Andrew and Alex covered Forrester Research’s Marketing Forum 2008. During the forum, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff presented material from their new book, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies.

Charlene and Josh quickly overviewed their POST framework for using social networks and shared a number of bite-sized case studies of how brands like Procter & Gamble, Ernst & Young, and Loblaws effectively use social media to talk with and energize their customers. They also used Dell to illustrate the importance of tackling social media one application at a time, with high level executive support, and getting it right before moving on to the next initiative.

In addition to covering the presentation at the conference, Andrew also interviewed Charlene later in the day.

Harnessing Social Technologies to Energize Sales
Charlene Li, Analyst, Forrester Research
Josh Bernoff, Analyst, Forrester Research

POST Framework

The biggest problem with the use of social networks is that companies are trying things without a strategy. You need to have a process, start with the desired customer relationships, not the technologies, then decide what technologies to use the enable those relationships.

We call our methodology the “POST” process:

• People – What are your customers’ social activities?
• Objectives  – What do you want to accomplish?
• Strategy – Plan for how relationships with customers will change?
• Technology – Which technologies will help you achieve those objectives?

Within POST we break Objectives into five pieces:

• Research – listening to your customers;
• Marketing – talking to your customers;
• Sales – energizing your customers to advocate;
• Support – responding to your customers’ needs;
• Developing – embracing your customers.

Today’s Focus: Talking and Energizing (Marketing and Sales)

Talking. Talking is about two-way conversations, not just shouting, which is analogous to traditional one-way advertising. It’s critical to accompany these conversations with the use of metrics to track activity to sales.

Blendtec is a great example. They sell commercial grade blenders, and their decision to make videos began when the marketing executive saw the CEO trying to blend 2×4s to test out the blenders and decided he should record it. So they spent a few thousand dollars buying stuff to blend and then creating videos. The videos have become a YouTube hit with over 7 million views and 20+% sales growth. (See also Digital Podcast’s Are Ads as Content the Future of Advertising?)

Another example is Johnson & Johnson. J&J created a blog, opened it up for comments but incorporated a very strict comment screening policy to avoid liability, and made those guidelines explicit to consumers to avoid any will. They are a good example of how you can try things even within a strict regulatory oversight environment.

Ernst & Young is doing a great job of interacting with people on Facebook for recruiting. E&Y needs to recruit 3,500 college students each year, so within Facebook, they include information about recruiting and a wall for posting. In one post a student asked E&Y why they are not recruiting on their campus, and Dan Black, the head of North American campus recruitment, answered personally with suggestions for how to get in touch with E&Y. This kind of dialog has a viral effect on campuses.

Procter & Gamble had a problem trying to connect with teenage girls regarding tampons, which is not something that’s openly discussed. P&G created beinggirl.com, which includes discussions and Q&A about life as a teenage girl and Tampax and Always branding but no direct marketing. They are achieving a 4X return relative to traditional advertising, using their own internal metrics, and have rolled out the approach globally.

Energizing. Energizing is about finding and motivating enthusiastic customers to talk about your customers. Example efforts include brand ambassador programs, communities, and embeddable widgets.

Ratings and reviews are one of the most interesting ways for interacting with customers, especially for customers who wouldn’t otherwise be engaged. Loblaws, a supermarket chain, encourages shoppers to rate products online and share the ratings in the store aisles and advertisements. If customers complain about a product they’ll fix it, like when the added more eggplant to the eggplant mousaka that customers told them were under-eggplanted.

Fiskars, a scissors and craft supplies maker, created the Fisk-A-Teers website, an ambassador program. These are deeply passionate customers, but when surveyed, were very neutral about the Fiskars brand (when asked what food Fiskars would be, customers said Saltines). They made the Fisk-A-Teers site somewhat of a hot commodity by restricting membership to invitation-only after the site was seeded. They have 4,000 Fisk-A-Teers, and the number of positive mentions on the internet went up many-fold after the site launched. Fisk-A-Teers go to stores to give demonstrations, and when they do triple sales in the store on those days.

Brides.com energizes its fans through the use of widgets. They understand that brides and their friends are the ones who care about weddings, and created a countdown clock widget that brides can put on their own MySpace page.

How should companies get started?

It’s very easy for marketers to look at these social media efforts and get intimidated. Do not start by trying to move social applications into everything you do in your company. Pick one place, one application, make that’s successful and only then move on. Put metrics in place to make sure the success is measurable and can be replicated.

