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an UPFRONT MEDIA publication ISSUE 22 June 2011

In this issue:
The Real Cost of Social Media 2 8 Brands That Have Found Success on 3 Facebook & What We Can Learn You Cant Measure What It Is 5 You Do Not Value Sock Puppets & Social Media : 7 Inside Fords Risky Marketing Campaign Random facts, humor 9 more...

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May 24, 2011 from Mashable

Brands That Have Found Success on Facebook & What We Can Learn

Any brand worth their social media salt has a presence on Facebook. But just because a brand is online, doesnt necessarily mean that it is doing a good job. While its possible to suggest some tips and best practices, theres no greater teacher than learning from example. Below, find eight brands that have found success on Facebook, including some takeaways on what they did right and how you can emulate their success. 1. The Pampered Chef The Pampered Chef launched their Facebook page at a national conference in front of thousands of enthusiastic consultants. The page earned 10,000 likes in its first 24 hours and now has over 260,000 likes. Sales of web-enabled mobile devices have surpassed sales of web-enabled laptops, notebooks, and desktop computers. Lesson: Ask your staff, customers, vendors, and partners who already know you and like you to Like your Facebook page first.

2. Restaurant.com Restaurant.com combines exclusive Facebook offers with lots of engaging questions. This drives higher results in users newsfeeds because of Facebooks EdgeRank formula. Last week for instance, they asked, When the weather is nice, do you prefer to dine on the restaurants outdoor patio or stay indoors? and Which American Idol finalist would you like to dine with Haley, Lauren, or Scotty? Lesson: Ask a lot of questions. Youll get valuable feedback, plus youll be more likely to appear in your fans newsfeeds. 3. Oreo Oreo is a global brand with over 19 million fans, and yet they still manage to make things personal for their fans. They consistently run fun content, creative pictures and links. They also have a Worlds Fan of the Week that showcases one Oreo fan in their profile picture based on uploaded fan photos. Lesson: Share lots of photos, and ask your fans to share photos. Facebooks Photos remain the most viral feature of its platform.

4. Vitamin Water Vitamin Water has been trailblazing on Facebook for years, including crowdsourcing an entirely new flavor back in 2009. Today, they have over 2.3 million fans with frequent posts featuring pictures, videos, events and links. Most importantly, they are responsive to fan questions and inquiries, breeding loyalty even when their answers arent exactly what customers want to hear. Lesson: Find the resources to respond to your fans questions and inquiries.
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5. Boloco Boloco is a Boston restaurant which has set up their Fan Page as a Place Page, allowing people to check-in. In addition to using the Reviews app to solicit and showcase reviews, Boloco is engaging and has fun with their audience. Most importantly, as a Place Page, they can leverage one of Facebooks newest features, Deals, offering customers specific and local specials. Lesson: If you have a physical location, use Place Pages and Deals to drive traffic through your doors.

6. LOFT Last June, LOFT upset its fans after they posted a series of photos of super-thin models wearing their clothing. So the very next day, they apologized and shared photos of their own staff, of various shapes and sizes, wearing the line. Fans responded enthusiastically, and since then LOFTs Fan Page has grown from 50,000 fans to 250,000 fans. They also post a lot on weekends, when their audience is online and theres less competition from other brands. Lesson: Know your audience well, and when you make a mistake, quickly own up, do right by your audience and fix the problem.

7. 1-800-Flowers.com 1-800-Flowers.com was one of the first brands to establish buying opportunities inside Facebook, and now leverages in-stream sales. But the most important thing theyve done is to deeply integrate Facebook onto their website, putting the Like button on all products. Imagine visiting an ecommerce website and seeing what products the person youre buying a gift for Liked it would make choosing the right gift a lot easier, wouldnt it? Lesson: Integrate Facebook outside of your Fan Page, on your website, in as many places as you can. Create more compelling opportunities for people to buy your product based on their friends Likes.

8. Brooklyn Museum This local non-profit has used pictures and an art app called Wall Paper to attract more than 37,000 fans. One thing they do particularly well is engage other entities. A look at their Wall shows lots of artist pages and other organizations pages interacting with the Museums page not just the fans. Lesson: Find synergy with other organizations and entities, and then work together to promote each others Facebook pages so that everyone benefits.

