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Who? Where? Why? Using Integral Personas for Social Media Marketing

August 22nd, 2011 by Skip | 1 Comment

There are a number of challenges in adopting social media as a marketing channel. Companies embarking on social media efforts need to seriously consider questions like:

- Who is our audience?

- Which social channels make the most sense for our business?

- Are we confusing our perspectives with the perspectives of our audience?

- What kind of language resonates with our audience?

- Are we behaving in ways that are acceptable for our audience?

In this post, I’d like to introduce the idea of Integral personas, which can greatly enhance marketing efforts. At Philly Marketing Labs, we apply personas to help develop social media strategies using a framework derived from Integral Theory. We find that persona development supports rapid discovery with the client and organizes useful insights for action.

The approach described here builds on the work by philosopher Ken Wilber. Wilber’s Integral Theory model (aka AQAL) is a five-part roadmap to human experience. We use a component referred to as the “Quadrants” in AQAL. The quadrants recognize that everything in nature, including us, are actually both an individual and a member of a collective. We are both human and humanity. Furthermore, each person has both an interiority that every one of us comes to in private way. We can describe it, but only our individual self can experience it directly. We also have a set of exteriors that can be measured and defined. Think of these as our credentials, our demographics, our activities and personal statistics.

Similarly, each collective has an interior and exterior. The collective interior is the world of culture and meaning-making. It is used to answer questions about what a group considers good, cool and bad. The collective exterior defines social structures like organizations, associations, corporations and social media.

The template below demonstrates how a marketing team might parse discovery items into the four quadrants.

So what? We build these nice little quadrants. How can a marketing initiative take advantage of the personas?

1) Organizing. It helps us to organize our thinking. In working with clients, we usually find two to five core personas that we should be thinking about. By segmenting the results, we can gain clearer insights and avoid mixing strategies and messages.

2) Messaging. Beyond helping with organization, persona quadrants lay out the foundations for messaging. Motivation, values, and core imagery are often readily apparent from a newly created quadrant. With these in hand, we can improve website copy, advertisements, newsletters and our social interactions.

3) Discovery. The persona quadrants allow the discovery of key social media platforms for meeting and integrating with our audience. Through a thoughtful conversation around a persona, we can fill out the lower-right quadrant with the social media platforms most likely to yield connections to that audience.

Consider this simple sample persona for an audience of stay-at-home moms with toddlers:

Once you spent some time critically thinking about this persona, I’m sure you could find ways to extend and improve it. However, you can also see how it could inform campaigns and launch initiatives, advertising efforts, and messaging.

Organizing, messaging and discovery are just the beginning of the journey. But they make a strong foundation for composing campaigns, developing analytics and creating results.

If you’ve used some helpful models to understand your audience, I’d love to hear about them in the comments section. Please let me know what you think of the ideas presented here as well.

Businesses: Start Preparing for Google+ Business Pages Now

August 10th, 2011 by admin | 2 Comments

It’s true, Google+ is not yet available to you as a business—large or small. But it will be at some point, and you can (and should) take steps to prepare now. We know you may be thinking:

Why should I waste any time on Google+ when I’m not even sure it will stay around?

Good point. Google+ may not have legs, but right now it has over 20 million users. That statistic can’t be ignored.

The better question is: What will happen if Google+ does stay around? Do you want to have to play catch up in your competitors’ trail of dust? (Okay, that was two questions.)

If you want to be ready for Google+ once it opens up to business pages, focus on these three things now.

1. Pay closer attention to your Twitter and Facebook followers.

Listen more closely to your followers on every social network you’re on. What are they saying about Google+? Are your follows and likes decreasing or are they still increasing? Poll your Facebook and Twitter followers who are also using Google+. Get their thoughts on what they want to see from brands on Google+ business pages.

2. Get familiar with personal page functions now.

Create a personal Google+ page, and have people on your team do the same. If you’re a Marketing Director or CEO, you can start representing your company now until brand pages are released. (For an example, see what Michael Dell is doing.)

