Make Money Online

Editor’s Note: The following post is an excerpt from material Jim Kukral, former Managing Editor of ReveNews and author of Attention! This Book Will Make You Money, used during his keynote at Affiliate Summit East 2010. It is published here with Jim’s permission. Rumor has it the Affiliate Super Friends appeared during the keynote, that indeed is all Jim’s fault. Enjoy.

Did you know that 4.6 million bottles of 5 Hour Energy Drink are sold each week in the USA alone? According to The New York Times, Bill Pecoriello, chief executive of Consumer Edge Research, estimated that energy shot sales could reach $700 million this year, nearly double last year’s $370 million. Today, 5-Hour Energy accounts for about 80 percent of the rapidly expanding market.

The question is how did a relatively new product gain such traction with the US consumer? Here are five valuable lessons you can take away from this product and their marketing.

#1 Reason – “Energy” Is In The Product Name

I’m a huge fan of saying what you do. If you are a plumber and your name is Angel, your business name should be Angel’s Plumbing. If you are the world’s best expert at databases, then you should be calling yourself The Database Diva, not “Aviva, LLC” which was her original name. If you are an amazing resource of tax information for small businesses owners, you should be calling yourself TaxMama, not Eva Rosenberg Tax Services.

Lesson: Say What You Do

#2 Reason – It Helps You Get Energy

You’re tired,  you’re down. You need energy. You can go and drink coffee all day long, but then your breath smells and you have to pee every five minutes. In other words, it solves problems which is what every successful product does.

Lesson: Solve Problems For Your Customer

#3 Reason – It Helps You For Five Hours

Not one hour, not 12 hours, not a half hour. Five hours. When you think about it that number is of significant importance to their marketing because people find it believable. A product with a claim that sounds outrageous, no matter how true, won’t sell. Consumers have to believe it to buy it. If it was 12 hours, nobody would buy it, they’d think it was fake or like a speed pill. If it was one hour, again, people wouldn’t buy it, they’d say “Who needs one hour of energy only?”

Five hours is exactly what you need, and want, and they know it. Need a pick me up after lunch to get you through the rest of the day? Drink 5 Hour Energy Drink. Need to hit the clubs at Midnight in Vegas and dance the night away? Drink 5 Hour Energy Drink.

Lesson: Think About What Your Customers Really Need

#4 Reason – It’s Very Portable

You can drink it in seconds. Not like a giant Monster energy drink that you have to chug-a-lug around with you all day. Not like a big coffee mug you have to carry around. You don’t feel bloated after drinking it. While all their competitors went big, five hour energy was smart enough to go small.

Lesson: Be The Alternative

#5 Reason – It’s Convenient

You can stick it in your gym bag or your work backpack. You can leave it in your glove compartment or put it in your coat pocket. Since it’s small, it’s convenient.

Lesson: Make It Easy

Whether you are a business or a brand, or you sell a product or a service, you can learn quite a bit from 5 Hour Energy. People look for new things all the time. Are you creating them for them? Not everyone loves coffee you know.

Now is your chance to take these important lessons and work them into your own strategy. Pretty soon you might just find yourself owning the majority share of customers in your industry.

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Five Marketing Lessons You Can Learn From 5 Hour Energy Drink

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Rather than build their way into social gaming, Disney opted to acquire Playdom who is the creator of Mobsters, the #1 game on MySpace, and a lesser player on Facebook. It’s an easy move to second guess and say that Disney should have bought a larger social network game company. While that was indeed an option for Disney, that line of thinking ignores the leverage-able market positions available to them and focuses on an assumption that Disney will not be able execute.

Disney’s experiments in the micropayments market

Back in 2005, Disney was involved in a micropayments market experiment, and I was in the fortunate position of running the marketplace behind that experiment which also included Microsoft and HMV music among others. In that experiment, there were two major categories of content: branded and unbranded. I’ll focus on two components of those, music and games moving forward.

In the music category, we featured an independent music provider with a catalog of over 1 million songs alongside music provided by HMV music. Single songs were priced from $0.25 through $1.25 for indie tracks, set by the artists, while HMV music tracks were at approximately $1 or $1.50. When we measured sales across both music providers at the end of each week of the trial, branded HMV music outsold indie music some weeks by 10 to 1.  Personally I was guilty of the same bias, since I tended to favor branded artists as well.

We also had games from other indie developers and publishers alongside games published by Disney in the marketplace. Again, we saw Disney games outselling non-branded games by at least 2 to 1 and often more. What was surprising was that even the best indie games rarely beat the Disney branded titles. Even more surprising, one of most frequent complaints was that some of the branded games were ‘crap’, and when we investigated further, people reported that they just bought the game because of some Disney character name they saw on it.

Why Disney branded games will triumph

Now, how does that behavior apply today? I ask you to name any character from the games by Zynga, Crowdstar, or Playdom. Can you name any strong traits of any characters in those games?  Let me change the question up a bit. If your friends, or daughters played DisneyVille, would you play too? What about an X-men Wars game?

Wait you say, it’s about game play! To that I ask, what game play is so compelling on these social games? Do the cute characters have an impact? Is the music that important? Is cross marketing important? To that I say, you may soon play a game with Nemo and “Finding Nemo” movie related music, where you can get power-ups and virtual goods with your happy meal from McDonald’s where you also get Disney character figurine.

Is the social engineering going to be lacking? Probably not. Not even mighty Zynga could knock Playdom out of the #1 spot at MySpace, so Playdom must have been doing something right. Oh, and don’t forget that MySpace is still more about entertainment than Facebook. While many people don’t use MySpace as their primary social network, including myself, I can still find and access music and videos an order of magnitude faster and efficiently there than anywhere else. So while I might read status updates on Facebook, I find music, videos, and bands on MySpace – AND, I play games on both platforms.

