Social media can be a very effective mechanism for marketing as shown in this video case study produced by Shel Israel as part of FastCompany.tv. The campaign was put together by SeaWorld San Antonio and focused on a pre-launch campaign for a new ride at the park called Journey to Atlantis.

They put up a WordPress blog and uploaded raw content to Flickr and YouTube. They then worked the online communities focused on roller coasters to get the word out.

This is an excellent example of a simple, highly focused campaign and a well orchestrated effort to measure the results.

This type of campaign shows that social media can be woven into your marketing efforts with practical and relatively straightforward methods. I’ve captured some screen shots below and a sample of a YouTube video to help provide some perspective on the project.

Here’s what the blog looked like:

And a video from YouTube.

And some of pictures from Flickr.

Technorati Tags: social media, social media marketing, FastCompany.tv, SeaWorld, Journey to Atlantis, Shel Israel

Conquering the Social Media Blues: Five Steps to Social Media Performance Management is a mini-ebook that focuses on how to use social media performance management and measurement to successfully manage growth.

It’s a management approach that applies a metrics philosophy to product development, product marketing, and business planning, so that resources can be focused and success can be repeated. The metrics philosophy that’s employed typically needs to be consistent with the performance criteria of broadcast media, but incorporates the interactive dynamics of social media.

The approach aligns management around success strategies and shared goals to provide your staff with the guide posts for making decisions consistent with the interest of the business. Done well, it will create or reinforce a culture of continuous improvement in new content, function, and initiative development.

If you would like to receive “Conquering the Social Media Blues: Five Steps to Social Media Performance Management” please sign up to receive our white papers.

There is no cost or obligation. Just fill out and submit the form. To make sure you want this white paper, you will receive a confirmation email from us confirming you are making this request. We respect your privacy and will not share any information beyond our organization.

Subscribing is free and you can opt out of receiving further information at any time by going to the link at the bottom of our emails to you.

Technorati Tags: social media, social media performance management, ebook, whitepaper, report

I believe that a lot of money will be wasted on social media initiatives and to make sure we don’t waste too much I think we need to build a framework for managing performance on the social web. I hope this podcast can be the start of a conversation about online performance measures and management as it relates to social media.

The hype and growth surrounding the space means that everyone is rushing in to connect with the huge audiences that are possible with successful social networks. Budweiser, Coke, Fast Company and many other brands have been deploying big new social networking initiatives. Facebook applications are being built right and left. Open Social means that even more social applications will be built for the other big networks as well.

However, while social networks like Flickr and cool Facebook apps are fun and social they may not generate significant commercial returns. Leading media and brand marketers know they need to be embracing social media, but risk falling into the same trap if they don’t focus on success and doing it in a way that makes sense for the social web.

My conversations with digital media executives lead me to believe that forward thinkers know they need to be managing distributed media across the social web and that they need more than just embeddable video players. They tell me they need guidance about what works beyond the BS they hear from vendors, how to measure performance and how to embed that into development processes so that future projects benefit from what’s already been learned.

There is lots of good thinking going on about how to measure performance on the web and some are even thinking about measurement in the social web. However, many are still stuck using traditional broadcasting or Web 1.0 models to define success and those measurement models are not going to be adequate for defining success and driving performance on the social web.

We need to rethink performance measures and the way we collect data from the social web.

 

 Digital Podcast 40 [12:53m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (544)

I thought it would be useful to provide some opening thoughts about how measures for the social web might be different and appreciate any feedback. To start, we need to identify what’s different about the social web.

From a long list of things that are different a few stand out to me as really important.

• User Contributions - On the social web, we have users producing content right and left. In addition, they are providing insight. Insight into themselves and insight into what is popular. This means that content with potential can, with some skill, be filtered and identified much more effectively.
• Distributed social media - The paradigm has changed from users seeking content to content seeking users. We see this new paradigm everywhere with downloadable media, embeddable videos and widgets that deliver content, services and more to users in a highly distributed way.
• Expectations that everything is free - The huge surge of low cost content supply means that users are willing to pay less and expect more to be free.
• Shifting business models - We are seeing the beginning of a major shift in business models from those that are based upon the economics of impressions to ones based upon the economics of community.

