Social networks

Customer-Centric Marketing. An idea whose time has FINALLY come?

May 9, 2018 by Susan Getgood Leave a Comment

Activating the passion that consumers have for the brands they love and turning them into your advocates is the secret sauce to identifying and converting new customers as well as increasing the loyalty of retained customers.

This simple concept, customer-centric marketing, has been the basis of my work for more than 20 years. It’s why I embraced blogs and then social media so wholeheartedly. It’s why I advocate so strongly for transparency, authenticity and disclosure, because they foster trust, the currency of social interaction. Online and off. It’s why I have embraced GDPR and other privacy initiatives for the promise they offer to build strong relationships with customers based on a balanced, informed value exchange for personal data.

Customer-centric marketing is also an idea that is often given lip-service, but not nearly as often embedded in our corporate DNA. We talk a good game about building relationships with customers, incorporating consumer feedback, building products and services that delight them. But when it comes time to implement the marketing plan, we use the language of war. We target audiences. We deploy tactics. We execute plans. We profile the customers into personas who are expected to follow prescribed patterns of behavior.

Which is fine, to a point. It would be foolish not to aim your marketing efforts at the audience most likely to buy. But our language and our tactics both tend to dehumanize our customer, to the point that we forget they are people and not just impressions or clicks or conversions or profiles. Taken to the extreme, and make no mistake modern digital marketing exists on the very edge of this extreme, our marketing isn’t just automated, it’s robotic, and not in a good way.

More human tactics like social marketing, influencer engagement, event marketing and even branded content restore the balance and remind us that customers aren’t simply segmented groups of purchasing behaviors, they are people. Living, breathing people who love our products and services, and are simply waiting to be asked. While these tactics are very often more effective, they are nearly always more expensive than digital advertising which uses programmatic buying and consumer targeting to reach the right audiences cheaply, at scale.

The good news, for advocates of more human centered approaches (like me), is that GDPR promises to reduce that financial gap. The SUPPLY for targeted ads will be diminished when (inevitably) publishers can’t document permission or consumers withdraw permission. It also will be more expensive to deliver an audience targeted PROPERLY with personal data. Both scenarios will increase CPMs for the remaining inventory. More on these and other scenarios in Marketing Week.

Certainly, contextual targeting will pick up the slack for digital advertising. There also will still be a market for premium permission-targeted audiences. Niche publishers in particular have tremendous incentive to develop a strong value proposition, both for their content and in exchange for the use of personal data for targeting. I wrote about this last fall.

As the cost gap closes between digital advertising at scale and more engaging tactics like influencer marketing and branded content, marketers will have incentive to shift budget to customer-centric marketing, where relevance can be proven by our interest and engagement with content and brands, not simply implied by our browsing history or past purchasing behavior.

It’s then up to us as marketers to create the compelling, customer-centric campaigns that engage consumers and convert prospects to buyers.

I’m game!

—

Additional Reading on GDPR. Tick Tock. Less than 3 weeks to go.

A column from the UK’s Marketing Week that shares a similar perspective on the opportunity to my own: Ben Davis: GDPR is the bible of customer-centricity
Overview from Ad Exchanger on Google’s Policy: Google’s GDPR Consent Tool Will Limit Publishers To 12 Ad Tech Vendors
Nice piece from AdAge: Publishing Trade Groups Criticize Google over GDPR Policy Sidebar: I find Google’s position that it is a data controller particularly interesting in light of its usual claim that it is a tech company, not a publisher or media company. It seems inconsistent that it would have first-party rights, as a controller, over data related to a content audience if it is not providing service to the audience directly (ie the content ) but only indirectly, via the services it provides to the publisher.
Sweet piece from TechCrunch on Facebook’s response

Influencer Marketing and Instagram: The peril of quantity over quality – MediaKix’s fake Instagram project

August 15, 2017 by Susan Getgood Leave a Comment

Earlier this month, influencer marketing company MediaKix released How Anyone Can Get Paid To Be An Instagram Influencer With $300 (or Less) Overnight, a project it undertook to prove whether was possible to game the system of influencer engagement on Instagram. In short, how easy is it to create fake Instagram profiles, purchase followers and then get offered sponsored content opportunities by the major influencer marketing platforms?

