ToddCop's Now Wait A Minute

This post also ran on Cookerly PR’s blog and has contributions by Candace McCaffery.

In the race to Facebook’s IPO, all the news seemed focused on guessing just how high the valuation would be as well as the litany of reasons that it would achieve dizzying success. And then General Motors dropped what seemed like a bombshell: it would no longer advertise on Facebook.

Seldom has a shift of only $10 million in ad budgets (less than half a percent of GM’s $1.8 billion total ad budget) brought such attention. Nonetheless, naysayers were off to the races, saying that the auto giant’s move was proof that Facebook doesn’t work; that without advertising support the social network was doomed.

Sadly, the over-heated IPO story meant that too many people missed the really important point of the news: content trumps advertising on social media.

While GM spent $10 million in ads on Facebook, it spends three times that on content creation and community management, which apparently works quite well, a point the Wall Street Journal didn’t make until a third of the way into its story on the GM advertising pull.

So 75 percent of GM’s budget for Facebook is working very well. “Content is effective and important,” GM’s CMO Joe Ewanick told the newspaper. But it’s the 25 percent that supposedly wasn’t working which everyone wants to discuss.

Sure, it’s a problem for Facebook to determine how to get its share of the money companies will spend using the service. And it’s a problem for media companies whose revenue depends on buying millions of eyeballs for their clients. It’s certainly a problem for any agency that still wants to apply old-school media practices to social media.

But it isn’t your problem.

Underlying Facebook’s success is the basic formula of empowering the connections between people, even when those people are speaking on behalf of a brand. This is a world where you earn people’s attention, and you continue to earn it every day to forge longer and deeper relationships. Its primary role is not to buy access to their eyes.

That is not to say that advertising on Facebook is always a bad idea and doesn’t have a place in your marketing mix. It may. There are many examples of successful paid ad campaigns on the social network, and it shouldn’t be completely written off because of this high-profile event.

Buddy Media’s Michael Lazerow recently wrote a great piece in Fast Company that highlights some of the positive data, including the fact that “on average, Facebook’s social ads had 55% higher recall than non-social ads.” I would bet that those advertisers – like GM – put a significantly higher focus on content, though, and it was the integration of the campaign that helped to drive those high recall numbers.

So in the coming months, Facebook’s team will no doubt be working overtime figuring out how to get more of GM’s ad budget. For the rest of the world, however, the message here is simple: create content, create a dialogue with your audience and enjoy success. Just as it always was.

Versions of this post also appeared on MediaPost’s Marketing Daily, CMO.com and IQ Interactive’s blog.

PRYOR, Oklahoma – If you’re looking for a perfect lesson in how to master CRM in the digital age drop by the Mid-America Grill, along U.S. Highway 69, more than 250 miles from the nearest big city. You can also get a pretty good New York Strip while you’re there.

I certainly wasn’t looking for marketing strategy when I ran into the grill. Actually I was trying to escape a hellacious Oklahoma thunderstorm, the kind where the sky takes on unnatural colors and the rain is moving sideways. But what I got was a lesson on how easy it really can be to connect with your customers.

Yet study after study demonstrates that companies are failing to deliver on even the most basic customer interactions online and off. Nearly half of the public want to interact with brands online a recent study on Toluna found.

Stop to think about that. Imagine a stadium full of potential customers with money in hand. And half of them say they want to talk to their favorite brands online. Can you imagine that any business would turn them away? And yet that’s exactly what’s happening.

A study by IQ Interactive found that more than half of Tweets to Fortune top 50 companies went unanswered, and last fall Maritz Research found that nearly two-thirds of consumers who reached out to companies via Twitter got no response. That’s like a business failing to answer the phone two-thirds of the time. Unbelievable.

CRM reminds us time and again that it’s much easier to grow an existing customer than to find a new one. The emergence of social media has just injected that logic with adrenaline. It’s no longer about just keeping long-term customers happy, but instead turning them into your best sales people. The extraordinary value of creating loyalty to the bottom line is proven, just read the classic “The Loyalty Effect” by Frederick Reichheld. All of which brings me back to dinner at the Mid-American Grill.