I believe that these changes shift performance measurement from being rather linear in nature to something that is more recursive in nature. By recursive, I mean that we are measuring a repetitious cycle where a change in one measure drives changes in other measures and is thus much more difficult to pin down. If we are not careful and discrete about measuring this kind of process the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies as well - the mere act of observing a phenomenon changes its nature.

Below is a simple illustration of what I’m talking about (note this is just illustrative and not all inclusive). In the impression based business model of broadcast, revenue was driven by linear function of reach multiplied by frequency and by CPM (cost per thousand impressions). That same business model was largely the model that drove Web 1.0 business models which were based upon uniques, page views and CPM models. This same model can be extended to commerce based businesses as well by adding click through rates, conversion rates and price per purchase.

In the social web, I think there is a recursive process of users, engagement, user contribution, viral impact, visitors, and conversion spawning more users as the cycle continues over and over again in a recursive manner. In addition, I think that the units of revenue measurement will shift from CPM to RPU (revenue per user) because we are now not just getting paid for advertising, but also for lead generation, potential direct sales and other ways of monetizing users.

Some of these measures are new so here’s the short argument for each measure:

• Visitors - Without new visitors there is no growth. Separating visitors into new and returning and identifying where they come from is still important.
• Conversion - if we are shifting from impression based business models to community based business models then we need people to become users or members. This can be a simple measure and extended to capture how much information the new user provides.
• Users - Users do more than visitors. They consume and they produce - which is essential for scaling on the social web. Tracking users usage by signup cohort to understand how sticky the user experience is can provide insight into the durability and scalability of the site. You want to know if people will return and increase their usage over time.
• Engagement - The experience needs to be compelling enough for users to produce good stuff and to return to do it again. Simple measures like time on site, page views and loyalty still matter, but getting deeper into understanding how much of the capability you are providing (both on and offsite) get used and which parts drive engagement becomes important as well.
• User Contribution - The more users contribute, the more the content scales and that drives the potential for viral impact and if they provide insight into themselves or into attractive content that can be leveraged into RPU. There are lots of interesting measures that could be developed her fro both measuring the content the produce and the insight users provide.
• Viral Impact - Who can doubt the ability of viral content to drive trial and traffic. Measures for this are probably different depending up on the nature of the business and include bookmarks, email forwards, trackbacks and the spread of embedded widgets
• RPU - Revenue per User is what matters in a community. We want to look at total revenue whether it comes from impressions, clicks, actions, leads or any other source and the how much we can drive per user will determine how much cost we can absorb to attract and convert visitors into users and realize an attractive ROI.

The list could go on to look at cost drivers and how they are different on the social web, but that will be another discussion.

I believe that once we embrace these kinds of measures and embed them into our management processes we will see social media marketing shift from being a stream of fun (and maybe expensive) experiments into a community based business model that will result in more deeply committed fans, increased brand strength, better sell through, new revenue sources and higher ROI.

If you see good posts about measuring performance, have suggestions or feedback please leave a comment.

Technorati Tags: social media, social web, online performance measurement, measures, measurement, online measures, social media measures

In Digital Podcast 39, we interview David Bloom. David is Associate Dean and Chief Communications Officer at USC’s Marshall School of Business. I met David at an event USC’s Marshall School hosted during the Los Angeles Technology Week. David described some the social media initiatives being used by the University to communicate with potential students, students and alums.

The USC Marshall School of Business is an important part of the University with programs that run the gamut from undergraduate to graduate business programs. USC Marshall has over 5,700 students, numerous graduate programs and 70,000 alumni. The University has been very active in using social media to enhance their communication programs and we thought the world ought to know more about how large organizations can use these new tools to engage and activate their respective community’s.

