100 Insights For New Media Marketing

For my 100th post on this blog, I thought I would share all 100 insights in one place. Each listing is a link back to the original post.

100 Insights For New Media Marketing:

1. Is New Media Killing Traditional Media’s Star?

2. Are Bloggers More Sensitive To Spin?

3. Technology Makes Us Dumber, Less Productive And Stressed Out

4. Which Advertising Medium Is best?

5. Can Direct Response Be Creative?

6. Toyota Apology-athon

7. Why Does New Media Matter? Because United Breaks Guitars

8. The Last Thing We Need Is Another Blog

9. Walk A Mile In Zappos’ New Media Shoes

10. Tu Voz Rings True For Minority Marketing

11. More Information On Information Overload

12. Does Copy Matter Less On The Web?

13. Can The iPad Save My Newspaper?

14. Are You Ready For A Content Revolution?

15. Somebody’s Watching Me

16. Is There A Creative Process?

17. Is All Buzz Good And Cheap?

18. Brand Extensions Achieve MAXIMum Failure

19. Speak Softly And Carry A Big Marketing Stick

20. Is Facebook’s Privacy Policy Friend or Foe?

21. BP Can’t Get Beyond Petroleum

22. Are Mobile Ads Still Annoying?

23. Are Intellectual Property Rights Wrong?

24. EBSCO, Forbes, Time Open The Digital Divide

25. Yahoo Cheers Associated Content Acquisition–Society Jeers

26. Can Millennials Save Us Through Cause Marketing?

27. Creativity Beats Media In TV ROI

28. GM Recall Recalls Past PR Crises

29. Cause Marketing Or Crisis Response?

30. US Census: Bad Ads But Great Information

31. Where Is The Star Power In The Gulf Clean Up?

32. Cause Marketing’s Future Is Engagement Through Social Media

33. Churchill, TED And New Marketing

34. Blah, Blah, Blog: Why Companies Should Listen

35. Online Research: Temptations and Limitations

36. Does .005% Make A Difference? Ask Toyota

37. Can Marketing Statistics Improve Your NFL Team?

38. Celebrity, Media Outreach And Events Oh My!

39. Cable TV Decline: Media Planning Gets Tougher

40. Failed Test? Try An Ethnographic Study

41. Do We All Need Twitter Editors?

42. The Press Release, Blogger Outreach And SEO

43. New Media Needs A New Name

44. Public Relations Challenges For Non-profits

45. Three Is The Magic Number

46. Corporate Communications, Marketing, IMC, PR and Advertising. What’s the difference?

47. Which Social Media Conversation Are You Joining?

48. Earth Day PSA 2.0

49. Click Here: Digital Call To Actions

50. Measuring Print Response 2.0

51. Visual Continuity in Print And Digital

52. Brand Equity: Tangible Assets Are A Small Part Today’s Brand Value

53. Do You Have Social Media Fatigue?

54. Which Came First The Product Or Value?

55. Ride The Cluetrain To Five Easy Pieces: New Marketing Strategy For A New Digital Market

56. The Top Ten Things I’ve Learned in Marketing and Advertising

57. Social Media Is A Big Idea For Small Business

58. Cause Marketing to Boost Startups and Small Business

59. As Smartphone Ownership Crosses 50% And Mobile Ad Spending Jumps 80% Keep 3 Key Measures In Mind

60. Search Gets Social

61. A Dead Guy Is Following Me On Twitter: Signs Social Media Is Taking Over

62. Visual Continuity: Is It Always A Good Strategy?

63. Big Ideas And Big Results Don’t Need Big Budgets

64. Afraid of Digital? History Says Run To It, Not Away

65. Savages Movie Written With Fragment Digital Media In Mind

66. A Social Media Experiment: TDI Club Forum

67. Hallucinations Aren’t Contagious, But Social Media Is Real For Many Business Functions

68. Do You Look For Wrongs Or Rights? Stop Social Media Excuses

69. “Like” Is More Than A Facebook Icon

70. Forrester: Facebook and Twitter Do Almost Nothing for Sales

71. Communications: The Language That Drives Revenue

72. Brand Engagement Through The “Martydom Effect”

73. Super Bowl Ads: A Unique Opportunity for Undivided Attention

74. Fear Means Go: Stretch Yourself For Social Media Success

75. Successful Entrepreneurs Make Mistakes To Discover New Approaches, Opportunities And Business Models

76. What Do We Do With Out-Of-Date Advertising Professors?

77. Gen-Y Honda Student Campaign Gets Results With This Gen-Xer

78. A Text For That? App Hype Shouldn’t Discount Text Marketing

79. Trouble Harnessing Social Media? Relationships Can’t Be Automated

80. Can Retail Make Room For Showrooming?

81. There Are No Top 10 Best Rules for Social Media Marketing

82. Has PR Become An Unsustainable 24/7 Profession: Do We Really Need Social Media Mission Control Centers?

83. Do You Have To Be Active On Social Media? Do You Like Being Invited To A Party And Being Ignored?

84. Filling The Digital Marketing Gap 19 Students At A Time

85. Mom’s Don’t Tweet But They Do Watch The Voice And #VoiceSave Through Their Teens

86. The 12 Ways of Brand Community Value: My Year End Social Media Tips List

87. Research Says Add New Media, But Don’t Drop The Old: Study Of Over 400 Successful Marketing Campaigns

88. What Is Your Social Media BFF? 42% Of Adults Now Use Multiple Social Sites