With your team, test out the features and talk about what features your audience seems to be using most. Notice that you can also use these features for business purposes:

Circles – You have time now to name your circles thoughtfully, so do that. Plan out how you want to segment people you follow and people who follow you. Now you can follow back customers and separate their stream of posts from other streams. You’ll be able to segment your messages and send out more targeted info and promotions.
Hangouts – Video chat with your team and test out potential customer service uses. Role play and practice potential scenarios so you’ll be able to experiment and prepare away from the public eye. Even better, test out Hangouts as an informal focus group tool. You’ll have a chance to get small groups together and chat with them on a regular basis. (Remember this also when naming your circles.)
Huddle – Test crisis response. Huddle allows you to text as a group, as you would talk as a group in a conference call. A perfect scenario for using this function is any sort of emergency. For example, you have a public relations nightmare brewing and it’s after hours. You need to get your team together quickly and share messaging. You can do it by text. Get comfortable using Huddle now so you don’t have to fumble around when speed of reaction is crucial.

The point is to start brainstorming now on all fronts, so you’ll be ready to implement once Google+ brand pages become open to you.

3. Start working on your Google+ page now.

Get photos ready to display and videos ready to load. Have an editorial plan ready to go. How will you migrate followers and information from other social channels? How will you integrate your marketing efforts?

Yes, you may have to make changes once the final version of Google+ business pages is released, but you will already be ahead of the game, instead of at square one.

In your overall marketing strategy, integration and coordination are crucial. Your Facebook page and Google+ page can’t be the same. They can be similar and have similar purposes, but you must have different strategies for each—based on their different audiences and the way people use them (among other things). Strategy is something you can start talking about now.

Once Google+ brand pages are open to all, it’s time to execute. Don’t be the only company still standing at square one.

As always, if you need help, you can rely on Philly Marketing Labs as your strategic marketing partner.

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Post written by Coreen Tossona, Digital Communicator and Brand Strategist for Philly Marketing Labs. This post is repurposed from her original post in her In the Crowds marketing blog.

Conversion Optimization: The grand-slam of website design

July 10th, 2011 by RyanDraving | 1 Comment

Every single element on a webpage impacts what visitors ultimately do, from the wording to the fonts to the color and position of all elements, as well as how easy it is to complete a form or transaction. To maximize conversion rates, companies need to combine creativity with a holistic, results-based analytical approach.

Landing page optimization, results-tracking, testing of new ideas, user-friendly forms, and learning from experience are all part of good website design, and all contribute to higher conversion rates. However, all the website traffic in the world doesn’t mean much for e-Commerce companies unless those website visitors are actually buying. Awareness that your company exists is nice, since you won’t sell anything if people don’t know you’re out there. Traffic is important , but even a well-trafficked website of a well-known company can fail if the design doesn’t convert visitors into buyers and generate sales. Companies who neglect any of these will lose visitors, and therefore, revenue, to those who dedicate resources to conversion optimization.

What Conversion Rate Should You Expect?

The average online conversion rate for e-Commerce stores across all industries is 2%– yes, that’s right, an AVERAGE of just 2% of website visitors to e-Commerce stores actually purchase. Doesn’t sound like much, does it? An industry-specific breakdown of average conversion rates tells a little more of the story:

Type of site	Conversion rate
Catalog	5.8%
Software	3.9%
Fashion & Apparel	2.3%
Specialty	1.7%
Electronics	0.50%
Outdoor and Sports	0.40%

Catalog sites have a clear advantage, with a 5.8% conversion rate, because most visitors come to their sites to shop. But even though their visitors are more likely to have the intent to buy, only 5 or 6 of every hundred visitors actually do. It may not seem like much, but when you consider that websites can generate tens or even hundreds of thousands of visits per month, and even more if you’re a very big player, it all adds up. If landing page optimization didn’t make a difference, no one would be doing it.

Steps to Improve e-Commerce Website Conversion Rates

Track

The first step is to gather information on the results you are getting from your website – you can’t fix problems you don’t know exist, and you can’t judge improvement if you don’t know where you’re starting from. There are many tools now available to track how people find your website, how many visitors you have, how long they spend on each page, and where they go as they navigate from one page to another. Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are free and easy for any webmaster to set up, and will give you the basic information you need to know about who’s visiting your site and what they’re doing once they’re there.

