PBNJ Marketing Blog

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Wow.. do you remember the first car phones. Those big black boxes that you would plug into your cigarette lighter. It would suck if you actually used your cigarette lighter to light a cigarette because you would have to unplug your phone and then plug it back in. Then we had those big whitish things that looked like a 2X4. Then the flip phones. Now, we have so many things that we can get and do on our cell phones and they fit in our pocket.

I remember watching the news to hear what was going on in the world or those special reports that were like 1 to 2 hours after the facty. We would need to wait for the news crew to arrive and setup before we could see or know what was going on. We used to watch the TV van go by with the big tuning fork on top and just wonder how that thing worked. Today, we have instant access to upload videos and pictures. Who needs TV crews when you have the American public out there ready and willing to take your video and/or picture at a drop of a dime. If you did something wrong, the common response would be “Prove it. No one saw me!”. You can’t do that nowadays. Wait a few minutes and your little escapade is up on YouTube or on Facebook or someone is tweeting about it along with the video with your hand in the cookie jar.

Do we even need to watch the news anymore? Do we even need to have a newspaper delivered to our home or office? Why cut down any more trees? Just read the paper online or download a book to your iPad or Kindle and your set. I have rss feeds coming in on any major news story as it happens so I don’t need to wait until 6PM to watch the daily news. I can just go to www.cnn.com or www.foxnews.com for the latest or go to any website that I need to for science, travel, technology, entertainment.

But I guess the question is… DO we really need a television any more except to use it as a playback device? We can watch our favorite shows online now. We use our DVR’s to record our shows because we are not home to catch them so we watch them when we do get in. Soap operas are going away.. THANK GOD!. Game shows… eh! News.. we already spoke about that. Made for TV movies… Don’t have time for that. We need a TV to watch our rented DVD’s or the ones that we purchased. We need a TV to entertain our kids with Teletubbies, Sesame street, etc.. but, WAIT, those are on DVD now as well. Which is good because you can just pop one in at any time and your set.

Isn’t our mobile technology or just plainly put, technology, really affecting more than just news coverage. Next thing you know we’ll have a usb connector in the back of our heads and all we would need to do is come home, connect, upload and in a matter of minutes or even seconds, we have everything that we wanted to watch already imprinted in our brains.

Done.. what’s next on the agenda!

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You can read the entire article here.

Hispanics are one of the largest growing populations in the United States. This has been pretty much public knowledge for quite awhile now. We(hispanics) are constituting a large piece of the population that are now internet savvy and computer ready with projections that these numbers are growing. It is no wonder that hispanics are turning out to be a large target market for many businesses. There is a large purchasing power that is still relatively untouched.

Social Marketing is touching every body, every ethniticity, every age, and every pocketbook. The only thing that I find that is disheartening is when you have a company(Pepsi) or even a state(AZ) for that matter, that cheapens themselves by not thinking through their strategies and proposals before making it public. Let’s not be just put some thing out there just to put out there without some form of study or at least some background checking. If you know your market, you can speak to the market.

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If you thought that Google was going to just sit back and let everyone else get closer and closer to their market share… Think Again!

Now this giant is thinking of dishing out ovr $1 Billion dollars to purchase ITA Software. They are the makers for the airline search and pricing systems that almost all airlines use. Read the article here.

Little by little.. I wonder what is next for this bohemeth.

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They say that people are going to start using Facebook instead of Google to do their searches.  Maybe I’m behind in the updates on businesses but i would probably guess that these two giants will merge one day.

Read more on this here

I used to wonder why I got invitations, game gifts, friend request, and all of the other requests that you send out in Facebook during the workday. Everyone is on at work and “visiting” Facebook. I play on Facebook as well so I can’t say anything bad about it. I’ve actually had to ween myself off of it because I was spending 1 hour every morning plowing, harvesting, seeding, or feeding the damn fish. TOO MUCH!

Check out these results from the article above:
Business Traffic and Bandwidth

Top five websites visited by businesses:

* 1. Facebook – 6.8 per cent of all traffic
* 2. Google – 3.4 per cent of all traffic
* 3. Yimg (Yahoo!’s image server) – 2.8 per cent of all traffic
* 4. Yahoo – 2.4 per cent of all traffic
* 5. Doubleclick – 1.7 per cent of all traffic

Top five business bandwidth sites:

* 1. YouTube – 10 per cent of all bandwidth used
* 2. Facebook – 4.5 per cent of all bandwidth used
* 3. Windows Update – 3.3 per cent of all bandwidth used
* 4. Yimg (Yahoo!’s image server) – 2.7 per cent of all bandwidth used
* 5. Google – 2.5 per cent of all bandwidth used

WOW! I wouldn’t be surprised that many companies are going to start blocking Facebook from their Internet Access.

