The Engaged Consumer

Each week, the members of Powered’s marketing, business development and product teams pick a news article, blog post or research report that “speaks” to them. With that article, they need to come to our weekly staff meeting prepared to give a 120 second update on what the article was about and why they found it useful. Links are below:

Beth Lopez (Marketing)
Facebook’s Own Estimates Show Declining Student Numbers; Now More Grandparents Than High School Users - Intereting article that speaks to changing demographics of Facebook users. What’s even more interesting is that the data is from Facebook’s own ad platform and the data is showing there are fewer high school and college users on FB today than there were six months ago. Interesting read to say the least.

DP Rabalais (Marketing)
My weekly article is, Three Ways Healthcare Brands Can Leverage Social-Media (from MarketingProfs). While the lead-in is actually quite good, the three big points that are promised… well, let’s just say they didn’t blow me away.

Here’s the Cliff Notes from this article. The big “Three Ways” are:

1. Listen
2. Participate
3. Learn

I have to say, I’m a little disappointed that this article didn’t deliver a little more value (because MarketingProfs is usually pretty awesome)

Bill Fanning (Business Development)
The first post is from Scott Berkun (The Berkun Blog) titled Calling Bullshit on Social Media.  Similar to the post I shared a few weeks ago predicting the demise of Twitter, I had to read this one simply based on the title.  Scott takes an honest and somewhat cynical look at “Social Media”, the hype, history and the behavior of both participants and marketers of social media.  While he makes a lot of good points, I don’t think of most PR firms or Social Media Consultants as the “greedy” gaming the system.  Sure, there are always a few but typically they don’t stay in business long.  Call me naïve.     

The second post was written by Tim Walker and titled In Defense of Social Media Manager.  This post highlights the debate between Chris Brogan and David Thomas about the necessity of the role and job title “Social Media Manager”.  Included are links to each of their blog posts stating their positions.  Both worth the read.  In part, I agree with Chris that companies ultimately should focus measuring what they need to change like sales, trials, PR coverage etc and that Social Media is a set up tools to help facilitate the necessary changes.  He also says that using these tools is “part of a job function, not a standalone vocation.”  This is where I have to agree with David Thomas, especially with larger organizations.  Until everyone clearly understands the tools that are available to them and how to behave while using them, it probably makes sense to have someone focused on understanding the medium thoroughly.  As the medium becomes more widely understood, we will probably see fewer and fewer “Social Media Manager” titles.

Jay MacIntosh (Business Development)
The article is entitled A CMO’s Guide to Social Media. It’s authored by a woman named Dana Theus who is a strategic marketing consultant with years of client-side experience. Though it’s much longer than the 140 microbites we’re accustomed to, I found it to be very worthwhile (but of course I did else I wouldn’t be sharing it with y’all now would I?). Anyhow, it’s an insightful POV on the societal and technological trends that have made the world more “social”. AND she offers a few strategies that marketing leaders might actually pursue. One of the things she discusses is something I’ve been hearing a lot of marketers say during my past 8 months of social media immersion – “Social media is simply another communications channel.”

I agree that social media is a communications channel but it’s not “just another” one. It’s radically different. As one of my social media heroes, Doug Wick, points out social enables three-way dialog to take place; brands with consumers & consumers with consumers. That changes all the rules of engagement. Which reminds me, wasn’t it Einstein who said “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results?” Time for marketers to stop the insanity!

Doug Wick (Business Development)

This article is about Moonfruit’s high-exposure campaign on Twitter where they gave away Macbooks in exchange for retweets and followers. While the campaign was a wild success, it provides a little context on the downside. First, the campaign giveaway didn’t exactly link with Moonfruit’s real business, which is web design. There is a relevancy issue. Also, there are reports that Twitter had to cap or control the buzz because it was a strain on their infrastructure, showing that these free tools have their limits when used for marketing. An interesting case study in the evolving medium.

Don Sedota (Product Management)

Based on some of our recent prospect efforts, I found the latest Razorfish Social Media “Fluent” report  had some interesting info regarding the financancial services industry and social media. The report was Twittered pretty heavily yesterday and was also Yammered internally, but thought I would mention a few takeaways I had regarding their financial industry insights:

• Out of 7 industries, Financial rated last with regard to propensity for social context interaction with a brand (only 13% being likely to interact)
• As an industry, the financial industry ranks a very distant second to the Auto industry (92 vs. 6.3) as far as positive consumer sentiment (as determined from positive/negative conversations on the web) and ranks 6 times better than Pharma (6.3 vs. 0.96)
• BofA has the highest share of voice (31.6%); almost 3 times more than Wells Fargo
• Wells Fargo has the highest brand sentiment out of 6 financial brands at 71%
• Online share of voice and sentiment is closely tied to offline voice and sentiment
• With the recent tumultuousness in the financial industry, there’s a ripe opportunity to improve these metrics for financial companies