89. Shakespeare Predicts Super Bowl Commercial Winners: Research Shows Sex And Humor Aren’t The Key, It’s Story

90. USA Today Ad Meter Super Bowl Results: Story Wins With Puppy Love And Others!

91. If You’re Simply Adding To The Noise, Facebook Will Now Turn Off Your Organic Reach

92. Airline Industry Has Highest Response Rate On Twitter And Facebook. What About In Winter Storm Pax?

93. Irony: Sharing Social Media About Spending Less Time On Social Media

94. 5 Ways Social Media Can Fuel Startup Success

95. 24 Hour Rule: What Harry S. Truman Can Teach Us About Social Media

96. Advertising Campaigns Are Dead: Brand Story Is The New Big Idea

97. Star Bellied Sneeches: Social Media Badges Can Save Companies Billions

98. Return On Relationship: Thanks Ted For Living It

99. Behind Amazon’s Pay To Quit Program: Happy Employees + Social Media = Real Value

100. 100 Tips For New Media Marketing

What Is Your Social Media BFF? 42% Of Adults Now Use Multiple Social Sites

The term Best friends forever (BFF) is a close friendship developed by teenagers and young people. We may be friends with a few or a lot of social media sites, but I bet you have your favorite.

The Pew Research Center’s Social Media Update gives us a look into how social media use is evolving. As of 2013, 73% of online adults used social networking sites. Facebook was many people’s BFF in terms of number of users. But Pew Center Research also found that a striking number of users are now diversifying onto other platforms.

Results of the survey indicate that some 42% of online adults now use multiple social networking sites. What’s more, Instagram users are nearly as likely as Facebook users to check in to the site on a daily basis. Have you starting exploring personal, career, or business relationships beyond Facebook?

But even this information from the Pew Center Research study can be limiting. It only looked at Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram. We know there is a lot more out there. It seems that every month another social media star is rising. Lately you may have been hearing about SnapChat or Quora, and Digg reinventing itself and gaining ground. Plus, you can never count out Google+, which keeps adding features to gain users. Let’s face it, social media can be overwhelming.

The key to success is realizing you don’t have to be in every social media channel to see real results. How do you choose? Start by organizing them into categories. You probably have high school and college BFFs, family BFFs, Work BFFs and neighborhood BFFs. They are all your friends, but you do different things with each. Below are the main categories of social media that I have developed with a list of the main players in each

Social Media Categories:

Social Networks – Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+

Blogging and Forums – WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr

Microblogging  – Twitter, Pinterest

Media Sharing – YouTube, Flikr, Instagram

Geo-location – Foursquare, Facebook Places, Google+ Locations

Ratings and Reviews – Yelp, Citysearch, Google+ Local

Social Bookmarking – Reddit, StumbleUpon, Digg

Wikis and Social Knowledge – Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, Quora

Podcasts – RSS, iTunes

For personal, business, or career, you have to decide who you want to talk to and what you to say and how you want to say it. Wikipedia says BFFs are common when you are young, but you may grow out of them as you get older. Perhaps it is time you grew out of your social media BFF and start exploring some of these other options.

The 12 Ways of Brand Community Value: My Year End Social Media Tips List

A couple of years ago some professors conducted research published in the Journal of Marketing. Using social practice theory, they studied 9 brand communities from various product categories to discover 12 common practices consumers realize value beyond what firms create or even anticipate. I thought I would take some time to explain these practices with examples, but also ask you to consider whether you are leveraging these insights to optimize collaborative value creation. Through these 12 practices, consumers can affect the entire marketing mix, enable brand use and encourage deeper community engagement.

12 Practices for Creating Value in Brand Communities

1. Welcoming – Greeting new members and assisting in brand learning and community socialization. Welcoming can also be negative and discourage participation. When I started following @JHUCarey they sent a quick note welcoming me to their Twitter brand community with, “@Kquesen Great to connect with you! Looking forward to your tweets. 🙂 ”

2. Empathizing – Lending emotional support to other members, including support for brand-related trials (product failure) or life issues (job). Apple’s new version of Keynote is simplified, but also deleted features upsetting Apple community members. Here is one member empathizing with those trials starting by saying, “Relax and breath.”

