Being In the Moment

Unless you’re new to TheDrewBlog, you’ve probably figured out by now that I’m moderating a panel this week on real-time marketing down in warmish Florida. Marshall Wright, Director of Social Media at T3, is another illustrious member of our panel and brings lots of insights and experience to the conversation.  I particularly enjoyed learning about how the team at T3 has worked the Windows Phone into numerous real-time conversations.

Drew: Define real time marketing in the fewest number of words possible.  

Real-time is being in-the-moment without looking like you’re trying to be in-the-moment.

Drew: What does it take organizationally to run a successful real-time program?

It takes knowing who you are as a brand, what your voice is, what your business objectives are and what your customers want from you. It takes buy-in from the C-suite down to the day-to-day client level, and having all the right people ready to take action. It takes technology and creativity. And it takes a shit ton of planning.

Drew: Tell me about T3’s real-time efforts on behalf of Windows Phones?

Over the course of over 50 brand and competitor device launches, we’ve learned that most device conversation happens within 48 hours of a launch so we wanted to take advantage of that while still staying true to who the brand is. So for the launch of a competitor device, we prepped by doing a ton of social listening and research to find what people were saying about key features likely to be announced – tone, sentiment, etc. and developed a messaging strategy and content to insert our brand at the right moments in the lead up, during, and after the announce. This allowed us to find the key brand–relevant moments for us to join the conversation, resulting in one of the most retweeted posts of the (launch) day.

Drew: What’s your favorite real-time program that T3 had a hand in and why?

Honestly, one of the most simple moments came a few years ago when the turtles escaped on the JetBlue runway at JFK resulting in a ton of delayed flights. This was shortly after the Bronx Zoo Cobra Twitter stunt, so someone created a JFKTurtles Twitter and started tweeting the journey of the turtles. It was great and caught on immediately. We were managing Windows Phone social and caught on to what was happening and started following along. Angry Birds had just launched that day on the phone and the turtles tweeted they were going to play a game of Mario Bros. It was a perfect moment for the brand to participate in the conversation without looking like they were just trying to be part of a “thing” and we had a great 4-5 tweet conversation with them in real-time that wound up on a list of the best brand responses to the turtles.

Drew: Why do real-time programs seem to fall flat so often?

Because there’s a perception that newsjacking – inserting your brand into every pop culture, trending moment — is real-time. And it’s not. Yes, it can be a part of that, but it really takes knowing who you are as a brand and where you fit. If your not authentic or relevant to the moment it shows immediately. As a brand, you need to pick and choose your moments.

Drew: Should we be talking about real-time as a separate thing or is just part of a smart social strategy today?

It’s smart strategy. At T3, we actually refer to it as “always-on” rather than real-time because it IS smart strategy. As a brand, if you’re going to be in social media, if you’re going to put yourself out there you should be ready to engage whenever your customers are ready to engage. Not just during key cultural moments but all the time. Have a social listening program set up and know what you’re listening for. Then engage when it makes sense all the time. Doing that sets up the foundation for you to be able to take advantage of those cultural moments in ways that makes sense for you and that give your customers a way to celebrate for you and with you, like in the JFKTurtles example.

Drew: Will we still be talking about real-time next year and if so why?

I guess it depends on what happens during the Super Bowl this year.

Real-Time Marketing Unmasked

With the Superbowl just a week away, leading edge marketers are, in the fabled words of Tim Curry, “breathless with anticipation” of the potential Real-Time Marketing opportunities awaiting them. These folks have been scenario planning for weeks if not months with the hope that they can steal the show away from the ads, football players AND reigning RTM champ, Oreo. So its little wonder that RTM will be a hot topic this coming Thursday at the Social Media Insider Summit AND lucky for you, I’ll be moderating a panel on that very subject. Among my savvy panelists will be Teresa Caro, SVP of Social and Content Marketing at Engauge, who was kind enough to once again share her insights on this here blog.  Thanks Teresa.

Drew: Define Real-Time Marketing in the fewest number of words possible.  

