Ventura and Company

SOPA, Komen and the Super Bowl – a Cautionary Tale

There have been several blips on the social media radar during the last few weeks that, taken on their own, have generated considerable press:

• Social media activists created such uproar on January 18 that congressional leaders backing the SOPA / PIPA (Stop Online Piracy Act / Protect Internet Property Act) were forced to withdraw the controversial legislation.

• Online protests regarding the Susan G. Koman’s Foundations decision to no longer fund breast cancer screening at Planned Parenthood locations forced Komen to do an about face and revert to the original funding policy. Online positioning against Komen’s defunding position will create long-term damage to the brand, and forced the resignation of the person responsible for the defunding initiative.

• Super Bowl XLVI set a new record for social media engagement. Twitter saw an amazing 15 million tweets during the 2012 game compared to 3 million last year. That’s an increase of 500%! Facebook and YouTube also saw record-breaking engagement.

Are these three events connected? The first two – yes, obviously. But what’s the connection to the Super Bowl?

The Super Bowl social activity, especially when compared to previous year’s engagement, shows that social media usage is mainstream. It’s no longer just the geeks, the technorati or the 18-34s. It’s everybody and it’s all the time.

Social media’s mainstreaming has created an instantaneous platform for social, political and brand activists. It really gained momentum, just a year ago, with the “Arab Spring” uprisings in the mid-east, which were started and fueled by social media. This was predictor of things to come. But there was a major disconnect. By most of corporate America.

The “suits” who were promoting SOPA / PIPA and running The Susan G. Komen Foundation didn’t (and probably still don’t) get nor understand the immediacy and the impact of social media. And what they truly don’t get is that it is spontaneous. It takes off like a wild fire and blazes out of control almost as fast.

The suits, and in many cases, traditional brand and public relations practitioners, think that they can still control the messaging. (Hello! Motion Picture Association of America’s Chris Dodd, a leading proponent of SOPA / PIPA; and, Susan G. Komen founder Nancy Brinkman!) You make a decision that impacts a lot of people and you can’t contain it like you did in the “old days” of “push” public relations, where only your side of the story is presented to the public.

Writing in MediaPost’s Social Media Insider, Catharine P. Taylor said,

“…what you come away with is the knowledge that many people in official positions in our society are ill-equipped to deal with the voice that social media brings to millions of people. It’s no longer enough for high-profile institutions to get their stories straight and have concise, prepared statements for reporters; now, the role of communications is to gird for whatever might be unleashed in the Blogo/Facebook/Twittersphere and to weigh the power of the social media with the fact that it’s not a focus group.”

Peter Hirshberg, a well-known commentator on Internet and social media culture wrote on his Facebook page last Friday (before Komen reversed their decision):

“Two weeks ago internet activism killed SOPA. Today online protests swamp the Susan G Komen foundation and leaving their founder looking like she had no idea what just hit her. (Much as MPAA’s Chris Dodd did last week.) These are pretty responsive political feed-back loops fueled by social media. They suggest that citizen voices really are resonating more powerfully than before. It’s pretty empowering to find that what you say really does have impact, something the Arab world discovered about a year ago.”

The dynamics of both the SOPA / PIPA and Komen fiascos are indicative of the sea change in messaging. It’s about the old, traditional methodology of controlling the message versus the new reality of the tsunami of the digital age and social media.

If you are a brand, or a brand marketer, your social media needs to be managed by really competent professionals, like Ford has done with Scott Monty. These professionals should be in the room when major decisions are discussed and should also be part of the decision making process. You need to understand that you really don’t control the totality of your brand messaging.

 

If your idea of “social media” is still that of a college intern managing your Facebook page, your day of reckoning is somewhere on the horizon.

 

 

Posted by Mike Ventura |  Read More |  No Comments
Filed under: Facebook,Marketing Strategy,Social Media,Twitter
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Google’s Schizophrenia – Search or Social?

Google just can’t leave it alone. The world’s largest and most successful search engine, one that generated over $36 BILLION in revenue last year, can’t be satisfied with being the most successful search engine ever. No, it looks at Facebook and Twitter and wants to be “social.” Actually, Google has wanted to be “social” for a long time, but couldn’t figure out how to do it successfully. Remember Google Buzz?

You may or may not be aware that Google has changed its search algorithm (the mathematical formula that is used to generate the results that you see when you search on Google) to provide personalized search results influenced by the behavior of your friends in Google’s online social communities (Google+ / Google Circles, Messenger and Hangouts). They call this “Search Plus Your World” (SPYW).

What does this mean? If you Google search “sushi restaurants,” you’ll get results based on what your friends using Google+ have liked, commented on or “+1-ed” instead of the type of search results that you’ve come to expect. Ah…that explains all those “Google+ this” icons that we see on every search result.

So, when you search using Google, you may not be getting what you asked for! There is a way to turn off SPYW, as HuffPost’s Larry Magid explains in this blog post. For a company that prides itself on the accuracy (through constant tweaking) of it’s search algorithm, it seems strange that the SPYW results are based on a lot of randomness – the friends in your Google social network, the number of that actually “Google+” something that they like, etc.

To me, that’s not very accurate. And, I don’t seem to be the only one. In a blog post on MediaPost’s Online Spin titled “Google You Suck” by Kalia Colbin, she says: “The reason you got a billion search users in the first place is because you’re really really good at what you do best, and the reason you’re failing so badly at social is because it’s so obviously not what you do best. Circles? Really? Doesn’t it occur to you that if that one issue were such a massive deal-breaker, Facebook wouldn’t have 850 million active users?”  And, later, “Google, remember how you became so awesome. It was by focusing on the user: by having a deep insight into the needs of people searching the Web and an empathetic understanding of the indicators of quality content online.”

