The Bolin Marketing Blog

This is a response to Adam L. Penenberg’s article “How Much Are You Worth To Facebook,” which can be found here: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/139/loop-de-loop.html

The article is focusing on what the author views as an opportunity for these large social media sites to begin making money off their massive audiences like the search engines have done with keywords and websites have done with banner ads.

We have addressed the value of banner ads and their role in a campaign, as well as clarifying several points the author makes in this article that may be misleading.

The Value of Banner Ads
Articles supporting or devaluing banner ads are released as often as articles that support or devalue all forms of media. It all comes down to what the objective is for your online advertising campaign. If your goal is to build brand awareness, you will want to spread your message quickly to as many users in your target audience as possible and at an efficient CPM, which is what banner advertising can accomplish. With banner ads, you generate reach and frequency quickly to tell people a message, including those who weren’t aware of your message before – which is especially important for a new product.

Many studies have been conducted that illustrate the effectiveness of banner advertising in increasing brand awareness along with sales, website visits and time spent/pages viewed on advertiser websites. For example, the Online Publishing Association did a study with Comscore in January of 2009, called “The Silent Click.” The study used a control/exposed methodology to measure behaviors of consumers post exposure to an online banner ad campaign conducted by the 20 top display advertisers across a variety of industries. In the area of Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) the study showed:
• The exposed group spent 14% more on CPG ecommerce than the control group.
• Large lifts in online searches for advertised brands and visits to advertisers’ websites (not counting immediate banner clicks)
• Large increases in minutes spent and pages viewed on advertisers’ website.

Specific Media, a network with robust targeting capabilities that Bolin partners with often, recently did a study measuring retail impact post online advertising campaign for a CPG client, using nothing but banner ads. This study showed a 58.6% lift in offline sales in the post-campaign period, and a lift of 86.3% in share of customer dollars.

Why “Clicks” and “Click Through Rates” Aren’t Important
In Penenberg’s article, he details click-through-rates (CTRs) and asserts in the second to last sentence of his intro that “it’s not about click-throughs anymore,” which is true…and it hasn’t been for a long time. Not since the internet and advertising on it stopped being a novelty.

Clicks are important if you’re doing a traffic-driving campaign that is specifically designed to get advertisers to your website. The media strategy here is paid search or banners purchased on a pay-per-click vs. CPM basis. CTRs aren’t important here because you’re using a mass amount of impressions in order to get a desired number of users to your site – visits to the site is the goal, and it doesn’t matter how many impressions are used to achieve this goal.

CTRs are not important in awareness campaigns because the goal is to put your message in front of the consumer where they spend their time online, similar to running a TV spot in a consumer’s favorite show or a print ad in a consumer’s favorite magazine. However, when the author talks about banner ads annoying users, he uses pop-ups as the example which is only one form of a banner ad and one that we would never recommend in any of our clients’ advertising campaigns.

The Role of Social Media
Social media is all about connections – with friends, coworkers, passion points such as sports teams, and even preferred brands. The connection you make with a consumer who “friends” your brand on a social networking site is far different than the audience you may reach with a banner ad which is why social media plays a different role in a campaign. We believe social media sites should be used to forge strong relationships through conversations with brand advocates – not for driving mass reach quickly. Social media is a longer term brand building effort.

Under the section “What Are You Worth To Facebook,” Penenberg discusses compensating consumers for participating with brands on social media sites. Our position is that to do this would ruin what these sites are all about – connections. People connect with people, groups, brands, etc. that they enjoy. Peer to peer endorsements are strong, and to know that your friend is talking about X brand because they’re getting something for it, rather than simply because they really like it, would take away much of the value of that endorsement. Sooner or later, we’d run into the same problem mommy bloggers are having – lost sincerity (also, the possibility of the FTC getting involved).

Summary
If click-through-rate is the only measure of banner ads’ effectiveness we would agree with the author. However, we use banner ads to build awareness (not to drive click-through rates).

As experts in digital marketing, we often find ourselves talking a lot among peers about social media – what it is, the  value it provides, how we leverage it for our clients, and so on. And we find ourselves (generally) nodding in agreement.

But that’s not always the case with people outside the realm of the social media industry, practice or study.

