Ford’s Fusion 41 Challenge – What Are We Missing?

October 26th, 2009

Sit down and buckle in (literally), this week we are taking the #SocialMedia discussion in a very different direction.  Instead of learning during these chats, we have been asked by Ford Motor Company’s Scott Monty to help teach.  If you are not aware, Scott is on a tear of late with the tremendous success of the Ford Fiesta Movement, he is now going for the equivalent of an encore with the Fusion 41 challenge.  Their newest challenge asks for:

• Current 2010 model Ford Fusion owners/leasees to apply for the challenge
• Eight (8) teams (to include the owner and four (4) team members each) will be selected
• Ford will provide a 2010 Fusion model to each team to compete with
• Teams will perform a series of challenges taking place over a 3 week period.
• To coincide with the Fusion Hybrid’s 41 mpg rating, the challenges will take place every 41 hours
• Team members will complete a task and “hand-off” like a baton to the next member
• All the while, team members are required to post content and updates across their social networks online

The winning team’s leader will get their new 2010 Fusion paid off and the team members will get free gas for a year.  If you want all the rules check here.

So how can all of us help Scott Monty and Ford Motor?  Well, hang on a second and we’ll get to that.  First, it’s important that you understand where they have come from and where they are going.  This deck from Scott’s recent keynote at OMMA Global 2009 provides a good overview and some insight into Ford Motor’s social media marketing strategy.

Zero to 60: Social Media Strategy via Ford [Keynote – OMMA Global 2009]

View more presentations from Scott Monty.

If you notice, the last content slide lists “Listening to our community for suggestions”  and that, my friends, is why we are all here.  Scott has asked for input regarding Ford Motor’s latest social media marketing project, the Fusion 41 challenge.  The format will be similar to prior weeks with 3 questions, a new question every 20 minutes.  The difference is the questions.  Scott will be providing insight into the planning of the campaign and we will be providing recommendations in how to think differently and possibly add a new dimension to the initiative.

Yes that’s right, for an hour we will all be honorary social marketing consultants for one of the hottest social media brands out there.  Please note: any suggestions made by you during this one hour +/- event are provided for Ford Motor and Ford Motor may use your suggestions at will.

Topic: Ford’s Fusion 41 Challenge – What Are We Missing?

Q1: Evaluate the WOM/Influence strategy

Q2: Evaluate the online marketing strategy

Q3: What are we missing to make this truly exceptional?

Disclosure & It’s Affect on the Brand Marketing Ecosystem

October 19th, 2009

We have all heard a lot about the Federal Trade Comissions’ (FTC) latest policy on the expectation for full disclosure on endorsements and paid reviews or testimonials.  But, how much do we really know about it and how will it affect all of us who are in the business?  That is the focus of this week’s #socialmedia event moderated by C.C. Chapman. 

To start, you can review the document for yourself and develop your own interpretation of it (it’s actually an update to it’s guides, not a law, and therefore open to some interpretations) as it was announced earlier this month.  Next the rules will be enacted on December 1st so anything being done now is not covered in this under the new guides.  More, while we have all read about the $11,000+ fine, this fine is only enacted after several warnings and for serious offenses as noted in this interview with the FTC from the LATimes:

When a LA Times reporter asked about Restaraunt Reviews, the answer was, “Technically, you’re supposed to disclose all comped meals. But if you don’t, the FTC’s not likely to do anything about it.”My initial reaction to that scenario [comped meals] is that disclosure would be required,” says Rich Cleland of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “Our primary concern relates to the fact that you received something of value and it’s for the exchange of writing about the product.”

So is this a conspiracy theory that gives ”big brother” yet another way to find out what my top ten social media blunders post is all about?….probably not as they really don’t care.  What it does do is provide a vehicle for them to be able to pursue the really bad people out there and have some teeth in the punishment.  Read their take on this issue of monitoring (from the same LATimes article),

“But the FTC has a limited interest — and ability — in monitoring blog traffic. According to Cleland, the FTC is far more interested in pursuing advertisers, especially those who violate the rules after repeated warnings, than they are in dunning individual bloggers. Unless the FTC receives numerous complaints about a specific blog, it’s unlikely to investigate. It’s a matter of enforcement priorities.”

