BtoB firms plan to follow their BtoC cousins and spend more on social marketing over the next three years, according to a white paper by the American Association of Advertising Agencies.
The study quotes Forrester in predicting that by 2014, BtoB spending in social media will reach $54 million, up from the $11 million spent in 2010. BtoB magazine’s survey, “Emerging Trends in BtoB Social Marketing: Insights from the Field,” found that 93% of B2B marketers are involved to some degree in social media. And in BtoB’s “2011 Outlook” survey, 62.6% of marketers reported plans to increase their spending in social media channels this year.
“Although B2C and B2B companies use social media differently, many of its functions, such as monitoring competition, gaining customer feedback and building brand awareness really do apply to the marketing goals of both types of companies,” the 4As wrote.
“Of particular importance to BtoB marketers is determining if their social media efforts are paying off.” Marketers are tracking leads by looking at click-through rates and number of downloads, among other metrics–although fewer than half measure their efforts, according to a survey by BtoB magazine.
You think writers are the only ones concerned with telling a story? Listen to this.
Earlier this month three of six agency owners and recruiters interviewed by blogger Arik C. Hanson said the ability to tell a story was the leading trait they want to see in PR professionals. They believe storytelling reflects the facility to identify themes and execute a strategy. Yet when many of their peers screen applicants, they ask for experience that exactly matches the job they’re offering. They’re focused on the product, not the process, like the ability to build social networks, negotiate for information or get along with others.
For those in marketing communications, here’s the wake-up call: financial planners have discovered the power of story. In a column for MarketWatch, MIT’s AgeLab Director Joseph Coughlin said the traditional model of financial planning won’t work in these unsettling times. Neither will an appeal to reason through a recitation of statistics. He believes advisers who tell stories that elicit emotion and inspire people to act will achieve greater success–for their clients and themselves.
“We’ve got to be good storytellers to get that emotion, to make us relevant, responsive and realistic for what the consumer needs today to plan for tomorrow.”
Let’s hope the people who hire are willing to make that investment.
Today’s guest post is from Amanda Kaiser, one of the fresh young minds on the marketing scene. Amanda has worked with some of the heavyweights in the consumer sector and brings a lot of practical knowledge to the trade. Here’s a sample.
This summer I vacationed with my family in Cape May, N.J. If you’ve never been to Cape May think up-scale, cute, sea-side village with very interesting Victorian architecture. At the end of the day we’d take long walks that always led us past a small inn that was being renovated. Maybe renovated is not the correct term – semi demolished would be more accurate. The historic-inn-renovation company placed its beautiful sign out in front of the property like many construction companies do. But at that time the place couldn’t have looked worse – landscaping had been trampled, paint scraped, windows and doors were missing; it was gutted and looking very sad.
Unwittingly the renovation company was probably sending exactly the opposite message to prospective customers than they intended. Instead of saying “Please hire us, we do fantastic work” the overall feel was more like “Want to go through renovation hell? Call us!” Installing their sign just as things were starting to look really nice could have been far more productive.
Many marketing tactics run on auto-pilot so it’s worth regularly revisiting the things you always do and make sure they say what you need them to say, look how you need them to look, happen at the right time and appeal to your prospective customers.
Amanda Kaiser is the creator of The Smooth Path, a blog of simple marketing ideas for small business owners. She is the director of marketing for a non-profit association and has worked for some of the most well-known brands in the United States. When she’s not doing all-things-marketing she’s traveling, hiking, camping and baking with her husband and son.
Marketers are boldly going where no advertisers have gone before — subtly into the minds of viewers.
With an explosion of media and devices designed to bypass commercials, marketers are integrating their products into the fabric of movies, TV shows and social media sites. That’s not news. It’s the escalation and arrogance that’s taken this contemporary version of the 1960′s subliminal advertising to new heights.
A few examples: In February “American Idol” became the top TV show ranked by product placements when it delivered 102 instances of product appearances over the month, according to Advertising Age. Rounding out the top five are “The Biggest Loser,” “Gossip Girl,” “The Academy Awards” and “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.” “The Academy Awards” squeezed in 57 brand appearances. Top brands for all TV placements included Chevrolet, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Cybex exercise equipment and Apple.
