The Migration to Mobile III--All Shopping Can Be Local

It used to be a sign that you were cool with current technology; you did research on your computer before heading to retail stores to shop. That’s no longer true. Now shoppers can use their smartphones or tablets to get the information they are looking for right at the POP--and maybe a coupon to boot! That is a powerful concept and it is driving profound changes that go all the way down to the individual retail location.

It doesn’t start when the shopper nears the store or walks in the door, though. It starts by building a meaningful SoLoMo strategy. One interpretation of the mobile shopping funnel captures the essence.

http://www.brafton.com/news/smx-advanced-buzz-social-local-mobile-marketing-leads-to-sales-800526890

Social marketing helps build—or maybe for the small local retailer builds all by itself— awareness and a positive brand image. Retailers use tactics ranging from paid advertising to instore promotions and events to lure followers to their social platforms. Mobile marketing—whether paid ads or content marketing—reaches people when they are actively researching a purchase or provides a triggering cue by suggesting a reason to purchase. Local marketing reaches them at the point of purchase, giving them compelling reasons to buy at that moment.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/25/mobile-shopping-apps/

Adding another dimension to that argument is data about the role of various types of shopping apps during the 2012 holiday season. The huge growth is seen in retailer apps and the lowest growth in the daily deals apps, whose difficulties have been much in the news. I wrote about the Macy’s shopping app during the holidays. The mapping application still seems to be available only for the Herald Square store but deals, wish lists and other retail services are going strong. At the moment they are offering me a 20% off promo code, which might be useful, and a bridal registry, which definitely is not! My initial reaction was “so much for personalization,” but how do they find out unless they ask?

The data also highlights another important mobile issue. Price comparison apps also experienced explosive growth. Showrooming—checking prices in stores then buying more cheaply online—seems to be ongoing.

But there’s good reason for local retailers not to hit the panic button. The trend can be their friend! No less a retailer than Walmart is encouraging people to use their phones in stores. Wired explains it well:

Walmart’s stores are “geo-fenced,” which means the location-aware app enters “store mode” when you walk through the door. Once in store mode, you have access to an interactive version of the weekly on-sale circular for that store. You can see what’s new in the store. You can scan bar codes with the phone’s camera for prices and keep a running list of everything you’re buying so you’ll know the total cost when you get to the register.

How can retailers without Walmart-level resources turn showrooming to their advantage? The advice from the Retail Customer Experience site is:

1. Embrace omnichannel.
2. Bring the best of online shopping into the store.
3. Implement innovative in-store technologies.
4. Empower in-store personnel.
 
Putting it all together they say:

Innovative in-store technologies can help shoppers engage with brands and create a great, enjoyable shopping experience that leads them to both return to the store and to act as brand ambassadors through social media, leading to more visits from their peers.

Very interesting—it all comes full circle. Use both the human touch of your store employees and the power of technology to give your customers a great shopping experience and they will share it with their friends on social media. Like all good advice, it’s easier said than done, but the guidelines are there!

The Migration to Mobile II -- The Second Screen, or Is It the Fifth?

“Second screening” has interested me from the advent of mobile. I used to think I was too old to watch TV with a mobile device in hand—that it was just for Gen Y and below. However, now even I find myself doing it along with a lot of others—amazing!

So first the terminology. It’s not standard, but this is general usage. TV was the first screen, the desktop computer the second. The third was the cellphone (now the smart phone) with the fourth being the tablet. The Pew chart shows the increase in ownership of various mobile devices and the corresponding decline in desktop ownership.






eMarketer recently quoted data suggesting that connected cars would provide the fifth screen. That is quite a challenge for marketers and their content! I do hope, however, that cars will be driving themselves before drivers start, for example, start browsing the Internet from their car’s dashboard!

What’s important is that behavior is changing right along with ownership as I pointed out last week. It’s safe to summarize that communication is still most important but brand-related activity continues to grow. Actual shopping, not so much. However, recent Nielsen data indicates that consumers are likely to research on smart phones and purchase on tablets. So second screening is taking place even within the growing mobile shopping space.


Three recent event illustrate what is happening and how brands, teams and people can benefit. See these summary infographics:

The Summer Olympics
The Super Bowl
The Oscars

All had their own issues. Olympics social media activity was overwhelmed by viewer angst about NBC’s coverage (#NBCfail). The Super Bowl had that power outage—what else did viewers have to do except tweet about it? The Oscars have taken heat in the past for not doing a good job with social media. This year the level of social media activity was less than that of the Super Bowl and the Grammys according to Mashable.