David was kind enough to spend about an hour with us describing how USC Marshall is using social media, how they manage the process and decide what to pursue. USC Marshall is on YouTube with USCMarshall channel, it’s on iTunes with it’s own podcast channel and it’s adding social networking capabilities to it’s website. We discuss some of the ways they are coordinating communications across the channels to maximize the returns from the long tail of PR. We also have a great discussion about objectives and the decision making processes as it relates to social media.

David’s experience with communications for both businesses and universities provides a unique perspective on the opportunities and the challenges of using social media for communicating and building communities. If you are interested in using social media for corporate or not-for-profit communications and PR this is the podcast for you.

 

 Digital Podcast 39 [53:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (536)

Technorati Tags: USC, Marshall School of Business, social media, David Bloom

As part of our Super Fan series, we interviewed Dean Carignan. Dean is Director, Advertising Business Strategy for Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division. In this role, he develops long-range strategic plans for investments in streaming video advertising, mobile marketing, and game-based advertising. Dean also spent several years with Microsoft’s adCenter group, where he drove product strategy for Paid Search, Display Ads, and Contextual Advertising.

Dean was able to provide us with some excellent perspective on these new advertising opportunities. He is part of a group that looks at opportunities to advertise via the Xbox, Media Center, Zune and mobile platforms. We go into depth on in game advertising and how important this new segment will be. He walked us through case studies of Domino’s Pizza and P&G that describe how a well designed campaign can add to the realism of the game experience and yield results for the advertiser.

This is a must listen podcast for advertisers who are struggling to break through on television and are looking for new ways to market their products using these rapidly growing platforms.

 

 Digital Podcast 37 [49:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (398)

Technorati Tags: Dean Carignan, Microsoft, in game advertising, gaming, social media, super fans

As part of our Super Fan podcast series, we interviewed Jason Feffer, Founder and CEO, of SodaHead. Jason was one of the earliest employees at MySpace and experienced their rapid rise into a major social networking site. After MySpace, Jason founded SodaHead, a company in the Social Answers space. SodaHead allows users to set up opinion polls that users get to vote and comment on. It’s a fun and addictive experience, and well worth trying.

Jason’s discussion of his experience at MySpace illustrates the importance of operational optimization to drive monetization of super fans. In his new company, Jason is putting a lot of what he’s learned to use in creating a new and fun social site. SodaHead has mastered the art of lowering the difficulty and barriers to user generated content. It leads to an experience where its much easier to join in the social mix in a more meaningful way than just asking someone to be your friend. SodaHead is definitely an experience everyone should try.

 

 Digital Podcast 36 [1:06:33m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (384)

Jason Feffer has an exciting eight-year history of Internet startup experience leading up to his most recent startup, SodaHead.com. Mr. Feffer helped start MySpace in 2003, which sold to News Corp for $580M. During his three years at MySpace, Jason served on the executive committee and as Vice President of Operations as the membership grew to 100 million. Mr. Feffer oversaw advertising operations, revenue reporting, policy enforcement, government relations and several other departments at MySpace.

Technorati Tags: Jason Feffer, MySpace, SodaHead, social media, social networking, social media optimization, super fans

Kina Grannis, a big Digg fan, used social media and some great content to win Dorito’s Crash the Super Bowl Contest. She just appeared on the Super Bowl in a 60 second music video and has won a recording contract with Interscope Records.

If you want to see more you can go to SnackStrongProductions.com to watch behind the scenes footage and download Kina’s winning song. And you can buy her winning single on iTunes.

Congratulations to Kina!

Here’s her video

Technorati Tags: Kina Grannis, Super Bowl, social media

The folks at Google must be smiling tonight. Microsoft has been lured into putting a bid in for Yahoo. This is a waste of time, money and energy by Microsoft and that should make the Google folks more confident that they are on their way to overtaking Microsoft in the battle for leading technology company on the planet.

Combining two companies that DO NOT GET IT is NOT a recipe for competing with one that does. So let me get specific about what I mean by NOT GETTING IT as it relates to Microsoft and Yahoo. Anyone who has used Google Adwords as an advertiser and Google Adsense as a publisher and done the tests on the competitive products from Microsoft and Yahoo knows what I’m about to describe.

