Brand Marketing Tips by Steve Poppe » social media

Social Media For Good.

Steve Poppe — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 12:55:48 +0000

When the Flip video camera, now owned by Cisco, first came out I posted it will change the world. If you thought the video taping of the Rodney King beating changed the world, image how putting video cameras in every pair of pants and pocketbook might alter history. Hello Iran?

Social networking, still in its infancy, is going to change the world in even more powerful ways. Flatten away I say. Social networking and social media started out as friend finding, simple messaging, and posting of photos and captions – uses which are still going strong. More recently, smart businesses have seen the upside of using it commercially to improve bottom line and topline revenue through a handful of applications: Customer care, promotions and research. We’ve along scratched the surface with Social Media in business…stay tuned.

What’s Next?

The next wave will be the more thoughtful use of social media. More cause related. Ask Nestle about its palm oil/rain forest problems — the result of social media pressure. Ask Nike about its policy of outsourcing production to Honduran companies who demonstrate unfair labor practices…really torking off college students. If you think a Mel Gibson diatribe can go viral quickly, wait until you see what citizen journalists can do with watchful eyes and some motivation. This new wave of social media activism is going to have mad impact. Cover-ups won’t cover as easily and corporations and governments will need to watch their steps. It’s next. And it’s welcome. Peace it up!

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Silo vs. Integrated

Steve Poppe — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 12:20:47 +0000

In the advertising and marketing business, digital is its own channel. Rare is the vendor that provides a truly integrated single source worldview of a brand. A really smart person once said to an important client “campaigns are overrated” which stuck me with a ferocity that shook my world, but he was right. A campaign, when well-defined and well-equipped is a powerful selling mechanism. It’s what people talk about. But translating campaigns across silos is not easy. Heck, anyone who has ever worked at an ad agency knows campaigns don’t always transfer across media. A great design-driven print campaign may not work well in radio or a murderously effective TV campaign may not work as out of home. It’s tah-woooh. And those silos are under one roof.

Competing Market Forces

A bunch of hearty souls are trying to bring online and offline selling under one roof. Yet a greater number of very skilled entrepreneurs are out there selling against the one roof approach — creating even greater and greater specialization. A friend at CatalystSF told me that there are over 200 social media agencies in the New York area alone. So what do you do about these two competing forces — the shops who want more pie and are trying to integrate and the shops selling best of breed, stand alone digital marketing specialties? Well the planner in me usually starts problem solving by “following the money.” In the case of integrated vs. stand alone I say “follow the strategy.”

If you find a potential partner with a sense of business strategy that transcends tactical discussions, listen. Business strategy first. Marketing strategy second. Message strategy third and tactical fourth. I don’t care if its RGA or TBWA. Peace it up!

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Heroes and Besmirchers on the Web.

Steve Poppe — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 12:06:14 +0000

Lionel Messi

Will there be fewer heroes in the world because of social media? I wonder. Lionel Messi is a futbol hero — in Argentina and to futbolers around the world. Back in the day (before YouTube and social) Messi would have been known to the world via a few video clips seen on TV, a couple of really positive well-told stories in Sports Illustrated, some bedroom posters and live game broadcasts and interviews. Heroes were made and packaged more easily then.

But today, no one of note makes it under the radar. One bad decision at a nightclub, one oafish treatment of a fan, an out of context insensitive remark and the luster is off. It is human nature to have heroes — be they in sports, politics, music or religion. We need heroes. They give us hope and aspiration. But jealousy and officiousness are also human behaviors and social media is filled with people so inclined. Besmirchers. And all it takes is a few besmirchers to start a hero’s downfall.

The good news is we are open to more global heroes than ever before because of the Web (I can’t wait to watch Messi play) and that’s good. The web needs to be a bit kinder and gentler, though, when it comes to comments and posts. The mission of the Web is to disseminate the truth, but for the good of the planet. Let’s dis the negative petty stuff. We need an emoticon to protest the negative stuff. Somehow doesn’t quite make it. Peace!

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The Ascent of Marketing.

Steve Poppe — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 12:42:57 +0000

Back in the 1700-1800s (in the U.S.) if you needed stuff you either made it or went to the general store. The Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalogue was the next marketing innovation (1888), showing pictures of products and published prices, allowing customers to purchase by mail. Among the 322 pages in the catalogue published in 1894 must have been products didn’t sell and had to be replaced. The birth of ROI?

