Tag: engagement

9 Sessions at #SMWNYC on Fan Engagement and Audience Growth

Posted on by Tyler Becker

Without customers, fans, viewers, and people that value your business and work, you wouldn’t exist. The gap between casual customer and brand loyalist is not as distant as many assume, and with emerging tools and technology, many brands are figuring out how to convert one-time buyers into repeat customers.

Register to attend Social Media Week NYC, and experience a variety of sessions that dive into the world of fan engagement, audience development, and customer retention.

You’ll learn what the leading brands use and do each day to move individuals through the customer life-cycle, and hear industry leaders from Hootsuite, VaynerMedia, Brandwatch, WOMMA, Code and Theory, and many others discussing the next wave of trends and innovations.

1. If you work with digital campaigns or high-profile individuals…

Pope-emojis and Millennials: How Pope Francis Engages the Largest Generation Alive Today
Hosted by Tracx • Tuesday 2/23 at 10:00AM • SVA Theatre
Millennials now outnumber Baby Boomers, and brands and organizations are looking for ways to capitalize on this group. In this session, learn how Tracx, the leading social business cloud, collaborated with Aleteia, a global Catholic digital media company, to engage Millennials through an integrated campaign around Pope Francis’ visit to the U.S., and how “Pope-emojis” re-connected younger individuals to their religions and beliefs.

2. If you want to use data to better identify and retain customers…

Extending Lifetime Value – The Future of Customer Engagement
Hosted by Simon Data • Tuesday 2/23 at 1:00PM • SVA Theatre
Lifetime value is the magic word these days; everyone needs to find a way to create more enduring, valuable relationships with their customers. This session with Simon Data will provide an expert overview of the latest crop of marketing technologies, and outline a step-by-step breakdown of how to use data to improve your marketing efforts.

3. If you want to boost brand advocacy and create loyalists out of customers…

Advocacy FTW: How to Turn Your Superfans Into Impactful Brand Advocates
Hosted by Hootsuite • Wednesday 2/24 at 10:00AM • SVA Theatre
How well do you know your social superfans? Are you looking in the right pockets of the web to find the conversations they’re having about you? Join Hootsuite to learn how you can build your social brand with the support of your existing fans to maximize the reach of your social messages.

4. If your business needs to reach Millennials and Gen-Z consumers online…

Online Identities And Impact On Gen Y+Z Consumers
Hosted by Code and Theory • Wednesday 2/24 at 1:00PM • SVA Theatre
To reach teens and young adults online, the challenge is no longer about just posting on Instagram. This session with Code and Theory will cover the ins-and-outs of how Gen-Z and Gen-Y manage identities and relationships across multiple social networks, hide in plain site, and what type of content and brands they are willing to engage with.

5. If you work in television or at an agency with entertainment clients…

Keynote: How Comedy Central Gets Fans Talking with CMO, Walter Levitt
Hosted by WOMMA • Wednesday 2/24 at 1:30PM • TimesCenter
Comedy Central’s CMO, Walter Levitt, will attempt to organize and rationalize all their social media and on-the-ground tactics into a fully thought–out strategy, and explain how they promote their roster of shows such as Broad City, Inside Amy Schumer, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and Drunk History.

6. If you want to improve your social listening and monitoring efforts…

Are You Listening? Learn How To Effectively Monitor Your Audience On Social
Hosted by Digimind • Wednesday 2/24 at 2:00PM • SVA Theatre
In a world where social media has taken over everything we do, it’s more important than ever to understand consumer behavior and use social intelligence to gain powerful insights for your business and marketing strategies. Join Digimind as they explain the important of social intelligence for agencies, non-profits, governments, and brands with influencers.

7. If you’re eager to learn how social media can drive new TV industry metrics…

Reach New Viewers! Develop Superfans! Impact Ratings! Launching a TV Show via Social Media!
Hosted by VaynerMedia • Wednesday 2/24 at 3:00PM • SVA Theatre
Social media offers more ways than ever to build awareness around TV programs, but did you know it can drive and impact the new markers of success in today’s ever-changing television industry? VaynerMedia will outline in this session how television shows and video networks can connect with existing and prospective fans across the many different virtual places where they’re spending time online.

8. If your brand has conversations with customers, or needs to create more interactions…

Consumer Pulse: Giving The People What They Want
Hosted by Brandwatch • Thursday 2/25 at 10:00AM • SVA Theatre
How we interact with potential consumers, haters, and brand loyalists has changed significantly over the past decades, and continues to rapidly evolve with how quickly we can exchange information. Brandwatch, one of the leading social intelligence platforms, will highlight best practices for capitalizing on emotions, purchase intent, influence, and consumer value.

