How successful is social media’s impact on a socially responsible company’s bottom line?
This is the leading question framing a Social Media Week panel I’ll be speaking at this Thursday.
We know that social media has had a tremendous impact on society, but to what extent does it translate into real dollars? There are many metrics we can use to track engagement: number of followers, number of people writing about us, number of visitors, etc. However, it is still difficult to correlate the impact of social media on a company’s bottom line; it’s often an ecosystem of small, unordered interactions that lead to a click, a purchase, a donation.
However, for some organizations, the correlation is much clearer. There are many companies that would not exist without social media: Mashable, Kickstarter, Pinterest, Groupon. These platforms are social media, thus their entire business models are predicated upon it.
While not all companies can exist as social media, what we can learn from these startups is that social media has a greater impact on a company’s bottom line when it is treated as an integrated part of a company’s brand strategy, rather than just a marketing afterthought.
Social media should be less about platforms, more about people and purpose.
Being “social” means creating a brand of listening. It means creating a brand that engages in in dialogues rather than monologues, a brand that empowers people to do more. It means creating a brand that is driven by purpose rather than just the latest trends.
Your brand purpose, based upon the intersection between what people need and what’s special about you, should shape how and where you engage with your audience. Your purpose should be a unifying force that drives your entire business – from social media to business model to operations.
When social media is contextualized within the big picture, your brand presence on Facebook, Twitter and other platforms seems more authentic, human and individualized. When it is viewed as another tool for driving impact and profit, the correlation between a tweet and a new business prospect is much clearer. When social media becomes an embedded part of your company’s DNA, it becomes an even more powerful – and sustainable – force for good.
Here are a few guiding questions we ask our clients to ask themselves:
Given our brand purpose, what are the most appropriate channels for engaging with our audience?
How can we empower our customers to do more?
If we are trying to translate social media into real dollars, how can we connect the dots between action and impact?
As part of Social Media Week, on February 16, WONY strategist Melissa Andrada (@themelissard) will join a panel on “Doing Well by Doing Good,” hosted by SCENEPR in association with Design for Social Innovation (DSI) at SVA. With Brian Reich, SVP/Global Editor at Edelman, and others from Purpose, Roadmonkey Adventure Philanthropy, and Mark & Phil, the panel will explore how purposeful businesses can use social media for both impact and profit. Sign up to attend here: http://dogoodsmw.eventbrite.com/
Social media is a powerful booster for brand authenticity and personality, but how successful is it in converting a good cause to sustainable dollars? In an atmosphere where customers’ trust and loyalty is increasingly earned through transparency and engagement there are new paths to the bottom line.
As part of Social Media Week, on February 16, WONY strategist Melissa Andrada (@themelissard) will join a panel on “Doing Well by Doing Good,” hosted by SCENEPR in association with Design for Social Innovation (DSI) at SVA. With Brian Reich, SVP/Global Editor at Edelman, and others from Purpose, Roadmonkey Adventure Philanthropy, and Mark & Phil, the panel will explore how purposeful businesses can use social media for both impact and profit.
Between all the strategic pre-game leaks, Twitter’s Ad Scrimmage, and the NBC/YouTube partnership that created the Ad Blitz channel, the actual 30-second Super Bowl on-air spot is now the center of a more prolonged, immersive advertising experience. Often these experiences are so focused on the spectacle or story of a campaign that the real merit of the brand gets lost in them.
Marketers have done a great job of capitalizing on the one opportunity each year where people are actually anxious for commercials. And in turn, an estimated 54% of those watching last year’s game were actually more excited for the ad breaks than the game itself, according to a 2011 study by Harris Interactive.
But where advertisers think they’re speaking to people asking to be “advertised to,” most viewers are really just anticipating a series of performances.The commercials that people generally “love” (the ones that will appear on most bloggers’ “Top 10” list and the USA Today Super Bowl Ad Meter) aren’t the most effective, they’re just the most entertaining. While raw amusement is awesome for viewers (who doesn’t want to watch a series of 30-second comedies?), most of today’s Super Bowl commercials probably aren’t getting the job done for brands.
