RENEGADE THINKING from the CEO of Renegade, the social media & marketing consultancy that helps clients make more out of less by transforming communications into "Marketing as Service."
Drew's Articles
Social Media

7 Crazy Ways to Increase Your Followers on Twitter

03/10/11

In the more-the-merrier world of Twitter, follower count is an obsession for some brands, whether personal or corporate.  Rightly or wrongly, increasing this count has become an industry in itself, with tools and gurus whistling new promises like the Pied Piper of olde.  There’s even a ranking of the most followed CMO’s that has become a coveted bio item, bestowing instant credibility in the new social order.

A recent survey (see highlights on Slideshare) among Twitter users reinforces the urgency behind the growing obsession with follower counts. Conducted by Renegade with the Business Development Institute, the study identified a huge gap between the have’s and have not’s, finding that over 85% of Twitter users have fewer than 5,000 followers.  While a whopping 75% expressed a desire to substantially increase their follower counts, less than half actually had a strategy in place to do just that.

Troubled by this situation especially in light of Charlie Sheen’s highly publicized Guinness Book of World Record setting achievement last week, it seems to me that we tweeters need to find new character in 140 characters and we need to have all those wonderful twits out there find us.  So yes indeed, now is the perfect time for this cynics guide to increasing your follower count.

1. Be a celebrity
Honestly, there really is no easier way to increase your follower count than to be famous and already have lots of obsessive fans.  Whether you’re Justin Beiber or Lady Gaga, Shaquille O’Neal or Ashton Kutcher, your minions will simply fall all over your every tweet.  Say something nearly clever or almost worth reading and millions more will find you in a click of a mouse.  Not famous, yet?  Well, keep reading.

2. Be a notorious celebrity
When Charlie Sheen added 1.3 million followers in just over 24 hours this was big news, and he suddenly had another place to share his miraculously self-destructive behavior that he describes as “winning.”  Lest you think he’s totally insane, with endorsement deals from Broguiere’s Dairy and Naked Juice hanging on his every tweet, Sheen indeed may end up having the last laugh on Twitter.

3. Buy your followers
If celebrity is out of the question, then maybe it is time to get out the cash and simply buy your friends.  The remarkably reputable GetMorePopular.com guarantees they can get you or your brand more followers in no time.  Want 10,000 more followers? This enterprising start-up will get them for you in 1-4 weeks for only $999.99.  And for just another 25%, they’ll even find you followers you would consider in your target!

4. Bribe them with prizes
Joel Comm, in his best-selling book Twitter Power, recommends among many other techniques, offering prizes or free gifts to attract new followers.  For example, one of his apostles, @fitbizwoman gave away a free ebook with 120 smoothie recipes to help increase her follower count from a few hundred to several thousand.  While this may seem a bit crass, worry not, if the shoe fitbizwoman, wear it!

5. Follow to be followed
If bribing seems a bit too primitive, then perhaps an aggressive follower campaign is in order.  Using power tools like TweetAdder and TweetBig, the idea is to identify likeminded tweeters who just might follow you back.  Searching their tweets, profiles and follow to follower ratios, you can suddenly follow hundreds of potential followers in a matter of minutes.  While testing TweetBig, without breaking a sweat, I myself added over 300 followers some of whom might actually care about what I have to say.

6. Unfollow the unfollowers
After you’ve aggressively followed hundreds if not thousands, you’ll then want to clean house, removing the ingrates who had the nerve not to reciprocate your follow. Again, by using tools like TweetAdder and TweetBig, unfollowing is as easy as following.  In fact, Tweetbig even has something called a “time bomb” that will auto-unfollow in a specified number of days. Since 75% of the surveyed Twitter users in our study said the follow/follower ratio was important to monitor, the “time bomb” feature should be an explosive hit!

7. Follow your new followers
During my same test of Tweetbig, while adding 300 new followers, I also lost 70 old ones.  Turns out, some of my old followers took it personally when I didn’t follow them back.  This led me to a tool called UnfollowMe, which helps assess why your sheep might leave the flock and hopefully fix the problem.  One thing is for certain, if you don’t want to take a follower for granted, follow them back post haste or risk their stealthy exit.

8. When all else fails, be interested and interesting!
Now comes the really hard part. Like chicks in the nest, your new followers will be hungry and must be fed.  A steady diet of highly digestible content should do the trick, although it wouldn’t hurt if you actually cared about the conversation at hand.  Try listening to relevant tweet streams and adding your POV with panache.  Turns out, just as in real life, it is as important to be interested as it is to be interesting in Twitterland.

