Marketing Roadmaps

SNCR

Could “fake news” harm your brand?

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Could “fake news” harm your brand? Some advertisers seem to think so — including P&G which recently cut $140MM in digital ad spend due to brand safety concerns.

But how widespread is the concern? Do marketers in general understand the potential damage to their brand if their ads are adjacent to dubiously sourced or out and out untrue content? Or how easy it is for this adjacency to happen in open programmatic marketplaces that are matching impressions to audience, not content?

The Conference Board’s Society for New Communications Research (SNCR) is beginning a research project to explore this issue. The goal is to understand how businesses contribute to the problem, particularly with ad-supported media models that make “fake news” lucrative, and identify actions that marketers can take to mitigate the impact on their businesses, and ultimately society.

Read more about the problem and the SNCR research project: SNCR Takes on Fake News 

Six years of blogging – perspectives on social media

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Since I joined BlogHer earlier this Fall, I have had a lot going on — traveling, speaking, digging into the new job, moving my family to the NY area — and this poor blog has been sorely neglected. So neglected in fact that my 6th blog anniversary passed earlier this month and I didn’t even notice.

Thinking about that milestone over this holiday weekend led me to think about some of the changes I’ve observed in the blogosphere.

In 2005,  early adopters were dipping their toes into the blogging waters. The hot topic was the corporate blog, and the term “social media”  wasn’t even being used yet — Facebook was in its infancy and Twitter wouldn’t even be invented for another year. Public relations agencies were just beginning to reach out to bloggers on behalf of brands, mostly high tech and consumer electronics. Online conversation often swirled around the mistakes agencies and companies made with poorly targeted “spray and pray” outreach.

Now, according to research conducted by the Center for Marketing Research at UMass Dartmouth,  23 percent of the Fortune 500 have public blogs, including four of the top five corporations (Wal-Mart, Exxon, Chevron and General Electric), 60 percent have corporate Twitter accounts and 56 percent have Facebook pages (The Fortune 500 and Social Media: A Longitudinal Study of Blogging and Twitter Usage by America’s Largest Companies).

The study, which was announced at the Annual Research Symposium and Awards  Gala of the Society for New Communications Research, concludes:

“This [adoption of social media] clearly demonstrates the growing importance of social media in the business world. These large and leading companies drive the American economy and to a large extent the world economy. Their willingness to interact more transparently via these new technologies with their stakeholders is [a] clear. It will be interesting to watch as they expand their adoption of social media tools and connect with their constituents in dramatically new ways.”

Furthermore, according to research conducted by FedEx and Ketchum, and reported in eMarketer, 75 percent of companies worldwide participate in social media in some aspects of their communications and marketing strategy, with 10% actively leading in the space and 15% still mostly on the sidelines observing (Leveraging Best Practices for Social Media).

Another hot topic in the early days of this blog was whether the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would accept blogs as an outlet for material disclosure by public companies.  The SEC began studying the issue in late 2006 and in 2008, announced that it would accept websites and blogs as outlets for material disclosure under certain circumstances.

The topic that has engaged me the most since I dove into the social media pool, however, is the relationship between brands and consumers. Initially, this activity was called blogger relations, a name that reflected its roots in public relations and a focus on blogs. Over the past year or two, the term blogger outreach became more prominent — in part I think in an effort to distance the work from public relations. At least that was my reason for the vocabulary shift.

The sphere of activity also has extended beyond blogs to embrace social networks like Facebook and microblogs like Twitter and Tumblr, and influence is just as important as blog real estate, prompting a shift to talk about  “social media influencers” rather than just bloggers.

Going into the new year, I will be shifting my analysis of this topic to focus on influencer engagement. How well do we engage influencers across the range of social media channels? What can brands do to better engage the customer with the brand premise while retaining authenticity? What is the role of the influencer herself? What can she do to engage proactively with the brands she loves without “selling out?”

Bottom line, I am more interested in the two-way sustainable engagement, brand to influencer and influencer to brand, than I am in a one-way outreach or a single campaign.

Next week, I’ll kick this off with a brief summary of  some best practices for influencer engagement.

Upcoming Events

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I’m back from Africa, and slowly getting back into the groove. I’ve got a couple topics rolling around in my head that I plan to write, but for now, I just wanted to highlight two upcoming events.

sm4sb_small22First, the Social Media for Small Business conference. Developed to help the the small business owner integrate social media into the business plan, the conference will be held October 22-24 2009 at the Renaissance ClubSport in Aliso Viejo California (about half way between LA and San Diego). I’ll be participating in a panel about Blogger Relations.

sym2009-tileThe Society for New Communications Research Symposium and Awards Gala is always a great event to recharge your intellectual batteries. This year the event will be held November 5 and 6 at the Harvard Faculty Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Attention: Social Media Innovators

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Did your company, organization or agency execute an interesting and successful social media project last year?

The Society for New Communications Research would love to hear about it, and invites you to submit your project for consideration in its Annual Awards. The deadline is September 7, 2009. More information at sncr.org.

Why should you enter? Of course, there’s the recognition for your project and your team, and who doesn’t like a little recognition for their achievements?

Just as important, though, is what your peers can learn from your best-in-class work. SNCR highlights the winners at the awards ceremony, in association publications and on the program at the annual conference, New Comm Forum.

Don’t miss this opportunity to contribute your work to our collective body of knowledge.

Thumbs up, Facebook

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I’m really liking Facebook these days. It’s far from the be all and end all of social media strategy, and the company often makes stupid policy decisions, like banning breast feeding photos while allowing hate speech, but it has made some very smart moves of late that truly make it a necessary part of your social media strategy.

Let’s start with Facebook Connect. If a company has developed or is planning to develop a rich media site with authentication, it should definitely consider using Facebook Connect. This eliminates the need to develop your own authentication and makes it far easier to tap into the 200-million-plus Facebook user base. Once logged in, your site users can then easily share the content on your site with their friends on Facebook.

Next, there’s the latest addition to the tool set, the Facebook Fan Box.

The Fan Box makes is easy to add Facebook Fan Page content to your existing website. This will be very valuable to transactional websites — those that don’t have many interactive or relationship oriented features on the site —  but who have made a commitment to developing a strong Facebook Fan Page.

The key to making the Fan Box a successful addition to your site, of course, is to actively engage your customers on Facebook. That means more than company announcements and the occasional poll.

That’s where Insights, the analytics provided by Facebook about your page, will be so useful, especially when combined with your web analytics. This data tells you what works, and what doesn’t, on your Fan Page. Combine it with your web analytics, user data and if you have a blog, blog analytics,  and you can get a good picture of your customer’s engagement with your brand.

Additional Resources

– My recent posts about Facebook and community:

– An excellent guide to creating Facebook Fan Pages from The Advance Guard

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The Society for New Communications Research announces call for entries for annual awards.