For a spot to be at its most effective and worth its $3.5 million price tag, it has to do more than entertain. It has to tell a worthwhile story about the brand in a way that gets attention for an appropriate reason. It also has to teach us something about the honest values and unique feel of the company it promotes.And it has to do all this strongly enough to inspire us to engage with that brand in the future, not just re-visit its commercial on YouTube.That’s an important distinction that often gets overlooked on this night.Pure entertainment gets the most hype (and yes, leads to temporary brand awareness) but it takes more than that to win true fans.
After the game (or now, since you’ve probably seen most of the commercials already), we’d love to hear your thoughts on which brands had the most effective commercials (not just the ones that made you laugh the hardest).In turn, we’ll share our own thoughts in an upcoming post. Comment below, on Facebook or tweet @wolffolins.
To watch the commercials with a more critical eye this year, here are a few fundamental characteristics to consider:
Is it entertaining? Is this commercial captivating enough to get a million views on YouTube?Does it put you in a good mood?It could be funny, surprising, dramatic or just plain cute, but a Super Bowl commercial today needs to meet a baseline level of entertainment just to meet viewers’ lofty expectations.
At its best: Audi’s “Escape from Old Luxury” (2011)- This commercial was funny, a tiny bit suspenseful, and in the end, staked out a real position for the brand.It proved that a commercial can use comedy without being completely empty.
Is it emotionally on brand?Did watching the commercial give you the same feeling you get when you’re in that brand’s store, using/consuming its products, and reading about its actions in the news?The commercial should create expectations that are in line with the rest of the brand experience and make a case for the importance of the brand’s own values in people’s lives.
At its best: Google’s “Parisian Love” (2010)- In addition to showing how easy and helpful its search features are, this spot simply oozed of the optimism and delight that characterizes Google at its best.
Is it Inspiring?Did the commercial realistically change your behavior?Did you quickly look up the new Mercedes models after (or even during?) the game?Did you buy a Pepsi Max the next day because you remembered it has zero calories?Did you rethink the value of an electric car?A spot doesn’t need to lead directly to a sale but it should inspire a viewer to do more than just watch it again and again.
At its best: Chrysler’s “Imported From Detroit” (2011) - Though I didn’t buy a car last year, this commercial definitely changed my perception of the brand, as well as the American auto industry as a whole.The day after the game, I remember spending a few hours reading all about the revitalization of Detroit, almost entirely due to the fact that I saw this commercial.
Time Warner is opening a 9,600-square foot media laboratory in Manhattan today, to research and analyze how people consume media and respond to advertising. Viewer-specimens will play games on iPads and watch 3D TV in a faux living room with infrared cameras that record their actions in the dark.
Time Warner and other media companies have always relied on consumer research to see how viewers might respond to new programming, but the intention with this new lab is really to partner with marketers to test how consumers experience and respond to advertising as part of today’s new media landscape. Time Warner hopes the lab’s Madison Avenue location will lure marketing partners into working with them.
So far, some big brands seem receptive. The New York Times quotes L’Oréal USA CMO Marc Speichert:
“As we continue to think about how the media landscape is changing and how to best prepare for it, having a lab down the street is extremely helpful.”
The lab costs anywhere from $50,000 for basic focus groups to $120,000 for research using biometrics. CNN and HBO are on board and marketing executives from MediaVest and WPP’s GroupM have already toured the facility.
This blog has often talked about the tidal wave of Big Data and a macrotrend we call #QuantifyMe, a recent, but persistent consumer hunger for metrics, dashboards, and data about their personal activities. For brands, being smart about Big Data is the next major challenge. In an increasingly quantifiable business world, where technology has become deeply personal, the most accurate consumer engagement and experience metrics remain a sort of holy grail of market intelligence.
Now, Time Warner’s lab can get businesses one creepy step closer. If you are a media-consuming specimen at the lab, a biometric belt and recording device will transmit your heart rate, skin temperature and facial reactions to marketers and researchers, so they can decipher your “engagement” as you watch TV, play a video game, or swipe through a branded iPad app. In other rooms, your eye movements will be tracked and a two-way mirror will be used to look over your shoulder as you browse the web or make selections in a fake grocery store.
