Conferences & Networking

Social Media Marketing Summit: Brand Spotlight on Best Buy

Posted on Oct 14, 2008 in Conferences & Networking, Social Media | 2 comments

This panel was done differently from the rest at the Social Media: The Marketing Summit conference at the beginning of this month.  Instead of a self-moderated panel, event organizer Lisa Picarille moderated this by grilling the two panelists from Best Buy on Blue Shirt Nation (BSN), their internal social network.  The panelists were:

• Steve Bendt, Sr. Manager Social Technology, Best Buy
• Gary Koelling, Sr. Manager Social Technology, Best Buy

These guys were hilarious AND on target – something that was supposed to help out the advertising guys with selling plasma screen televisions turned into such a great outlet for employees.

Bullet Point Review!

• Started out with a couple hundred users across the network of stores.
• For the first few months it was just a collection of jokes shared with fellow employees.
• Started in June 2006 – by October ’06 the execs liked it and threw money at them and said, “Grow it.  Fast”.
• They actually gave some of the money back so they could take some pressure off and feel free to fail on the way to growing.
• Used the money to go to the stores around the country to get feedback from employees on what they wanted to use the BSN for.
• It no longer belonged to Steve & Gary; it belonged to the users.
• They needed to build trust – gave out t-shirts and stickers to woo the employees they talked to.
• Part of the success is relate-ability to Steve & Gary but not much.  Gary said, “We can’t be interesting for that long”.
• Members became just as important, if not more, as admins.
• Early on they identified users who had admin potential and promoted some moderators.
• In 2 years they’ve only had to moderate 3-4 posts.
• Mostly users are moderating each other pretty well.
• The average employee age for Best Buy is 22, so these are the social media generation.
• A device/mobile version is coming so execs and higher up employees who rely on these devices more than the average sales clerk can access the BSN readily.
• Have there been any outside benefits? They hosted a video contest to help boost 401-K enrollment – something they thought for sure would fail when the HR department came to them with the idea.  401-K enrollment increased 30% with 40,000 more employees nationwide enrolling.
• Does it help control the “bad stuff” that gets out there?  Not really; they do have about a 50% turnover rate, which is just the nature of retail.
• How do things get acted on?  They pass on feedback to those who need to hear it.  Example: the company was going to announce that they were going to be severely modifying the employee discount and that got leaked to the forums.  Activity skyrocketed with concerned employees who put out there all the reasons why they needed the discount to stay as good as it was.  Management listened and kept the discount unaltered because they not just saw people complaining but saw intelligent discourse on why people wanted it to stay the same, and they agreed.
• There have been a lot of smaller and medium sized issues that corporate has seen on the BSN and acted on.
• Now employees have a voice that matters.
• Has there been an impact on employee retention?  This MAY be coincidental since they have no actual data to back it up, but they did notice that before the BSN, Best Buy had about a 60% turnover rate, and as of a couple of months ago it was down to below 50% for the first time ever.
• Has the venting been positive?  What they see more often than angry venting is organic problem solving & collaboration.  Example: person at store A says they have a fixture that doesn’t look right, person at store B chimes in to tell them it’s the wrong one and who they should call to get the right one.
• They can set up user names like any other social network, but they are traceable back to their employee ID if they break the rules.
• Videos are uploaded almost every day, original music; it’s interesting to watch how people group up, whether it’s by their personal interests, departments they work in, etc.
• BSN is all internal, but one step they took towards being external is BSN Bazaar.  Vendors can set up a room & members can come look up product info.
• Also launched a universal gift registry, GifTag.com.
• Most companies aren’t built for co-creation like this; they’re built for command & control.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• There’s no immediate plan to expand the BSN to consumers.
• When an employee leaves the company, their account is blocked – it’s an HR thing.  They’d love to keep them around; maybe it’s something they can work out in the future.  If they rejoin Best Buy, their account can be reinstated.
• Has there been any correlated rise in sales?  There might be, but they really haven’t been looking at that data or concerned with it.
• Sales aren’t the point.
• Used an open source platform called Drupal to set up the network; had to kill & resurrect it several times in the early days.  Now they have a great relationship with the Drupal developers.
• There haven’t been any cases of management retribution that they know of.  The closest they could remember was that someone complained (rather clearly and thoughtfully) about a particular product line the store carried and their negative opinion of it.  Someone in purchasing, probably related to the decision to carry that line, saw it and asked them to remove all the posts.  They refused because the employee hadn’t broken any rules and they were honoring the social contract.
• Any plans to sell this to other businesses?  No, they’re not in that business.

Fascinating stuff; it’s great that the Blue Shirt Nation has stuck to the social contract of being for the employees and isn’t violating that with some evil corporate agenda.  Sounds like something more retail chains might consider doing.