Turns out, pretty easy, at least for the two profiles the firm created – one focused on beauty, and the other on travel, not coincidentally I am certain, two content areas where Instagram is particularly strong, and the demand high for influencers with scale.

This has spawned a great deal of coverage in the industry trades over the past week, including AdWeek, PR giant Edelman and Digiday. All bemoaning the fact that it is possible to game a social network and artificially inflate followers and engagement.

I’m mostly surprised that anyone IS surprised. The demand for volume, for more, more, more – bigger reach, more likes, more clicks — is bound to lead to both fraud and waste. It did in advertising, in search of the almighty click, and it has in social, in search of likes, comments, shares AND clicks.

Let’s take the two problems separately. Fraud is the intent to deceive by artificially inflating numbers, whether buying followers or engagements. Waste is the natural by-product of scale. Not every legitimate viewer/reader of a message is the target, no matter how good our demographic and behavioral targeting. Even today, with the phenomenal matching made possible by programmatic advertising, there will be waste, and targeting on social is a mixed bag. You can do it within a social platform like Facebook, but not across platforms.

In my opinion, the platforms are responsible for posting the first level of defense against fraud in influencer marketing. The social platforms, to police the activity and manage fraudulent accounts effectively. The influencer platforms, to build similar checks and balances into their technology so brands can trust their influencer recommendations.

Managing the impact of waste, however, is part of the influencer marketing strategy. Our best offense is to put scale in its proper place in the strategy. Quantity – followers, likes, comments, shares, clicks – is not the only metric that matters. Quality of engagement is just as important. In the long run, perhaps more important. That means balancing your strategy, and including tactics that lead to deeper engagements with your current and potential customers as well as broader, more volume-centric microinfluencer tactics.

Remember: the influencer who matters is your customer. Always. That’s why influencer marketing works.

FTC Endorsement Guidelines Update: Disclosing a Sweeps or Contest Entry on Social Media

April 1, 2014 by Susan Getgood

Disclosure: Not a lawyer. Don’t play one on the Internet. But I’ve studied the FTC endorsement guidelines. A lot.

Yesterday news broke that the FTC had issued a warning to shoe manufacturer Cole Haan, notifying it that the disclosures used by consumers in its Wandering Sole contest on Pinterest were not sufficiently clear as to the potential material connection between contest entrants and the company. Said the letter (as quoted in MediaPost):

“We do not believe that the “#WanderingSole” hashtag adequately communicated the financial incentive — a material connection — between contestants and Cole Haan,” Mary Engle, FTC associate director for advertising practices, said in a letter sent to the retailer’s attorneys on March 20.

This represents an evolution in the FTC’s thinking with regard to disclosure of a sweepstakes or contest entry. In the early days, it did not explicitly require such a disclosure when a blogger mentioned a brand in a post to enter a sweeps or contest. In part, because there was no material relationship between the parties, so there was nothing to disclose. And, for the most part, back then (2010!), in text-based formats like blogs and Twitter, sweeps and contest entries were often disclosed as part of the entry instructions. Hence no confusion. [Facebook only allowed contest entries on pages recently.]

So what has changed? The endorsement guidelines are grounded in two basic concepts:

is there a material (compensated) relationship between the parties, and
is there a possibility of consumer confusion about the relationship?

In my opinion, the FTC’s thinking has evolved due to the prevalence of contest and sweepstakes entries, particularly on the highly visual Pinterest, that mimic organic endorsements, and do not have clear disclosure that they are a contest or sweepstakes entry. In other words, that the posting is motivated by a commercial incentive, not an organic interest in the product. Quite simply, all these sweeps and contests were causing too much consumer confusion.

