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Book Review: Groundswell Effectively Introduces Social Technologies to Executives
Recently I was a panelist at a National Leadership Council event in on Boston that focused on how businesses and political campaigns can leverage social technologies. An audience member asked a question that went something like this:
"I understand the value of engaging in conversations online with our customers. In fact, I know the conversations are going to happen anyways and our only real choice is whether we’ll join in or not. But how can I convince my boss this is the right decision?"
I recommended she share a few chapters of Groundswell with the members of her senior management team that were reluctant to engage in social technologies. Forrester Research analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff wrote this excellent guidebook to thinking about the Internet-enabled social marketing as an opportunity, not a threat.
"Right now," they warn, "your customers are writing about your products on blogs and recutting your commercials on YouTube. They're defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you in social networking sites like Facebook." Scary stuff. Or is it?The authors spend the first sections of the book describing this technology-enabled groundswell. It exists. And it is creating opportunities for some businesses and threatening others.
Li and Bernoff use over 65 specific examples. For example, journalism professor Jeff Jarvis’s blog posts about “Dell Hell” led to a wave of unfavorable publicity on Dell customer service and led Michael Dell to personally oversee a revamped online marketing strategy. He implemented an internal community, IdeaStorm, to generate innovate ideas within the company, he encouraged engagement with Dell's community of customers, and he advocated authenticity in company communications.
In many ways, Dell was pulled into the groundswell unwillingly, but now social and online marketing are a critical element of its marketing strategy. Obviously, this isn't new content, but it is framed with the CEO in mind and it focuses on the questions the C-suite likely have.
The book offers helpful prescriptions for marketing managers new to incorporating social technology into the marketing mix. For example, as you adopt a social marketing program:
- Start small. "The change will take time…. So pick your battles strategically."
- Educate your executives. Use data to show them this isn’t just for their kids.
- Pick the right team. Recruit people who use the word “customer” often.
- Get agency and technology partners in sync.
- Plan for the long-term.
Social marketing changes the paradigm. Instead of broadcasting a message, you build customer relationships. This book helps managers see this transformation unfolding through examples they may see as analogies to their own market position. Groundswell also explores how tools like wikis, employee social networks, or crowdsourcing can be utilized. It concludes that these tools have potential to enable innovation, but that ultimately "culture and relationships trump technology." Success requires aligning management, employees, agencies, and technology vendors together around embracing the way the groundswell shapes marketing strategy.
While the book presents useful data, it is not a rigorous assessment of the space. It doesn't offer a compelling high-level framework that helps senior managers "get it." What it does do is delineate time and time again how Facebook or Twitter or Blogs are presenting new challenges for organizations -- challenges that managers should ignore at their own peril.
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Content Management Systems Continue to be a Good Investment in a Bad Economy
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
According to a recent CMSWire article, a Forrester study demonstrates that Content Management Systems continue to have a strong ROI in a weak economy. The Forrester's 2008 fourth quarter web content management survey forecasts continued growth in the Content Management industry in upcoming year.
Some of the highlights from the report:
- 72% of respondents plan to increase their CMS investment
- 64% plan to add a level of personalization to their sites over the next year
- 55% plan to incorporate audio and/or video in their sites over the next year
As a company that specializes in equipping all of our sites with our own Content Management System, it seems like a no-brainer that the sector is going to continue to grow, especially in a tough economy. A CMS truly maximizes an organization's ROI on its website. It allows organizations to fully leverage their site, engage visitors, keep the site fresh, add new features, participate in inbound marketing, and much more.
Content management continues to become more ubiquitous and affordable, and as the CMSWire article states: "by cutting back on WCM [web content management] initiatives, enterprises risk failing to meet customer needs and losing Web momentum to competitors." So far, we've seen spending on our CMS remain strong during the recession, confirming our beliefs and the research from this article. Do you plan on purchasing a CMS in the next year? If you're a web developer, are your clients still continuing to spend on content management solutions?