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Around the globe, companies are struggling to get a handle on the explosion of the social Web and what social media means to their business or even where it fits into existing departments. The marketing potential led to early adoption by many advertising teams who were anxious to extend traditional campaigns and move beyond the limitations of banner ads.

Public relations and corporate communications teams have been equally quick to point out that the nature of social media demands more of an editorial touch. Practitioners must curate content and nurture influencers, connect and engage with users through compelling content. But all too often, these discussions have left out one of the most critical teams: customer service.

And that’s a mistake. If social media has done nothing else, it has handed the consumer a powerful platform for communicating with brands. Truth be told, consumers would likely have little tolerance for brands invading social media were it not for their new-found clout.

Download the full white paper I wrote for Cookerly PR on this topic here.

What do these things have in common: Netflix, Bank of America, SOPA, Susan G. Komen for the Cure?

Answer: they’ve all got tread marks on their backs from social media protests.

The last six months have provided an amazing string of case studies on how protests movements are being changed forever by the speed and reach of social media.

Forget about organizing workers to gather signatures on a petition, or emails calling for a boycott of some company’s product. Those are your grandfather’s protest tools. Today’s protests take shape in a matter of days, and the battles can pivot in a matter of minutes. Gone are colorful posters with catch slogans. Today the canvases are short emotional messages with hash tags or links.

So every company that deals with the general public, makes large donations to causes, or has a line of business that can be considered even remotely politically influenced needs to rethink its communications plan. If you don’t have a disaster plan already on the shelf then this is your chance to prepare for being hit by a runaway train.

Let’s use the events surrounding Komen for our example. If you’ve been living under a rock you can find a good summary of the controversy here (under the heading Relationship With Planned Parenthood). If we pick apart the past seven days we come away with six critical lessons.

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Image courtesy of Jezebel

Behold today’s lesson in how to maim a brand – a very, very valuable brand. In one fell swoop the gold-standard of non-profits trashed decades of hard work, and fund-raising efforts by millions of volunteers.

I’m not here to discuss the merits of the decision by the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation to pull funding from Planned Parenthood’s women’s health screening program. Instead let’s dissect how a decision on expenditure .2% of the foundation’s budget, that’s 2/10th of one percent, has inflicted so much damage.

First, be up front that I’ve had repeated business dealings with the foundation, going back to their first web sites. I also have a family connection, going back to when I did babysitting for Susan Komen, yes THAT Susan Komen.

So over the years it’s been a point of pride to watch the foundation Nancy Brinker worked so hard to build succeed beyond all wildest expectations. Millions of people did Race For The Cure, or the Three-Day Walk. Meanwhile the leaders of the foundation make the pink ribbon as American as baseball and apple pie. And they did with a savvy most CMOs will never approach.

If company X wanted a feel-good association with Komen, it cost real money. It wasn’t unusual for the foundation to seek $1 million or more for use of its logos. And why not? If brands wanted under the umbrella then they needed to do some good for the women Komen supported. And the foundation kept a laser-like focus on the victims of breast cancer.

In exchange, what partners and volunteers got was to share in the halo of fighting for women’s health. How could you find fault with that? Sure there were missteps, like hooking up with KFC. But the miscues were relatively minor, until now.

Like a love affair disrupted by infidelity, Komen’s bond with its base took a blow to the body with the Planned Parenthood decision. And like a lover spurned, a big chunk of the Komen base felt betrayed. But unlike a pissed off boyfriend or girlfriend, these people had a whole host of targets for their rage.

Let’s take the cute Energizer bunny, a long-time supporter of the cause. The battery company had the misfortune of being at the top of the wall on Komen’s Facebook page when the crap hit the fan. So after venting at Komen, some of the more than 7,000 angry followers turned their wrath on Energizer.