Done right: Timely, on-brand content that is relevant to an event or trend, created to elicit an emotional response and/or drive action.

Done wrong: A shiny marketing object, fueled by a knee-jerk reaction, that once posted, makes you the subject of ridicule by your peers.

Drew: What does it take to launch a successful real-time program?

  1. Be realistic about your organization. Every company is different — has different types of legal regulations, different approval processes, different levels of trust in their agencies and employees, etc. The amount of preplanning required is ultimately determined by what it takes to ensure a brand feels comfortable navigating the real-time space.
  2. Recognize real-time marketing is more than a well-timed Tweet. You need to think of it more broadly as timely, on-brand content that is relevant to an event or trend, created to elicit an emotional response and/or drive action. Real-time can be how you handle a physical event in the social space. How you handle a crisis. It’s how you address consumer needs or consumer love or express of frustration. Take it into the offline world and it is the use of data and mobility to share messages with people performing certain actions or in a certain location.
  3. Have a strategy. What are your goals and objectives? What are you looking to achieve? What is your brand voice and tone? You need to have this first so when an event or meme presents itself than you have a filter to determine if the opportunity even makes sense.
  4. Have a plan. The extent of this plan depends on #1, #2 and #3.
  5. Promote it. I don’t need to remind you that the “build it and they will come” does not work here. It needs to be promoted somehow, someway to the right audience through the right platform.
  6. Practice, practice, practice. Don’t expect to hit it out of the park the first time around – and if you do, You Go Girl. This is something that requires practice, a theme, relationship building with your fans so they are ready to receive it and promote it, etc.

Drew: Tell me about your RTM work with Chick-fil-a?  

7.3 million fans on Facebook, 333k followers on Twitter and 36.8k followers on Instagram doesn’t happen overnight. It requires daily care and feeding to grow and ensure there are engaged audiences to receive the content and have an emotional response… Without the ongoing piece, there would never be anyone to create a big bang. As a result, we take an integrated approach of great planned content, real-time fan engagement and opportunistic content. Examples of real-time include:

  • Unplanned and reactive –
  • Planned and reactive –
    • We spend a lot of time working on our monthly content calendars, getting them approved and getting them scheduled, yet sometimes you need to pivot when you have an opportunity such as acknowledging how cold it is through out the U.S.
  • Planned and proactive
    • And sometimes you just need to be prepared for what’s coming and be timely, relevant and unique. How many did something relevant to New Years vs. heading back to work?

Drew: Why is real-time so hard to get right? 

  1. No objectives
  2. No brand definition
  3. No talent
  4. No process
  5. Too much process

Drew: What’s your favorite real-time program that your agency didn’t have a hand in?

Mini (see link.) This isn’t the first time BMW Mini did a campaign like this. They did a campaign several years ago and coupled it with social listening. They found the share of voice they received for the campaign back then, generated sales three months later.

Drew: Should we be talking about real-time as a separate thing or is just part of a smart social strategy today?

Part of a smart social strategy. Goes back to why it’s so hard to get it right… it’s currently a shiny object, fueled by a knee jerk reaction… it’s rare you’ll get this right.

Drew: Will we still be talking about real-time next year? If yes, why? 

Smart marketing and really bad marketing will always be talked about. Take a smart piece of content that was turned around in amazing time and it will always be talked about… Well, that is if it’s promoted the right way.

Drew: Okay.  Lightning round.  Let’s bang through the logistical issues…

  • DN: What does it take from a staffing standpoint?  TC: Depends on how much you want to do, what types, how frequently (special events vs. continuous)
  • DN: Client approval processes? TC: Some brands can’t manage to pull this together because there is such need for multiple approvals of one post
  • DN: What brands should avoid altogether? TC: Topics that don’t align with their brand. Emotionally charged topics.
  • DN: Other barriers to success? TC: Lack of planning. Lack of understanding their own brand. Lack of understanding what they are looking to achieve.
  • DN: What are the right metrics? TC: Depends on your objectives.

