JitterJam® Social CRM

Social media is increasingly becoming an influential force in business and on the Internet. It has had an irrevocable impact on marketing and has led to positive changes in corporate culture, including increased levels of brand transparency and accountability and, as a result, a heightened sense of corporate social responsibility. This corporate social responsibility has opened the door for a number of brands trying to change the world for the better while still turning a profit.

The social web makes it easier for these companies to spread their social messages, to generate issue awareness and to build their brands, and blogging has become a critical component to driving and delivering that social message. Blog content helps strengthen connections with people that may have originated on Facebook, Twitter or even at a retail store. A blog creates an informal “voice” that the organization can use to build trust and engage people who care for and support specific social causes. Two brands that I’ve seen doing this particularly well, are Impact Foods and Seventh Generation.

Impact Foods – This granola company has an ambitious mission, ending hunger. For each bag of granola they sell, they promise to feed a hungry child for one day. Impact’s blog strategy is narrating their mission, describing the company’s journey as they travel and deliver on their promise to help feed children. This builds trust with consumers because it shows Impact’s credibility, and demonstrates their commitment to the issue at hand.

Seventh Generation – One of the leading brands in green household and personal care products, Seventh Generation strives to make their products from plants and not petroleum, while operating as one of the most environmentally friendly companies. Over the past few years, their blog has become a resource for consumers covering everything from green household tips to advice on cleaning showers. This blogging strategy helps extend Seventh Generation’s mission to consumers, providing people with the information they need to make a difference whether or not they’ve purchased Seventh Generation products. By pushing information that advances their cause and not their product, Seventh Generation shows that the issue is just as important as the brand.

These are two unique blogging strategies, but they are both successful because they build trust and credibility with consumers. Brands that strive to change the world and impact a global issue have to first show they are trustworthy and transparent. A company blog is the perfect platform to accomplish this, while simultaneously building brand awareness and developing a following.

Have you seen other socially responsible corporate blogs that are changing the world? How does their blog strategy help advance their cause, their brand, or both?

Photo Credit: LittleMan

Everybody loves a good viral video. Whether you are watching funny cats or the Old Spice Guy duke it out with Fabio, viral videos are sure to entertain. Companies consistently try to achieve viral status with their marketing efforts, as a single viral video can provide millions of brand impressions and a level of buzz unattainable through paid media. However, creating viral videos isn’t a marketing strategy, rather it should only be a goal. This is because the power to make a video or campaign go viral lies in the tweets and shares of millions of social users and not in the hands of marketers.

One danger to considering viral marketing a strategy and not a goal is focusing more on the video than the actual campaign. By this I mean allocating more time and budget to video production, special effects, and promotion channels than to the execution of the campaign strategy. To ensure the best chance of going viral, try allocating resources in the opposite manner. From what I’ve seen, simple videos documenting complex and creative campaigns go viral more often than complex videos documenting simple campaigns. Here are two such videos, which both went viral because of the creativity of each campaign, and not each video:

Tropicana Natural Energy: In France, Tropicana created a billboard covered in oranges with the words “Energie Naturelle” (natural energy) glowing on the front in neon. The catch was that the oranges provided 100% of the energy needed to light the sign, and this received a very positive reaction from the crowd.

Heineken Soccer (Football) Heist: After creating a fake classical music and poetry concert on the day of the biggest soccer match of the year in Italy, Heineken then recruited girlfriends, professors, and bosses to ask boyfriends, students, and coworkers to attend the phony concert. On game day the concert room was packed, and at game time the heist was revealed and everyone was thrilled.

Why did these campaigns go viral?
As you can see, marketing campaigns with the best chance of going viral use emotion to spark interest. Curiosity, joy, surprise, and awe are just a few of the feelings that Heineken and Tropicana successfully created with these efforts. The second reason they were so successful is that viewers appreciated the brands’ efforts to give something to them. In the Tropicana example, this was as simple as something neat and innovative for a Paris passerby to look at, while in Heineken’s case they gave people the chance to watch one of the biggest soccer matches of the year. Online viewers will likely remember these videos the next time they see a Heineken or Tropicana product. These memorable positive brand impressions are another reason that viral marketing can be so valuable and effective.

What other marketing campaigns have you seen go viral? In your experience, do these viral instances occur more often because of the creativity of the campaign or the video? Let us know what you think!

