Bracketology

By: Jessica Learish

Now that your brackets have been busted by the wild upsets in every region, it’s time to take a step back and examine the context of the March Madness tradition.

First, ask yourself: who won the National Championship the last time you filled out a bracket with a pencil and paper?

One of the oldest forms of social media out there is the online NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament bracket. What could be more social than gathering to speculate on whose alma mater will take the big prize home from the big dance? Sports fans have been making their picks and interacting with each other over the information superhighway since the days of dialup, but the venue is slightly more complex today.

Bragging rights go a little further than the office water cooler when the entire nation is one click away from your personal rank and point total at any and every round of the tournament. This was the beginning of the inflated tourney pools like ESPN’s Pick’em Challenge.

Through the years, the online bracket pools have added prizes from huge sponsors and advertisements targeting college sports fans. Some sites with bracket games even offer multi-million dollar purses for perfect brackets.

Then came the social media boom. Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and the like became forums for additional bragging and heckling of the opposition. In the last couple of years, the NCAA and other sports giants have launched mobile-optimized applications for taking your brackets with you on the go.

In the same way that Facebook allows people to stay connected to friends all over the world, social media platforms have made it possible for sports fans around the country to stay on the road to the Final Four with their favorite college basketball teams.

Technology has reclaimed the closeness of collegiate athletics for fans, alumni, and prospective students across the country and around the world.

Now, I probably have you wondering how many of your sweet 16 are still going strong. So go ahead and check and pay a visit to the cool uncle of social media on whichever platform suits your fancy.

The Value of "Mobile"-izing Social Media

By: Jessica Learish

What happens when you suddenly realize you don’t have your cell phone (or worse, Smartphone)? A mild feeling of panic and emptiness washes over an otherwise tranquil moment, and you wonder what updates you’re missing from your mobile life.

Facebook, Twitter, and the Social Media universe are all mobile now, and, according to Packaged Facts, this mobility has initiated “a new era of speed and convenience.”

The facts are these…

Packaged Facts released a report in the February 2011 called Social Media and Technology in the U.S. Foodservice Industry: Trends and Opportunities for an Emerging Market. The report analyzes the behaviors of mobile consumers in the United States. The report cites the pervasiveness of Facebook interactions and mobile applications of restaurants like Chipotle and Starbucks. If a brand is able to incentivize consumers-on the go, it can earn the opportunity to “weave its way into consumers’ lives.”

Before I read this report, I had the Chipotle and Starbucks applications downloaded on my iPhone. My life is woven with brands and social media. I have been indoctrinated into the Smartphone culture in the seven short months since I bought my first Smartphone.

A Pew Internet survey conducted in 2010 suggested that levels of Social Media usage online has a negative correlation with age, but that 50% OR MORE of internet users from ages 18-55 engage in the Social Media universe.

Easy as pie

Now, all of this mobility and sociability has made it incredibly easy to stay connected, be aware of things, and keep up with the RSS feed.

My phone lets me know when my favorite brands tweet something new or when someone tweets about them. There is always something new going on.

It is the responsibility of consumers and of brands to stay current. Brands and consumers cannot sleep through the Social-Mobile-ity explosion. The percentage of market share that is looking for a socially relevant, mobile-optimized brand to integrate into their lives is absolutely invaluable.

… or easy as tacos

I’m going to order some Chipotle on my iPhone!!

#Cometogetherrightnow

By: Jessica Learish

Social Media Marketing expert Scott Monty recently blogged, “When the
technology allows us to reclaim some of the round-the-fire element of
our humanity, it’s encouraging that we’re not simply living separate yet
connected lives.”

Twitter brought aspiring actors and actresses backstage at the Oscars. Facebook
played a vital role in the protests in Cairo -- helping families
communicate and safely locate loved ones. Social networks have already
changed the world and again picked up the speed of the global economy.

The lanes of communications

Getglue and Stumbleupon are two of many growing communities which allow people
around the world to share things they like, discover new ones, and
connect with others with similar interests.

These interactions are important and for the conversation to continue to be
meaningful, it can’t become one sided. Companies and consumers must work
together to maintain the balance of communication. If consumers feel
like they are shouting at a brick wall, the lanes of communication will
be closed and the whole system will lose its value.

Global town hall

Social promotions allow consumers to actively endorse companies that they
like. This is the next step in the process. Companies can imbue their
fans with personal charge of promoting things that they support. Just
like sports fans posting Facebook statuses about their home teams, fans
of companies are now able to take initiative and champion companies on
their profiles.

Like in small towns with mom and pop grocery stores, consumers are directly
connected with the success of products and companies they use and
support. With companies and consumers communicating in real time and
working together to create a better marketplace, products and services
can improve and social networks can be used as a global town hall,
improving the products and services we all use.

_________________________________

As Monty said, through social marketing, we have regained a global
closeness that has not existed in decades. So, grab a seat by the
electronic campfire.

Crowdsourcing: Giving Power and Control to the Public

The crowdsourcing term was first coined in 2006 by Jeff Howe in a Wired magazine article about the ability of companies to take advantage of the talent of the public. Howe later went on to write a book titled “Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business”, where he describes in detail just how this phenomenon is revolutionizing the relationship between companies and their customers. In crowdsourcing, a task is completed, or a problem is solved, by utilizing the group intelligence and diversity of the community rather than the expertise of a select few.