Insights on Real-Time Marketing

Thanks to those clever folks at Oreo who stole last year’s Superbowl spotlight, real-time marketing  was among the hottest topics of 2013. (It even warranted its own abbreviation: RTM!)  Agencies and clients scrambled to set up “newsrooms” in the hopes of thrusting brands into “the conversation” at just the right moment.  Similarly, marketing swat teams were poised to pounce just in case opportunity knocked again during live events. Not surprisingly, few matched Oreo’s success at catching lightning in a bottle.  As the year progressed, “newsjacking” became both commonplace and an opportunity for epic fails (see top 16 from Econsultancy.)

As with all such trendy / newish / emerging  marketing approaches, once the excitement wears off, the professionals move in and help bring some discipline to the party. One such pro is Anne-Marie Kline, SVP/Account Management at DigitasLBI, whose agency has helped P&G and Buick among others ride the RTM wave.  I was delighted to catch up with Anne-Marie prior to our panel discussion next week at MediaPost’s Social Media Insider Summit.  As you will see, being a RTM practitioner is neither easy nor for the faint of heart.

Drew: Define real time marketing in the fewest number of words possible.  

RTM happens when a brand expresses humanity.

Drew: Can you provide some brief examples?

Tide: The Onion published a story about a Tide Brand Manager talking about a viral video – it was poking fun at Tide [and] the entire marketing community’s obsession with viral videos.  Tide responded in the only way possible – they made the video and posted it.  The Onion responded and the video took off in social media.  [For Tide examples see these Adweek stories–Sharkweek and Halloween]

Buick: During in Buick’s daily monitoring they noticed the trend of putting the phone down and enjoying life.  #putthephonedown  was trending off and on and Buick started making suggestions of what to do when you put the phone down in full support of Buick’s discovery platform.  Then they hooked up with Rhett and Link of Youtube and created a video all about putting the phone down and created a bigger effort to get people to enjoy #inthemoment. They supported it on their tumblr feed, asked the audience to make a pledge for being in the moment, and finally taking Christmas day off – from social media. [See Adweek story]

Drew: What does it take to pull programs like this off?  

  1. Dedicated resources on both sides on a daily basis.  This is about not only being ready to respond, but to build the muscle memory.   Listen, Create and Distribute.
  2. Present to the approver, next step legal if you have to.  Gone are the days of having multiple rounds of approval.  Relevance has a deadline and you will miss it if you are stuck in a conference room presenting ideas.  The client is much more in the creation, which helps to get ideas into market more quickly.
  3. Senior brand leadership to help clear the hurdles.
  4. Knowledge that you can’t do this for free with a skeleton staff.  It’s not free.  Budget must be earmarked for media and content creation.  Content shouldn’t be created unless a distribution strategy has been thought through.  Earned media has such power, more than is being realized just yet.

Drew: What are the three reasons why real-time programs fall flat? 

  1. When a brand forces entry into a conversation that they have no business being in.
  2. They approach real time in isolation — as a stunt– with no anchor in the broader brand messaging.
  3. Has nothing to do with what people care about.  You have to find the intersection between what is interesting to the audience and the brand purpose.

Drew: What’s your favorite real-time program that you or your agency didn’t have a hand in?

Mini Cooper does a great job on a regular basis.  One of my favorites was what they did around the horse in beef scandal in the UK.

Drew: Should we be talking about real-time as a separate thing or is just part of a smart social strategy today?

I know its called the Social Media Insider Summit, but Real-Time is a core / foundational piece to a sound marketing strategy.  What brand doesn’t want to engage with their audience on an everyday basis in a relevant manner while providing value?  This is what Real-Time can do for a brand.  It is always on and should be an integral part whether you are talking about expressing the idea in social channels or traditional.