So if games are supposed to be about entertainment, and Disney is about entertainment, then the Disney-Playdom deal has the potential to rock the social game world. In addition to the standard Disney stable of characters, Disney’s Marvel Studios also has the rights to 5000 Marvel characters as well.  If the Playdom team made an X-men game that played across the entire comic’s time-line, would that have draw? If you think strategically about where a well executed plan from Disney would take you – it’s not a hard stretch to see integrated marketing dominating the cross-sells of the near future.

A Disney game campaign imagined

So what could this mean? How vast would this power be? Imagine the following scenario:

Imagine Disney creates a game. Let’s call it Happy Nemo World. The game  the characters of Nemo, plus a few more personalities from the Finding Nemo movie. The following steps would come natural to a company that is versed at leveraging brand relationships to create advertising opportunities and buzz:

-As an in-game advertising deal, Disney partners with McDonald’s to launch with Nemo based happy meals w/partner McDonald’s, includes codes for special power-ups in the happy meal.
- ABC has a 2 hour holiday special featuring Happy Nemo World, adding the new characters, also offers special codes on TV.
- Disney radio also promotes the holiday special, game, and offers power up codes for special items.
- Disney stores nationwide find a new opportunity to sell Nemo plushies but this time with power-up codes.
- Disneylands and DisneyWorld introduce a new ride with characters from the game and special power-up codes on the ticket
- Disney introduces a new movie on DVD (like the nearly endless Aladdin series) – “Nemo finds a friend”, continuing the Nemo story, introducing characters from the game, and also providing power up codes.
- Disney runs a Twitter campaign where everyone who posts a link to the game also receives special gifts, with a similar one on Facebook
- Playdom games on Facebook and MySpace offer a cross-sell to the new game, and discounted movie tickets if you use play the new game.

Imagine the above scenario played out across Disney’s properties each already with their built in fanbase. Who else has that kind of marketing leverage and power to make those deals happen quickly? Certainly not Zynga. If/when Disney really wants to make an impact, they could bring to bear a tidal wave of marketing and leveraged brands that has yet to be seen in the social game space.

Disney is rapidly moving into a position where it will have the chance to dominate the entire social game industry by bringing recognizable brands and characters to new or even existing games, followed by cross-marketing in film, TV, radio, and other games. Such an endeavor is ambitious, requires massive cat-herding management skills from within Disney, but is well within the reach of the technology, business units, and existing footprint of its properties.

I say it’s Disney’s game to lose by failure to execute. It won’t be easy, but it’s usually dangerous to bet against the mouse.

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Disney To Use Playdom Acquisition To Redefine Social Games And Crush Zynga

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Companies are learning a tough lesson about customer empowerment: give your customers reasons to communicate and they’ll do so willingly, sometimes in ways you can’t control.

American Express recently released findings of a customer service survey the company conducted online among a random sample of 1,000 U.S. consumers age 18 and over. The same survey methodology was used in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan , Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain, and the U.K.

The findings indicate, not surprisingly, that nine in ten Americans consider the level of customer service important when deciding to do business with a company. But only about one-quarter of them believe companies value their business and will go the extra mile to keep it.

Good News / Bad News

The good news is that, contrary to a commonly held belief, customers will talk more about a positive experience with a company than a negative one. Three-quarters of respondents said they are very likely to speak positively about a company after a good service experience, while 59 percent said they are very likely to speak negatively about a company after poor service.

But here’s the bad news companies need to consider: nearly half (48 percent) of respondents report always or often using an online posting or blog to get others’ opinions about a company’s customer service reputation. What are they looking for? Negative opinions.

According to American Express’ survey over half of respondents (57 percent) say they believe more in negative reviews than positive ones on blogs, and 48 percent believe more in negative reviews on social networking sites. Jim Bush, Executive Vice President, World Service for American Express, explains:

“The Internet has made service quality more transparent than ever before. In the online space, positive recommendations are important, but people often give more weight to the negative. Because consumers can broadcast their views so widely online, each and every service interaction a company has with its customers becomes even more crucial.”

Even more telling is the fact that Americans are seemingly losing their patience with poor service. In fact, 81 percent of respondents have decided never to do business with a company again because of poor customer service in the past. Half of the respondents say it takes just two poor service experiences before they stop doing business with a company.

According to Brand Reputation CEO Graeme Crossley:

“A customer that has a good experience will typically tell 3 to 5 people, but a customer who has a poor experience will tell more than 20. When this is trend occurs via the web, these numbers can rapidly multiply and could spell disaster for brands that don’t have strategies in place to combat online negative chatter.”

How should consumer ratings impact your social initiatives online?

When it comes to consumer ratings for a product or company, for example, should a company stay silent in the face of a negative review? Given the implications of this survey, probably not. Maybe a company can ask satisfied customers to post positive reviews on the same site, or respond to the review if allowed.

A similar strategy might be wise when it comes to social media. Companies need to be proactive and react quickly to both negative and positive feedback with the objective of both engaging a consumer in a dialogue and deflecting any negative follow-on.

Gatorade recently set up “Mission Control” (video below), a central facility that’s being used to monitor the sports landscape, monitor online discussions, track sports trends and buzz, track brand attributes, track media performance, and do proactive social media outreach. Obviously, not every brand marketer can afford a sophisticated “Mission Control,” but this is an example of how seriously big brands take social media – and it’s a good lesson for every company.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Combine perceptions about poor service with reliance on blogs and social networks for opinions about companies and you can see a conundrum looming for marketers. It becomes ever more important to not just provide good customer service, but also to monitor online complaints and do whatever possible to resolve them quickly and to the satisfaction of the consumer.

When a consumer takes the time to complain about a company’s customer service online, that company had better pay attention – because it appears that’s what other consumers are doing.

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American Express Study Finds Consumers Seek Out Negative Opinions

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For a group whose claim to fame is crafting forward-looking breakthrough marketing campaigns, advertising agencies sure can be a Johnny-come-lately.

