FLUID MARKETING

Buy Facebook; Don’t Buy The Hype

So, the prevailing winds are blowing against Facebook. Here’s just one of the current streams – “A poll by the Associated Press and CNBC reveals that 83% of Facebook users report never or hardly ever clicking on ads or sponsored content, despite frequently visiting and spending lots of time on the site, which translates to a conundrum for advertisers.”

This is exactly the kind of uninformed analysis we would expect at this moment in time. It’s the first step in the now-public process of reviewing exactly what Facebook is versus what it is not now that the IPO is done. The fact that display ads are performing poorly on the platform would appear to the uninitiated as conclusive evidence that Facebook is a failure at connecting people with brands, or driving people to actually buy something. But, this theory assumes that Facebook is just like any other web domain, that it’s just another web site. However, dive even one level deeper – let alone into the multitudes of engagement layers currently in play for nearly one billion members – and a far more complex and compelling picture emerges.

We in the industry toss the term “platform” around far too casually. But there’s truthiness as it relates to Facebook. There has never been, nor will there likely be during the next few years, a singular digital environment that offers brands the variety and depth of opportunities to engage with people and enable people to engage with each other – both within as well as outside Facebook. That the media focuses so narrowly on ads simply illustrates that business and media journalists have not bothered to spend the time to understand Facebook as a marketing platform – they still think of Facebook as an advertising venue. It is not – it is a social business, social commerce, social gaming, and social marketing platform. There are dozens of entertaining and immersive ways for brands to engage with Facebook members – ads are simply the easiest to recognize.

In the same way that Facebook has enriched the member experience over the past 5 years, they are similarly building the infrastructure and business models to enable brands to engage members in ways we have not yet imagined. This is where business and marketing magic likely will occur – hence the massive valuation. We’ve seen innovation trickle out within Facebook’s many engagement environments – from in-game commerce, to Timeline, to API integration with Pinterest, Spotify, and dozens of other external environments. In short, brands are now just starting to figure out how to innovate – many leading brands are tasking their agencies to figure this out for them. Laggards, however, just task the purchase of Facebook ads or branded content, and find that like most things in life, you get what you pay for.

It’s time to be bold. Truly innovative brands, in concert with or pushed by their agency partners, will exploit the network effects of Facebook’s social graph to create real brand impact. Now public, there is no reason to believe Facebook will not continue the march toward creating even better opportunities for brands to create disruption.

As an agency planner at [wire] stone watching all of this unfold, it’s clearly too early to reach any conclusions. I would caution brand marketers from believing the current anti-Facebook hype. Conventional wisdom among savvy marketers (brands and agencies alike) is the opposite – that we are still in the early days of understanding how and why Facebook is a brand engagement platform, not just another vehicle for advertising.

So, don’t buy the rhetoric that Facebook is tanking because GM pulled funding for display ads on the platform. Challenge your internal marketing leaders – and your digital agency partners to define what digital influence really means to your brand. Task them to rank every digital environment on its ability to influence brand sentiment, engage in relevant and immersive activity, or propagate positive sentiment about your brand or product. And dare them to find a better digital space to be bold. I’ll bet they’ll still bet on Facebook.

The MoLoSo Path To Purchase

May 9th, 2012 by Scott Doniger in Integrated Digital Marketing

A funny thing happened on the path to purchase last year – it disappeared. The emergence of the SoLoMo consumer – socially enabled, location-aware, and mobile-device-connected – has turned the path to purchase into a minefield. The marketing funnel is no longer linear – it’s a convoluted mess that changes with every new Pinterest, Path, Shopkick, or Perch. Durable goods brands can create and sustain a differentiated presence by better understanding these consumer behaviors and purchase drivers:

People relate to brands on their own terms

“Don’t tell me, don’t show me, engage me” has become a prevailing consumer mantra, played out millions of times a day in social media and in customer service centers around the world. Consumers, not brands, are in control of the retail experience and the relationships they have with brands. To compete, brands must create interesting, intriguing content. Understand how people want to connect and engage with your brand. Enable people to share content with your brand and their social networks – and nurture these interactions into conversations and relationships based on what people want.

 Customers want to interact with smart, engaging, enabled sales associates

While we love digital devices and experiences, sales associates still determine showroom floor success. Training them for enabled, empowered shoppers, however, is painstakingly complex and expensive. Unless they take the Apple or Nike retail route and invest in direct-to-consumer models, durable goods brands have no choice but to rely on sales staff and a consumer touch point model that is outdated, outmoded, and unlikely to produce brand and product differentiation.

Consumers want one brand voice

Brands and retailers compete for share of voice between and within an increasing array of owned, earned, and hybrid marketing channels and digital touch points. Brands that don’t coordinate between their own product or service silos don’t always sync customer data, which leads to clumsy outreach. The challenge here is that people actually want a simple relationship with a single entity. Brands seeking engagement and influence must invest in great storytelling, and the publishing infrastructure that enables great stories in any environment.

Retailing is broken. The fix is “all-in digital.”

By Scott Doniger, Executive Director, Strategy and Planning, [wire] stone

Retailers are reeling. Prolonged recession, a shrinking middle class, global competition, Groupon, LivingSocial, Amazon Prime, “every-when” enabled consumers, smart phones and smarter devices, sensing technologies, cloud-based gaming, virtual clothes-changing programs, 3D showrooms, social commerce and gaming, Level-Up, Foursquare, Etsy, Gilt, Pinterest, NFC and mobile wallets, digital coupons, device-enabled sales staff, LiveChat customer service…the list grows every week. Optimists see opportunity. Most see trouble.

Has e-commerce already dis-intermediated the physical store, like online has in newsprint? Some are right to think so. There is growing evidence that digital channel commerce just might displace brick and mortar. Among others, here’s a recent study validating that the motivation to shop in-store is decreasing:

"Digital usage and ecommerce increase when women become moms. Two recent studies show that women spend less time with media outlets such as TV and magazines—but more time online—during pregnancy and after becoming a mom. An Eric Mower and Associates survey, for example, found that more than half of new mothers spend less time watching TV (59%) and reading magazines (55%), and that 59% spent less time shopping in stores as a result." 

Sure, new moms will actually shop more and will be less inclined to go to stores. But do retailers want to make the risky assumption that this data is not a harbinger of a major fault line trend that confirms the question "if the experience shopping offline continues to get better, will people ever really need to shop in-store?". We think this risk isn’t worth taking.

Brick and mortar sure seems broken – see Blockbuster, Borders, Kmart, Comp USA -- who’s next to file chapter 11? But we are bullish on brick and mortar because our vision of the in-store future (unfolding on a few beachheads already) is that, done right, digital in-store is the game-changer. Retailers who don’t sprint to their own digital future will soon realize it’s game over if they don’t.

If the pace of chaotic, rampant disruption is roaring ahead, can retailers run fast enough? They can – IF they go “all-in digital”. We urge retailers to completely re-think how customers use digital devices to connect, share, and buy today – and how they’ll do so in the future. We propose that winning retailers will create their own scalable, sustainable, personalized, and digitally enabled path-to-purchase models, engagement platforms, and technical infrastructures, all driven by evidence-based learning specific to their domain. Here’s a short list of guiding principles as we see them today retailers of all types should embrace to go “all-in digital”:

1. Define the role of your physical store in an all-channel world
   With so many new ways to connect with customers, one of the first things big box and brand retailers have to define is what each channel is best at delivering, based on real insights into consumer “need states” – outcomes that deliver utility, entertainment, information, rewards and recognition. Determine what your branded web site does better than your Facebook page, for example, and re-think the role of the store inside the matrix of how your specific customers want to transact before, during, and after a store visit. Retail is one part of a broader customer centric business strategy. For most organizations, the greatest barrier to hatching an integrated multi-channel consumer experience strategy is achieving cross-functional alignment on business objectives. It’s more important now than ever to work across organizational silos.
   