And how does the FTC decide who to go after?  It looks like it will be more of an “opt-in list” meaning they already get inquiries from citizens on publishers (bloggers) who are possibly scamming.  they will still filter for the more detrimental publishers and go specifically after them.  In their words:

“If we received complaints,” Cleland says, “we’d look at how serious the representations are. Are there other possible violations? What kind of blog is it? We might be more concerned about a blogger who was writing a review of a medical device that’s used for a serious disease than we would be about someone who’s writing a restaurant review.”

So if the new FTC guidelines are really just meant for the true scumbags out there then what’s all the hub-bub about?  This goes deeper into the expectations that consumers have where honesty and disclosure are now a ”need-to-have” and no longer a “nice-to-have” for reviews, promotions and endorsements.  These new guides begin to shine a light on all marketing relationships and will have serious affects for Brands who try to fool their consumers.  While some may say this officially shifts the responsibility of disclosure from the advertisers to the publishers, what is really does is says that everyone is accountable – the advertisers and the publishers.  Not longer can we stand around like school-children and point fingers at each other saying “she did it”!  We are all responsible and accountable. 

(CNN) — Like a lot of people, Anna Owens began using MySpace more than four years ago to keep in touch with friends who weren’t in college.

Our real-world friendships are often a reflection of who we connect with online, experts say.

But soon she felt too old for the social-networking site, and the customizable pages with music that were fun at first began to annoy her. By the time she graduated from the University of Puget Sound, Owens’ classmates weren’t on MySpace — they were on Facebook.

Throughout graduate school and beyond, as her network began to expand, Owens ceased using MySpace altogether. Facebook had come to represent the whole of her social and professional universe.

“MySpace has one population, Facebook has another,” said the 26-year-old, who works for an affordable-housing nonprofit in San Francisco, California. “Blue-collar, part-time workers might like the appeal of MySpace more — it definitely depends on who you meet and what they use; that’s what motivates people to join and stay interested.”

Is there a class divide online? Research suggests yes. A recent study by market research firm Nielsen Claritas found that people in more affluent demographics are 25 percent more likely to be found friending on Facebook, while the less affluent are 37 percent more likely to connect on MySpace.

More specifically, almost 23 percent of Facebook users earn more than $100,000 a year, compared to slightly more than 16 percent of MySpace users. On the other end of the spectrum, 37 percent of MySpace members earn less than $50,000 annually, compared with about 28 percent of Facebook users.

Social networking by the numbers

Users with household income above $75,000
Facebook — 41.74 percent
MySpace — 32.38 percent
LinkedIn — 58.35 percent
Twitter — 43.34 percent

Users with household income under $50,000
Facebook — 28.42 percent
MySpace — 37.13 percent
LinkedIn — 17.34 percent
Twitter — 28.36 percent

Female users
Facebook — 56.33 percent
MySpace — 56.69 percent
LinkedIn — 48.11percent
Twitter — 53.59 percent

Users aged 18 to 24
Facebook — 10.27 percent
MySpace — 15.46 percent
LinkedIn — 3.99 percent
Twitter — 9.51percent

Users aged 35 to 49
Facebook — 31.54 percent
MySpace — 29.09 percent
LinkedIn — 43.64 percent
Twitter — 34.02 percent

Source: The Nielsen Co.

MySpace users tend to be “in middle-class, blue-collar neighborhoods,” said Mike Mancini, vice president of data product management for Nielsen, which used an online panel of more than 200,000 social media users in the United States in August. “They’re on their way up, or perhaps not college educated.”

By contrast, Mancini said, “Facebook [use] goes off the charts in the upscale suburbs,” driven by a demographic that for Nielsen is represented by white or Asian married couples between the ages of 45-64 with kids and high levels of education.

Even more affluent are users of Twitter, the microblogging site, and LinkedIn, a networking site geared to white-collar professionals. Almost 38 percent of LinkedIn users earn more than $100,000 a year.

Nielsen also found a strong overlap between those who use Facebook and those who use LinkedIn, Mancini said.

Nielsen isn’t the first to find this trend. Ethnographer danah boyd, who does not capitalize her name, said she watched the class divide emerge while conducting research of American teens’ use of social networks in 2006.

When she began, she noticed the high school students all used MySpace, but by the end of the school year, they were switching to Facebook.