When I set up a campaign at Google Adwords, it is an automated process that is rich with interaction and feedback. I can test a campaign, keywords and ads in a very responsive manner that allows me to set it up, test it and optimize it quickly. Yahoo’s equivalent service was a captive to the belief that permeated Overture/Goto that only human editors could screen ads to make sure that they were relevant. It would take days under that process to do what Google did in minutes As a result, I advertise at Google and do so with Yahoo when I get around to it, if ever. (BTW I told this to the senior team at Yahoo’s search marketing group, but they either didn’t want to hear it or could not change the business process that had been set in place 4-5 years before) Since then, Yahoo has tried to reinvent its ad platform and Microsoft has launched their own version, but both still lag way, way behind Google.

How will Microsoft be able to merge two hugely expensive computer platforms when neither is yet good enough to compete with Google’s ad platform? And the same problem exists when you look at it from the publisher side. Google’s Adsense delivers better ads than does the equivalent Yahoo product despite huge investment by Yahoo. What will Microsoft do, scrap one deficient set of systems for another or try to make both work? Either way, the path leads to doom and gloom for both Microsoft and Yahoo.

There is obviously much more to both Microsoft and Yahoo than search and search advertising, but let’s be clear. Search based advertising is the engine that powers Google and everything it does. Social networking/media, a la MySpace and Facebook, has huge potential and Yahoo should have been the king of that domain given all their acquisitions in that arena over the years, but if Yahoo can’t turn My Yahoo, Flickr, GeoCities, De.licio.us etc. into a Social Media powerhouse how can we expect Microsoft to do so.

I can only hope Yahoo turns down Microsoft and they come to their senses. Yahoo can still do great things with the audience and assets it owns by changing its focus to become the queen of social, instead of the king of search. Microsoft should stop listening to bankers and get back to making products that work well and can out perform the competition.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, social networking, social media, search

We sat down with Will Flannery, Vice President of Advanced Services for Fox Cable Networks (FCN), and Brian Peterson, Director of Corporate Communications, to discuss the challenges of multi-channel content distribution, the importance and role of Super Fans and what we can learn about Super Fans from sports fans.

We have a great discussion about the Big Ten Network and how the Super Fans can be more like tribes than traditional segments. These Super Fans cover the entire demographic spectrum and building communities that work for them requires understanding the different use case these fans have and how to build sites, tools and conversations that recognize these different needs.

We also explore some of the organizational challenges of coordinating across the different channels, and the importance of creating complimentary experiences across channels.

 

 Digital Podcast 33 [37:43m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (602)

Here’s a bit more about Will and his responsibilities at Fox:

Will Flannery is Vice President, Advanced Services for Fox Cable Networks (FCN). He is responsible for the day-to-day distribution activities for advanced television services including high-definition, interactivity and video-on-demand services involving Fox Cable Networks, a portfolio of networks including FX, FX HD, FSN and its 19 owned-and-operated regional sports networks, National Geographic Channel, National Geographic Channel HD, SPEED, SPEED HD, FUEL TV, Fox College Sports, Fox Soccer Channel, Fox Sports en Español, Fox Movie Channel, Fox Reality Channel and the Big Ten Network. In addition, Flannery also works closely with sister units such as Fox Networks Engineering & Operations, Fox Digital Entertainment, Fox Interactive Media and Fox Mobile Entertainment on new product offerings, copyright protection, inventory sales and technical solutions.

Technorati Tags: Will Flannery, Super Fans, Social Media, Fox Cable Networks

As part of our new Super Fan podcast series, we met with Chris Adams after last year’s Digital Hollywood conference to discuss his experience working with both movie producers and web producers. We focused on how these two very different organizational cultures need to learn from each other to realize the potential for online video and social media. Having done lots of work with both web based companies and feature film producers, Chris is able to provide excellent insights into the challenges these companies face in this era of new media. He understands the differences between the cultures and the need for help in bridging the gap.

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.

 

 Digital Podcast 31 [44:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (726)

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.

Technorati Tags: Chris Adams, Super Fans, social marketing, social media, Digital Hollywood