Social Media Predictions For 2012
My recent Forbes Article discussed social media trends for 2012. You can read the article here, or at Forbes.com, enjoy!
Companies sometimes gripe that social media is useless as a branding tool.
For marketers, converting messages into transactions is the Holy Grail, but if they don’t quickly materialize through new media outlets, that’s no reason to throw in the towel. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other outlets are constantly evolving and experimentation is necessary to find success.
Once we accept that “social” does not equal “transactional” we’ll all be a lot more adept at using it in 2012.
Three trends and tools to watch in the coming year:
From Checking In To Cashing In: Geo-Gaming
Geo-location has been an important marketing tool for a few years, but in 2012 it will become more personal and more transactional, especially in social-media marketing. This is a game-changer for retailers because it enables them to put potential consumers in the context of time and place and more effectively influence purchase intent.
This type of influence is a reason I see social media as a bridge to commerce because it’s where marketers build a relationship with customers.
The context of the offline world is crucial for marketers so they know what kind of message to deliver and how to interact with a customer at any given time. Is my potential customer in front of a store or on the couch? Is that person with people or alone?
Yes, geo-location has been around a while because the technology exists, but marketers have not yet taken advantage of it. To date, geo-location has been all about the “check-in.” Nobody really understands the value of the check-in yet, but if you think about it, the check-in is a social transaction, but soon will become a monetary one.
How will that work? Look for marketers to motivate and change behavior through geo-location tools and social gaming.
Starwood was one of the first brands to see the check-in as a bridge. Starwood Preferred Guest (SPG) members could connect their SPG accounts directly to Foursquare. Anytime they checked into a Starwood property combined with a confirmed reservation they got points. There’s a reciprocal relationship between the check-in and the reward, which is what game dynamics are about–rewarding behavior through real and virtual currency.
Let’s say Starwood has a million fans, a small sub-set of whom checks in on Foursquare. Now let’s add a layer of social gaming so that whatever those fans do online they do through Facebook. I post to my page saying, “I just came back from Paris, ate at this restaurant, and it’s amazing,” and that is shared with the Starwood community of a million people through a gaming experience. Starwood could reward me for that because I’m selling travel to Paris where Starwood has properties.
I don’t think there’s a place in social marketing to have offers, promotions, coupons and transactional items as a part of the social eco-system and social story telling. Where I do think there is a time and place for coupons, offers, promotions is through mobile and geo-location and how those two talk to each other.
These are ways for brands to say, “Believe in us, be part of our community, and when you engage with us, we notice.” It’s that acknowledgement that creates loyalty, advocacy and drives earned-media value.
Facebook: Gateway To The Web
Would it surprise anyone to think Facebook will become the overlay of the Internet experience? It may not happen in 2012 but it certainly will in our lifetimes. Facebook is what Ma Bell once was, a utility with which few people could conduct their daily lives. It’s almost impossible to not use the web these days, and it’s becoming less possible to use it without Facebook.
As marketers build the bridge to commerce through online communities, it is imperative that they do not cannibalize them for the sake of transactions. Microsoft and Zynga got it wrong with their partnership.
Back in early 2010, Zynga moved beyond making its popular games available on social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace and began making some titles, especially the wildly popular Farmville, available on Microsoft properties like MSN Games and Windows Media Player. More than 200 million players had interacted with friends and acquaintances through these games every month. But Zynga wanted to expand its reach even further, hence the Microsoft partnership.
It was a great move for MSN’s gaming portal, which was steadily losing traffic, but what did Zynga gain? It already had enviable reach. What it really did was cannibalize Zynga’s passionate and original gaming community by adding all those MSN gamers.
Imagine being at a party with people you know and feel comfortable with, and then suddenly, an outside group of revelers crashes your bash. It’s not the same party anymore. You don’t want to be there. You aren’t going to stick around.
Microsoft spent a tremendous amount of time, dollars and effort cultivating a community, and they threw it out the window with the Zynga deal just to boost its fan base.
