Author Archives: Heidi Skinner
Post 2 of 3. The Present, The Future, and How do We Get There? This part of my OMMA Social experience links trends that were talked about at the conference to my opinion and, in come cases criticism.
The Future: As a whole, there’s a whole lot of talk and not a lot of real action. What a shame. Lots of testing without calculated risk in 2008. For the record, I’m not angry at those early adopter efforts. I, for one, wish our own agency did more testing last year. As the industry eases their way into influential marketing, which is a combination of both earned and paid media; we’ll stumble over things like planning and measurement. Once we evolve those pieces, I think we’ll begin to see changes in 2 areas of our digital marketing approach:
#1. Lead with CRM, not basic marketing strategies around product awareness. We currently talk about finding evangelists and getting them to bring more people into the fold –influence their consideration set and purchases. But, in the future, (when most brands realize that they are chasing their tails) we’ll look at our current databases of consumers and crawl 
Revisions 2/10: The orginal post went up on Monday, but had a dialogue with Christine Champagne, freelance journalist/media critic who has written for publications such as OMMA, Adweek, Variety and Time Out New York.
She shared some of her thought-leadership, by saying, “I’m all for trying new things, but HoneyShed got a lot of things wrong, and this project appeared doomed from the beta stage. What it all boils down to is that HoneyShed tried really hard to be cool, and it just wasn’t cool. For all I know, a bunch of 20-year-olds produced this site. But judging by the throwback look and style and the, uh, “sexy” videos, I got the sense that HoneyShed was created by a bunch of guys in their thirties and forties who think they are hip because they work in advertising and make a shitload of money but are way out of touch with what the kids are into these days.” Thanks for your time. We look forward to reading more of your work!
Original Post:
Despite my criticisms, I really wish they would have pulled it off. I was hoping for an online shopping experience that broke the mold. This post is no where near breaking the story about Honeyshed shutting down, but I wanted to post a few thoughts about how they could have made it work.
I attended OMMA Social last week and it took me a few days to organize all of the information by sifting through all my tweets and mobile notes. For those of you that didn’t attend, I’m creating this thread in 3 posts. The Present, The Future, and How do We Get There?
The Present: We all agree that we’ve talked about it long enough. It’s time to get our hands dirty. There are 2 main themes that I saw coming out of the conference:
#1. The economy doesn’t mean cut social spending. If anything gets cut, it surely shouldn’t be social.
- Peer-reviews and WOM influence purchase now more than ever. Forrester, eMarketer and Jupiter are all singing the same social praises. Consumers are using peers to research before buying.
- Only 15% of the top Fortune 500 brands are participating in social. Get in before it gets more cluttered and fragmented.
- If nothing else, listen to the insights and measure paid media impact through social graphing and analysis. You can also use it to understand how you stack up to your competition.
- While they are pricey, there are tools that can help you track your social share of voice, traffic and ecommerce conversions. The key is to use them efficiently. Pull information that helps shape flexible creative messaging and ongoing distribution strategies.
- Other budgets should make the sacrifice. If 8 out of 10 holiday shoppers read web reviews, then we’ve identified triggers for conversion. Cut spending in places where we can’t track those conversions in this economy.
Wordle <http://www.wordle.net/> is a DIY site to make a word cloud for any of your favorite words, websites, blogs, feeds and social bookmarks. It’s simple. Enter a block of text to create a word cloud and various settings allow you to change colors and fonts.
The cloud above was created from the words on our very own Experience Matters page. There’s a lot of great words in there that make up an exceptional customer experience. I think we’ve got a great representation of our priorities:
· People. Consumers have to be the priority, this is marketing best practices 101.
· Technology. Technology helps brands reach consumers at the right time at the right place. It also helps us streamline those 1-on-1 conversations with consumers.
· Still. Consistency and relevancy is key to our practice. We live & breathe in perpetual beta.
· Collective. Live and breathe what consumers are saying about your brand. It’s not what you say your brand is – it’s what they say it is.
Remember a time when you had certain freedoms and someone ruined it for you? I remember when I was in high school and we were allowed to leave the school grounds to go out for lunch. A lot of kids began skipping classes instead. You already know what happened. They stopped letting us leave. A few of the reckless ruined it for all. Corporate social media makes me feel like my “lunch freedom” was taken away, again.
The recently released Forrester study, Time to Rethink Your Corporate Blogging Ideas states, “Only 16 percent of consumers trust what they read on company blogs.” Darnit. In the past year, we’ve watched 100’s of marketers create branded blogs.
What went wrong?
Many marketers weren’t prepared. In short, they were used to pushing mass-media communications and were not ready for a dialogue.
- Consumers caught on quick. They saw that many marketers weren’t honest in their outreach. Blogs and branded communities were selective about what comments and criticisms they’d allow to go public. What’s worse is that some of these “communities” didn’t allow for comments at all. I don’t need to tell you that using smoke and mirrors is wrong – we all know that.
- Many marketers were lit on fire. Build a Facebook application. Create a YouTube branded page. Commercial messaging flooded the platforms, and marketers weren’t equipped or ready to take on such a responsibility. I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve read in the past year – from some of the greatest minds in our industry- that say “go out and try it – it’s free.” Now we’ll all pay for it.
Is Social the wrong way to distribute my brand message? What do we do next?
“Make a Facebook Fan Page because it doesn’t cost anything. Create a YouTube Brand Channel to house your video assets – YouTube allows you to do it for free. Befriend 100 people on MySpace and create a Ning community because there are no fees…” If you’ve ever allowed yourself to say these things, please adjust your social media compass.
The expectation that social media tactics are free initiatives is a huge fallacy to both agencies and marketers. There are four reasons why a good influential marketing strategy should cost you money:
1. Focusing your scope costs money. Take the guess work out of social media by engaging a buzz monitoring tool. Before you decide on your brand’s approach, gain insight on the topics, tonality and volume of conversations around our brand before you get started. If not, you aren’t truly fishing where the fish are.
