Jen Grant from Box – Audacity of Brand – #IMS11
- Box was founded on simple ideal
- Make it easy to get to content
- 60k businesses using box
- 6M users globally
- 180 employees
- $71M in funding
- New business is accelerating across industries
- Companies are using Box to share sales tools with their companies
- Advertising companies are using Box to share content with their clients
- The 3 Realms of Perception
- Public Perception
- Consumer Back-Up Tool
- Didn’t match what Founder thought perception was all about
- What Our Customers Loved
- Customers Loved that Box replaced FTP
- Labor intensive process to share files – cost of FedEx to transfer files between offices
- What We Wanted to Be
- Sharepoint replacement
- Consolidating content across the company in one place
- Sharing information in a secure way
- Wanted to be simpler than Microsoft
- End-user experience and end-user happiness
- Sharepoint replacement
- Public Perception
- Revenue Implications
- Consumer Back-up Tool – $
- Replace FTP – $$$$
- Sharepoint replacement – $$$$$$$$$$$
- Knew that as much as they wanted to be a Sharepoint replacement, they couldn’t back away from FTP replacement
- Brand aspiration was to be a Sharepoint replacement
- How do we get from small to big
- Six steps ….
- Targeted messaging
- Finding the inflection point
- Where in the cycle can they talk about the shift?
- Can talk about the big message with press, influencers, etc.
- Talk about about FTP replacement with sales cycle
- Let customers speak for us
- Pandora moved everything into the cloud
- Case studies
- Video testimonials
- Every page of website has quote from customer
- Marketing person can talk about what they are, but until it comes from customer nobody would believe it.
- Found 3 massive trends in the marketplace
- New Worker
- No patience for complexity
- Works from multiple devices
- Viral adoption of ad hoc tools
- New Workplace
- Geo-distributed workforce
- External collaboration
- Decisions made in real-time
- When iPad hit the market, sales skyrocketed
- New IT
- Business objective alignment
- Pressure from end users
- Adopting secure cloud services
- New Worker
- Great guy to share his story
- Getting CEO out there to speak and share his story
- Develop a distinctive personality
- Branding campaign
- Billboard up on 101
- Box.net vs Sharepoint
- Sharing should be simple
- One billboard strategically placed in the “alleyway” of influences – near where VCs drive, TechCrunch, etc.
- The Results
- Inc 500 Top 5 Breakout Companies
- 73% of Fortune 500 use Box
- Grew from 30 to 180 people
- Raised $47M in February 2011
- Tripled Q1 2011 revenue over last year
- Targeted messaging
- It’s really about the story
- Aaron’s story
- Story about market & trends
- Having a story to the press
- Having a story for customers and sales
Deconstructing ROI – Rick Bakas – #IMS11
- ROI: Return on Investment
- We have a predictive model for ROI for traditional media
- ROI is like Voltron on Transformers
- ROA: Return on Attention
- ROA = time (impressions + reach + influence)
- “Time” is now a multiplier of return
- We want to cut through all the noise that people have in their life and get them to pay attention to your message
- Attention to Intention
- First moment of truth
- Humanize
- Build trust
- Educate
- Offer
- You’re remembered for one thing – how much you invest in your community
- 96% of the people that like your Facebook page never come back to the actual page
- Social is really all tributaries that flow to your inbox – Twitter DMs, Facebook notifications, etc.
- Turn sales process into hourglass
- First moment of truth
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Action
- Value Realized
- Loyalty
- Brand Evangelized
- Important to plant the seeds and nurture your community. You never know when that Return is going to happen. YouTube video you create now may create return months or even years from today.
- Tools need to built to correlate data with return & measurement. If someone is on your site and buys something how do you ultimately know where they come from?
Vitrue case Study – Top Social Trends – #IMS11
- Help brands and brand marketers engage in social media
- POEM – paid. owned. earned
- Social allows you to share that story with others
- Kraken rum showing how you engage with your consumers one-on-on
- Different platforms and marketers need toi think about which to best use to engage with their consumers
- Social spending is increasing fast. it has to be part of the marketing mix
- Mobile helps provde a frictionless buying cycle
- Social commerce
- – Pay by mobile
- – Rewards
- – Ease of use
- – Gaming commerce
- – Social ordering
- – Gaming commerce
- Emergence of social ads
- – Social advertising is in its infancy
- – Twitter and Facebook now offering sponsored ads
- Social segmentation emerges
- – 10k sites add the Like functionality daily
- – Not all your fans and consumers are in the same place.