   
2. Focus on people, experiences, and outcomes -- not technology
   “All-in digital” retail isn’t really about technology. It’s about meeting individual shopper need states through memorable, friction-free, informed, and engaging immersive digital experiences. Re-programmed by online e-commerce models like Amazon Prime, shoppers already expect the brands they like to know who they are, what they want, how they want it, and enable them to share it with friends when they walk into a store. Cool technology in and of itself is only half the game so simply using a 60” multi-touch screen to show music videos or building a mobile app that’s little more than a brochure isn’t enough. Success will be measured by how effectively technology facilitates and exceeds need states for every store visitor.
   
   
3. Technology should enhance human interaction, not replace it
   Nordstrom and Ritz-Carlton know well how the investment in sales, service, and management staff can pay off with increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue. Apple, on the other hand, has pioneered the use of technology to re-think the role of sales associates and the entire sales floor experience. And we’re seeing the integration of technology and human interaction successfully employed in e-commerce — done right, live-chat increases online sales and reduces abandonment. Winning retailers are figuring out that technology is best used to augment human interaction rather than as a replacement for human engagement. Instrumental to the deployment of technology is training – it’s one thing to give sales associates a tablet, but enabling them to use it to enhance the shopping and purchasing experience is another challenge.
   
   
4. Awe like Disneyland and drive like Amazon
   Whether you are Best Buy or Levis, your digital in-store strategy needs to make the most of what the physical store can offer – a unique, memorable destination that provides experiences shoppers can’t get online. Since people browse and buy anywhere anytime, shouldn’t the store visit deliver more, something bigger than the ability to touch and feel products? Brand “wow”, delivering unexpected, unique, and immersive experiences should be core of your vision. At the same time, consumers expect in-store to be very much like online – frictionless shopping and checkout preceded by personalized recognition and service that comes from learned behaviors, level-ups, rewards, and loyalty programs, informed sales and customer service staff, and the ability to purchase everything anything in your catalog even if that particular store doesn’t have it in stock.
   
   
5. Master the creation of layered digital experiences that generate stopping power and immersion 
   Today’s direct-to-consumer (DTC) retailers are challenged with the burden, and opportunity, of telling a lot of stories within the physical store. Visit a Nike store and you’ll see a global leader simultaneously telling brand, athlete, social good, product, service, and history “stories” throughout the store. A tall order in the analog world, but here’s where going “all-in digital” can change the game. Creative retailers are figuring out how digital technologies weave various messages and storylines into seamless, multi-layered, immersive experiences. Leaders are delivering them through innovative applications, device interfaces, and social / mobile channels ranging from personalized smartphone alerts, to multi-touch display walls, to near field communication at check out, to image capture and social integration, to exterior surface projections, to augmented reality experiences that bring static displays to life. Similarly, content for these stories must be at the same time informative, entertaining, technologically innovative AND easy to use. And, at the end of the day, it has to drive to purchase.
   
   
6. Build and enhance community
   Whether you're a global brand with DTC stores or a big-box retailer, it’s never been more important to understand your role as a community leader. Re-envisioning the store environment as a community hub means creating a place where people can escape from the challenges of daily life with experiences that exceed to potential of strictly online social interactions. The largest brands have a unique opportunity to make their customers feel an enhanced sense of community by letting them participate in activities that accent their place in the community. Because social connection has become so prevalent, smart retailers will turn the shopping and buying experience into socialized events that enable customers to connect to their social networks and properties. Best Buy, for example, might consider using a large multi-touch display to show a map of the local area with pinpoints that indicate new Wi-Fi zones, or indicate traffic snarls so shoppers take the fastest route home, or build a mosaic of customers who’ve contributed to the store’s local charity, or pictures of sales staff who’ve just completed advanced smart phone training. Stores can use digital tools and techniques to create and amplify community, differentiating from competition and solidifying bonds with customers.
   
   
7. Commit to invention and innovation
   Unilever gets it. The massive CPG leader is hell-bent on “getting to the future first” by institutionalizing digital innovation through a new Digital Advisory Board, a group of non-Unilever digital leaders tasked with helping them navigate the future digital consumer. Ralph Lauren, whose marketing leader recently stated that their investment in digital is “all-in”, is another good example of a brand dedicated to running to the digital future because they know that keeping pace with evolving consumer behavior and technology change is a non-trivial endeavor. RL and a growing number of leading brands have committed to the processes and resources required to foster ongoing innovation, invention, and, yes, even failure. Here are some of the priority steps to consider:
   
   
   • Partner with a company who thinks and bleeds digital to build a digital lab—a dedicated team of retail strategists, social/creative technologists, designers, and engineers. Most retailers and DTC brands struggle to dedicate visioning resources.
   • Challenge your lab to focus on rapid digital experience ideation, exploration, and testing. Center the effort on the building blocks of great digital experiences; visioning, strategy, playbooks, pilot executions, and scalable implementations.
   • Concentrate on pilots, not prototypes. Why prototypes? Because they are technology exercises that typically don’t enter the market.  A good pilot is designed for testing in retail environments; it's a more efficient spend and effective proof point for new digital experiences…even when the proof points don’t work exactly right the first time out.

1. Think platform
   We define platform to mean an amalgamation of consumer path-to-purchase behavioral models, physical store cartography, technology architectures and applications, and the influence of human interactions that influence the purchase path. The platform stretches across consumer touch points from brick-and-mortar interactions to out-of-store experiences. Retailers that are digitally enabled need to offer an API, among other tools, to truly be a platform of greater scale. “Sharing buttons” are table stakes – retailers must develop a platform of connectivity and intelligence so can consumers easily help spread word about the retailer within and between all digital touch points. Platforms are big systems --  Start small; Think long and large; Scale fast. Here’s how:
   
   
   • Think and act “lean”. Yes, it would be nice to shed a few holiday season lbs. But that’s not quite what we mean here. Modern business is pure chaos – those prepared to adapt and invent are better poised to succeed. Lean planning and lean development – see lean strategy and tech innovators like Eric Ries and Farrah Bostic – is a philosophy for moving at Internet speed. Thinking and acting lean enables your company to iterate and fail versus wall flowering until a group of consumers “asks you to the dance.”
   • Plan for the technical backbone -- “the piping” – so that as new technologies and use cases emerge and evolve your company can simply change “faucets” versus redoing the entire plumbing system every time a new device becomes hot.
   • Control your own “big data”. Prioritize a customer intelligence hub – it’s the engine that aggregates consumer and retail data and produces re-marketing, loyalty, and overall business optimization. Capturing and optimizing shopper behavior metrics from every channel into a customer intelligence center enables smart retailers to re-market with extreme precision to meet shopper need states.

Eight easy steps, right? What are you waiting for, walk-ins?

Scott Doniger is Executive Director, Strategy and Planning, at [wire] stone. Contributors to this blog were co-strategists Paul Marobella, Neil Michel, Jon Baker, Greg Rattenborg, Norman Guadagno, and Jason Michels. You can find us all at [first] dot [last] @wirestone.com. Subscribe to our blog for a steady stream of digital retail insights.