Final note:
Despite my cynicism, try not to underestimate the value of a strong following on Twitter.  Reports Ted Rubin, Chief Social Marketing Officer at OpenSky, who has more than 43,000 followers, “Having thousands of followers has given me a broad audience of marketers, bloggers and social media enthusiasts.”  Rubin adds, “Follower counts are important [for brands] because that is what gives them access to the social graph of others and that is the true power of Twitter, the ability to spread a message. “  (For a deeper discussion on this same topic, join me at BDI’s The Social Consumer – Case Studies and Roundtables.)

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Drew's Articles
Marketing as Service

How to Ice the Competition via Marketing as Service

06/10/10

With the Great Recession looming on the horizon, Catherine Davis, then the SVP of Marketing Services at Diageo, knew it was not a time for the usual, and called for an entire re-distillation of her online marketing program. Noting that, “In 2008, we saw a big shift to home consumption,” Catherine and her team at the world’s largest spirits company set the bar high, aspiring to “own cocktails” and to “preempt the competition” in order to gain share. When the program rolled out in the latter part of 2008, it soon achieved all its goals providing a “top-shelf” example of the power of Marketing as Service.

With the totally reconceived microsite TheBar.com at the core along with a paid search program and partnerships with leading recipe sites feeding it, Diageo effectively dominated the online cocktail recipe search and fulfillment during the all-important holiday seasons in both 2008 and 2009. Traffic to TheBar.com, according to compete.com, was four times that of any of the leading brand sites, peaking at a whopping 286,621 visitors in December 2009, thus allowing this punctilious author to outline for you seven key ingredients to icing your competition.

1. Turn Lemons into Lemonade

Catherine reflects upon her efforts at Diageo with a matter of fact tone that minimizes the true nature of her challenge, stating simply, “The economy had gone south and we needed to grow share.” Easier said than done. Many marketers saw the storm clouds but most just closed the windows on their efforts, choosing inactivity over new initiatives. Catherine, on the other hand, planned out a fully integrated online program that had real scale in the market in order to take advantage of the shift to home consumption. “We looked around and we saw a lot of programs, but they weren’t generating a lot of scale,” offered Catherine, whose three-pronged approach turned economic lemons into share-gaining lemonade.

2. Know Your Patrons

Prior to the re-concepting of TheBar.com, Diageo conducted extensive qualitative research to understand the needs of their target. “Our research showed that consumers lacked a lot of confidence about how to make a cocktail,” offered Catherine who used these and other insights to guide the makeover. Noting that “rum and Coke is the 9th most searched recipe,” Catherine and her team focused on content that was easy to grasp even for novices. Instructional videos and hundreds of simple recipes made it easy for “consumers to see what they really wanted,” added Catherine. “We understood the purchase decision process and what they needed to do to feel good serving cocktails,” thus insuring that TheBar.com fulfilled a real consumer need.

3. Shake Things Up

Marketing at its best is a mutually beneficial exchange of value between brand and consumer. The original TheBar.com sought that exchange as entertainment, trying to replicate a genuine bar experience complete with a chatty bartender named Jack. Turns out, even the hardiest of spirits lovers aren’t seeking that online experience and instead visit brand sites primarily for recipes. “We went from being a combination of entertainment and service to really being 100% focused on service that consumers wanted,” noted Catherine who also hired a new agency, Tribal DDB, to help with the transformation.

4. Find the Right Mix

Knowing the critical role of search in consumer’s quests to find recipes, Catherine and her team sought to “own search,” both of the organic and paid variety. By ditching the flash-based content in the old site, improving key word tagging and adding a lot more recipes, Diageo saw significant gains in organic search performance. Adds Catherine, “We developed a multifaceted search program around drink types, spirits categories and brands, particularly around the holiday season – our period of higher volume.” Without revealing any confidential information, Catherine assured me that these activities were among the most cost effective she’d ever seen, driving qualified traffic to the site by the caseload.

5. Flavor it with Partners

Wanting a program with true scale, Catherine told of partnering with “the top 4 recipes sites, which represented 70% of all recipe volume.” These were not typical ad buys, but rather true partnership deals in which sites like AllRecipes.com and Delish.com focused on recipes that featured Diageo brands. “We know that about 1.6 million people search the word margarita each month,” offered Catherine as further evidence of the need to be everywhere the consumer searched. “The whole strategy was about going where people already were and intercepting them at the right point in the decision making process,” she concluded.

6. Measure the Right Things

Because spirits has a complex distribution system, it is very difficult to directly correlate marketing and sales. ‘Since we couldn’t tie it directly to sales, we had to develop proxies like number of page views and the number of brand views as a better proxy of success for cross sell and up sell.” As usual, this was grounded in a consumer insight as well. Offered Catherine, “When you’re planning a party you’re not thinking about a single brand or a single spirits category,” so monitoring page views and brand views by individual visitors along with number of recipes printed were simply the best means of measuring site performance.