Test

Once you have benchmarked the data on what’s currently happening on your site, you can start making small changes and testing the impact those changes have on visitor behavior. Google Website Optimizer enables you to create multiple versions of the same page, each with one or more elements slightly different, and to compare the differences in visitor behavior generated by each page. For best results, follow Google’s guidelines to effective A/B split or multivariate testing, so you’re not misattributing changes in results to an elemental change that didn’t actually cause the difference.

Tweak

As you see improvements in visitor behavior and conversion rates on your site through testing, implement those changes that increase your conversion rates, and then choose the next element you’re going to test. Never change more than one element at a time so you can appropriately assign responsibility (or hopefully, credit) for improvements. Monitor the response over time because there are many factors that influence conversion rate, including the calendar, sentiment and payroll cycles, and you don’t want to overemphasize the impact of any one factor. Each change will improve upon the previous version of your site, and will bring you one step closer to maximizing your conversion rate.

Repeat

The process of testing and then tweaking your site in response to your results should be an always-ongoing process, because visitor behavior is always evolving. The effectiveness of some elements decreases as people become accustomed to them– banner ads, for example, were once a major advertising draw, but are now far less effective because many consumers have developed “banner blindness” and no longer “see” banner ads.

There is both an art and a science to landing page optimization and e-Commerce website design, and when all the elements come together the right way, magic happens and conversion rates can far exceed industry averages.

Pitching Social Media to Organizational Leaders: Crowdsourcing Solutions

June 10th, 2011 by admin | No Comments

Last week I played facilitator to a group of super-sharp social media professionals at the SoMeBizLife conference in Doylestown, PA (put together by Chuck Hall). This group helped me crowdsource some answers to tough social media questions like:

How can we be sure a client is ready for social media?
What are the common objections that we hear from organizational leaders?
How can we demonstrate value in social media efforts in advance of a project?
What kinds of expectations need to be set?

I’ve updated my presentation with a number of the deeper questions that the brain-trust came up with – as well as some of their solutions. Thanks to all of you who participated!

My favorite five takeaways (shown below) are all included in the SlideShare presentation on Pitching Social Media:

Remember the ROI (Risk of Ignoring). Conversations happen with or without you. Do you want to be able to influence the conversation?
Listen first. Start with listening. Discovering what people want and care about and how your competition is playing is a powerful and smart strategy.
Integrate social into transaction points. Make it easy to leave testimonials or to tweet, as in “Hey! I just bought a cool supersonic widget from Widget Masters!”
Help educate clients that costs and demands will change. I like to think of this as crawl-walk-run. The needs for a listening project are different from an engagement effort – and will change as engagement is progressively expanded and moved to internal team members.
Use the marketing needs pyramid to determine if the basics are in place BEFORE a company contemplates a social media presence.

We don’t have to stop here though. Check out the full presentation and all of the other great ideas put together by this group. Please add your questions and ideas on pitching social to organizations in the comments below to continue the conversation.

Post by Skip Shuda, shown here doing some “deep listening” to his collaborators!

Which Social Media Channels Should Your Business Use?

May 5th, 2011 by admin | 2 Comments

Answering this question doesn’t have to be that difficult. We know, there are plenty of social media channels to choose from—probably too many. But, you don’t have to weigh the pros and cons of each channel. You simply have to focus on three things:

Audience
Resources
Priorities

Audience

The channel or social media space doesn’t determine whether you should be there, your audience does.

First, ask yourself these questions to help create a list:

Where can you best reach your audience?
Where does your audience expect you to be?

Once you narrow down your list to the places your audience is and would expect to interact with you, then you need to figure out what it would take for you to manage those channels.

Resources

How much time will it take to maintain a valuable and engaging presence on the social media sites you choose? Can you handle it in-house or will you have to outsource?

Determine what skills your team has and how much time you’ll need to keep up with each channel.

