If you're still unsure what Twitter is, here's a fantastic video explaining it all...
Have You Called The Fail Whale?
Have You Called The Fail Whale?
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Monday, April 6, 2009
Here's an intersting point of view on whether companies need a social media specialist in-house. Pepsi is leading the way with the recent appointment of a global director of social media but there's still a common view that social media may be better outsourced to agencies, who can integrate social media marketing into their overall digital mix.
Do You Need a Social Media Marketer?
April 4, 2009, Brandweek.com, By Todd Wasserman
Do you like to go on Facebook and Twitter all day? Do you excel at making online friends and writing pithy tweets and status updates? If so, there may be a job out there for you!
If more companies follow the lead of Pepsi, Ford, Dell and Toyota, then social media marketer will become a growing occupation as more companies hire full-timers to interact with consumers on their behalf via Facebook and Twitter. But the lack of ROI around social media, and the belief that such duties should be spread around rather than concentrated in one unit, may limit that growth.
“Most companies just aren’t ready,” said Matthew Schwartz, president of MJS Executive Search, which placed Bonin Bough as global director of social media, a new position, at PepsiCo in September. Schwartz said he would not describe social media marketer as a hot new occupation yet. “Pepsi was a visionary.”
A recent survey of 110 of the top CMOs by recruiting firm Heidrick & Struggles in Atlanta seems to echo Schwartz’s point. The report found that social media was a relatively low priority—ranked in the bottom third. “Mostly it’s because of analytics,” said Lynne Seid, a parter at the firm. “The things that are measurable are a top priority. Most marketers see [social media] as an experiment.”
While almost every company does some form of social media marketing these days, the function is usually performed by an interactive marketing group and not broken out separately. Coca-Cola, for instance, clearly believes social media is important. The company created an office of digital communications and social media led by Adam Brown, director of digital communications for Coca-Cola, last month. But that group doesn’t hire a single full-timer charged with social media marketing. The company prefers that all employees in marketing and communications do some social media marketing instead. “Our model hasn’t been to have a staff that does nothing but respond to tweets,” said Michael Donnelly, director of worldwide interactive marketing for Coke. Donnelly said he believes having full-time employees charged with such a function comes across as disingenuous. “The only way is to be genuine and real,” he said.
That’s not everyone’s view. Dell has more than 40 full-time employees charged solely with social media marketing on behalf of the brand. Dell formed the group in 2006 after blogger Jeff Jarvis had shown how consumers in the Web 2.0 age can flex their muscles. Jarvis’ bad experience with Dell tech support, outlined on his blog Buzz Machine, in 2005, wound up hurting the brand’s reputation. “That was a factor and it was a catalyst for us to start listening and engaging people in the blogosphere,” said John Pope, a Dell rep.
Another pioneer in the space, Wells Fargo, has had a vp of social media since 2005, Ed Terpening. Part of the function of such a position is to determine which forms of social media are worth investing in. “We were the first brand that participated with Second Life and the first one to leave,” said Tim Collins, director of experiential marketing for Wells Fargo.
Wells Fargo entered Twitter in late March and Collins sees that as the big three of social media marketing outlets along with Facebook and MySpace. Other brands have been on Twitter for a while, including Dell, which has more than 80 accounts (most notably RichardatDELL with more than 5,000 followers) on the network and Ford, whose Scott Monty holds the title head of social media for the brand. As of last week Monty had more than 16,000 followers on Twitter and has authored close to 13,000 tweets—bursts of text of no more than 140 characters. While those tweets often plug Ford products in one way or another, he occasionally goes off topic as if to underscore the fact that he’s a real person. (Last week, for instance, he entertained a discussion with a follower about the fact that Bacardi rum is actually made in Mexico, not Puerto Rico as commonly thought.)
The mix of genuineness and salesmanship is a key to being a successful social media marketer, said Collins. “You have to have a passion for the space,” he said. “You can tell some people are very passionate and you can tell [when] it’s kind of forced.”
Though Collins said Wells Fargo has been able to prove ROI on its social media efforts in many cases, Schwartz said most companies are still tentative about social media marketing.
“There’s been a lot of pushback on that as far as marketing goes,” said Schwartz. “People think that social media doesn’t work. It’s hard to find ROI on pure social media marketing, but it’s a long, slow build, not something you see immediate gratification on.”
Do You Need a Social Media Marketer?
April 4, 2009, Brandweek.com, By Todd Wasserman
Do you like to go on Facebook and Twitter all day? Do you excel at making online friends and writing pithy tweets and status updates? If so, there may be a job out there for you!
If more companies follow the lead of Pepsi, Ford, Dell and Toyota, then social media marketer will become a growing occupation as more companies hire full-timers to interact with consumers on their behalf via Facebook and Twitter. But the lack of ROI around social media, and the belief that such duties should be spread around rather than concentrated in one unit, may limit that growth.
“Most companies just aren’t ready,” said Matthew Schwartz, president of MJS Executive Search, which placed Bonin Bough as global director of social media, a new position, at PepsiCo in September. Schwartz said he would not describe social media marketer as a hot new occupation yet. “Pepsi was a visionary.”
