Technology

100 Insights For New Media Marketing

~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

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.

Social Media Marketing Tips

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

~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

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?SocialMediaSitesBut 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

~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

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.

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?

~ K. Quesenberry ~ Leave a comment

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?