Videos via Adverblog and Guerrilla Communications

Thanks to a blog post by @econsultancy, I discovered this slideshare presentation by Izzie Zahorian, a graphic design student from Cincinnati. There are some great insights and truths here, and I suggest you take time to go through it. It’s worth the read.

Are your company’s values reflected in your brand?

Happy Fun Stuff Friday!

This Idea Spark blog post is the result of the discussion during our Friday morning Creativity Coffee. If you’d like to join us (in person or via web/phone conference), please sign up here. There’s no charge or obligation. We just love ideas and open discussion!

Last week’s Creativity Coffee focused on Characteristics of Key Influencers—who they are and how you recognize them. But once you do identify key influencers and others you have engaged/desire to engage in social conversation on behalf of your brand or business, what kind of information should you be gathering on these people? Why is it important to do so? This was the topic of our last Creativity Coffee—Social Profiles.

1. What’s a Social Profile?
• Core component of a Social CRM. The social profile is the heart of a Social Consumer Relationship Management system. It provides a 360-degree view of the individual and enables the brand to target its communications, marketing, messaging, promotions and outreach based upon the wealth of information collected and summarized within the Social CRM.
• Collection of data versus usage. Each brand/company has their own view of an individual. The information gathered in a social profile is only as powerful as the way the brand uses it. Unique tagging and customization is critical to enabling the brand to create highly segmented groups for specific messaging, handling and engagement only if that brand decides to created targeted messages!
2. What are the components of a social profile?
• Contact points. Contact information is no longer limited just email or snail mail addresses. Social profiles are multi-dimensional and include contact points from a variety of traditional and “new media” sources—blogs, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, etc. People can also have multiple identities that map to either their professional or personal associations, interests and networks.
• Activity profile. A social profile includes a record of an individual’s relevant social communications and activities. This includes direct communications with your company, but also expands to public social communications that pertain to your brand, your market, your products, your company, or even your competitors. Brands want a view not only of a person’s influence within social communities but also their engagement within those communities. The social profile should provide that information.
• Communications analysis. The social profile should include a history of every communications between the brand and the individual, but it should also provide an analysis of the social conversations that the individual has had. How engaged is that individual? Have their conversations been positive, negative, neutral? How often have they mentioned or discussed the brand’s products? What communities are they engaged in? How often have they been exposed to the brand’s communications?
• Segmentation and customization. While a system’s core data and analysis is essential to developing a view of the individual’s personna, it’s the brand’s own definitions of important segmentation that makes or breaks the value of the social profile. Enabling multiple custom categories or tags within the social profile enables the brand to (even on the fly) define an essential way of defining an individual in relation to the brand for later use in communications, messaging and marketing.
• Influence analysis. The social profile should include ways for the brand to evaluate a person’s standing within the social community—how much that person can influence and reach others.
• Preferences. Interests and communications preferences need to be an integral part o the social profile. How they want to be contacted, how often, which channels and what they want to receive…these are essential and should be strictly adhered to.
3. How can brands use the Social Profile?
• Targeted marketing. At the end of the day, everyone wants to sell their products. Using all the intelligence developed in the social profile, the marketer now has the opportunity to fine tune their messages, offers, communications and engagement with a willing and interested audience. Higher response and action rates will ensue.
• “Free” data. Much of what we’re gathering into the social profile is freely available data. Marketers pay a high price for lists that include demographics and psychographics. Using the right tool, all that “free” data can create a powerful profile.
• Adjusting the tenor of a conversation. Using the social profile will help the brand determine the best way not only to reach an individual but to speak to them in a way that is appealing, desired and appropriate.

Are you developing social profiles on your social contacts? How are you using those profiles to drive your social marketing?

Image Credit: Hilde Vanstraelen

In social media, personal connections inspire trust whether in an individual or in a brand. Connecting personally helps brands to develop relationships with consumers and promote advocacy. The challenge is identifying potential advocates. One effective solution is utilizing user-generated content, which allows willing advocates to step forward and help promote your brand. This can be much cheaper for your business, and it will be fun for your customers.

The most common method for gathering user-generated content is asking users to share brand testimonials or a specific brand experience through a video. Consumers are inclined to trust the opinion of customers more than the voice of the company, because consumers are unpaid and don’t have their own agenda. A consumer taking time out of their day to share their positive experience with others is an endorsement of the brand in itself.