9. If you need to learn best practices for developing a customer life-cycle…

Managing Brand(om)s and Fandoms: The True Story
Hosted by Everybody at Once • Thursday 2/25 at 12:00PM • SVA Theatre
These days, almost every single brand is expectedly active on social media. And almost every single one of those brands has a challenging time trying to find and interact with their audience. In this panel, audience development and social strategy consultancy, Everybody at Once, will lead an exploration around how a person or agency works to enable an audience in the best way possible, all while building a brand.

Synchronizing The Social At The New York Times

Posted on by chauncey zalkin

The New York Times are experiencing a phase of rapid change. While social has been top of mind recently, they decided to pull together the disparate parties working on various aspects of “search” and “media” to create a unified, collaborative front for their search and social strategies. They treat each social platform differently, and find unique uses for each one while not abandoning the others. For example, they print an 800-word article for the magazine, and then allow content that didn’t make it into print to live as a longer web piece. Aside from their internal marketing teams, what’s clear is that they value (need) journalists who have a native understanding of how their content can most effectively reverberate through all of the possible strands of media distribution.

Jenna Wortham, a journalist for the Times, explained how her natural affinity manifests; when she tweets, she reveals her process providing readers an inside look at the ‘day in the life’. She doesn’t think it’s a great use of social media to solely promote yourself or your company with clicks. She says the more you engage – and what I think she means is invest yourself – the more people will follow even if there is no click back. That is, invest with content that is interesting, relatable, and shareable. The editor working on audience development pointed out that she found the most shareable stories to be ones of personal perseverance, service-oriented stories, stories that provoke discussion, and ones that appeal to a bit of readers narcissism (said affectionately). People want to share things that make them look “smart”.

The most important takeaway of the session for me was that people need a sense of continuity as opposed to being inundated by a barrage of content. There most be something to come back to or tune into again and again. Food for thought.



Chauncey Zalkin, Co-founder and Creative Director, Show Love. Show Love creates highly shareable documentary video for lovable companies. Check out our reel.

Yunha Kim, Founder of Locket: Why I Quit My Job To Launch A Startup

Posted on by Stephanie Carino

When you initially meet Yunha Kim, you wouldn’t automatically assume that she is the mastermind behind Locket, the super successful lock screen app for Android, but that’s before she begins to speak with an intelligence and passion that you would expect from the head of a company. I’m not the only/first/last person to take notice. When companies like TechCrunch and VentureBeat are writing about your company and when Tyra Banks expresses interest in investing in your idea, people are bound to jump on the band wagon. During my visit to San Francisco, I got a chance to speak to Yunha about her journey from Investment Banker to Founder and CEO of  her very own startup. Find out below what exactly it takes to get an idea from concept to realization.

1) You started your career as an Investment Banker and with your switch from iPhone to Android user, you quickly found the calling for this company. Can you tell me a little bit about your first couple of months of the company?

YK: I can barely remember the first couple months of the company. It was just so crazy.

In the first month, I was running around pitching our idea for investment. After getting funded by Great Oaks VC, I was then running around pitching to advertisers and I did that for a half year. Then I started pitching again for another round of funding.

When we had no money or product, I was getting somewhere around four hours of sleep every night. I was living with five other guys out of a two-bedroom apartment with three dogs and a hamster where we worked and lived. We were also getting by with hot dogs and ramen noodles.

Sometimes, I wondered, ‘What did I sign up for?’ but I think I was really happy, getting things off the ground, creating something out of nothing.

2) This idea actually came from our culture’s tendency of constantly checking our phones. Can you give us a little more insight into that?

YK: While pulling long but boring hours in investment banking (prior to Locket), I wasn’t able to do anything fun on my monitor, so I was checking my phone a few hundred times per day. That’s when I realized I keep on checking my phone every single day, bringing it to the restroom, everywhere I go. Every single one of those moments I was unlocking my lock screen which was a picture of a daisy which came as a default lock screen with my Galaxy S3.

One day, I was looking at it wondering why anyone wasn’t doing anything with the most valuable real estate in advertising. If people check their phone 150 times per day, with 71 million Android users, that’s 10.7 billion glances on the lock screen every day in the US that we have not been able to monetize. It occurred to me that this will be the next big thing in mobile advertising.

3) What do you feel are some of the benefits of Locket?

YK: Locket brings content you care about to your lock screen based on your interest, swiping habits and time of the day. It’s a quick passive way to learn about what’s going on around you, in your world. I am too busy to check out all my apps on my phone, but with Locket, I am consistently updated. I was able to learn about a fire in Soma which is only a few blocks away from our office through my lock screen, then I looked outside my window and I saw that fire.

4) How do you find a life work balance with being in such a busy and quickly expanding company? What does your typical day look like?  

