Archive for the ‘Business’ Category

What Is Interactive Marketing?

June 11th, 2010 · by troysabin · Business

This post is an introduction to a blog series I’ll be writing that will hopefully help clarify what interactive marketing is, the tools and technologies that enable it, and the disciplines and activities required to do it well. In support of this series, I have started composing an infographic to illustrate the big picture. Rather than try and have it complete and polished up front, I am gong to introduce it now and evolve it as needed – hopefully with your input.

Click on the image below for a zoomable, interactive version.

There are various opinions and perspectives on what specifically falls under the interactive marketing umbrella. I’m not a stickler or an academic. My perspective is based on my experience working with interactive marketing agencies. Not everything these agencies do would necessarily be considered interactive marketing. E-Commerce sites may be an example. (Others are illustrated in gray.) But I think it is fair to say e-commerce and interactive marketing have a reasonably close relationship.

For now, let’s start with good ol’ wikipedia’s definition:

Interactive Marketing refers to the evolving trend in marketing whereby marketing has moved from a transaction-based effort to a conversation. The definition of interactive marketing comes from John Deighton at Harvard, who says interactive marketing is the ability to address the customer, remember what the customer says and address the customer again in a way that illustrates that we remember what the customer has told us (Deighton 1996). Interactive marketing is not synonymous with online marketing, although interactive marketing processes are facilitated by internet technology.

That last sentence makes a distinction between interactive marketing and online marketing. I consider that an academic distinction. (It did come from Harvard, after all.) While I do agree with the premise, in practice interactive marketing and online marketing are closely related and usually executed together as part of a holistic marketing strategy.

In subsequent posts I will elaborate on each of the main activities I consider interactive marketing. These include:

Content Marketing
Search Engine Marketing
Display Advertising
Social Media Marketing
Community Marketing
Email Marketing
Mobile Marketing
Affiliate Marketing
Online Promotions
Integrated Campaigns

I’ll update this list with links as they’re available.

I’ll also be revising and expanding upon the infographic. The permanent url for the interactive version will be: http://troysabin.com/what-is-interactive-marketing/. So bookmark that link if you want to follow along and offer your feedback in the comments.

Talking to Angels about Social Media

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November 4th, 2009 · by troysabin · Business

No, not the heavenly kind. I was recently invited to attend a local angel investment group meeting. It was an opportunity to meet local investors, listen to a few pitches from other entrepreneurs, and learn how the group operates. I gained some good insight and would suggest that anyone planning to seek angel investment for their endeavor find a way to attend a meeting informally before pitching your opportunity officially.

While I didn’t present, I did get to talk to several investors about Mediassembly and social media. You might think that social media, being a very hot topic these days, would naturally be of interest to investors hoping to ride the next big wave. But many waves crash into rocks. The investors I’ve met tend to be conservative and skeptical of anything that is overly hyped. They’re interested in finding companies that provide innovative, yet practical solutions to tangible problems. The clearer the problem, the easier it is for them to understand the opportunity.

Social media is indeed a phenomenal wave that is changing the way people interact with each other and the way businesses interact with customers. And it is tempting to lead into discussions with how social media is changing the world and citing amazing Facebook and Twitter statistics. But doing so will likely trigger the skeptic’s spidey sense and disengage your audience. Statistics are important, but only after you demonstrate that you’re offering a valuable solution to a clear and significant problem. Sell your solution, without incorporating the hype. The good news is there are plenty of problems to be solved with social media. You don’t need the hype.

While the context of this post is speaking to angel investors, I believe the advise is broadly applicable. It seems there are many agencies and social media champions inside organizations who encounter skepticism while proposing a social media strategy to senior management. I have found that a healthy skepticism is a trait common to both executives and angels. Angels are often retired executives, after all.

There have been several great posts and presentations recently that address the ROI of Social Media. Whether you’re talking to investors or executives, you should be well versed on the bottom-line impact of your solution and how ROI will be measured. This is a good place to start:

6 Must Read Posts about the ROI of Social Media

Scale Social Media Engagement with Brand Ambassadors

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May 9th, 2009 · by troysabin · Business

While I am involved heavily in business and marketing activity, I am a tech guy at heart. I often have to stop myself from being overly influenced by technical concerns and perspective. However, sometimes that perspective is broadly relevant. One example that has been on my mind recently is the issue of scale – how to design and extend a solution to support (sometimes massive) growth.