There are several variations of product placement. There’s generic product integration, where characters smoke whether the act is germane to the plot or not. There’s product placement, where the product is a prop, like the case of Canadian Club, where the whiskey received hands on and on-screen exposure in at least four scenes of a recent episode of “Mad Men,” from characters handling a bottle to shots of the product sitting on a counter.
Then there intrusive product integration, such as the time when “Monk” character Adrian Monk told a squad room full of police not to worry about tracking a suspect because “I have a Dell and it’s fully loaded.”
Sports programs are famous for integration, from scoreboards branded by Gatorade to NASCAR racers covered with logos to commercial placements in EA Sports video games. The trend is spreading to social media, where product placement has come to Farmville among other games and sites.
It seems film has always included products as secondary characters. BrandChannel counted placements by 64 unique brands in “Iron Man 2.” It’s a marketing strategy that works, sometimes in reverse: the engagement ring worn by Bella in “Twilight: Eclipse” has become a real product.
You can see a montage of films with prominent product placement on YouTube.
And the winner for the most ubiquitous brand? Apple Computer, which won BrandChannel’s “2010 Award for Overall Product Placement” in its annual Brandcameo Product Placement Awards. (Runners up included Nike, Chevrolet and — no surprise to “Idol” viewers — Ford.) Apple products appeared in more number-one films in 2010 than any other brand — 10 of the top 33 films by box office receipts. In the past decade Apple products have starred in one third of all number-one movies — 112 of the 334 top-grossing films in the United States.
If you’re a creative who wants to market your work, comScore knows where to find your audience. They’re on Facebook.
Social media continues to attract more viewers and advertisers, according to comScore’s report “The 2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review.” Nine out of every 10 U.S. Internet users visits a social networking site every month, accounting for 12% of all time spent online in 2010, the digital measurement firm reports in the whitepaper. Facebook leads the pack of sites that receive that traffic with nearly 154 million unique visitors last year.
Advertisers have followed, serving up 4.9 trillion display ads, an increase of 23% over 2009. Social networking publishers delivered 34% of those ads, up 11% over the previous year.
Creatives interested in marketing their work on a shoestring might want to follow the trend. As they say on Wall Street, don’t fight the tape.
How much of what we do is by choice? How much is influenced by others?
Apparently quite of bit of what we consider choice is programmed from an early age, and a crucial part comes from the classroom. That’s according to a pair of university researchers who studied the effect of surnames on buying habits.
Chances are if your last name starts with a letter toward the end of the alphabet your teachers had you sit in the back of the class, or stand at the end of the line. That meant while people in front were chosen for various opportunities, people in the back had to wait.
When they became adults, they made up for lost time. So goes the theory by Kurt Carlson of Georgetown University and Jacqueline Conard of Belmont University, who conducted the research.
They think the reverse is also true. People whose first names begin with the first letters of the alphabet, the people who sat near the front of the class or stood first in line, got first crack at opportunities. They’re used to being first, so as adults they tend to “buy late.”
The issue of choice is more than academic, especially if we want to remain free of most propaganda, both political and commercial. Several authors have made this kind of research accessible. In OutliersMalcolm Gladwell discusses the case of the Korean co-pilot who, because of cultural inhibitions, didn’t aggressively challenge his errant pilot before a crash. Blogger Laura Rowley writes about the issue and happiness in general on Yahoo! Finance. And Columbia professor Sheena Iyengar explores the positive and negative effects of decision-making in her book The Art of Choosing.
The Internet has redefined the way people produce and distribute information. Now it’s up to organizations to figure out how to generate interest and revenue in the new environment.
In the new ecosystem top-down distribution doesn’t work. Spreading information does. That’s how online social networks operate and why advertisers are clamoring to reach the influencers who dominate those networks. But the network is only half the issue. The other half is content. Here an organization’s goal should be to create information that others want to spread. Think humorous YouTube videos.
This is all by way of Henry Jenkins, the founder and former co-director of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT and author of Convergence Culture. In his new book, Spreadable Media, Jenkins takes the idea of media convergence a step further by discussing how and why the digital generation distributes information. And in that explanation is a clue for corporations, journalists and other news generators about how to join the conversation.