We firmly believe that social media strategies and tactics can have huge impact for specific clients. But we also erroneously assume that everyone around us also understands the imputed or explicit value it can provide. It goes without saying that many marketers are skeptical about social media, especially when they’ve grown accustomed to traditional measures for marketing activities in the mix.

After all, it all comes down to dollars, comfort with what people know, and discomfort with what they don’t know.

Definitions like reach, awareness, frequency, preference, recognition and recall are generally understood by seasoned marketing folks. Social media, however, requires new definitions and new measures, like conversation, sentiment, velocity and online share of voice. These new definitions need to be matched against old ones and compared and contrasted regarding their value. Social media has the ability to take customers deeper into the product, service and brand experience. There are varying discussions on how to measure it objectively and subjectively, too. We’re finding that comparing the value of traditional media and social media is an apple-versus-orange argument.

We are not only talking about different types of measures for different types of consumer activities, however. In true Gerald Zaltman fashion, I came up with another metaphor (a little more elaborate than apples and oranges) to explain what I think is also happening with social media. For instance, consider the effect the alternative fuel car (social media) will have (or, is having) on the infrastructure and market for gasoline and gas-powered cars (traditional media and marketing).

For example (here’s just one), the electric car will soon make up a significant mix of all road-bound vehicles. Why? The very existence of the electric car challenges the infrastructure of gasoline distribution, not to mention the market for oil itself, by reducing demand for gasoline and the need for gas stations (presumptively, because people are more carbon-footprint conscious and are coming to terms with the inefficiencies of the gas-powered car). There’s a (presumptive) growing demand for alternatively fueled vehicles which is fundamentally changing the way we perceive and measure value in our commuting and consuming lives. (Reference what’s happened in Detroit).

Let me take that same paragraph and substitute some language:

Social media will soon make up a significant mix of all media spends for many marketing initiatives. Why? The very existence of social media challenges the infrastructure for media distribution, not to mention the market for traditional media itself, by reducing demand for traditional media and the need for media placement (presumptively, because more people are understanding the benefits of social media’s efficiency in connecting with consumers, dollar for dollar). There’s a growing demand for social media which is fundamentally changing the way we perceive and measure value in our marketing mixes. (Just look at this tiny example of efficient local marketing).

I’m not saying traditional media (on and offline) and gas stations will go away entirely. And I’m not saying social media has evolved as much as the alt-fuel car. There is a lot of change happening, however. And this is just one metaphor to help explain it.

What do you think?

Minneapolis and St Paul have become a hotbed of social media so it’s no small feat to make it into a list of top innovators. Although TaulPaul comes by his interest sincerely, he is lucky to have clients who are savvy enough to recognize the opportunities he brings to them. Congrats Paul!

Here is the official list of Top 20 Social Media Innovators:
http://tinyurl.com/lq7neq

Last night I had the fortunate opportunity to attend the local UPA MN lecture where Susan Dray and David Siegel talked about some of the myths of user research.  Without getting into the details of the presentation, their main message was basically don’t always trust research outcomes, no matter how massive or sophisticated they appear.

We work hard to never stop questioning our approaches to defining customer or user experience problems, in addition to our methods in answering them. But as experience design strategists and designers in agency or consultancy settings like Bolin Digital, we often don’t have the luxury of large budgets to help us inform our design decisions for many projects.

In the methods of our work, we rely heavily upon activity-, user-, and system-centered approaches as models to guide us through the forest of decisions. We hope that one of them or a combination of them gets us to the answer quickly.  Paul and I have also chatted about the common sense approach to design: should we  sometimes  rely on our own experience or instinct to guide decision making (also referred to as Dan Saffer’s “genius” centered design approach)? It seems like even this cost-efficient “gut” check, however, can get us into deep water.

As we continue to grow up in a world of increasingly sophisticated interactions and product experiences, it’s important to understand how we arrive at conclusions about which design paths to take.

All this recent thinking provoked me to ask these questions about design research methods and tools: Wwhat’s the best mix of data and methods?  How much of it is driven by common sense? How do we know when we arrive at the best possible solution?