When boyd asked why, the students replied with reasons similar to Owens: “the features were better; MySpace is dangerous and Facebook is safe; my friends are here,” boyd recalled.

And then, boyd said, “a young woman, living in a small historical town in Massachussetts said to me, ‘I don’t mean to be a racist or anything, but MySpace is like, ghetto.'” For boyd, that’s when it clicked.

“It’s not a matter of choice between Facebook and MySpace, it was a movement to Facebook from MySpace,” she said, a movement that largely included the educated and the upper-class.

So why do our online worlds, unencumbered by what separates us in daily life, reflect humans’ tendency to stick with what — and who — they know?

A lot of it has to do with the disparate beginnings of MySpace and Facebook, said Adam Ostrow, editor-in-chief of Mashable, a blog about social media. Facebook originated at Harvard University and was limited at first to students at approved colleges before opening itself to the public in September 2006.

MySpace, on the other hand, had a “come one, come all” policy and made a mad dash towards monetization, Ostrow said. “They used a lot of banner ads without regard to the quality, and it really diminished the value [of the site] for the more tech-savvy demographic.”

And while the Internet can build bridges between people on opposite sides of the globe, we still tend to connect with the same people through online social networks who we connect with offline, said technology writer and blogger Sarah Perez.

“It’s effectively a mirror to our real world,” she told CNN. “Social networks are the online version of what kids do after school.”

These social-networking divides are worrisome to boyd, who wrote “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics.” Instead of allowing us to cross the boundaries that exist in our everyday lives, these online class differences threaten to carry those boundaries into the future.

Don’t Miss

• Obesity, politics, STDs flow in social networks

“The social-network infrastructure is going to be a part of everything going forward, just like [Web] search is,” boyd said. “The Internet is not this great equalizer that rids us of the problems of the physical world — the Internet mirrors and magnifies them. The divisions that we have in everyday life are going to manifest themselves online.”

Jason Kaufman, a research science fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, examined the Facebook profiles of a group of college students over four years and found that even within Facebook, there’s evidence of self-segregation.

Multiracial students tended to have more Facebook friends than students of other backgrounds and were often the sole connection between white and black circles, Kaufman said.

Nonetheless, Kaufman feels that social networks may one day help us overcome our instinct to associate with those who share our income level, education, or racial background.

“I think it’s fair to say that the Web has great potential to at least mitigate everyday tendencies towards self-segregation and social exclusion,” Kaufman said. “In some ways, [Facebook] levels the playing field of friendship stratification. In the real world, you have very close friends and then there are those you just say “Hi” to when you pass them on the street.

“The playing field is a lot more level in that you can find yourself having a wall-to-wall exchange with just an acquaintance. If you pick up the unlikely friend, not of your race or income bracket, the network may [help you] establish a more active friendship than if you met them in real life.”

But MySpace’s users still find something appealing about MySpace that they don’t about Facebook, and it may have nothing to do with class or race, blogger Perez said.

“It’s not just the demographics that have people picking one over the other,” Perez said. “It also comes down to what activities you like. If you like music, you’ll still be on MySpace. If you’re more into applications, then you might go to Facebook because you’re addicted to Mafia Wars or whatever.”

In the end, boyd isn’t as concerned about the reasons behind these divisions online as she is about the consequences of people only networking within their chosen social-media groups.

“Friendships and family relationships are socially divided; people self-segregate to deal with racism sometimes,” she said. “Okay, fine: We’ve made a decision to self-segregate, but what happens when politicians go on Facebook and think they’re reaching the whole public? What happens when colleges only go on Facebook to promote?”

When and if that does happen, Mashable’s Ostrow said, we’ll know perhaps we’ve given social networks more credit than they’re worth. “When it comes to information, I don’t think social networks are the best source for that. The Internet is so open,” said Ostrow, who believes users would go beyond their networks to search out information online.

If you’re looking to branch out of your social network box, your best option may be Twitter. Nielsen’s survey didn’t find a dominant social class on Twitter as much as they found a geographical one: Those who use Twitter are more likely to live in an urban area where there’s greater access to wireless network coverage, Mancini said.

“The simplicity of Twitter definitely creates less of a divide, because it’s not a relationship like it is on MySpace or Facebook,” Ostrow said. “If you live in the middle of nowhere or you live in a city, you can follow anyone about anything.”