A recent video campaign using this strategy was the Ten Second Challenge from Aflac, which asked fans to explain what the company does in only ten seconds through a creative video. While these videos are funny, they also communicate the brand’s message through the credible voice of a consumer. This is a main strength of brand advocacy, and user-generated content accomplishes this and more.

Another campaign leveraging user-generated videos is Tillamook Cheese, who gathered similar videos and used them as the basis of a TV advertising campaign. Since the video campaign, they have expanded their efforts and are now asking their fans for notes that  “Share the Loaf.” This new campaign builds upon existing relationships and fosters new connections through engagement.

User-generated content is beneficial to businesses because the value it adds to a company far exceeds its cost. This campaign strategy can be implemented on social networks like Facebook for almost no cost, while simultaneously identifying the best potential brand advocates. The connections formed with these users give your brand the opportunity to build loyal customer relationships through engagement, which is the first step towards developing brand advocacy.

If you have time, spend a few minutes of your Friday watching these videos or checking out Toyota’s campaign, and see how user-generated content campaigns can be successful and fun at the same time! If your company has used this strategy before what were the results, what worked and what didn’t? And how would you recommend other companies implement their own campaigns?

In the era of social business on the web, reputations are determined by how companies act in the public eye. Whether positive or negative, sentiment can spread very quickly across social networks with the potential to become viral. To take advantage of this, marketers have begun to publicize their socially responsible activities through cause marketing campaigns. Cause marketing has helped companies build brand loyalty, increase engagement with consumers, improve brand reputation, and—most importantly—do good for the community.

The Pepsi Refresh Project is one of the largest and most popular cause marketing campaigns, and recently committed $1.3 million to the gulf coast alone! The campaign is structured so that users vote on grant ideas submitted either by other users or by well-known celebrity figures, allowing everyone to feel like they are doing a bit of good along the way. This creates huge engagement opportunities on Facebook and Twitter and motivates people to share the initiative with others as well.

Dawn Dish Soap has also turned heads with their Everyday Wildlife Champion initiative, which promises to donate a dollar to rescuing wildlife for every bottle of Dawn product purchased. To activate this donation you have to go to their website, where you will see plenty of cute animal pictures, and then enter the activation code from the bottle.  By enabling consumers to complete the donation, Dawn makes them the ones responsible for doing good.

The common denominator in both of these campaigns is finding important charitable causes that consumers feel passionate about and that genuinely reflect the company’s values. Both campaigns move the responsibility of involvement to consumers, empowering them to contribute, and making them feel good about their actions. Additionally, cause marketing motivates consumers to share with the brand and with other consumers creating an opportunity to develop engagement into long-term customer loyalty.

There are plenty of great opportunities to get involved with cause marketing right now, whether you are donating a dollar through Dawn or beginning your own cause marketing campaign. Just remember, with a little creativity you can do an awful lot of good! What other cause marketing initiatives have you seen and participated in? What about the campaigns made you want to participate?

Photo Credit: LittleMan

This Idea Spark blog post is the result of the discussion during our Friday morning Creativity Coffee. If you’d like to join us (in person or via web/phone conference), please sign up here. There’s no charge or obligation. We just love ideas and open discussion!

As we have stated in the introduction to our JitterJam Advisor program information, it’s important to lay the proper foundation and determine the goals and strategies of your social marketing efforts in order to achieve measurable success. A strong strategy and implementation plan will have you achieve your business goals, increase your visibility and grow your business. But 59% of businesses engaged in social media/social marketing admit to not having a strategy! So how do they know if what they are doing is working?

During our last Creativity Coffee, we discussed why it’s important to have a social marketing strategy and what needs to be included in that strategy. It was a lively and varied discussion. Here are a few key take-aways.