Some have raised that Manhattan’s heartbeats and sweat might not represent the best cross section of American consumers. Then again, maybe the new methods are enough to put traditional focus groups and industry research to shame.
The lab is so new, we’re yet to see reporting of any great insights or projects it’s inspired. Ok Time Warner, we’re watching you…
It’s too soon to know if Kodak’s Chapter 11 filing is the final death knell for the iconic brand, but the news is a timely reminder of the link between innovation and brand longevity.
Kodak’s heritage is rooted in innovation, and their best products became part of our lives in a deeply emotional way. However, Kodak’s failure to innovate goes beyond their inability to recognize the rise of digital imaging and their ill-fated foray into printers.
Their failure was one of imagination. An inability to understand that product, like brand itself, is a living idea. When you buy a product, what you’re really buying is the ability to do something. The brand is both a projection and a reflection of what that ability is and what it means in your world. Product, construed as ability, is form agnostic, and should not just adapt to, but also anticipate changes in how people will want to access and use that ability.
Kodak, like Blockbuster, Borders and others, failed to imagine product beyond product.
Now Kodak is forced to pursue ever more desperate measures to raise cash, like selling its patents, which will take it even farther away from the pioneering spirit that built the brand.
At its core, Kodak helped us see—and remember—our world. It helped us tell the story of ourselves. This is a remarkable and timeless role for a brand to play, but with Kodak’s growing gap between brand and product, the company itself may soon be a memory.
The ironies of Kodak’s bankruptcy are kind of limitless: Kodak is a classic example of a one-time giant getting outpaced by the technologies it helped invent (in this case, the digital camera).
Kodak hasn’t been profitable since 2007, having switched its focus from photography to printers (making the world-historical mistake of picking the physical over the virtual). The rest of Kodak’s value rests in the patents it owns related to digital imaging, which the company says are used in virtually every modern digital camera, smartphone and tablet.
But the demise of Kodak is also a brand tragedy.
Kodak invented a new kind of memory. It was a brand capable of freezing the present and reprinting the past.
The memories Kodak stood for were both personal – as immortalized in the famous Paul Simon song– and national – Neil Armstrong used Kodak to take the first pictures from the moon, and 80 films shot on Kodak film have won Oscars for Best Picture.
When it invented the handheld camera, Kodak created a sweet new strain of independence.
Now, that brand equity has become a soup of chemicalsand patents. Still, Polaroid bounced back after its 2001 bankruptcy, and Kodak might also find new ways to develop.
This post was originally published on Morgan Holt’s Digital Content Blog. For for of his thinking, follow @MorganUK.
How does the News International brand stay alive? It is clearly suffering, and the risks — as The Times in particular seems to have recognised — is that the weight of the News of the World could drag all the company’s assets down with it. The brand damage for the group isn’t for focused on the group, but on the sum of its parts. And the pay wall has made recovery more difficult than ever.
Brands take years to build and moments to destroy. The tarnishing happens very fast in today’s media environment because digital media has made the flow of news and personal opinion almost effortless:
Stories are heavily linked
Readers have a strong social voice
News is not limited by space or time, so is always looking for something new to say
All of which makes it painfully difficult for any organisation that is experiencing negative PR to respond to the situation.So it’s even more painful when a media organisation like The Times is not able to cash in its positive investments when it needs them.
Times writers like Caitlin Moran and Matthew Parris are much-loved by readers and have a healthy digital presence. They have been nurtured by their employer and are now powerful, effective (and very funny) voices in the digital space. Unfortunately, they are handcuffed in their ability to remind the public that The Times brand is independent of the mucky world of its sister title. They discuss their personal views but they cannot make that discussion a part of their employer’s own voice because they cannot link behind the paywall. I have written about how paywalls limit non-commercial benefits elsewhere.
Media companies do themselves a valuable service when they invest in talent. New journalists are promoted to leads, to section heads, to columnists and to eminent ‘voices’ of the title. They are promoted because they are loved by their audiences.
In good times these voices amplify the goodwill their audiences feel; and in bad times they reassure audiences (and potential audiences) that they are valuable.
