5/10/2010Posted by Soraya Eltomey, Associate, Corporate CommunicationsFacebook’s Open Graph…friend or foe? I’ve pondered this question since Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced the new platform. As word of mouth is often viewed as the most powerful form of communication, Open Graph might prove to be beneficial to consumers and marketers alike. On the other hand, it already has fueled the fire amongst a number of privacy groups and Senators already lobbying for stronger regulation and protection of private information. I sat down with Draftfcb New York’s EVP of CRM Mike Brzozowski to get his thoughts on the subject ...Mike B on Facebook
9/30/2009Posted by Mike Brzozowski, Executive Director of CRM, Draftfcb New York
Today’s New York Times article by Stephanie Clifford caught my eye this morning and is bound to be a hot topic in the advertising community as data and analytics have become increasingly important in delivering effective campaigns for clients.
While the study has yet to be released, I did have a few thoughts that were front and center that I wanted to share. Of course, more to come once the actual study has been released and I can read and digest it.
- This study's findings does not mean the end of behavioral targeting. In fact, it validates a core principal about customer management which is -- always be transparent with the use of customer data. Everyone's talking about transparency but few practice it to the fullest extent -- this study is telling us it's time to walk the talk.
- Privacy Rules need to go beyond descriptions of how brands will use customer data to being POVs about how they will interact with their customers with assurances that consumer data is the consumers' property and they hold all the rights to how it's used -- it's more a philosophy or statement of principles if you will.
- There's a difference between "Explicit" and "Implicit" profiling. It appears that consumers are reacting negatively to Implicit profiling, where brands are tracking them as they surf and serving up targeted messages based on that surfing behavior. I think consumers feel that being watched without their knowledge can feel scary and a violation of privacy, especially since they didn't give explicit permission for this activity. Yet everyone wants offers and information that is relevant to them. So how do we balance these conflicting forces?
- To me this speaks to the need to go back to a principle Seth Godin spoke about back in 1999 -- "Permission" Marketing. Permission marketing is "explicit" profiling. If the consumer tells a brand they want XYZ and you give them XYZ there are few consumers who have a problem with this. In fact there's a quote in the New York Times article stating that 51% of respondents said tailored discounts were OK. I think this study is telling marketers that targeting relevant offers and information is still important to consumers. It's the way we go about serving up relevant offers and information that they have an issue with. So relevance needs to be balanced with privacy needs. Hence the focus on Explicit profiling. Explicit profiling relies on an ancient form of human communication -- It's called "dialogue & conversation"!
- Dialogue is something marketers are woefully poor at. Many would rather "Talk at" consumers and hide behind statistical models than engage consumers in a dialogue about what they want, like and dislike. It's strange, because marketers ask consumers what they like all the time in research, but when we launch marketing campaigns, it's mostly about getting "OUR" message out, not listening in real-time to feedback.
- Dialogue is also important because it builds trust and trust will be the new currency in marketing effectiveness in the real-time environment of the web and social media. Marketers may want to spend more time with their colleagues in customer service to learn these dialogue and listening skills.
- Consumers also want control of the behavioral data that is collected about them. Why not? It proves to consumers that a brand's transparency policy is truthful and how can it not build trust between the brand and the consumer?
- Finally, marketers need to get out ahead of this issue now rather than wait for legislation to tell us what we can or cannot do. Chances are that outcome will result in throw ing the baby out with the bath water!
3/31/2009
Posted by Armando Alves, Head of Interactive, Draftfcb Portugal
The enormous growth of social media services, with Facebook now over 175 million users and Twitter having a yearly growth rate of 1382%, validates the need for companies to start using these social platforms to engage with customers. And with more people joining these platforms, the amount of content created and shared also increases, with users becoming more sensitive on the way they build their personal network.
At first, users are driven to sign up by curiosity or bombarded by constant friend requests, joining their close circle of contacts. The trouble is that it doesn’t stops here. You then become a fan of your favorite author, start following you favorite basketball player on Twitter or discover that old colleague from trainee years.