1. Ready-Fire-Aim is not a social marketing strategy.
• Many companies are trying things to see what “sticks” but don’t have a method to their madness nor a way to measure the success of their experimentation.
• While experimentation is fine, there needs to be goals behind the brand’s social marketing efforts; experimenting with tactics to achieve those goals can be part of that strategy.
• “Brand impressions” may be a goal, but even brand impressions need to lead to something tangible.
2. It’s the Wild Wild West out there. Beware of snake oil salesmen.
• Picking the right consultant or agency to help develop and implement your strategy is vitally important.
• Look for good/bad signs that the consultant or agency you’re looking to hire has the expertise they claim to have. Are they using social marketing tactics for their own lead generation? How are they executing social marketing for other clients? Do the even have a Twitter account? How effective is it?
• Just because an agency has social marketing services, it doesn’t mean that they have expertise. Ask questions regarding other strategies and campaigns they have executed. How did they measure success? What were the goals? Did they reach them?
3. What are the components of a social marketing strategy?
• Goals and objectives. What do you want to achieve through social marketing? How do they relate to your business’ overall goals? While ‘brand awareness’ is always a goal (measured by brand mentions through social channels), what specifically can social marketing deliver? Website visitors? Revenue/purchases? Repeat business? Higher customer satisfaction? Product feedback and ideas?
• Strategy to achieve those objectives. What is the driving idea behind achieving your goals? Like the goals, the strategy should complement and supplement the overall company strategies. Using a football metaphor, the social marketing strategy is like the offensive strategy. It needs to fit with the game strategy, the defensive strategy, etc. How does the social marketing strategy fit with the overall marketing strategy (the game strategy)?
• Tactics. What are the specific actions you are going to take to implement that strategy? These are the “post content to Twitter and Facebook” types of items. In the football metaphor, these are the specific plays and players that you use to achieve a win.
• Success criteria, measurement and review. If your goal isn’t explicitly a measurable figure, how are you going to measure the success of your efforts? How are you going to review and measure your progress, adjust the strategy and tactics as needed, and move forward?

So, has your business created and implemented a social marketing strategy? Why or why not? How has social marketing improved your business/brand? We’d love to hear from you!

Need some help developing your Social Marketing strategy? JitterJam is now offering Advisory Services to help you get more out of your efforts.

The Idea Spark discussion about Facebook Marketing was very lively last Friday during our Creativity Coffee Tweetup in celebration of the 5-year anniversary of @TechCrunch. The discussion surrounded how consumer-facing brands and businesses can gain more than just “fans” or “likes” from their presence on Facebook. Here are some ideas to spark your marketing creativity.

1. Facebook is a “game changer” that is appealing to a broad demographic of users that is mapping to the general population’s demographic make-up.
• Embrace Facebook for more than the youth market. In fact, the fastest growing segment of Facebook users is women 55+.
• Facebook is a great way to reach your target customers and draw them into deeper engagement with your brand. Try using Facebook Ads to begin finding new fans for specific target markets.
2. Post sharable content.
• Post videos, photos, links and other content that your fans will want to share with others—content that's interesting, entertaining or fun.
• Sharable content enables your brand to grow beyond your fan base and to be redistributed throughout (and beyond) Facebook.
3. Let your "fan" or "like" count be a goal—but not your only goal.
• DO drive people from your other marketing efforts (print, TV, direct mail, online ads, website, SEM, events, etc.) to engage on Facebook and through other social channels
• Getting people to "like" your brand is not that difficult. Getting people engaged with your brand and getting them to recommend and purchase—that is your ultimate goal. Use content, open conversation and conversion tools like promotions to engage them further.
4. Reward your fans for engaging with you.
• While fun content will keep your Facebook fans entertained and engaged, providing unique offers will drive measurable return of your social marketing efforts.
• Unique offers reward your Facebook fans for their loyalty and participation. Make sure that your offers are also sharable so your fans can invite others to participate as well.
• If your business has different locations, enable offers to drive revenue and participation at specific locations.
5. Let your fans be your guide.
• Even though your Facebook fans are engaged with you on one channel, make sure that you enable each individual to drive the channels, the frequency of communication and the content they'd like to receive from you. JitterJam's Make Me Happy™ permission marketing system does just that.

Would you like to join in our live discussions? We hold a Creativity Coffee hour every Friday morning at JitterJam's Bedford, NH office. Come by and join us! There's no charge, and no "sales" going on!

In Part 1 of this blog post, I stated that I didn’t believe that social media is the VERY BEST way to reach customers—that social media is just one tactic for reaching customers that should be driven by an overall marketing strategy. In this post, I’ll discuss some ways to achieve balance in your marketing approach.

Achieving marketing balance, to me, is taking steps to ensure that your marketing tactics are continually driving towards your goals and strategies. And it’s sometimes harder than it sounds. It’s easy to get distracted by new opportunities that present themselves every day, the changes in the market climate, by your competitors’ actions and even by game-changing events. Keep these tips in mind to help you continue to move towards your goal and weed out distractions that can tip you in the wrong direction. While goals and strategies should be evaluated on a regular basis, they shouldn’t be short-term milestones; tactics are the short-term levers that you can pull to move your business in the right direction, but your goals and strategies should tie into your longer-term business metrics.