Flight of the {Air Jordan} Concords

No foot-covering, magic-inducing sneaker has ever looked as good as the Air Jordan 11, Concord blue edition. I can remember watching Jordan rise in ’96 wearing a variety of colorways of this insanely crafted and designed flying apparatus. So when the Jordan Brand chiefs decided to drop the Concord retro edition last night (well, December 23, starting at 12:01 am est), which most of us heard about as early as August, my Jordan retro crack addiction kicked into high gear.

I jumped onto nike.com at exactly 8:58 pm pst – opening not one, but four browsers – to ensure my IP address would be as early in line as possible. Nothing. No picture in the “new releases” tab; no link on the home page. 9:08 – a picture appears in “new releases”…but clicking brings me to a blank page. The site is down. Footlocker.com is down. Hordes are collapsing every possible digital outlet. I can envision millions of snearkerheads hacking nike.com, and I’m lamenting the fact that some, who Jordan brand managers from Beaverton court for their overt enthusiasm online and at sneakerhead conventions, are already in and ordering away. @dabu85 (former Jordan Brand client and one of the coolest people I’ve ever met) tweets “footlocker site down, another one bites the dust”, so I feel pretty good that even he hasn’t been able to get through.

Some perspective. There is more magic here than the mere fact that there are so many people coveting this most baddass sneaker ever invented that the Nike.com site has crashed. The brand sprung from the other-worldliness of MJ’s athletic domination and indominatable personality, and it’s now as relevant and pervasive 26 years later than it ever was. Old white guys like me still wear and covet the sneakers, millions upon millions of younger fans literally in every corner of the world can be found wearing apparel. If you’ve ever experienced MJ entering a room, it’s like the air is sucked out behind him as he enters. Think Neo, twisting around bullets. As a 25-year marketer and media analyst, and now a strategist at a digital marketing agency, [wire] stone, the only comparison I can think of to the Jordan retro phenomenon are lines forming around Apple stores in anticipation of i-anything introductions. I just can’t help but think that every brand would love to have this kind of passion for its products, for its history, for its presence, for its imagination. True, most brands were not birthed by larger-than-life, globally recognized icons. But the strategist in me thinks this is a standard to shoot for. Damn straight it is.

Okay, it’s 9:23, and I’m refreshing four browsers every 15 seconds to “be there” when the content is actually loaded and I can click onto an image that gets me to an order page. Wait – an email has arrived in my inbox from Nike: “Introducing the Air Jordan 11 Retro Concord. Click here to buy now.” Click. Nothing. Blank page. A bad joke. 9:”23”. As in MJ – 23. Now it’s 9:28 and one of the browsers connects. I am in. ordering two size 13’s, knowing I can find a buyer somewhere for the other pair. I get to checkout, click submit, and wait. Purchase denied, session timeout. It was only about 45 seconds, and I’m shut out. Try again on browsers 2,3, and 4. I get in on all three, go through the ordering process on one of them, shut out again. This browser dance goes on until 9:50, when I reboot to change IP’s and I’m back in – yes! Click through again to order 2 pairs of 13’s and…shut out again. Session timeout. Okay, this is f—ked. And I’m pissed. Try another new browser and … wait… I’m in, but no 13’s left. Also no 12’s, or 12.5’s, or any size between 6 and 15. It’s 10:23 and I’m done. I go to flightclubny.com and spend a crap-load more than I ever thought I’d have to. But I have Concords on the way, and I’m pretty damn happy. Poor, but happy.

What I haven’t mentioned is that I’ve gone through this three years in a row. Every December 23^rd the Jordan team perpetrates this cruelty on willing fanatics. Lines to buy them in person at FootLockers and other retail stores stretched into the thousands here in Sacramento, and in bigger cities ran ten times longer.

There is nothing like having passion for a brand. I am fanatical about a very small group of things, starting with my wife. Ferrari, siberian huskies, Hendrix, Lance, to name some of the others. But it is an irrational thing, passion. An unwieldy beast. We as marketers spend way too much time rationalizing the metrics and analytics of marketing instead of understanding why people have, or don’t have, passion for the products we are asked to help communicate and sell. Some products are necessities; some buyers have to buy because their bosses ask them to. So passion isn’t always a part of the equation.

But I don’t buy that. Marketers, and the agencies they ask to help them connect with people, are obligated to help people tap into a latent passion they may not even know they have, generate a higher degree of passion than they currently have, or create it out of thin air. Regardless of the route or path, there is no connection without passion.

Hey Sean, Reggie, John, Gentry – anyone at Jordan... Let me into your friggin’ site so that I can feel, again, the passion!

Live From New York, It's All About Innovation

I recently attended two events in NY – the 4A’s Strategy Festival and Pivotcon: The Rise of the Social Consumer. Big brands, big agencies, big egos presenting big ideas, and there really was lot to take away for [wire] stone as a midsize agency to help us get better at what we do.

But more than any specific social campaign or keynote on how to handle big data, there was an undeniable theme that spread across nearly every aspect of these two events. Innovation is happening in every aspect of a digital agency’s world, and new, innovative thinking is spawning transformation of the very definition of what it means to be a digital agency today.

At the heart of this movement is new technology – but the innovative spirit that is driving media and marketing is no longer about technology in and of itself. It’s about how innovative technology is deployed, how brands and their agency partners are using technology to engage, to facilitate and nurture meaningful, relevant, and scalable relationships between people and organizations.

For agencies, nearly everywhere we look we see new models popping up, spawned by a proliferation of technologies and applications that create diversified revenue streams, new corporate ownership models, re-considered operational infrastructures, and new spins on the traditional agency-brand relationship.

Beautifully articulated by John Hayes, CMO at American Express, here are the attributes defining the spirit of innovation that is facilitating transformation:

• Speed – change happens at unprecedented speed because information is propagated through social channels instantaneously and people are informed in real time -- only the nimblest agencies who adopt an agile and lean business philosophy can keep pace or ahead of industry and market movement;
  
  
• Disruption – innovation is again a guiding cultural, political, and economic mantra, driven by the proliferation of digital code and a creative design renaissance that enable nearly anyone (tech labs, global brands, governments, general consumers) to create paradigm-shifting experiences;
  
  
• Listening – in an era where people are increasingly in control of their own relationships with brands, agencies must master the art of listening to people to fully understand consumer motivations, needs, and wants – listening is at the heart of all brand engagement and relationship building experiences;
  
  
• Losing control – agencies must help brands become comfortable with and ultimately exploit the fact that they have already lost a significant amount of control of their own image as well as their ability to direct or manipulate sentiment about their brand, products, or services.

Change is happening in real-time for digital agencies -- “full service” firms are now offering interactive services, public relations firms hold firm as lead social media providers, and some media firms are now offering digital.

This is leading to an increasingly competitive marketplace that can make it hard to successfully differentiate one agency from another. In response, a new era of mergers and buyouts is underway as large holding companies aggregate social, technical, and other niche technology and services agencies to aggregate the focused talent pools they offer to support existing teams or augment their own portfolio of service offerings.

Potentially more threatening for agencies, however, is the trend that many brands are developing in-house capabilities once core to the digital agency portfolio. Some believe the situation could become even more destabilizing for agencies -- as an example, tvguide.com recently consolidated their mobile development capabilities in-house with a new staff that is several dozen deep.

