Popimedia on Social

Beyond Advertising

Facebook Places – bigger is definitely better

Location based services leapt onto the South African centre stage in a big way last week when Facebook announced the local availability of Facebook Places. The application is designed to help people share information about where they are, connect with friends who may be nearby and find special offers from their favourite retailers, restaurants and entertainment venues.

Facebook's new Places feature lets you share your current location by "checking in" from your smartphone. For businesses, claiming and managing a Place page is a must. Plain and simple, it is a promising new way to connect with customers, prospects and partners.

But what makes this announcement so significant?

It is about sheer volume. Compared to Foursquare with almost 8 Million users globally, Facebook with more than 600 million people already using the platform and close to 4 million in South Africa alone is set to become THE location based service provider of choice.

How does this add to the services that Popimedia already offer?

From a marketing point of view, the sky is the limit and in this instance bigger is definitely better. It now becomes easy for big and small businesses and consumer products in South Africa to leverage Facebook Places for any number of marketing initiatives from loyalty and rewards programmes to creating awareness about new products and special offers. Competitors like Groupon and Google Latitude have a lot of catching up to do as Facebook becomes more ubiquitous.

So is the Facebook Places announcement a big deal? Absolutely.

Facebook keeps innovating


Facebook is constantly innovating and introducing new services that have an impact on the social media environment at large.

Most notably marketers and brand managers can look forward to Facebook Places and Facebook Deals - innovations that make an even stronger case for social media in the mobile arena. Already launched in the UK and US, local companies can look forward to having access to these services in the next couple of months .

Used independently or together these services are simply powerful stuff. Facebook Places, a location based service, gives brands the capability to set-up their "place" on Facebook. Users can then check into a place with their mobile phone, telling their Facebook friends where they are and connecting with friends nearby. From a business point of view, this will open up marketing opportunities to wider or brand new target markets.

Through Facebook Deals, retailers and other merchants can offer special deals to the users who check into their "place". Users who take on the deal then tell their friends via the news feed that they "got R50 off a pair of jeans" or "a free muffin with their cappuccino". This gives the brand a great advantage as their customers are now punting their brand through word of mouth - the most effective form of marketing.

Social media marketing opportunities

Using the inherent features of Facebook and the constantly evolving platform, there are some incredible marketing opportunities available on Facebook:

  1. Socially activated crowdsourcing: send out a call to action to your community to become intimately involved with your product or brand. This can be applied to the full development life cycle of a product - from branding, naming, copy and even sales. You know that your product will be successful because your customers are the ones who designed it and land up selling it for you. This can be achieved through a series of campaigns on your fan page, supporting functional and interactive tabs and a well planned content strategy, each with social sharing features which allow the fan to market the brand for you by word of mouth. See an example of what Vitamin Water did here.
  2. Social e-Commerce: You can even go as far as selling your product on your Facebook Fanpage by adding an e-Commerce tab. The added benefit here is that, when somebody buys one of your items, it is possible to post that action to their profile page - instant word-of-mouth circulation. Have a look at how Delta Airlines offers ticket Sales on their Facebook page here.
  3. Social philanthropy: for brands such as banks or insurance companies, a good idea is to support a cause to which users may be familiar with. The incredible thing with the Facebook platform and its range of features and facilities is that you can allow your fans to be involved in your philanthropy giving them power to have a say on how and where your philanthropy should be applied, making your fans feel good about their actions and your brand, and of course marketing the cause by word of mouth.

Content strategy

Tools aside, a solid content strategy for your social media campaign is a must. How often have we seen communication debacles on Facebook Fanpages where a situation could have been dealt with more strategically. Examples of this include the Nestle catastrophe where Greenpeace created a parody video of the company's KitKat candy bar and the resulting fallout.

A strong content strategy is invaluable and you should keep in mind that this strategy is not about a daily post on how wonderful your product is. As with any social media activity, your comments and posts must always be relevant and need to resonate with your community.

Social media is becoming ever more relevant in our country and we are even seeing newspapers like Business Day talking about the possibility of replacing email with these new platforms. We bet that Facebook will be leading the way.

Facebook brings Sponsored Stories to the marketing mix

Johannesburg, 27 January 2011 - Hot off the press. Popimedia sources from Facebook last night confirmed the availability of Sponsored Stories, an online version of the traditional word-of-mouth referral for products, services and brands

In positioning the benefits of Sponsored Stories, Facebook stated that: “The best form of recommendation is one you get from a friend. Sponsored Stories allow you to surface word-of-mouth recommendations about your brand that exist organically in the Facebook News Feed. Sponsored Stories are different from ads and including them in your Facebook Premium Ad campaign amplifies the actions your target audience takes with your Premium Ads”

But how does it work? 