A recent survey of 110 of the top CMOs by recruiting firm Heidrick & Struggles in Atlanta seems to echo Schwartz’s point. The report found that social media was a relatively low priority—ranked in the bottom third. “Mostly it’s because of analytics,” said Lynne Seid, a parter at the firm. “The things that are measurable are a top priority. Most marketers see [social media] as an experiment.”
While almost every company does some form of social media marketing these days, the function is usually performed by an interactive marketing group and not broken out separately. Coca-Cola, for instance, clearly believes social media is important. The company created an office of digital communications and social media led by Adam Brown, director of digital communications for Coca-Cola, last month. But that group doesn’t hire a single full-timer charged with social media marketing. The company prefers that all employees in marketing and communications do some social media marketing instead. “Our model hasn’t been to have a staff that does nothing but respond to tweets,” said Michael Donnelly, director of worldwide interactive marketing for Coke. Donnelly said he believes having full-time employees charged with such a function comes across as disingenuous. “The only way is to be genuine and real,” he said.
That’s not everyone’s view. Dell has more than 40 full-time employees charged solely with social media marketing on behalf of the brand. Dell formed the group in 2006 after blogger Jeff Jarvis had shown how consumers in the Web 2.0 age can flex their muscles. Jarvis’ bad experience with Dell tech support, outlined on his blog Buzz Machine, in 2005, wound up hurting the brand’s reputation. “That was a factor and it was a catalyst for us to start listening and engaging people in the blogosphere,” said John Pope, a Dell rep.
Another pioneer in the space, Wells Fargo, has had a vp of social media since 2005, Ed Terpening. Part of the function of such a position is to determine which forms of social media are worth investing in. “We were the first brand that participated with Second Life and the first one to leave,” said Tim Collins, director of experiential marketing for Wells Fargo.
Wells Fargo entered Twitter in late March and Collins sees that as the big three of social media marketing outlets along with Facebook and MySpace. Other brands have been on Twitter for a while, including Dell, which has more than 80 accounts (most notably RichardatDELL with more than 5,000 followers) on the network and Ford, whose Scott Monty holds the title head of social media for the brand. As of last week Monty had more than 16,000 followers on Twitter and has authored close to 13,000 tweets—bursts of text of no more than 140 characters. While those tweets often plug Ford products in one way or another, he occasionally goes off topic as if to underscore the fact that he’s a real person. (Last week, for instance, he entertained a discussion with a follower about the fact that Bacardi rum is actually made in Mexico, not Puerto Rico as commonly thought.)
The mix of genuineness and salesmanship is a key to being a successful social media marketer, said Collins. “You have to have a passion for the space,” he said. “You can tell some people are very passionate and you can tell [when] it’s kind of forced.”
Though Collins said Wells Fargo has been able to prove ROI on its social media efforts in many cases, Schwartz said most companies are still tentative about social media marketing.
“There’s been a lot of pushback on that as far as marketing goes,” said Schwartz. “People think that social media doesn’t work. It’s hard to find ROI on pure social media marketing, but it’s a long, slow build, not something you see immediate gratification on.”
Friday, April 3, 2009
It was inevitable. Google are now offering search-based advertising that leads customers to content on Twitter. The service is running on Google and a number of social media partners and is an interesting experiment in whether Twitter Followers can be commercialised, or in fact have any real value in generating sales.
Google Uses Twitter to Sell Ads
Intuit Is First Marketer to Have Its Tweets Streamed Across AdSense Network
by Abbey Klaassen, Published: April 02, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Twitter may still be tweaking its own business model, but Google has found a way to use the popular microblogging service to sell ads.
The search giant has started offering marketers ad units that stream their five most recent "tweets" across the Google AdSense network. The first marketer to use the ad units is Intuit, whose TurboTax brand is trying to boost its Twitter followers. Intuit used several of the measures available for any AdSense campaign to target the ads, which are running on sites such as Bebo, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace and Alltop.
"It's syndicating whatever the team that works on the TurboTax Twitter account [@turbotax] posts," said Seth Greenberg, director of marketing at Intuit. When a user clicks on an ad it takes them not to TurboTax.com but to twitter.com/turbotax.
'Conversational vehicle'
The deal with Google also expands the audience for TurboTax's Twitter presence as the ads are syndicated it across the web. After all, while Twitter is growing and had about 7 million unique visitors in February, Nielsen NetView pegs the active digital media universe as 167 million people.
"We could have used this as an acquisition vehicle, but we're looking at it more like a conversational vehicle," Mr. Greenberg said. We're measuring this [in part by] how many followers can we get. Can we get to 100,000 by allowing people to know we're a resource? We're not going to hard sell you on the product, but we want people to know there are lots of people here who can help answer your questions."
The ability to put real-time feeds and data into ad units has existed for years, but one of the technological limitations of this particular execution was that users can't actually click on links that are included in the "tweets," or posts by users. Right now, the feed only pulls from TurboTax's Twitter account, rather than pulling a stream of tweets that mention the brand or tax-related issues. A Google spokesman said it is doing "limited" tests with a "small number of advertisers and publishers."