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Today I came across these very simple but yet effective ways to promote sales via social marketing efforts. Read entire article here.

The three items listed are:
1) Expect social media to deliver measurable, qualitative outcomes, not quantitative novelty.

2) Trust your instincts, question your consultants and ask yourself, “am I a tool of the tools?”

3) Ask better questions that don’t seek universal standards.

Some think that creating a Facebook ad or group will accomplish their social marketing efforts. That is but the first step of many. There are several things that need to be researched in order for it to become effective. Any social marketing effort must have some sort of measurable outcome in order to know if it is truly working for you. Accumulating fans is great but how are you going to convert those fans to a sale? How are you going to keep your fans informed and interested so that they can keep coming back.

Questions needs to be asked of any marketing professional that is delivering this methodology to you and they should be able to answer all of them and/or at least go out and find the information for you. Innovation plays a key roll in all of this. What is ‘it’ going to be that makes me convert my status from a fan to an actual sales figure. Then once I become a ’sale’ why would I want to share that experience with everyone else. Those are the questions that need to be answered, tried, and practiced in order for any type of social marketing to take effect. You don’t just want to be like everyone else. You need to stand out and deliver.

“It is not easy being cheesy”, taken from the infamous Cheeto’s advertising, but you may have to think along those lines in order to get establish yourself an outcome.. that can be measured.

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A recent article in Advertisers Age about Pepsi’s new campaign targeting Hispanics is laughable. You can read the article by clicking here.

‘Yo Sumo’ which translated means ‘I Add’ and definitely not even close to the ‘I count’ tag line that they were hoping to capture. This campaign is laughable at best. As I read the positive and negative comments regarding this campaign, I wonder if big brands and ad agencies will ever “get it”. ‘Yo Cuento’ in spanish is as a clever as “I add” in English. I wonder if looking at it from that point of view, would Pepsi move forward with this campaign.

Then you stick a personality who is hispanic but gets by when speaking in spanish. There are several well-known personalities that speak spanish. If you are targeting the hispanic population, select someone who can speak both well and fluently. “We felt the Hispanic consumer needs to go beyond simply being counted, and count,” said Martha Bermudez, Pepsi’s senior marketing manager, multicultural marketing. Thank you for thinking of our community but don’t do something ridiculous and screw up the translation Ms. Bermudez. With the high ranking position that you hold, this should have been a big RED FLAG unless you yourself just ‘gets by’ with your spanish language literacy.

One more thing before I get off my soap box, this has nothing to do with not giving Hispanics enough credit or talking “down” to them. This campaign represents how disconnected Pepsi is to their target market. Maybe it’s time to try a new agency?

Yo soy hispano y yo cuento!

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In an article by Christopher Heine, with ClickZ, written on March 29, 2010, Facebook seems to be in the process of changing their ‘Become a Fan’ button to the  word ‘Like’. You can read the entire article below. This is going to be a tremendous change among how you can market your brand on Facebook and how many followers will perceive it.  If I am a Fan of something, I want to follow it and keep informed of any updates.  A sports Fan follows their teams every move and game.  If I like something, that does not necessarily mean, to me, that I am want to keep up constantly abreast of it.  I simply just like it.

But, in the bigger picture, I will tend to like more things than I would become a fan of and, hence, my profile will tend to show a more deeper side of me.  I then become part of a more specific demographic and more specific targeting trends.  Hmmm… interesting!

Read on and let me know what you think.

Facebook is scaling back on the word “Fan” and ramping up usage of “Like” on brand pages. According to a confidential e-mail sent to ad agencies today, the social media site will change the “Become A Fan” button to read “Like” within the next few weeks.

When asked about the change, Annie Ta, spokesperson for the Palo Alto, CA-based company, confirmed via e-mail that the words on the button would be changed. But she wasn’t able to offer other specifics about whether “Like” would replace “Fan” in other places on Facebook. “We’re still working on some of the details, but brand Pages can still be referred to as ‘Fan’ Pages after the change,” Ta replied.

Facebook, in the note to ad agencies, said it wanted to give the agencies advance notice about the change that could affect upcoming advertising campaigns or Facebook strategy.

Part of the confidential e-mail read: “Over time, as users adapt to the language change, we recommend that you invite people to connect to your Page by saying ‘Find us on Facebook’ or ‘Like us on Facebook’. You may also choose to put more emphasis on your custom URL than you used to.”

The e-mail also explained how the new “Like” button will be differentiated from the “Like” feature already seen in user updates.