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Analyzing the Traffic Sources of a Successful Blog
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
Collis Ta'eed recently took a tour through a large blog's traffic on his blog and the data is very interesting. When I say "successful blog," I mean it. The site, psdtuts, that Collis walks through gets over a million visitors per month.
The data is a great way to see the principles of web traffic and blogging in action on a very large scale. The data he compiled strongly supports the frequently discussed tenets of inbound marketing and the long tail of successful blog posts by demonstrating that:
- Organic search traffic consistently outweighs social media traffic, even outweighing the initial surges from a successful Digg or Reddit submission.
- Search traffic steadily increases month by month in almost a linear fashion, with each month bringing in more organic visitors.
- In the past year, the monthly visits from organic searches has nearly doubled.
- The traffic begins to take on a life of its own as the links get passed around the web; several foreign sites that Collis has never even heard of send thousands of visitors each month.
The traffic analysis also presents some interesting data relating to which sites are the best at driving traffic to the blog:
- Twitter referrals are consistently growing. The traffic from Twitter is aided by the fact that the @psdtuts Twitter account tweets about every post to its more than 3,000 followers.
- Facebook traffic referrals are close on the heels of twitter; the most interesting part of this fact is that there is currently no Facebook strategy in place. He doesn't post links in his status or anything; so this is all driven by other people.
- StumbleUpon is the social site that sends the most traffic and it does so more consistently than sites like Reddit or Digg. Stumbleupon consistently sends 100,00 visitors/month; Digg only reaches that amount when there's a surge from a popular post.
- A post on Reddit's homepage sends almost an identical amount of traffic as a Digg homepage score, and it is much more accessible. Also, Reddit is better at sending smaller amounts of traffic to somewhat popular posts; whereas with Digg it's almost all or nothing.
Thanks to Collis for opening up PSDTuts' numbers and allowing people to see the long tail benefits of blogging and the general trends of web traffic on such a large scale. Are these referral proportions in line with what your website or blog is experiencing? What is your biggest traffic source? I encourage you to check out Collis' new blog after only three posts, it's already one of my favorites.
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Ad Agencies Build Infrastructure to Shift Traditional Marketing Dollars Online
The Wall Street Journal reports that WPP-owned advertising agencies are pursuing broader Internet advertising strategies in response to the economic downturn. WPP’s Mediaedge unit is developing increasingly complex Web sites that include interactive features such as online games, and Mediaedge is integrating these efforts with traditional advertising. For example, a series of 10-second television advertisements are designed to push viewers to a Unilever deodorant micro-site.
This article speaks to a few relevant points:
- Change accelerates in a downturn. As managers review budgets and contemplate cuts, they are forced to think more creatively about how they allocate resources. When a manager must review the budget line-by-line, the relative return of a micro-sites (thousands of dollars) versus a magazine advertising campaign (millions of dollars) is apparent.
- Invest in innovation, particularly in a downturn. WPP is the best of the best. The advertising conglomerate, founded by Sir Martin Sorrell, is the world’s largest communications services group. They are continuing to invest in innovation, not in spite of the recession, but because of it! They have recently purchased a virtual reality research group. Why?? It isn’t part of their core business. It isn’t going to immediately increase profitability. But it is going to keep them innovating and thinking about how to leverage new technologies on behalf of their clients.
- New mediums demand richer content. Great advertising campaigns were centered on a single 30-second advertisement in 1990. Not any longer. There are too many platforms (which all feature different strengths) to get the same mileage out of a single short piece of creative. Traditional content shouldn’t just be repackaged for the phone or the web--it should be rethought. How can it be made more interactive? How can it engage consumers for longer? Content that captures consumer interest will deliver better return on investment. To “turn shoppers into buyers” you must engage them, integrate different mediums and deepen consumer engagement.
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What Is Inbound Marketing?
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
If you've been in the marketing world in the past couple years, you've probably come across the term "Inbound Marketing." It seems to be gaining more and more steam, and people are more interested in what Inbound Marketing is and how it can help them.