The social network, once reserved to our closest friends, is now growing beyond any reasonable Dunbar number and providing much more value that keeping us connected and building group stability.
Friending is a social verb
We can’t deny it: we love groups. We need to belong to a social circle. Bigger online social circles usually imply an increasing complexity of filters and preferences necessary to make it manageable, with revised criteria for friending people. As personal networks grow in size and influence, we also get to the see how artificial barriers to entry are built, with cultural groups creating psychological boundaries (from celebrities to intellectual prejudice).
From Coleman’s concept of network closure as social capital to today’s social media rise, we’ve kept the need to include in our social graphs both weak ties and strong ties. What changed was the way both geographical and social circles were affected by the Internet. Twitter, for instance, favors an asymmetric behavior regarding groups, by not requiring two-way acceptance to get updates. Facebook, on the other hand is focused on a reciprocal relationship that implies social approval.
The nature of these social network relationships also changes according to the stage of a person’s life, with younger demographics having fewer and closer friend evolving to adult life with connections more essential to structural sustainability and innovation. Linkedin, a professional social network, is based on more private conversations and encourages these weak ties, quite valued on today's economic uncertainty.
In most of these online social networks, users put a great deal of effort to perfect their profile, showing that it goes beyond fine tuning preferences, it’s also a public expression of the self. At social music service Last.fm, your playlist is a pretty good psychographic profile of who you are. Or at least, how you want to be seen by others.
But all these profiles, filters and preferences, where users spend hours so they can have a better experience, are mostly useless. Useless in the sense you can’t easily get this data out of centric platforms.
Portable me
These platforms have been evolving slowly, from pre-api times were each user had to login on services and invite all his relevant social circle to today's APIs with password anti-patterns and OAuth Support.
If Facebook started providing closed filtering and grouping mechanisms, Google has pushed even further by releasing Portable Contacts. The open standard makes it easier to access your social circle information in a safe way, using existing standards and libraries (OpenSocial, OAuth, vCard).
Users can “port in their existing network of friends and see who they know is already using a site”. It goes beyond the Facebook feature of optional grouping when adding a friend, by enabling 4 system groups for each user, accessible by service providers. Any user can manually add contacts to the Coworkers, Family, and Friends groups; the My Contacts group contains contacts added to contact groups by the user.
Your mom
What’s your mom have to do with this? Well, let’s put it bluntly: most of us don’t want to share some of our social network updates with our mom, the same way most of us as teenagers didn’t want her to know who we started dating. Or as Clay Shirky mentioned last year at Web2.0 Expo: “What filter just broke ?”. As experience architects, we should be thinking on providing context to social circles and encourage the integration of third-party applications that respect this behavior.
Your mom probably doesn’t have a clue what Microformats or Data Portability is, but she still would love to have a future where she could setup a TV with her media preferences, thanks to a simple Facebook Connect on a Boxee device. That way, you don't need to worry that she messes your remote when staying for the weekend.
With each consumer defining proper contexts, with new tools and better ways to manage their portable profiles, brands and services that encourage this open portability will get to build better behavioral approaches to this ubiquitous vision. The structural holes that will be detected once the data starts flowing will provide immense growth opportunities and gains in productivity, as each person starts connecting their networks with the appropriate context. 11/14/2008
Posted by Sid Liebenson, EVP, Director of Marketing
In my past posts, I've discussed the problems facing e-mail marketers and the common mistakes that are made. In this, my final post on the subject, I'm going to offer some recommendations to get your e-mail efforts on the right course. (Maybe the title of this post should be "Kissing Your Customers With E-Mail".)
- Test out messages on various provider e-mailboxes.
- Test out messages on Blackberries, cell phones, and other screens where people are reading e-mail nowadays.
- If you use images in your messages, build the text in separately so the offer can be seen without requiring graphics to be turned on.