These eight brands all demonstrate worthwhile lessons in Facebook marketing.

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You Cant Measure What It Is You Do Not Value

May 24, 2011 from Brian Solis

Likes and follows. Once there, they found that connection was only the beginning. At the heart of these new communities was just that, a community. And, communities require an investment of not only time and resources, but valuevalue on both sides. This is about going beyond Likes, this is about loyalty, advocacy, and engagement.

ROI is as popular an acronym in social media as OMG or LOL are in TXTING. No matter how much you believe in social media, the reality is that management needs to know, whats the ROI of Tweets in the Twitter or Likes in that Facebook thing that all the kids are talking about? Kidding aside, the future of social media within your organization and the value your customers experience in their networks of relevance is in your hands. No one said this was going to be easy, and if they did, they didnt report to the management infrastructure where you and I operate. Change isnt easy. But, these are the times we read about in books and see in the movies. By 2016, its projected that cumulative mobile apps download will reach 44 billion. A classic Cinderella Story, if you will. You are the person who will rise against the odds to bring about meaningful change within your organization. Like Cinderella or any other character in an underdog story, youre destined to take the bumps and bruises before you realize the glory or validation you deserve. The question remains however, whats the ROI of social media? Its a question that is in all reality, unavoidable, but achievable. The pursuit of the answer defines your destiny. Lets start with a bit of the truth. You cannot measure the ROI of anything when the R, or the return, isnt defined from the onset of any strategy. Nor can it be measured through the quantification of the 3Fs (friends, fans, and followers) or any other simple math formula tracking Likes, ReTweets, comments, impressions, mentions or sentiment. This is the time to apply a bit more science than history to better understand how to design social media programs that measure a click to action. Like Me? Why Dont You Love Me!? In a classic twist of fate, brands rushed to social networks to seek acceptance in the form of

HubSpots The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing report spotlighted the critical importance of Facebook and Twitter in 2011 business strategies at 44% and 38% respectively. Thats up from 24% and 21% in two short years.

With an increased focus on Facebook specifically, businesses will need a better understanding of what it is consumers want and how it is the company plans on delivering it within an interactive, peer-to-peer environment. eMarketer recently published a report, Facebook Marketing: Strategies for Turning Likes into Loyalty, to help shed light on the importance of meaningful engagement. The title of the report says it all. Businesses will need to invest less in superficial interactions and more in driving loyalty and steering beneficial customer experiences. Everything begins with defining the value and the experience customers are seeking. Yes, it goes beyond the ask, Follow us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. The reality is however, brands arent outright expressing why consumers should do so. Instead the entire premise of many social media campaigns is void of expressed value or meaning and therefore absent of a solid foundation for measurement. Measurement Starts with Benchmarking Against Progress Toward Business Objectives In the early stages of social media marketing, brands experimented with measurement by tracking soft, but still necessary metrics such as awareness, engagement, sentiment, mentions, Likes, Followers, RTs/mentions, comments, etc. Sometimes, these metrics were benchmarked against competitors to demonstrate position and change over time. In an unpublished study that I reviewed, over 50% of businesses admitted not knowing how or what to measure in social media. Without connecting the dots between intention and cause and effect, we are measuring nothing more than activity. However, defining what