So how do organizations survive in the digital ecosystem? His mantra on information is simple: If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.
Take the case of bloggers, people Jenkins calls “grassroots intermediaries” who help spread news by way of their online social connections. They don’t treat their information as proprietary. The best news sources and brands create content and then “actively encourage readers to spread their materials, often directly courting them as participants in the process of distribution.”
To make this distribution process work a source must ensure the content is relevant to the audience. “People are making conscious decisions to aid the circulation of certain content because they see it as a meaningful contribution to their ongoing conversations,” he says. That requires sources to reframe their view of content and distribution. “For the producer, the content may be a commodity or a promotion; for the consumer, it is a resource or a gift.”
You can read the full interview with Jenkins by Nikki Usher at the Nieman Journalism Lab of Harvard University.
What does it take to create a trend, a movement, a runaway success? Leaders? Followers? Or someone in between? An important question for creatives, marketers and others who try to harness the wildfire properties of the Internet.
Along comes Derek Sivers, a musician who founded CD Baby, which became the largest seller of independent music on the web. From this three-minute video clip he calls “Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy,” Sivers has extracted several lessons in inspiration and group-think that apply to artists as well as executives.
The first is obvious. The second is amazing, maybe even a little unsettling.
We need leaders. But we might need what Sivers calls the first follower even more.
It takes guts to be a leader. But it also takes guts to be a follower (just ask the apostles). The dancing guy has no effect on the people around him except to provide mild amusement . . . until a second person overcomes his aversion to risk and gets up to dance. And then a third, and then. . . .
“The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader,” Sivers says, echoing Malcolm Gladwell’s contention that any viral movement is spread not by the creator but by people he calls mavens–those with both the contacts and the social standing to gain the attention of followers. It’s those first followers who use their influence to help the movement achieve critical mass–or to use Gladwell’s term, the tipping point.
“We’re told we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective,” Sivers says. “The best way to make a movement . . . is to courageously follow and show others how to follow.”
Peter Krainik has a word for those who would separate marketing and PR functions: don’t.
The founder of an organization for chief marketing officers, the CMO Club, Krainik believes CMOs need to align marketing and PR/corporate communications if they want to defend and build their companies’ brands and reputations. The rise of social networks makes it mandatory.
The statistics aren’t encouraging. Only 23% of CMOs have lead responsibility for employee communications on products, services and messaging, according to a survey of 129 CMOs conducted by Hill & Knowlton. Some 66% have lead responsibility for media relations but only 55% have overall responsibility for blogger relations. Most (70%) do not have an active employee-engagement program (read brand ambassadors).
Krainik thinks CMOs need to address that disconnect.
“Marketing and public relations have overlapped, thanks to the explosive growth of digital communication that created an unprecedented level of transparency between businesses and their audiences,” Krainik writes. “The result is that brand reputation and brand image have become intertwined; the synchronization of the two is more critical than ever.”
Consider us the lucky ones. Most of our clients understand the need for a strategy that encompasses both marketing and communications. So does the agency, which allows copywriters and PR pros to flow across departmental boundaries. Copywriters run projects that include public relations components while PR pros write copy for collateral and advocate for employee ambassador programs. The process is driven by the clients’ marketing and communications functions and supervised by the agency’s account executives.
It’s not a typical arrangement but it works. And that’s what counts.
There’s a scene in the movie “Minority Report” where digital screens read the eyeballs of Tom Cruise’s character and serve up personal ads. A trio of articles this week shows that, as the Borg like to say in “Star Trek,” trying to escape the long arm of marketers has become futile.
Starting on June 17, ESPN will display its broadcast of golf’s U.S. Open on trucks near sports bars and festivals in New York and Chicago. At 14 ft. by 8 ft. those digital displays will be hard to miss.
Separately, the New York Times is reporting that Automated Media Services is testing a system that allows agencies to buy commercial time in stores. By placing the 3GTV displays near the items being sold, advertisers hope to reach consumers as they’re making a decision to buy.
And finally comes word that digital will surpass newspaper advertising in the United States by 2014. Digital ads are projected to increase to $34.4 billion while the print equivalent will drop to 22.3 billion, the Wall Street Journal reports. The channels of choice? Your computer and smart phone.