Starbucks got it wrong — and then got it very right. The coffee bar behemoth woke up one day and noticed it had completely alienated its consumers. Instead of selling them coffee in an ambient setting, Starbucks installed mega coffee machines to serve people faster. They took the artisanal aspect from the process and then realized they moved away from their core brand attributes. The company was smart and sincere enough to ask its community for help by launching Mystarbucksidea.com, listening to the people who were very attached to their brand. It was like the return of the Prodigal Son.
Starbucks also devised Pastry Thursday, creating a regular event on Facebook where people could register and check-in to get a free pastry. On Election Day, they gave away free coffee.
Starbucks is one of the few advertisers that know it will lose [Facebook] friends if all it does is talk about itself. If I had a friend who, whenever we’re together, tries to sell me something, we wouldn’t be friends for very long. Starbucks knows it has to care about what their customers have to say.
Mystarbucksidea.com was an example of perhaps the first time that a brand had to act like a person. The company recognized that relationships are personal and that for a relationship to thrive, some base-line principles must be observed.
Perpetuating The Personal
Brands in 2012 must create a social world of personalization.
Facebook has built a model for this. Its “pages” function enables brands to engage customers on a virtual island and have a theme party of their choosing. If the guests are into Huggies, the page can be about potty training. Amex’s page/party theme can be about small business.
Then you have Facebook’s “social ads,” through which brands can deliver targeted messages to fans and followers. Any marketer that knows something about its core fan base, derived from the insights gathered on its Facebook page, can create and deliver custom messages to sub-sets of that population.
The third prong is Facebook’s “sponsored stories,” which are about leveraging the friends of fans. If you become a fan of my page, this generates a News Feed story that your friends might see. Sponsored Stories increase visibility of this story by highlighting it for my friends in the right column.
The brand has delivered a story to someone on Facebook, and that person delivers the story to their Facebook friends.
Let’s say you became a fan of the AMC show “Breaking Bad.” Now your feed reflects that action to your friends, and the next time any of your friends log in, they’re alerted that you just “liked” “Breaking Bad” — and maybe they should check it out. Your friend clicks on that link, which takes them to a “Breaking Bad” page, completing the loop.
The Facebook triad of Pages-Ads-Stories is one example of how to create a loop using paid media dollars to drive earned media. There are many other ways of delivering earned media across social channels. Every brand has different needs, but most importantly, every brand has a different personality – it’s crafting and delivering that personality that ultimately drives the kind of earned media that you don’t need write checks for.
The best kind of media is organic earned media. In 2012, social media as a bridge to commerce may seem obvious, but the journey will be much more interesting–and lucrative.
Read MoreWhy you should care about 4Square.
Mark my words, Geo-location will be at the heart of Social Media.
Social Media Is About Me.
I had the good fortune to hear Peter Theil speak a few weeks ago. He shared a lot of wisdom from behind his podium — one memorable moment for me was his answer to the question “why did Facebook succeed where other social networks (ie. MySpace) stalled out?”
His answer was simple and elegant. “MySpace was started in LA as a place where people went to become somebody else. Facebook was started in Boston as a place where people went to be themselves.”
I have always said that Social Media is a channel of “people stories” but Peter’s insight into what made Facebook successful adds further context. The people stories are real, they represent a collective human experience and every individual user is part of it.
Essentially, Social Networking is about real people and the connections between them. However, social media is also a highly individual experience — I experience social media through my “social graph” and my experience is different than your experience. Social media is about me — it’s the place I go to be myself.
Mobile Is My Gateway
Like many folks today, I am constantly on the go. Like many folks today, my mobile phone has become an appendage. My mobile phone is what connects me to my digital world no matter where I am. Mobile is the gateway I use to access information, make connections and “plug in” to my social graph.