Dell jumped into social networking when Dells started catching on fire, literally. They had Lionel Menchaca be the lead spokesperson  he had the technical background, product review PR experience, and was well connected throughout the company.

Unfortunately, Lionel’s first efforts were too stiff and too company-focused. The blog was getting criticized, but despite these setbacks Michael Dell threw his support behind Lionel. It’s critical to have this kind of high-up support for social applications as these efforts always some ruffle feathers along the way.

Lionel put up a post titled ‘Flaming Notebook’ directly addressing the issue, including a link to pictures. He described in detail what Dell was doing about it and their investigations. Dell got wide praise for its directness and as a result were well ahead solving the problem and getting replacements before other laptop makers.

Dell didn’t stop there. The next thing they tried was IdeaStorm, a social application for generating ideas from customers. The first suggestion was a PC running Linux. They asked customers what form of Linux, what type of support, and conceived and shipped the product in 2 months vs. 9 months for the typical Dell product.

Next came DellShares, a Dell investor-focused blog. In many ways, this was really a means for distributing to individual investors answers they were already providing to the institutional investor community. They engaged with Legal first to identify and agree to necessary safeguards, ensuring that DellShares made it through to release versus being roadblocked. In this case, the Legal department devised a disclaimer that needs to be agreed to and clicked through before gaining access to the site.

In summary, to succeed with the use of social marketing:
(1) Focus on relationships, not the technologies.
(2) Find and nurture your revolutionaries.
(3) Start small with individual applications, but think big.

Q&A Discussion

How do you engineer the creation of viral video? It’s really hard to create something that goes viral, and it’s even harder to create one that communicates the message you want for the brand. For example, Delta put up a safety video featuring “Deltalina”, a take-off on Angelina. They at least thought about this enough to show consumers that they “get-it”, and there’s a lot more they could do to engage fans around the video. Forrester is going to do a video in support of the book about how to use data. It won’t be BlendTec-scale success, but we expect some pass-around

How critical are these techniques to driving business and marketing peripheral or the meat? It depends on how big your company is. BeingGirl.com is not what made Tampax and Always successful, but it’s a nice addition to a marketing plan. On the other hand, BlendTec had no consumer market before the videos, now they do. ConstantContact doubled their business with customer involvement. It goes back to marketing mix – never put all your eggs in one basket. You never know what will work with your audience.

How do you feel secure about what you’re creating? You don’t start with coming up with a brilliant idea, you start with who are your customers and what do they want. The BlendTech guys started by spending $50 with no real risk involved. Make it safe to fail, and encourage your team to try a lot of different things.

How do you tackle efforts to create very rich customer experiences with a very small number of people? If you look at the classical value of lifetime value, look at purchase amount, frequency, and viral value. Count the number of people they are actually touching and the value that drives. It’s not nearly as expensive as TV too. You have to start small to prove out the concept and see what works before trying to move it to the next level; once they get going these things scale very well.

More resources are available at www.forrester.com/Groundswell

[tags]Forrester 2008 Marketing Forum, Forrester Research, Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff, Groundswell, Social Marketing[/tags]

Patrice spoke about how at the very start all the parts of the program were completely disconnected. Someone had arranged for the branded entertainment piece on the Project Runway show and as a part of that got a large online buy on the Bravo site.

The project landed in Patrice’s lap and she went to Avenue A/Razorfish and had them develop an online campaign oriented around a very detailed map of all the touch points. Once they had completed the map, they went back through the map and made sure that they incorporated selling pants into the program in a way that featured the right products.

They got 3,000 design submissions to the contest for designing a new Levi’s product. Over 2000 of the submissions complied with the rules. The campaign got 134,000 unique visitors and almost 19,000 registered users. Two-thirds of those were women in target age group of 18 to 25 years old. They had 122,000 design ratings. They also got 924 social networking/blog badges with over 30,000 views.

Interestingly word of mouth marketing on social media like blogs and social networks turned out to be a major driver of awareness about the campaign. Social media drove 38% of the awareness about the campaign as compared to 30% of awareness coming from TV and low single digit for everything else.

During the five weeks that the program was running, the top 5 selling products changed from traditional products to the featured products. The traditional core products had a price point of about 44 dollars and sold to an older demographic. The products featured in the campaign were Levi store exclusive, more fashion forward and had price range of 58 to 70 dollars. Literally overnight they got a different demographic and a sales lift that made a measurable impact on sales.

Once the campaign ended, the top 5 selling products switched back to the traditional top 5 selling products.