YK: When you are in a startup, it’s really difficult to balance your work and life (if you even have a life). It’s like when you have a baby (your startup), and the baby cries, you can’t really say you are off your work hours and let it cry. So, it will feel like you are on call 24/7.

5) I know focus on the company has changed, can you tell me a little about that?

YK: Recently, we have stopped our paid-per-swipe-ad service. We are now focusing on contextual content on your lock screen. Based on an user’s interest, swiping habits and time of the day, we serve content that people care about in a visually delightful way on the Android lock screen, and as the apps is consistently used, the content becomes more relevant

For more on Yunha and Locket, please visit: http://getlocket.com/.

Stephanie Carino has spent over the past 10 years working in the city in the Fashion, Food and Event industries. She currently works in the PR Department at leading Technology and Business Book Publisher, Apress.  On the side, she also writes event coverage and reviews for, Socially Superlative, a NYC-based event website, covering predominantly food, travel and entertainment stories. Connect with Stephanie on Twitter.

 

2014: Trends in Social Marketing

Posted on by Jess Seilheimer

The year social matured.

The entire industry continues to recalibrate their mindset on social. Is it tactical, is is about community management and customer service or is it really about real time insights? All of the above (plus, 100 other things). But, social has matured and is now  a core function or marketing — not a “really fun, cool add on.” We live in a social world, and here’s the reality of how social has matured.

Existing social platform use has steadied amongst consumers — leaving room for emerging platforms of course, but I’m not certain we’ll see the hockey stick growth patterns of years past. Because of that, brands will be able to take a time out, recount the successes/failures of their pilots from 2013, get their footing, and most importantly the appropriate BUDGET according to a survey from CMO.org.

I think we’ll see:

  1. Investment in customer insights and analytic software
  2. Social diversification: matching content and cost to the right platforms/consumers
  3. Marketing leaders will gain additional headcount, and hire talented individuals (vs. interns) and integrate social into their discipline
  4. Measuring (and making sense of) quality engagement metrics vs. only quantitative ones

The winners will be the ones who invest in quality talent, to collect the right insights to keep their audiences engaged across multiple platforms (desktop mobile, tablet). Want more stats? There’s expanded reading on it from the Altimeter Group here and the Harvard Business Review: What’s the End Game for Social?

The trend: Building marketing efforts around shifting and sometimes transient customer behaviors  — “Marketing For a Social World”.

Interested in learning more about trends in social media? Join us at at Social Media Week New York February 17-21 at the Highline Stages.

 
Jess Seilheimer runs a consultancy called Cretegic– your insight-driven partner for a digital world. We accelerate strategic planning into actionable ideas & marketing for brands and startups. She is also the Strategy & Marketing lead for a startup Birdi. Prior, she was the SVP of Digital Innovation and Strategic Planning at Havas.

Image courtesy Engagor.

8 Social Media Marketing Predictions for 2014

Posted on by Dion Hinchcliffe

Even though spending on social media marketing is at an all-time high and continues to grow, there’s a good reason that the overall portion of the marketing budget dedicated to social channels remains comparatively small. Frankly, this is a bit surprising. It’s been nearly 10 years after social media arrived on the scene; and today, social media essentially dominates as a share of digital consumer attention, yet social channels remain an under served target for many businesses.

The underlying reasons for this general underinvestment in social media marketing are complex. In general, marketers have discovered that attaining their objectives through social media can be less predictable, particularly because the discipline itself is one of the fastest changing in the media business. It is harder to tie outcomes to specific business goals. Directly translating traditional marketing activities into social media usually doesn’t produce the best results, as marketing efforts typically have to be rethought for two-way engagement, user participation, and/or viral amplification.

Some of the current data is sobering:

Yet over 70% of marketers plan on increasing their investment in social media next year, and by an average of 50%. This means marketers will be doing more in social, expectations by the business will be higher, and successful outcomes more important than ever.

In this environment then, my research indicates that marketing teams will be looking to increase the effectiveness of their social marketing efforts in three ways: a) by better adapting their digital assets and campaigns to social channels, b) shifting to a focus to managing for quality metrics, instead of just quantitative measures, and c) preparing for more rapid engagement in new channels including mobile and new emerging social networks.