Not exactly a new concept
The concept of aggregating tweets and syndicating them on web pages isn't new, either, although it's more commonly seen on an individual's blog or other content-based websites than it is within paid-media placements. There are several widgets, blogging tools and independent third-party apps that can be placed on a website or blog to stream tweets organized by user, hashtag or keyword. Earlier this week, Glam Media launched an offering called Tinker.com, which lets advertisers buy ads around events or conversations. For examples, a retailer could buy all Twitter conversations around the Oscars, and those Twitter conversations -- along with the ad -- would show up on sites Glam Publisher Network.
The TurboTax ads are running during the last two weeks of tax season -- crunch time for tax-prep marketers. According to TNS Media Intelligence, Intuit's tax brand spends more than $100 million in 10 weeks. Intuit did not disclose how much it spent on this particular buy or whether the unit was sold at a premium ad rate.
TurboTax spokeswoman Colleen Gatlin mans the Twitter account, along with her public-relations team and Christine Morrison, social-marketing manager at the company. She considers them "enablers" -- they get people's questions to the folks who can provide answers. There are many reasons why the company is on Twitter, she said, but one big reason is that the microblogging site humanizes the brand.
Network effect
"We're raising awareness in the social community that we're here helping consumers," she said. "We make changes based on customer feedback, we're learning about the process."
Mr. Greenberg said he's still trying to work out exactly what a Twitter follower is worth from a marketing point of view, such as whether people have a greater propensity to become a customer when they're following a brand on Twitter or how valuable those customers are. But he's sure one of the advantages to the tool is its network effect.
"We're doing research about people who engage with us but also more interesting are their friends and followers," he said. "People can influence others in their own networks."
Google Uses Twitter to Sell Ads
Intuit Is First Marketer to Have Its Tweets Streamed Across AdSense Network
by Abbey Klaassen, Published: April 02, 2009
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Twitter may still be tweaking its own business model, but Google has found a way to use the popular microblogging service to sell ads.
The search giant has started offering marketers ad units that stream their five most recent "tweets" across the Google AdSense network. The first marketer to use the ad units is Intuit, whose TurboTax brand is trying to boost its Twitter followers. Intuit used several of the measures available for any AdSense campaign to target the ads, which are running on sites such as Bebo, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace and Alltop."It's syndicating whatever the team that works on the TurboTax Twitter account [@turbotax] posts," said Seth Greenberg, director of marketing at Intuit. When a user clicks on an ad it takes them not to TurboTax.com but to twitter.com/turbotax.
'Conversational vehicle'
The deal with Google also expands the audience for TurboTax's Twitter presence as the ads are syndicated it across the web. After all, while Twitter is growing and had about 7 million unique visitors in February, Nielsen NetView pegs the active digital media universe as 167 million people.
"We could have used this as an acquisition vehicle, but we're looking at it more like a conversational vehicle," Mr. Greenberg said. We're measuring this [in part by] how many followers can we get. Can we get to 100,000 by allowing people to know we're a resource? We're not going to hard sell you on the product, but we want people to know there are lots of people here who can help answer your questions."
The ability to put real-time feeds and data into ad units has existed for years, but one of the technological limitations of this particular execution was that users can't actually click on links that are included in the "tweets," or posts by users. Right now, the feed only pulls from TurboTax's Twitter account, rather than pulling a stream of tweets that mention the brand or tax-related issues. A Google spokesman said it is doing "limited" tests with a "small number of advertisers and publishers."
Not exactly a new concept
The concept of aggregating tweets and syndicating them on web pages isn't new, either, although it's more commonly seen on an individual's blog or other content-based websites than it is within paid-media placements. There are several widgets, blogging tools and independent third-party apps that can be placed on a website or blog to stream tweets organized by user, hashtag or keyword. Earlier this week, Glam Media launched an offering called Tinker.com, which lets advertisers buy ads around events or conversations. For examples, a retailer could buy all Twitter conversations around the Oscars, and those Twitter conversations -- along with the ad -- would show up on sites Glam Publisher Network.
The TurboTax ads are running during the last two weeks of tax season -- crunch time for tax-prep marketers. According to TNS Media Intelligence, Intuit's tax brand spends more than $100 million in 10 weeks. Intuit did not disclose how much it spent on this particular buy or whether the unit was sold at a premium ad rate.
TurboTax spokeswoman Colleen Gatlin mans the Twitter account, along with her public-relations team and Christine Morrison, social-marketing manager at the company. She considers them "enablers" -- they get people's questions to the folks who can provide answers. There are many reasons why the company is on Twitter, she said, but one big reason is that the microblogging site humanizes the brand.
Network effect
"We're raising awareness in the social community that we're here helping consumers," she said. "We make changes based on customer feedback, we're learning about the process."
Mr. Greenberg said he's still trying to work out exactly what a Twitter follower is worth from a marketing point of view, such as whether people have a greater propensity to become a customer when they're following a brand on Twitter or how valuable those customers are. But he's sure one of the advantages to the tool is its network effect.
"We're doing research about people who engage with us but also more interesting are their friends and followers," he said. "People can influence others in their own networks."
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