CJU Course: Innocent Until Proven Guilty

Posted on Oct 12, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing, Conferences & Networking |

his is the last of my notes, finally!  This panel promised to deliver real live examples from advertisers and publishers who have faced the best practices issues and discovered the resolutions that helped both sides continue a successful working relationship. The panel consisted of:

• Brian Conchuratt, Sr. Sales Manager, Commission Junction (Moderator)
• Matt Earls, Sr. Marketing Manager, Yahoo!
• David M. Lewis, CEO & Founder, Cashbaq
• Kurt Lohse, CEO & Founder, Keycode.com
• Maggie Tucker, Manager of Performance Marketing, Intercontinental Hotels Group

I didn’t get many notes from this session, but it was some good stuff.

Bullet Point Review!

• 2009 is the year of the data feeds.
• CJ is listening to publisher complaints about data feed accuracy and uniformity.
• Threshold of quality needs to be raised on CJ so advertisers can take advantage of IT resources effectively when asking for the creation of data feeds.
• Utilizing data feeds is top priority for the top publishers.
• Advertisers wonder if anyone’s listening?  Always looking for better ways to speak to publishers.
• Understand what your core publishers need.  Give them exactly what they want.
• Lead time is good to make it easy.
• Don’t mark offers urgent if they’re not – publishers need to appropriate their time wisely.
• Understand how your publishers want to communicate, whether it’s IM, email, phone, etc.
• It’s difficult to write one email for all publishers.
• -> Don’t worry about flashy templates, data is the most important aspect.
• -> Segment to different publisher groups and address their needs.
• Keycodes white labels their syndicated content.
• Publishers should tell the advertisers straight out if they develop a new promotional method.
• The higher the trust level, the more aggressive you can be with payouts.
• Look at click-through URLs, conversion rate, cancellation rates.
• -> Not looking for secret recipe, but just a general idea of what the publisher is doing.
• Good publishers are looking to be transparent and will let you know when they’re experimenting.
• Violation of T&Cs us more of an opportunity to start a conversation than to punish.
• Affiliates are direct marketers.
• Run the numbers before you go to publishers with unappealing offers or news to prove it’s necessary.

There was no time for Q&A on this panel, but there are definitely some good take away tidbits.  This concludes all my notes from CJU!  Until next year…

CJU Course: Web 2.0 Affiliate Marketing in Practice

Posted on Oct 9, 2008 in Affiliate Marketing, Conferences & Networking |

This session was September 18th and promised to tell publishers and advertisers alike how to embrace web 2.0 in their marketing campaigns and get in on the discussion about upcoming trends for emerging markets, Commission Junction, and the industry as a whole. The panel consisted of:

• Angela Mihalakopoulos, Associate Business Development Manager, Commission Junction (Moderator)
• Shergul Arshad,Vice President Business Development, Stylefeeder
• Melissa D. Salas, Director of Marketing, Buy.com
• David Silverman, Director Business Development, Aggregate Knowledge

Other than a stray weird comment about user generated content being the primary technology of web 2.0 (it’s not a technology), the panel was pretty good.  Lots of good ideas, but I apologize in advance if my notes are a big fragmented.

Bullet Point Review!

• The piece of the pie this represents is still small.
• Common tie for web 2.0 is UGC (user generated content).
• UGC drives social interaction.
• Collaborate, engage, interaction, control.
• You don’t have to do everything, do what’s right for your business.
• Web 2.0 allows the ability to grow rapidly.
• Open source software is your friend.
• Modules: RSS, blogs, video, podcasts, forums, chat rooms.
• Bookmarks integrated with advertisers RSS feeds.
• Many technologies can work together without developers to alter them.
• How do you measure?
• -> Increase in conversions/revenue.
• -> Ask for reviews.
• -> Brand awareness can’t always be measured.
• -> For video, how long did viewers watch
• -> Natural search
• -> Test & improve.
• CJ has “emerging markets” team.
• Advanced link section works well with web 2.0 technologies.
• Market to individuals instead of segments.
• -> Use personalization and customization whenever possible.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• Try using the CRM angle when approaching management about embracing these web 2.0 avenues.
• Create your benchmarks at the beginning so you know your goals.

I was a bit ahead of the curve in terms of web 2.0 so I heard a lot of stuff I’d heard before, but hopefully this is new for you!

Social Media Marketing Summit: Brian Solis

Posted on Oct 4, 2008 in Conferences & Networking, Social Media | 2 comments

As promised, I will deliver with more notes from the Social Media: The Marketing Summit conference.  This was the second talk of the conference promising to tell attendees why social media is the new and much better PR and how to garner attention and then make the most of it.  The featured speaker was:

• Brian Solis, Founder and CEO, FutureWorks

I’ve heard of Brian previously and had the pleasure of meeting him upon my arrival at the summit Wednesday morning.  Incredibly nice guy – I later found out through Twitter that it was his anniversary and he’d still agreed to come talk!  And it was a great lesson on social media as public relations.