Against this backdrop, here’s what 2014 holds in store for social media marketing:

  1. Marketers will get Facebook fatigue as the social networking giant continues to change its algorithms. 
    Fresh off the most recent — and rather contentious — changes to brand pages, marketers will re-evaluate how much they invest in the platform in 2014, looking for a more diversified social strategy. I’ve long recommended that companies serious about social media should avoid driving their traffic to Facebook in general, and the latest round of changes by Facebook should give marketers reason to carefully rethink their plans.
  2. The resurgence of Google+. 
    Now that Google+ has grown recently to become the #2 social network online, it will get new respect by marketers next year, who will figure out how to incorporate it into their social marketing plans.
  3. Image-based services and surprisingly, blogging, will see new emphasis. 
    Whether it is Pinterest or Instagram, or images in feeds on Twitter and Facebook, compelling visuals continue to drive high engagement and attention. Marketers will be looking at expanding their efforts in this area next year. Blogging will also return as a key engagement strategy that avoids the lock-in and control issues of major social media sites.
  4. Integrated marketing begins in earnest. 
    In 2014, it’ll be practical for the average organization to largely achieve a long-standing goal: Easily create an integrated marketing campaign that has presence and engagement capabilities at all the major social and non-social touchpoints. What’s new that will finally make this happen? The rise, maturity, and recent prominence of new multi-channel and “omnichannel” marketing platforms like Marketo and Eloqua that perform a lot of the work automatically to make consumer experiences seamless across Web, mobile, social, and other digital channels.
  5. Real-time marketing will get real. 
    RTM was all the rage this year, and powerful examples like T-Mobile’s customer retention effort demonstrated that major, market shifting results were possible. But most organizations were just learning about it in 2013. Next year, they will begin integrated real-time efforts into their social media efforts, particularly as more companies build social media command centers capable of scaled listening, triage, and dispatch.

  6. Social marketers will continue to struggle with mobile. 
    Over 250 million Facebook users are mobile-only and that number is growing. While Facebook was able to gets its act together around mobile, it took an investment and effort that most marketing organizations won’t possess. Organizations willing to focus on mobile-first for their social marketing efforts will fare better, but it will be another difficult year adapting marketing strategies to both social and mobile.
  7. The move to measurement of quality of engagement, instead of quantity. 
    Not that quantity won’t continue to matter, as it always determines the ultimate funnel size, but as measurement methods continue to improve dramatically, social marketers will also be able to determine if their efforts are resulting in the quality of engagement needed to drive business outcomes, like conversions. You can’t manage to what you can’t measure, and measuring quality of engagement will ensure more effective and efficient marketing campaigns in 2014
  8. A significant shift in the social networking landscape. 
    The emergence of Snapchat and a host of other new social networks and apps shows how dynamic the industry is. Marketers will find it easy to focus on the old standbys like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, yet some of the best demographic segments will shift their attention to new social networking services in 2014, and smart marketers will allocate resources and budget next year to tap into them.

Of course, much more will happen in social media marketing next year, but these will be some of the most significant in my analysis. That’s not to say that some of the strategies of five years ago aren’t still key. For example, I’m still sanguine the major investments in customer communities have the biggest bang for the buck, even as the window increasingly closes on the easy opportunities.

What are you seeing as the biggest trends for social media marketing next year?

Dion Hinchcliffe is the Chief Strategy Officer of Dachis Group. To find out more about Dachis Group’s session at Social Media Week, click here.

Master Class: Engagement@Scale – Three Steps to Leveraging Brand Advocates

Posted on by Lisa Chau


On 20 February 2013, I had the pleasure of attending Master Class: Engagement@Scale – Three Steps to Leveraging Brand Advocates with Dachis Group. Speakers from the Dachis Group included: Michael (MJ) Jones, Vice President of Technology; Liz Schroeter Courtney, Social Strategist and Allison Squires, Social Strategist.

The presentation focused on social marketing as the ideal way for brands to authentically interact and scale engagement with customers. Social media facilitates messaging large groups of people. Additionally, panelists spoke about leveraging brand advocates, a brand’s most trusted and effective audience group, to spread a brand’s presence beyond internal corporate efforts.

The Dachis Group offered a three step approach to working with brand advocates around (I) identification, (II) mobilization and (III) measurement.

How do companies identify advocates?

Advocates:
+ Frequently talk about particular brands
+ Have positive feelings about particular brands
+ Desire to influence others
+ Advocates should be people that others trust

According to Edelman’s trust index, people trust academics, experts, people like me and employees at a company more than CEOs, government institutions and financial analysts.

“Friends are better marketers than marketers.”

92% of people trust earned media, such as word-of-mouth.

What’s more, 67% spend more online after receiving recommendations from online communities.

It’s the power of advocacy.

How do companies mobilize advocates?

+ Foster relationships — Make advocates feel valued
+ Create mutually beneficial relationships – Reward your advocates
+ Must be authentic, not just driven by money

Good examples of brand advocacy include:
+ Red Bull
+ Coffee Mate
+ Starbucks
+ Vitamin Water

How do companies measure results of working with brand advocates?

