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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‘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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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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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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When I moved to Costa Rica six years ago, I entered the internet stone age. I was used to paying all my bills online, doing my Christmas shopping online and even doing my job online. All of a sudden I was surrounded by paper bills, physically going and standing in lines to do my banking and pay my bills. High speed internet was not available outside of San Jose so ISDN was my best bet. Costa Rica has come a long way since then.

In the time I have lived here, doing business on the internet has evolved leaps and bounds. The banking system was the first to take the gigantic step towards gaining the confidence of the Costa Rican community, online marketplaces, blogs and now social media have followed. Businesses large and small realize that an internet presence is crucial so they are thousands of web pages are floating out there without a purpose. (Many haven’t discovered the magic of SEO yet)

My online initiatives have always been US driven buy in the last year I’ve  been turning my attention to Costa Rica. I have had the good fortune to meet many large business owners that are on board with the online initiative but not quite sure how to get it started. Their marketing firms are still green when it comes to online marketing so whatever they have done so far hasn’t produced large returns or no measurement has been achieved. Traditional media is adopting the call to action message to be .com related but those are few and far between.

With that being said, you can imagine my surprise to be going thru my google reader this am and coming across this article in Adage: Costa Rica’s Pilgrimage Goes Viral. The article spoke about Jotabequ’s online initiative to get people to do the pilgrimage to Cartago online. The idea was great, the site was interactive but why the heck did I not know about this site until 7 months after? I live in Costa Rica, I read the local papers; I am online everyday and nothing, nada until today. (By the way, congrats to Jotabequ for winning a local award for this initiative)

So this brings me to the conclusion that Costa Rica is missing the online buzz. The ideas are there but online road maps are not being laid out. Costa Rica is still stuck on traditional forms of media and ignoring the importance on advertising online, viral marketing and SEO. As veterans in this space, it is our responsibility to get this great country online and create a strong online Tico community. Educate businesses on the online potential that is slipping away day by day.

What have your experiences been doing business online in Costa Rica? What are you doing to instill confidence in within the Tico online community?

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But as I was sitting with a little bit of time on my hands, I decided to just update our site and add a few more things and make a little big more clearer and clean.  I hope that all of you like it.  Please let us know what you think.

Thank you,

Robert Maldonado

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