“I will no longer donate or buy the pink products as I do so often just to be giving. I will give elsewhere and hope everyone joins in and gives directly to planned parenthood,” one woman wrote on Komen’s wall. Even on Komen’s message boards there are dozens of posts railing against the decision with subject lines like “Pink is the new yellow.”

Kivi, over on the Non-profit Marketing Guide blog summarized the situation quite well.

“Previously Komen stood out as a tremendous organizer and mobilizer of women across the political spectrum who would raise money like crazy for them. They kept it nice and simple, and non-controversial…”

“No more. They took a deep dive into the hot swirling waters head first (but apparently eyes shut). No matter what they do from here on out, they will be forced to pick sides, and that’s just awful for the Komen brand.”

I have no doubt the foundation will go into disaster mode quickly. Odds are they are meeting late into the night as I write this trying to figure a way out of this mess. But this is an election year, with abortion again becoming a hot button issue. No matter what Komen does it has been dragged into the political fray. That can’t be undone. Even massive staff changes won’t right the wrong for many supporters.

So put yourself in the shoes of a CMO at a consumer package goods company, or a car company, or even the NFL. How much less valuable is that affiliation with the Komen foundation today than it was last week? Think your CEO, or even the board of directors will feel good about redirecting marketing funds into a partnership now?

Last year Komen raised $270 million to fight breast cancer. By sparking a controversy over where .2% of that went the foundation will inevitably lose tens of millions of dollars. No one can feel good about that.

So often we have a great idea for a campaign, but the questions inevitably comes down to “How do we make sure it succeeds?”

The same was true for French division of Amnesty International and their recent drive to collect signatures civil rights abuses by military forces. This year the organization decided to turn each signature into a note of an ever-expanding song so that authorities could actually hear the scope of the protest.

That’s a great idea. They even got a famous Israeli musician to create the song. But how do you get the message out for people to join the effort without investing heavily in advertising?

The answer here, and so often overlooked in many campaigns, is to take the message out of advertising and engage the audience in a more organic fashion. When are you most focused on the nature of a song? When you can’t name that tune.

Amnesty International partnered with Shazam, the wildly popular mobile app that listens to a song and identifies the name and artist. Sometimes Shazam can’t work its magic. But rather than delivering its standard error message, in this case it delivered a powerful call to action:

“Valentina Rosendo Cantu could not make herself heard either. Assaulted by soldiers, she asked for justice but the authorities refused to investigate.”

With one click users could add their names to the petition. And click they did.

More than 257,000 (and climbing) signatures were gathered, a 500% increase. The resulting song was made into a CD that Amnesty International now distributes.

It was a great success, not only for the protest, but for Shazam too. While some TV ads have linked to the app for marketing efforts, this program demonstrates the utility of the program as a gateway to extended communication.

Here’s a video case study of the Shazam extension. And you’ll find the supporting web site here. But be warned, it opens with a rather unsettling animated video message.

Think forward a couple years. Is it possible your debit card will be from the Facebook National Bank? What about that proof of insurance in your car, will it be from LinkedIn National?

Laugh if you will, but there’s good reason to see banking and insurance in the near future for social network. Gartner Research analysts dig in deep on the possibility in their industry predictions for 2012. Actually their prediction is that at least one of the social networks, likely Facebook, would be active in the financial services field by 2014.

So what’s going to move Facebook from global water cooler to financial services giant in just two years? You. Well, actually you and the other 800 million users who are laying bare your lives.

You can’t be surprised, are you? How many bankers would kill to know when their customers have a baby, change jobs, get married or divorced? What insurer wouldn’t want customers to waive their hands up high every time their life situation changed, they moved or started thinking about a new car?

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There’s a battle about to break out and it will rage behind your back. Actually just behind your head shot, on Facebook.

If you haven’t made the jump yet to the new timeline format profile, what are you waiting for? Aside from the visual difference between the old profile and new photo-intensive design, the new layout represents a fundamental shift in how you project yourself.

Until now Facebook has been about a snapshot in time. What are you doing now? What did you snap a picture of last night? What topics/pages do you like? Sure they were archived, but really the past was lost. There was no context.