The resolution is pretty simple, and follows the same simple guidelines that normal disclosure does. When possible, use natural language to disclose the relationship (Pinned for the Blah Blah Sweepstakes) and use clear hashtags (#sweepsentry) or @ addressing (@BlahSweepsEntry) to make it crystal clear. Using the hashtag or @ addressing is useful even if you also require a natural language disclosure as it makes it easier to track the entries. IMPORTANT: Make the proper disclosure part of the requirements to enter the sweeps or contest.

Why A Marketing Promotion Hashtag Is Not Appropriate FTC Disclosure by Sara Hawkins

Matching the social platform to the marketing objective

December 31, 2013 by Susan Getgood

Matching the social platform used in a marketing campaign to the marketing objective of the campaign is the first step of successful strategy. Yet, all too often, early adopters rush to the shiny new object, regardless of whether it is the right choice for the specific need. And on the extreme opposite of the spectrum, risk averse marketers wait. And wait. Until all the proof is in, and any opportunity for first (or even second) mover advantage is lost.

We want to aim for the middle ground – to be in the right place for our audience with the right message at the right time.

Let’s break it down.

Right platform? Consider the social platform in the context of your marketing objectives. Is the platform conducive to your marketing need?

Blogs: The deep content on blogs drives readers through to consideration and often purchase. More than 85% of the BlogHer audience has purchased a product based on a recommendation from a blog (BlogHer Social Media Matters 2012).
Pinterest: Its curated content with aspirational and inspirational appeal acts as long term consideration sets for consumers.
Facebook: Personal connections pique interest and foster consideration.
Twitter: Broad amplification drives awareness

The Social Purchasing Funnel
Image Source: BlogHer marketing materials

Right time? Is your audience actively using the social platform? If your customers aren’t actively using a social platform, it doesn’t matter that it is the hot new thing. It is not the hot new thing for your brand. Continue to monitor, but move on, at least for now, for your overall marketing strategy. If you sense potential for the platform, be vigilant for an inflection point – that moment when enough of your audience is actively using the platform for it to be potentially useful in your marketing strategy. Maybe even test it with small pilot projects, but don’t expect any ROI from these pilots other than knowledge about the platform and your customer base. You are asking for failure if you expect your pilot project to deliver significant sales results.

Right message? Is your audience receptive to hearing about or engaging with your brand on this social channel? That they might not want to talk about your product doesn’t mean they might not engage with your company on related topics, but be honest about what you are bringing to the online conversation. Some advice I wrote in 2008 about the secret sauce for a perfect blog pitch might prove useful in this exercise.

You should spend at least as much time thinking about WHAT you want them to say/do, HOW you want them to react and engage with your brand, as you do slicing and dicing the demographics. More really, but I’ll settle for equal time to start. The social platform may be perfect and your audience ready and willing to engage with you, but if your message is forced and inauthentic, it will at best fall flat. At worst, you’ll understand the dark side of “viral” which is far closer to the real world meaning of the word than the sentiment behind the oft-repeated mantra of the social era: <clueless enthusiasm> let’s hope our story goes viral !</clueless enthusiasm>

Spend the time to sanity check your message and your ask, against the audience and the platform, and once you get started, monitor the community reaction closely and adjust as necessary. Spelling your name right is not a good substitute for positive brand awareness and corporate goodwill.

Who “owns” social platforms?

November 27, 2013 by Susan Getgood

Who “owns” social platforms? The user or the platform? The answer is both obvious, and yet not.

Clearly the developer of the platform (and its shareholders) own the business and its intellectual property. Deciding who owns the experience is a wee bit harder. Without the engaged users, there is no experience. In that respect the users are just as invested in the platform as its nominal owners.

This tension can sometimes get ugly. Nearly every time Facebook changes its terms of service, interface or algorithms, the users get restless, threaten revolt etc.