Brian shared some pretty well-known charts he’s created, which we even mentioned in our panel as well since they’re so provocative.

Bullet Point Review!

• PR people are the most popular at any company.
• Social media is like a renaissance of sorts.
• Markets are conversations, participation is marketing.
• We can’t control the message anymore.
• We miss what we’re not part of.
• One -> One and Many -> Many are important communication concepts to use in social media.
• Something to think about: how do you define influence?
• There are 120,000 new blogs started every day (I believe the source was Technorati).
• Social media is not just blogger relations.
• PR is not about top down anything anymore.
• Old metrics no longer ally with the new web.
• Something to think about: are you an evangelist or a consultant?
• Are you confined to the role of a social marketer or do you represent something with long term value?
• This is about public relations – remember that!
• Everyone feels like they’re an expert about something.
• Social media creates a new hybrid of PR professionals.
• We become influencers.
• Understand how to match people to products.
• There are 3 sides to every story – what you want to say, what people want to hear, and the truth somewhere in the middle.
• People = viral.
• No social media is rooted in broadcast, 1 way streams, or blasts.
• Who owns this channel?  Sometimes it’s advertising, PR, marketing, customer service.
• It requires a champion internally, but it’s really everyone’s responsibility.
• It’s the listening that separates experts from the theorists.
• People become pseudo-sociologists – each community is radically different.
• Chart your social media.
• Identify ways to deliver value.
• It’s about conversations not messages.
• Cultivate relationships.
• Remember you’re speaking with people, not an audience.
• DO NOT jump in and start pushing a message or shilling.
• DO NOT SPAM.
• DO NOT fake it.
• Remember that social media requires daily participation.
• Interactive marketing is starting to seriously clash with traditional advertising.
• PR is contending with outsourced relationship managers.
• Web marketers are grappling with digital content creators.
• PR is no longer defined by hits.
• For every bit of information you push out, the higher your authority as an expert becomes.
• Conversations are traceable.
• Social media is not the final frontier – this is just the beginning.
• The semantic web is around the corner.
• Social media is a means, not an end, and is a lesson.
• Being human vs. humanizing your story.
• Either you’re an employee or you’re an evangelist.
• All your social media efforts work back to building your personal brand.
• Respect the community and it will respect you.
• Companies will earn the relationships they deserve within social media.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• How did you decide where you need to be?  Looked at keywords, thought leading people’s names to see where they were, there are tools to show metrics.
• When asking some major brands why they got into social media, they just said they felt like they needed to be there.  When asking them how they track they said “We don’t.” which is cool but scary at the same time.
• There is math you can do to see where or how deeply to participate.  Look up your brand + sucks to see the suck factor and use that to gauge your success.
• What do you look for in hiring a community manager?  They vary, the ones who really understand social web are very expensive.  Use the social media tools to find them – put out a tweet, use LinkedIn.

Great stuff that helped to set some of the high level concepts on social media for the relative newbies in attendance and people who really had the questions on how to make social media work for their business.  I’ve seen lots of people talk about how powerful social media is, but this was very related to make it really work well for your brand and company.  Great job!

Social Media Marketing Summit: Mobile Marketing

Posted on Oct 2, 2008 in Conferences & Networking, Social Media | 4 comments

The topic set forth is mobile marketing and social media’s impact.  Unfortunately, through no fault of the organizers, the panelists fell way short of linking mobile marketing to social media at all.  My laptop battery died at the beginning of this last session, so I was unable to post it right away like all of the other panels today.

• Amielle Lake, Co-Founder & CEO, Tagga.com
• Ben Bajarin, Director of Consumer Technology Practice, Creative Strategies.

One of the first things that Amielle said is that neither of them have very much experience with mobile marketing, and she tried to use this as an example of how new a medium this is.  Sorry, that just discredits you right away as not knowing what you’re talking about.  There were a few points, but I was less than impressed.

They were very clearly unprepared and ended what they were talking about (which had nothing to do with social media) rather quickly and opened up for audience questions and anecdotes.  Some of the audience members even seemed just as qualified to speak about mobile marketing as the panelists, and the panelists looked like the questions confused them at times.  To their credit, some of the questions were incredibly detailed and long winded, so perhaps they just didn’t know how to approach them right away.

Bullet Point Review!

