Social Media Strategy

Most every brand feels the pressure to engage in social media. It seems like every day there is another article on the need for brands to dive into social media or improve upon what they are already doing.

Here are a few quick observations on things that we've seen that have led to successful social media initiatives.

1. Coordinate. Make sure your organization either centralizes or strongly coordinates social media. If PR has certain ideas, different marketing managers have other ideas, and the CEO wants to start tweeting on her own, you are going to have a fragmented approach to communicating your brand in this space. Also, put a senior manager in charge of social media and hold them accountable for meeting goals.

2. Set goals. Social media does not have to be an experiment. It has matured to the point where real goals should be set as a part of a social media strategy. These can involve identifying top influencers, turning customer conversation into insights that are fed back into the organization and reducing customer service costs.

3. Measure. There are many tools available to support your work in the social media space. And there are tools available to meet almost any budget: Adobe's Ominture, Radian6, TwitterAnalyzer are just a few. Others are becoming available as new social media tools come on the scene.

Atemporality Revisited

Recently I've been thinking about Bruce Sterling's 2010 TED Conference speech, "Atemporality for the Creative Artist." I like how he defines the idea of atemporality, but I think other examples may illustrate his point better. Many of his examples, especially those related to social media, do a great job showing how we've managed to create a world outside of space, but I think there are other ideas and products in the market right now, that will eventually help us create a world outside of time.

Take, for example, the growing ubiquity of devices like the iPad and iPhone. These devices have the potential to be always on and always recording. Couple that with the growing number of surveillance cameras everyone is subjected to, satellite images, mapping projects, geo-coded photos and tweets, etc... and you have entire portions of the world in which a substantial portion of the visual and mental landscape is recorded.

If these trends continue, and the cost to archive this content continues to decline, then without much difficulty you can imagine a future in which you can dial back time as easily as you can change the aperture on your camera.

For example, let's say I am sitting in my office on a beautiful sunny day in 2050. I hold up my future reality recording/augmentation device (or simply adjust the setting on my digital glasses) and dial back time 5 years. I can easily see this same office in 2045, the people that are here, the way the furniture is arranged, what people on the street and in the press are talking about. Enough adjacent content will exist that unrecorded objects can be extrapolated and rendered automatically.

Now, I've abolished at least a part of the concept of time and definitely changed the nature of history. I am well on my way to an atemporal world.

FourSquare: The Rise of Location-Based Social Networking Applications

For those of you who haven't heard, FourSquare is one of many emerging location-aware social networking applications. And like most social networking applications, FourSquare is a great tool to support and encourage the creation of communities around your brand.

While the growth of FourSquare has been rapid, the application still has a relatively limited reach compared to other social apps and the final marketing model is still being worked out. In the meantime, if you want to use FourSquare to reach customers, it is best to refrain from using the platform to aggressively advertise and instead tie promotions to community activity. This model has worked well with other social media platforms and it's likely that FourSquare will continue to follow this trend.

Here are a couple of ways to tie FourSquare promotions to community activity:

1. Create promotions that reward customer loyalty. This can be done by providing discounts for frequent visits or when customers bring in friends as new customers. In FourSquare, the person who visits your location the most times becomes that location's "mayor." Loyalty could also be rewarded by providing recognition of your mayors on your primary web site.

2. Create promotions that leverage the gaming aspect of FourSquare. FourSquare lets users gain points and unlock badges through the use of the service. Bravo Television and Intel have both created custom badges within FourSquare that users can gain through interacting with the brands. Creating similar custom badges is another way that FourSquare could be leveraged to support your own unique communities.

FourSquare is like other social media platforms, but with the added dimension of location. This gives rise to several exciting opportunities to engage your customers. In addition, with the growing ubiquity of GPS-enabled smart phones, the rise of apps like FourSquare that leverage user location will also continue to grow.

What we can learn from Chatroulette

Kate Moss is addicted to it. Devo says it is more Devo than Devo. I came across an estimate last week that over 1.5 million people use chatroulette.com every day.

The question is: What can we learn from it? Here are a couple of things that were reinforced for me by the success of the site.

1. The site and its rapid growth demonstrates the power of social networks and blogs to turn a modest site into a global phenomenon.

2. As average bandwidth increases, the ability of more users to have a good experience with interactive full-motion video also increases. As the tipping point is reached, more and more sites based on full-motion video will proliferate the web.

3. The power of a well executed, simple idea. Chatroulette is based on a simple idea and fulfills a singular human need. It's neither over engineered nor bogged down in gratuitous fluff. It's a nice example of user-centered design.

4. The power of a platforms. Many of the most successful sites: Ebay, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Craigslist are just a few sites that are successful because they offer users a platform to create and distribute their own content. We can now add Chatroulette to this list.

Lastly, there is surly a lot that Chatroulette can also teach us about the human condition and human nature, but I will leave that to the philosophers among us.

Marketing Tactics, SMS and Technology Adoption

On January 27, Nielsen released the results of a study which showed that American teenagers send and receive an average of 3,146 text messages every month. That amounts to more than 10 messages for every hour of the month that they are not sleeping or in school.

Five years ago, when everyone was buzzing about text messaging, Method Engine was regularly asked to develop text message-based marketing tactics. Now that mobile apps and social networking are all the rage, we are asked about those. The irony is that for a lot of brands, using text message-based campaigns might be a more useful idea now that the technology is more mature and widely used.

The key takeaway is to know your customer and understand how they use technology. This knowledge is the foundation for an effective allocation of your marketing dollars.