Google, obviously, wants to be all things interactive to all people, with “social” at the top of their list. Google is envious of the social worlds created by Facebook and Twitter. And, by the way, Google and Twitter have their own little tussle going on, as described on TechCrunch.

But Google, with $36 Billion in revenue, may be jeopardizing that trying , again, to be something that they’ve never really figured out how to be.

What do you think? Does this impact the validity that you give to Google search results? Do you Google+?

 

 

 

Posted by Mike Ventura |  Read More |  No Comments
Filed under: Facebook,Search,Social Media,Twitter

Social Media Marketing – It’s Just Like on the Radio.

I learned my marketing chops in radio. First as a commercial writer / producer and later as a sales rep, I created thousands of campaigns for clients ranging from single store mom and pop retailers to Fortune 100 marketers. Regardless of the message or creativity involved, there was one constant that made radio work in terms of delivering customers, and that was “frequency.”

Frequency is the number of times a radio commercial airs over a specific period of time. When I was a radio sales rep, I quickly learned that an advertiser had to run a certain number of commercials for each event in order to motivate the potential consumers in my audience to take an action. For example, if an auto dealer was promoting a weekend sales event, they might run 30 or 40 commercials in the days leading up to the event. It seemed as if every time that you turned on the station you heard the commercial. That was good, because “frequency” drove the message home and caused consumer action. We knew that the consumer had to be exposed to the message more than once before they “got it.”

It's that commercial again!

Frequency also works on TV. Whether it’s Old Navy, Verizon or Apple, we’re inundated with their TV spots during marketing events.

But what about frequency for social media? Most of us, whether marketers or in our personal social networks, post one time to Facebook and Twitter and think that we’ve gotten the word out. Facebook and Twitter work just like radio and TV in that the audience is there for a specific period of time, and, unless our message is at the forefront on their wall or Twitter feed when they are, they are not going to see, or react to it.

We might check our Facebook page a couple of times a day. This is just like listening to the radio on the way to and from work.

If I want you to see my message, it needs to be on your wall or Twitter feed when you are looking at it. Not many people scroll back through all the posts since their last log on. So, to be effective, the message needs to be there when the consumer is.

There’s a lot of research that shows us Facebook and Twitter usage. One of the key periods for Facebook usage is late afternoon, just before people go home from work. They are killing time by logging on to their social networks (by mobile device if their company net has blocked them). To reach this audience, I might post at 3:30pm one day, 4pm the next day and 4:30pm on the third day. I’ve covered a 90 minute spectrum in this crucial time period. And, if some of my friends see the message more than once, that’s all the better!

The concept of frequency is what makes radio and TV effective, and it works the same for social media. There are several apps that allow you to pre-schedule posts and Tweets (we like Hootsuite) so that you can create frequency with your messaging. When you design a frequency element to your messaging, develop three or four versions of the message – after all, this is “social” media.

Once you apply “frequency” to your social media messaging, you’ll see a greater return in consumer engagement and action.

Posted by Mike Ventura |  Read More |  6 Comments
Filed under: Facebook,Marketing Strategy,Social Media,Twitter
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Don’t Let Your Social Media Go On Summer Vacation.

It’s summertime…and the livin’ is easy!

Most of us have slipped into “summer mode.” Vacations have happened, are happening or will happen soon. Some cyclical businesses slow down during the summer months. Customers are on vacation, or normal consumer spending drops so that discretionary money can be spent on trips, summer fun and family.

People’s routines have changed. Kids are out of school. Maybe their social media habits have changed too? Nope!  The analytics show that people consume social media at the same rate during the summer that they do the rest of the year. So, you shouldn’t assume that because it’s summer that you should post less often to your company Facebook page or Twitter feed. What you might want to do to keep your customers and fans engaged is to go into summer mode with the content on your social sites. Remember, “social media” is “social.” It’s not about always selling your products or services. So be social and engage your consumers the same that you would talk to your friends about summer.

Sadie Dog

Sadie, our Director of Security, on her summer vacation.

We just experienced a huge surge in activity on a blog site that we manage in a promotional partnership with a major TV station. One of the things that we did to drive traffic and engage our community over the Fourth of July weekend was to create and post a comprehensive list of all the fireworks displays in our market. The response was overwhelming! We had the info up early enough for Google to index our site and Google was a major driver to the site. We posted links on our Facebook page and Twitter feed several times leading up to the Fourth of July and saw major bumps on those two social applications.

Be relevant!  One of our favorite sites, allfacebook.com, offers 5 tips to make your Facebook page relevant during the summer.

If you have a blog, talk about summer events and things to do in your area. You could run a promotion and ask customers to take your product on vacation with them and submit a photo to your Flickr stream showing your product in new and fun places. Run a promotion and give away a summer picnic for a family reunion or a block party. Humanize your company by showing that you enjoy and participate in summer too!

Maybe your social sites need a summer makeover using summery graphics or skins. Most importantly, don’t let your social sites go “dark” for a week or two because the person responsible for them is on vacation! Use an app like Hootsuite to pre-schedule posts to your social sites while they are on vacation. Or, have more than one person posting to your sites so that engagement is ongoing.

See ya’ at the beach!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted by Mike Ventura |  Read More |  No Comments
Filed under: Facebook,Marketing Strategy,Social Media,Twitter

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