Talk To And With Consumers
Archive for March, 2012
Finding People In Crowds Is Hard
Alec Painter and I are attending SXSW, representing Empower. We hope to provide a few more posts over the weekend to provide some insight for those who are not in Austin.
Probably the biggest pre-SXSW Interactive festival trend was that social discovery services such as Highlight and Glancee were going to break out in wide adoption. Meaning that later in 2012 you would see brand marketers using these tools to further drive engagement for their products and services.
We wanted to truly put the services through a test in the perfect petri dish that is Austin during SXSW. Last night we tried to connect with at least ten people using Highlight and Glancee (we know there are many more
) but for the purposes for our homework, we chose just two.
The responses were mixed as expected, everything from no response, to fun dialogues (think SMS conversation) to people actually trying to physically meet up based on our close proximity.
Crowds make it tough, out of the twenty people we reached out to, only one wanted to meet had a lot in common with Alec via mutual friends and interests, the only problem is that we couldn’t track him down in a large crowd. This proves that these services do provide value but physical obstacles (that have always been around) still exist.
Lauri Schwartz, Chief Technology Catalyst at McCann Worldgroup was one of many who carried on a nice dialogue with us. When we asked her to weigh-in on her thoughts of these types of services she replied, “a bit stalkery at first but love the concept of applying intelligent layers on top of a person’s Facebook social graph.” We too share her concerns around the “stalking nature” of these services. People have even been adding us as contacts without our being able to confirm like you can on LinkedIn or Facebook. This underlying concern makes us wonder if these services can ever reach mass scale beyond early tech adopters. People come from around the world to connect and share at SXSW, the same is true for any other event. Outside of this context, is there value when we are sitting at home or out at a bar?
From the value we experienced last night and given the opt-in decision a person makes to share their location and interests with others, we think these services and the technology they employ has a very promising future.
Crystal Ball: Expected Trends Coming Out of SXSW Interactive
Ok boys and girls, its that time again. What has become for many the annual migration to Austin, TX to escape from the office for a few days to catch up with old friends while making new ones over great conversations that always start and end at the intersection of science and art.
SXSW Interactive over the past 5 years as evolved to become the dominate force in the U.S. of bringing creative thinkers across technology, design and marketing. We have seen the likes of Facebook, Twitter and FourSquare ‘be the next hot thing’ only to really wait another year or so before truly hitting hockey stick trajectories of use and adoption. Last year specifically we saw FourSquare pull away from the pack and GroupMe dominate the on-going theme that group texting and sharing hit mainstream.
As I look out over the past year combining that with the onslaut of startup releases prior to this years festival, a few key trends emerge from my vantage point before even setting foot on Congress Street. Here we go:
People Discovery Via Apps
With releases of Highlight, Glancee, Sonar, Kismet and Ban.jo. Not only will these four duke it out for adoption and scale but it would seem that the VC crowd is all-in for this trend so look for continued entrances and funding to follow. My hunch is that while I might use these services every once-in-a-while, but I think I will keep my settings private for awhile. It is bad enough when people stock you based on FourSquare check-ins.
Content Marketing
I suspect Content Marketing will be even a more bastardized term than social media in the coming few years. It is clear from the likes of not only our clients at Empower but heavy hitters like P&G and Coke have already signaled that content marketing (publishing and distribution) is going to be a huge priority. The only point I would like to make is that when hasn’t content mattered or been the number one priority? I think if you survey agencies you would see that we have been arguing this since the early days of Google but clients didn’t care. We weren’t calling it content marketing but that is exactly what we were pushing. Now that Google’s best the farm on social search they in turn have forced brands to change their focus. I think this is a positive evolution for brands and their agency partners that serve them and the ultimate winner is the consumer but it is going to be just sad that we have to add another buzzword to our vocabulary.
Look for more posting from me during and after SXSW!