How it may affect ads was also addressed in the e-mail to ad agencies. “Users will understand the distinction through explicit social context, messaging and aesthetic differences. An Engagement ad unit, capable of making connections, will feature the ‘Like’ button and show social context above it such as, ‘John Doe and 3 of your friends like [Page Name].’ Standard ad units, not capable of making connections, will simply feature the word ‘Like’ by itself, and may show social context above it that says ‘John Doe and 3 of your friends like this ad.’”

Facebook users have been clicking the current “Like” feature nearly twice as often as the “Become A Fan” button, according to the memo. And the social site appears convinced using “Like” more often will increase engagement between consumers and brands.

The e-mail read: “‘Like’ offers a simple, consistent way for people to connect with the things they are interested in. These lighter-weight actions mean people will make more connections across the site, including with your branded Facebook Pages. We believe this will result in brands gaining more connections to pages since our research has shown that some users would be more comfortable with the term ‘Like’. The goal is to get the most user connections so that you can have ongoing conversations in the news feeds of as many users as possible.”

Scott Kleper, CTO for the San Francisco-based social marketing firm Context Optional, suggested that the change could indeed create greater engagement as Facebook intends. “Becoming a fan of a brand is perceived as a large commitment and is an important measurement metric… ‘Liking’ can be another great driver of awareness and an opportunity for users to show an additional form of affinity,” he said.

Scores of brands, such as Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Skittles, have cultivated online communities on Facebook.

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I will admit that I am a fan of Google Reader. I have my keywords added and every morning I have several articles to peruse. Several articles have been publicized on how to use social marketing or social media to brand your product to increase sales, on what to avoid doing, on what you should be doing, and several on “We are the best at it” so we can help you do all of these things. Every one has their recipe and, is one better than other, could be. I believe that for each opportunity comes a different recipe. A little bit more here and a little bit more there. A higher temp to cook faster or you may only want a simmer. I know these analogies are terrible but I think it’s true.

Today I came across this article that deals with the 10 Essential Rules for Brands in Social Media by Taddy Hall from Advertisers Age. He points out some interesting facts if you are trying to sell your product utilizing Social Media and he even states that this is not an exact science.

Here are the steps for you to read:

1. The 1% Rule
In category after category, our data show that a small fraction of site visitors are responsible for a substantial portion of total site traffic. On average, the percentage of influential users (defined for our purposes simply as a visitor who’s subsequent sharing actions result in at least one additional site visitor) on a given site is 0.6% and rarely above 4%. However, these influencers regularly generate 20%-50% of total site traffic and an even higher share of conversion (defined however a site owner so decides). To make social media marketing effective, marketers have to identify and engage — and better recognize and reward — these super-influentials.

2. The 2-4X Rule
When it comes to conversion, visitors driven to a site by influencers are to to four times more likely to convert compared to visitors from other sources, such as display advertisements or paid search. That means your landing pages for people coming from shared links and social sites should reflect these visitors’ interests and offer enticing deals that will encourage them not only to convert but to share the deals with others.

3. The New Media/New Pipes Rule
In today’s socially driven internet, it matters far more what consumers do with your content than what you do with your content. What they say about your brand means more than what you say about your brand. Our data shows that content spread from consumer to consumer through word-of-mouth is far more powerful at driving brand preference and purchase intent than content distributed by the brand itself. This has profound implications in social media. To illustrate, if a brand puts content on its Facebook fan page, it is far less likely to go viral than if an influential consumer puts that very same piece of content on his or her page or posts it to a relevant community of enthusiasts.

4. The Martha Stewart Rule
Throw your own party; don’t just cater someone else’s! If you base your social campaigns in venues you don’t control — such as Facebook or YouTube — you may get great “attendance,” but data show it’s hard to convert and retain these party-goers. If your goals are anything beyond building brand awareness, it’s better to have a house of your own where friends can find you — such as your own branded social site, contest site, or customer forum.

5. The Power of “Weak Links” Rule
Influentials generally do have many direct “friends” and “followers,” but what makes them truly valuable is the number and relevance of their extended or indirect connections. As Albert-Laszlo Barabasi illustrated in “Linked,” you are far more likely to find your next job through a friend-of-a-friend than through an intimate contact. These “weak links” matter in the “real world,” and they matter even more online. A critical implication for marketers is the need to track the extended social graphs of their content if they are going to be able to understand and activate the dynamics of influence.

