MarketerBlog

Tweets for Eats - Chefs Using Social Media: @SBoSM

Twitter has replaced the Yellow Pages for some chefs and their suppliers. An article by Chuck Sudo in today's Chicago Sun-Times highlights a new trend of restauranteurs and suppliers using social media to find customers and generate business.

"Carl Galvan, a sales representative at Supreme Lobster & Seafood in Villa Park, uses the messaging service Twitter to post photos of fish and other seafood Supreme is offering and to interact with chefs interested in placing orders based on those photos. Since Galvan started using Twitter four months ago, he estimates his sales have doubled."

Sudo notes that as technology has made communication easier and faster, a growing number of chefs and others in the food industry have taken to social media services such as Twitter and Facebook to promote themselves and their projects, interact with customers and fans, offer special promotions -- or just see what all the fuss is about.

Restaurants have long known that word-of-mouth referrals are critical for success. Social media provides another set of tools for generating and sustaining positive referrals.

Even paper-bound reviewers like @ZagatBuzz are getting into the social media game.

Services like @CloudProfile make it easier for local food and beverage companies to expand their reach and grow revenue. Leesburg Vintner (http://leesburgvintner.cloudprofile.com/) and The Four Firkins (http://fourfirkins.cloudprofile.com/) are two great examples but there are many others.

So next time you have a hankering for a cold brew or a great slice (or both) what will you do? Check out your friends tweets and yelps, or open the yellow pages?

Using Social Media to Break the Nonprofit Starvation Cycle

The current issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review has an in-depth article about the vicious cycle nonprofits face in trying to balance unrealistic funder expectations regarding administrative costs with the reality of building an effective and efficient operation.  As anyone who’s worked with or for a nonprofit knows, well-meaning grant requirements whose goals are to direct the maximum amount of funding towards program delivery often result in reporting shell games, where administrative costs are buried in program line-items in order to achieve unfeasible expense ratios.  Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard, the authors of the article and partners at the Bridgespan Group, assert that the best place to break the cycle is where it starts -- adjusting Funder expectations.                 

“A vicious cycle is leaving nonprofits so hungry for decent infrastructure that they can barely function as organizations—let alone serve their beneficiaries. The cycle starts with funders’ unrealistic expectations about how much running a nonprofit costs, and results in nonprofits’ misrepresenting their costs while skimping on vital systems—acts that feed funders’ skewed beliefs. To break the nonprofit starvation cycle, funders must take the lead.”

But as they rightly point out, the responsibility for solving this problem does not rest solely with funders.  Nonprofit leaders must understand and effectively manage their true infrastructure needs.  

I would add another point:  nonprofit leaders must embrace new tools and technologies to amplify reach and mitigate costs.  Social Media is a perfect mechanism for tapping into constituent interest, spreading the word about a cause or issue, and engaging supporters, whether as volunteers or donors.  Nothing demonstrated this better than the Obama campaign’s superb use of social media, which not only extended its reach but allowed the campaign to secure unprecedented levels of donor support.  But there are countless other organizations who have Facebook groups or causes, who tweet, and who blog their way to broader awareness and support.  Mashable posted on this last week in a terrific article on how to Do Good on Facebook.  

Despite their desire to change the world, nonprofit managers are often themselves resistant to change.  It’s time for them to recognize that the “low pay, make do, and do without” culture undermines their lofty goals. 

Addendum:  Here's a link to a great presentation on this topic.     

Knowledge vs. Information: Social Media and the Arab World

Renee Blodgett (@MagicSauceMedia) retweeted a post last night from Naseem Tarawnah (@tarawnah) a journalist in Amman, Jordan.  Naseem Tarawnah offers a thoughtful, but somewhat pessimistic analysis of how people in the Arab States use (or don’t use) Social Media, and why it’s been rejected by some religious and intellectual leaders in Arab countries.  Now I am a new student of the Middle East and will not pretend to fully understand the complexity of the issues described, though I’ve discussed them often with my husband, who is an expert in these matters (@AmbassadorNed).  But I suspect that, much like here in the US, it all gets down to the difference between knowledge and information, and the power of harnessing collective intelligence. 

I studied classics at a school with an extraordinary focus on the pursuit of knowledge achieved through rigorous questioning and critical thinking.  All of our classes were taught seminar-style, with a focus on the text, rather than the teacher.  From what I understand, the vast majority of schooling in the Arab World is based on rote-memorization and lectures, educational techniques which are not the best for cultivating the ability to question and challenge voices of authority.  

For that reason, Social Media may be a perfect way for new writers and thinkers to express themselves, collaborate, and challenge the norm.  Social Media offers the potential to engage in dialog with someone across the street or on the other side of the globe.  It builds on itself, aggregating new insights along the way.  And it amplifies the writers voice, as tweets are retweeted and links are shared.  That’s a powerful tool, whether you’re an academic, a journalist or a small business looking to get the word out about your idea or product. 