Influencer Marketing From an Expert

tahoe shotOkay, okay, I know I have been talking a lot about next week’s panel on influencer marketing.  Well, tough.  I’m not even close to done. Trust me, this is a hot topic and there are experts to be consulted.  Case in point, Teresa Caro, SVP, Social and Content Marketing at Engauge (just acquired by Publicis) who suggested the panel topic to MediaPost in the first place.  But before we get to Teresa’s insights, here for the record is the official description of our panel which is taking place near beauteous Lake Tahoe:

Your Biggest Fans: Best Practices for Engaging Influencers
Building and maintaining relationships with influencers can be difficult and sometimes time-consuming. But, when done right, the relationships can be rewarding for both brands and for the influencers. How do you identify the key influencers for your brand? How do you maintain those relationships and what type of monetization is required to keep those influencers engaged? Join our panel of brands, agencies and social media specialists as they take you through the best practices behind influencer marketing.

Now onto the interview which I for one found particularly interesting.  After all, how often does one get to use the phrase “influencer porosity” in a discussion?

Drew: How do companies begin to implement an influencer outreach program?
First off, don’t allow a tactic such as social influence marketing drive your strategies. Objectives and strategies should drive your tactics. So, the first thing to do is to define your objectives and the strategies you will use to achieve those objectives. This is especially important with influence marketing because there are so many different types of programs.

Drew: How should companies approach an influencer? Should all potential influencer relationships be thought of as a long-term commitment? 
The answer to these questions all depends on your strategic framework and which social influence marketing programs you choose to deploy. And yes, because it is time intensive to identify and ramp up your influencers, we always recommend a long-term commitment, yet we understand this is not always feasible and again, depends on the program you choose to deploy based on certain objectives and strategies.

A few examples of the many approaches include:

  • Surprise and Delight: You already have social influencers out there talking about your brand. Why not put a program together that surprises them with samples to share with their fans or a simple gift to say thanks. This is a good way to get a sense for how an social influence marketing program would work for your brand. For several of our brands, we start here and then evolve to the next bullet.
  • Advocacy/Social Loyalty Program: Are you looking to evolve to more of a social loyalty program, identify your most valuable advocates and reward them appropriately? Chances are you already have a strong relationship with your Tier 1 and Tier 2 consumers and can simply reach out to them directly to ask if they are interested. It can be positioned initially as an unpublished loyalty program and a test. Once you get it right you can role it out.
  • 3rd Party Influencers: For those brands who are looking to launch a new product or need to hit their numbers during certain seasons, incorporating paid influencers into a campaign helps to extend the reach and increase brand resonance. In this case, we spend the time to find the right influencer through organic search with the occasional 3rd party provider.

Drew: What are some best practices for understanding the influencer-fan relationship?
Let’s face it, we want to reach the influencer’s fans. An influencer’s success depends on audience satisfaction and, by proxy, so does the success of the brand within those audiences. Understand what the audience expects from the influencer. If the influencer is passionate about pure bread dogs, will a message about Rachel Ray Nutrish resonate with them? Unlikely, since this brand is focused on dog rescue. If the fans are looking to be entertained, is providing the influencer with information (which may be useful to some) going to work with this audience? Know what the influencer values and what the fans expect.

Drew: How should brands approach “influencer porosity” in terms of shaping content, building relationships, and simply starting the conversation? 
It means when brands work with influencers directly they need to understand their primary and secondary channels, their role and purpose, how they flow and how they can be leveraged by the brand. The more effort you take to understand the more effective the results. When brands are working with 3rd parties, it again depends on what you are looking to achieve and through what kind of medium. If you want an influencer to review a product, you need to work with the 3rd party to let them know the type of influencer and the type of content you want. What’s fantastic about influencers now (it’ll probably evolve) is if they love your brand and they’re excited about the experience, they’ll meet their commitment and do more. We just finished up one influencer program and were excited to see the abundant number of Instagram photos… something we did not include in the contract.

Drew: How do you remain attuned to your relationships with influencers and by extension, the fans when social is constantly changing? 
Channels change, people remain the same. If a brand has a long term social loyalty/advocacy program, you are going to evolve that program as you would any relationship marketing program: by asking your audience what they need and expect. With short term programs, we always recommend the 70-20-10 rule: 70% is allocated to those channels/programs that we know will allow us to hit our numbers and get our bonus check. 20% is for those areas you know you need to do. The market has already proven it works, a brand just needs to figure out how best to get it to work for them. We feel influence marketing falls in this bucket. The 10% is for those shiny objects that come by. By having a budget and a process for these channels and tactics, it allows you to test and discard (or optimize) quickly without disrupting the rest of the marketing plan.