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it is were trying to solve for and also identifying desirable outcomes is how we begin to design measurable programs. And, not only do social media engagement programs become measurable, they also by default, start to teach us how performance directly aligns with customer needs, interests and expectations. In the third annual Benchmark Report: MarketingSherpa, sponsored by Vocus, focused a majority of the insightful 200+ pages on ROI. It begins with a telling sign of the growing importance of social and its ultimate collision with the C-suite. 65% of business budgets will increase social spending between 2010 and 2011. Along with that discovery, senior executives are expecting quantifiable results that contribute to ROI or to measurable outcomes. 1. Developing an effective and methodical social marketing strategy 2. Achieving or increasing measurable ROI from social marketing programs 3. Converting social media members, followers, etc. into paying customers 4. Achieving or increasing measurable lead generation from social marketing The list goes on and on. The path to measurement starts with a clear picture of the destination and what it takes to get from here to there. Businesses that learn to measure effect and outcomes will discover engagement strategies mature naturally simply because theyre designed to deliver against customer expectations while driving meaningful and measurable experiences. Taking the easy road is tempting, but its the path that many are following. Your job is to rise above the fray and connect the dots between social, outcomes, and demonstrable progress toward business objectives. Doing so bridges the gaps that exists between executive management, social media, scale, and customer expectations. Moving forward, businesses that will leapfrog their peers are those that identify customer needs and business priorities and then reverse engineer them to design informed and measurable programs. Additionally, establishing metrics that benchmark against the opportunity sets the stage for establishing links that connect performance to ROI and ROI to executive support and sponsorship. Next 1. Understand the need and the opportunity amongst customers and prospects. 2. Design programs that meet their needs, offer tangible value, and also tie to business objectives. 3. Design outcomes and returns and integrate KPIs that capture progress, performance, and opportunities for optimization. As mentioned earlier, we cannot measure what it is we do not know to value. Therefore value must be designed into the programs to accurately capture progress and effect. Moving forward, MarketingSherpa and Vocus found that the priority areas for businesses responding to executive requests to show them the money have several issues to overcome. 4. Create a disciplined process that is replicable across the organization and the various social presences that exist or are sure to arise. Now, show us the way.

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Sock Puppets & Social Media :

rds Risky Inside Fo Campaign g Marketin, 2011 from Mashable 18
May
anteed a home run with each swing. And with fictional characters engaging with brand fans, an outspoken sock puppet with a big mouth, and an agency that manages the social media updates, Ford is asking for trouble. Anything and everything could go wrong. Mashable spoke with Kelly extensively to get a behind-thescenes look at the campaign and a progress report on how its going. Who is Doug? In understanding Fords motives for the spokespuppet campaign, one must first understand who Doug is and what he represents.

Brands are littering Facebook, Twitter and YouTube with run-of-the-mill social media campaigns. Many are guilty of replicating the ideas of their more ambitious competitors while others simply hope to get additional mileage out of television spots by placing them on YouTube. Not Ford. On the heels of its successful and well-received Ford Fiesta Movement and 2011 Explorer Facebook reveal initiatives, Ford has crafted yet another innovative social media campaign, this time to raise awareness and introduce consumers to the 2012 Focus. At the center of the campaign is Doug, an irreverent and absurd tweeting, Facebook updating and YouTube uploading sock puppet serving as the spokesperson for the new car. Ford has constructed multifaceted fictional characters in Doug and John. John is Dougs human companion the straight man of duo. Dougs comedic, brazen and off-thecuff personality is the perfect foil for Johns more factuallygrounded act. Together, they flit about the country in a new Focus, frequently updating their social media accounts with an assortment of content and playful banter. The idea, says Digital Marketing Manager Scott Kelly, whose team is responsible for the campaign, is to use social channels as a medium to create invitational content. Doug is a multilayered character thats more fun to get to know in an interactive setting. A 30-second TV spot could never afford us the opportunity to engage with our consumers the way the social channels do, says Kelly. The videos are an introduction to him and John, but the real fun begins when people can talk to Doug and have him talk back. Untraditional and the opposite of politically correct, this social media and content-heavy campaign is the riskiest one yet for Ford. Ford, widely regarded as a digitally savvy brand, is not guar-

Doug is the latest addition to a long history of spokespeople for Ford, Kelly says. Like the 100 agents from the Fiesta Movement, hes someone whos been loaned a Focus for a certain period of time and expected to get the word out about what is, essentially, a brand-new car. Doug is symbolic of the redesigned Focus hes the opposite of what youd expect. The 2012 Focus is nothing like the past Focus, and Doug is supposed to serve as a provocateur who gets people to take a left turn in their day, says Kelly. The company intentionally made Doug a sock puppet so he could say and do things that might not be acceptable from a human spokesperson. Doug is Fords license to walk on the wild side. Add to that John, the straight man to Dougs occasional absurdity, as Kelly describes him, and you have a comedic pair in balance. [John] is the one with the real knowledge of the vehicle, so he can correct misinformation when Doug says something like, Every new Focus comes with an ejector seat and a license plate changer, says Kelly. Basically, he acts as a liaison of decency between Doug and the public, as well as letting us interject some vehicle features in a natural way.
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90% of all purchases are subject to social influence.