7. Trust a Proven Recipe

Acknowledging that a recipe-focused program was hardly a new idea, Catherine laughed, chalking it up to the benefit of good training. “I worked on Pillsbury for 5 years at Leo Burnett and had seen the power of recipe campaigns and what they can do to drive a brand,” added Catherine. Knowing full well that “about 50% of people who are looking for drink recipes are looking for them online,” she pursued this approach with the clarity of purpose that only comes from experience. Catherine notes, “we knew what role we wanted to play and aimed to do so in a sophisticated and polished way that still enhanced all the Diageo brands.” Cheers to that.

Final Note: Though Catherine has since moved on, she considered this program to be one of the major highlights of her three years at Diageo. She also delighted in the fact that this premium example of Marketing as Service lives on, adding more content via a recent mobile edition and thus continuing to “fulfill a need and dominate the competition on recipe search.”

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Drew's Articles

No One Dies in Marketing (7 leadership tips from Kodak CMO)

05/26/10

Two days after resigning from his position as Chief Marketing Officer, Jeffrey Hayzlett was still saying “we” when referring to Kodak, a habit I suspect will take some time to break. Speaking with understandable pride after four years of remarkable accomplishments, Jeff answered my questions with an authority that at first left me baffled. Then it hit me. This is not your typical marketing maven. Jeff Hayzlett actually puts the Chief in Chief Marketing Officer.

Instead of talking about ad campaigns, we talked about products and value propositions. Instead of talking ideas, we discussed what a marketing chief needs to do to succeed in a rapidly changing media landscape. Its not that Jeff doesn’t care about ideas, its just that he knows those are by products of performing the CMO job as a true leader, a practice that I have broken down into seven bite-sized morsels for your immediate consumption.

1. Align Goals

Making sure your marketing goals align with the goals of the company seems like a fairly basic place to start but it is amazing how many senior marketers forget this important first step. “A lot of CMOs fail because they forget to get conditions of satisfaction,” offered Hayzlett, who spends a lot of time setting the goals and won’t move forward until he knows what will make his customer (in this case, his boss) happy. Jeff acknowledges that “a lot of CMO’s aren’t even in the C-suite,” which can make nailing down the goals quite a bit tougher.

2. Create Tension

Once your marching orders are clear, Jeff believes the next priority of the CMO is “to create tension in order to encourage more innovative activity.” When reviewing the launch of a new video camera, Jeff created tension “by asking questions no one thought to ask before,” even going so far as to publicly ridicule an alphanumeric product name. “That made some of my people cringe,” acknowledged Hayzlett, whose questions led to a public search for a new name that generated millions of free PR impressions, thousands of entries and one winning name—PlaySport.

3. Act Fast

As we jumped from topic to topic, it was clear to me that Jeff is nothing if not a man of action, and his biggest lament, “wasting time on things that didn’t materialize.” In a period of four years, he was able to launch several successful new products in both B2C and B2B segments, all of which were able to achieve 1st, 2nd or 3rd positions in their respective categories. Jeff noted with glee that 60% of Kodak’s revenue now comes from products that didn’t exist when he started there. When talking about the launch of the naming promotion for Play Sport, Jeff sounded more like the head of racing pit crew, having jumped from concept to execution in two weeks flat!

4. Stretch Budget

It is no secret that Jeff is a huge fan of social media noting that, “It’s a great way to launch a new product and gave us an extreme amount of credibility in the video camera category.” Targeting “every blogger and thought leader,” Hayzlett and his team were able to make Play Sport a strong alternative to category leader Flip without spending a dime on traditional media. As he points out in his new book, The Mirror Test, Hayzlett sees social media as an extraordinary way to connect with consumers and stretch a budget under an umbrella notion he celebrates as OPM, or “Other People’s Money.” Given the low costs, even the smallest businesses can see very tangible returns from social media,” offers Hayzlett.

5. Breakdown Silos

Recalling the extraordinary success that Kodak has had in the ink jet category, Jeff zeros in on how Kodak changed the value proposition in the category, offering reasonably priced ink cartridges to go along with a reasonably priced printer. “When the printing of a recipe is more expensive that the actual ingredients, the consumer knows there is a problem,” noted Hayzlett. Because marketing had a “seat at the table” and participated in the product development process, Hayzlett was able ensure that a strong value proposition was baked into the product, offering a point of difference that made marketing a far simpler task. With the silos broken down, Kodak ink jet printers, according to Hayzlett, “achieved #1 share in some countries.”