1. Evaluate each tactic with the same lens.
If it doesn’t move you toward your goal and/or doesn’t align with your strategy, why do you want to do it? Yes, there are opportunities that could provide you with benefit. But if the benefit redirects the resources that you have slated to move you towards your goal, is it worth it?

2. Balance what you think you know with what you can learn.
We’re often surprised by the results of our campaigns. Consumers can be an unpredictable lot, and many of our assumptions about how our customers act can be very wrong. We need to stay open to learning as much as we can about what our customers want and acknowledge that those preferences change—sometimes very quickly. For instance, one of our customers asked their consumer contacts to provide their communications preferences across email, mobile, Facebook and Twitter. To their surprise, many of their contacts preferred to connect with the brand over Facebook and provided no email contact information—completely contrary to what they expected.

3. Don’t be afraid to alter your tactics.
Some marketers believe that after mapping out the perfect strategy and the supporting campaigns and tactics, they’re done. They execute the entire plan and THEN they evaluate. In today’s market, the immediacy of information gives us the ability to make changes to our tactics as we learn, and we shouldn’t be afraid to make those changes. Being a nimble marketer enables you to incorporate what you’ve learned and correct your course for the next tasks at hand—while keeping the end in sight.

4. Turn the channels.
What does email have to do with mobile and social media? Everything. Your marketing campaigns and methods should map to the demographics of your target audiences. However, the demographics of those using specific communications channels are ever-changing, and your opportunity to reach your target market through multiple channels is better than ever. Use one channel to reach your customer through another; for instance, use email marketing to drive your audience to your social media communities—and vice-versa. You shouldn’t be swayed into thinking that email marketing is dead for a certain demographic or that mobile marketing is only for the youth-oriented market. Facebook’s demographic used to be just college students; last year, the 55+ crowd was the fastest growing demographic on the platform. You never know when the winds will shift again, and you can maximize your impact by keeping agile.

5. Make it personal.
The broader the audience you target with a single message, the greater the chance that the message will get lost. By selecting smaller, highly-targeted segments and testing focused messaging on each of those smaller segments, you have the ability to continue to test and refine your messages and determine which messages are the most successful. Defining those segments is another matter (of course, we believe that JitterJam is an exceptional tool that makes this task much easier). It can be as simple as splitting a list into sections and A/B testing amongst small test populations or as refined as selecting segments based upon how frequently your contact base has engaged in conversations about your specific brand. The more personal and relevant the message, the better chance you will have of turning the contact into a customer and that customer into an advocate.

There’s a bit of social media hype going on in the marketing world today. Many claim that social media is the very best way to reach current and potential customers. I’m not convinced. I do not believe social media is the very best way to reach customers.

I’m sure you find that statement interesting coming from a company that focuses on providing tools for multi-channel marketing with a basis in social engagement. If you look at the the world’s 6.9B people, the 400M Facebook users constitute an impressive capture rate (5.85%). But that leaves about 6.5 billion people unaccounted for—people who could be buying your product but may just not care to Tweet or share their family photos on Facebook. Social media may be one of the ways—and even the very best way—to reach some of your customers, but don’t ignore the fact that it’s not the only way to reach them.

The new frontier of social marketing DOES provide a tremendous opportunity for companies and brands to build close and trusted relationships with their customers and discover new voices on the real-time web. But it’s dangerous to approach the market with a plan that ONLY focuses on the social landscape. You need to look at social media as means to an end, and only one of the means available to you. If you can’t define the end, then you’re missing a critical step that will leave you wondering why you spent all those resources to manage your social marketing activities. That’s where marketing balance comes in.

Marketing balance is utilizing the best practice of creating an overall marketing strategy that includes the most relevant and rewarding tools and channels that are available to us today. The answer to “How should I market my product” should not be “social media.” The answer should be a combination—an artful balance—of those lovely 4 P’s (thanks Mr. Kottler) that we all loved to hate in college. Social media should be part of the implementation of your strategy, not a strategy on its own.

So what are some steps to achieving marketing balance? We’ll cover that in Part 2 of this blog post. And while you’re waiting with bated breath for the Steps to Achieving Marketing Balance that I’ll describe in Part 2, please let know your thoughts on how your marketing strategy has evolved or changed because of social media. How have you altered your approach to marketing strategy, messaging and tactics due to the opportunities afforded by social / new media? Post a comment!