Social media marketing is about dialog, not monolog. Conversing, not broadcasting. It is about engaging at a personal level. That is probably the most common message shared and passionately propagated by social media marketing experts and practitioners. And I certainly believe it to be true. But the implications of this message make the software architect in me uneasy.

In software development, supporting multiple concurrent dialogs (user sessions, transactions, etc.) is the number one factor inhibiting scale. Content publishing sites (msn, cnn, nytimes) are relatively easy to scale because they don’t have to sustain ongoing dialogs with each reader. But transactional and dialog-centric sites (ecommerce, gaming, social media) are very difficult to scale. This is because each dialog requires memory, CPU cycles, and other finite resources. Twitter is the poster child for the scalability challenges that come with dialog-centric systems. They have had tremendous growth and success, but not without a lot of pain and frustration for both the company and the users.

I see a clear parallel between the scalability challenges faced in software and the challenges that will be faced by agencies and marketing organizations as they attempt to scale their social media marketing programs. Brand engagement, at a personal level, is critical to success. But brand representatives are finite and expensive resources. As social media usage continues to grow, along with consumer expectations of brand engagement, consumer demand for attention will exceed brands’ ability to connect at a personal level. Brands can’t add marketers as readily as they add servers. But without those personal connections, the social media marketing benefits are lost. If brands can’t scale their social media engagement and maintain personal connections, they will be perceived as using social media as a broadcasting medium – and end up fostering resentment, rather than affinity.

Fortunately, the consumers themselves are the solution. Marketing agencies and organizations should include brand ambassador programs as central components of their long-term social media strategies. The brand ambassador term seems to have many definitions and interpretations. So, in this context, I’ll define a brand ambassador as a customer/consumer who is an active advocate and has been given some kind of official recognition or endorsement from the brand – usually for their product knowledge and/or passion. They are part of an exclusive community that have a privileged relationship with the brand, and are recognized by other consumers for that relationship.

Again, I’m really a tech guy, so I’m sure a marketer could provide a much better definition. But, hopefully, I’m in the ballpark – at least in this context.

One of the best examples that I’ve personally experienced is the Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) program. Microsoft describes the program as follows:

Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) are exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who are awarded for voluntarily sharing their high quality, real world expertise in offline and online technical communities. Microsoft MVPs are a highly select group of experts that represents the technical community’s best and brightest, and they share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others.

The program is run by Microsoft’s Community Support Services group – not by marketing. While it was not conceived as an ambassador program, it very affectively solves the same problem of scaling customer engagement through social media. Through this program, Microsoft has extended its reach into hundreds of communities and discussion forums where customers are interacting with and supporting each other. MVP participants in these communities and forums are recognized and respected because of their relationship with Microsoft and are often sought out by other members. Some MVPs have more respect and credibility with customers than many Microsoft employees.

While the MVP program is not a marketing program, it is a fantastic case study for the power and effectiveness of using customers to represent a brand and scale social media engagement. I believe the fact that it is not simply a marketing initiative elevates the credibility of the program and the MVPs.

Sean O’Driscoll was the primary architect of this program. Since it pre-dates the social media term and social media marketing era, you could say he was doing social media before social media was cool. I had the pleasure of meeting him while working on Microsoft’s social media marketing platform for Windows & Windows Live. He has since left Microsoft and is now President of Ant’s Eye View, a community and social media marketing firm. Definitely a company worth following.

The Community Golden Hammer

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March 24th, 2009 · by troysabin · Business

“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” ~ Abraham Maslow

That golden hammer mentality can be seen in the use of community platforms by many brands. Broadly, there are three common business goals and uses for community platforms. (Again, broadly – there are many more specific uses.)

Support – enabling users to help and support each other.
Research – gaining consumer insights and feedback.
Marketing – generating awareness, buzz and word-of-mouth.