Before Sponsored Stories, when your friend liked your page, interacted with your application or checked-in at a location, an update dynamically displayed in your friends’  News Feed which they may or may not see.  By including Sponsored Stories with your Facebook Ads campaign, this user’s friends can now see the story appear in the right-hand side.  Just like Premium Ads, Premium Sponsored Stories are served on a targeted user’s Home Page and Profile pages with 100% share of voice. 

Available immediately from Popimedia,  with Sponsored Stories, brands have the ability to promote these user experiences by leveraging trusted referrals.

Says Daniel Levy, CEO of Popimedia Innovations, “the Sponsored Stories feature amplifies a traditional Facebook Premium Ad campaign.  We are excited and ready to work with local and international brands, to grow their audience reach and extend the user experience they aim to create through their social media campaigns.”

Making a case for social media in small(er) businesses

Few small business owners and entrepreneurs have the bandwidth or the budget to launch a full scale marketing campaign. Combine this with a lack of the critical mass in terms of audience so frequently associated with the medium to large organisations/ brands, and it almost seems hopeless to try and compete.

However, with the dawn of the digital age and the rise of social media platforms and opportunities, the sky has quite literally become the limit. It is no longer just about having the traditional above-the-line campaigns spanning across radio, TV and print, but about creating an online brand presence, about having a conversation, about listening and responding in real time to customers, potential customers and even potential detractors.

We believe that a truly successful social media strategy is one that is not based on talking to every man, but developing a specific and personal customer and audience experience.

There is no doubt that the current platform of choice for a two way, tailored communications experience online, is Facebook. And more specifically, the Facebook Fan Page as the first line of communication for an organisation.

Using Starbucks, as an example of a brand with one of the most successful Fan Pages, we have created a set of top tips and considerations, for maximising impact and delivering value, for a company of any size.

  1. Know your brand personality – who are you, how do you engage, what is the ‘language’ and tone that you use when interacting and ensure that this resonates across all your audience interactions
  2. Know your audience – who are you talking to, what makes them tick, what kind of information do they use and re-use, who do they talk to and about what
  3. Don’t SPAM – instead of putting out marketing collateral, share content that is industry, topic and of audience interest and relevance
  4. Make time – to post relevant information, to respond to comments and queries posted to your Fan Page and to really get under the skin of your audience
  5. Listen – to the conversations not only on your Fan Page, but on other blogs, newsfeeds and Facebook Fan Pages and ensure that when you do respond, it isn’t mid-stream or out of context

Once you have these five elements buttoned down, Facebook has made it ridiculously easy to set up a Fan Page. Go to the Facebook login page, click on ‘Create a page for a celebrity, band or business’ and follow the step-by-step guide to setting up your page and gaining access to more than 500 million people around the world.

Your challenge – to sift through these more than 500 million people and make sure the right people become your ‘fans’.

And unlike traditional above-the-line advertising, which can sometimes feel like a bit of a hit and miss approach to reaching your target audience, Facebook advertising is audience customisable. By deploying a customised advertising campaign, you are able to eliminate what marketing and advertising folks call ‘wastage’, resulting in a more cost effective and tangible campaign.

Engage, interact and enjoy!

Facebook Promotional Guidelines to be imminently updated

On Friday 26 November 2010, Popimedia was informed by our contacts at Facebook that new Facebook Promotions Guidelines will soon be released.

What our sources say?

  1. Previously, promotions and terms and conditions needed to be explicitly approved by Facebook – this is now no longer required.
  2. Facebook no longer require a minimum media spend investment to support a promotion (ASU ads only).
  3. Promotions must still follow the company’s Promotions Guidelines and Facebook Platform Policies and brands are responsible for ensuring that all promotions fall within those guidelines.

Although the changes have not yet reflected in the guidelines, we have been informed that this is imminent.

What does this mean?

This means that you are not required to have a media campaign on Facebook to run a promotion, nor do you need to ask for approval of the promotional T&Cs from Facebook. Previously, there was a minimum spend required in order to run a promotion which will now fall away and ensure the barrier to entry for promotions is less onerous.