The aforementioned companies successfully mobilized advocates to increase customer awareness and mindshare in the market.  Things to consider:
+ Increasing the reach of the brand
+ Enthusiasm and sentiment
+ Conversion patterns and business impact
+ Community engagement
+ Frequent activity, frequent brand mentions and frequent purchases

Finally, give advocates space to engage with the company’s audience. Does your company provide forums, community events, product initiatives, etc. Help advocates develop a suite of experiences for audiences to engage and invigorate positive feelings about your brand.

Want to see it for yourself?

Lisa Chau has been involved with Web 2.0 since graduate school at Dartmouth College, where she completed an independent study on blogging. She was subsequently highlighted as a woman blogger in Wellesley Magazine, published by her alma mater. Lisa currently works as an Assistant Director in Alumni Relations at Dartmouth College. She has been published in US News and Forbes. You can follow her on Twitter.

Twelve Twitter Tips

Posted on by Lisa Chau

Twitter Tips to help you make the most of your time. Yes, there are actually strategies for maximizing your 140 character missives. My advice won’t apply to every case, but I hope it will serve as a good guide for helping you craft a personalized approach for your needs. The suggestions below are primarily geared towards businesses, but can used for personal accounts, too.

1. SMILE
As I mentioned, there are exceptions to my advice. So, if you’re a haute couture fashion model, you might want to skip to step two. Everyone else, you’re here to engage and collaborate. Project approachability. Smile! Be the “person I’d like to have lunch with,” not “person I’d rather walk up 20 flights of stairs to avoid rather than share an elevator with.” Be a confident, compassionate leader, not a dull, disinterested slacker.

If you’re really camera shy, you can use a logo or photo of an inanimate object. I wouldn’t advise it, though. People want to put a face to the tweets. Either option is still infinitely better than the default Twitter egg, however. If you can’t bother to put up any profile image, why should anyone bother to take you seriously?

 
2. PERSONALIZE
This step is an extension of picking a good profile photo to represent you. Whenever I look at a new Twitter profile, I look at the photo first [out of instinct], then the bio. Who is this person? Why would I care what s/he has to say? Tell your audience who you are — Concisely & directly: What is your function? What is your expertise?

I highly advise a link to a fuller bio for people who want to know more about you. My suggestions are LinkedIn or About.me If you have various social media accounts, the latter will neatly organize all of your redirects in one place.
 

3. HUMANIZE
Yes, there is a definitely a place for Twitter accounts that just broadcast news. They are called news outlets, like The Wall Street Journal or CNN. For most other companies, I believe it’s much more effective to humanize your Tweets. Because there will be some people who are only interested in corporate updates, I urge keeping two accounts. One that is business-oriented (Product launches, formal announcements and the such) and a second that allows for more creativity (Employee stories, thoughts about other industries, etc.). Humanize yourself and your staff. Who works at your company? What are they interested in outside of the office? Build an emotional attachment to your brand.

Hootsuite makes managing multiple accounts very easy, even on an Android phone.
 

4. BALANCE
If you plan to keep a business account that is not limited to formal corporate announcements, make sure you balance the ratio of personal to professional tweets.  I would aim to keep work-related updates around 70%.
 

5. SCHEDULE
Decide when you want to send out your updates. If your company is international, but based in the U.S. you might want to schedule tweets to out at 9PM US time to appear on an Asian timeline at 9AM. Figure out what time slots work best for your company and plan accordingly.

I’m currently experimenting based on Dan Zarrella’s concept of “contra-competitive timing.” In numerous cases, he discovered that the most successful times and days to publish new content are off-peak times. “It’s like when you’re at a noisy party and it’s hard to hear the person talking to you 2 feet away, but… When there is less other noise to compete with (ie fewer tweets, emails, blog posts, etc) your content can gain attention more easily.”

Again, I recommend Hootsuite for this job. Huge fan.
 

6. DISTRIBUTE
Now that you’ve decided XYZ day at XYZ time is optimal for you to tweet, don’t bombard your followers with all your insights at once. I don’t think that anyone needs to send out more than one tweet an hour. Any more than that, you’re should either be classified as a good friend (in which case, you should just text my personal phone number or email me directly) or a spammer (in which case, just stop. Stop now- seriously).
 

7. SPECIFY
You have 140 characters to tell me something. Give me details.

Pointless: Checked out some clothes. Totally going shopping.

Much improved: Went to Hermes fashion show with @heatherpixley. Must buy green cashmere turtleneck Heidi Klum wore.

Quality tweets attract quality followers.
 

8. CHOOSE
Don’t blindly follow everyone who follows you. Yes, it might feel a little rude, but it’s better than cluttering up your feed with updates that are completely irrelevant to you. I have no interest in buying real estate in Florida. Sorry.
 

9. ORGANIZE
The more time you spend on Twitter, the more feeds you will follow. Make organized lists and use them. Otherwise, things have the potential to become very messy and overwhelming after your feed tops 50 unless you only follow very niche accounts which don’t update often.