Priorities

Now you know where your audience is and what resources you’ll need to engage with them there. Next, it’s time to use this information to decide which channels you should create and maintain a presence on.

For example, let’s say you’ve determined your audience is on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, foursquare, Gowalla, Flickr and YouTube. You have seven possible channels to engage on, but you think you only have the resources to maintain a solid presence on three or four.

How do you choose which four?

At Philly Marketing Labs, we recently asked ourselves this question. One particular question we had was about Facebook. We’re a marketing agency, and initially thought it might be important for us to be there.

We chose these categories to weight and rate:

Credibility
Sales – Value to Sales and building business
Reach
Resources
Skills

Your categories might be slightly different based on your business and your goals. Here’s an example of what a decision table would look like:

Each category gets a rank or weight in terms of importance. Then each channel gets a rating under each category that represents how much:

Credibility that social media site gives you with your audience
Value the site can bring in terms of sales, brand recognition or business building
Reach the site gives you access to in terms of your target audience
Resources you have available within your business to manage these channels
Skills your team has to accomplish your social media goals

Your total number for each channel then represents a more objective, weighted ranking of how important that particular social media site might be for your business. So using the table above, you would conclude that LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and foursquare are the channels you should focus on.

Keep in mind, just because you decide today that a certain channel is not one you should be on, that answer may change in the future. Most social media sites are constantly evolving and, to keep up, hopefully your business is too.

*****

Post written by Coreen Tossona, Digital Communicator and Brand Strategist for Philly Marketing Labs. Coreen also writes the In the Crowds marketing blog.

Corporate “Therapy” In 3 Steps

March 22nd, 2011 by admin | 1 Comment

I view social media as an opportunity to gain “corporate therapy“. The way I see it, social media is a means of going through the KFC process:

K: Know what you want (or who you want to be).

F: Find out what you are getting (or who you are at the moment).

C: Change what you are doing until you get what you want (or become who you want to be).

Social media can provide feedback and empowering tools to support this KFC process. As a growing business, social media can be an opportunity to help customers and prospects see your strengths. It’s also an excellent way to bring a positive light to your vulnerabilities and weaknesses.

Social channels can help you gain valuable feedback from your customers. If you are a business manager, you know that customers can be brutally honest about your weaknesses. They will tell you exactly who they want you to be. But don’t take it personally! Customer feedback accelerates the evolutionary process, helping you ”Know who you want to be”. It’s an opportunity to “Find out who you are”. Knowing who you want to be, and finding out who you are now, is a key to success. Now you know where you want to go, and you can “Change until you get the results you want”.

At the same time, you can turn your vulnerabilities into strengths by providing honest insights to customers to help them understand where you are in the process. Customers may not like your weaknesses, but they’ll be happier if you are on the path to positive change.

37 Signals provided a great example of this process. When their Campfire product was going down for intermittent periods in 2010, they used social media as a way of interacting with customers. They told customers that they were actively working on the problem. They asked for feedback about how to compensate customers for the problems. And they provided regular updates until the problem was fixed. This was a type of therapy, both for 37 Signals and their customers. 37 Signals’ method of handling this problem fostered stronger loyalty in customers and made the employees proud to be part of such an honest, communicative company.

Are there ways that you can use social media therapy to develop a stronger image and better serve your customers? You bet…. maybe it’s time to reach out to your current customer base and ask for their help to become a better, stronger company.

– post by Ryan Draving, SEO Consultant with Philly Marketing Labs. KFC Process comes from Nicholas Boothman, author of How to Connect in Business in 90 Seconds or Less.

Man vs Machine

March 15th, 2011 by RyanDraving | No Comments

You can buy the most complex web analytics program out there…but if you think the program will tell you what to do, think again. Without high end human analysis, you might as well have a hit counter instead of an analytics program. The story is in the numbers, but computers never make it to the New York Times bestseller list.

If your company is important enough to need to improve conversion rate, you need to know what’s happening on your online campaigns right now, and you need to know why. Don’t let a machine be the gatekeeper to your business success. Find an expert and discover what you need to change.