Many industries have realized the value of crowdsourcing. In each case, the use of crowdsourcing has altered the balance of power in significant, game-changing ways. Threadless.com relinquished control of clothing design to the opinion and diversity of the community, creating better product in much shorter timeframes. iStockPhoto financially rewards amateur photographers for stock photos, and simultaneously drove down costs for usage of these photos for the consumer. Innocentive has allowed large companies to financially reward anyone from a college student to a high school teacher for solving unusual problems, increasing opportunities for individuals to demonstrate their problem-solving skills without having to work in a large corporate environment. Open-source software endeavors like Sourceforge, TopCoder, and GNU have given amateur software developers the opportunity to show their skills without working directly for large companies as well. Citizen journalism projects like NowPublic, Cincymoms.com, Wikipedia, and DailyCrowdsource.com have given anyone in the public the opportunity to be published on topics of their own choosing.

More and more companies are also turning to crowdsourcing to meet their marketing and advertising problems. Most of these services are geared toward the creative aspects of marketing (i.e. logo design), but crowdsourcing is also becoming a viable model for actual message distribution. Why pay google or facebook to promote an advertisement if you can tap into a passionate crowd of users to spread the message? Time will tell on whether this form of crowdsourcing will work as well as others have. If it does, it will be incredibly disruptive to the balance of power online just like every other successful crowdsourcing model has proven to be.

Facebook Display Ads - A round peg in a square hole?

Despite the promise of Facebook display ads, the response rates thus far have been abysmal. Recently, analytics firm WebTrends examined 11,000 different Facebook ad campaigns which totaled 4.5 billion impressions . Webtrends found that in 2009 the average click-through rate on Facebook was 0.063 percent. That figure slipped to 0.051 percent in 2010.

Despite the ability to target very specific demographics with contextual advertisements, the results are disappointing to say the least. Advertisers are pouring billions of dollars into social display ads hoping the new medium of social media will yield better return for their interactive advertising dollars.

The problem with social display is that it doesn’t match the medium. Social media has changed the way people interact online, so logic would say it might also change the way people interact with advertisements. Google’s adwords (the sponsored search results on the side of each search query) have been around for nearly a decade and display ads even longer. Taking an old advertising (if ten years is old) approach and trying to fit it into a new medium might make sense on the surface, but is it really surprising that response rates are so low. Or is social display like trying to fit a round peg into a square hole; It doesn’t make cents.

Social Promotion, the best of display and social media

If social media marketing is a panacea to online marketing (as many experts claim), why are advertising dollars continuing to flow into online display and search advertising? Social media certainly gets most of the attention, but display and search are still raking in most of the money. The reason is that display and search offer important advantages over social media.

Three Advantages of Display and Search

1. Measurable. Display and search advertising is precisely measurable. ROI is predictable and therefore manageable. And while there are numerous tools that help advertisers monitor social media conversation, they still lack the ability to define a clear relationship between investment (time & money) and results.

2. Earned. The other advantage of display and search is that it is “earned” instead of “paid.” This is related to ROI but more importantly it allows the advertiser to mitigate risk by only paying for performance measured by end-user action. Social media marketing initiatives require investments of time and money on the front end. If the campaign fails to yield any results the advertiser doesn’t get the money back they spent to create the campaign.

3. Simple. Display and Search is also relatively simple to manage and define. The organic nature of social media makes the advertisers task complicated because it changes so rapidly. There are so many conversations, so many mediums and such little time to manage it all.

Social Promotion offers the best of both worlds

The downside of display and search advertising is that online users are more and more focused on the conversation taking place in social media and less on the advertisements placed on the periphery. Social promotion services offer (yes 6Dcast is one of them) a simple way to bring the advertisement into the conversation while maintaining the advantages listed above.

It seems nearly everyone working in marketing today is focused on how to use Social Media to make their message more viral, more relevant and more accessible. For many its still a leap of faith because its hard to measure and manage all that is taking place across social networks.

With social promotion an advertiser can create display type campaigns with common metrics such as pay-per-click but still retain the viral effectiveness they want from social media.

Social promotion and the collective celebrity

Social promotion is the result of an old advertising idea being democratized by social technology. Social promotion is simply incentivizing individuals to endorse and talk about a product or service via social media . Celebrity endorsements are nothing new. Just turn on the television and its hard to ignore how many products and services are being promoted by familiar personalities.

Of course, these celebrities are paid by advertisers in hopes that the endorsement will lead to more people purchasing the product the celebrity is promoting. Why does this work? Because the people watching the commercial are likely to identify with, trust or want to be more like the celebrity on a sufficiently large enough scale to warrant the cost of the commercial. They have influence and reach, so paying for them to appear on a TV commercial works.

In a sense social media enables any individual today to become their own mini-celebrity. While individual social media users may not have the reach of someone like Ashton Kutcher, many of them have the same if not greater level of influence on the people they can reach in their network. If enough mini-celebrities (individual social media users) come together to “endorse” a message, the sum of their collective efforts could dwarf even the most recognized celebrities.

Social promotion assumes that paid influence will continue to work online the same way it has always worked offline. The only difference is that online we can all be “celebrities.”