It’s also a great public service. I’ve found some great lists compiled by others. I can follow 36 new photographers or 63 CEOs in just one click.
 

10. ENGAGE
Give. Receive. Share.

Exchange information and build relationships. This is how you will make the most of your time on Twitter.

Empower yourself and others. Remember, we’re here to be social. In fact, Social Media Week’s theme in 2012 focuses on “Empowering Change through Collaboration. This theme is designed as a call to action, allowing individuals- like you- and organizations around the world to explore how social media empowers citizens, increases mobility, enables mass collaboration, develops hyperlocalism, maximizes interconnectedness, fosters knowledge creation & sharing, bolsters leadership, and encourages global empathy.”
 

11. EXPERIMENT
Twitter is best understood and used by those who do. Experiment. Everyone needs a different strategy. Find the approach that works best for your specific case. I would be remiss not to tell you to heed caution in your activities, though. This is a very powerful vehicle for communication. The larger the corporation, the higher up in management, the more visible you will be. Be vigilant in your messaging choices and stay on course.
 

12. ENJOY
Of course!
 

I hope this list helped you. I could go on, but I like the alliteration of Twelve Twitter Tips. Also, I reached my word limit for this post.
 

Lisa Chau has been involved with Web 2.0 since graduate school at Dartmouth College, where she completed an independent study on blogging. She was subsequently highlighted as a woman blogger in Wellesley Magazine, published by her alma mater. Since 2009, Lisa has worked as an Assistant Director at the Tuck School of Business. In 2012, she launched GothamGreen212 to pursue social media strategy projects. You can follow her on Twitter. 

A Student’s Perspective: Beyond the Like: Using Real People’s Real Stories to Drive Brand Awareness

Posted on by smwnyc

Trinna Leong is a student at Columbia’s School of Journalism. She is one of ten students providing on the ground coverage of SMWNYC- all from the student’s perspective. She is providing her report from Beyond the Like: Using Real People’s Real Stories to Drive Brand Awareness, hosted by Microsoft.

A highly-anticipated event, with over a hundred guests in attendance, Beyond the Like was filled to its capacity with guests even standing throughout the presentation.

It was the launch of Microsoft’s new product, “People Powered Stories.”

Microsoft Advertising collaborated with Bazaar Voice, a software as a service (SaaS) company that integrates customers social data to help brands leverage content. Microsoft Advertising’s General Manager for Brand Advertising, Jennifer Creegan, and Bazaar Voice’s co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer, Brant Barton, came to introduce the product.

Using the “Back to School” campaign as their test pad, Microsoft took reviews of Windows 7 from their target audience, high school students, and displayed them on their banner ads. Microsoft is aiming to make banner ads content more social to add relate-ability with clients. And they were did it. “Back to School” was a success for Microsoft, who now looks toward marketing “People Powered Stories” to other brands.

The move to produce “People Powered Stories” came when Bing, a Microsoft company, conducted research that showed audiences look to reviews more than to social networks for advice on products. This prompted Microsoft to look into developing a user-generated reviews to market a product. The company believes that having users submit their reviews adds believability to the ad on sites.

The company still uses engagement time as a metric to determine relevancy of ad with consumers, a metric that was dismissed by another panel: Why Engagement Should Be Spelled A-T-T-E-N-T-I-O-N. When interviewed, Creegan stressed that Microsoft isn’t using engagement time as the only metric but does factor it into their evaluations.

“That’s why we have three metrics: purchase, believability and engagement time,” said Creegan, making their process a sound launching pad.

 
Trinna Leong is from Malaysia and had two years of work experience in the online advertising industry before deciding to trade the sweltering tropical heat for a chance to pursue journalism at Columbia University. Prior to switching fields, she has worked on projects for Nike, IKEA and Citibank. You can follow her on Twitter at @trinnaleong.

A Student’s Perspective: Why Engagement Should Be Spelled A-T-T-E-N-T-I-O-N

Posted on by smwnyc

Trinna Leong is a student at Columbia’s School of Journalism. She is one of ten students providing on the ground coverage of SMWNYC- all from the student’s perspective. She is providing her report from Why Engagement Should Be Spelled A-T-T-E-N-T-I-O-N, hosted by SocialVibe.

“If you are asking for someone to pay attention, you are probably doing the wrong thing.”

Engaging consumers has been a difficult task for all advertisers in today’s fast paced age. The day’s panel of five industry experts in the field of advertising and marketing came together to discuss what works and what doesn’t in capturing audience’s attention.

“People are more interested in being the curator, purveyor,” said Vanessa Montes, Vice President of Integrated Marketing at Fuse. All panelists agreed that consumers usually pay attention through “word of mouth” when friends introduce an item or brand.