Brands, on the other hand, are also savvy, and sophisticated marketers know full well that no agency can “do it all”. Agencies that represent they are experts in every area increasingly run the risk of not being credible in the minds of brand marketers.

Within this miasma of change, however, we can see the following “innovation waves” driving the formula for agency differentiation:

1. Strategy
   Miles Nadal, CEO of MDC Partners, stated “strategy has become a critical differentiator for agencies, and there has never been a better time for strategy to take its rightful position as primary in an agency’s portfolio.” “Strategy innovation” is one of the core areas [wire] stone is differentiating, and we fully suspect brands will increasingly consider our ability to create innovative consumer engagement strategies a determining factor for picking us versus competitors. A recent survey of CMO’s indicated that the #1 reason agencies were fired is a “lack of innovative thinking and strategy, the ability to develop strategies that drive innovation across the brand’s business units that are primarily derived from insights derived from an understanding and optimization of data and information”. At a higher level, there is another perspective agencies simply must adopt -- as I learned from my favorite strategist, planner (and curmudgeon) Farrah Bostic, to lead, innovative digital agencies must adopt lean, agile strategy planning and technology development philosophies – leading shops must think and act like startups. Nuf said.
   
   
2. Social + Mobile
   The tsunami of social engagement protocols, technologies, and techniques continues to transform every aspect of business, as well as cultural and societal change. Some posit that “social agencies” are the only ones capable of leading brands in the connected, networked social future because they represent the seamless blend of technology and social interaction / engagement understanding. Further, there is a shortage of talent among agencies in this space – agencies are investing rapidly and deeply in training and skill development, including at the programmatic level with efforts like social marketing certification programs. Mobile (i.e., device / screen proliferation) has also become a core capability – enabling brands to connect with consumers anywhere and any time is no longer an option. [Wire] stone believes social marketing is not a silo-d arm of the marketing or PR department; rather, it is the glue that connects everything a brand does both internally with employees and stakeholders as well as to the external world of consumers. It is a philosophy of business that integrates a brand’s entire portfolio of marketing and business operations together into a connected enterprise built around people. Social media and marketing places people at the center of relationships between brands and consumers, disrupting traditional marketing model brands have typically organized themselves to execute.
   
   
3. Disruptive Technology Deployment  
   At the heart of the rise of digital and social media is technological innovation. There is no shortage of disruptive technological change -- the challenge for agencies is that brands have become enamored with bringing new tech development in-house. The availability of inexpensive and highly efficient tools, and the talent needed to turn tools into dollars, potentially marginalizes the role of the agency. If it is simply using an analytics or social monitoring or digital media tool then the agency risks becoming unnecessary overhead. Successful agencies will either be able to demonstrate strategy combined with mastery of the tool or they will invent the tool.
   
   
4. Creative + Design
   A renaissance in the philosophy and role of design is propelling innovation across the agency landscape, and leading digital shops are taking a design approach to everything from consumer marketing creative, to emerging and immersive technology experiences, to proprietary technology and product development, and to the agency’s own business model. Design is increasingly a core pillar of our philosophical approach to everything we do, and we are in the process of “designing our business” for the future, incorporating a new design perspective to what we do.
5. Execution
   Brands are more discerning than ever about how agencies price and deliver services, forcing more openness and transparency during sales and account/client management processes. Similarly, agencies are increasingly being judged more on the ability to deliver high levels of quality work at extremely rapid speed because brands are forced to respond to more rapidly shifting consumers than ever before. As a result, developing new and more efficient executional processes and models are more important than ever, and agencies who are not efficient AND nimble in deploying high-quality resources risk losing new and existing business opportunities. See lean planning discussion above.
   
   
6. Analytics
   Big Data. It is everywhere, overwhelming, and unstructured – therefore, increasingly critical to brands as they search for ever-more granular insights into consumer behavior and keys to building relationships. Search – both SEO and SEM/PPC -- as well as social analytics, social CRM, data mining, and a host of other sub-disciplines are must-haves for agencies, either as core practice areas or strategic consulting capabilities.
   
   
7. Diversification
   Independent agencies are exploring and experimenting in social and mobile technologies to develop new, proprietary products to sell or license (i.e., see Buddy Media). Some agencies are building incubation hubs and technology labs specifically to invent new services and innovate core capabilities. Pepsi, for example, has an “official” desk at one of the largest technology incubators in New York city so that they are at the origin of new ideas and applications. Holding companies like MDC Partners are expanding into pure consulting, think-tanks, and product development in an effort to define entirely new revenue streams.
   
   

 

The Planner's Canvas, Part II -- "Eat the World"

Eat The World.
The Planner’s Canvas -- Part II

Account Planners and Strategists thrive in chaos and fluidity. The great ones, however, typically don't come up with innovative thinking out of thin air. They internalize and process the world around them in ways most people can't, and add their own perspective and experience into the mix. Good planners seem to always be aggregating raw material “inputs” from the world around them and from what they already know. It's like they eat the world, and then spit out new and amazing things we've never thought of before.

Some of the Planners and Strategists I follow -- Chris Anderson, Paul Saffo, Ben Malbon, Dr. Pamela Rutledge, Edward Boches, Farrah Bostick, Rick Liebling, as well as [wire] stone's own Paul Marobella, to name just a few -- inspire me as a Planner to make [wire] stone a place where pushing the envelop (not just winging it) is the norm.

To help us get to that lofty place I introduced the The Planner’s Canvas Part I (Download Planning_canvas_cal_rd6). Today's post deconstructs Phase 1 of the Canvas and explains why Raw Inputs are so important for Planners.

Phase 1 is about Raw Inputs. They come from the extermal world all around us, as well as the Planner's own experience. Aggregating a thick stream of raw inputs creates a 360 degree perspective of the brand's problem or challenge, and enables the Planner to sift through peripheral information and focus on core, relevant, charged elements of a storyline that could unfold. Raw Inputs also help frame key questions the Planner is tasked with answering:

Inputs from The External World

• Filtered and unfiltered data and information about the brand, competitors, and its objectives / challenges;
• What cultural (i.e., economic; social; political) factors should be considered?
• Basics about the people the brand is most interested in connecting with.

Inputs from The Planner's Own Experience

• What is the Planner’s installed base of knowledge regarding the brand and its customers?
• How does the planner perceive the “voice of the customer”?
• What subjective opinions or perspectives does the planner incorporate into the project?
• What other relevant personal information or perspective is germane?

Raw Inputs are the building blocks all Planner's need to internalize to make sense of the challenges and opportunities a client is asking the agency to figure out. I've placed Raw Inputs at the center of the Canvas because everything the Planner does flows from them. Raw Inputs is visualized as two yin- and yang-like spaces the Planner fills in to prepare for diving into Phase 2 -- creating a core hypothesis, conducting research, and performing analysis. The stuff all well-respected Planners love to do. I'll describe Phase 2 in detail in my next post.

For now, a couple of additional key points on what the Canvas is and how to use it:

1. What it does
   Its best and highest use is to help the Planner map his/her role in the process of generating the driving forces behind great marketing. As such, it's a tool to lead teams in this process. For lone practitioners as well as Planners and creatives with robust teams of strategists, researchers, and analysts, the Canvas is both a blueprint for identifying the right work to be done and a roadmap and process for getting the work done right.
   