The use and adoption of mobile is critical to the thesis of this blog post ( “geo-location is the heart of social). If the stats are true and by 2014 a person’s first online experience will be via a mobile phone not via a computer, then mobile and social will converge — social media becomes more than just being “about me,” it becomes being about me and… where I am and what I am doing. Everything that I do is tagged by “where I did it” and the mobile device becomes the conduit to sending and receiving that information — mobile provides context to everything about me.
I “Check In,” Therefore I Am
Content is the fuel that makes social media run. Whether it’s a 140 character tweet, a video clip or a photo — content is at the center of the social universe. Moreover, content with context is the holy grail. Geo-location provides instant context to the content we create and share because remember — social is all about me, what I’m doing, where I’m doing it, etc.
Now let’s think about this a little differently. Let’s think about this eco-system from the perspective of someone that needs to find information rather than share information… Here is a scenario:
I was recently in Amsterdam for 3 days of client meetings. I landed a day early to adjust to the time change and get settled in, which gave me a free afternoon to explore and wander. As I headed out of the hotel I had a few choices:
- Ask the concierge what I should do or where I should go.
- Open google maps and search for some points of interest.
- Or…. You guessed it. “Check-In” to my hotel on foursquare and access real-time information about my current surroundings.
Here is the hypothesis. As adoption rates continue to increase across mobile and location-based platforms like Facebook Places and FourSquare, hopefully the quality of real time information improves also. This means that in the future FourSquare could become the front door to the mobile web just like Google became the front door to the desktop web. When I’m at my desk, I search to find information in the digital world. When I’m on the go, I “check in” to access information about the physical world. Social lives right in between the two.
Social is what connects my physical world to my digital world. “Checking in” is the digital representation of “showing up” — it’s how your digital self knows where you are.
Think about it. We have all seen movies like Terminator. Where a the creature or robot from the future (good or evil) has a built-in computer embedded with some augmented reality view of the world. What does that computer do? It provides relevant (and real time) information based on where the creature is and what it is doing.
If FourSquare can unlock delivering users relevant information, connecting them to their social graph and providing context to the content they create — then they could indeed become the future front door to mobile — then we will all care about FourSquare.
Read More10 Reasons Brands Need a Social Media AOR
Is 2011 the Year of the Social Media AOR?
There is no doubt social media is here to stay. Anyone who still says that social is a flash in the pan (and yes, there are people are still saying it) must be living on a different planet. So now that social has crossed the chasm, do brands need a dedicated social media agency?
My answer, even if I am slightly biased, is unequivocally yes.
Brands need a social media AOR because today a brand is shaped more by what their consumers say than what the brand tells them. And because social media cannot be treated as an afterthought, it needs to be integrated into an overall marketing plan. We live in a social world. Consumers are looking for human connections with the brands they buy. Consumers want to be co-creators with brands. And consumers are looking closer at the role brands play in society.
Additionally, if you look at the perception gap between what brands think and what consumers think about the role of social media – the disconnect speaks volumes. This study was conducted by IBM and shows how far apart brands actually are in understanding what consumers are looking for out of a relationship with them.
The bottom line: This is the first time in history that Advertising is talking back. Which means brands (and their agencies) can’t look at consumers the same way in social media as they do in other media. Not to mention, the growing importance and complexity of social media requires ongoing stewardship in a medium that is “always on.”
So, here is 10 reasons why Brands Need a Social Media AOR:
- Social media is a specialty. It requires specific expertise and skill traditional agencies don’t have. You would not ask your media buyer to write your press release or your Publicist to write ad copy.
- Traditional marketing is about interruption. Social media is about invitation. It’s about a two-way dialogue. It’s about creating experiences. It takes a different mentality.
- You can’t adapt advertising messaging for social media. Advertising is about selling and telling. Social media is about storytelling, engagement and socialization.
- Social is about creating audiences and which is different than traditional “targeting” of consumers. It’s about thinking like a publisher, not a marketer.
- Developing content platforms are fundamentally different from ad messaging. Social media is like advertising in reverse. It would require traditional marketers to unlearn years of engrained behavior.