The relaxation of these guidelines does not mean that one can do as they please, and Facebook has still outlined that their policies need be complied with failing which the promotion will be removed.

Ensuring promotional compliance

Popimedia, ensures all client promotional campaigns are Facebook Promotional Guideline and Platform Policy compliant, which means the risk of such promotions being removed from Facebook are mitigated. A Popimedia Compliant Badge appears on all compliant promotions.

Watch this space for further updates.

Popimedia industry announcements at "The Social Network" Premiere

Johannesburg, 04 November 2010 – Popimedia Innovations, the leading provider of social media marketing strategy, tools and services to the world’s largest brands and agencies, today announced that, thanks to its direct relationship with Facebook, the company’s proprietary promotional systems and technologies implemented on Facebook have been vetted and approved by respective Facebook Advertising and Promotional Guideline divisions. The company is therefore able to swiftly implement advertisements and promotions which are aligned to Facebook’s guidelines.

Popimedia_badge
A “Popimedia Approved Promotion” badge will accompany all promotions vetted by Popimedia and registered with Facebook.

Speaking at an exclusive preview of The Social Network, attended by 150 of the most influential creative directors; heads of agencies; media buyers, journalists and industry commentators, Popimedia Group CEO, Daniel Levy said: “Publicising a promotion or competition on Facebook, requires Facebook's prior approval in order for the promotion to be registered with Facebook. In the absence of this, Facebook may remove any materials relating to the promotion (including advertisements) or disable a Page or account if Facebook determines a violation of the Promotions Guidelines, the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities or any other of Facebook’s policies including Advertising Guidelines. We are now in a position to seamlessly facilitate the approval and registration of promotions with Facebook and also consult with companies and brands currently running unapproved promotions in order to rectify their position and avoid reputational risk.”

To date, Popimedia has worked with many traditional and digital agencies and have recently added new clients such as Brandhouse with Captain Morgan Black and Jose Cuervo, as well as Tempest Car Hire to its list of clients.

Adds Levy:  “There are some common misconceptions in the market around buying advertising on Facebook and Popimedia is excited to announce that through our Facebook Sales House division, we will be selling all Facebook advertisements including Facebook Premium Ads (CPM) (formerly Home Page Ads) in addition to ASU Ads (both CPM & CPC) and payment terms will be 30 days. Clients can contact us directly for our competitive rate card.”  

 “We are excited about what the future holds not only by further entrenching our working relationship with Facebook, but also in terms of developing tools and applications that can audit and monitor campaigns, which will be launched publically in the next few months to brands and agencies both locally and abroad.  We’re saying – watch this space,” concludes Levy.

For more information about Popimedia go to www.popimedia.com or visit the Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/Popimedia

Do brands undervalue using Social Media for customer service?

What would your company use social media for? Everyone else is doing it, generating leads, spreading awareness, building a community and how about customer service?

Find out if brands undervalue using Social Media for Customer Service below:

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According to a survey conducted by Alterian, few companies are utilising social media channels for customer-service objectives.

Results reflected that when asked about the most important social media objectives to a company, 24% reported that the central objective is retaining existing customers, 26% believe that the most crucial objective is driving brand awareness and 30% are aiming for new customer acquisition. 1.2% cited that their most important objective is to offer customer service.

"It's surprising that brands are reporting that they don't highly value deploying customer service in the social media channel," said David Eldridge, CEO of Alterian. "Many are under utilizing this approach, as all brands need to be prepared to handle their customers' complaints and act on them. While marketers may have different objectives than those working in the customer service department, it's important to have a cross-channel strategy and integrate outreach to gain maximum exposure and positive chatter about your brand online."

Cross-Channel coordination is still needed

Although their is lack of emphasis on customer service as an objective in social media, the survey results showed that about 90% of marketers believe that cross-channel coordination is indeed vital in marketing campaigns. Similarly, a whopping 61% of marketers said their brand's engagement with consumers occurs both online and offline, suggesting that engagement takes place on multiple platforms.

Social Media engagement

Based on survey results, marketers said they are increasingly viewing social media as a means for engagement as opposed to promotion. Three out of four respondents (74.8%) say their brand is either 'somewhat' or 'extremely' engaged in social media. Roughly 25.3% percent reported they are not very engaged, and three percent said they are not engaged at all with social media.

Measuring ROI

Yet the survey showed that measuring ROI is still a challenge. 37% of respondents said they are not able to measure ROI when it comes to the socialization of their brand, and 42% reported to be only somewhat able to measure ROI.