Without question a lot of garbage is created and time wasted.  But as more people engage in social media, the tools are refined and the high-value conversations emerge. 

Last month, one of the first large-scale acquisitions of an Arab Internet company occurred when Yahoo acquired Maktoob.  Internet usage is experiencing double-digit growth in the Arab States and they’re rapidly adopting Social Media.  Yet the 320M+ people of the region remain under-served by Internet services, with Arabic-language content accounting for less than 1% of all Internet content.  (I was told by a Google executive that there’s less online content in Arabic than there is in Czech.)  It’s about time the global technology community realized there’s enormous potential in the Arab States.  The Maktoob-Yahoo deal, along with recent Google announcements, are putting the Arab technology and entrepreneur communities on the map. 

But Naseem Tarawnah is right, the real innovation will be in the ways Jordanians, and Egyptians, and Tunisians, and everyone else across the Arab States use the Internet and Social Media to harness collective intelligence, share information and create new ideas.  

Back in the 14th Century, when Europe was in the Dark Ages and the US didn’t exist, Arab intellectuals led the world, serving as a bridge from the Ancients to the Renaissance. I hope that Arab innovators, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs will use the Internet and Social Media to create another Golden Age.            

Generation Y: they’re online, and they’ve got an opinion

My husband often talks about his “glory days” during the civil rights movement in the 60’s.  He was actually paid by Dean Rusk’s State Department to go to SDS rallies and tap into the zeitgeist of the Boomer generation.  Generation Y is taking its political activism online and specifically to social media, according to a recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.  

Frederic Lardinois posted an analysis of this report on Read Write Web yesterday.  He points out that users under 35 represent 72% of those who make use of political networks, yet are less likely than the old fogies to participate in offline civic engagement.  Pew hopes this may be a bellwether of increased interest in politics among the younger generation.  Lardinois points out that it may just be a reflection of the excitement around the 2008 Presidential elections, and the Obama campaign’s shrewd use of social networks and online media. 

Whatever the reason, it’s important for advocacy and nonprofit organizations to take note.  By 2010 Generation Y will outnumber Baby Boomers - that’s next year.  96% of Generation Y has joined a social network.  So do the math.  If you want to enlist Generation Y as advocates for your cause, recruit them as volunteers, or cultivate them as donors you need to take your case to the digital street.  

The good news is that even small organizations can leverage the power of social media to raise awareness and build community support.  Facebook and Twitter are two great tools, but blogs and services like CloudProfile offer ways to foster conversation (or debate) and deepen member/supporter engagement.  

The Boomers were “talkin’ ‘bout my generation” in the 60’s.  Today, Generation Y is tweeting about theirs. 

Facebook vs. Twitter: Talking vs. Conversation

Aliza Sherman (@alizasherman) wrote a great post in Web Worker Daily yesterday (see link below) about the ongoing debate whether Facebook or Twitter is better for building your business.  She makes it clear that it depends on your business goals and what you’re trying to accomplish, but that both can be valuable marketing tools.  I agree with Ms. Sherman that the critical difference between them is the level of user engagement.  

 

“You might gain a fan on Facebook just because someone sees someone they know becoming your fan. You gain followers on Twitter — genuine and engaged followers — because they actually want to hear what you have to say.”

Another way of thinking about it is that Facebook is the current version of “mass marketing” and Twitter follows the new customer engagement model.  With Facebook you can reach a large audience, using many of the traditional advertising techniques.  Arguably these are more effective than most online ads. 

But with Twitter you can listen to what people are saying, get into real conversations with them and cultivate interest in your product or service.  You engage with your prospects and they follow you because they’re actually interested in what you have to say.  Oh, and one of the side benefits?  If they like what you have to say, they retweet it ... that is, they send it out to their network of contacts with an implicit endorsement.  Remember that old shampoo commercial?  I told two friends, who told two friends ... you get the idea.  The techies call that the “network effect”.  I call it expanding the impact of your marketing program.  

“Social media is not about placing an ad to capture eyeballs. Social media is about engaging in meaningful and appropriate conversations with consumers, because today’s savvy consumers are no longer passive couch potatoes watching a stream of advertisements. They are empowered with social media tools that provide them with the platforms to have their say about the products they love or the companies they hate.”

Thanks to Ms. Sherman for publishing such a great analysis. 

Is Facebook Really Better Than Twitter For Your Business?

Back to School: Marketers Learning How to Work With Social Networks

A friend and blogging inspiration, Toby Bloomberg, recently sent me a note about a new program she’s developed on behalf of one of her clients, GourmetStation. GourmetStation is a great little company down in Hotlanta. They provide “delicious prepared meals delivered with an upscale worldly spin” – in other words a gourmet experience in the comfort of your own home, without the cost of a private chef. The company attracts an upscale customer base and is trying to expand to new audiences. So they decided to run a test program on MySpace.