3. Governing – Explaining behavior expectations within the brand community. I return to Apple Support Forums for their governing example. The Community Etiquette guidelines are simple, yet enforced. One member remarked how his first post expressing frustration over Keynote ’13 was removed for obscenities. He removed them and the comment was returned to public view.

4. Evangelizing – Sharing brand “good news” and inspiring others, which may involve negative comparison to competing brands. This summer the Android Community website published a blog post evangelizing Android, “iPhone 5S specification rumor wrap-up: this is no Android competitor.” It spurred 26 emotional comments from brand enthusiasts.

5. Justifying – Rationale for devoting time and effort to the brand. Lego Certified Professionals does a great job of justifying more time spent with the brand by explaining their existence as “… a community-based program made up of adult LEGO hobbyists who have turned their passion for building and creating with LEGO bricks into a full-time or part-time profession.”

6. Staking – Recognizing variance within the brand community membership and marking intragroup distinction and similarity. Yahoo Answers provides staking with Top Contributor badges for its most active brand community members.

7. Milestoning – Milestoning is noting seminal events in brand ownership and consumption. When Facebook surpassed a billion users it was a big deal. The facesoffacebook.com is milestoning by cramming every user onto a single page of over 1.2 billion colored pixels that can be zoomed to reveal individual faces.

8. Badging – Badging is translating milestones into symbols. Samsung Nation is an online loyalty program that offers virtual rewards to consumers who talk up the electronics giant and offers badging such as a virtual “Twitterati” turquoise circle for posting links to samsung.com.

9. Documenting – Detailing the brand relationship journey as a story. Chipotle Grill’s “The Scarecrow” does an excellent job at documenting their brand story as over 11 million now know their commitment to food with integrity.

10. Grooming – Caring for the brand and optimizing use patterns. The Home Depot’s YouTube Channel is a great place for grooming the brand’s “You Can Do It” image including their “How to Tile a Bathroom” video with over 1.3 million views.

11. Customizing – Modifying the brand to suit group or individual needs by changing factory specs or enhancing performance. NikeiD has built a community around customizing by allowing “you to personalize your performance, fine-tune your fit and represent your style.”

12. Commoditizing – Recommendations directed at other members or at the firm (you should fix this/do this/change this) improve products brought to the marketplace. Five years ago Dell brought commoditizing to a new level with IdeaStorm, which has received nearly 15,000 suggestions and has made 500 refinements based on them.

That is my year end top 12 list. I hope you found practices to implement this year that will add value and increase engagement in your brand communities.

Can Retail Make Room For Showrooming?

Retail stores have had to deal with an increasing threat to their sales as smartphone ownership has crossed 50% and more consumers are using stores as a “showroom” before buying goods online. This especially became a problem for retailer Target when Amazon offered a 5% discount to anyone who used their Price Check app to scan a bar code of an item in a store and then bought it from the website. As a result, Target dropped Kindle from shelves saying, “What we aren’t willing to do is let online-only retailers use our brick-and-mortar stores as a showroom for their products and undercut our prices.” Not too long after Walmart followed suit by dropping Kindles from their stores.

How big is this problem? A recent survey says 50% of respondents with smartphones research prices while in store, 1 in 3 who research prices leave and buy from a competitor, and 96% plan to “showroom” in the future.

So what can retailers do? An article in Forbes suggests three strategies:
1. Begin a strategic conversation between brands and retailers. Through dual distribution or multichannel marketing they often end up competing against each other. Big retailers such as Best Buy need to develop exclusives to keep customers coming and buying. Tom Van Riper from Forbes said this is how Barnes & Noble kept Amazon from closing their business by developing the Nook.
2. Embrace customization as a key area of strategic growth. Large shoe brands such as Reebok and Nike are seeing revenue numbers in the $100 million range with their custom shoe programs.
3. Focus on the customer experience. Forrester research says 35% of shoppers want to purchase custom products to stand out from their peers. But also consider custom buying experiences for long term loyalty and engagement.

Mashable suggests innovation as another way to battle showrooming and talks about a store in Australia which started charging consumers $5 just to walk into the store. Before you start a retail cover charge also consider new digital marketing services that engage shoppers to entice them to stores. For example, Target has announced plans to price-match online competitors, such as Amazon. And Brian Gillespie, principal at a service design firm, suggests encouraging “webrooming” (the opposite of showrooming) where shoppers search for products they want online, and then head into the store to make a purchase.