Some marketers might be on the fence about ROI, the majority (57 percent) said they believe investing in social media has been a worthwhile investment for their brand. 35% claimed it's still too early to tell. Not one respondent reported that social media is not a worthwhile investment.

"There are tools available today that help marketers measure the influence of their social media investment, and consequently understand the ROI for their social media efforts," said Connie Bensen, Alterian's Director of Community Strategy. "It's just a matter of identifying what you want to measure and tracking progress in a way that is appropriate for your brand."

Reducing company costs

Helping customers directly via social media is a great way to reduce costs! What’s the cost of a customer service call versus the cost of helping a customer via social networks? Also, as you begin to use social media to provide customer service, customers begin to help each other out by pointing you out to anyone that has problems.

Here’s a few examples of companies that are using social media to lower customer service costs:

InfusionSoft: The company provides web-based marketing automation software to small businesses. The company decided to create a community site to help customers better use the software, but
InfusionSoft saw that the majority of the customers had customer service issues. So the company shifted gears a bit, and used the site to help customers with their problems. The company reports that in 2 years time it’s gone from having one customer service agent for every 55 customers (with a 77% customer satisfaction rating), to as of early this year having 1 agent for every 172 customers, and a 87% satisfaction rating.

Cisco: The company needed a way to better organize product information/expert sources for Account Managers so they could handle issues for customers. The company created the Specialist Optimization and Results (SOAR) initiative, which brings the company’s vast knowledge base together in one location that can be easily accessed by Account Managers. It includes access to ‘virtual experts’, discussion forums, and marketing materials. The results the company has seen from this initiative include:
Every 100 specialists can now do the work of 120, saving the company $5 million a year.
Travel expense for Cisco product specialists are down by as much as 60 percent in teams using SOAR tools, and specialists report saving 17 hours a week on average, and boosting their productivity by 22%.

Pitney Bowes: PB also utilizes company-backed forum to provide customer service (noting a trend here?). One interesting aspect is that the staff constantly monitor the forum for customer issues, but will wait a minimum of 24 hours before responding. They do this for two reasons: First, to give them time to properly research the problem and give the customer a better answer. And second, to give their fellow customers time to help out the other customer and offer advice. Obviously, you need a strong community in place to make the latter feasible.
Results? The company estimates that every 5 visits to a specific question on the forum, or every 25 visits to a general post averts a customer service call, and that Pitney Bowes has averted a total of 30,000 calls to their customer service centers. At a cost of $10 per call, that means a total savings of $300,000. Thanks to Mike Hardy from Pitney Bowes for clarifying that in the comments. He added this: “While we don’t generally share hard numbers about our performance, I can say that we met all of our first year’s expenses, including startup, within 6 weeks of launching our forum.”

Conclusion

The study found that only 1.2% of brands surveyed utilise Social Media for customer service. In South Africa particularly, one only has to look at how seriously our brands take tools like Hello Peter to understand the value of engaging with customers in their domain on a customer service level. If taken seriously customer service through Social media can not only help build your community but save costs too.

Amazon becomes the best Facebook Connect implementation yet

On Tuesday, Amazon implemented Facebook Connect to become - in our opinion - one of the greatest Connect implementations yet. This is a match made in heaven and takes Social Networking and connectedness to a new level. Read on to find out why and learn about some of the sensitive decisions Amazon made, that will make this move propel Amazon’s business and affect their bottom line.

So how does it work?

Amazon’s might, power and success is due to a large degree, to its recommendation engine. As you purchase more books, music or any of the thousands of products available, it learns about your personal tastes and sends you an email with the latest offerings that match. This is excellent for personal use, but the one aspect that has been missing all these years is understanding what your friends or family might like as a gift, sure you might ask them but what if you’d like the gift to be a surprise?

Enter Facebook Connect and what you see on the right in the image below is a list of friends birthdays.

Clicking on the Amazon Facebook Page brings up options to see gift suggestions for friends as well as which books/products are popular among specific friends.
This makes it extremely easy to spend money with Amazon - by simply clicking on a recommended gift I can purchase a friend a gift that they actually want and don’t even have to know where it should be delivered because Amazon should have those details already.

What are the benefits of connecting Amazon and Facebook?

Tap into your Facebook network to improve your Amazon shopping experience:

  1. Discover Amazon recommendations for movies, music, and more based on your Facebook Favorites and Likes.
  2. See upcoming birthdays and find Amazon Wish Lists for your friends on Facebook more easily.
  3. Get great gift suggestions for your friends based on their Facebook Favorites and Likes.
  4. Explore your friends' Favorites and see who has similar interests.