It is only now, writes Suzanne Vranica in The Wall Street Journal, that big ad agencies are figuring out they’d better secure their position in social media. Why? Because they’re seeing big clients shift spending of big bucks to social media, and that means traditional media billings could be going out the door.

Worldwide ad spending on social networks will reach $2.5 billion this year, according to eMarketer, an online research firm. That’s only about 5 percent of the total online advertising market, but it’s a segment that’s booming. Clearly, advertising firms see dollars floating away into the air – and they’d like to pull them back down to earth.

One thing that has distinguished the usage of social media for marketing purposes thus far is that companies have largely done their own thing rather than engage ad agencies to assist them. No offense to the ad agencies, but I think that’s largely because the clients themselves are more knowledgeable in social media. If an advertiser uses an outside resource at all, it is often a smaller, highly specialized firm.

I’ve written about numerous big companies who use social media to their advantage, such as Pepsi, notable for its truly advanced thinking in the area. In fact, Vranica says that Pepsi’s Gatorade just established a “Mission Control Center” to monitor mentions of the brand across social-media networks in real time.

Ad agency holding companies always get concerned when big clients develop their own in-house capabilities or use resources outside their networks, so the big guys are scrambling to build or buy social media expertise.

Media agency Universal McCann, for example, launched Rally this week, a division that “will help marketers develop campaigns, track online chatter about their brands and measure how those campaigns perform.” In charge of Rally is a former MySpace executive, Heidi Browning. The CEO of Universal McCann, Matt Seiler, tells The Wall Street Journal, “Social media is now part of all our clients’ plans; we can’t not be in this space.”

Vivaki, the digital organization within Publicis Groupe, one of the world’s top agency holding companies, intends to start a social media consulting practice by the end of 2010, according to Vranica.

Things get even more interesting when you combine this trend with a recent ad industry report in Advertising Age that suggests mergers and acquisitions in digital marketing will flourish in the second half of the year. An investment banking firm said close to three-quarters of all merger and acquisition activity in the first half of 2010 was in the interactive media area.

Interestingly, it wasn’t ad agencies who were demonstrating the highest interest in digital marketing earlier this year, it was magazine publishers. Hearst acquired digital marketing company iCrossing, and Meredith just acquired mobile agency Hyperfactory. Publishers see the writing on the iPad – digitize or die.

So now, it seems, the marketing industry’s sleeping giants are awakening. Ad agencies are finally realizing that if they don’t jump on their clients’ social media bandwagon, they’ll be left eating their dust. Interesting to note that while ad agencies often claim to be ahead of the curve, they’ve been behind their clients on this one.

Original post:
Ad Agencies Arrive Late to the Social Media Party

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This is a tale of two stories. Both are about the use of social media. But they are usually on opposite ends of the spectrum: cars and bananas (unless you are playing a practical joke as in Beverly Hills Cop, see clip at end of article).

First, cars:

Apparently, Ford decided it would make more sense to unveil its new Ford Explorer model on Facebook instead of at an auto show, reports USA TODAY. Last week, Ford launched a Facebook campaign, releasing “teaser photos” of the car periodically and indicating that the Explorer would be revealed on the social media site soon. The Explorer is set to officially launch sometime in July.

Ford’s head of social media, Scott Monty, told USA TODAY, “We live in a 140-character society [referring to Twitter]. When we have people’s attention, we want to make sure it sticks.” Monty added that Ford wanted to use the Internet to show that Ford is not “a faceless monolith,” but rather a company that encourages consumer involvement and feedback.

Just a few years ago, such a move would be inconceivable. Auto shows have always been the accepted launching pad for a manufacturer’s new models. For Ford, no less, to introduce a car via Facebook is breaking the mold, to say the least.

Now, bananas:

Chiquita is a name that’s been associated with bananas for almost fifty years. In fact, it was Chiquita that first branded the banana by putting its famous blue sticker on the fruit.

But even Chiquita has to keep up with the times, so the brand decided to encourage consumers to create their own Chiquita stickers via a “Sticker Generator.” The company started a social media campaign at www.eatachiquita.com. Chiquita also launched “Shop A Peel,” an online store that allows consumers to take the customized stickers they make and order products with the designs on them.

According to the Advertising Specialty Institute, the “Eat a Chiquita” campaign has attracted almost half a million fans and has generated some 25,000 unique sticker designs. I guess you could say people have gone bananas over the idea.

Judy Chen, a group leader in marketing at Chiquita Brands International, says

“The response to the store has been growing, with lots of online buzz, positive response and excitement on the social media front. We fully expect the store to continue to grow in its customer base and sales, especially with future contests and refreshers planned for the overall Eat A Chiquita campaign later this year.”

Why cars and bananas are effective:

In using social media, Ford and Chiquita each took a calculated risk. Ford opened itself up to unfiltered commentary about the Explorer, and Chiquita left itself vulnerable to stickers that could be inappropriate. But these brands recognized that the benefits of grabbing attention and connecting with consumers, of being approachable and engaging, outweighed the possible consequences.

These are just two examples of big brands that have been around a long time who recognize that social media is not just a fun thing to do, it’s a necessary part of a modern-day marketing strategy. Kudos to Ford and Chiquita.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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The gargantuan numbers being generated by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are of paramount importance for marketers.  These numbers set the tone for why social media has already changed the manner in which major advertisers are now defining their media strategy. More and more companies are realizing the potential social media may have.

Famecount.com is a British website that reports on usage trends across Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Famecount uses data reported via the APIs of the three services and then categorizes that data to create rankings.

The leading Performer of the moment is Lady Gaga, with over 8,475,000 Facebook fans, over 4,500,000 Twitter followers, and over 303,000 YouTube subscribers. Those are awesome numbers, but she’s an entertainment phenomenon, after all. Let’s take a look at something a little less hip – commercial brands – to see which companies are making the grade in social media.