6. Take Risks

“No one is going to die in marketing,” offered Hayzlett when discussing the justification for taking risks like playing a video featuring a gray-haired spokesman shouting “booyah” about how Kodak was changing. He went on to note that, “if you want to grow, you’re going to have to take risks. It’s not that Hayzlett is out to offend but as he cautions, “sometimes you don’t know ‘til you try it.” He prescribes “doing it in such a way to minimize the backlash,” and if things don’t work as planned, “its okay to say we screwed up.” Jeff recalls with bravado that his group was fined $500 for not filing a promotional contest in time, a calculated risk that ended up saving his team irreplaceable weeks in program development time.

7. Listen Up

After talking for a good bit, Hayzlett circled back to the importance of listening to the consumer and being “completely transparent.” During his tenure at Kodak, he brought “voice of the customer” to the forefront establishing the position of Chief Listening Officer “to bring scale” to all of Kodak’s social media activities. With a CLO in place, Hayzlett ensured that complaints were heard, questions were answered, comments were responded to and even more PR was generated. “When a consumer tweets ‘they are thinking about buying,’ then we listen and point them in the right direction,” added Hayzlett, whose innovative and authoritative approach to the CMO position at Kodak leaves some pretty big shoes to fill.

Final Note: During his tenure at Kodak, Hayzlett established himself as one of the first “celebrity CMOs,”gaining notoriety on Celebrity Apprentice and extending it with a well publicized book tour. With an army-sized following on Twitter, and a well-established presence in every form of media, I have no doubt we’ll be hearing a lot more from Jeff in the near future.

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Musings

Shaky Shack?

08/6/09

The Dallas Morning News carried an interesting story on Radio Shack’s new marketing campaign. The reporter, Maria Halkias included a lot of commentary from yours truly so I thought I just post the whole story. Enjoy.

RadioShack to launch rebranding effort as The Shack

RadioShack is trying to turn up the volume on its image by turning off the “Radio” and calling itself “The Shack.” Not to be confused with the Shaq who’s famous in basketball circles, The Shack apparently is a nickname that employees, customers and investors have used for RadioShack.

The Fort Worth-based consumer electronics chain’s rebranding effort begins Thursday with a national television, print and digital campaign and the start of a three-day launch event in New York’s Times Square and San Francisco’s Justin Herman Plaza.

The bicoastal hoopla will include 14-foot laptops hooked up to webcams for live video and audio exchanges. The company isn’t changing the name of its stores. Chief marketing officer Lee Applbaum said the nickname is an attempt at “contemporizing the way we want people to think about our brand.”

“The Shack speaks to consumers in a fresh, new voice and distinctive creative look that reinforces RadioShack’s authority in innovative products, leading brands and knowledgeable, helpful associates,” he said. The company believes it has “tremendous equity in consumers’ minds around cables, parts and batteries,” Applbaum said. Now it needs to get consumers thinking about its ability to keep them “connected in this highly mobile world.”

Ads in the campaign will focus on mobility and wireless products from AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Apple, BlackBerry and Samsung. “Radio Shack is in a desperate battle to remain relevant,” said Drew Neisser, chief executive of Renegade, a New York-based brand marketing agency.

“The name RadioShack is a quaint artifact in a rapidly evolving marketplace in which mobile devices have become the CE [consumer electronics] portal. Using The Shack as a nickname is a bid to update its image and represent the passion loyalists have for the brand,” he said.

However, company leaders may be “hedging their bets,” he said.

When Federal Express decided to become FedEx, consumers had already been calling the company that, and using the shortened name was a no-brainer, Neisser said.

“If consumers are really already using The Shack, then why not commit fully?” he said. “The only reason I can think of is that they are worried about abandoning the awareness and any positive equity remaining with their old name.” Using The Shack in ads only, “the whole thing could come across as forced at best and confusing at worst,” Neisser said.

The creative campaign was developed by Butler, Shine, Stern and Partners of Sausalito, Calif., which was named RadioShack’s creative agency of record in April.

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Drew's Articles

Drinking in Social Media

01/15/09

This article first appeared in Chief Marketer on January 12, 2009:

The word “liaise” is about as common in the U.S. as are reports of successful marketing efforts on Facebook and MySpace. To succeed in social media, brands would be wise to LIAISE, a word first coined by our genteel and cultivated cousins across the pond in the 1920’s. By definition, liaise means “to communicate and maintain contact with,” the fundamental goal of marketing on social networks. Modern synonyms like “link up” and “hook up” bring the word even closer to home. To tighten the connection, LIAISE becomes an acronym for a six-step process to connect with consumers via social media: Listen, Identify, Activate, Integrate, Socialize, Evaluate.