Welcome to the new profile

Now you have a canvas on which to tell a much richer story. And it starts with a big 310X833 pixel cover image that goes behind your head shot. For now, most people will put a pretty picture there, maybe from a vacation or some idealized scene. (If you want to get creative here’s a handy guide.) But that won’t last.

No, it is only a matter of time until the brands you love will recognize that you’ve got something they want. You’ve got a billboard where you can profess your passions, and they want in. [Click here to read the rest of this post]

Weh-Ming Cho and his 11 horsepower snowblower of ecstasy.

It’s the biggest blight online, dull boring copy. Let’s face it, you may watch a half-dozen videos a day, if you have lots of time to kill. But you’ll read thousands of words, maybe tens of thousands and little if any of it will do anything more than lull your brain into a coma.

So let me share with you how to make your copy jump off the screen and give the reader’s grey matter a big wet sloppy kiss.

Start by selling a snowblower. You don’t have a snowblower? No problem, let’s take a look at how one Canadian went about selling his on a northern version of Ebay.

Weh-Ming Cho, a resident of Moncton, New Brunswick (think far, far north east) could have snapped a picture of his snowblower, dropped in a few specs and slapped on the $900 price tag. Instead he wrote this: (The post is 800 words, you can find it here. I’ll share some highlights.)

Do you like shoveling snow? Then stop reading this and go back to your pushups and granola because you are not someone that I want to talk to.

Let’s face it, we live in a place that attracts snow like Magnetic Hill attracts cars, only that ain’t an illusion out there. That’s 12 inches of snow piling up and, oh, what’s that sound? Why it’s the snow plow and it’s here to let you know that it hates you and all the time you spent to shovel your driveway. Did you want to get out of your house today? Were you expecting to get to work on time? Or even this week?

-snip-

Here’s the deal. I have a snow blower and I want you to own it. I can tell you’re serious about this. It’s like I can almost see you: sitting there, your legs are probably crossed and your left hand is on your chin. Am I right? How’d I do that? The same way that I know that YOU ARE GOING TO BUY THIS SNOWBLOWER.

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Getting a little confused, and annoyed by the 4G hype in commercials by cellphone makers and service providers? Wondering what the fuss about 4G really is all about? Here’s a piece I wrote a while back that tries to put it all in practical perspective. I share it here for de-mystifying value ahead of the holiday shopping season.

Picture this, some time in the not distant future you’re walking down the street of a in a foreign city, your cell phone extended in front of you like Sherlock Holmes holding a magnifying glass.

Across the screen there are pointers identifying the landmarks, translations of the signs, ratings of the local restaurants, and a video feed of your friend who’s been here before pointing out where you want to go, and avoid. Welcome to the world of 4G in the not so distant future.

“In the past we talked about going online. It used to be an actual activity,” said Charles Golvin, a principal analyst at Forrest Research. “No we won’t go online, we will always be online. With 4G we will have a broadband connection with us, all the time, no matter where we go.”

In October 2010 nearly 250 luminaries from economics, public policy, the private sector and elected office gathered in black-tie attire at London’s Museum of Science. They gathered to honor the recipients of the Economist Magazine’s coveted 2010 Innovation Awards.

Steve Jobs was honored for advancing consumer products; a chemist was lauded for devising a way to recycle billions of pounds of plastic. But it was the last prize, the Reader’s Prize, which focused not on accomplishments, but potential.

The Reader’s Choice Award went to 4G, the next generation of cellular networks, for it’s potential to “change society drastically,” Economist editors said. Futurist Alex Lightman, who first preached the value of 4G in 2002, was asked to accept the award.

“I’m going to time travel to 2020 with all of you and tell me what happened,” Lightman told the audience. “We did it! We connected 6 billion people at 20 bits per second, everywhere in the world. We created a productivity singularity. We enabled complete global connectivity, interoperability and adaptability, so that any one can buy, sell, loan or swap with anyone else… In 2020 everyone is above average compared to the dark ages of 2010.”

What is it about 4G that has created such lofty expectation?

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