Drew: How can brands make sure they “don’t suck” as you suggested in your Slideshare presentation?
This is more of a brand problem, one that can be exasperated by social. I’m always fond of saying that social is like alcohol: the more you drink, the more it enhances your underlying personality. Social is the same way, the more you engage in the social space, the more a brand’s faults come to the surface (and their good features too).

Drew: When setting up an influencer program what are the right metrics for success?
Success is in the eye of the beholder. Before you embark on any program, ensure you know your business objectives and you know the KPIs that align to those business objectives (share of voice, NPS (net promoter score), pre-/post- brand awareness/perception, etc. The metrics for that campaign depend on what you are looking to achieve. We had one client who simply wanted to look more innovative than another brand. We have another who wants to deepen their relationship with their audience. We have another who is media-focused and measures success based on impressions.

Why the Future of Facebook is Bright (part 2)

If you happen to be Patrick Toland, your answer to the question “So Your Facebook Developer Isn’t “Strategic”. Does It Matter?” is likely to be “of course” since he is Chief Revenue Officer at Optimal, one of Facebook’s Strategic Preferred Marketing Developers.  That said, Patrick makes a strong case for why the future of Facebook is bright for just about everyone connected with THE social network in our interview below.  (And pardon the shameless plug but why not join us Feb 9-12 at the Social Media Insider Summit where we’ll be delving into this issue and many more while trying to ignore the sunshine of Captiva Island!)

Drew: Can you provide a brief description of what your company does and how Facebook fits in?
Optimal is the leading social ad buying and analytics platform.  We specialize in helping marketers effectively and efficiently reach audiences in real-time, AND we create tools that help companies evaluate their own social presence + their competitors’.

Drew: Some marketers are beginning to question the efficacy of Facebook.  Can you provide a (brief) recent success story on Facebook that you’ve executed?
Recently, we worked with a Fortune 100 Financial Services company, that wanted to find high-value fans / potential customers through social media.  Using a combination of our analytics products and Custom Audiences, we helped them refine their target demographics and increase their fanbase by 350%, while lowering costs by 60%.  Most importantly, we found them people, who were more likely to be customers.

Drew: How has being a Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer that helped your organization?
To become a PMD, an organization needs to meet a certain level of quality, service, and support.  It also means that we have experience working within the industry we are performing sales in.  Being a PMD has been helpful for us & the entire industry because it gives partners and potential customers the knowledge that we have met a certain level of qualifications.   AND, it gives Facebook a level of quality of control because, unlike the Ad Network space in the 2000’s, we have a set of credentials, and we’re ready to work with you.

Drew: As Facebook applications have proliferated and FB usage has moved to mobile devices that don’t support these apps, have you noticed a decline in the usage and/or effectiveness of FB apps?
The usage on mobile is only natural, and although the current trends might seem to the decline in usage for FB apps, this should only be temporary situation.  In the long run, the rest of the ecosystem should catch up.  As this happens, engagement should continue to rise and occur in real-time!

Drew: Are you bullish on the future of Facebook applications?  If so, why and how do you see them evolving?
Yes, of course.  As you mentioned above, FB usage is moving towards mobile devices, and that is something Facebook understands. Applications are being built to adapt to the environment over time, and the future should continue to be promising overall.

Drew: Can you share how you see Facebook advertising becoming more effective?
Of course – the opportunities on Facebook have always been very interesting given the ability to create targeted segments based on actual information that is updated in real-time.   Custom Audiences, Open Graph Targeting are couple great examples of recent developments.  This is much better than the survey based data making assumptions of what people are interested based on what they are viewing, and we feel that everything can only improve, with better ad units, and communication all around.