Lee Aase | Social Media University, Global (SMUG)

Fighting Facebook Fears

Craig Coblenz, Director of media sales for Facebook, was the resident thought leader, and Tara Lamberson, VP of Marketing, MindComet, was the moderator of an afternoon breakout, “Balancing Web 2.0 & User Generated Initiatives with Traditional Marketing.”

Facebook is growing 1.2 million users per week, with 31 million active users. Apple, for instance, has a sponsored Apple Students group within Facebook with 417,000+ members.

Top challenges or concerns about Facebook and other sources of consumer generated media cited in the breakouts included:

Losing control of brand messaging (or the perception of it) – risk of negative content and what do you do then?
Do we want competitors to know who our customers are?
Having the staff to monitor, manage and review comments and take action. Finding internal resources passionate about it and not having it be just an another add-on to their “real” work; making it a real job.
Legal concerns – whether HIPAA for patients or in cases in which federal regulations (like Medicare supplement products) limit what a company can say.
Complexity – understanding the customs of the social media to avoid missteps
How many channels – which ones do you join (e.g. Facebook vs. MySpace vs. LinkedIn)
Who takes it over and assumes continuity when the proponent of blogging leaves.

Craig said lots of companies want to be fast followers, not first adopters. They don’t want to be laggards, but they would like someone else to go first.
Some of the suggested solutions that were brainstormed for these challenges included creating a password protected intranet site as a first step to create comfort (or maybe an invitation-only blog on wordpress.com.) By starting small with internal blogs, people become familiar with the concept, and then as comfort builds you can evolve toward where you want to go.
Debby Brannon from TMNG Global recommended Wikinomics as a good resource, which I reviewed here yesterday.

Technorati: Facebook, Marketing, UGC, CGM

Twitter Knitter Dinner

I just got back from a blogger dinner with Jim Long and Dennis McDonald. Jeremiah Owyang organized it but wasn’t able to attend. There was this little matter that he had thought he was traveling to the DC area yesterday, but then realized he wasn’t arriving until late tonight. We’ll have more on that, including an interesting video, in the next few hours.

It should be good, because it was shot by Jim, whose day job is as a videographer for NBC News. We had a really good conversation tonight, and Jim showed us his new venture, craftynation.com, which is a social network for what Jim calls the “Twitter Knitters.”

Speaking of Twitter, Jim’s in love with it, and he regularly tweets about what he’s doing at work. Last week he went on a round-the-globe trip with Defense Secretary Gates. I’ll look forward to following his feed…and Dennis‘.
Dennis recently did a post asking whether Facebook is going down the tubes because it’s new openness has wrecked its simplicity. I understand but don’t share his concern because people decide what applications they want in Facebook, customizing it to their needs. He also is concerned that putting too much original material behind Facebook’s walled garden doesn’t make sense: if he’s going to write something, he wants it to be on his blog where anyone can see it. I told him about the WordPress.com application for Facebook, which solves that problem: you can post to the blog for the wide world, and the fact that you’ve done it shows up in your Facebook news feed. Of course, that’s only for WordPress.com, but eventually applications will be written for other blogging platforms.

Thanks to Jeremiah for introducing us. None of us had met each other before, and none of us had met Jeremiah. It’s the power of new media and social networking that got us together for a truly enjoyable discussion tonight.

I see on Twitter that Jeremiah says he’s hung up in Dallas, with his flight delayed due to thunderstorms. A likely story!

Technorati: blogging, Twitter, NBC, Jim Long, Dennis McDonald, Jeremiah Owyang

Wedding Marketing

Wedding marketing was the substance when Veronica Smith Katz of David’s Bridal presented “Enhancing the Customer’s Experience by making the Most of Multi-Channel Strategies During a Major Life Stage Event.”

They have something like 30 million unique visitors a year (or 10 percent of the US population), and because people spend more money in the five years after getting married than they do during the rest of their lives, David’s is in good position to introduce partners to people who are about to spend a bunch on honeymoon trips, opening bank accounts, buying houses, and much more. Wedding marketing leads to all sorts of other marketing opportunities.
The wedding dress is typically the first purchase in the bridal cycle, and the gateway to lots of other purchases, such as photography, catering, tuxedos, bridesmaid dresses and much more, as I recently learned first-hand with my daughter’s wedding.

wedding marketing
We did things in an understated way, but as I heard in this presentation, we’re in the distinct minority.