In typical Diva Marketing fashion, this is a well thought-out and executed program, and I’ll be fascinated to see the results. It also got me thinking about the concept of Social Network Marketing in general, and how companies large and small can leverage this new media format as an opportunity for greater consumer engagement. Apparently I’m not the only one … there’s been a spate of articles on the topic over the past few days. And of course a number of strong reactions to NewsCorps’ Peter Chernin’s rather stunning comment.

“If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flicker, whether it’s Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace,” Chernin said at the conference. “There’s no reason why we can’t build a parallel business.”

While I wouldn’t agree that the success of every Web 2.0 company is dependent on its relationship to MySpace, I would suggest that social networking is a critical element in the new marketing landscape. The numbers are hard to argue with, whether you’re talking about 100 million registered users at MySpace or the impact of professional social networking sites like CollectiveX and LinkedIn. Tony Hung summarized it well in a post yesterday, when he said that social networking is creating a new marketing “ecosystem”, and that today’s social networks are similar to instant messaging circa 2001 – they create stickiness (e.g. brand loyalty) because the costs of switching are too high. (You’re locked into networks where your friends or colleagues are.)

So if you’re not Google and you can’t pony up $900 million to ensure your access to MySpace users, what should you do? Find ways for your brand to become part of the conversation in the community. Understand first and foremost that you’re entering a community, not placing a media buy. Be respectful and transparent. Get to know the sensibilities of that community and make sure that your brand presence fits. If you’re targeting teenagers on Facebook your brand presence should look and sound like something a 14 year old would dig. (And yes, I’m told “dig” is back.) If you’re trying to reach professionals to raise awareness of a political issue, then use appropriate creative and copy for that community. If you’re running a promotion, make sure that it’s clear and the benefits are relevant. Burger King’s character on MySpace has some 120,000 friends, not because he’s such a likable guy, but because they’re giving away free episodes of Fox shows like “24”. But most importantly, be realistic about your brand your goals. If you’re a big hit with the AARP crowd, chances are your clickthru rate will be pretty low on Facebook. Be as strategic about your targeting and audience analysis with social networks as you would with any other form of media. It’s early days for social network marketing and a good time to test and learn.

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Social Networking

AIMSpace or Outerspace?

There was a kerfluffle in the blogosphere yesterday about the non-announcement of AIMSpace … a “MySpace” killer to be launched off the AIM platform. One comment made was that despite their “community” heritage (surely one of the most over-used hype terms of the last bubble), they were two years too late the party. Whether it manages to unseat the popularity of MySpace or not, I think we can count on AOL to deliver another mass market solution. But 43m is a bigger network than I want – social or otherwise. 

Stowe Boyd had it right when he said there’s an opportunity to create a social networking tool for the rest of us, and that current offerings targeted to adults and professionals (e.g. LinkedIn etc.) don’t deliver the goods. Social networking needs to be meaningful and relevant. It’s not 43m users on a particularly technology platform. It’s thousands of micro-segments of individuals who share common passions and goals. 

Last night I was at a fundraising committee meeting for my totally old-school alma mater. I ran into a guy from a prior class, whom I’d not met before, who’s doing work with Web 2.0 technologies. We have much in common between our interests in the College and emerging technologies, and the education itself. So we’re going to start talking about ways we might collaborate. It was a delightful surprise. This isn’t MIT or Stanford, we studied classical works by Homer, De Tocqueville, Newton and Kant, not technology. 

Those kinds of connections matter at this point in my life. The intersections between my personal interests and my professional goals are really exciting to me. I’m beyond caring about random hookups, and I’m not interested in irrelevant, unsolicited job inquiries.

So I have to echo the question: when will the Web 2.0 companies deliver social networking for the rest of us? 

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AIM, AOL, CGM, Marketing, Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0

Cultural Anthropology? Heck I Thought This Was Just Marketing …

Shawn Gold, Senior Vice President of marketing and content for MySpace.com gave the keynote speech at the OMMA Hollywood Conference & Expo this week in Los Angeles.  Today’s edition of Online Media Daily (registration required) provides a summary of his remarks, which were something of a “state of the art” with regards to impacts of social networking on advertising and marketing. 

Gold referred to the work of marketers on MySpace as “empowerment marketing”.  He said that word-of-mouth has turned into citizen journalism as a trusted form of media among the Millenniall/GenX crowd.  He reminded advertisers that people don’t come to sites to click on the ads.  Social networking sites are a form of self-expression and discovery, and more than anything a way to build networks of like-minded people with common interests.  An interesting point for the nonprofit world is that cause-related marketing on MySpace is growing.  Bottom line:  sites like MySpace reflect someone’s personality and not just their consumption habits and to be successful marketers need to credibly insert their messages in the context of social networking activity. 