According to Famecount’s popularity index, which is an aggregate of all three of the leading social media, the top three brands in social media worldwide are (1) Starbucks, (2) Coca-Cola, and (3) Skittles. Starbucks has over 7,700,000 Facebook fans, over 920,000 Twitter followers, and more than 6,600 YouTube subscribers, to Coke’s 5,700,000 Facebook fans, 32,000 Twitter followers, and more than 9,500 YouTube subscribers. Starbucks comes in at 68.81 percent to Coca-Cola’s 52.54 percent on the Famecount index. Lady Gaga, by the way, is 100 percent on the index.

Starbucks and Coca-Cola leading the pack may be expected, but some of the ten most popular brands might surprise you. They include a remarkable range of industries: food (Oreos), drink (Red Bull), airlines (JetBlue Airways), technology (Dell), supermarkets (Whole Foods Market), and online retailers (Zappos.com and Woot.com).

Over my years in marketing, I’ve learned to take numbers with a grain of salt, so I don’t necessarily agree with the notion of a popularity index, which might skew the data and show a somewhat arbitrary ranking. For example, Whole Foods has just 264,000 Facebook fans, but because of its 1,770,000 Twitter followers, the company ranks as the number four brand according to the Famecount index.

But let’s put that aside and consider the implications of the raw numbers. Consider Starbucks’ 7,700,000 Facebook fans, for example. That number is more than the circulation of Better Homes and Gardens magazine, the third largest magazine in the United States. It’s about 10 percent of the worldwide viewers of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the world’s most watched television program in 2009.

For any company to generate interest from almost eight million people is, from a marketing perspective, nirvana.

That’s why you see Fortune 500 companies scrambling to gain a presence on Facebook and Twitter. That’s why you see Starbucks soliciting ideas from customers, and why you see companies like Pepsi and Coca-Cola trying to outdo each other in the social media arena.  That’s why you see companies like Visa using YouTube instead of television advertising during the World Cup.

For marketers, it is all about numbers. And when marketers look at social media, they see the kind of huge numbers that make them want to shift their promotional dollars from traditional media to social media.

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There are few online to offline success stories. Often they are limited to large brands who are either part of the technology industry or whose consumer base are early adopters to technology trends. Which is why when Media Trust, ranked as the 9^th fastest growing company by Inc Magazine, joined forces with a little known driver outside of NASCAR circles named Joe Nemechek no one expected quick success. The results surprised everyone. I sat down with Peter Bordes, CEO of MediaTrust, to discuss that success.

How did the deal come together with Global Media Minds, Joe Nemechek, and NASCAR?

The whole thing happened very rapidly. In NASCAR there has been a contraction in the amount of sponsorship money available for drivers due to the economy. GMM approached us literally weeks before the racing season started with the idea. We decided to take on the challenge as a case study with the goal of creating a different way of packaging various elements of online marketing within the world of NASCAR racing. GMM had all these parts for Joe in place that weren’t really being leveraged:  a late 90’s style website, a Twitter account that was sort of being used, and a Facebook account that was only partially up to date. Nothing was really integrated together. So we ripped it apart and put it together in the short timeframe we had. What you see now is just version one of our concept, there are two or three more evolutions yet to come.

How has the response been?

I have to say the attention we’ve gotten so far with this project is phenomenal.  We built the Media Trust brand leveraging social media but I don’t think you really understand the concept of engagement until you get behind the wheel of a social campaign with someone that is a celebrity. We first looked at Joe Nemechek’s personal site and his official site NEMCO Motorsports but decided that we should start from scratch with FrontRowJoe.com.

So we started with the fundamentals putting all the pieces together, setting up tracking to measure sign-ups and clicks, integrating Twitter and Facebook, getting Joe to personally buy into using the social platforms more methodically. Joe began posting regularly and the following grew quickly from about a thousand to just under five thousand users in Facebook and took the Twitter from in the hundreds to just under three thousand.

It’s groundbreaking because none of the other NASCAR drivers, to my knowledge, are remotely leveraging social media the way we did. Our efforts actually brought in two sponsors.  One of these is England’s Stove Works, which is not necessarily a typical sponsor. We were able to drive a half a million dollars in sponsorship revenue. For having put everything together in three weeks we’ve been enormously successful.

It’s kind of allowing Joe to be real spokesperson. Instead of the drivers just wearing the logos he can actually talk to the audience and react.

Exactly!  When we began working on the campaign we spoke with other companies who had sponsored NASCAR drivers and they all said, “We love NASCAR but we just could never figure out what our return was from it.” I talked to the CEO of Liberty Medical and he’s like “I love what you guys are doing!” And he even sent me a picture of his car and was like, “We love NASCAR, we’d love to sponsor it, I just couldn’t figure out how to make sense of it.”  Because what is my logo on the car worth?

But if you can have the driver talking about Liberty Medical its like  now he’s off and running. When the driver is talking about the brand you need the mechanisms in place to be able to really connect with the fan base. Not just through some static website but through interactive mediums like Facebook and Twitter. It’s amazing how quickly you’ll see people coming to that brand and transacting.

That’s how it was with England Stove Works. We drove half a million dollars worth of transactions initiated by our efforts with FrontRowJoe! In a way Joe became a super affiliate. That success with this experiment can certainly be replicated.

Quite an experiment; it seems to have out reached its goals. What were Joe’s team and GMM initially hoping for from this?

We really had no idea. This was a complete and total shot in the dark but it was better than nothing. Joe’s agency had been working with us on other projects and knew that we were able to look at the broad online universe and take a holistic new approach to the channel. It was either that or nothing so what have we got to loose in trying something new?  Let’s leverage Joe’s passion for the fans and history  as a driver and see if we can possibly generate revenue online. Let’s experiment and find out, we have nothing to lose, we have a willing driver, we have a great agency and a group of people to work plus if this model works it can be replicated within the NASCAR industry.

I’d say this has gone metric wise way past anything we could possibly imagine.  What’s great is that the season’s not even over yet and we’re definitely going to have a phenomenal case study.

How did you track the affiliate and social media ROI?