- If you build a community, you need to engage with your audience on an on-going basis. It’s a living breathing entity that needs nurturing. Traditional marketers are not trained and skilled understanding the dynamics of engagement.
- Social media content has to be created with distribution of content and syndication strategies in hand.
- Social impacts everything: from awareness to advocacy to sales and marketing to customer service.
- A dedicated social media agency has social media as part of their DNA. It’s not taking people who happen to be on Facebook and Twitter and dubbing them the new social media department.
- Social media needs to be scalable. While many agencies can handle social media campaigns, few can handle scalability.
Five Social Media Tenets Every Agency Should Embrace
This season, social is the new black. Fashion victim, fashionista: these are words not easily applied to me. However, I have learned one valuable lesson over the years by observing an industry that’s always on the lookout for the next big thing: if you wait long enough, past trends and patterns will make a comeback.
This is exactly to the case with social media right now. As all things social start to mature, the same evolution that took place in the digital marketing industry only a few years ago is emerging: social is fast becoming less about experimentation, and more about regular production. In fact, production is the key word in many ways, which I’ll come back to a bit later.
In recent months, a noticeable shift has taken place among the clients and prospects we’ve talked with at Big Fuel. They fall roughly into three categories: those still experimenting with social media, those using social media consistently as a tactical add-on to their marketing activities, and those trying to make social a more central, strategic component of their marketing efforts.
As we approach 2011 budget deadlines, more and more marketers are trying to switch gears and move from using social as a tactical add-on to making it a core component in their overall efforts. Small, medium and large companies want to know how they can streamline, automate, budget, and measure social media and social marketing. How can it move from a series of handcrafted singular projects to a more consistent, more repeatable, more predictable undertaking?
We have clear answers to that. The key challenge remains implementation.
Marketing integration may have been the Holy Grail for advertisers over the last 15 years, yet the agency world became increasingly fragmented during that period of time. Many agencies that initially dismissed digital as a peripheral activity are now bent on not making the same mistake again with social.
Agencies rightfully see social as central to the future of marketing and work to develop in this space as fast as they can. Yet each agency, each discipline, looks at social through a very narrow lens that only puts the emphasis on their original core competencies. And, this is what really spells trouble for marketers.
Back to the issue of production, as mentioned earlier: It is tempting to draw parallels between social content production/earned media on one hand, and advertising production/paid media on the other hand. However, the comparison can be misleading in many ways. There are at least five key differences about social that every marketer should bear in mind:
1) Forget one-size-fits-all messages targeting “lowest common denominator” audience. Recognize that fragmentation is here to stay, and embrace it at every step.
2) Frequency and freshness of content matters more than production values. Increase your execution capability and move to rapid-fire, low-cost production cycles.
3) Campaigns have a limited shelf life, but quality content is a valuable and reusable asset. Build your library for the long term and ensure that you will be able to do “re-runs.”
4) Stop thinking (and budgeting around) campaign flights and push marketing. Start thinking about ongoing engagement. Audiences can no longer be turned on and off on demand.
5) In a genuine two-way, real-time conversation, it is hard to separate the production arm from the distribution arm. Your brain is connected to your mouth for a reason.
Larger creative and media agencies have legacy economic models built around scale and size that make it difficult to adapt and operate profitably in a world of exponentially fragmented audiences and touch points. When it comes to social, the question is not whether “they get it,” but whether they can evolve to become as fast and nimble as marketers need them to be. Even web agencies, in spite of their digital DNA, can sometimes struggle with things like video production or labor intensive, low tech conversational engagement.
The long-predicted new marketing paradigm is finally here. Marketers need to start thinking, behaving and organizing themselves as content producers who treat engage consumers as audiences, instead of fully outsourcing this function to external publishers. Content is still king, after all.
It’s official: Social is now well beyond a passing marketing fad. Amid this environment, marketers find it increasingly challenging to differentiate brands, products and messages. The push for a constant flow of newness is becoming a key operational requirement – just like in the fashion industry. One thing is certain: more change is yet to come in social media marketing.