• Advertising industry as a whole has been looking to just re-purpose current content for mobile instead of doing something innovative.
• There’s been a rise in the number of people who own smart phones.
• Smart phone advertising needs to be contextual.
• Devices are using the web as a common feature.
• We are very far behind globally in mobile technology in general – Asia is in the lead, and Europe is even significantly more advanced than the US.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• Does the 45+ crowd just not get it?  They’re learning; there’s definitely a slower adoption process.
• How do you serve ads with any quality?  Amielle answered with a plug for her company.
• What are the challenges in dealing with various carriers?  They will eventually want a piece of the action, but right now the biggest hurdles are technology – you need to use an SMS aggregator who’ll set you up with the short code and do the wheeling and dealing with the carrier for you.  They cost a lot of money up front, take 4-6 months to get set up, and then charge a monthly fee on top of that.
• Mobile marketing has incredible potential to be highly targeted and sophistically geotargeted.
• US carrier structure is very different from Europe and Asia’s.
• SMS content is definitely more appreciated by consumers, so you have to give good content for any kind of advertising along side it to be acceptable.
• Hard to satisfy broad interests – some interfaces will be more appreciated than others by various groups and individuals.  Can’t please everyone.
• Is there a tool that will aggregate campaigns and marketing across different channels like mobile, social media, email, and possibly integrate them? Nope, but that would be great (thank you for that stunning report, Cpt. Obvious).
• Are there standard tools to filter the incredible amount of user data?  Actually, data being collected now is limited to carrier, type of phone, time of interaction, click-through if there’s a mobile site, very basic stuff.  There are ad platforms that can assist in targeting your ads to the right audience.
• It will get better, but more precise data with demographics and geographics isn’t there yet.

Ultimately this session turned from a panel into more of a loose discussion and plug fest, and really, aside from a throw away mention of a Facebook app on phones, had nothing to do with social media.  Had they introduced it like a “clinic” type open forum discussion, it wouldn’t have been so awkward but the expectation of panel experts was already set.  It was a disappointing end to an otherwise good conference, although through no fault of mThink.  I hope for these speakers’ sakes that they brush up their power point skills and general professionalism and come a bit more prepared for their next speaking gig.

Social Media Marketing Summit: James Lamberti

Posted on Oct 2, 2008 in Conferences & Networking, Social Media | 2 comments

This should be interesting, as the topic is on the intersection of social media marketing and search.  The speaker is:

• James Lamberti, Senior Vice President of Media and Technology, comScore.

Started with a comScore plug – that’s kind of a turn off for me personally.  I’m the kind of person that is savvy enough to look you or your company up on Google if I didn’t know about you before and actually care to know more going forward.  Seems like something a search guy would understand, right?  I know that obviously people accept speaking engagements, in part, because it brings attention to their company, but to use it as a platform for a mini commercial is a faux paux – or at least should be – in the conference world.

I digress, overall it was informative if just a bit dry.

Bullet Point Review!

• In 1996, 2/3 of the world’s online population is in the US.  Now it’s more spread out.
• Most commonly used internet categories include Search, Entertainment, and Retail.
• Social networking sites are exploding, so are multimedia sites such as YouTube.
• Community and Personals sites are seeing negative growth, likely a result of social networking sites replacing a large part of these sites’ functionality.
• America is slowest growing area given internet maturity, but there’s explosive growth internationally.
• 25.3% year-over-year increase in queries on search.
• Eyeballs -> Awareness, Consideration, Preference, Action, Loyalty -> Buy.
• Most consumers admit to being receptive to more leisurely products like music and entertainment being advertised on UGC sites than necessary items like financial services and utilities.
• MySpace monetization nearly 6x that of Facebook.
• Search is everywhere, not just on search engines but within the communities themselves, like YouTube, MySpace, Facebook.
• 2.5 billion queries within YouTube.
• 68% of web users never click on a display ad, and only 16% drive 80% of all clicks.
• Clickers are predominately younger with lower income.
• 90% of site visitation is view-through with no engagement.
• There are free tools lying all around the internet to help.
• 83% of the sales impact of Search is latent or offline.
• Brand advocates represent about 40% of online buyers.
• Advocates are very avid searchers – 104 queries vs. 72 for non-advocates per month.
• Hasn’t seen anyone really leverage search to create an advertising campaign or tie  it to a social media strategy.
• Identify search query points-of-origin to determin optimal markets for print, TV, radio ads.
• Search intersects with EVERYTHING.
• Search is a logical and desired outcome.
• The value of search is almost always dramatically underestimated.
• A lot is being left on the table – too concerned with ROI metrics sometimes.
• Search is an under leveraged asset in the strategic and creative process.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• Engagement mapping trying to measure touch points, undervalued.  Shave money off your TV campaign and make sure your search is solid.  There’s no more an expression of human interest than someone actively looking for your brand.
• Ways to take this knowledge and make it actionable?

Last complaint, I swear!  If you have a lot of interesting data points with numbers and facts, don’t skip through them in nanoseconds.  There was a lot of interesting data presented, but no time to write it down.  Jumping around slides is a bit awkward as well, but if you’re a data nut that wasn’t as concerned with writing things down as I was this was a valuable presentation to be sure.  I enjoy sharing facts and percentages with others because they have more weight, but can’t share them when reviewed at 90 miles per hour.