Gillespie makes a good point. It comes down to retailers creating an in-store experience exceptional enough to keep consumers purchasing in-store. The kind of customer service Nordstrom offers and enhanced with digital environments. But will that kind of service draw a crowd for toilet paper at Target the same way it does for Eau de toilette at Nordstrom?

Trouble Harnessing Social Media? Relationships Can’t Be Automated

Today I can’t imagine recommending a brand not be on Facebook. It’s hard to ignore reaching one billion people. A recent survey of CMOs indicate they know this. In fact 82% said they plan to increase their use of social media over the next 3-5 years. But that same IBM study indicates marketers are struggling to harness their social media investment. They feel overwhelmed by the volume of customer data on websites like Facebook and consider themselves ill-equipped to leverage it.

IBM’s solution is more robust software. Marketing executive Marcel Holsheimer says, “Marketing is going to become much more an automated software play than it was in the past. This is why IBM is now making the investment in this space.” I agree that automation is key to collect and analyze social media information, and we need more robust software to manage big data. But we shouldn’t pretend that is the only part of the solution. In all the hype over big data let’s not forget the human at the end of the technology.

Social media has exploded because it connects real people. Humans by nature are social creatures. Relationships give meaning and purpose to our lives like no other activity or endeavor. Despite the attempts of HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey you can’t have a relationship with automated software. Use all the social media dashboards you want, but there still has to be a human with that update, post and tweet investing time into the customer relationship.

How do you develop strong social relationships? Student health services at University of Indiana suggests the following as essential relationship skills:

1. Listen to what the other person is saying.
2. Develop solutions that suit both of your needs.
3. Express your appreciation.
4. Show empathy and genuine concern.

A similar list emphasizes these key interpersonal skills:

1. Look
2. Listen
3. Ask
4. Learn
5. Understand
6. Acknowledge
7. Provide
8. Commit
9. Contribute
10. Follow up

If your brand is on Facebook, good, you probably need to be there. But are you acting the right way? Go to your page, look at the activity and compare it to the two lists above. Then estimate your brand’s social skills score. How are you doing?

For those who have seen 2001: A Space Odyssey you know how HAL 9000’s personal interactions turn out for the Discovery spacecraft and crew. If you haven’t seen the movie, take a break from big data software automation to interact with an epic film filled with real human drama.

Why Does New Media Matter? Because United Breaks Guitars.

Consumers are creating their own content and marketers are monitoring their activity to react. New media has made the single voice a force to be reckoned with. Have you seen the YouTube video “United Breaks Guitars?” It is one man’s effort to get United Airlines to pay for the guitar their baggage handlers broke. It is up to 8.1 million views. On the best nights last fall the  Jay Leno Show pulled in 6.2 million viewers. And United Airline’s own magazine Hemispheres only has an annual circulation of 4.5 million.

Why does new media matter? Because Blending an iPhone on YouTube lead to a five-fold increase in sales for Blendtec. Because CEOs are communicating directly with employees and customers. Sun Microsystems CEO Blog gets 400,000 hits a month. Because the cable company is actually changing its image. Comcastcares is improving customer service by monitoring negative comments on Twitter and responding directly. Because in three days the American Red Cross raised $7 million for its Haiti relief efforts via text messaging.

What we’re really talking about is anything that promotes interaction (consumer to consumer, company to consumer, consumer to company) through digital technology. Is it all still new? Dot coms had their boom and bust over ten years ago. The FTC suggests a six-month limit on the use of the word new in advertising. So is it time for a new name for new media? I humbly suggest “Interactive Digital Media.”

New media is digital. And it matters because it is interactive.

It’s Activigital.

Technology Makes Us Dumber, Less Productive And Stressed Out.

A recent Psychology Today article says GPS may get people to their destinations faster, but in the process they’ve loosing the ability to think through navigation problems themselves–a skill that trains our brain to solve other problems too.

Other research on “Infomania” says workers distracted by email and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers. The study even warns of people becoming addicted to email and text messages finding that 62% of people checked work messages at home or on vacation. More than 50% said they always responded to an email “immediately” or as soon as possible, but people constantly interrupting tasks to react to email or text messages suffer similar effects on the mind as losing a night’s sleep.

Similarly a recent Wall Street Journal column cited growing evidence that multitasking erodes, rather than enhances, productivity. As people divide their attention between two even seemingly simple tasks–like reading email while talking on the phone–comprehension, concentration and short-term memory suffer. Research also indicates that switching from one job to another eats up more time than waiting to finish one job before beginning the next.

Stress-management expert Jon Kabat-Zinn offers seminars and workshops on time-management. His secret? Mindfulness–doing one thing at a time–can add more hours to your day. You get more done, enjoy things more, and feel less stress.

Technology can connect people. It can also disconnect them. Technology can improve efficiency. It can also drain it. How long can you let an email or text or Tweet go without answering it?