If you’re looking into analytics, here’s a tip: Save on the program, not the human expertise. Google Analytics is free and robust.

– post by Ryan Draving, SEO Specialist with Philly Marketing Labs

November Social Media Roundup and Other Tangents

January 11th, 2011 by admin | No Comments

Let me introduce you to the monthly social media and analytics roundup: a gathering of information on new startups in the social media and analytics realm including interesting tidbits about the available tools out there. This month I was surprised to hear about Marc Andreesen’s pet project RockMelt and the new competition in that space.

RockMelt: The most intriguing aspect of this new social browser add on is the fact that it is backed by former Netscape founder Marc Andreesen as well as engineered by John Churchill former main Netscape navigation engineer. Netscape was the first all purpose web browser will RockMelt be the first of its kind in the social browser space? If you ask me I wouldn’t bet the farm on RockMelt but I do believe that if RockMelt keeps evolving through market calibration it could carve out a nice niche for itself.

The competition…

F1: Has the battle of the Social Media Browsers begun? A comprehensive add-on to Firefox web browser is F1. Designed by Andy Chung a Mozilla add-on enthusiast. The add-on is limited to Twitter, Facebook and Gmail but insinuates that they are not done there with an API welcoming publishers to connect and grow the F1 add-on.

One side effect of social media web browsers is they connect to twitter and facebook allowing them to track your activity giving them more statistical power for advertisements, just like Facebook does with connecting ads to people based on interests likes and or dislikes.

Onto the twitter tangent…

Recenlty an article came out on how three researches discovered a pattern between the overall mood of twitter and how it corresponded to the fluctuations of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. They used two algorithms: OpinionFinder and Google Profile of Mood States. The algorithms separated positive and negative tweets: whichever type of tweets tipped the balance would result in the public mood. The mood states had an astonishing 87.6% level of accuracy when overlaid over the fluctuations of the DJIA. This peaked my interest and I wanted to know more. I also wanted to know at the minimum what tools were out there to the public since the above algorithms were done through an analysis toolkit not accessible to the average person.

Photo credit; http://www.kdnuggets.com/2010/10/twitter-mood-predicts-stock-market.html

Enter Twittermood: a very basic web app that displays moods based on tweets geographically. Twittermood displays circles: the sized displaying the amount of tweets and the color expressing moods above (yellow) and below (blue) average. The circles are displayed over google maps pinpointing location of the tweets. Overall the web app is very interesting it may not however provide business intelligence but the project is still in beta while their team strengthens the product.

What does this mean to your business and tribe?

We are starting to see the things you can do when social data is aggregated and filtered. The more people use social media the more footprints we can track, how people feel about certain things, their likes and dislikes and everything in between. The future is analytics displayed in numbers and graphic interfaces. One day we may be able to accurately track a business’s ads, blog posts, services and products based upon analytics that display the subsequent mood providing business intelligence and to better understand their key performance indicators.

Enough of the research and development side of the Twittersphere and onto solid tools that I use a lot for research purposes. Twitter’s search box is pretty limited especially when you need to find lists of users with similar characteristics. With the use of Google search function this becomes a whole lot easier.

1) Search by occupation: (on google search) intitle:”occupation* on twitter” site:twitter.com

This searches the title and name of the twitter users.

2) Search twitter bios: intext:”bio * photographer” site:twitter.com

Swap “photographer” for your specified search term

3) Search by location: intext:”bio * firm” intext:”location * PA” site:twitter.com

Swap “firm” for your bio search term and “PA” for you state initials location

By,

Josh Meth

Web Analyst for PhillyMarketingLabs

Introducing Philly Marketing Labs… from Marketing Dreams to Results

November 2nd, 2010 by admin | No Comments

Philly Marketing Labs is a new brand dedicated to helping Mid-sized companies maximize their Web marketing and Social-Search footprint. Through the use of the Science of Conversion Optimization, Actionable Analytics and an embrace of the Human Element, we provide Visibility to Profitability(TM) for our clients. Founder Skip Shuda describes how it came to be and the numerous chefs who were involved in cooking up our new brand.