But what happens when a change in and enforcement of the terms of service impacts the business of its users. As when Facebook restricted sweepstakes and contests a few years ago. Restrictions it has since loosened. Or when Pinterest began applying daily pin limits to minimize spam and revising and enforcing its guidelines for contests and sweepstakes that involve Pinterest.

On some level, the platforms rely on creative users to experiment with business models to surface interesting ways of leveraging the platform. Is it then fair when the platform asserts its marks (pin, pinning), chooses to limit an activity (number of pins per day) or restricts something to itself alone as Facebook did with “advertising.” Perhaps not, but no one ever promised fair.

When you build your business on the back of someone else’s platform, you run the risk — always — of the platform making changes that impact your business. For example, when Pinterest asserted its claim to the concept of digital pins and pinning and signaled intent to enforce, a number of companies building third party Pinterest tools that used Pin in the name rebranded. Pingage became Ahalogy. Pinerly morphed into Reachli.

And last month, blogger Amy Lupold Blair was requested to not enforce a trademark she had registered for “Pinning Party” and to comply with Pinterest’s terms of service guidelines for sweepstakes and contests.

I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on the Internet, and my purpose for sharing this example isn’t to overanalyze it or decide who is “right.”

Because it doesn’t matter. Pinterest has a terms of service, and reserves the right to change its TOS at any time. If you want to use the service, you have to play by its rules.

The company also has to be consistent in its enforcement of its TOS and defense of the claim to the concept of the digital pin. That means pinning only happens on Pinterest and no other business entity can own pin/pinning in a digital context. It may seem draconian when applied to a loyal user like Amy, but if Pinterest doesn’t assert its claims consistently, it sets dangerous precedent for when it tries to assert against the inevitable copycat platforms.

I’m far more interested in exploring how we can use social platforms in our marketing and business offerings without getting tripped up by the inevitable tension of who owns what. Here are a few thoughts. Your Mileage May Vary.

Build your offering on something you can own independent of a platform. It can certainly leverage a platform but for maximum flexibility, the underlying concept should be portable. This is why content-based plays are so powerful. The “product” is the story. The platform is simply the conduit.
If you have a great idea for technology play on top of/relying on a single platform, be honest with yourself. Are you a bleeding edge first mover? Or is your idea a breakthrough for the platform? Then it’s possibly worth trying to position you/your idea/your company as an acquisition candidate quickly. Whether the platform wants to leverage your technology, get you out of the way or both, this is a strike-fast play.
An independent technology concept that might plug into multiple platforms is also a decent bet, but again first mover or breakthrough has an edge, and shopping yourself may take longer than you have funds. Your idea needs to have legs on its own. Does it really fill an unmet market need?
Pick a name for your product/service/company that you can own. You can’t own another’s trade or service marks, so don’t use ’em. Very few companies will be as lenient as Twitter when it comes to use of their name in your name. As we’ve learned with Pinterest, that a term is a generic like “pin” isn’t enough to rely on if the company can prove that use of the generic term in the specific context is something it created beyond the generic meaning.

And you know that just because a domain name is available, that doesn’t mean the name is, right?

For most bloggers, the content-based play is the simpler choice. It allows you to build on your strengths as a storyteller without being married to a platform. Your power is in your story, and in who cares to read it/engage with it/converse about it. Not in how you share it.

Bottom line: don’t build your empire — however large or small –on someone else. Build it on YOU.

How Pinteresting (360degreesofadvertising.wordpress.com)
Nordstrom Will Use Pinterest To Decide What Merchandise To Display In Stores (JWN) (businessinsider.com)

Should you work for free?