Social CRM – Lipstick on CRM or Transformational Business Model?

October 11th, 2009

We spend a lot of time on this chat discussing social media and marketing with details like implementing, measuring, strategizing, executing, engaging, etc.  Let’s say we dial it in and our community efforts are going great and growing quickly.  I say, SO WHAT!  If you’re not converting these prospects and customers to do something then who cares.  All this social stuff doesn’t matter if you don’t sell more stuff or keep existing customers on board longer by providing better service.  Another way to look at it is turning regular customers into advocates and detractors into believers.  This happens when you engage the customer quickly, meet expectations, deliver quality and consistency over time in an open and transparent way.  Companies manage these interactions today using internal tracking systems like Customer Relationship Management (CRM).  But wait, customers are not using old ways to communicate, they are using new ways to engage and interact with social tools.  this leaves companies scrambling to figure out how to engage and interact from their internal legacy systems.  Along comes Social CRM.

Everyone is trying to define Social CRM (great resource from Bob Thompson) in their own way and yet no one definition quite fits all needs yet.  One definition by Paul Greenberg makes a lot more sense than many others I’ve seen.  He says:

CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.

But we are not here to define it, our intent is to educate a new legion of corporate soldiers – hell bent on infusing their companies with social goodness both externally and internally.  So what does Social CRM look like?  Here’s a possibility:

• Traditional CRM: (sales) prospects become leads, leads become accounts and from accounts come opportunities.  Sales people are managed with activity levels (# of calls, emails), funnels are staged and it becomes more operationally focused (read: process focused not customer focused)
• Social CRM: in an online home improvement Q&A, a homeowner asks “what goes better on a kitchen floor, wood, carpet or tile?” A professional from a home improvement big box store responds with “Tile, because wood might warp with water spills and carpet will hide food that drops.  I am going to forward you a direct line to our local store and a 15% coupon on flooring tile.  Come in this weekend and I’ll make sure Joe is available to walk you through the options in person.”  CRM is updated, Joe at store is notified and homeowner is sent an email with a “Tweet This” link on your experience.  The new measurement might be interactions started, prospects referred and  conversational intent.

A couple of things are happening here.  1) Sales forces must change the “50 calls/day = 10 meetings /week =1 sale/month” sales by the numbers approach to an approach that engages with prospects and their needs and over-delivers with solutions that are relevant at the time.  2) Systems must be able to support this distributed engagement and broaden the ownership roles across many levels of a customer taking what is traditionally an inside-out approach and integrating more of an outside-in model.

To  help us make sense of this all, we’ve invited Aaron Strout to help us moderate the topic this week.  Aaron is a proven professional in this space working from both the vendor and customer side, and is a social heavyweight for sure.  We’ll need a heavywieght as we explore this relatively new topic of Social CRM and begin to identify places to consider implementing within our collective companies.   The chat will consist of 3 questions as usual coming 20 minutes apart and starting at 12 noon EST.  Join in by following #socialmedia through Twitter or to make it easier follow our LIVE page during the event.  The topic:

Social CRM – Lipstick on CRM or Transformational Business Model?

Q1: How does adding social make CRM better?

Q2:  If social is front end & CRM is back end, what information is important to capture into CRM?

Q3:  How can Social CRM help improve conversion (cover sales, service, support)?

Estee Lauder Gets Women Ready for Their Social-Media Close-ups. Cosmetics Giant Offers Makeovers and Professional Photos to Use for Profile Pictures

By Jack Neff

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) — The venerable Estee Lauder cosmetics brand has found a seemingly natural way to connect with social media: offering free makeovers and photo shoots at its department-store cosmetics counters coast-to-coast to produce shots women can use for their online profiles.

Excellent Idea, though one has to wonder whether the demographic at the cosmetics is an active user of Facebook or understands the how. We’ll see.

One of the participating shops, called Ignited, tracked the amount of time Zappos spent reviewing its submission. With the help of Google Analytics, Ignited found that the retailer had only viewed five pages of its 25-page submission, with an average page-view time of 14 seconds. Ignited then publicly criticized Zappos for what it felt was an inadequate review.

I’d be pissed too, but there must have been something in those 5 pages…