Treading carefully

But why would you want your friends to see what products you have purchased before? That could be dangerously close to privacy violations and perhaps the end of a marriage or two. So how has Amazon solved this problem?

Quite easily actually:

Your personal Amazon data will not be shared with Facebook:

  1. Amazon will not share information from your account with Facebook.
  2. Amazon will not share your purchase history with Facebook.
  3. Amazon will not attempt to contact your friends on Facebook.
  4. Amazon will never post anything to your Facebook Wall without your consent.

This means that only the information that you have shared on Facebook or have Liked on the web is pulled into Amazon from Facebook and not the other way around.

Let’s wait and see the impact this has on Amazon's bottom line.

Facebook - A retailers best friend!

Since social media is the hot topic that is permeating our everyday lives, Web Analytics World (WAW) thought it was important to check in with customers to get their thoughts. How do they interact with retailers via social media? How would they prefer to interact? What value are they seeking from their interactions with retailers via social media?

Find out answers to these questions and some best practices for retailers below.

As part of the study of nearly 10,000 visitors to the biggest e-retail websites in the United States, Fore-See Results wanted to use the methodology of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) to examine these issues, because the ACSI is able to show how different elements of a shopper’s interactions with a company (including on social media) impact their purchase intent, loyalty, and recommendations.

Key Findings:

What WAW found is validation that social media is a viable marketing strategy when one understands what customers want and know which social media platforms such customers frequent.

  • 56% of shoppers to top e-retail websites who interact with social media websites have elected to “friend” or “follow” or “subscribe” to a retailer on a social networking site like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
  • Facebook is by far, the best place to reach shoppers—both because it’s where they already are, and it’s where they want to hear from retailers.
  • Customers mainly interact with retailers on social media sites to learn about products and promotions— a marketer’s dream come true!

Consumers Blending Social Media, Email Marketing

Alison Diana InformationWeek

Almost 40% of consumers consult Facebook and Twitter to complement the information, deals, and news they receive from companies via e-mail marketing, according to a new study by ExactTarget.
"Consumers don't silo their engagement with brands to a single channel, instead they tend to layer marketing channels on top of one another to meet their different objectives," said Morgan Stewart, principal, ExactTarget's research and education group, in a statement. "The things that motivate consumers to go online initially dictate where and how they choose to engage with brands -- whether that be e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter."

The buying public apparently are willing to develop relationships with businesses: More than 90% of consumers that are a fan of or like at least one brand on Facebook also get at least one permission-based marketing e-mail each day, the study of 1,500 consumers found. And more than three-quarters of consumers that follow at least one brand on Twitter, subscribe to at least one brand's e-mail marketing, according to the Social Profile study.

"Simply understanding demographics of a customer group is no longer enough," said Tim Kopp, ExactTarget's chief marketing officer. "By bridging the gap between demographics and consumer motivations, the Social Profile research identifies unique personas that give marketers an entirely new level of understanding of consumer behavior."

One-third of consumers identified themselves as "info seekers" and were most-heavily influenced by product reviews, and other forms of user-generated content. About 45% of mothers with children living at home called themselves "deal seekers" and on average were a fan of 10 brands on Facebook, followed 10 companies on Twitter, and received 14 permission-based marketing e-mails every day, the study showed.

Slightly more than one-fourth of buyers under 25 called themselves "social butterflies." These consumers were fans of the most brands on Facebook and were most likely to buy from companies that send permission-based e-mails, according to ExactTarget's study.
Ice cream giant Ben & Jerry's disclosed this week it will rely on Facebook and Twitter to communicate with consumers, sending only one e-mail newsletter per year, according to reports.
And instead of unveiling its 2011 Explorer at an auto show, Ford is expected to debut its latest SUV this month on Facebook, according to USA Today.

Best practices for retailers - stick to the following 8 simple rules:

  1. Make shopping more social.
  2. Engage your customers through polls and contests that get them generating the content.
  3. Enhance your page with applications that drive engagement and virality – like virtual gifts.
  4. Reward your customers with giveaways, sweepstakes, and sale coupons.
  5. Partner with causes your customers care about.
  6. Boost SEO by securing a vanity URL for your page.
  7. Bring the conversation offline.
  8. Remember to keep it simple.