All great points for those of us trying to make the bridge from old think to consumer generated marketing.  Brand managers need to let go of the concept of message control and hand it over to these creative, enthusiasts.  Advertisers need to get beyond the “big is better” concept of media buys and learn how to think in terms of micro-segments and many-to-many instead.  And don’t think this just affects the under-30 crowd.  As more social networking sites like CollectiveX and MyFamily.com come along, Boomers will hop on this bandwagon as well.  Success in the future will be measured in terms of consumer engagement instead of reach, frequency and click-through rates.  And if the recent valuations of MySpace and Facebook are any indication, marketers can take that to the bank. 

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Social Networking By Invitation Only: Nike & Google Launch Soccer Site

In a brilliant combination of marketing insight and Internet-savvy, Nike and Google have teamed up to create a social networking site for soccer enthusiasts around the world: Joga.com.  According to an article in BusinessWeek, Joga.com is a free network where members will be able to create Web sites and send e-mail, photos and video clips, as well as access Nike content.

 

One of the most intriguing aspects of the site is its “by invitation only” member enrollment program. While it’s not clear whether this is a strategic decision or merely a mechanism to gate traffic flow during the early days of the site, it will be interesting to observe its impact on the development of the community. 

Based on the statements in the BusinessWeek article, Nike clearly understands the challenges and sensibilities of corporate-sponsored consumer generated media. Trevor Edwards, Nike’s vice president for global brand management explains: 

"It has to be of the people and authentic and credible," Edwards says. "It's a self-governing community. Our job is to feed it, help it start, but then they'll fuel it. It's a long-term way of connecting with consumers."

For its part, Google is hoping this will improve its burnished reputation in the social networking space, and begin to build its portfolio of interactive communities. To date, Orkut, Google’s only foray into social networking, has met with limited success outside of Brazil  and certain other (alleged) unsavory uses. 

It’s exciting to see big, mass market driven brands embrace the new world order. Clearly Edwards and his colleagues at Nike get it. It will be interesting to see who’s next on the social networking hit parade. To quote Edwards: 

"Our job is to reinvent the way that we connect with consumers," Edwards says. "We have to make sure we stay in their world, stay connected, stay relevant, and, more importantly, we allow them to do what they want. It's their world, their lives. We give them the tools."

Just do it, Nike!

 

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CGM, Google Marketing, Nike, Social Networking, Web2.0

Net Effect: Social Networking as Marketing Change Agent

Google’s acquisition of tiny Web 2.0 company Writely was big news in the blogosphere last week. This week it’s hitting the mainstream media. BusinessWeek’s analysis of the importance of the deal was particularly revealing. 

“In a small deal that signals big changes on the Internet, Google announced Mar. 9 that it has acquired a   Silicon Valley sensation called Writely. The online word processor is still in the testing stage, but it's attracting attention as a free alternative to relatively expensive desktop applications like Microsoft (MSFT ) Word.
 
But the transaction stands out for bigger reasons. Writely is one of dozens of companies that are infusing once-static Web pages with the power, speed, and features of sophisticated desktop applications. And by combining these online applications with the new wireless and broadband communications ability of the Web, they are redefining the Internet itself.”

In other words, this is more than a version upgrade. New applications, greater broadband penetration and shifting consumer adoption models are combining to create dynamic user experiences. And they’re challenging traditional media to keep up. 

A recent study by Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism shows that newspaper revenues increased by a mere 1 – 2 %, largely because of an increase in revenue from online ads of 30%. The study reports similar dismal numbers of other offline channels. 

And the Hollywood Reporter draws an interesting comparison in CPM values.

 “The value of a viewer is in flux. The average hour long primetime series generates $3.46 million in net advertising revenue, or the equivalent of 41 cents per viewing household. The same program would generate $1.39 in gross receipts for the content owner per $1.99 iTunes download, based on a 70-30 split with Apple, according to estimates from veteran analyst Larry Gerbrandt of Nielsen Entertainment Reports. If a content owner proposes providing downloads off of its own Web site -- as ABC.com, CBS.com, NBC.com and Fox.com have started to do -- they retain all of the $1.99 fee as incremental income.”

Beyond CPM, consumer generated media amplifies value. Social networks translate to trusted relationships. Companies large and small can leverage this into new marketing opportunities. According to Steve Rubel, Forrester Research recently issued a report on social computing which dramatically demonstrates these dynamics. He published a chart on his site today, which is a great primer for the new services, both from the perspective of large companies who want to leverage their social networks and from the perspective of newcomers looking to extend their own marketing advantage. 

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Advertising, Forrester, Marketing, Social Networking, Web2.0