device indifferent. While computers are the preferred device for checking Facebook, 46 percent of the under 35 demographic use their mobile phone to access Facebook, based on Retrevo's October 2009 Gadgetology Report.
7 Actionable Facebook Tactics for Marketers
While Facebook was initially used by entities with small budgets, such as advocacy and not-for-profit organizations, now, everyone's using it. Facebook is a "must have" for every marketer whether you're a retailer, brand, or media entity. Even companies in regulated industries, whose legal and compliance hurdles make social media a challenge to implement, are using it. For example, TIAA-CREF, a well established financial services company, just launched its "Raise the Rate" campaign on Facebook.
But Facebook requires a different approach from other forms of marketing messaging and engagement. To develop and expand your Facebook marketing strategy, here are seven actionable tactics:
1.Publish on Facebook to create interactions with and among your fans. Think like a gossip magazine to give fans something to talk about. Focus on information that's important and interesting to your audience. For example, Live Nation uses Facebook to discuss music and concerts, not to explicitly push ticket sales.
2.Give people a reason to join. To this end, use virtual gifts, coupons, contests, and insider tips. While in many ways, these alternatives aren't very different from offline promotions, they require a different lens to ensure that you're not perceived as just promoting your services. For example, Einstein Bros Bagels runs a "Shmear Campaign" to grow fans on Facebook.
3.Use Facebook to expand relationships with your prospects, customers, and fans. Many marketers use Facebook to expand their pool of prospects. This can be extended to responding directly to fans when asked or recognizing personal events such as birthdays. For example, The Denver Post, an older media format, is using Facebook to expand the reach of their classifieds.
4.Make Facebook communications conversational. Act like you're talking to real people, not just spewing corporate-speak! Despite its extensive reach, Facebook isn't a broadcast medium. Here are a few recommendations to guide your interactions:
1.Listen carefully to what's being said before joining the conversation.
2.Let consumers talk to each other when they're discussing your company and products. Other customers may answer their questions before you have to. Curb your impulse to respond to every comment.
3.Actively participate without each comment being inwardly focused on your firm. Remember, no one likes someone who only talks about themselves.
4.Only remove inappropriate content. This doesn't mean anything at all negative about your company or brands, but rather abusive or foul language.
5.Leverage supporting marketing and collateral to promote your Facebook presence. To support your firm's Facebook efforts, it's critical to promote it across your other media and communications. In addition, make sure that the content on your website and other channels can be shared on Facebook easily. This helps expand your reach and prospect base through friends of friends.
6.Give your Facebook initiatives sufficient support to succeed. This translates into dedicating sufficient headcount to develop content and participate on Facebook and having sufficient content that's targeted to Facebook's unique needs. It also means having management support for these efforts, as well as establishing company guidelines for employee participation.
7.Measure your Facebook marketing efforts and their impact on your business goals. Among the salient metrics to track are the number of fans and sales. With Facebook, it's important to look deeper to determine how many new prospects you've acquired, the level of interaction and advocacy for your product offering, the impact on your purchase funnel, and the amount of earned media generated.
Facebook has proven to be much more than a passing fad. Many organizations now realize that it has turned into a powerful marketing medium, so long as you do the required planning and integrate it properly with the rest of your marketing and overall business strategy.
By Heidi Cohen, ClickZ, May 3, 2010
Share Facebook has grown too big for marketers to ignore. Over 117 million Americans visited Facebook in March 2010 and the average visitor spent almost seven hours during the month on the site, as tracked by Nielsen. According to comScore, from March 2009 to March 2010 Facebook's unique visitors increased about 90 percent and its average minutes per visitor increased almost 50 percent.
To show that there's been a tipping point, traffic to Facebook has exceeded traffic to Google since the week ending March 13, 2010. From a marketing perspective, it's important to note that Facebook, like Google, has become a major referrer of traffic. For example, Starbucks has over 7 million Fans (or, in Facebook-speak, "people who like it"). Furthermore, Facebook is the most searched term across search engines, according to Experian Hitwise. Marketers should also note that Facebook is becoming device indifferent. While computers are the preferred device for checking Facebook, 46 percent of the under 35 demographic use their mobile phone to access Facebook, based on Retrevo's October 2009 Gadgetology Report.
7 Actionable Facebook Tactics for Marketers
While Facebook was initially used by entities with small budgets, such as advocacy and not-for-profit organizations, now, everyone's using it. Facebook is a "must have" for every marketer whether you're a retailer, brand, or media entity. Even companies in regulated industries, whose legal and compliance hurdles make social media a challenge to implement, are using it. For example, TIAA-CREF, a well established financial services company, just launched its "Raise the Rate" campaign on Facebook.
But Facebook requires a different approach from other forms of marketing messaging and engagement. To develop and expand your Facebook marketing strategy, here are seven actionable tactics:
1.Publish on Facebook to create interactions with and among your fans. Think like a gossip magazine to give fans something to talk about. Focus on information that's important and interesting to your audience. For example, Live Nation uses Facebook to discuss music and concerts, not to explicitly push ticket sales.
2.Give people a reason to join. To this end, use virtual gifts, coupons, contests, and insider tips. While in many ways, these alternatives aren't very different from offline promotions, they require a different lens to ensure that you're not perceived as just promoting your services. For example, Einstein Bros Bagels runs a "Shmear Campaign" to grow fans on Facebook.
3.Use Facebook to expand relationships with your prospects, customers, and fans. Many marketers use Facebook to expand their pool of prospects. This can be extended to responding directly to fans when asked or recognizing personal events such as birthdays. For example, The Denver Post, an older media format, is using Facebook to expand the reach of their classifieds.
4.Make Facebook communications conversational. Act like you're talking to real people, not just spewing corporate-speak! Despite its extensive reach, Facebook isn't a broadcast medium. Here are a few recommendations to guide your interactions:
1.Listen carefully to what's being said before joining the conversation.
2.Let consumers talk to each other when they're discussing your company and products. Other customers may answer their questions before you have to. Curb your impulse to respond to every comment.
3.Actively participate without each comment being inwardly focused on your firm. Remember, no one likes someone who only talks about themselves.
4.Only remove inappropriate content. This doesn't mean anything at all negative about your company or brands, but rather abusive or foul language.
5.Leverage supporting marketing and collateral to promote your Facebook presence. To support your firm's Facebook efforts, it's critical to promote it across your other media and communications. In addition, make sure that the content on your website and other channels can be shared on Facebook easily. This helps expand your reach and prospect base through friends of friends.
6.Give your Facebook initiatives sufficient support to succeed. This translates into dedicating sufficient headcount to develop content and participate on Facebook and having sufficient content that's targeted to Facebook's unique needs. It also means having management support for these efforts, as well as establishing company guidelines for employee participation.
7.Measure your Facebook marketing efforts and their impact on your business goals. Among the salient metrics to track are the number of fans and sales. With Facebook, it's important to look deeper to determine how many new prospects you've acquired, the level of interaction and advocacy for your product offering, the impact on your purchase funnel, and the amount of earned media generated.
Facebook has proven to be much more than a passing fad. Many organizations now realize that it has turned into a powerful marketing medium, so long as you do the required planning and integrate it properly with the rest of your marketing and overall business strategy.
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