- – Reward loyal engagement
- Local commerce
- – Dynamic vertical collaboration – make sure it’s good for both brands
- Local works
- – Close the loop and figure out a way to get messages across channels
- Gamification
- – By 2012, there will be 68.7MM social gamers in the US
- Communities create content networks
- – Distribute contents in a non-traditional way
- – Drive engagement to your brand
- Social television viewing
- – Growth of check-in services for TV
- Social tools integrate
- – Very fragmented now
Best practices
- Determine strategy from beginning
- Social local mobile experience is on the brink of creating social purchase experiences
- Take advantage of social medial tools
- Engage your audience where they are via games and mobile
- Become a content strategist
Compete Product Case Study – Jen Russell – #IMS11
Why Are We Here:
- I need to justify my social media budget?
- What is my competition doing?
- I’ve got a lot of fair weather fans? what should I do?
- My boss wants to measure my social media success.
- Is Facebook the new storefront?
- People not only want to measure what they are doing but also want to measure what they are doing compared to others in their vertical.
- Social Media Case Study Part 1
- Who
- 43 US-brand based sites and Facebook pages
- What
- Unique Facebook Fan Pages
- Index of Facebook page UVs to Brand Website UVs
- Infinite possibilities to measure beyond Thumbs Up
- When
- February 2011
- Where
- Multiple US-based industries
- Why
- Top social questions
- ROI
- Walmart leads brands in Facebook page visitors – Nearly 1 million unique visitors
- Followed by State Farm and BMWs
- One post about a new popsicle generated 3,500 comments on one page
- Top 10 Brands – Walmart, State Farm, BMW, Best Buy, Capital One, Blackberry, Progressive, iTunes, Ford
- Only Apple’s iTunes has more FB page UVs than Domain UVs
- iTunes has 16 million uniques on their page – free music, shared music, storefront that incorporates iTunes, giveaways like trips to music festivals
- Don’t spend millions of dollars building your Facebook page and driving traffic through offline advertising and then not spend the money on the page to promote engagement
- If your company has hundreds of Facebook pages due to local offices, etc.
- Who
Content Management Systems and Platforms – Panel – #IMS11
- Leon Fryer – OmniTi
- Tom Carter – Sitecore
- Joseph Wykes – Percussion Software
- Your content management system needs to match your business processes. – Leon
- Why are you in the cloud? Does it match what you’re trying to do. You can do content management in the cloud and the cloud does have benefits. – Tom
- Step #1 is identifying your business needs. No two businesses are the same and the CMS out there are going to match different business needs. – Leon
- What are all the pieces of this website that I need to work together, and which platforms out there work with all of those. – Tom
- What is your definition of success for your business and your website? What tools are going to help you get there? – Joseph
- You have to marketing and IT both sitting at the table. The platform needs to work for both groups. – Tom
- There is more complexity now and there is going to be more. What happens if something happens tomorrow, and I’m not prepared for that? – Joseph
- Requirements and complexity continue to grow and marketers shouldn’t need to rely on IT to go program it into CMS. – Joseph
- Data is key. Personalization; behavior tracking; correlation between the users, etc. is more valuable than geographic or other demographic value. – Leon
- Sitecore has analytics built in and can measure various analytics directly on the system. – Tom
- Percussion has integrated Google Analytics into system, and allows users to not only see what happened, but why it happened. Analytics are tied in to CMS so you can see things like if a blog has driven traffic to the site. – Joseph
- How can your CMS adjust for mobile / smartphones / tablets.
Cliff Pollan – VisibleGains – Using Video in Sales and Marketing #ims11
- Today, buyers are 2/3 of the way through the sales process before they ever speak to anyone in your company.
- Video is a way to tell a story in short fashion.
- A 1 minute video is worth 1.8 million words.
- How do you learn? Remember to think about your buyer’s learning style. Make sure to vary your marketing messages.
- “Online video is second only to word-of-mouth for its ability to influence decision makers” – MarketingSherpa
- 53x more likely to end up on first page organic search if you have video up on your site.
- 200-300% higher open and click through rates if you incorporate video into your email marketing.