1. Listen

Listening to your customers is a marketing “no brainer” that seems to fall on deaf ears when it comes to social networks. Heavy-handed product messages are simply ignored on Facebook to the point that IDC labeled social advertising “stillborn” and Seth Goldstein of SocialMedia Networks wrote that banner ads are “universally disregarded.”

Bacardi found success on Facebook after customer research revealed its Mojito campaign had become wildly popular. Extending this campaign effectively meant engaging Facebookers via the Bacardi Mojito Party widget. This useful and entertaining application included a Mojito Cocktail Calculator and a game that allowed users to become bartenders. According to its creators, Buddy Media, over 100,000 adult Facebook members installed the “app-vertisment” in the first week.

2. Identify
Most of us come to realize at an early age that not everyone wants to be our friend. Painful as this may sound for mass brands, the same is true for marketers on social networks. Rather than fight this reality, savvy marketers will look at social networks as a unique opportunity to connect with well-defined micro-targets.

Absolut focused on aspiring bartenders with an application that connected Facebookers to a reality TV show called “On The Rocks: The Search for America’s Top Bartender.” To support the search, Absolute created a “Top Bartender” application that first served as a casting /bartender registration tool, and then enabled users to become an absolute bartender ‘fan,’ vote for their favorite bartender featured in the series, share photos, videos and post on the bartender wall.

3. Activate
A whole lot of marketers have fallen down and not gotten up again when they dropped into social networks ads first. Disappointed, they walk away not knowing in this case “A” is for Activate and not Advertise. To effectively leverage social platforms, marketers need to activate community by creating something of value that is either highly entertaining or extremely useful.

Bud Light found success by going the entertainment route. Their “Decode Your Dudeness” application on Facebook was a hilarious progression of silly photos requiring one to make a choice each time. At the end of the quiz, Bud Light fans scored a customized ”Dudeness” rating that was equally humorous and highly viral. Bud Light found a way to activate that was true to their brand and worthy of sharing with a friend (hmm, just like a nice cold beer.)

4. Integrate
One of the quickest ways to be anti-social is to think of your social media effort as a stand-alone program. This is the equivalent of planning a big party down to the last detail and then neglecting to send out invitations. Having an integrated effort that extends the engagement both within and beyond your social media partners is a sure fire way to get the party started.

Beck’s relatively fresh “Different By Choice” campaign includes a strong social media component that is surrounded by traditional advertising. “The Daily Different” blog features comedian Darius Davies as the content curator, and so far, the content is indeed different and entertaining. And the Beck’s wiki invites consumers to add and develop the brand’s story in a unique fashion. It remains to be seen whether the promised arrival of Darius on Facebook and YouTube will attract a crowd, but the consistently integrated approach of the overall campaign certainly gives it a fighting chance.

5. Socialize
Social media campaigns should not be confused with “pop-up stores” that come and go in a New York minute. Like good friendships they need to be cultivated over time. And like a great hostess, marketers need to truly socialize, working the room, offering a range of entertainment options to ensure that all of their “friends” continue to have a great time.

For Absolut, the InAnAbsolutWorld.com website, acted as a platform for social interaction, inviting consumers to share, request, vote for, and blog about their vision for a ‘perfect world.’ Tools for engagement were provided for users to create and upload images, films, words and sounds that depict their visions of an ABSOLUT world – you can even download desktop wallpaper for your favorite vision. The website also housed videos of celebs and artists’ visions [Kanye West] of an Absolut world.

6. Evaluate
It is generally ill advised to request a conjugal relationship from someone you’ve never even talked to. Nonetheless, marketer’s eager to close the sale are consistently disappointed that they couldn’t do so via social media. When evaluating the effects of your social media campaign, it is important to have realistic expectations and measure everything from “friends” gained to application downloads to time with brand to website traffic and yes, even sales if the romance period was sufficient.

Bud Light’s “Decode Your Dude” quiz was the most downloaded application on Facebook during the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. The original ‘Dude’ spot has been viewed more than 2 million times on YouTube alone, and the four ads have been viewed more than 13.5 million times from sites like YouTube, MSN.com, break.com and MySpace.

To sum up, while many brands are keen to make “friends” via social networks, few are willing to take the time to learn this new channel and treat it with the requisite finesse. These brands are like drunken sailors who charge into a bar shouting, “who wants to dance?” When no one responds they get testy and proclaim, “This place is useless.” By adding LIAISE to their repertoire, marketers can drink in the potential of social media.

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