Marketing Roadmaps

Marketing

Facebook just wants “to be a real boy”

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This is the time of year when some folks trot out the tarot cards and crystal balls, and attempt to predict the coming year. And others wax eloquent (mostly)  on what transpired in the year just past. Over the 7 years I have been writing this blog, I have generally tried to stay away from this sort of post.

This year, however, that is pretty much what you are going to get. There are a few trends that I have been watching for a while now, always intending to post about them but never quite having  the time. Here’s the first.

Facebook  just wants “to be a real boy” and become a social content platform.

Facebook gets lots of eyeballs — 800 million active  worldwide users, 50% of whom access it everyday according to the company’s stats page. And the boys behind Facebook are smart cookies; they know they need to give people a reason to keep coming back. But, it seems like they aren’t entirely sure that catching up with friends and family and sharing “stuff”  is unique and defensible enough. And mining user data only works if you keep the users.

So they’re hitching their horses to the content wagon, and setting themselves up to be a content platform. Brand pages, apps, timelines and other enhancements designed to make Facebook a source of information, not just connection.

Brands are diving right in. Everyone has a Facebook landing page, contest or app. The ubiquitous URL in advertising has given way to the Facebook like and share buttons.

At the end of the day though, the Facebook platform is inherently hostile to robust content development. It was developed for short form messages and social connections, and layering apps and other tools to make it more content friendly doesn’t make it so.

But we’re sure as shootin’ going to try. Facebook has the eyeballs that brands want, and doesn’t want them to go elsewhere.  The more of our activities and transactions it can own, the better that database gets.  In the coming year,  more and more brands will shift content to Facebook that in the “old days”  would have been on brand-owned microsites.

The $25K question is, will they really recognize sufficient benefit from being on the Facebook platform to make up for the inherent unfriendliness of the platform to branding and deep content. Not to mention the murky area of who owns what on Facebook….

The more transactional, ephemeral and social the content, the more successful the efforts will be. Deep thinking? Complex topics? I just don’t see Facebook as a hospitable place for this. The Facebook brand page just doesn’t have enough branding to make the brands happy, or enough information to make the consumer happy. For one thing,  all the custom developed apps bypass one of the key benefits of Facebook, the simple user interface.

Brands will try, but in the end, I think the winning strategy will continue to be to link into the social graph to promote or aggregate content that lives elsewhere on microsites and blogs. This allows the brand to leverage the social aspects of Facebook, but still own their own robust content platforms.

Unfortunately, at the moment, things are moving in another direction,  and 2012 is going to be the year of bigger and splashier brand pages on Facebook.

Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.

Should you work for free?

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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.

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

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BlogHer Visionaries

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For the past few weeks, I’ve been working on the launch of BlogHer’s new consumer panel, Visionaries. I’m very excited about the possibilities we have with the panel to connect the BlogHer audience with brands.

Once or twice a month, we’ll be sending panel members a survey or perhaps even an offer to try a free product. The first trial offer is in the field — sign up for Visionaries now and get a full 12-ounce bottle of Dove® Body Wash with NutriumMoisture™.

Click  here to join.

Pitching on the grave

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Normally, I’m proud to tell people that I’m a marketer. I love connecting consumers with the brands they love and companies with the products that fuel their business.

Every so often though, someone calling themselves a marketing professional does something that makes me embarrassed for my profession.

More than a few of these instances have occurred in the past few years, quite specifically related to the practice of blogger outreach. You’ve read about them here and elsewhere too — bad pitches, rude PR people, “spray and pray” mass mailings. And so on.

Many of these are mistakes made out of simple ignorance, lack of experience and miscommunication. Some are simply rude; for example, when a blogger says she isn’t interested in the pitch, replying back implying that she’s stupid is the social media equivalent of the classic Saturday Night Live line, “Jane, you ignorant slut.”

Most faux pas can be forgiven. There is however one for which there is no excuse. Pay close attention, aspiring and practicing PR pros and marketers.

Don’t pitch on the grave.

It is NEVER okay to pitch someone who has recently had a death in the family or her circle of friends. And particularly on the back of a blog post about the death. NEVER, NOT EVER.

If you know the blogger well, a message of condolence or a donation to the charity in memory of the deceased is perfectly fine.

But if you don’t know the blogger, don’t use the death in an attempt to bond with her, on any basis, about anything. It’s crass, and the social media equivalent of ambulance chasing.

In fact, when I was consulting, I advised clients to do a read-through of the blogs in their outreach list the day they planned to send their pitch just to be sure there hadn’t been a tragedy or death in the family. In which case, they should remove the blogger from the pitch list regardless of how perfect the pitch was.

Obviously, if the blogger hasn’t posted or publicly mentioned the death in Facebook or Twitter, you aren’t pitching on the grave, you’re just the victim of poor timing. If the blogger replies, apologize and move on.

Don’t believe this happens? A good friend has had it happen twice. She posted about a death, someone pitched her on the back of the post, and when she pushed back, the sender was not only NOT apologetic, but also rude.

That’s just terminally clueless.

Is “earned media” an anachronism?

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anachronism — A thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that in which it exists, esp. a thing that is conspicuously old-fashioned (Source: Google Search)

Perhaps anachronism is a little harsh, but not by much. The whole concept pf earned media, as part of the triumvirate of Earned, Paid and Owned, has always been a little squishy. There’s just something a little bogus in the idea that the story being told was so tremendously good that the brand earned its non-paid media mention in a story, when of course brands, entertainment properties and celebrities spend millions of dollars every month to PR agencies and publicists to obtain these placements. There’s nothing unpaid about earned media.

Nevertheless, earned media  is where “we” have been accounting for the results of blogger outreach and other word of mouth engagement programs. In part because many early social media engagement programs originated in PR agencies for whom the earned media model made sense (or at least as much sense as it ever will.)

Certainly more so than paid media, which was clearly understood to be paid advertising media, and owned media, which is a bit more complex but boils down to the assets that the company controls – its packaging, trucks, website and so on.

The problem is that nothing is that simple. It never was, but social media and the rise of the engaged consumer has changed the dynamic to the point that classifying things into three buckets just doesn’t work any more.

Blogger outreach programs often include freelance fees paid to the bloggers for their work. So that’s paid media, I guess. When readers of those posts leave comments or post to Facebook or tweet about the posts? Earned. What about if the blogger who was paid to write a post, either a sponsored post on her own blog or as a freelance assignment, tweets it out on her own initiative?

Digital ads almost always include Share icons for Twitter and Facebook. So the media is paid, but the sharing is what? Pearned, for paid + earned?

And then there’s Facebook. How do we classify the activity on Facebook? A brand page is owned, I suppose. But are the comments earned? And what about custom promotional tabs? Are those owned or paid? And when someone shares it, is it now earned?

Clearly, we’ve outgrown these simple models of Paid, Earned and Owned.

What matters is whether consumers want to share. It doesn’t really matter whether the story you are telling starts in paid, earned or owned media.

Will consumers share it?

This concept of shared, or shareable, media is easy to understand. Much harder to execute, because it crosses so many functional lines – media, PR, marketing, advertising, creative. Much harder to measure, because it is more than pageviews or Twitter followers.

Up for the challenge? I am, and would love to hear how you are navigating this world.