That said, brands would want to generate positive talk-ability amongst its audience. Examples given by the panel included the Chipotle ad that aired at the Grammys; an ad that Adrian Barrow, Head of Planning at JWT’s New York office, thought was “artful” (while stating that overall “brands have developed the touch on how to behave on entertainment channels”); and the PETA ad that Michael Learmonth, Digital Editor at Advertising Age, felt strongly against. With the PETA ad, Leamonth felt that the message was that being vegan increases sex drive, but by painting a woman who looks sexually abused, PETA was not sending out a positive message.

Another key point brought up by the panelists is that in social media networks, brands have ended up looking at numbers instead of content. Quantity has been ranked higher than quality, causing brands to lose sight of engagement with their audience.

“Social media is a media that exists between people. For it to pay off, it has to be nurtured,” added Ian Schafer, CEO and founder of Deep Focus.

“Instead of focusing on number of likes and posts, advertisers should focus on what people are talking about on the page,” said Schafer.

The general consensus from the panelists was that advertisers in the midst of trying to pull in more fans end up failing to determine what to do with the fans they have on social media. The worst metric to measure is one that measures how long users spend on a page.

Barrow also argued that consumers now want “something that can help them make the best use of their time” because then “they’ll award brands with some attention.” This defines a new role for agencies to produce new ideas that is useful for consumers.

Panelists also commented on the importance of brands making sure that their brand stays relevant by encouraging audiences to talk about the brand instead of the celebrity that endorses it. Ultimately, the main takeaway for brands is to have engagement fueled by consumers not by brands.

 
Trinna Leong is from Malaysia and had two years of work experience in the online advertising industry before deciding to trade the sweltering tropical heat for a chance to pursue journalism at Columbia University. Prior to switching fields, she has worked on projects for Nike, IKEA and Citibank. You can follow her on Twitter at @trinnaleong.

See you Tuesday! A guide for Day Two

Posted on by Sara Haile-Mariam

We hope you enjoyed your first day of #SMW12– now on to day two!

Below you’ll find a list of solid events that, as of publication, still have some slots left!

9-11am at JWT Panel: Why Engagement Should Be Spelled A-T-T-E-N-T-I-O-N hosted by SocialVibe

9-10am at Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness Keynote: Frank Moss on The 2012 MIT Health and Wellness Innovation Hackathon

9-11:30am at Thomas Reuters Interview: John Katzman and Jeremy Johnson on The Future of Higher Education: Will Colleges Survive? followed by Panel: The Classroom of The Future: How Social Media Can Better Our Education System

10-10:45am at Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness Keynote: J.C. Herz on Unpacking the Quantified Self followed by Panel: The Sensor Continuum

10-11am at Hearst Digital Voyeurism: How Sharing Real Homes in Real Time is Changing the Way We Decorate

12-12:30am at Big Fuel Jon’s Fireside Chat: Joseph Jaffe and Social Media 2.0

12-2pm at Thomas Reuters Keynote: Rachel Lloyd, Executive Director & Founder of Girls Educational & Mentoring Services

12-2pm at JWT Beyond the Like: Using Real People’s Real Stories to Drive Brand Awareness

1-2pm at Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness Fireside Chat: The Rise of the Patient Platform

2:30-3:30pm at Big Fuel Connecting disruptive business models with innovation in business

3-4pm at Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness This game will make you healthier

3-5pm at Hearst The New Ghostwriter

3-5pm at JWT Social Media for Social Good

4:30-5:30pm at Hearst Social Syndication in 2012: Experiences First, Networks Second

5:30-6:30pm at Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness Women, Money & Social Power: What Made The Komen Debacle A Win For Women

6-8pm at JWT Deep Focus Presents: An Evening of “Connectedness”

 

An Interview with Susan Halligan, SMW12 Moderator

Posted on by Lisa Chau

Susan Halligan, the former Marketing Director of The New York Public Library (NYPL), established the first-ever marketing department for the 100-year-old institution, transitioning the library from traditional communication platforms to new media platforms.  The library’s “Don’t Close the Book” advocacy campaign was named by MarketingSherpa to the 2010 Viral and Social Media Hall of Fame.  Today, she is a Social Media Consultant based in New York working with cultural organizations such as The American Museum of Natural History, various non-profits, startups, and authors on social media strategies spanning channel selection, content marketing, employee activation, stream management, listening and measurement. As a multidisciplinary marketer, her specialty is integrating social media into traditional marketing and communications channels.

Susan Halligan, twitter: @srhalligan

A familiar face at Social Media Week, Susan moderated 2011 panel, “The Inner Workings: Social Media Success Through Coordinated Staffing,” and co-keynoted “The Connected Network” at the Arts Marketing Association’s Digital Marketing Day in London in November 2011. On February 14, she will moderate Literature Unbound: Radical Strategies for Social Literature at NYU during Social Media Week New York 2012. I spoke with Susan to learn more about her work and experiences.