Inbound Marketing is the practice of bringing warm, qualified leads into your sales funnel rather than reaching outward to cold, questionable targets
Traditional "outbound marketing" was largely focused on outbound methods such as cold calls, print ads, attending tradeshows, etc. The idea behind these techniques was to get in front of cold leads and warm them up to the point where they would try your product or service.
This form of marketing was largely a numbers game - you knew you had to, on average, get in contact with a certain large number of people before one of them would be interested and make a purchase. This method was inefficient and expensive, causing marketers to waste time getting in contact with tons of people who may have had no interest in their offering.
Especially in this resource-strapped recession, Inbound Marketing is becoming more popular as marketers look for efficient and affordable ways to acquire new leads. Some of the most popular Inbound Marketing techniques are blogging, interacting on social media, search engine optimization, and webinars.
All of these inbound methods pre-qualify the leads that discover your company, so you can be sure that your message is greeting welcoming ears rather than random outbound contacts. By bringing these warm leads into you, you will greatly save time and money on the old outbound strategies.
How Can I Use Inbound Marketing?
The most important part of a successful inbound marketing strategy is creating great content that will bring people into your sales process. Another important element is ensuring that you have a site that is optimize to close leads into deals and engages visitors once they "land" on your website.
One of the most popular methods to accomplish this goal is by keeping an updated blog. A blog can provide many benefits for your organization, and almost all of them relate to Inbound Marketing. By creating great content, you'll rise in organic search results, create linkable content, and educate your audience. All of these outcomes will help you bring in warm leads that have been pre-qualified through a Google search for relevant terms or by reading similar content that links to you.
In addition to blogging, there are many other forms of great content to create that will bring interested visitors. Hosting webinars, offering e-books for download, and developing microsites will all attract leads that are interested in your offerings and are eager to engage in a conversation with you about your organization.
By sticking with these Inbound Marketing strategies, you'll continually bring in new leads and grow in authority, however, it won't happen overnight. While Inbound Marketing will save you money, it does take an ample commitment and patience. You won't be the top Google result for desired terms overnight and your first webinar may only have a few people register, but by making a longterm commitment to inbound marketing you will see results.
This commitment requires that you create quality content through a Content Management System, engage with people through social media, and try new ideas to bring traffic to your site.
Have you had success with Inbound Marketing? How much did it save your organization in advertising dollars? We'd be excited to discuss your current marketing efforts and how to help you bring in new, qualified leads through Inbound Marketing.
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Online Marketing Lessons From an American Idol
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
Last night I greatly enjoyed watching fellow Tar Heel and my friend Anoop Desai perform on American Idol. He did a great job and I think it looks like he should probably move on to the next round of twelve.
I must admit, though, that I would have most likely missed the broadcast of the performance if it weren't for online marketing efforts on behalf of Anoop. I'd never watched the show outside of his previous appearances, so I was completely clueless in regard to when it aired and the voting process. However, the online marketing made me aware of his appearance and educated me on the overall process.
A quick Facebook search demonstrates this Idol's online prowess. His fan page and Anoop Desai: American Idol group have more than 15,000 supporters total.
These presences don't simply stand alone but are part of an integrated online marketing campaign. The groups were leveraged to reach out to members and organize "watch parties" around the country, send messages to members, provide resources for members to pass along to their friends, and more. Furthermore, the IOMC leveraged other services such as Twitter, e-mail marketing, and online video.
The campaign spread so virally that my grandma even got an email urging her to use her AT&T phone to vote for Anoop.
Watching this all unfold got me incredibly excited for Anoop but also caused me to think about some of the online marketing lessons that are prevalent in the campaign to get him to the Top 12. Here are some takeaways that I think can apply to organizations marketing online:
- Use a variety of online services. This campaign featured elements ranging from Twitter to Facebook to classic e-mail. Each included aspect has the potential to reach new people. Don't just limit yourself to one message medium, as you're probably missing a large portion of your target audience.