Social is the most powerful tool any organisation has to redress negative PR, but News International has cut itself off from the conversation. The talent that it has invested in are cut off as spokespeople for the title.
According to the New York Times, there are the “signs you’re an old fogey: You still watch movies on VCR, listen to vinyl records and shoot photos on film. And you enjoy using email.”
Under this criteria, many of my recently graduated peers and I fall under the category of ‘old fogey’. We like playing vinyl and shooting on film. And yes, we enjoy using email.
With the ubiquity of online chat and text messaging, many predict that email is on its way out. Because messaging is increasingly becoming more immediate, conversational and informal, people are arguing that email is nearing its demise.
The world is becoming more fluid, but at the same time, there is still a place for email. Just because another medium eclipses another in popularity doesn’t mean the other is going away. Just as photography has not done away with painting and email has not erased postcards and letter writing, IM and texting have not replaced email. Each medium offers a different way of experiencing the world.
So why do I like email?
Although it can just consist of a subject line or attachment, email is the kind of medium that allows you to dwell. It is incredibly valuable for sending letters, essays and thought pieces that you just may want to share with friends and family, not a public audience. It is a much more intentional medium than instant messaging and texting. It involves deciding to whom it is for, choosing a subject line, crafting a message and waiting for a response that can take days. For the many reasons that many people dislike it, I prefer it.
Every form of communication doesn’t need to be in real-time or provide us with instant gratification. Sometimes you want a medium that inspires you to flesh out your thoughts and communication.
From Twitter to IM to Text, the world is dominated by short, instant conversation. most of the time I’ll find myself doing all three at once, but sometimes I just want to savor the moment and receive leisure gratification.
After publishing with a blackletter logo since 2007, Fashionista decided it was time to reconside and redesign its stoic face as well as swap its back-end CMS from Movable Type to Wordpress.
The old logo was this oversized, domineering, gothic lettering thing that said “spiky, aggressive, old-school news brand.” That’s not what Fashionista is. The editors of Fashionista are excellent journalists who will be critical when it’s called for, but they’re also unashamedly fashion lovers. They might poke fun from time to time, but they’re not spiky or unnecessarily aggressive. And they’re also inherently new-generation when it comes to how they go about their business — they use a blog platform, Flip cameras, smartphones and various social media to deliver their content and engage their audience — so unless we were being very ironic with the gothic, old-school newspaper font thing it just wasn’t really appropriate. I’m also a big believer that the logo and furniture on the site should be a little subservient to the content — it’s the content that engages and the content travels well beyond the site too — so we also needed something a little less imposing. — Jonah Bloom, CEO/Editor-in-Chief, Breaking Media
I remember the freesheet wars a few years back when Londoners welcomed two new players to the freesheet market. It was a monopoly the Metro newspaper, London’s first freesheet, had enjoyed for far too long. What a media frenzy and what chaos outside the train and tube stations.
On Friday 18th September Londoners said goodbye to one of those new players, a News International title, the Londonpaper. I have to say out of the three it was probably my favourite. The layout, the news snippets, the trashy celeb column and the style sections rocked. But for bosses at News International, things weren’t so great. With distribution just over 500K (against the Metro’s 1.3m) the paper was reportedly losing its publishers £10million a year it was time to shut shop.
The closure of the londonpaper came at the time when News International announced their strategy to start charging for online content that has so far been available for free. From June 2010 titles such as The Times will charge users for their news, features and more.
So what do we think about the end of free content? I for one think if it’s worth it, people will pay. We’ve enjoyed over a decade of free stuff and now we’re drowning in so much free we don’t know the good from the mediocre but at least we expect the great from something we pay for and I believe publishers have understood this. I’d expect News International have thought long and hard about ways to offer high quality, super relevant and valuable content and services to readers once they start charging.
Today the Evening Standard, the capital’s only paid for newspaper, announced it will start charging zero to readers. Previously part of Associated Newspapers Group, sister to another freesheet, London Lite but now under new Russian owners it has decided to take on the freesheet market head on. So as one goes paid for, the other goes free. Interesting huh?
So what next for publishing? Is the future free or a combination of both?