The Grammys seem to do a consistently good job of self-promotion. Here is their advice for other event producers:
1. Be semi-obnoxious, promoting platforms and hashtags at all opportunities.
2. Tell your audience what they will get for following you on social media. In the case of the Grammys that included behind-the-scenes coverage and unique content.
3. Let your audience know you are listening. That takes a trained social media team at work during the event.
4. Spell it out. See Number 1! The Grammys used the transitions to ads to promote platforms, sites, etc. often using their celebrity presenters to do so.
5. Be active on social media during your event. More than listening, have proactive official posts and tweets to encourage engagement.
6. Think about social media long before the event. The Oscars actually did a good job of that. Consumers were fairly accurate in predicting Oscar winners.
7. Use social media to help the viewer keep up. Use captions, crawlers, etc. to list platforms and hashtags, making social engagement easier.

Whether it’s a brand-related event, a business conference, or a non-profit activity, the work it takes to integrate social media can pay off handsomely in visibility!

What Makes a Good Social Media Team?

Nike’s announcement last month that it was bringing “all” social media activity in-house stimulated a flurry of speculation, some of it off-base. “In-house” does not necessarily equal “all”.

I participated in the attempt to integrate direct marketing into traditional marketing in the late 80s and early 90s. History is being repeated in the social media era. The direct marketing agencies I first knew were entrepreneurial. Many were subsequently acquired by general agencies as a quick way to gain direct expertise because their brand marketer clients were demanding it. As brand marketers acquired direct marketing skills many established in-house direct marketing departments. This was especially true of telephone marketing where it became an axiom that brand marketers hired service bureaus to learn the business, then brought telephone marketing in-house.

Do you see any place in that paragraph where “social” could not be substituted for “direct?” I think not, but even that covers up an important issue. Sarah Hofsterrer, CEO of digital agency 360i closes the loop. She says:

some brands will move in the direction of taking social media management in-house, but that does still leave room for the agency to consult a brand in a strategic context, even though the activation is in-house.

That mirrors perfectly what happened in direct-response marketing. Brands with in-house departments often sought the strategic advice of agencies, especially when they were launching new initiatives. Brands also recognized that agencies are mostly a variable cost while in-house units are fixed costs.  Smaller companies need to be especially aware of the cost issue, but all need to strike the correct balance. Digiday has some cost estimates and other good observations from large brand marketers.

Marketing Charts quotes a survey of companies of 100+ employees that found that while 27% have a team that works exclusively on social media (most others assign SMM along with other work) only 3% outsource SMM completely which suggests that the in-house trend is in its infancy.

So if history repeats itself--as it seems to be doing--more brands will be developing substantial in-house social media marketing expertise. I recently highlighted a video from one social media team, the Mars Curiosity Rover, doing an excellent job. The three social media marketers sat around a table and had an interesting conversation. What about requirements when the social media team gets larger?

There are many lists of do’s and don’t’s but Jeremiah Owyang has a post that details not only the makeup of a social media team but gives job descriptions for each category and takes a look at social media teams by level of corporate social media maturity. You should read the entire post.

He defines the social media team as follows:

The Corporate Social Media team is business program lead by a corporate social strategist that achieves business goals using social tools by coordinating with multiple business units across the enterprise.
In that definition he gives the basic answer to my question. What makes a good social media team is not specific skills, it is strategic focus.

Are you ready for complete control over SMM? Can you demonstrate ROI and thereby justify the costs involved? Can you locate employees with the needed skills, including the ability to orchestrate social media content and response across the enterprise? And finally, is your SSMM at a level that qualifies it as a strategic activity?

The best advice is to go slow. Don’t dump your agency quickly or rudely. You are probably going to need them to help build a strategic SMM team and to back it up from time to time in the future.

In-house social media teams simply aren’t an either/or proposition!

Another Shout-Out for the Importance of CEO Social Media Engagement

A recent study by social media agency BRANDfog gives additional support to the belief that CEO social media engagement is important. The survey included employees from 800 US and UK firms of various sizes in a variety of industries. According to their press release:

• 80.6% of respondents believe that social media is an important communications channel for CEOs to engage with customers and investors
• 68.7% of respondents believe that C-suite social media engagement enhances the perception that a brand is honest and trustworthy
• 83.9% believe that CEO social media engagement is an effective tool to increase brand loyalty.
 
The emphasis in this passage is mine! There are a whole host of reasons why CEOs and other C-level executives are reluctant to engage in social media, but increasingly the excuses just don’t hold water. Listen to BRANDfog CEO Ann Charles:

“We are witnessing a fundamental shift in the culture of modern leadership, brought upon by social media but sustained by the strategic inventiveness of smart CEOs. . .The role of the CEO has been transformed by social media and CEOs have no choice but to become more visible, social, and accessible than ever before.”