Each of these goals have unique requirements. Yet most companies use the same community hammer for all three purposes. Many of the community platforms can indeed be used effectively for each purpose. There are several impressive platforms with both broad and deep feature-sets. But there is a fundamental problem with existing community platforms when the primary goal is marketing – word of mouth marketing, in particular.

The problem is these platforms create what I call destination communities. Users have to navigate to a specific site/destination and interact with other users within the confines of that site. In the physical world, this is analogous to gathering customers at a corporate campus or conference center. That is commonly done and is appropriate for support (training), research (focus groups), and the awareness component of marketing. But, to be effective, word of mouth has to be encouraged and enabled everywhere – especially off-campus. Otherwise, your members are just preaching to the choir.

The real value of word-of-mouth comes from influencing others outside the loyal customer base. You want passionate customers and brand advocates to influence friends, family, peers and colleagues wherever they are having conversations. Most of those (online) conversations are not occurring within the confines of a brand’s destination community. They are scattered across multiple blogs, forums, social networks and other social mediums.

Word of mouth is the most effective and, appropriately, the fastest growing marketing segment. Unfortunately, it is not well served by existing tools. Assembling, engaging, and activating a community of brand advocates is an important component of a word of mouth marketing strategy. In that context, implementing a “traditional” community platform may seem logical.

In fact, most community platforms do provide relevant features to help community managers inspire members and motivate participation. Usually this is in the form of a reputation system. Reputation systems are prevalent on many forms of social media because they are highly effective at encouraging desired behaviors. A great exploration of the reasoning behind this can be found in a research study by Sarah P.W. Sheik and Choon-Ling Sia, of The University of Hong Kong, entitled: Using Reputation System to Motivate Knowledge Contribution Behavior in Online Community. Ultimately, they suggest that reputation systems play on the belongingness and esteem motivations described by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Reputation systems are powerful tools provided by most community platforms, but their scope is still restricted to a single destination community. Therefore, they are of limited value to word-of-mouth marketing initiatives. Community platforms have attractive features and seem almost right for the marketing job. But their confined scope is a significant marketing barrier.

Marketers need a new set of tools for building marketing and brand advocacy communities. They need to be able to assemble, engage, and activate advocates across all the advocate’s communities and social networks and through all social mediums that the advocates use. They do need features similar to existing community platforms (reputation systems, for example), but that can be applied to a broadly distributed community of advocates. They need an alternative to the community golden hammer.

Social Media Marketing for Windows & Windows Live

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October 10th, 2008 · by troysabin · Business

In my last post, I suggested that Microsoft embraced social influence marketing (which includes participatory marketing and word of mouth marketing) in a bold and unique way with the launch of www.windowslive.com. This post will provide some detail on the solution that was developed.

As demonstrated by the proliferation of Microsoft product team and employee blogs, the MSDN Community, XBox Live, and other social media outlets (including the Windows Live products, themselves), Microsoft has recognized the value of social media for some time. But, with the re-launch of www.windowslive.com, Microsoft is demonstrating a much stronger commitment to social media as a strategic interactive marketing channel. Led by Marty Collins, the Windows group assembled a dedicated team to focus exclusively on social media marketing. Along with the Windows Live marketing group, Marty engaged my team at Avenue A | Razorfish in late 2007 to help define the social media strategy for Windows Live and develop a web site and services platform to support it. Let’s start with the goal, as stated by Marty:

We really want to connect people who are doing cool things with Windows Live to other people who may be inspired to try creative things of their own. By giving engaged customers a place to share their experience and knowledge we hope to inspire others while recognizing those that have been great customers. In addition to inspiring people we will look to the community for product feedback to help us continually improve our products. The main goal is to simple: get closer to our customers.

To support this goal, we designed a custom solution enabling Microsoft to engage community members, aggregate, rate, and syndicate their blog content, and recognize and reward their contributions.

Engaging the Community

Through email invitations and posts on product team blogs, Microsoft initially invited over 10,000 of the most active Windows Live users to join the “Community Clubhouse”. The Community Clubhouse is the main hub for community interaction. Members of the clubhouse are asked to:

Tell stories about how Windows Live makes their everyday life easier and more fun.
Share tips & tricks for using Windows Live products and services.
Help “newbies” (new users) learn how to connect and share with Windows Live.
Respond to challenges to blog about specific topics, such as new beta products.
Rate and tag each other’s posts.