In Austin for the festivities? You can track me down via @drewmckenzie
Understanding the Media Mix: Lessons from Personal Finance
I spend a lot of time thinking about paid, owned and earned media and how to best plan, invest and optimize our clients dollars. A fellow Empower colleague, Alec Painter, put together a great analogy the other day for paid, earned and owned media that I would like to share with you all today. Below are Alec’s thoughts which I fully endorse.
The Evolving Media Mix
Over the past year or so I have seen a lot of discussion about the media mix and the changing nature of investments made in paid, earned and owned media. As marketers and advertisers, it is important for us to understand these changing tides and the unique value that each media brings. These concepts are complex and often times understanding them means hitting a moving target. It’s easier to use a simple analogy to get at the heart of the matter. This time, I chose something simple that most Americans should be able to understand: personal finance.
Paid Media
Think of paid media as your walking around money. I know that money in my budget will buy the tank of gas that is going to get me to work in the morning. It will also buy the cereal that I eat before leaving. That walking around money also buys the clothes that I wear and pays my utilities. It even got my dog the rawhide thing she is destroying on my carpet right now.
Paid media behaves much in the same fashion. If an advertiser spends this much they know that they will get that much in return. I can execute a multi-million dollar TV buy and expect to get X impressions and reach. I can pay for a contextual targeting display campaign paired with some paid search that will likely yield Y visits to my website. Like my walking around money, I know what I can get for it and it serves a distinct purpose. I can use it almost immediately and it is infinitely scalable (unfortunately, my paycheck is not).
Earned Media
When I look at earned media, I start to think of investment, but more smaller investments. It reminds me most of the money I set aside in my 401k or my yearly contributions to a Roth IRA. I cannot predict what is going to happen to the funds I have invested those accounts in. Like paid media, it could be infinitely scalable and I could be wealthy beyond my wildest dreams in ten years. It is also unfortunately unpredictable and the markets could tank tomorrow and I could lose all of my investments.
That is why of these investment accounts when I relate this analogy to media. Earned media is hard to predict, but you make the investment predicated on the assumption that if you manage the investment appropriately, it will yield something greater than the expense I incurred in that investment. If I manage my social media channels in the right way, craft good consumer experiences with engaging content, if I listen carefully and respond in the right way, I will stimulate word of mouth conversations that are practically priceless and worth much more than the money I invested in the exercise.
Owned Media
The last part of the media mix has been all the rage recently as I see an explosion of interest surrounding new(er) tactics like content marketing. It’s likely the hardest to fit into this analogy, and some people might disagree, but I see owned media almost the same way I see a mortgage. You take a huge investment in a down payment on a home and then take out a sizable, secured loan.
And for what?
For starters, you get the satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) of home ownership and the cost efficiencies of not paying rent. But, more importantly, you also build up your personal equity. Your timely payments mean that one day you can borrow against the equity you have built. And the occasional room addition or kitchen facelift will increase that personal equity and the value of that asset.
I see owned media as highly similar. It is typically a sizable investment up front, and while most brands have enough marketing dollars that they don’t need a bank loan, they are usually borrowing that money from other places in their marketing budget. But once you make the investment in owned media, it is yours to do with what you want. Your level of control is 100%. It could take awhile to scale, but sustained owned media engagement has the potential to build enormous brand equity, customer relationships, and can even start to yield earned media.
Heck, you can even choose to start to monetize your owned media investment (timeshares anyone?).
Managing Assets and Balancing Your Portfolio
So great. We have all of these analogies that help us understand how these types of media behave and some of the intricacies within. What do we do now? We have our marketing budgets. We have our business goals and objectives for the year. Which type of media do we invest in?
The answer: all of them. Assuming that everything is managed appropriately, the best use of my money is to contribute to my investment accounts, build up my personal equity, and still be able to pay my bills and keep my dog well stocked in rawhide. The same goes for your marketing dollars. Use your paid media appropriately, put some of your marketing budgets toward earned media, have the long-term view to invest in the right owned media, and your ultimate payoff will be larger than if you had chosen to stick with just one.
::By Alec Painter
© 2011 Drew McKenzie. All Rights Reserved.
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