What are some of the benefits of CEO social media engagement? They include raising the corporate brand’s profile, communicating corporate vision and mission, attracting desirable employees, increasing brand loyalty, and even increasing purchase intent. (Study pdf)

The study also speaks to the importance of social media in times of corporate crisis and the belief that CEO involvement can be helpful. That goes back to my often-repeated question: How can a CEO know how to use social media under pressure unless (s)he has experience and is comfortable with the social channels? The answer is simple; experience and comfort level is crucial.

That said, what channels are the CEOs in these companies most likely to use? The answer is no surprise—Twitter! Are they linking to more detailed corporate information? I hope so! Many also use LinkedIn; why don’t all of them have a professional presence there? Facebook is fine and corporate blogs round out the important channels. The blogs, along with the website, are where the detailed information lives; that’s where the links should go. (See the complete infographic of study data here.)

It’s not a new message, but this study makes it clear that it’s still a hard one to get across. My personal opinion is clear. Why should customers trust a brand whose C-level executives are afraid to engage openly and transparently with them?

Increasingly the answer is: they will not trust those brands!

Trends for Internet and Social Media Marketing in 2013

Tis the season for marketing predictions for 2013—my Twitter stream is full of them this morning. There are a lot of retrospectives also and we can learn from them, but I’m sticking to looking ahead.

One recent post suggests that 2013 will be a year for consolidation and implementation. There’s a lot of truth to that but who knows when and where the next great technology development will occur? I’m not willing to say that it won’t be in 2013. And there will be lots of useful, if not revolutionary, developments like the Thinglink platform that I wrote about last week for marketers to incorporate into their actions.

With that in mind, I’ll use eMarketer’s 5 key trends as the basis for my take on 2013 trends. They are all issues that are familiar to marketers—and ones to which most marketers can substantially refine their approaches. The entire eMarketer presentation is embedded at the bottom of this post, and it’s well worth reviewing.

Trend #1—Fragmentation everywhere
Fragmentation affects all aspects of marketing, witness the recent interest in microsegmentation. Channel fragmentation is probably the marketer’s key issue and that’s one place where new developments could occur. We will all continue to struggle to integrate all our channels in a meaningful fashion. In the process we may learn more about targeting specific segments through specific channels. I just pinned an infographic that looks at consumer relationship to channels and brands in 2013 that has some good insights.

Trend #2—Mobile first is the mother lode

After the bazillions of words written about mobile in 2012, what is left to say except that the trend continues and even accelerates? A growing amount of website traffic is generated by mobile devices. The same is true of ecommerce sales. Did I really see a TV crawler headline that someone bought a $48k bulldozer from his (almost certainly?) smartphone recently? Apparently that’s not the only high ticket item bought from a smartphone this holiday season—and paid for with PayPal!

Trend #3—Consumer behavior becomes circuitous
That’s another way of saying that purchase behavior is non-linear and may follow a variety of different paths at different times for the same individual. Maybe the bulldozer purchaser hired a driver through an ad in a local newspaper—digital or print edition, maybe both. This McKinsey article on the consumer purchase path is not new, but good concepts don’t get outmoded rapidly.

Trend #4—Content marketing is dominant
That’s not news to readers of this blog. There are interesting takes on it though. eMarketer’s own strategy for these trends is worth noting. They published an article on each trend beginning in late November, leading up to the webinar in December. Good repurposing—and promotion! Content marketing goes by different handles—Brent Turner calls it “native advertising” in an MIT blog post. They’ll be offering other posts on trends through the end of January. Think about it. Most of us are doing our posts as end-of-year celebrations. They are continuing into 2013 with thoughtful posts from guest bloggers—good content marketing!

Trend #5—Big Data is still the big thing
This is hardly news either. We all know that data for tactical uses such as personalization and data mining for strategy development are crucial. The torrent of data will only speed up in 2013, leaving marketers continuing to struggle to keep up with it. One of the most interesting insights comes from the recent LeWeb conference in Paris. It’s theme was the Internet of Things. Again, not a new concept but one that is exploding all around us. I found the example of the diabetes mobile app and online communities especially compelling. Social media for good is always a pleasant topic. 

eMarketer calls it Marketing Reimagined and it suggests that marketers in 2013--as always--have their jobs cut out for them. May all the developments be positive ones!

eMarketer Webinar: Key Digital Trends for 2013 from eMarketer