Television

The next massive marketing innovation was television. Television commercials which began in earnest in the 1940s became the most popular, effective form of advertising. But can you imaging trying to track sales to media and production back then in the very beginning? “Where’s the ROI? How do you measure this stuff?” Mad men.

The Web

Fast forward to the Inter-nech. Banner ads and ad serving allowed us to count clicks. 2% click thru rates. Whoo hoo. Click to buy. Whoo hoo. But not everything could be bought over the web. (Discussion of that for another day.) CTRs diminished and web display ads became, so said the salespeople, a branding mechanism.

Social Media

Enter social media. And consultants. When consultants out-number practitioners you know the market is in flux. The Altimeter Group, some very smart people let me just say, created a social media presenttion ‘splaining how to measure social media via a marketing analytics framework. Here are some of the measurables: share of voice, audience engagement, conversation reach, active advocates, active influence, advocacy impact, customer problem resolution rate, resolution time, satisfaction score, plus a couple of metrics tied to gathering input for product innovation. What’s not mentioned here, something Messrs. Sear and Roebuck might have added, is sales. I love consultants ( am one) and the Altimeter Group is growing like a dookie, but until they and all of us tie these type of metrics back to da monies, we’re just making paper.

A smart client at AT&T once said to me, “we collect all this data now we have to do something smart with it.” That’s business. That’s return on strategy. Peace!

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Meaningful Memorable Context.

Steve Poppe — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 13:02:10 +0000

Product placement is a funny thing; more often than not when you see a brand in a movie or a TV reality show it’s been placed there at a price. Most of the time, those placements are heavy-handed and disruptive — not a good thing. If a viewer feels the product has been curated into a story it suspends belief. Kind of like bad acting.

When discussing commercial social media I often refer to the need for the brand poster – the person posting on behalf of the brand — to create a persona, complete with a tangible, obvious motivation. For Zude.com, for instance, “Tip-Z” was created as a roving help person. She assisted people with the drag and drop application, but she did so as a bit of a tippler. Hic. So some of her help came out a bit garbled, goofy and funny. Personality flaws aside, it made Tip-Z real.

Product placement on TV that doesn’t fit or social media personalities that lack personality underachieve. Content may be king but context is key. One way around what Steve Rubel calls “The Attention Crash” is to create muscle memory for brands. While others are out there shamelessly hawking product and services one on top of the other, smart brands are standing out because they create memorable context. Meaningful, memorable context. Peace!

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How to Charge for Social Media.

Steve Poppe — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 12:56:33 +0000

I was chatting with a friend at JWT the other day about how agencies can’t make money in today’s social media entranced marketplace — and I may have solved the problem. Here goes:

Say you come up a with a big engagement idea. It’s for a new product launch and you have created a fun video demonstration of the product. A couple of graduate students from NYU did the production at a cost of $4,500. You work at Publicis and know you can post the video for free and the mark-up won’t pay for the pastry at the presentation meeting. How do you price it? Staff it? Measure it? Is it done under a retainer? Oy.

The answer is simple: You price it based on delivered reach, with a smidgen of frequency. If the video is viewed 0-24,999 times (uniques) you charge $2,500. If seen 25,000 to 75,000 times $4,500….and so on.

If the video is linked to another site, Publicis earns a bonus based on other site’s traffic plus the additional views. If the video gets played on TV or a big portal, another bonus plus those views. Think of the model as part SAG/AFTRA, part pay-per-view, part Nielsen Ratings.

Now that wasn’t that hard, was it? Piece. I mean Peace!

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Corporate Social Media Departments.

Steve Poppe — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 13:17:30 +0000

I met with someone smart yesterday and shared my view that in the future large corporations will have their own social media departments — staffed with writers, videographers, photographers, coders and digital editors. This senior strategy and innovation officer processed the thought, nodded in partial agreement, then noted that the level of creativity likely to come out of this type of group would be modest. He was right.

An internal social media department will do a good job of relating the corporate viewpoint, organizing proof and demonstrations of product value, and it will do so accurately… but in the end it will lack that creative oomph provided by an agency. And here, I mean a digital or a brand agency.

That’s not to say internal social media departments won’t happen, they will. They already are. But the talent level required to do it BIG, won’t be found on staff. Sure, some implementation can be handled inside, but not the big honkin’ creative idea. Not the polished sight and sound. And agencies need to figure out how to charge for that idea? Beyond production and mark-up that is. Does the answer reside within Google? Hmmmm. Peace!

