ICH MARKE DU JANE

Am 1.12.2009 fand in München das PR 2.0 Forum statt. Diskutiert wurden die Veränderung der PR im Social Media-Zeitalter und aktuelle Case Studies verschiedener Unternehmen. Sie boten einen guten Überblick darüber, wie Unternehmen ihren Einstieg in Social Media fanden, wie sie diesen Kanal aktiv nutzen und was sie aus dem Umgang mit dem neuen Medium gelernt haben. In einer Paneldiskussion, an der auch Stefanie Wagner-Fuhs teilnahm, wurden die Anforderungen an Pressesprecher und Ukom-Leiter in PR 2.0-fähigen Organisationen diskutiert. more »

When you work as a telecom and media industry consultant for a while, you learn how hard it is to strategise, research, brainstorm, or just try to magic the next this-will-make-me-my-family-and-oh-yeah-my-company-a-million-bucks application for the mobile phone. No matter what you do, the pesky, top-performing application remains the humble, old-fashioned, but incredibly efficient and relatively cheap (depends somewhat on location) SMS. With the arrival of the iPhone, and more importantly, the iTunes App store, I think things are changing…really fast. And I have no doubt that Android and Windows Mobile and company will catch up with time as well. But…these days I dream in bits and bites of iPhone applications and am buoyed up by the popularity but also the usefulness of some of the applications out there. For instance, I’ve recently liked having 9 Toolbox – a useful set of utilities like tip calculators and public holiday listings by country. Another good one out there for even the casual photo snapper is Photogene – a great mini photo editor that does a LOT within a tiny space. Beyond mere usefullness is inspiration and  Adidas’ new Urban Art app showcasing the street art in Berlin complete with GPS walking guides to which you can even add your photos showcases the originality and creativity of some of the apps. Finally, let’s not forget the addictive fun of simple games like Flood-It! (Yeah, I admit it – I am a little nerdy.)

My iPhone app dreams have been interrupted recently, though. At first it was mostly nuisance: “oh, someone else yapping about the wonders of Twitter. Ignore.” And then it became some sort of vague interest: “Really, you find it useful? hmmm, for information that I can’t get via Google Reader or otherwise?” And then progressed to alarming as I wondered if I was totally missing the boat: “Do I have to tweet too?” And really since then (sometime last summer), I have traveled up and down this rollercoaster trying to double guess if this Twitter brew-ha-ha is all just hype and marketing (sigh. yes, I am a marketer) and talk talk talk.

But.

Lately, I must admit, I am a little bit in love. Not with Twitter itself. But with what some companies and private individuals are doing with Twitter. Here are five of my favorite ideas of late and I think there is real brilliance to be further defined within the possibilities of this 140-character texting movement. (If you know me, you will understand why 4 out of 5 of them are food related):

BakerTweet: You are a baker? Ah ha. And your bread/cakes/cupscakes/pastries/addictive carbohydrates just came out of the oven? Ummmm, yes, I can smell them. You have some customers who would really prefer to get your goods as fresh and warm as possible? Well, easy. Tweet. Alert these people that it is time to stop by and get their hot cross buns.

Tastelive: Need some port to drink along with those biscuits you just bought? Not sure if you want the tawny? With tastelive, wine enthusiasts around the world get a chance to listen in on the rantings and ravings of the top wine personalities. Just follow binendswine and you can join wine tasting events as they take place – comment or ask questions of experts live.

Energize: (this is the non-food example) Here’s a clever way to search for new agency blood. Utrecht-based agency, Energize, is looking to hire an account manager and a strategic planner. They want to make sure that their people have some social media cred and experience and have therefore designed an application form that looks exactly like a page on Twitter, including an empty text field. Candidates enter a short message—describing why Energize should take a second glance at them for the position, plus their email address and Twitter username. Uploading a CV is optional.

Kogibbq: This one was launched last fall. Kogi Korean BBQ fuses the flavors of Korean barbeque with the ease-of-use (read: portability) of Mexican tacos and burritos and creates a whole new type of food addiction in the process. The food is sold primarily through two trucks that cruise around the Los Angeles area. You need a fix? Customers have to follow Kogi on Twitter to find out where the trucks are at any given moment. Apparently, more than 20,000 already do.

Maureen Evans: Perhaps my favorite of the bunch, but the least "useful." Maureen describes her services thus: “Tiny recipes condensed by @Maureen, Serves 3-4. Delicious ideas from all over the world.”  And I am really in awe. In 140 characters, Maureen tweets entire recipes for fairly complicated fare.

Check out her recipe for biscotti: "mix 1/3c sug/3T oil/egg/t anise flavr; +c flour/t bkgpwdr. Roll log to fit bkgpan; pat down. 30m@375/190C. Slice~14; brwn+6m/side."