October 21, 2011 by Susan Getgood

The social media “industry” is built on the back of people doing “stuff” for free. The business models of most social networks — Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Flickr, YouTube etc. etc. — depend on consumers using the free/”freemium” services and thereby creating both the free content that attracts and retains users, and more importantly, a mine-able database. People. Topics. Linkages (who are your friends, what do you like, where do you go). Marketing gold. And the companies are reaping the benefits of our “work” in potentially ginormous valuations, as discussed in this Businessweek article.

You could argue that posting on Facebook or sending a tweet isn’t work per se. We, the users, are getting something in exchange for our activity — the use of the network to accomplish a personal objective. The question is whether the value is balanced — are we getting enough from our participation in exchange for the value we are helping these companies build?

Honestly, that’s a question that each person must answer for themselves. Participating on Facebook DOES mean that you are surrendering some of your personal privacy, and a great deal of personal information that is going to be aggregated, analyzed, mined and sold. Every Facebook item you post, link or share is going to earn money for Facebook and its investors somehow. Maybe ad revenue. Maybe data mining revenue. But certainly revenue. Facebook is a business, not a public service.

Is it worth it to you? If yes, play away. If not, don’t.

And of course, you can figure out ways to monetize YOUR participation in the networks. Use them to promote your business. Or yourself. It’s all about extracting the value you require from your participation.

The other “work for free” model prevalent in the social media space is influencer relations, which owes its structure to the earned media model inherited from public relations. I’ve written about this before — Is earned media an anachronism?

In a nutshell, the idea is that companies and brands can have such compelling stories that consumers will write about them, share them on their social networks, for free, without compensation. And you know, sometimes that’s true.

Sometimes a product is so compelling that we are happy to harness our word of mouth for no other reason than we love the product. Perhaps Apple products are the only ones that can generate widespread mass word of mouth at the mere whisper of a new version, but we all have things we love that we’re happy to share just because we love them.

I’ll use myself as an example. Recently I bought a SpotBot Pet, a little spot carpet cleaner from Bissell that I first learned about at the BlogPaws conference. It is TERRIFIC, and eventually I will get around to posting a review on my personal blog.

But… products we are intrinsically passionate about are few and far between. Certainly far fewer than the number of firms reaching out to bloggers asking them to work for free on behalf of the brand. To write about a new product. Or attend an event and tweet it up. And so on.

So here’s where I draw the line. If it is work — if you are asked to do a specific thing in a specific fashion or to a deadline — you should be compensated for your time and expertise. Because if you are not paid for your work, it is volunteer work, and if you are going to volunteer for something, it should be something that you care about personally and passionately. I’m pretty sure cereal and motor oil don’t qualify. At least for most of us.

Is a free product adequate compensation? In my opinion, it all depends on what you are being asked to do. Try the product and participate in a short survey? Or leave a comment on a Facebook page? Probably yes. Try the product and write a 500 word blog review? Unless it is use of a car for a year or some other equally large “in kind,” probably not. It’s your call, but remember that the FTC and the IRS do not distinguish between cash and “in kind” compensation. You get a free product, you must disclose, and if you get enough of them, you probably should be reporting the “income” on your taxes. Disclaimer: not a lawyer, not an accountant, consult yours if you have questions about your legal obligations, especially for taxes, which unlike the FTC guidelines, DO have defined penalties for getting it wrong.

So, if you are working in exchange for free product, whatever it is, best to make sure it is something you actually want. Because you may have to pay taxes on it. If it is not something you need or want, cashy money probably would be more useful.

A final point on working for free. I am not saying you shouldn’t volunteer your time, skills or blog content to causes — or even brands — that you care about and want to support. Everyone has to make their own decision on that score. However, if you do work for free, if you give it away, don’t expect the recipient to turn around in future and say, wow, you are so great I should be paying you. Volunteering in the hopes of a paying gig is a losing proposition. It is VERY unlikely to happen.

So when someone asks if they could just pick your brain, or could you just post about this thing on this day and include the following three points, or whatever, understand that you have just created a non-paying customer. And no one can afford too many of those.