- Salesforce can generate 163 view on a video … equivalent to 1 month of sales work
- Where to Use Video
- Engage
- Promote content: email marketing; blog posts
- Expand a Webinar
- Adding video to webinar promo — 2x click thru rate; 4x increase in signups; 65% increase in highly interested engagement
- Post a Topic
- Nurture
- Provide an Overview
- Demo an Offering
- Share a Testimonial
- Close — Sales Process
- Make a Connection
- Send Follow-Ups
- Submit a Proposal
- Engage
- Remember when video comes to the web it can be interactive. If you personalize content, they are more likely to engage.
- SalesGenie has a personal introduction; talks about what problem they are trying to solve and they have a call to action to get people to engage.
- Including email in sales process
- Allows you to track who is watching the video; how long it takes to go to next meeting; and time from video watching to closing the sale.
- Not difficult to get started – be personally engaging & be yourself.
- Start with something friendly.
- You can do great video very inexpensively.
Chris Brogan – The Changing Role of the Trust Agent – #IMS11
- Chris had worked with a lot of big companies, but wanted to translate that to work with smaller companies and help people figure things out.
- A Trust Agent is the person that builds the bond between the company and the regular people.
- We’ve gone from greeters to concierge in social media
- We are working to build relationships and make people feel better
- Concierges serve a business need to the person in front of them — not just lob marketing messages at them.
- You have to mix the personal and the business
- Chris Brogan hates Empire Avenue, and is waiting for someone to show him something with it
- “Sexy Data” is important — important to measure revenue being brought in via social media and show that to clients and executives
- Dig in to email marketing metrics beyond just open rate and clickthrough rates
- Do you know what percentage of people are accessing your site via mobile?
- Are you making it easy for people to find the information they need when they access your site via mobile vs. when they access via desktop
- Need more plumbing – “stuff” to move data back and forth
- Trust Agents have to become marketing technologists — can’t just be “tweeters”
- Everyone is looking down at their mobile device
- Stop touching your phone when you’re talking with other people
- Technology is wonderful and helps bring people in to the conversation — like with the #ims11 hashtag — but also need to have that human conversation with people
- We are all in sales, customer service or marketing — or you’re unemployed
- Trust Agents 1.0 was customer service; Trust Agents 2.0 is customer service, marketing, and sales
- Many social media people are the “pirate ships” still, but you need to be integrating those tools and messages back into the “fleet”
- CRAP – Connecting. Always be connecting. Get them to be part of your community, sign up to your email list, sign on to your tweets.
- Push them towards your email list instead of a sales page right away
- Do not use “donotreply” in your email address.
- First line of your email should not be “having trouble viewing this, click here to view it in a browser”
- Email marketing can be “kickass” if you’re doing it well
- Brevity is the key to email marketing – Groupon / Woot work because they are one product.
- If it’s boring for you to make your email marketing message, it’s boring for people to read it.
- Emails should be less than 500 words.
- Need simple call to actions in your email — email signatures should be really simple.
- CRAP – Referrals.
- Facebook like button is a super powerful referral message.
- Zappos has like buttons under each of their products.
- CRAP – Attention or Awareness.
- Build interesting stuff that is interesting to your users not necessarily interesting to you.
- Game On – Social Games and
- The more times you can make other people look awesome, the better you are.
- CRAP – Presence. You need to fish where the fish are.
- Comic book store owner sends twitpics to customers when their orders come in.
- Do more than just splash the “Follow us on Facebook” giant F in your business. Give them a reason to engage.
- REWARD your referrals.
- Reciprocity is alive and well.
- Question asked about A/B Testing. Chris Brogan says it’s really important but that he’s really bad about it.
Bryan Srabian – Director of Social Media at SF Giants – #IMS11
- Giants are a 100-year-old brand
- Prior to social media, SF Giants was always trying to create a connection to fans
- Importance of players meeting with fans
- Importance of merchandise
- Your tools may change, but the fundamentals remain the same
- You need to humanize your brand
- You need to create a voice for your brand
- Don’t just speak to your fans — Speak *with* your fans
- Make sure to “listen” to your fans
- What are people saying?
- What do they like?
- Instead of just posting marketing messages – ask questions.
- Started curating content from web on Facebook that they found interesting.
- Hardcore fans, but also casual fans. Have to provide content for both.
- Try to bring your fans into the “front row”.
- Announced dynamic pricing and used social media to educate their fans when questions come up about the policy.
- Have done tweetups and they are trying to make them unique for Giants fans.