2. How to use it
   Like the Business Model Generation canvas from which this was birthed, the Planner's Canvas is designed to be projected as an image -- or printed and taped to -- a conference room wall, so that it facilitates the creation of an organized, well thought-out wellspring of new thoughts and ideas. Filling in each section of the Canvas results in a comprehensive roadmap creatives and technologists use to develop differentiated, innovative campaigns.
3. Mindspace -- a critical part of the process
   You'll see Mindspace called out in several places between process stages. What is Mindspace, and why is it important? Strong Planners are a unique aggregation of analyst, creative, engineer, psychologist, sociologist, politician, and intellectual athlete. But to make sense of market and consumer fluidity, smart Planners know they need time to think and process – what I'm calling Mindspace -- time or distance away from the project that enables the mental freedom for good ideas to simmer into great ones; for disparate issues to gel into into something that makes sense; to disrupt one train of thought in favor of a new opinion, derived from a vetting cycle. Mindspace is the fuel for igniting the best in our creative and productive selves. If you’ve gathered the troops for a one-day brainstorm, take a lunch break outside of the war room after creating the repository of knowledge. If you’re working on a six-month strategic discovery and believe you’ve hit a wall and don’t have true insights, call a time out and come back to the project in a week.  While it’s only a dotted line on the Canvas, and many marketers and Planners take it for granted, the recommendation here is to do exactly the opposite.

I want -- and need -- your feedback to make the Canvas and the Planner's process better. Comments and recommendations accepted any time at [email protected].

Thanks for your help.

 

A Strategy Planner's Canvas -- Part I

It's been more than 40 years since Stanley Pollitt from the UK agency BMP birthed the account planning role to design a process of advertising development that would rely more on rigorous, research-based work than on gut feel. The account planner's role would be to develop a deep understanding of a brand's position in its market, and use associated research data and consumer feedback to glean insight into a brand's core connection points with consumers. Today -- and probably for the rest of our professional lives -- a planner's ultimate role is to develop big ideas and great marketing concepts derived from and in concert with people as partners in a holistic endeavor.

The role has transformed how forward thinking agencies help brands connect more deeply with people. Strategic Account Planners, also called Strategy Planners, have now embraced the Internet and Social Media (SoMe) as the harbingers of a new era of consumer-centric engagement marketing. Moreover, Strategy Planners are fast becoming as prominent and notable as their rock star brethren, creative directors. And for good reason -- great Planners exhibit a unique synthesis of data researcher; market, business, and consumer analyst; marketer; technologist; and (perhaps most important of all) storyteller. They develop new, unseen perspectives (sorry Farrah Bostick, there are such things as insights), and can, on occasion, create big ideas from which innovative marketing platforms and communications campaigns emerge.

The story of the Strategy Planner is well-known among successful agencies. Brands too are assigning significant value to agency and industry strategists, such as Altimeter analyst Jeremiah Owyang or 360i's David Berkowitz, now recognized globally not for their ability to create memorable Super Bowl spots but for their ability, among others, to interpret how SoMe and digital marketing is changing the relationship between brands, markets, and consumers. Google's Liminal blog is another example of how prominent the role of research-based strategy is becoming. 

A story that has not been told well, however, is how Strategy Planners work. What exactly do they do, and how do they do it?

Several months ago, I came across a fantastic book called Business Model Generation at the Seattle airport, of all places, while waiting for a colleague to arrive and various strategy meetings at Microsoft. Read the whole thing in 90 minutes. The book's central focus is around the Business Model Canvas Download Business_model_canvas_poster, a strategic management and entrepreneurial tool that enables planners and strategists to describe, design, challenge, invent, differentiate, and pivot a business opportunity or idea into an operational model. I found it fascinating that the book was actually crowdsourced by 470 practitioners, researchers, consultants, marketers, and analysts from 45 countries. It's a fantastic primer for those untrained in business modeling, and an extremely useful tool for people responsible for defining the components and mapping how an idea becomes a business model. There's a lot more to this, so I highly recommend buying and using it. They're actually near to publishing the next book -- Business Model You -- for people in need of re-engineering their careers and their own personal brands. I've contributed to this dialogue and anticipate even greater response.

Using the Canvas over the past several months -- most recently with our [wire] stone Chicago team -- it became clear to me that I had already developed the guts of a canvas for Strategy Account Planning but had never organized it in a way nearly as useful as the Business Model Canvas. The concept -- create a tool for Strategy Planners that identifies the most important work a Planner is responsible for, and organizes it into a process for doing the work -- baked inside my head for months...until now. Here Download Planning_canvas_cal_rd6 (and pictured below) is the first draft, and an accompanying explanation document Download Planner_Canvas_070411 describing what the pieces are and how it works.

In future blogs I will review the Canvas and the process piece by piece. For now, please review and respond with comments and suggestions. Like the Business Model Canvas, my ultimate goal is to crowdsource this project and offer it to planners, strategists, and agencies everywhere.

Send it to friends and co-workers, and ask them to send comments directly to me at  [email protected].

I look forward to your feedback.

Thanks!

There's No "User" in "Personalization"

One of the hottest topics in today's fluid media and marketing morass is personalization -- creating experiences defined by a person's behavior, or desired outcomes, or stated preferences. Yet, so many of us still use the term "user" far too often. It's wrong -- and dangerous for brands and agencies.

I just watched another series of video cast studies, these from Adobe (here) that feature how T-Mobile, MTV Networks, and  Martha Stewart Living created cool implementations of Adobe products and services. Nice pieces. But "user" is used all over the place by people who sound like experienced and savvy product, creative, strategy, and brand leaders to describe or define people, consumers, customers, individuals, or even simple human behaviors.

Forrester's Josh Bernoff wrote about why the term "user" is risky years ago. He was right in 2007. Moreso today, however, because digital tools and analytics suites, among other techniques, have progressed so far. The ability to obtain, synthesize, and exploit digital data to construct profiles specific to individual people is no longer an insurmountable problem. It's actually a point of brand differentiation leaders are using to distance themselves from competition. He who truly knows their customer -- and calls her by her name -- will likely win her loyalty.

We should send "user" into the deadpool. It's not just semantics. It's the philosophy behind the linguistic transformation Josh proposed and I'm now supporting. Marketers and advertisers talk a good game about "personalizing" digital brand experiences, but are they really delivering? If we still call people "users", do we truly believe in the vision of personalization? How are we defining personalization in an era of increasing privacy concerns -- do we understand the balancing point?

Most marketers and digital agencies have invested significant financial and human resources in data mining and analytics platforms and software to better understand the landscape in which they do business -- specifically the people they want to connect with. [wire] stone's experience clearly indicates that smart brands are banking future success on developing these skills -- deep, granular understanding at the individual, genetic level, can unlock long-term engagement, affinity, and loyalty. There's little chance they'll get there if designers, engineers, marketers, analysts, or sales teams continue to think "users".

Institutionalizing the culture of "personalization" may become the defining attribute for success in the next digital decade. In the same way that we all want to be treated by friends, family, and profession as an individual, do the same for the people your brand needs to connect with. So throw "user" out with the trash. Make a contest out of it within your company. Fine people who use the term $1 and buy cookies with the bounty.

A New World, A New Word: Digitization

In my recent post, 2011: Year of the Wave, I proposed that digital applications, experience layers, game play, and social commerce are massive, rising waves, elevating brands who understand them out to new heights, potentially crushing others that don't. 