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The Playbook & Cast of Characters The ongoing campaign, launched in March and set to run through fall and possibly until the end of 2011, is quite intricate. Heres a rundown of whos involved: Paul Feig
Rob Cohen

Ridley Scott & Associates WPP Team Detroit

John Ross Bowie: Paul F. Tompkins

Paul Feig is the creator of Freaks and Geeks and an occasional director of The Office. For the Ford campaign, Feig directs the video spots that appear on YouTube.

More Than an Anecdotal Success? Anecdotally, the campaign is a hit. Kelly shares that while the company wasnt anticipating a one-to-one correlation between consumer exposure to the campaign and a new Focus purchase, it has seen brand converts its most coveted buyer post to Dougs wall announcing their new car purchases and giving Doug all the credit. Those few Wall posts make for great stories, but theyre more flashy than they are indicative of real success. We asked Kelly what the specific goals of the campaign are and how the company planned to measure success. Ford, he says, primarily set out to raise awareness and increase consideration for the all-new Focus. Ford plans to measure whether its met this objective by surveying people who were exposed to the campaign, he says. Were also measuring that success via engagement with our videos and ad units, and sentiment for the 2012 Focus and Doug. So far, so good, he reports. Heres a breakdown of how Doug is doing: aGoal: 10,000 total Facebook fans Actual: 35,650 Facebook fans in four weeks aGoal: 2.5 million YouTube video views Actual: 1.7 million views, or 67% of the goal with several months to go More Stats: aFacebook post views: 725,000 aFacebook likes and comments: 7,019 aFacebook demographics: 70% of status updates reach Fords target 18 24 year-old audience aTwitter followers: 1,000

The show is an always-on production. Doug uploads videos to YouTube once or twice weekly. The videos spawn a slew of responses from viewers, and responses are weaved into the plot as both Doug and John engage with fans. With the campaign so heavily tied to social media, Ford rarely lets Doug rest.

[Dougs] Facebook and Twitter channels are buzzing on an hourly basis even on the weekends, says Kelly. We try not to leave fans hanging for too long without some sort of response. Producing campaigns for social media is perceived to be a cheaper affair, but as you can surmise Fords not pinching pennies on this one. This is roughly what we would spend on a TV campaign that would produce 3 to 5 commercials, says Kelly. Yet were producing a lot more content and having a more engaged conversation more bang for the buck.

Plus, 41% of all the online conversation about the 2012 Focus is related to Doug and the campaign. We definitely see this as a successful measure of driving incremental conversation about Focus by using Doug, Kelly asserts. The campaigns style of humor is definitely working smart, subtle humor as opposed to broad slapstick seems to resonate with the consumers weve wanted to reach, Kelly concludes. And many of them have admitted to going to take a testdrive because of Doug or actually buying a new Focus.
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Humor

INTERESTING TO KNOW Stockholm: The Homeless Banner Campaign

May 25, 2011 from Mashable

Here is a neat little case study for Stadsmission, a small charity dedicated to helping the homeless in Stockholm. The Homeless Banners campaign was based around a blank, homeless banner with no website to live, a banner that has been resized, and waiting for a home When users got to the micro-site, they were promoted to copy the embed code, and paste it onto their own website, essentially giving the banner a place to live. The longer it was embedded and the more that it was interacted with, the brighter the banner became, helping to drive donations and further emergency banner housing to help spread the word After just a month, there were over 400 websites hosting the homeless banners, generating 36 million impressions, and tripling donations

Mercedes-Benz Tweet Race Case Study

May 24, 2011 from DigitalBuzz

67% spend more online after recommendations.

Did everyone catch the Mercedes-Benz Tweet Race back in February this year? Well, they were a few days late due to some bad weather, but they made it through and here is the campaign case study to prove it was a big success. The campaign had almost 30,000 active participants with over 72,000 Facebook Fans and 77,000 Twitter Followers who generated over 150,000+ tweets to power the cars. The campaign videos generated about 2 million views, while the twitter reach pushed over the 25 million mark. Aside from the numbers, the Mercedes-Benz Tweet Race was a great way to try something a little different, and by utilising simple ways to get involved, along with enough interesting, ongoing event content, theyve created a very successful campaign.

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