The ideas for a good company name have always come from my closest personal advisors. In 1993, my wife Lynne helped me brainstorm the name for the company we called Destiny. The name reflected our desire to be an “Engine for Change”. The company grew to 120 people with $17 million revenue building eCommerce and Reporting front-ends for Financial Institutions and their clients. But the most remarkable thing about that company was its culture. To this day, many of us who lived through it long for a people-centric, productive environment like Destiny. And yes, I did own the domain name www.destiny.com for a while… I am the man who sold Destiny.

“Post Destiny” was the rather uninspired name which I used to fill out a business card template on Vistaprint in early 2003. After two years of running as Post Destiny, I asked my trusted advisors to review my web site. My close friend and advisor Raef Lee said, “You don’t need a new Web site. You need a new name.” So, I looked at the focus of our business. We were working with Technology Entrepreneurs to help them realize their dream. As anyone who tried to start a company can tell you, the early days can be lonely. We often provided the team for these fledgling startups. And hence, Team and a Dream was born.

Fast forward to March, 2010. Our work had begun to shift. We were excited to be working with some bigger companies on their Internet Marketing initiatives. There were a lot of differences between working with established businesses vs. working with startups. In particular, when a company already has a stream of sales, it is easy to see if your marketing efforts are having an impact or not. We were having an impact with measurable ROI.

I had been working with ClickEquations while I was also growing Team and a Dream. I sat down with CEO Lucinda Holt, a long-time friend and advisor, to talk about Team and a Dream. Lucinda is a master business strategist. She understands the ebb and flow of markets with an uncanny ability to quickly grasp what will work and what won’t work. She encouraged me in our current direction. At ClickEquations, she had come to understand the incredible power and competitive advantage that could be taken from an analytics and best practices based approach to Internet Marketing. She made some very practical suggestions… build a great team, streamline your methodology and change your brand. “Team and a Dream was great for entrepreneurs, but now you are serving up & running companies. Companies with revenue want to focus on results that are derived from your attention to the intersection of Social and Search. Analytics are critical to that success. You need a brand that communicates your new value proposition.”

The name didn’t come for many months later. In a strategic brainstorming session in August, 2010 five of us gathered to discuss the future for our company, which we had started calling NewCo.

We looked inside ourselves. We were a technical bunch. I have a BS and MS in Computer Science. Jason Lomberg is an HTML programmer as well as a deep-dive, numbers-driven SEO. Bechara Jaoudeh is always showing me the latest tools, tweaking analytics and tracking results for clients. And so it went.

In fact, we considered calling ourselves the “Dashboard Mechanics” for a while since we were SO analytics focused. I even spent a while editing mechanic’s coveralls onto our team!

Somehow, the analytics focus wasn’t enough. We were helping companies understand human behavior in their Web site’s Conversion Architecture. Our newest team member, Steve Levine, spends a lot of time building market research efforts to understand customer behavior relative to a company’s value proposition. We knew that the human element was an important part of our future.

When we looked closely at our new focus, we were able to boil it down to three things:

1) Conversion Architecture. There are specific things that are proven to work in Internet Marketing. The science of Landing Page Optimization is grounded in an understanding of how different types of people approach a Web site or interact with a brand online. Over the years, we’ve embraced the work around Persuasion Architecture, Integral Theory’s Quadrants and Landing Page Optimization from the team at Marketing Experiments.

2) Actionable Analytics. Knowing how to segment data effectively and measure the right things is central to good Web Analytics. My work with ClickEquations (and especially world class analyst Adam Figueira) has opened my eyes to the power of making the analytics actionable. Developing recommendations from deep insights in the analytics is a hallmark of our work today. A big nod to Google Analytics Guru Avinash Kaisuik is in order as well. We’ve reviewed some of his seminal work on Web Analytics 2.0 in this blog.

3) The Human Element. This is where the magic really happens. The intersection of psychology, anthropology, sociology and network theory is a pretty cool place to work. The cerebral cortex of the collective human race is forming right before our eyes! Social channels are mixing with the already knowledge-rich Internet to create conversations that no-one could have anticipated a decade ago. We follow the work or Psychology and Social Media Scientists like Robert Cialdini and his book on Influence, Michael Wu and Dan Zarrella on this front.