Today, my co-worker, and [wire] stone's analytics guru Wendy Ertter found an eConsultancy blog post full of account planning presentations (here). Sorting through the fluff lurked an intriguing-yet-simple framework from Zigurds Zakis called "Account Planning in the Digital Age" slideshare:

Looks pretty simple, right. The big issues, interconnected. Technology is clearly now a key part of the account planner's formula, as Zakis represents here. Adding "technology" to the standard mix of people, culture, and economy -- the general landscape -- is a major step forward. The right planning perspective.

Viewed through the account planner's lens, however, there's a lot more to consider. There's a problem with the word "technology" -- it falls short in capturing the essence of how transformational technology has become. Technology change moves faster and in many respects is the catalyst for cultural, economic, and human behavior change at an increasingly faster pace, some would argue with a more pervasive scope. 

Clay Shirky's prescient review in Foreign Affairs argues that social technologies are have become the catalyst for driving political transformation -- amazing that he published literally within a month of 26 year-old Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation. Paul Saffo recently quipped, “Connectivity has become like oxygen. If you don’t have it, you notice its absence at about two seconds,” and has for years projected a vision for human behavior change transformed by digital technology -- "We're going to put eyes, ears and sensory organs on our computers and our networks in absolutely unprecedented ways. We're going to ask them to observe and manipulate the physical world on our behalf.”

For years, account planners trained themselves to look at the world through the eyes of the brands they serve; really talented planners honed an innate ability to construct 360 degree views of the environment within which brands connect with people -- key social, cultural, political, economic, and scientific inputs. No small task. And none of this has changed. Except to say that the planners universe has become infinitely more complex, on orders of magnitude, by the tsunami of digitization and the spinning, convulsing "waves" digitization continues to create.

I'm a planning hack, like most of us trying to figure it all out. My gut tells me, though, that "technology" just doesn't capture the essence of it all...that we need a new word. I'd propose replacing "technology" with "digitization". From artificial intelligence; to cracking the genome; to validating string theory via the LHC (which might actually happen); to the elevalation of women's rights in the Middle East; to Watson winning on Jeopardy; to bio-engineering; to virtual worlds; to transforming the way we teach and learn...the common thread among all of these things is the digitization of everything, along with the interconnectedness created from it.

To ensure we truly capture the breadth and depth associated with our task of bringing a 360 view to our business, account planners must see a the new lens of "digitization" as the filter that provides perspective beyond the nuts and bolts of new digital hardware and software -- to truly "be insightful", we must grok how human behavior adjusts and responds to our increasingly digitized world.

 

2011: The Year of The Wave

While we can't see most of them, waves of all different shapes, sizes, sounds, dimensions, and dynamics crest and crash around us all the time. I’ve been thinking a lot about waves lately -- 2011 is shaping up to be the "Year Of The Wave".

From the most astounding we can imagine (Japan's quake, resulting tsunami, and still-unfolding recovery and nuclear meltdowns); to the bizarre (anti-union and small-government movements in the US and Europe); to geo-political transformation (Tunisia, Egypt, maybe Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ivory Coast), these things don’t seem like isolated moments in time.  

For global brands, the world is no less undulating. Troughs and crests seem to rise and fall at unprecedented scale – Facebook and smartphone adoption are two obvious examples. But this year, a few are beginning to crest into massive forces -- and brands find themselves going back to school to re-learn the physics of wave dynamics. Here’s a short list of others to consider:

 Apps: 

• From a recent Pew Internet and American Life study: “Every metric we capture shows a widening embrace of all kinds of apps by a widening population. It’s too early to say what this will eventually amount to, but not too early to say that this is an important new part of the technology world of many Americans.” In or out-of-browser, people are increasingly consuming information and media as applications. And the US trails app adoption in countries like Japan, India, and China;

Layers:

• The ability to overlay various types and levels of information to digital experiences on any device is has changed the way people expect their interaction to unfold. Digital information, media, and entertainment are now mashed-up aggregations of content designed to enhance and expand the relevancy and depth of any digital experience -- augmented reality adds social information to smartphone cameras; iTV overlays shopping opportunities to standard television viewing; Bing adds the social graph to Facebook search; soon, Kinect-enabled gaming will feature social connection; and global positioning -- already standard -- will soon bring remote experiences to us wherever we are via any connected device. Our expectations of media and information are no longer uni-dimensional;

Game-play:

• Gaming — and the protocols inherent in game-play -- have leapt out of the playroom and devices and are increasingly defining the protocols for how people interact with the world at large. Airlines and weight-loss hucksters perfected behavior modification through game mechanics. Today, banks, political campaigns, media organizations, governments, and educational institutions employ game-play to motivate and reward behavior. With or without joystick, online or offline, people respond to playing games…even when they don’t think they are playing.

Social Commerce and Social Gaming:

• The confluence of social media / marketing and e-commerce. People can browse and buy almost anywhere, anytime through an increasing variety of connected devices -- social commerce adds the dimension of social connection (see previous post on personalize shopping here). Some great statistics provided by social commerce analyst Paul Marsden:
  
  • According to a recent comScore report, nearly one in four Twitter users (there are 15 million active accounts) follow businesses to find special deals, promotions, or sales.
  • A study by iModerate Research Technologies found that people are 67% more likely to purchase products from brands they follow on Twitter and 51% more likely to do so if they follow a brand on Facebook.
  • Research from Efficient Frontier indicates that to-date, 53% of retail transactions involving Facebook directly convert from Facebook to checkout
  • The online gaming market is worth $15 billion today; In 2009, social gamers bought $2.2 billion in virtual goods; this is predicted to increase to $6 billion by 2013. (NPD Group).

So if you’re the George Clooney of your brand, captain of the marketing ship trying to avoid the “perfect storm”, how do you deal with big waves? How does a brand avoid getting rag dolled? How does a brand set up to drop into the tube and ride the delicate dance? Global brands have to figure this all out as the next digital decade unfolds.

Last week I attended Forrester's Marketing Forum where Chris Stutzman and Emily Riley detailed ADAPT To The CORE, their prescription for brand positioning in an era of transformative waves. Stutzman’s ADAPT construct drives home the requirement for brands to establish both the mindset to move quicker than the market as well as the organizational flexibility to reset as change unfolds:

 

 

Emily Riley’s CORE framework springboards off ADAPT by delivering the formula for optimization – it’s a roadmap for how brands should do the work.

What I found equally as thought-provoking, though, was L’Oreal’s interpretation of engagement. The $27 billion global beauty leader simplifies their engagement approach and aligns their “digital” marketing ecosystem to these four pillars -- enabling both ADAPT and CORE along the way:

What struck me most is L’Oreal’s emphasis on innovation. Like Kraft's Dana Anderson recommends (interviewed here by Forrester's Christine Overby; covered by David Berkowitz of 360i here), brands need become badass, and “pilot, pilot, pilot!” (i.e., try new things all the time). L’Oreal is steadfastly committed to developing new technologies, communication techniques, and thought leadership. In this view, complacency is failure. Moreover, L’Oreal strives less for pragmatic KPI’s in favor of a psycho-social vision of success – without passion, consumption and loyalty are always at risk.

I am fortunate to work at a company that, from its very beginning more than a decade ago, has always known how to surf. [wire] stone’s DNA is a double-helix of adaptability, integration, innovation, and digital. As marketers AND technologists, we’ve created a formula for helping brands achieve their ADAPT To The CORE vision and foster long-term passion. We call it Experience Engineering. More on EE in my next post…

“Do Not Track”, Privacy, and the Struggle for Relevancy

A Great Data Debate: Keep it Fluid and Future-focused

by co-[wire] stone thinkers Zach Melchiori, Neil Michel, Kevin Gamache. And a little help from me.