She was recently reviewed by The New York Times, by writer Lawrence Downes, who also went to the trouble of testing out a good number of her recipes – without any help from anywhere else on the web.

Admittedly, this last listing is not about a new way to engage with customers, nor about more superior customer service, or even representative of a new genre of eCommerce. It’s just a fun and different way to share ideas, expertise and probably to make some new and interesting friends.

Which is what social media is all about.

The IAB just proposed a set of Metrics for measuring Social Media but this proposal still remains very conventional: Effectively measuring the success of social media marketing requires indicators that have been customized for particular categories in the social space and goals and have to go beyond reach and engagement. No other subject is receiving as much attention in digital marketing circles these days as marketing in social networks. This is no surprise given the ever-increasing number of active users on Facebook, LinkedIn and similar sites. Leading the way is Twitter, a micro-blogging service that has grown by an astounding 1,200 percent in the past year. Attempts to reach members of social networks using conventional forms of online advertising such as banners, however, have not been successful. When the German business networking site XING began embedding ads on the profile pages of its premium members, users were outraged. These communities simply will not tolerate intervention that impedes direct social interaction. One way around this difficulty is for companies to hire experts to enter into dialogue with users or to provide applications that offer users something more, like on Facebook. The main reason why many companies are still hesitating to try out these options is that they are uncertain how to gauge their effectiveness. As usual, marketing executives have to show exactly how much ROI their initiatives will bring. There is a widespread tendency to measure the effectiveness of social media marketing using conventional online-marketing KPIs, and the current IAB proposal is not going far beyond this. I tend to say that this the wrong way to go. Conventional online campaigns have a set length of time and are judged on things like Visits, page impressions, Duration of Stay or conversions. Social media initiatives, on the other hand, are usually designed for the medium to long term, plus they pursue different goals, like developing relationships with users and positioning influencers for the brand. Instead of subjecting social media goals and ROI to standard measures of campaign success, marketing professionals should apply metrics used in customer service and CRM. After all, customer satisfaction and customer retention are good signs of the success of social marketing campaigns too.

Defining goals and developing a systematic approach

Before a marketing department can measure the success of an initiative, it is essential for it to define the goals of the initiative and to know what the company wants to achieve with, say, an application. What is it that will determine success? Will it be a certain number of followers or influencers? Or will it depend on reach? In addition to precisely defined goals, it is important to establish and follow a systematic approach that will enable comparisons with other social media initiatives. A framework of this kind should at least include four components:

• Engagement: How will users engage and interact with content, apps and media in the social network?
• Impact: What effect will my content and topics have on users? Do they consume, interact or share?
• Stickiness: How long and how often are users interacting with the content or application?
• Quality of Reach: What is the quality of user profiles or user networks? Do they have large networks and can they or their networks be classified as influencers in the relevant area?

These items are important when defining metrics for different social media areas and tools, However, analysts and strategists will need to break down special indicators individually, depending on the goals of the company and the type of application.

Indicators for social media measurement

Social media – as a collective term – is not a single, neatly defined area. Each site has different goals and expectations, so different indicators are necessary to measure success. Just because you’re talking about Twitter or a Facebook application or even a banner on MySpace doesn’t necessarily mean you’re talking about the whole of social media. Standard KPIs like number of downloads are fine for a Facebook application, but very different indicators are needed for Twitter and online communities. A better approach for Twitter for instance would be to use listening tools and text-mining technologies to classify buzz. They give companies information about brand or product-related conversations, including how much is being said, how engaged the participants are and how serious the discussion is. More advanced tools like Twitalyzer can go far beyond that toward the quality of influencers and participant of the conversation. They do not ony reveal how frequently people send tweets on the subject to their friends, what keywords are being used, how often influencers contribute, e.g. by “re-tweeting” as well as the number of listeners and how they are being reached. Last but not least, they provide preliminary information about the tone of tweets. The posts of influential Twitterers can be monitored by a company and integrated in an internal workflow for further processing. Marketing professionals can measure the success of this strategy based on the quality and quantity of tweets posted on a certain topic and on the degree to which influencers “influence” their followers.

The most important thing, though, is that each platform needs its own individual set of metrics that take into account all four key components– Engagement, Impact, Stickiness and Quality of Reach. We still mainly see definitions of Reach and Engagement parts but this is not enough.

Bereits am ersten Tag der CeBIT nahm Oliver Schiffers (Head of Marketing Strategy & Analysis, Sapient) innerhalb des Webciety Programms als Diskussionspartner am Panel "Social Media Marketing" teil. Das Thema des Panels ist in soweit für Oliver und Sapient hoch interessant, da die Analyse und das Monitoring von Social Media entscheidende Erfolgsfaktoren für das Marketing darstellen und die Strategien neuartig und oft ungeplant aufgesetzt werden.

Die Diskussion brachte nun folgende Statements und Erkenntnisse hervor: more »