Finallly, there’s a fine distinction that I don’t want you to miss. Doing something of your own volition — whether writing a blog, sharing a link or posting on Facebook — is very different than working to someone else’s specifications or timeline. Sometimes it is hard to tell the difference when the email box is overflowing with “opportunities.” All I can advise is to consider the value to both parties in the exchange. If it is an even exchange of value, if you are getting what you need to make it worth it (whether cash, products, connections or feeling good about helping out) and so is the other party, go for it.

If not, you may just want to say no.

—

Disclosure: I work for BlogHer. We pay the bloggers who write for us.

Emptying the bit bucket: books, pitches and too fat to fly?

February 16, 2010 by Susan Getgood

Heard on Twitter about a big brand: Apparently the brand is using multiple word of mouth agencies on blogger outreach programs for the same company initiative. Some of the agencies are offering compensation for posts, others not. Here’s the kicker though: some bloggers are getting both sorts of pitches. For the same program. Ouch!

And before you ask: yes I know who it is, no I am not telling, and I’d appreciate it if my readers do not “out” the brand in the comments either. I’m telling this story to make a point, not to embarrass anyone.

Here’s the lesson. It’s okay to have different programs for the same initiative. Just make sure the programs are highly differentiated, especially if some include compensation and others do not. And for heaven’s sake, de-dupe the lists, and do your best to make sure that bloggers only get ONE of the pitches.

Too fat to fly? The ‘net was all a-twitter over the weekend and yesterday about the @ThatKevinSmith and Southwest Air incident Saturday. It was all over the mainstream media as well, but just in case you missed it (on vacation at the South Pole, crossing Alaska with a dog team, climbing Mt. Everest, etc.), here’s the short story.

Director Kevin Smith (“Clerks”) was asked to get off a full Southwest flight from Oakland to Burbank last Saturday for “safety reasons.” He twittered about it as it was happening, and later released a special, very long, very ranty episode of his podcast with the blow by blow.

Smith has 1.6 million Twitter followers, so the whole thing blew up hard and fast. And of course, the whole situation was further fueled by the fat/thin debate.

Eventually, Southwest apologized, sort of but not really, which further inflamed Smith. They then apologized again, as detailed in both this Nuts about Southwest post and Smith’s final word on the subject in his blog.

I’m not going to do a blow by blow analysis. The pundits have analyzed this thing to death, and it’s pretty clear that this was a customer service snafu that evolved into a full-blown communications crisis due to bad decisions and the power of social networks.

Southwest has learned a hard lesson. What can we learn from it?

First, exercise a little common sense. The entire situation could have been avoided in multiple ways. First, the obvious — just let the man fly. Southwest also could have chosen to NOT clear Smith from the standby list if they were truly already hyper-aware of fliers with “safety issues.” Is that right? No, of course not. It’s awful and stupid and ugly. But, it would have avoided the problem. Putting the man on the flight and then taking him off is the problem, because, truly, he didn’t get any fatter while waiting to board the flight.

Second, and I know others have said this as well: When you apologize to someone, you really should apologize for the thing that actually upset the other party. Otherwise, it isn’t an apology. It’s a justification. The lawyers may not like it, but good customer relations demands it. When you screw up, own it. All of it.

Enough of this. I may write about this on my travel blog this weekend — after I fly Southwest to Houston for Mom 2.0. The airlines — all of them — do have a problem. As they try to pack more seats into each plane and then pack each plane to capacity to improve the bottom line, the US population is getting larger. It’s not good. It just is.

Finally, I meant to post this weeks ago, but forgot. The second edition of David Meerman Scott’s book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR (Amazon affiliate link), has just been released. While I don’t agree with all of David’s tactics, it’s a good introductory text on how to use social media in your marketing plan.

What don’t I agree with? I am a profound opponent of using press releases to reach customers. News, yes. The press release form, no. Otherwise, our approaches to integrating marketing and social media are pretty similar.

Social networks

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