Everything was built in a dynamic environment so we could look at the results daily and start tweaking the campaign as we went. First there was the car itself which had no sponsors, so we thought “Let’s make Joe his own sponsor and put FrontRowJoe.com all over the car.” That would drive fans to a website designed purely with marketing in mind. We started to track metrics to optimize: how many people were coming in, from where were they engaging, what were they signing up for, the newsletter, what products were they clicking on.

Using Google Analytics we measured which channel, Twitter or Facebook, was stronger giving us a very clear picture of our efforts right down to the Tweet. We could see which Tweets and posts in Facebook worked, what type of call actions we used  in the posts did not. It’s been a very effective mechanism for allowing us to adjust as we go.

For the affiliate side, to track offers, we used our own proprietary affiliate tracking technology.  It’s really very interesting, prior to working with Joe, I didn’t realize how many affiliates are NASCAR fans. It’s huge!

For the New England Stove sponsorship we set up a tracking mechanism on their website. When a user came from NASCAR  a special discount or offer would trigger so we could see what the effect of the traffic that we were sending out was.

How are the offers on Front Row Joe picked?

At first it was fairly blind. We just looked at the demographics, the geographics, the “demo-geos”,  and where the races were held. We guessed the categories that would be popular, like DirectTV and offers from Force Factor because that was primarily more the “demo-geo” of Middle America. As the clicks came in we started to find out there were more females interacting with Joe and with NASCAR drivers than there were males which was something that none of us would have expected.  So what we are now doing is looking at the data of who is signing up into the database and which offers are getting interacted with.  Currently all the optimization is being done by hand but we’ll start applying technology to it.

So now that you’ve had this success what do you hope to replicate from the lessons you’ve learned?

What we want to do is really turn Front Row Joe into an actual brand. Not only for Joe, himself, but for NASCAR. The website will be completely rebuilt to focus on providing unique content from each race for the fans with content from the pits, from the front row with the drivers and will also provide visitors a much deeper integration with social media sharing features.  There have actually been other drivers that are interested in taking part after having seen this. Everyone is pretty astounded by the success, especially considering Joe has crashed and burned in every race but yet you’re still getting this incredible traction with the sponsors and the fans.

Once someone has gained some affinity with the fans it doesn’t necessarily matter if they’ve placed in the winner’s circle because they’ve built up this relationship over the years.

Exactly!  You know Angel, I’ve got a pretty big following within online marketing industry but I’ve never been able to generate the kind of response with my personal Tweets as I’ve seen Joe generate with NASCAR fans. The speed and responsiveness from those fans is just phenomenal! People are coming up to Joe in the pits and saying, “I saw your Tweet, “it’s faster than a tweeting bullet” that was great!”

My background is in mass media. Mass media and mass marketing is changing forever to “me media” and “me marketing” and I think this is a great demonstration of that.  And relationship is the point because consumers are getting so smart they can tell if someone has an  authentic social presence or not. We have tons of people coming on the site and saying, “Joe, is this really Joe?”

Which is why it’s important to have Joe excited and fully involved for this to work. You have to have the authenticity of the voice of these guys and this is what we’ve done with just one of them. The success certainly can be replicated.

Still, you have to be a little careful not to bastardize this because there is a lot of responsibility that comes along with engaging fans.  Social media is unregulated and if marketing agencies get a hold of a medium for the wrong reasons it can totally ruin this channel  just as quickly as it ruined other channels. I think there’s a big responsibility that comes along with this as we start seeing power of harnessing social media. Done right it can create a lot of value for the fans.

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MediaTrust Sets the Pace with NASCAR Success

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By the end of 2009, more than 4.6 billion people had mobile phones, according to the International Telecommunications Union. That’s almost 70 percent of the world’s population. In Europe and Asia, mobile phones are already standard means for consumers to conduct business and make purchases. North America is just now catching up.

Seamless web integration is fast becoming standard on mobile phones, and networks are being pushed to improve data communications speed and capabilities so they can remain competitive. That’s why 2010 could be a banner year for mobile marketing.

A recent blog post by two mobile strategists, Dan Neumann and Allison Mooney, offers a leading edge look at where mobile marketing could be headed this year.  Here are just three of the trends they say will be shaping the way marketers interact with consumers:

Localization

In a previous post, I spoke about the steady rise of interest in Foursquare, which bases its success on users checking in with each other from specific locations, like bars and restaurants. Neumann and Mooney suggest this is just the beginning of a whole range of location-based services that will open up new opportunities to marketers who want to influence local buying behavior.

Think about the possibilities. You could offer mobile coupons keyed to local stores, provide tools that allow consumers to comparison shop, and even allow consumers to interact with digital signage in store windows, using their phones to respond to ads submit messages or place orders. “Mobile will completely revolutionize the way local advertisers can connect with potential customers,” say Neumann and Mooney.

Applications

While branded applications will continue to be popular, Neumann and Mooney point out that the applications marketplace is already crowded. Marketers will need to find other ways to break through on the handset. The developing trend will be “in-app content” – the ability to develop ad-supported applications. Google is expected to be a big player – they acquired a mobile advertising network called AdMob and they’re “creating a competitive alternative business model for developers” to challenge the iPhone’s application superiority.

Social Media Integration

The cross-over of social media with mobile phones is a natural. The growth of Twitter, for example, has been driven by mobile tweeting. But the real future, according to Neumann and Mooney, is not just in consumers’ ability to interact with each other and offer feedback, but in how marketers react. “Smart marketers will do all they can to encourage and act on this real-time feedback. Whether brands carve out a dedicated mobile channel or simply rely on Twitter customer service, we’ll see more embracing the feedback loop.”

This is one bandwagon online marketers should be prepared to jump on in 2010.

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Making Mobile Matter

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In his post about Foursquare last October, David Lewis said Foursquare had “some serious weaknesses,” but he admitted, “It’s worth keeping an eye on it.”