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Optimism vs. Other

Steve Poppe — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 12:33:28 +0000

Let’s face it, it’s been a crazy tough economy for everyone. Especially marketers and those in advertising related businesses. Were it not for internet search and social media (ways to keep moving at reduced costs) things would have been even worse.

When money is tight people fall into two distinct categories: optimists and pessimists. The whole pessimism thing is easy to diagnose and figure out. It is an alterable condition cured by the passage of time. The optimism thing is harder to understand. And in business it’s less prevalent. Is it tied to a special neural gene? One thing that goes hand-in-hand with optimism in my view is the ability to view things not just in the here and now but with a historic perspective. Time passes. There is a now, a future and a past. Optimists tend to see them all.

New York University

New York University is an example of an institution surrounding itself with optimism. NYU has grand plans to grow the school’s footprint, stature and academic standing over the next 20 years. They will succeed because of optimism and planning. Do you think the day after healthcare passes and a huge part of the populace is angry is a good time to talk about this huge investment – probably not. That’s optimism.

When you meet marketers and corporate leaders you can often tell immediately which camp they fall into. And trust me it’s always best to do business with optimists. Not those of the “head in the clouds” variety but realists who are builders and forward lookers. Brands, businesses, organizations and departments need good leadership. Optimism and a positive view forward are cornerstones. Steve Jobs? Optimist. Peace it up!

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Davos for Marketers?

Steve Poppe — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 13:40:32 +0000

The World Economic Summit currently underway in Davos Switzerland should be recreated once a year for all the leaders of the advertising and marketing communities. We should probably throw in a few economists just to keep the event grounded; after all, the real prize is money.

The polyglot array of marketing agencies which make up client rosters today is insanely inefficient and needs to be fixed. Some big global companies have 50 plus ad agencies. Add to that public relations shops, direct marketing companies, digital, events/promotions, and the newly coined social media shops and you can begin to imagine the waste. The donut and bagel budget alone must be incalculable. And all the people needed to effectively manage these many agents is also a big honkin’ number. Plus communications, travel, entertainment, etc. Smart agencies and holding companies should take the lead on this — but that’s not likely to happen.

Davos for Marketers will, no doubt, be held in Cincinnati and it should be broken into two parts: all agencies then agencies plus marketers. No golf, no awards, no spousal programs, just hard work intended to optimize the silos, the workflow, outputs, integration, proper spending and measurement. I suspect the first year will be a mess. — metal detectors will be a good idea – but the reality is, for marketers and their agents it will be an important step toward building a more effective marketing future. Peace!

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Twisted Juice.

Steve Poppe — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 13:46:33 +0000

Mitch Joel and Jaffe Juice’s Joseph Jaffe squared off yesterday in a podcast that was a good deal of fun. Each agreed they were good friends but that was about all they agreed upon — save for the obligatory strokefest at the end. Mr. Jaffe is a principal at Crayon now owned by Powered and Mr. Joel is president of Twist Image a leading digital shop based in Toronto. Both are published (books, blogs and pods) and practiced “duelists.”

The discussion with which they played pong was “Is social media a discrete marketing practice?” Mr Jaffe says “yes,” Mr. Joel “no.”

The crux of the debate is this: Social media needs to be well integrated into the marketing and digital practices of corporations. Today, it’s not. Mr. Joel says there are smart companies doing so and he’s right. Mr. Jaffe says those companies are the “exception not the rule” and he’s right. Powered is betting that specialized shops – best of breed social shops – will be better positioned to make waves and earn low hanging engagements. Mr. Joel believes that cleanest most likely social successes will come from integrated digital shops, and in the long run that is probably more correct. But his approach is less promotable and less newsworthy. Social media is the haps today. There is demand for it and a social marketing swell surrounding it.

Da Monies.

So where is the money in social media? Tweeting buy the pound? Friending by the hundred? In strategy? Yep. Where is the money in the integrated approach? The answer is tweeting by the pound and building websites – a more lucrative approach.

Win by Knockout?

No. Both arguments are very compelling. Mr. Jaffe and Powered CMO Aaron Strout are loudly breaking new ground. (There are supposedly scores of quiet social media agencies in NYC alone.) Mr. Joel gets it for sure, and though his sound bite is not as powerful he will probably have higher margins this year. Were I a marketing director and these two pitching my business, I’m sure the last one to present would win the business.

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