Read MoreChurch and State
My recent adweek article covered the topic of how social media and traditional digital media work hand-in-hand. You can read the article here, or at Adweek.com, enjoy!
Social media has grown into an irreplaceable marketing strategy, but it must work in concert with your corporate Web site
If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest in the world behind China and India. Weighing in at a whopping 500 million users, the social media giant has just surpassed Google in U.S. market share, according to data from Hitwise. To me, the rapid ascent of Facebook begs the question: Do businesses even need to set up brand Web sites anymore?
You’d likely be wrong if you answered “no.” Social media has grown into an irreplaceable marketing strategy, but it must complement and work in concert with with your corporate Web site.
Brands should be taking a “church and state” approach to marketing on the Web. You want your Web site to be simple and to articulate what the brand is all about, so including corporate positioning and traditional Web site strategies is recommended. But manipulating social media is a completely different ballgame. The game’s motto? Stop selling and start engaging.
Many marketers are starting to think of their brand’s Facebook and Twitter pages as “social CRMs,” which is a step in the right direction to shifting from a one-way channel of communication — marketing directly to consumers — to a back-and-forth, conversational relationship with customers, fans, friends and followers.
The crucial, often ignored part is that social networks are not socially enabled customer-relationship management platforms; they are audience-relationship management platforms. This distinction is a crucial part of navigating social media in an effective way.
When it comes to your brand’s Facebook page or Twitter account, the key is engagement. You want your social media pages to be content-centric first and foremost. The content that powers your social media should be engaging on a level that appeals to your core audience. The split between “product stories,” i.e., “show me/sell me” via a corporate Web site, and “people stories,” or “help me/entertain me” via social media and branded content, represents the divide between church and state.
These two coexisting worlds reveal that the corporate Web site can’t die in the face of the social media revolution. Social media is a great catalyst for bridging the divide. In order to do this, you have to define your brand’s social identity.
Building a social identity means representing your brand in an engaging way, regardless of what you sell. To leverage social media as an effective bridge to your product, you must think outside the typical consumer profile and find a unique way to engage your core audience. You must think like a publisher.
Let’s look at an example. Your company sells fertilizer. Your brand’s corporate Web site is pretty straightforward: it includes details about the product, the unique benefits of buying your product, how to use the product and other company-centric details. These details fit perfectly on your Web site, but they do nothing to engage your core audience. Let’s be honest: no one wants to friend or follow a bag of fertilizer.
Your brand should use social media to demonstrate what you offer to the world in terms of value and value exchange. Staying in theme with your product, use your Facebook page to offer tips on general lawn care in order to help the consumer. Or, maybe, you upload the best user-submitted pictures of their gardens in order to entertain the consumer.
In the end, creating and sharing compelling content for social media channels forces us to think of brands as publishers. You have to grab the attention of your consumers before you can try to sell to them. Creating a
social identity and associating it with your brand bridges the separation of church and state. Now that you have the audience’s attention, feel free to sell.
Six Ways Brands Should Think of Social Media as a Party
I’ve been using this analogy for some time now and it seems to resonate with everyone who hears it. If you are a brand looking to connect with consumers through Social Media, think of Social Media as one giant party. Here’s why:
1) Social Media is one giant party.
Let’s set the stage.
Imagine the social web as one huge cocktail party. In one corner of the room, a group of moms are talking about education and parenting issues. In another corner of the room, a group of recent college grads laugh over Will Ferrell’s latest movie. Everywhere you turn, different groups of people are enjoying themselves, sharing stories, discussing current events, pop culture, trends, etc. All the groups are mingling, making new “friends,” and the most influential people in the room have the most “followers” hanging on their every word.
Sound familiar?
Social Media is a true reflection of society today–and what better representation of social behavior, fragmentation, hierarchy and influence than a giant party?
2) Lead with “people stories,” not “product stories.”