Veronica spoke on enhancing the customer’s experience by partnering with “best In brand” companies. For example, they have partnerships with Sandals to host Caribbean nights, for brides and grooms to learn about various islands. A high proportion eventually convert to buy a Sandals honeymoon.

Brides are looking or this kind of information on associated needs. Veronica quoted a customer email that said: “All the discounts and goodies included when you purchase your wedding gown go beyond what you could ever imagine…” Customers see this as a benefit to them, a bonus that they get while buying their dresses. So, it’s a case of David’s doing well by doing good for their customers.

Clearly we have something of a relationship like this in Rochester, with restaurants, hotels and other organizations in the community providing services to Mayo Clinic patients and their families when they come to town. I believe Mayo tries to be neutral and not pick one community vendor over another, so the benefit from these community collaborations are indirect. But without community service providers it would be impossible for Mayo to serve the number of out-of-town patients we do.

To what other kinds of major life events might this approach be applicable?

Technorati: Marketing, wedding, Frost & Sullivan, liveblog

7 Steps to Web Metrics Success

Kristine Kelley from Motorola facilitated this session, entitled “Metrics Framework for the Web and Interactive Marketing: How to Successfully Build/Deploy/Execute”

The goals for our session were to develop:

An approach to determine key metrics and KPIs
A process to define, capture and manage metrics taxonomy and reporting
A governance model to support metrics framework

While others are B to B or B to C, we at Mayo Clinic are B to P (Patients), so that’s kind of a blend between the two. Kristine is concerned with measuring both B to C (buy that cell phone now) and B to B (with longer sales cycles, which make it harder to get the direct ROI from the web site.)

Here’s a synthesis of all of the breakout groups (and if I left important things out, please chime in:)

Identify “Owner” of the project and what they want to accomplish.
Begin with the end in mind. Define success and identify the steps involved in getting to the successful end.
Identify Stakeholders within the company and an ambassador for each stakeholder group.
Identify the universe of what could be measured (likely through a survey of each stakeholder group). Also define each measure so all stakeholders understand what each measure means and does not mean so they can judge relevance.
Map the possible indications against the strategic goals and determine which ones are critical success factors. How meaningful is each particular measure in contributing to the overall goal.
Measure against current sales and web data and benchmark against competitors.
Establish a governance board for the measurement project that reports back up through the organization’s leadership to ensure that the data are collected and that the initiative has staying power.

John Kendig from VWR International also schooled me a bit on the high-level performance indicators for web marketing sites:

Clicks – how many people visit your site
Conversion – How many people buy something
Spend – How much do they spend

Typically, increasing any of those three factors leads to stronger sales, so you want to look for metrics related to these three categories if you are in the BtoC web marketing world.

As someone who spends most of my time in media relations and new media, this discussion was very helpful to me. Thanks to Kristine for facilitating!

Technorati: Web, Marketing, Metrics, Frost & Sullivan, liveblog

Joe Batista Keynote: The Last Three Feet

Joe Batista, Chief Creatologist at Hewlett Packard, gave the second keynote. He spoke about creating new markets based on what your company has as resources or assets.

His Key Principles:

Inventory of Assets: Discover, unleash and reorient everything!
Dialogue −Open dialogue creates opportunities to channel company assets, resources and energy around client’s business challenge
Alignment of business interests −Example: Personalized Medicine project HP has with Harvard (Mayo Clinic has something similar with IBM)
Synchronizing business assets −Example: Memory Spot (HP) is RFID technology that can be used to validate pharmaceuticals to prevent import of counterfeits.

To Summarize, he emphasized:

Creating business conversations for results− Create forums for dialogue
Aligning talent & company franchises with client business objectives− Focus on projects not products, develop team of value added agents, build “net new”value streams
Synchronizing assets− Discover, Unleash and Reorient suite of hidden assets within your organization for client success
Intersection of Marketing & Sales− Look to build upon your products and services you currently offer, look at your ecosystem, IP portfolios, business processes, business policy and practices and create new value streams to be marketed.

Joe says, “Seeing growth is not a matter of selling more of what you produce, but expanding the domain in which you can respond to your clients.”

Technorati: Frost & Sullivan, liveblog, innovation