The Human Element keeps us guessing. And so there is an experimental component to all real Internet and Social-Search marketing efforts that push the boundary. You have to integrate thoughtful experimentation, insightful analysis and an understanding of human nature to be successful in this world. Marketing Labs seemed to fit the bill.

At the end of the day, we are people too… which leads us to the last element of our new brand. What common theme seemed to capture who we are as a group? Philadelphia – or Philly – is a great city and our (adopted in some cases) hometown. Steeped in the experimental and scientific work of Ben Franklin, the revolutionary spirit of the USA’s founders and the workingman’s competitive ethic that allowed Rocky Balboa to stand up to the world’s Goliaths, we felt that Philly captures many of the values our team holds dear.

In an embrace of our hometown of Philadelphia, we are now Philly Marketing Labs.

The story continues…

Jackie Russo-Casey, our logo designer, did a fantastic job of coming up with some creative angles for Philly Marketing Labs. Whether you see our logo as a magnet pulling the signal from the noise, a conductor of an orchestra or a magician tossing a fire into the air, it seems to conjure up images for most individuals that are consistent with the direction and value of Philly Marketing Labs.

BTW – our newest team member, Gloria Bell, is very much focused on the human element and the importance of striking up a conversation with our friends. Gloria suggested this post as a next step in our re-branding efforts.

As you can see, it takes village to create a new brand. I’m grateful to be part of the emerging village we’ll call Philly Marketing Labs. Please leave us your reactions to our new brand. I’d also love to hear your story of how your company brand came to be.

- Skip Shuda

Can You Engineer Social Media Campaign Success?

October 10th, 2010 by admin | No Comments

MIT Media Labs won $40,000 by putting together the fastest crowd-sourcing team in the world this past winter. The MIT Media Lab team attributed their deep knowledge of social networking mechanics as being central to their victory, as outlined in a Forbes article about the Red Balloon Challenge. In a nutshell, they made heavy use of crowd-sourcing with a recursive, incentive structure for the social network. By recruiting a strong, well dispersed team with a big focus on sharing the incentive to not only find the balloons but to spread the word and recruit more potential balloon finders, the MIT team was able to generate a Social Network of

It got me wondering – could we all engineer our way to social media success?

So I started doing some reasearch. My first stop was the cyber-anthropology series on Influencers that Dr. Michael Wu of Lithium has been putting together. Social Networks, Communities, the components of Influence and conversational dynamics are all covered with clarity and depth. His blog is a terrific source of insight and inspiration for anyone hoping to understand the deep mechanics of Social Media.

Dr. Wu identifies six key factors contributing to influence in Social Networks; two for the Influencers and Four for the likelihood to be Influenced. Influencers have two key factors they can leverage:

1) Credibility (expertise in a given domain)

2) Bandwidth (ability to transmit message/knowledge through social media channels)

The likelihood of a person being influenced is impacted by four key factors:

3) Relevance (the right information)

4) Timing (the right time)

5) Alignment (the right place)

6) Confident (the right person)

All of these factors were prominent in the MIT Media Lab victory. However, the role of incentive for this “campaign” also needs to be considered.

Next, I researched DARPA’s project report from the Red Balloon project. They identified a wide range of factors in being an effective competitor for the Red Balloon project. Those factors are repeated below, with my interpretation of how they fit into Michael’s influence model. You’ll see that his six factors are spot on for supporting the Red Balloon crowd-sourcing effort. I include the six factors below in parentheses, where applicable.