- Use your company name and/or a real name in the “from” field.
- Personalize and customize content as much as possible. Segment e-mail content so that recipients get information that most interests them. (And if you don’t know what interests them – ask.)
- Include interaction, like polls or quizzes. Offer reports and white papers. After all, this is interactive media. Use it to your advantage.
- Keep messages short, simple, and focused. A text-heavy appearance is deadly.
There’s good news for smart e-mail marketers. People like the medium. A Merkle Quris survey reported a growing interest in and willingness for e-mail to replace many functions traditionally served by direct mail.
But marketers have to earn the right to keep a place in the inbox. The same study revealed rising expectations regarding e-mail, with 30% saying they are likely to punish companies for poor e-mail practices by ceasing to do business with them. 11/4/2008
Posted by Sid Liebenson, EVP, Director of Marketing
In my earlier posts I described the "ruthless" environment of the e-mail inbox. And the fight for reader attention is only going to ramp up.
Forrester predicts e-mail volume will reach 838 billion messages by 2013, with growth fueled by wider adoption by smaller companies, more aggressive tactics by current practitioners, lower costs from e-mail service providers, and the “green” trend that encourages marketers to replace printed materials with electronic communications. With 77% of online consumers already fed up with e-mail volume (according to a 2008 Forrester report), e-mail use is declining among many consumers in favor of communications via social networks and text messaging. The business world is still e-mail-centric, but don’t be surprised if other online channels begin to emerge in this space as well. Yet e-mail will remain an essential medium for business-oriented communications. And successful marketers need to make it work effectively.
I am often asked the ideal frequency of e-mail contact with customers. My advice is to communicate as often as you have relevant information to share. In some cases, it makes sense to ask customers how often they’d like to hear from you.
I have nothing against United Airlines. I was a loyal frequent flyer for years, and even though company travel policy now dictates that I fly other airlines most often, I still have some fondness towards United. But their e-mail policy is relentless. Every week I feel bombarded with offers from Mileage Plus partners for mortgages, cruises, investment services, and so on, as well as a dizzying array of promotions. I know they are trying to demonstrate customer service, but it kind of smacks of desperation.
Worst yet, their e-mails come to my home in HTML-format, so I have to click to see graphics and activate links, which creates another barrier to readership. I shouldn’t pick on United, because plenty of other marketers are in the same boat. According to an Epsilon study from a few years back, 65% of e-mail users encounter image suppression. This means that all too often our elaborate promotional efforts won’t be seen by our target audience. The problem is probably even worse in 2008. Increasingly, e-mailbox providers, including AOL, Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft, are blocking HTML in an attempt to fight transmission of viruses through e-mail.
The Epsilon study showed that only 69% of those who experienced suppression sometimes activated images from senders they patronize. Just 15% said they always turned on graphics in promotional messages from senders with which they have a business relationship.
With images suppressed, the target audience sees text only. And in some cases, that means the first thing they see is opt-out instructions. Ouch! 10/24/2008
Posted by Sid Liebenson, EVP, Director of Marketing
A lot has been written about how online media is being used in the 2008 presidential race. Supposedly, Obama has the leading Web fundraising strategy, attracting millions of dollars in small amounts from online donors. And the McCain campaign reportedly has the edge in search optimization.
But I don’t think either candidate totally “gets it” when it comes to relationship marketing. And it’s a major lost opportunity.
Take a moment to think about all of the TV advertising for the presidential tickets. With all of that media tonnage, why are there so few spots with an actual offer? You might see a superimposed URL with a “read the plan” message, but why not an honest-to-goodness direct response call to action? “Visit this site for a detailed comparison of my tax plan vs. my opponent’s, as validated by a reputable independent source, and use our online calculator to determine what it means to your family.” Or “Call now to receive your free booklet outlining my plans for economic recovery.”
When people respond, the candidates could ask a few qualifying questions, let individuals rate the importance of several issues that will influence their vote, and offer opt-in opportunities for further communication. Then, the candidates or political parties could send emails to interested individuals featuring relevant messaging at appropriate intervals.