You have quite an impressive biography.  How did you become involved in social media?

Thank you, Lisa. I began to explore Facebook and Twitter in the early fall of 2008. Honestly, I originally started playing around with the platforms, because I had a very small marketing budget and was lured by the fact that the platforms were free. It was very much a “let me see what we can do with this” undertaking. I had no idea, actually, what I was doing, but spent a lot of time exploring and learning, and began to see that social could be integrated into traditional communication channels and that it was an opportunity to take the library’s brand and initiatives to entirely new audiences in a very powerful way. I became very passionate about social and remain so. While paid media remains an important component in any marketing campaign, the trend for marketers is to spend more resources on social and less on paid.

You established the first-ever marketing department for The New York Public Library.  What changed?

Most of the library’s outreach efforts prior to my hire were concentrated on print advertising. I was hired to create and implement an integrated marketing effort across multiple channels.

In 2010, you helped The New York Public Library win the PR News Non-Profit PR Award: “Use of Twitter, Success through a Coordinated Staffing Model.”  What went into this work?

I built a teamapproach to content marketing at the library. Non-profits have limited resources (i.e., people) to push messaging. But a big organization like the library has multiple message points: programming, customer service, circulation, collections, to cite just a few. It’s a matter of coordinating outreach. Though internal education and training, a regular working group of key stakeholders, the creation and implementation of polices, including a Crisis Plan, Best Practices and an Editorial Calendar, we were able to dedicate staff throughout the organization to message on a daily basis using team tools like HootSuite and Socialflow.

What kind of metrics were used to determine that The New York Public Library is #1 public library in the world on Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare?

Community growth, brand mentions, interactions and referrals. We published a monthly Metrics Dashboard using Facebook Insights, the HootSuite and Socialflow Twitter clients, Twitter Counter, Radian6, AddThis and Google Analytics. We shared the data with key stakeholders and examined it closely for insights about messaging, engagement and content.

How does social media for a library differ from social media from other companies?

It doesn’t. Like any business engaged in social, we had a long-term customer-centric vision. One of our major goals was discoverability. We wanted social users to be to be surprised and delighted to find us online (and to discover online and offline resources, like free databases and thousands of programs) and to think “Wow, I didn’t know you could do that at The New York Public Library.”

Have your ideas ever been challenged?  Which ones and how did you overcome resistance from others?

If an idea isn’t challenged, it may not be that good.  The first step in social media iteration is to identify the organizational challenges: internal resistance (turf, legal, security), lack of resources, lack of skills, an ever-changing technology space and the ongoing challenge of measuring ROI.

Alignment is key: the ability to rally internal resources and stakeholders is the #1 skill in successful social media integration. Evangelizers must be able to maneuver adeptly within an organization and rally the “deciders” for support.

Does Foursquare have any real purpose in relatively remote towns with a maximum of 30 retail businesses?

As part of its 2011 Centennial, NYPL was the first in the world to secure a Foursquare badge. The badge was yet one more way to introduce the library to new audiences and it proved a very successful partnership in terms of unique users, check ins and check outs.

AdAge recently did a post about Foursquare’s connection to “mainstream” retailers. Chris Copeland wrote: “Foursquare is a regional play that masks what it is not – a middle America, mainstream tool.” He suggested that Foursquare needs to continue to educate businesses about the benefits of its platform.

What do you think is Foursquare’s future?

Mobile location-based social networking will continue to be adopted.

Of all the campaigns you’ve led, which was your favorite?

The Centennial of NYPL’s flagship Fifth Avenue building in 2011. It was a perfect storm of owned, earned and paid media: there was an exhibit; a microsite; multiple programs; an advertising campaign that included print, radio, outdoor, transport and online; publications; signage; ecommunications; and a deeply integrated robust social effort across Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and YouTube. I secured VIK sponsorships from The Wall Street Journal, Titan Outdoor and the MTA to support the efforts. One interesting metric from the campaign was the incredibly high level of engagement with the library’s social content.

What is the most innovative use of social media that you’ve seen?

I am a big fan of Coke’s social strategy and tactics. I love that their Facebook Page is governed by regular fans, not “experts.” At the library, much of its social success is owed to the contributions of its staff. Power to the people!

Lisa Chau has been involved with Web 2.0 since graduate school at Dartmouth College, where she completed an independent study on blogging. She was subsequently highlighted as a woman blogger in Wellesley Magazine, published by her alma mater. Since 2009, Lisa has worked as an Assistant Director at the Tuck School of Business. In 2012, she launched GothamGreen212 to pursue social media strategy projects. View her online portfolio or follow her on Twitter.