Well suddenly, Foursquare seems to be breaking out of its status as a cutesy, fun mobile-enabled game. It has just been discovered by the likes of Bravo TV, HBO, the History Channel, Warner Brothers, and Zagat, according to Advertising Age. The magazine says “These new deals represent an entertainment trifecta for Foursquare – network TV, cable TV and movie studios.”

It’s true that when big advertisers discover a new media channel, it tends to legitimize the channel for other advertisers. My last post about Pepsi snubbing Super Bowl ads in favor of Facebook speaks to that. So is this the beginning of Foursquare’s coming out party?

Obviously, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley would like to think so. He sees entertainment brands as having significant potential for the company because of changes in viewer behavior. He believes consumers now watch shows on television “with computers on their laps or phones in their hands – multitasking while they watch, communicating about the content, or just killing time during commercials.”

This kind of behavior plays nicely to Foursquare’s shtick: users and friends checking in with each other from specific locations, making lists of favorites and sharing them, winning points for checking in, and winning badges for participating in new experiences. It all may sound a little juvenile, but think of it as a GPS-enabled Twitter combined with enticing rewards. Obviously, some very big advertisers are testing Foursquare to see if it will work for them. Exactly how these advertisers will use Foursquare, or benefit from it, is part of the test.

There are already some advertisers who are proving that Foursquare can pay off. Zagat, a guidebook that rates restaurants, is probably one of the better examples because what Zagat does fits so well with the concept of Foursquare. According to Advertising Age, “[Zagat] has populated five cities with tips that share their expertise – things like drink deals, the best times to dine, and what entrees to order. By checking in at Zagat-rated locations, users can unlock a new ‘foodie badge’ and those that frequent a place most often might be featured on Zagat.com…”

Zagat has an iPhone application that allows users to access content about and ratings of restaurants. It also offers the ability to make OpenTable reservations for those restaurants that accept them directly from the app. But Zagat’s Ryan Charles told Advertising Age that iPhone and other smartphone applications are just the beginning. Foursquare is “a natural progression. There is an obvious synergy between Zagat’s expertise in helping people make quick, informed decisions and Foursquare’s location-based platform.”

Will this latest buzz get Foursquare over the hurdle of being an intriguing if inconsequential technology? And will the current interest from big advertisers help transform Foursquare into a major player capable of displacing Twitter? It’s too soon to tell – but one way or the other, chances are Foursquare will become a player that online marketers will be have to take seriously.

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Jeff Molander wrote a post on his blog about social media. I decided to write a response at ReveNews instead of my own blog because, frankly, it is more provocative here. Plus, this is the community that introduced us. And that is the point Jeff misses about social media: it’s about the community.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary

In his post Jeff wrote about Mary, a woman who chose not to hire Jeff or attend one of his speaking engagements. Jeff humbly accepted that Mary was right to reject Jeff based on her logic. Mary thought that Jeff did not tweet enough and, therefore, could not provide value to her on the topic of social media.

Jeff called out Mary for looking at the quantity of tweets which is a statistic and does not denote value. On this, I think that Mary is more correct than Jeff, even if she cannot or did not express why.

Well, there’s this Guy

Jeff gave a little detail on Guy Kawasaki’s use of Twitter. What he left out is that @guykawasaki is really just @alltop with each item tweeted and retweeted at least 3 times (often and unfortunately more). Guy added the @alltop account after I asked about his self-retweeting and started a heated debate that continues today.

@guykawasaki is widely followed. While it started out with stories that Guy himself probably found interesting, it now appears to be operated by the Alltop staff. It links to Alltop articles that give an inferior summary and often make it difficult to find the link to the information that sounded interesting in the tweet that got a follower to the page. Which begs the question if/when Guy leaves Alltop, who keeps @guykawasaki?

Guy’s third Twitter account is @guysreplies. This is the account that Guy tweets from. If you reply to @guykawasaki, oddly the reply back to you is from @guysreplies.

The problem here is that Guy isn’t present. He is not a part of his own community. His blog post that is the heated debate is a debate in the community but Guy is not a part of it. This is what Jeff should be talking about. Regardless of the amount of tweet volume, Guy is absent from his own twitter account, in his own community, on his own article.

It’s in the conversation

So why was Mary right and Jeff wrong about the quantity of Jeff’s tweets? Jeff lectures on social media but he is not a member of the community. He does not take part in the conversation. If Jeff finds articles that others have written, he rarely tells his Twitter followers about them. If Jeff is active in commenting on a blog post he thinks is provocative, he doesn’t tweet about it. To me (and I think to Mary), that shows that Jeff doesn’t get social media.

Jeff tweeted a link to an article about what 1-800-Flowers has done wrong on Facebook. That post criticizes 1-800-Flowers for not taking an active role in its community. The author writes that 1-800-Flowers has little more than Facebook posts of Monday, Wednesday and Friday contests and a stock answer to anyone who has a complaint. That is not showing your community that you care. That is not taking leading the conversation, let alone even taking part in it.

We can discuss metrics to measure success of a retailer’s social media campaign another time. The real issue Jeff should be looking at in order to counsel retailers is how a retailer can be an active member of its own community whether on its own pages or that of others.

The beginning & end

The tweet that got me going on this was your ability to create meaningful biz outcomes w/ social media rests in your ability to act on this single realization. The single realization that I think you need is that to succeed in social media, you need to be active, proactive and a leader in your community. Hey, that’s no different than how people used to succeed in the brick-and-mortar world of days past.

[Author's note: I found Jeff's article via a tweet as I follow him on Twitter and then I read the article on his blog with a domain I used to own.]

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Taking an Active Role in Social Media for Your Business

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The best marketing campaigns are rarely created, but instead are often found. And they’re out there waiting to be discovered.

In April 1999, an under the radar article in the Indiana Daily Student about an obese Indiana University coed hardly seemed like the genesis of a company’s 10-year advertising campaign, however; it    provided the basis for  resounding success for one company and has changed the landscape of the fast food industry as we know it.