Media coverage of the team (Bandwidth)
Team built around an existing social network (Bandwidth, Alignment)
Name recognition of the team (Credibility, Confidence)
Planning time available to organize the social network (Timing, Alignment)
Method for searching Twitter posts (Relevance)
Search engine ranking for the team (Credibility, Bandwidth, Confidence)
Mobilization and dispatch ability (Timing, Alignment)
Team geographic coverage (Bandwidth, Alignment)
False report rejection strategy (Relevance)
Mobile phone App (Alignment, Timing)
Team overall Strategy
Team network hierarchy (Bandwidth, Alignment)
Trading/Collaboration strategy
Operations center for coordination, mobilization, tracking and entry decision making (Relevance, Timing)

The DARPA team also identified eight distinct tools for the geo-location problem, meaning how they answered the question, “How do I quickly reach and communicate with a wide, dispersed audience across multiple, social media channels?” The eight factors were:

1) marketing and media broadcast strategies to recruit team members

2) Recursive, incentivized recruiting of networks of friends/associates

3) Extraction of data of reported balloon locations from open Internet Sources like Twitter

4) Automated means of extracting data

5) Deployment of technology with automatic reporting capability (e.g. iPhone Apps)

6) Dispatching team members as spotters to search or confirm reports

7) Website design that motivates, encourages recruitment, or allows easy, secure reporting

8 ) Search engine rank optimization of website

In our work at Team and a Dream (soon to be Philly Marketing Labs), we’ve found that Social Media at the campaign level can be done quite effectively. With embedded incentives, the ability to tap into an area of interest or passion can be driven towards specific outcomes (register for a newsletter, watch a video, make a contribution or find a red weather balloon). In the case of the DARPA contest, several teams used social networking mechanics.

In fact, the MIT win was impressive, but not decisive. Given that the entire contest lasted under 9 hours, eight other teams had considerable momentum and used many of the MIT techniques as well. But given over 4,000 entrants to the contest, the quality drops off pretty quickly. By the 43rd place, the number of balloons reported near the end of the race had dropped to just 2. In fact, the winning strategy was not exactly obvious before-hand. A quick review of some brainstorming of social media strategies before the event shows that while crowd-sourcing was identified as a critical success factor, the idea of how to motivate that crowd was not anticipated in the blog post. Furthermore, the MIT Media Lab’s prominence and influence seems to have played a critical role.

The Wrapup.

What are some conclusions we can take away for this quick study of the DARPA Red Balloon experiment? Here are a few takeaways for your consideration.

1) Social Media strategy and team quality matters. The top 1% of the contest entrants outperformed the rest by a strong margin. Part of this “quality” has to do with credibility and the attendant reach of the team. Part of it has to do with applying a well-informed strategy grounded in an understanding of the campaign objective and aligning with the available channels.

2) Social-Search tactics rule. The prominence of Search strategies combined with Social Media techniques becomes evident in the post-contest analysis. Strong SEO rankings for the recruiting web-sites as well as powerful search tools for scanning Twitter, Social Media and news reports allowed for a broad, pre-contest reach and rapid identification of relevant information during the contest.

3) Whats in it for me? The MIT strategy to distribute the winnings maximized incentive for the network members to actively participate. Bragging rights are nice, but hard cash is better. In fact, the number of man-hours employed to win this efforts likely amounted to pennies per hour of effort. There as a bit of a lottery effect, but you had control over you odds. The more people you helped recruit, the better your odds of winning some cash. The recruiting/bootstrapping efforts via the web site and email outreach reportedly increased the team from an initial 5 to 5,000 in 48 hours, with hundreds of thousands of page views in a very short timeframe.

4) Strategic Use of Technology can help. While I don’t think the MIT team used an iPhone app, some of the top competitors did. The strategic use of mobile computing can help with this type of geographically based initiative. Thinking about your mission might imply other strategic technologies. For example, voting tools for panels or ideas, video submission tools or bar-code scanning apps are examples of tools that could play a role in distributed or crowd-sourced initiatives.

5) Campaigns vs. Community. Understand that this is an example of a very focused campaign-oriented effort. This is very different than building a sustainable, long-term community organized around a common mission or passion. In a community building effort, a number of other factors, like roles in your social networks could be taken into consideration. Food for a future post.

Have you used any of these ideas with success in your Social Media marketing efforts? I’d love to hear from you. Or leave your comments on our analysis to add to the discussion. What did we miss? Do you have another perspective you’d like to share?

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