The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Commerce took a hard stance in the online privacy debate last week, stating that self-regulating marketers are not doing enough to keep consumer information safe. The FTC released a 79-page report that advocates the creation of a “Do Not Track” system that would require online marketers to disclose what information they gather from users, how they use the information, how long they store it, and ultimately, provide a way for users to opt out of any tracking mechanisms.  

Regulators have increased their attention towards online privacy after recent highly publicized security gaffes like Google’s WiFi data collection and what seem like weekly privacy concerns over Facebook’s ever expanding collection of personal data. The FTC notes that their main concern is the use of a user’s web history and personally identifiable information to customize a user’s experience.

The idea behind “Do Not Track” has been compared to the popular National “Do Not Call” registry. However, a similar approach to online tracking is unlikely to gain momentum since users now access the web thorough multiple computers and a variety of devices. What is more likely to occur is an expanded emphasis on the “privacy mode” capabilities of modern web browsers.

What the FTC and the Department of Commerce either fail to realize or have chosen not to publicly acknowledge is that behavior tracking in general is a benevolent movement toward the creation of higher-value, more personal and therefore relevant experiences on the web. Tracking helps users find the signal in the noise. To [wire] stone, if an 'ad' or personalized content offering actually helped you solve your problem or relieve your pain, then technology actually acted in your interest.

Two sides in the debated have emerged from the fog: 1. those who come from a cold-war "privacy and paranoia" paradigm that distrusts systems perceived to be out of our "control" (Leslie Stahl described this user as a “fuddy-duddy” when referring to privacy concerns at Facebook on Sunday’s 60 Minutes), versus 2. younger internet denizens who accept the notion that technology can enhance our lives despite the fact that we do not control it and often do not understand how it works.

The debate over online privacy is likely to continue unabated for a while as parties on both sides tout the benefits and drawbacks of online tracking. The real debate, though, should be about whether or not the value that marketers, search providers, social networks, and other intermediaries assign to tracking is outweighed by the fear of losing control of personal data. Our hope is that all parties understand the “best and highest use” of our digitized world and exploit the personalized relevancy new tracking tools and techniques are creating every day – that we not fold in response to those who prefer “shotgun” marketing approaches that we know under-serve both marketer and consumer.

Reach us directly:
Zach Melchiori -- [email protected]
Neil Michel -- neil [email protected]
Kevin Gamache -- [email protected]

Personalized Shopping, by Jason Michaels

A great piece from Jason Michaels, personalized for fluid marketing professionals:

Just for You
How Personalized Experiences and Products Change How We Shop

Personalized Experiences Defined:
We humans are eager to personalize our experiences. We wrap our phones in pretty cases. We organize our desktops with personal photographs. We categorize our applications in wittily named folders. We curate ourselves on Facebook, Twitter, Xbox Live, Farmville and Second Life. Personalized shopping experiences and goods are simply extensions of our digital, aspirational, or innate selves.

This holiday season I’m giving personalized gifts to most of my family. My Dad will receive customized t-shirts from SilkScreenInk.com. Calendars featuring my kids will come from RedBubble.com. Hand-stamped jewelry for my wife will come from Etsy.com. A friend on Facebook recommended my sister’s gift when she “Liked” an item on ThinkGeek.com. Zazzle.com will print our custom holiday postcard and postage, a family favorite.

Five years ago personalized goods were far and few between. The quality was sub-par and the costs were beyond most gifting budgets. What’s changed? The confluence of social media and technology has enabled the everyday consumer to personalize and share their shopping adventures and customized goods. Here are some of the tools, technologies, and techniques that will power personalization in 2011:

Facebook
Facebook has a stunning 500 million users, of which nearly 50 percent login daily. To put this in perspective, Facebook is 11 times the population of Australia and 50 million citizens shy of the United States. For Millennials (those born between 1982–1995), Facebook has become the de facto news source for local and current events, and it’s quickly becoming a place in which they interact with brands, companies, as well as shop – or at least get their coupons. I’ll mention Twitter here too, but in its current form it’s less of an affinity and brand-to-consumer relationship builder than Facebook.

Data portability
A good example of making data portable and “data scraping,” e.g., allowing sites to leverage your social network to customize information, is Etsy’s Gift Guide. Etsy leverages your Facebook network to make finding a great gift ridiculously easy.

Group Buying
Group buying services such as Groupon make saving money easy. You can debate Groupon’s ROI for the retailer, but it’s nothing but a win for consumers. With every Groupon I buy, the Groupon engine is getting smarter about what I like. BTW, I just doubled my money with a Nordstrom Rack/Groupon promotion. Did you get in on that deal?

Mobile
Amazon’s Price Check and the proliferation of SKU scanning apps should tell you that the consumer is firmly in control. Before they purchase, they’ve likely researched the item online, on mobile, on Facebook, or via text messaging with friends. As an aside, I recommend that you download Pottery Barn Kids’ Halloween Costume application. It allows consumers to snap a picture of their child and then virtually model costumes on screen.

Print-on-Demand (POD) 
The cost of POD equipment has dropped precipitously in the past 12 months. Having moved to a “razor and blades” model, the ink cost remains high, but the end-consumer doesn’t eat the cost of misprints and damaged goods. The consumer receives a product with a back-story and/or an immediate personal connection. Cafepress.com is a good example.

Data Synchronization
Relevancy engines will continue to get smarter, synthesizing data in order to deliver experiences and products that matter to you and me. This type of targeting won’t be limited to websites – targeting and “push” technologies will deliver goods and incentives to us on the fly, across websites, mobile and other devices, e.g., Xbox 360.

Storytellers
Storytelling is a human element that has the power to create affinity, repeat sales, and improve search engine optimization. Without a story, you’re selling a collection of things – and things can be commoditized to death in the long run. Don’t have a story behind your company or products? Get one.

How has social media and technology personalized your shopping experiences? We’re eager to hear your story. Tell us.  Please comment below or contact me, the author, at: [email protected].

Search Becomes Fluid With Bing-Facebook

Search Becomes Fluid With Bing-Facebook

Media outlets are reporting today that Facebook may have hit another major milestone, on paper, net worth is believed to have surpassed eBay's to become the third most valuable Web business in the United States. Why? Valuation experts are projecting that the platform’s evolution into search – and now social inbox announced yesterday – will equate to unseen levels of long-term loyalty and monetization for the half-a-billion Facebook members, even if we can’t see how it will all play out quite yet. We here at Fluid Marketing agree. Facebook is creating strong reasons for people to conduct their most important and frequent activities within the Facebook environment, dare we say taming the fluidity beast. Maybe. Here, my colleague at Wirestone Zach Melchiori and I take a swipe at the Bing-Facebook search integration breakthrough, and what it could mean for Facebook in its burgeoning war with Google.

Bing-Facebook

Microsoft and Facebook have announced a partnership that enables Bing to present search results that incorporate “Liked” content together with Facebook profiles. This effort represents what could be called the 4^th generation of search.