- Leverage the support of those close to you. For Anoop, this meant his college friends that built the initial groups and organized the meetups. For your brand it means your current customers, friends, and employees. They will already be the most passionate about your success and brand, anyway.
- Have your online efforts translate to offline mobilization. There's still little that can replace actual interaction with other people, so use your online marketing as a spark for people to galvanize around your brand in real life. For Anoop, this meant organizing meetups. For your brand, it means hosting conferences, events, etc. for your online "fans." This is specifically important to online marketing for political campaigns as they translate web support into boots on the ground.
- Make it so easy to participate that people can't say no. The different groups and emails gave you all of the necessary information to forward along to friends to push them to vote - it took no extra effort other than copying and pasting and typing in their e-mail addresses. If you require too much effort people will resist helping spread your message; take the little bit of extra time to have everything set up for them and it will pay off exponentially as your message spreads virally.
- Don't shove your message down people's throats; let it happen naturally. I wasn't subjected to dozens of emails or SPAM Twitter messages, because the message was allowed to spread on its own, which made me much more eager to participate. For your brand, this means not SPAMMINGblogs with comments or projecting much more noise than signal in social networks. If people trust you and your motives, they'll be much happier to spread your message on their own, which will pay off in the long run.
Are there other successful online marketing techniques from this case that I left out? Have you seen other "celebrities" successfully leverage online marketing campaigns?
Hope that you found this helpful and that you also voted for Anoop last night!
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The Long Lifespan of a Successful Blog Post
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
One frequently overlooked benefit of blogs is the longevity of the content and the traffic it can drive in the longterm. A successful post on a popular topic can create a bountiful long tail of traffic that may organically outgrow the originally surge of visitors.
We recently had a very successful blog post authored by Joel Sutherland about how to build an interactive map using jQuery instead of Flash. The post was published on January 27 and in less than three weeks has had more than 9,000 visits!
We anticipated an initial traffic bump, because we knew the topic was interesting and could gain some traction on social media sites. To help the post along, we submitted it to Hacker News and Reddit.
These two sites would end up driving about 35% of the total traffic, with the rest coming from the post being passed around the web by other interested people. As an example, over a dozen strangers tweeted about the post, which resulted in another 500 views. Also, more than 1,000 visits resulted from the post being on delicious.
The other 6,000 views are a part of the traffic long tail that can be so invaluable to successful posts. Many of these visits are the result of dozens of other sites blogging about or simply mentioning the article, generating thousands more visits.
The post has continued a steady track of visits since the initial rush, and has only received less than 100 visits on five days since its publishing. This consistent pace of traffic is owed to organic search results. There have been over 750 visits as a result of organic searches on Google. This number will only continue to grow over time as the post has cemented itself on the first page of results for many different search terms involving jQuery.
This organic traffic serves as a great example of the value in creating a lot of content. Over the next year, this post will likely drive thousands of new visitors to our website without us doing a single thing. All we had to do was invest the upfront time to write the content, and we now get to reap the perpetual benefits of quality traffic to our site.
Have you had a blog post become wildly successful? How did the traffic graph look in terms of the long tail benefit? How much of that traffic ended up coming from organic search results?
Thanks for everyone that helped us publicize the post. We'll try our best to continue generating interesting content.
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C-Step Gets Attention on UNC Chancellor Thorp's Blog
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
NMC has worked closely with UNC-Chapel Hill (and other university websites) over the past year to build several higher education websites and custom applications for the school. We're always excited to work with them not only because much of our staff are alumni, but also because we know that our work is making a difference in others' lives.
Holden Thorp recently called out one of these projects on his personal blog. As a side note, I encourage you to check out the Chancellor's blog as an excellent example of an institutional leader successfully writing a blog.
C-Step is a program that allows students to spend two years at a community college and transfer to Carolina after completing their associate degrees. It's an innovative program that helps students around the state continue their education and earn a bachelor's degree.