6. The Feed the Fire Rule
Consumers love to share relevant, engaging, useful, and entertaining content with their friends. Make it easy for them to find your content and make it easy for them to share your content. Ninety percent of internet pages have fewer than 10 links pointing to them — making them effectively unfindable. Avoiding this abyss of irrelevance requires more thought and effort than just pasting a sharing tool on your pages. It means actively syndicating and curating your content and distributing it not only through your brand’s social graph, but through the graphs of your most influential advocates and fans. Easy ways to do this include following/friending your influentials’ followers/friends and retweeting/posting content even if it’s not yours.

7. The More Things Change Rule
Our research consistently demonstrates that e-mail and IM remain popular ways to share content. So don’t throw out your old e-mail marketing methods just because Facebook and Twitter are the newest communication platforms du jour. The tried-and-true methods of getting customers to share links via e-mail and IM are still extremely valuable sources of traffic. Furthermore, incorporating social elements into your e-mail, such as incentives to share, can dramatically enhance an investment you’re already making.

8. Horse Before the Cart Rule
Success in social media happens when brands infuse their content with social dimensions (Facebook Connect, most notably), not when they simply stick their ads and content in social forums. In other words, if you want to succeed in social media, your brands and content need to have social attributes — content worth sharing, brands worth talking about, sites that encourage consumer participation and dialog. If your social strategy relies on advertising in social media, it’s probably better to hang on to your money.

9. The PR Pitfalls Rule
Blogger outreach and content seeding may be popular ways to get your message into the social world, but our data show that more than 90% of seeding has no material impact. Up to 5% gets some response, but less than 2% of seeding drives valuable traffic. In other words, if you can’t track efficacy of these efforts, don’t bother.

10. The Customer-Service Rule
Social marketing programs succeed when they provide a service to the consumer. Traditional media-planing processes that begin with reach and frequency targets are largely unhelpful in social media. Reach and frequency — as well as engagement, preference and conversion — are positive consequences of giving consumers content that is sufficiently relevant and useful that they propagate your message across their own social graphs. Focus on providing useful content and offers to your target audience and they will spread your messages for you.

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Spending to quadruple as B2B marketers warm to new channels

by Bethan Jones

NEWS

Mobile and social channels will be the fastest growing areas of business-to-business marketing spend, analysts have predicted.

The cash splashed on B2B mobile marketing in the US is set to quadruple over five years – rising from $26m in 2009 to $106m in 2014, according to a report from analyst Forrester.

The rise and rise of the smartphone in the enterprise means marketers are waking up to the mobile channel as a valuable tool for getting their message across, the report said.

Spending on social media marketing in the US is also set to boom, reaching $54m in 2014 – up from $11m this year.

According to the report, businesses must interact with their customers in order to get the most from their social media spend.

“Explore the use of cost-effective social marketing tactics like blogs and Twitter that allow you to connect and converse with your customers, and use display advertising to build excitement around your products and direct customers to these more immersive experiences,” the report said.

Forrester raises a caution flag, however, against businesses diving into social media without a firm strategy in place. The report suggests setting up a social media hub that spans all areas of the business: “We recommend creating a cross-functional social media committee or centre of excellence to develop social media strategy, process and guidelines,” it said.

Marketing spend across all interactive marketing channels – including paid search, display media, SEO, mobile and social – is expected to double from 2009’s figure of $2.3bn, climbing to nearly $4.8bn in 2014, the report added.

Increased spending on digital marketing has been stimulated by the need for marketers to avoid expensive offline campaigns and adopt channels where ROI can be more readily proved, Forrester said.

My comment:

Thank you Bethan for this information.  It is hard to believe that I so much money is going to be available out in the market.  The days of newspaper ads and yellow page deals are pretty much counting their days to extinction.  If your marketing proposal doesn’t come with an application that works on Iphone, has an ad on Facebook, an immediate tweet on Twitter, or any one of the several social marketing techniques, it may go without saying that you have a very good chance of not getting the contract.

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In The Economic Times yesterday, an article was presented with excerpts from Marketing Guru Philip Kotler from an interview that was done with ET.  Below are some of the excerpts from this article.

It is interesting to read what this expert, who is credited from coining the phrase ’social marketing’, is saying about where the marketing market is today and where companies/institutions need to be aware of when it comes to social marketing.   He believes that ‘one requires a radical change in mindset & approach in such an age of turbulence.’  He states that he is working on a new framework called ‘holistic marketing’ which will go beyond the already well known framework named the ‘four P’s’ (Product, Price, Place, and Promotion).

These are only some of the excerpts but if you would like to read more, please click here to view the entire article.

You have said that the average company is using only about 10 per cent of the Internet’s potential. Which ‘eavenues’ are particularly under-used?