In return, members are recognized for their contributions and rewarded by having their posts showcased in front of millions of users. Members activities and contributions are tracked by a reputation system and awarded clubhouse points and achievement badges.

A key objective of the clubhouse strategy was to make participation as easy as possible. Rather than requiring community members to maintain separate blogs and post content in multiple systems, members contribute content by adding posts to their existing blogs and including technorati-like tags in the post. Posts that are tagged appropriately are aggregated into the clubhouse through RSS feeds. Each clubhouse post must have at least three tags – the word ‘clubhouse‘, at least one Windows Live product/service name, and at least one content type (technical ‘how-to’ or inspirational ‘story’). Members are encouraged to add additional tags to identify other topics covered in the posts – whether they are product related or not. (Examples include ‘wedding planning’, ‘sports’, ‘college’, ‘photo stitching’, ‘red eye’, etc.)

Members visit the clubhouse site to read and rate all the content contributed by the community. Posts are rated three ways: they can be flagged as inappropriate, given a qualitative star rating, and given a content level. The content level suggests whether a post is appropriate for new users, everyday users, or power users.

Marketing with the Community

Many companies are, respectably, working to create or foster active communities. Most do so by appending a “Community” tab/menu to the primary navigation and sending users to a section of the site, or a separate site altogether, that is focused exclusively on community content. They maintain very clear and distinct barriers between their brand/marketing voice, and the community voice. This keeps the brand safe from “rogue” community members or content. However, with this approach, customers have to explicitly seek out the community perspective and navigate away from the more structured editorial content they might also be interested in. This barrier reinforces the “marketing-speak” mentality.

Microsoft, on the other hand, pushed to blur the lines between marketing and community perspectives. A fundamental component of the strategy was to tightly weave community and editorial content throughout the site. Recognizing that social influence is more powerful than marketing influence, incorporating relevant community content should elevate marketing message authenticity and trust. Community members control a good portion of the content that is displayed throughout the marketing site. In fact, there are only two pages on all of www.windowslive.com that do not include user-generated content (UGC).

The tags in the original posts and the ratings that were applied in the Clubhouse are used to dynamically route posts to various sections of the www.windowslive.com marketing site. While all community content is visible in the clubhouse, only content that has received a certain number of ratings and exceeds a minimum average rating threshold is promoted to the marketing site. This assures that the community content displayed on a marketing page is contextually relevant, appropriate and useful. As you can see from the image below, the tags also drive other parts of the UI, such as the “Featured in this post” module.

While Microsoft is engaged with the community, they are not moderating the content. The community is responsible for self-policing. Microsoft will not edit or remove valid content – even if it represents negative opinions. While that is a scary proposition, Microsoft has confidence in its products and respect for its community. In turn, Microsoft hopes to cultivate community trust and support. The value of that trust will outweigh the risk of occasional un-flattering posts. If there are legitimate concerns, Microsoft wants to know about them.

In addition to being integrated throughout the marketing site, community content is syndicated out through RSS, advertising placements on MSN and Live.com properties (Hotmail, Spaces, etc), Windows Newsletters, and Hotmail email footers. This provides reciprocal value for Microsoft and Clubhouse members. The community provides valuable content assets and generates word-of-mouth for Microsoft and, in turn, they get exposed to millions of users. One community member received over 10,000,000 views on their blog in one month from a single post that was featured on the www.windowslive.com home page and syndicated through ad placements. For bloggers looking to grow their readership, this is a great opportunity. And, obviously, we felt this was a great opportunity for Microsoft to generate positive social influence and word-of-mouth.

The response from the re-launched www.windowslive.com was much stronger than we expected. It exceeded the traffic projections and server capacity we had planned. So we had to struggle to support the load for the first month. But that is certainly one of the better problems to have. Marty has already announced that the program is being expanded to support www.windows.com, and the entire Windows family of operating systems and online services.

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