From what I can tell, there’s plenty of political email flying through cyberspace, but little if any is carefully segmented. Everyone seems to be “blasting” the same emails to their entire list. Perhaps with so much frequency that the messages become annoying.
Recently, someone signed me up for a GOP e-newsletter. I’m getting emails every two or three days – and I don’t want them cluttering my inbox. While each email transmission gives me a number of opportunities to engage more deeply in information on the McCain Palin philosophy, what I don’t get is the opportunity to unsubscribe to the newsletters.
This strikes me as blatantly illegal. But even if there exists some loophole for political messages, one would think that email communications supporting proponents of CAN-SPAM legislation would actually follow its guidelines.
Perhaps I’m foolish to expect too much in the way of ethics (or honesty, for that matter) in political advertising. But current practices certainly do little to engender loyal relationships from American voters. 10/21/2008
Posted by Sid Liebenson, EVP, Director of Marketing
In my last post I raised the issue of how marketers who should be using e-mail to enhance customer relationships are, in many cases, mis-using the medium and actually annoying customers.
So let’s examine the problem more closely. According to Forrester Research, eight out of ten broadband users delete most commercial e-mail with out reading it, and six out of ten say most e-mail offers nothing of interest. Marketers that think their company’s e-mail messages and e-newsletters are eagerly anticipated should dream on. Today’s inboxes are quickly filling up, and patience is wearing thin. Nowhere is this more evident that in the workplace.
If you are like me, you get plenty of commercial e-mails and e-newsletters every day. I subscribe to quite a lot of trade magazines and research sources. Nearly every one sends a daily newsletter. Several of them send various daily newsletters based on industry segment or media channel. Once in a while I find something of relevance, but not most of the time. And these e-newsletters are multiplying like rabbits. I’ve finally had to say no to a few of them. I’m willing to risk missing something that might be interesting just to avoid more time reviewing and deleting e-newsletters. I’d rather just search for information when I need it.
Mind you, my job requires me to keep up with information relevant to our agency and our clients. I doubt I’d be so forgiving otherwise. And when it comes to vendor e-mail, I’m not. And I’m not alone.
E-mail usability studies conducted by Alertbox show the inbox environment to be ruthless. People are stressed and fast when they process new messages. Low relevancy equals immediate deletion. Having your low-quality messages deleted is an unfortunate fate. But the long-term impact is even worse; your future messages may not even be opened. Once users are trained to expect uselessness, they stop paying attention.
10/2/2008
Posted by Sid Liebenson, EVP, Director of Marketing, Draftfcb
Quick show of hands. How many of you recommend using e-mail to market to business-to-business prospects and customers?
I can’t actually see your hands in cyberspace, but I suspect that there are plenty of them raised. And I’m not surprised. According to the DMA’s most recent Power of Direct economic impact study, the ROI for commercial e-mail marketing averages $45.65. The ROI for all commercial non-e-mail-related online marketing is less than half of that – only $20.19. E-mail is profitable, it’s relatively inexpensive, and it works. That’s why, according to a StrongMail/Jupiter Research executive survey, 93% of companies deployed some type of e-mail marketing in 2007 to communicate with customers. In a February 2007 survey by Daltran Media, 83% of marketers listed e-mail as their most important advertising tactic in their annual plan.
Now, a virtual show of hands again. How many of you really like receiving e-mail messages from marketers when you’re at work? If I’m not mistaken, there are fewer hands raised.
And that’s the dilemma. We have a hard working, efficient medium at our disposal that also has the power to annoy. Marketers that should be using the medium to enhance customer relationships are mis-using e-mail – and, at worst, abusing the medium – and risk killing off the customers they wish to develop. This is not a good trend. But it’s one that can be turned around.
In my next few posts, I'll discuss the problem in more detail...and eventually suggest some ways to control it.
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