And that is exactly what happened when Ryan Coleman wrote about an obese dorm mate and caught the right person’s eye. How exactly did this come about?

In his article Coleman wrote  that when this student  “registered for a class, he didn’t base his choice on professor or class time like most students. He based which classes to register on whether he could fit into the classroom seats.” What an emotional situation, one that is geared to spark an uncomfortable emotional reaction and empathy from the reader for the student in question for s getting himself into this situation.

But the story has a twist, one that involves this student having a serious medical scare  that prompted him to  lose some serious weight. Enter a new attitude and a new diet. Three months into his diet, he weighs in at 330 pounds, almost 100 pounds lighter. The pounds kept flying off…300, 275, 250, 225, 210. Believe it or not he got down to 180 pounds, a whopping 245 pound loss!

How did he do it? (The subsequent marketing campaign was so effective you probably already know this part of the story…)

Simple. He ate at Subway.  A lot. He developed his own diet based on Subway subs and stuck to it.

His name…Jared Fogle. You know him. The guy who had the 60-inch waist but now can fit his entire body into one pants leg. The guy who has been the centerpiece of Subway’s marketing campaigns for over a decade now. Yeah, that guy.

The first Jared ad ran on January 1, 2000 and soon the “Subway Diet” was featured on the news, on morning shows, in USA Today, on Oprah even! Sales for Subway began to boom and all because of an inspiring story that everyone can relate to on some level. The commercials were, and remain today, pretty simple. No fancy graphics or high-paid celebrities, although Jared himself is now a bit of a celebrity. Just Jared talking about how he lost weight and showing off the newest healthy sub.

Soon, every fast food chain under the sun began to offer healthier options and yet Subway remains at the top of the list in terms of people’s perceptions of healthy fast food, thanks in large part to the visual reminders they give us of Jared every so often.

How effective was Subway’s campaign?

According to data compiled by Compete in 2008 (the 10th year anniversary of the campaign being launched), Subway’s Fresh Buzz site which was launched to help customers engage with Jared and continues to provide diet and health information today, is 5x more likely to be visited by consumers who are focused on diet and health. More than any other national fast food chain, including McDonalds.

The great news for the rest of us is that every company has a Jared, someone whose emotional story about their brand or product makes for such a compelling argument to buy that customers can’t help but respond to message. . Everyone likes to be inspired and inspiration leads to action.

Jared’s story is not about healthy eating or losing weight. It’s about a guy who reaches his potential and overcomes the odds, with the help of a certain product.

You have a Jared you just need to find him. Ask your customers to share their stories, it helps increase their since of affinity to your brand by tying their story to yours.  Get real stories from real people. It works in the online world just as well as the offline world.

Jared’s story is a vivid reminder that great marketing ideas are rarely created, but found. Go find yours today!

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Finding Your Inner Jared: A Must for Any Company

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In the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) world, when Procter & Gamble (P&G) makes a move, every one of its competitors take notice. That’s because P&G is the world’s branding powerhouse, owner of 300 brands with such legendary names as Crest, Gillette, Ivory and Tide.

P&G has long been known as a marketing innovator. The company was, of course, among the first sponsors of “soap operas,” but more recently, P&G has used every media imaginable to relentlessly push its brands. That’s why it’s more than curious that P&G has been somewhat late to the social media party.

In fact, in November 2008, Ted McConnell, P&G’s general manager of interactive and innovation, told a conference in Cincinnati, P&G’s hometown, that he was anything but enthusiastic about Facebook. “What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend? …I don’t think everything every consumer says to someone else and writes down is somehow monetizable by the media industry,” McConnell said.

My, Ted, how things have changed. Little more than a year later, P&G just announced that it has opened a Silicon Valley office specifically to “help develop social-networking systems and digital-marketing capabilities,” according to Advertising Age. Venture capitalist David Hornik, who met with P&G executives, reported that “P&G’s explicit goal for 2010 is to assure that each of its brands has a meaningful presence on Facebook, and they are willing to pay dearly for that. …[P&G leaders] view Facebook as a must-have for digital advertising and brand building.”

When P&G does anything, it does it in a very big way, so this latest move is clearly signaling that social media is to be taken seriously by P&G – and therefore by the whole marketing industry, which follows its every move.

Interestingly, on the very same day that the P&G story broke, Advertising Age also  reported that Clorox (a P&G arch-rival) was seeking a full-time in-house legal counsel to focus on social media. This is yet another sign of how important social media has become to big marketers. A Clorox spokesman told Advertising Age:

“Social-media channels are a growing focus for consumer communication and stakeholder engagement for our brands and company. As a newer communication channel, the application of existing laws to this medium is evolving. For those reasons and the rapid pace of communication in the Web 2.0 world, we’re seeking an attorney to focus on social media as well as talent rights.”

Maybe it doesn’t seem like such big news to hear that Procter & Gamble and Clorox are finally focusing on social media, but it matters. These guys are now drinking the social media Kool-aid. When you see companies of this size and stature going full-speed ahead with the likes of Facebook, you know mass adoption of Facebook as a business marketing medium for all CPG companies, and all marketers for that matter, is just around the corner.

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P&G Finally Embraces Facebook

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At various times I, and my ReveNews colleagues have talked about Twitter as a sleeping giant when it comes to business usage. Google “Twitter business usage” and you’ll see that it’s a topic worthy of hundreds of articles and posts.

As 2010 unfolds, it seems likely that the business usage of Twitter will skyrocket. Why? For one thing it’s a way to reach huge numbers of people – Nielsen says Twitter had over 18 million visitors in December alone, a 579 percent increase from December 2008. For another, it’s one of the easiest, quickest, least expensive ways to get disseminate information, and that could mean gaining a significant competitive advantage.