• Generation 1 started what seems like a hundred years ago in the mid-90’s when early adopters to the Internet realized the connected web actually contained information worth finding;
• Generation 2 exploded as mathematicians and statisticians at Yahoo! and Google created algorithms that enabled searchers to find exactly what they looked for really quickly -- it's the browser-enabled search we know and love today;
• Generation 3, still emerging, is about semantic search; where search results combine the obvious and literal with the imagined and intuitive -- search understands what we mean even if we don't use the exact terms;
• Generation 4 is about enhanced social value and personal connections, where information relevant to the search topic are culled from a person’s social graph and incorporated into results, thereby creating what people may think as a higher value result because it includes recommendations or suggestions from people you know and trust.

The goal of this partnership is to offer people who use Bing a more personalized experience. If the assumption holds one’s social graph represents a focused layer of relevance than the generalist approach represented by agnostic search algorithms, then incorporating social graph data into search results will produce a higher value result. By applying a social layer to search, Bing and Facebook are anticipating that users will be able to make decisions quickly and with more confidence since their search results are being influenced by networks of users they presumably trust. 

A lot has been written, including a great post by Charlene Li, about whether or not this represents a coup for Microsoft or Facebook vs. the dominant search engine, Google, and the prevailing view is that it is indeed a smart, differentiating play that could hurt the 800-lb. search gorilla. To date, and despite the proliferation of Google services and platforms, Google is not a social network, and they have no way to collect or exploit high-value social information. This is a story that will unfold over time, but there’s much to dig into today as the Bing-Facebook integration emerges. Let’s take a look:

Social Search Features -- “Liked” Results

Bing’s “liked” results feature includes results based on items in the social graph that a user’s connections have “liked” and shared. “Liked” results are unique for every user and a user will only see “liked” results for a search query if someone in their network has “liked” a page or item. Here’s an example with a person searching for “Iron Man 2”, where 2 people in the searcher’s social graph have conducted a similar search, and their “liked” search results appear within this person’s search – thereby providing a unique, personalized perspective to the general search for information on Iron Man 2 that would normally not emerge. So, the IMDB result might add real value for this searcher, whose generic search on Google might have shown an IMDB result in a different way or not at all.

 

Profile Search

Bing’s new “People on Facebook” section lists search results for people based on a user’s social connections on Facebook. People will see results based on those who are a closest match by name and relationship on their social graph. A person will be able to add another person as a friend on Facebook or send them a message directly from this pane.

 

Short-Term SEO Implications

At the present time, search results outside of “Liked Results” and “People on Facebook” are not affected by Bing / Facebook’s social search integration. This development has brought no known change to Bing’s search algorithm and Bing will continue to serve its search results in a traditional format, with social results highlighted at different placements on the search engine results page.

Long-Term SEO Implications

Over the long-term it is likely that information from a user’s social graph will be combined with traditional search ranking algorithms to deliver more relevant content to a user performing a search. As this fluid space becomes even more fragmented by cross-platform integration (i.e., Facebook connect; Open ID), social search could very well become a high-value center of excellence for brands seeking higher relevance with people. Investment in search optimization and marketing continues to increase – see Forrester’s projections here – yet, most brands are unaware of how social search may add more relevance to social marketing than any other single marketing tactic.

Outlook

The Bing-Facebook partnership is another development in a long line of innovations that have turned SEO into a complex undertaking. As search technologies evolve, it is vital that marketers evolve with them to achieve high-ranking search results. But social search is more than a technology – it’s a technique that will require mastery. How brands learn to manipulate social search will be another fascinating chapter in the evolving story of social media and marketing.

The short and long-term implications of social search highlight why it’s so important for brands to build content rich social media experiences that will increase visibility to searchers -- and that will have a strong presence in future search results where socially integrated experiences may very well become the new standard.

More Information

http://www.facebook.com/Bing?v=app_162396457121380

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/13/bing-likes-facebook/

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/bing-facebook-press-event/24940/

 

 

 

Guest Post on Ecommerce from Jason Michaels

Beyond “Buy Now” – The online retail evolution

 A note to ecommerce and marketing directors: your SEO-optimized, direct marketing-tuned product catalog isn’t going to attract or retain your best customers in 2011. The future of ecommerce is comprised of a series of personalized customer interactions and experiences – and they extend far beyond your .com website.

We’re not saying that the online retail environment can’t (or doesn’t) deliver personalized shopping experiences – mostly driven by those technologies mimicking Amazon.com. Our take here at Wirestone is that the next evolutionary step for ecommerce is built from a carefully curated mix of brand and consumer interactions. We call it Personalization 2.0+.

Personalization 1.0 – where we’ve been until recently – was built on recommendation engines (i.e., suggested products, cross and up-sell merchandising tools), that tailor product assortments to consumers based on aggregate information about their needs and desires. More recently, retailers have learned that content – reviews supplied by people – were more powerful conversion motivators to close a sale or validate a purchase.

The game continues to change, and it’s now more fluid than ever. Enter Facebook, where a plethora of positive peer recommendations are multiplied to deliver increasingly social connections between people’s social graphs. But we’re finding that negative product sentiment can act in the same manner, so brands have no choice but to pay attention and curate these conversations. The same holds for Twitter -- brands are finding they have no choice but to embrace the platform holistically (i.e., understand the technical and experience protocols; modify dialogue with consumers accordingly). Big companies late to the game, on average, have only suffered for it.

So, how do we corral these silos to create personalized customer interactions and experiences that imbue an overarching brand identity?

1. Know your brand. Employ ground rules for your voice and aesthetic and hold firm when they are challenged. Make sure that these brand guidelines are extended to every consumer communication.
2. Use automation appropriately. Database-triggered communications help manage customer expectations, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t carry your brand messaging – or be fun. Which leads to …
3. Humanize the sales process. The shopping cart and checkout are the perfect environments for a 1-800 number and live online chat. Facilitate the conversation.
4. Meet the customer where they are. If your customer base uses Facebook or Twitter to discuss your brand – meet them there.
5. Do your products justice. Would you merchandise a $3,000 chandelier using one photograph? A single photograph might work for the “comparison shopper” – they’re already in the buying mode – but your new and affluent website visitor will demand “white glove” features such as rich images, live customer service, and perhaps audio or video. Remember to educate and entertain your shoppers.
6. Add value wherever possible. Tutorials, guides, and how to’s deliver both SEO value as well as thought leadership. Every customer loves the story behind a product – and they’re often willing to pay more for that story.
7. Plan for mobile commerce now. Amazon, eBay, and others already have excellent mobile apps, but you can create a mobile version of your website at a fraction of the cost.
8. Innovate and iterate. If you’re an ecommerce website, you’re also a technology company. Don’t shock users with large-scale website redesigns; instead, take a cue from Amazon.com and Facebook by iterating often – introducing new features that are informed by data and customer feedback.
9. Experiment 20% of the time. Projections and goals are key to running a successful ecommerce business, but don’t be afraid to test some well-reasoned tactics. A prior false negative could be your greatest opportunity today.
10. Integrate. Integrate. Integrate. Ecommerce is not a silo. Social marketing isn't either. They are horizontal business activators that should be woven throughout a brand's marketing portfolio. Smart brands view all of marketing through a single lens, where efficiencies emerge through coordinated partnerships, promotions, communications, and product development.

The online commerce marketplace has evolved to a social commerce ecosystem. Brands must harness this fluidity to fully capture the opportunity – understanding how personal the relationship people can now have with brands is the first step. We challenge brands every day to adopt this philosophy, but only a few are truly able to keep pace. Are you? Let us know. Please comment below or contact me, the author, at: [email protected]. Feel free to reach out to our other retail and ecommerce innovator, Paul Marobella at [email protected].