- Establish voice, go behind the scenes and give photos of clubhouse, etc.
- If you can give the fans value and feel like they are on “the inside”, that’s the value of social media.
- Spend as much time listening as you do broadcasting your own message.
- Fans want more of the players on Twitter, but baseball players tend to be more traditional and don’t necessarily want to be on Twitter. Giants social media is trying to bring experiences like live Q&As with players to build that connection with the fans.
- Don’t Stop Believin’ video from fan got over 2 million views on YouTube … SF Giants decided to do their own twist with Keenan Cahill video.
- Try to make social media seamless within the company. How can they incorporate social media into their normal workflow.
- Use social media as customer service and when someone says something negative about you, use it as an opportunity to turn people into bigger fans.
Be Careful With Automation
Bloggers love plugins. And, plugins that add dynamic content to a page without you needing to do much are even more fun.
But, there are almost always examples of this going wrong. There are lots of plugins out there that let you add your tweets to your page, and there are even plugins that allow you to add mentions of your name (or your new book, company, etc.) to your page. But, what if people are not saying nice things about your brand? Is it really wise to take the risk?
Simon Mainwaring just released a book called “We First” and has a “Twitter Feed” on his page that has the various tweets mentioning his name. Some are not that flattering. For a book about marketing that wants to change the way we do business, this seems like a big red flag. He even had a Fast Company article published about “How Social Media Can Destroy Your Business And What You Can Do About It“.
Some of the more unflattering tweets that are scrolling on the page right now:
- “Simon Mainwaring’s #TEDxSF is pissing me off. His ideas are great but the government, banks and big shot CEOs are not going to listen.” – @OWStarr
- “#TEDxSF Simon Mainwaring’s video is strictly ART–it’s a glossy but false new paint job on the broken capitalist model. no real ideas there.” – @ptvan
- “Beware social marketing expert Simon Mainwaring and his cut&paste marketing advice- passion doesn’t transform mundane ideas #TEDxSF” – @tomforemski
To me, this isn’t smart marketing or branding to have the Twitter feed on his homepage.
Top 10 Tidbits from The Thank You Economy
Over the weekend I finished The Thank You Economy
I’ve got a file of probably 20-30 different quotes from the book, and I won’t share all of them (because why would you read the book), but I will share a top 10 list of my favorites.
Before that, a little history as to why I even bought the book. I read a lot, but over the past couple of years I’ve actually had a rule about no marketing and social media books. When I finally step away from the computer, I wanted things to read that would stimulate other areas of my brain. I read a lot of historical fiction and non-fiction about things like World War II and the Tudors and stuff like that. I’ve won a few marketing books over the past couple of years, but haven’t bought a marketing book in a long time. So, why did I buy “The Thank You Economy”? Because Gary asked. Late on a Saturday night, when no one else was around. The book had just went on pre-sale and Gary was trying to get his book on a couple of Amazon’s daily lists. Because he asked, I bought the book, and felt like I had a little part in his success on getting the book up on the ranking. And, again I add that it was late on a Saturday night and that meant something to me.
Here are the Top 10 tidbits I enjoyed the most from The Thank You Economy
- “There are too many businesses that are still holding back, watching the social media train rush by …”
- “We live in a world where anyone with a computer can have an online presence and a voice.”
- “It’s not the number of followers you have or “likes” you get, it’s the strength of the bond with your followers.”
- “It’s still so rare for anyone to be personally acknowledged by a brand that the impact of such a simple, polite gesture on a customer’s buying habits could be huge.”
- “Social media is a marathon — you cannot reach the finish line without patience and determination.”
- “It’s not about the budget, it’s about the creativity and the caring.”
- “Behind every B2B transaction, there’s a C.”
- “Every time you draw a line in the sand, you’re robbing yourself of a learning experience that could serve you well in the long run. Lines in the sand will only box you in.”
- “A large company can scale one-on-one to the masses, because it has the resources to train enough people to engage in the conversation.”
- “Use social media to create an opportunity for engagement, not to force it.”
There’s much more in the book, and I would encourage people to read it. If you’re waist deep in social media like I am, it will affirm many of the things you think already. If you have a boss or an entire C-Suite or a Board of Directors that don’t “get” social media, buy a whole bunch of them and bring them with you to the next meeting.
(I am an Amazon affiliate and this post contains Amazon affiliate links.)