Companies should be increasingly turning to the new media, not to replace the old media, but to find blends of the new and the old that work well together. Tools that should be considered include webinars, blogs, podcasts, and most importantly, mining the social networks, where so much dialogue takes place about products and services (both favourable or unfavourable). We haven’t yet figured out how to use these new avenues and vehicles profitably; we’re still in the experimentation phase. Most companies are still using traditional media for the bulk of their promotions, but they should also be carrying out experiments to determine where they can mine some ‘gold’ in the new media.

You are credited with creating the concept of ‘social marketing’, which seeks to discourage unhealthy behaviour amongst consumers. Are you pleased with the results so far?

Very pleased, but social marketing involves much more than efforts to discourage unhealthy behaviour. The purpose is really to encourage positive behaviour and the maintenance of such behaviour, and to show people that while they are free to make their own choices, some choices are very counterproductive to their lifestyles and goals. Social marketing ideas have been widely applied to well-known causes like ‘say no to drugs’, ‘exercise more faithfully’ and ‘eat healthier’, but they can also be applied to broader social causes.

You have said that turbulence often leads to all the wrong responses from management. Like what?

One wrong move is to do nothing — to continue with the way you’ve been doing things. A second wrong response would be to panic, which often leads people to behave so conservatively that they forget that, as a wise person once said, ‘a crisis is something that shouldn’t be wasted’. Crises produce all sorts of new opportunities.

The third wrong response is to just cut budgets across the board by some fixed percentage. Let’s say a service-focused company cuts its service budget by 20 per cent. This basically removes the key factor that led people to prefer this company over others in the first place. So if there must be cuts — and often there will be some slashes in both budgets and in hiring — this must be done with great selectivity and care.

MAJOR SHIFTS IN THE MARKETING MINDSET

FROM marketers thinking about customers to everyone in the company thinking about customers.

FROM selling to everyone to trying to be the best at serving well-defined target markets.

FROM organising by products to organising by customer segments.

FROM emphasising tangible assets to emphasising intangible marketing assets such as brands, customer equity, channel loyalty and intellectual property.

FROM building brands through advertising to building brands through integrated marketing communications and performance that satisfies.

FROM making everything inside the company to buying more goods and services from outside.

FROM making profit on every sale to building long-term customer value.

FROM aiming for more market share to aiming for more share of each customer’s wallet.

FROM being local to being ‘glocal’ — both global and local.

FROM focusing on shareholder benefit to focusing on stakeholder benefit.

Until now, many business leaders have operated with a ‘playbook’ based on two underlying market conditions: a bull market and a bear market. Is this approach suitable for the Age of Turbulence?

These two playbooks will always be of some use, depending on whether the business cycle is going up or down, but as I’ve indicated, we are now also dealing with all kinds of unexpected disturbances. Just one disruptive technology entering an industry can have the effect of an earthquake: the ‘plates’ can move and suddenly an industry can find itself destroyed. Look at what happened with Kodak and film: we all stopped buying film for our cameras.

Luckily, there are things you can do in the face of such disruptions. One is to have an early warning system in place, because you’ll be in a better position if you can detect early signs of trouble; you can make preparations and adjustments. An early warning system would survey all of the external forces that could potentially damage your company. The second thing you can do is scenario planning. A lot of value can come from thinking about what you would do if an extremely pessimistic scenario took place.

Not that this scenario will actually occur, but what would you do if, in fact, things actually got that bad?  Suppose a competitor was to invent a better-quality product and sell it at half your price. What would you do? Another way to stretch your team’s thinking is to have them consider a highly favourable scenario, and what they would do in that case. Such scenario-building exercises have long been used by the military, and they can help companies think about what they would do under different ‘what if’ conditions.

The third thing we need is flexible budgets. Instead of every department having a firm budget, regardless of what happens, each department should be prepared to say what they would cut if they had to cut 20 per cent from their budget, and what amount of money they would ask for if things suddenly got so good that they could capitalize on some amazing new opportunities. These three tools — early warning systems, scenario planning, and flexible budgeting — can provide a strong defense against surprise developments that affect every industry.

Your marketing textbook is in its 13th edition and is used in most MBA Marketing courses worldwide. Are the ‘four Ps’ still a useful framework?

Definitely, because all marketing plans still have to address those four big questions — Product, Price, Place and Promotion. However, we are working on a new framework that will involve a more holistic set of considerations. What we call ‘holistic marketing’ entails the development, design and implementation of marketing programs, processes and activities that recognize a wide range of interdependencies, including the work of integrated marketing (the four Ps); internal marketing (i.e. getting support from the other functional areas); performance marketing (i.e. developing metrics to indicate what you’ve accomplished); and relationship marketing. So this new concept of holistic marketing goes way beyond just the four P’s.

Philip Kotler is the S.C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management.

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