When the program came to us last year, they did not have a website and essentially all of their applications were handled by mailed and faxed forms. We worked with the Admissions team to design a website for C-Step that was consistent with the Admitted Students site we had recently launched for newly accepted Freshman.
In addition to designing the site, we equipped it with our Content Management Software, which has helped the program continue to scale out the site as C-Step has grown in popularity and numbers. Also, we built an online interest form, which allows interested students to complete the majority of the application process online.
It was very rewarding to help this very worthy program take an important step forward by launching their first website and streamlining their application process. We're excited to watch how C-STEP continues to expand.
We share the Chancellor's sentiment that this program "reminded [us] how much Carolina and its proudly public tradition means. And I thanked the folks at Carolina and the community college system who invented the C-STEP program, which is so consistent with what Carolina is all about."
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Helping Ronald McDonald House Charities of North Carolina Share a Heart
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
Launching a non-profit online marketing campaign to engage donors around the Carolinas.
Ronald McDonald House Charities of North Carolina has run a Valentine's themed campaign for the past couple years known as "Share Your Heart." It has been a point of purchase campaign where shoppers at selected stores can donate a dollar after making a purchase and then give a paper heart to someone close to them.
This year, their PR Firm, McKeeman Communications and marketing firm, Grace Strategic Marketing, thought it would be great to add an online element to extend the reach of the campaign to those who may not see the point of purchase promotion.
The team came to us, knowing that we act as a web development partner for PR firms and have launched dozens of non-profit website designs to implement the design and set up the design for the new rmhcnc.org as a portal to this campaign.
We also had the idea to let people send virtual hearts to friends from the site, in order to establish it as more of a destination and to refer other people to the campaign.
The team loved the virtual heart idea, and we were off to the races.
After coding their design, we designed the Virtual Heart feature, which allows visitors to personalize a heart (seen above) and send to up to 10 of their friends. The friends get an email that refers them to both the heart and the main site.
This site is a great example of how to take current campaign, move it to the web, and add an online touch that encourages usage. By building in the Share a Heart online feature, the campaign automatically gains legs and expands its network of visitors/donors far beyond the original visitors.
Please join the movement and visit the site to share a heart this Valentine's season.
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WPI Survey Shows Big Agencies Must Adjust to the Times
Clay Schossow
Clay Schossow leads New Media Campaigns' project management and business development efforts. A graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, he has guided more than 200 websites from concept to launch. He is a frequent writer on Internet marketing and online campaigning. You should follow him on Twitter.
Even in the midst of the recession, Marketing Vox released an article today based on the latest Agency CEO Survey by Worldwide Partners that predicts online spending should continue growing through 2009. 62% of North American Ad Agency CEOs anticipate that their digital spending will grow over the next year.
This survey continues to reinforce a change in the classic agency model of media buys and markups. With increased online spending, clients are seeking more measurable and cost-effective methods to market themselves.
The predicted change in the agency model doesn't just stop at this medium shift. The survey also says that a majority of agencies now are operating on a "pay-as-you-go" model with their clients. This model is popular in emerging markets, but is a new addition to the North American advertising market. The model gives clients more control over their budgets, demands more measurable results from agencies, and replaces blanket annual budgets.
The economic downturn is forcing big, bloated agencies to catch up to the times and function more like small boutiques that do not have the luxury of huge guaranteed multi-year contracts. Agencies are now going to have to embrace new media in a smart, measurable, and effective way, and they will have to prove their value with every project.
This new report coincides with what we've wrote over the past months about how smaller agencies are great partners in a tough economy and how agencies need web development partners to correctly prepare for the digital explosion. Our team works with many small and medium sized agencies that we've seen do a great job of adjusting to the times and truly embracing new media; however, big agencies seem to only be doing it in name and not truly living in the space; this can be best exhibited by the huge, innavigable Flash sites that large agencies regularly churn out for their clients.
These changes will most likely lead to larger clients looking to smaller agencies and specialty shops that can better and more affordably serve their needs.
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