A recent article in ADWEEK  gives us some inkling of where the business use of Twitter is headed. In the article, Brian Morrissey says businesses are now using Twitter as “a default content-syndication channel, pop-culture icon and real-time content source.” As a “real-time source of consumer-to-consumer recommendations,” says Morrissey, Twitter excels, and brands could leverage that ability to their benefit. “Retweets” have become the preferred virtual pass-along mechanism, meaning that a brand’s messaging can extend well beyond the original tweet.

We all know that the Coca-Colas of the world discovered Twitter long ago, but now the lesser-known brands are jumping on the Twitter-wagon. Morrissey cites the fact that even the most pedestrian brands have discovered the business benefits of Twitter. Two examples he mentions are Sweethearts candies and Tasti D-Lite.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, NECCO (New England Confectionary Company) is adding “Tweet me” to its collection of imprinted sayings on Sweethearts, those silly little candy hearts. The best-selling Valentine candy has been around since the 1860s, so it’s nice to know Sweethearts can keep up with the times. NECCO has gone social, too, creating iPhone and web applications so users can tweet Sweethearts messages to friends.

Tasti D-Lite is a chain of low-fat frozen dessert treat stores that started in New York City and has expanded to New Jersey, Florida, Tennessee, Texas and just recently, Arizona. Morrissey says Tasti D-Lite has made Twitter “the backbone of a customer loyalty program. It lets users earn extra rewards points for broadcasting their purchasing activity on Twitter and mobile social network Foursquare.”

You wouldn’t necessarily associate candy or frozen desserts with Twitter – but that’s the point. Twitter is everywhere, and businesses large and small have figured out how to use it. Morrissey points out another key fact in the Twitter business usage explosion: “Twitter’s decision to open its application programming interface (API) has allowed brands to weave Twitter into campaigns, rather than have stand-alone Twitter strategies.” Aha, interactive integration – it’s just what every advertiser wants, isn’t it?

So now’s the time to ask yourself if you are making the best use of Twitter for your business.

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Twitter, long the poster child for hype-heavy, profit-low Web 2.0 sites, may finally be seeing where the money is.

This week, Twitter started to roll out a business-friendly feature which may portend a direction of more corporate focused applications. With its new “contributors” feature, businesses are going to enable designated Twitter users to tweet on their behalf. Those updates would be labeled as being by a specific author.

The nitty-gritty behind what Twitter is doing is not the new feature, which is fairly benign, but what looks like to be the site’s first steps into a much more sophisticated system for business.

In screenshots of the new feature, Twitter offers a glimpse at its advanced settings, which allow businesses to offer enhanced levels of access for users.

But the settings also hint at a Twitter dashboard, which will ‘soon’ be available to users. This is where Twitter will find a selling point. If your business is able to access important analytics of the way other users interact with your tweets, you will be able to tap into quite a lot of valuable information.

Dial back to what Twitter has done up to this point, including enabling geolocation of Tweets and the list feature, and then you see how it adds up to the creation of a great storehouse of info for businesses. With these analytics, coupled with geo-tagged Twitter users, business will be able to see where clusters of followers or Retweets come, as well as where they are getting no traction. They may also be able to get very granular detail about followers, follower’s followers and so on.

This may be where Twitter comes in and tells businesses they can have this all for the low, low price for $X a month. Suddenly, for the geniuses behind Twitter, a business model.

And who knows where Twitter can go from here, once they show businesses that there is real data to be dug out of the 140-character service? Red tweets for Coca-Cola and blue tweets for Pepsi? There is much to be done with those few little words and Twitter is the only one to peek behind the curtain so far.

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Twitter for Business Services

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With the launch of extensions for Google’s Chrome browser one of the most interesting and potentially troubling pieces of the Web has popped back into the picture: Google’s Sidewiki.

What is Sidewiki? It’s a creation by Google that allows comments by anyone on any Web site. Sounds innocuous enough, but in the hands of any lurker on the Web with a vendetta against a company or a competitor, it may send Web messaging into a tailspin.

Picture this: Someone running Sidewiki goes to your site looking to buy your product and on your homepage, in the Sidewiki window, is a comment by a rival on your high prices – with a link to their site. If you are a more controversial company or blogger, a systematic campaign could be build against you of Sidewiki commenters.

“Just like Google bombing, in an attempt to influence the top Google result for a specific search term, I suspect people will quickly master the art of Sidewiki bombing as they attempt to get their comment at the top of the Sidewiki comments on key pages,” wrote Adam Turner of ITWire.com.

When it was first launched earlier this year, Sidewiki caused a scare and a bit of unease, but failed to have gain much traction. The addition of it to the extensions of Google Chrome, which make for a one-click addition to your browser rather than the clunkier add-on to the Google Toolbar that it was, could see it grow in popularity.

Furthermore, Google has some rules built in to make sure that people play fair – in theory. According to its’ terms of service:

If you believe that someone is violating these policies, use the “Report Abuse” button within Sidewiki. We’ll review your report and take action if appropriate. Just because you disagree with certain material or find it to be inappropriate doesn’t mean we’ll remove it. We understand that our users have many different points of view, and we take this into consideration when reviewing reports of abuse. Although not all reports will result in removal, we do rely on our users to tell us about materials that may be violating our policies.

That’s tricky language to navigate: “We understand that our users have many different points of view, and we take this into consideration…”

Initial impact I think will be limited because, while Google dominates the world of search, its footprint with both Chrome and its apps are small, though influential. It would take a significant shift in user habits for Sidewiki to hit the mainstream. In essence it comes with the baggage that savvy Web users are going to be both aware of it and able to manipulate it. Ultimately Google might find limiting the manipulation of such an app in the wild, more trouble than it’s worth.

If you are a site owner, you need to be prepared for the baggage Google Sidewiki will bring and be prepared to spend additional time monitoring your brand on the web. Policing Sidewiki could become a daily routine for those who are sensitive about their brand’s image. The bottom line is that Google, not you, has ultimate control over what appears there and it, not you, will determine which comments to boot.

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Has Sidewiki Trouble Been Reignited?

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