Marketing has taught us to always lead with our “product story”: distilling our message down to a “unique selling proposition” and driving it home with features and benefits. As a brand marketer, your first priority has always been to show or sell your product. And it works well–if you only have 30 seconds to sell your product through a message that’s blasted out into the world. However, if you walk into that party and the first thing you do is try to sell your product, nobody will talk to you and you certainly won’t get invited back.
You walk into the party and head for the group of moms in the corner. If you interrupt their conversation to talk about your “new and improved hydrating face cream” or your “ultra-absorbent paper towels,” chances are you will alienate the group or simply be laughed out of the room.
To become the life of the party you can’t lead with product stories; you need to lead with people stories. If you want that group of moms or those recent grads to listen to you, you need to enter the conversation on their terms. You have to start a dialogue with something that is important to them, not what’s important to you. Only then will you have earned the right to talk about yourself. People need to like you first, then they’ll ask what you do for a living.
This means it’s critical to have the right “opening line”–a way to enter the conversation that starts with the consumer’s agenda but can seamlessly migrate to your agenda.
3) Use content to make connections.
The right story, joke or anecdote at a party goes a long way, and social media is no different. If those moms are talking about parenting issues, turn them onto a parenting expert who can help with their problems. If those grads are laughing over Will Ferrell’s latest movie, give them something similar to laugh about or recommend another movie for them to see.
The right content will allow you to make instant connections. And that means you need to think of your fellow party goers as audiences rather than consumers. Like a publisher, you need to help or entertain first; showing or selling comes later.
4) Embrace fragmentation.
Just like a party, social media is made up of many groups. People with different interests, different likes and different dislikes. This means that you can’t use the same opening line with moms that you used with those college grads.
Every audience is unique and you should speak directly to each group. This means you may need a few different “opening lines” if you are going after different audiences. In the same way you would “work the room” at a party, the way to get scale in social media is to break your audience into segments. As you walk around having conversations with different groups of people, you naturally adjust your talking points based on who you are speaking with. At the end of the night you will have met everyone at the party; if you are interesting, relevant and sociable, people will remember you and be willing to learn more about you (and your products).
5) Leverage the influencer.
Have you ever walked into a party where you didn’t know anyone? It’s not impossible to meet people, but you certainly have to work hard at it.
Now, what if you walked into the party with the most popular kid in school? You get instant credibility, everyone in the room knows who you are and talking to them becomes that much easier.
Simply put, leveraging the right influencers makes you “cool by association.” You don’t have to work as hard meeting people, you get to talk about yourself more and instead of trying to figure how to start a conversation with people, they will come talk to you.
sBrands are obsessed with impressions. For them, it’s always been about reach and frequency. Well, when it comes to social media, the name of game is engagement, not impressions.
If you walked into a party and just stood against the back wall, people might “see” you standing there. You may even make eye-contact with a few of those moms you so desperately want to talk to–but what good will that do?
You could go to 1,000 parties and stand against the wall at each one of them. Eventually people may recognize you–but they won’t know anything about you and there’s still no basis for them to have a relationship with you.
The Social Media Party is not about making eye-contact (impressions); it’s about shaking hands (engagements). It’s about meeting people, talking to them, sharing with them–it’s about engaging with them and participating in the conversation.
Final Thought
The party analogy is a whimsical way of saying that brands can’t treat Social Media the same way they treat other mediums. For the first time in history, brands are trying to navigate a two-way channel of communication. This means they can’t talk at consumers. Instead, they need to engage with audiences. Social media requires a value exchange between the consumer and the brand.
So when it comes to developing successful social media campaigns and programs:
1) Pretend like you’re getting dressed up for a giant party.
2) Lead with people stories, not your product stories.
3) Use content to make connections.
4) Try to align yourself with the “in crowd” so people will want to talk to you.
5) Don’t just make eye-content, shake hands with the people you want to meet.
About Me
Proud father, devoted husband, Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Big Fuel, a full-service marketing and communications company based in New York that takes brands from Content To Commerce.
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