Judson Laipply Dance

I had to post a few pics of Bolin’s exciting video shoot with the star of Evolution of Dance, Judson Laipply.  This went down last Sunday.  For readers who are not familiar, Evolution of Dance has reeled in just under 117 million YouTube.com views.  I wont give too much detail until we’re closer to release, but as you may be able to gather from the image, it was quite the experience.  You can subscribe to Judson’s YouTube channel if you would like notification of the release.  I can personally attest to the fact that Judson is one heck of a nice guy and that he has some amazing energy.

Yours truly was offered a wonderful costume for the shoot.  After 4 hours wearing this thing and dancing, I was severly dehydrated.  I have new found appreciation for mascots everywhere.  Can you guess which of the costumes below was mine?

Wolfram Alpha is a knowledge engine based on Mathematica. Here’s an interesting article giving hints on what it is, and how it could impact how we look for answers online. What will be your first question for Wolfram Alpha?

If you’ve been on facebook lately I’m sure you’ve noticed the “25 Things” lists – or perhaps written one yourself (I’ve seen a couple Bolinites’ lists – myself included).  This writer for Time had a negative yet humorous point of view on the lists – although they sure did get a lot of content links out of his list considering he was making fun of it.  And notice the dig in the last line of the article .

 http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1877187,00.html

 Although this writer’s obviously dislikes the lists, if it was facebook’s idea I think it is genius – it gets people to use the “notes” function, which I didn’t really know about before.  I’ve seen more and more notes being written since these lists came out.  This function can be used to talk amongst friends you tag only or can be seen by anyone, depending on your choice.  This can mean more time on facebook, and less time on email (for example – when and where to do happy hour can be a note w/ tagged friends, instead of an email).

This one writer things the lists are stupid – fair enough.  I have seen an awful lot of them posted lately, I’m just sayin’…

Here are a few things that will happen to Twitter in my 2009 predictions:

• We will see the first noticeable increase in bot use

  You’ve probably seen the auto responders thanking you for following a person.  It’s going to get worse (way worse).  We’ve seen bots creep their way in chat rooms, IM sessions, video games, and you’ll see it happen in Twitter this year.  You’ll even see a company try to utilize a bot for customer service usage.  It will fail whale hardcore, it will gain some media attention, and ultimately scare other companies from adopting Twitter for customer service purposes.

• Early adopter exodus

  2009 will mark the beginning of the move to “the next thing”.  Face it, a large portion of Twitter’s user base is made up of marketers, media and PR folk, and bloggers.  When grandma gets her Twitter account set up this year, they’ll start looking for the next Social Media tool.  That’s not to say they won’t keep their account, but their usage will fall the way of Friendster in the next year.

• Facebook will cease to be interested in purchasing Twitter

  Remember the rumors of Facebook buying Twitter?  Facebook will have a “come to Jesus” moment, and realize they don’t need to buy Twitter’s user base, and they’ll focus on Facebook Connect (like they should).  Facebook isn’t doing all that well with their ad metrics, and I’d say their contextual algorithm needs more than a bit of work.  They really have no business trying to serve ads on Twitter, when they can’t correctly serve ads on, well, Facebook.

• Google finally buys Twitter near the end of 2009

  We’ll all breathe a collective sigh of relief when Google finalizes the deal near the end of 2009.  Google will introduce new ad serving tools which will fully utilize sentiment analysis.  Based upon an @username conversation being positive, negative, or neutral, the ad will change message.  Online marketers will collectively cry tears of joy.

Aside from all the news about Apple’s withdrawal from Macworld and tradeshows in general, as well as the questions surrounding the health of Steve Jobs, there’s been a lot of speculation about what Apple’s next Big Deal is.

How about an enhanced, more evolved, touch screen iMac? This is not a stretch. HP has it. Or maybe you just call it the iPhone. Will Apple will roll out some application that is more intuitive, more useful, more sexy, more capable of complex interactions than current devices out there? How quickly will non-keyboard gestural interfaces become part of the lexicon of computer interaction?  We’ve seen how the iphone technology works with current ergonomics of human movement. Here are some foreseeable extensions of the idea:

• POP swiping and account transacting (e-money services have been popular in Asia for some time)
• Mobile health monitoring that tracks human movement and vitals
• ‘Smart’ apparel that collects numerous points of data from and for people that wear it
• Any type of research requiring micro viewing

These applications are not only forseeable, but require sophisticated new devices to handle enhanced human interaction. The moment of truth: How will a company like Apple strike out on this front? The pressure is on.