Patrice said that they had to steal themselves to the loss of control and reaction during the program. Once they had chosen a winner, they had some very negative comments from people who didn’t win. This caused some consternation about the comments and debate about what to do about the comments. Levi decided to leave the comments up and it turned out well as the community policed the problem well.

Perhaps the most important part of the program was the way the program changed the way the company worked to get the digital team working with the marketing team. The online and traditional agencies had to work together to make this work.

While the results may not seem tremendous, Patrice felt that the program was a tremendous success, due to the organizational learning and the level of engagement.

It is very interesting to see Levi’s willingness to experiment and the results of this program. Project 501 clearly provided some hands on learning and capability building for Levi. It is clear that this kind of program can drive sales. The challenge now becomes how how to scale this type of program into a more significant campaign and how to make it more than a five week program.

[tags]social marketing, case study, Levi[/tags]

It’s great to see marketers start to understand why community matters, and it’s why we’re seeing investment in sites like these. Both are nicely designed sites that offer the promise of community.

The problem is that huge brands like these need to be attracting the attention of large audiences to make their marketing efficient, and trying to create large, new communities from scratch is both high cost and high risk.

In the physical world, you don’t try to create another shopping mall so people can come to your store, you take your store to the existing shopping mall so you can tap into an existing community. The mall shoppers are not going to go to a remote store in large numbers because it’s too much hassle.

By that logic, brands should not expect people to leave where they are now to travel to these new spaces. If the people are hanging out in MySpace and Facebook, why not build community there, or at least make that a major part of the your community building effort?

I looked, but could not find ways these sites link into MySpace/Facebook. If they are not built to connect to these huge social networks then they are making a mistake. Perhaps they are, but I couldn’t find out how. It would be interesting to find out if they have plans to connect into these communities.

I looked to see what others thought about the build versus join question. The question has been asked and debated in some depth. While there seems to be a strong leaning towards “it depends”, I think you have to go with the economics of community building.

Building large communities from scratch is hard, costly and risky. Anything you can do to lower the cost (hassle, time, etc) of connection and participation is incredibly important to building community. A well thought out strategy that makes it easy for people to connect to these new spaces from their existing hang outs will reduce the cost and risk of community building.

The social web is a distributed community with people in lots of places and increasingly they expect the content to come to them. RSS, embeddable players, and Facebook apps are training people that they can get what they want, wherever they want it. And that place is where they hang out now. Start there, and then give them a good reason to come visit your place.

If brand marketers don’t start getting this, they will spend lots of money and end up with lots of disappointments.

[tags]brands, community, social marketing, Levi, Krystal Light, Razor Fish[/tags]

In this podcast, Chris provides some great perspective on the organizational and personnel challenges these companies face in the transition to new business models. He describes the role that social marketing and super fans played in helping properties like Syriana and An Inconvenient Truth break out and build audiences. This podcast interview provides a behind the scenes view into where things are now and some of the major changes to come.

Chris is founder and president of Orbit Media Group, where he consults with media and internet companies creating partnerships, programming and relationships between and to the benefit of media, entertainment and online brands. His current clients range from Facebook.com, one of the fastest-growing internet companies on earth, for which he helped to create and produce “Facebook Diaries,” the first-ever hybrid user-generated video/reality TV show to be distributed on Facebook.com, Ziddio.com, Comcast VOD and linear television and the IFC Channel, to HBO to Comcast, the largest cable and broadband company in the US to HBO to Glam.com, the number one site for women to film icons, to Born4Sports, a social network, marketplace and ecommerce platform for sports and sports lifestyle with presence in Europe, Asia and soon, the US.

Prior to launching his own consulting company, Chris co-founded Participant Productions in 2004 with Jeff Skoll, eBay’s first President. Participant’s vision is to create entertainment that inspires audiences to make social change. In this capacity, Chris developed and executed on the business plan, was intimately involved in finding and hiring initial executive personnel and managed the company overall. Participant’s first slate of movies — Syriana, starring George Clooney and Matt Damon; North Country, starring Charlize Theron; Good Night and Good Luck, starring David Strathairn and George Clooney, and the documentary Murderball – were nominated for an unprecedented 11 Academy Awards. Chris is also proud to have identified and helped to develop former Vice President Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth which won the Oscar for Best Documentary and Gore’s work participated in his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In addition to the above-mentioned films, Chris developed and Executive Produced Participant’s first feature: American Gun starring Marcia Gay-Harden, Forrest Whittaker, Donald Sutherland, Linda Cardelini and Tony Goldwyn.

[tags]Chris Adams, Super Fans, social marketing, social media, Digital Hollywood[/tags]