Looking forward to 2012
Dec 08We’re not yet halfway through December (woo!) but our attention begins to turn to assessing the year past and looking forward to the year ahead. I am closely following all of the trends that have developed in 2011 and have written about a lot of them. Assimilated here are some of my key predictions that will matter to brand leaders in 2012, in no particular order.
1. Mobile
I’m not just talking about broad “mobile growth,” which is pretty generic (although true). We’re going to see exponential growth in adoption of smartphones and tablets as well as exciting new commerce platforms that make mobile the next major retail gateway. This includes innovations on the retail side that enable them to take payments via mobile devices, a trend we’re already seeing with Google Wallet and Square. We’ll likely see the irksome world of digital coupons evolve into a platform that works for everyone in that ecosystem (retailers, POS technologies, consumers and marketers) and finally close that gap in the final frontier of the consumer couponing craze. This will bring massive scale to a marketer’s ability to develop relevant, customized and personalized offers for their consumers and to reach the middle of the adoption curve. I suspect by the end of 2012 we’ll be having very specific and frequent discussions with marketers about making mobile coupons part of their core outreach strategy.
2. Startupville
Let’s revisit a trend that repeats itself in Silicon Valley. A company, founded by quirky 20-somethings, develops something marvelous that immediately captures the imagination of millions and grows seemingly overnight, finding itself the subject of cover stories and bar conversation across the globe. Said company reaches an inflection point and decides to take the next growth step by going public. Newly funded and flush with millions (or billions) in cash, the company turns up the heat and the strain of its stratospheric growth begin to show. Meanwhile, somewhere, the cycle begins to repeat itself and a new story develops. This isn’t a perfect equation but I think many could agree it seems to be a general framework, most recently with Google and Facebook. If we believe the recent reports of Facebook’s IPO plans we’ll probably see a Facebook ticker at some point next year. That will certainly legitimize the cottage industry of developers and agencies that have built robust businesses around Facebook’s platform, and that will be a trend that continues. But I suspect we’ll also see new energy emerge at the outer reaches of that ecosystem and we’ll start to see signs of a new startup, a new story and a new thing for consumers to get excited about. Marketers, take note: you’ll want to be part of that story as early as possible. Consumers have increasingly high expectations of the brands in their lives and expect innovation even from their toilet paper brand. Be ready to pounce on opportunity.
3. Big Data
If you haven’t heard this buzzword already, chances are still good that you’re participating in it. Big Data is the accelerating emergence of massive sets of data, fueled by the social web and cloud computing, that takes equally massive amounts of computing power and expertise to mine and understand. If you’re doing sentiment analysis or tracking word clouds of conversation around your brand online, you’re already taking advantage of Big Data. Analyst firm IDC says this is an area where companies must have a develop a competency in 2012 (http://gigaom.com/cloud/its-cloud-prediction-time-idc-gartner-and-i-weigh-in/). I’d generally agree. I am seeing PR firms, digital agencies, brand teams and consumer relations teams taking advantage of Big Data now and that’s a trend that will accelerate rapidly early in 2012. It’s a competitive advantage to put that data to use for your brand, with a caveat…
4. Privacy
All that data in the cloud comes with inherent privacy concerns and none are more sensitive than a consumer’s personal information, credit card details or location. As brands have begun experimenting with the trends around Big Data, it’s leaving the heads of their legal teams spinning. I predict that brands and agencies will take a cautious stance toward emerging channels that require heavy personal information to participate (see trend #1, Mobile) until they can be assured that the necessary infrastructure is in place to protect that data. But it won’t take years for that process and 2012 will be the year many of those questions find accurate and permanent answers.
Making innovation part of your DNA
Sep 16
I write a lot about innovation and explore a variety of methods to infuse it into your marketing efforts. In this post I reviewed four key innovation elements from Google that are broadly (if not universally) applicable to the function of PR and marketing. There was a two elements missing from that list that are worth exploring.
Part of the process of innovation involves a certain mindset that not everything goes as planned. If you try enough ideas and try hard enough, some will work out with astounding success while others will be doomed for the deadpool before they even launch. Still, if you have not encouraged your marketing organization to truly embody what it means to innovate and move quickly you will be missing out on massive opportunities to engage your consumers and stakeholders.
It’s easy for senior leadership to get excited about the buzzword “innovation” and they will likely welcome hearing you talk about how you are making your marketing and PR engine more lean and innovative. It’s the kind of stuff managers like to hear. But the reality of innovation is this – it’s not always rosy. Often, it results in bad results.
To capture all of the upside you also have to accept that there will be downside too. These are a couple of very important mindshifts you will need to consider before you start selling your organization and your agency roster on innovation:
1. It’s OK to Fail
This is such an important mindset to embody and it’s very, very difficult for many managers to accept this reality. A lot of organizations are tuned to extract failure out and in the process make those who may have bold ideas fearful of exploring them. You have to be willing to address that when it comes to marketing and social innovations, some amount of failure is OK. Better than OK, actually, because if you haven’t failed at a couple of things you are probably not taking enough risks. Google was famous for its quarterly planning process involving OKRs (that’s Objectives and Key Results). Each employee was expected to set for themselves every quarter what many might consider absurd performance goals. Most often, we’d fail to reach them and that was considered ideal – the stretch goals usually constituted about 120% of what success really looked like and so by getting to 90% of the goal, major progress was made. This encouraged everyone to experiment and to do so without fear of being tagged “failure.” Note: this is not a license to throw caution to the wind with every project and rush into things. It will be your job to defend every single project coming out of your marketing group to the rest of the company. But you won’t make those strides that will be widely celebrated if you’re not open to failing a little along the way and committed to providing that failure the necessary air cover.
2. Re-examine Your Listening Capabilities
I’ve seen this concept tested time and again and it’s another area where most organizations fall short. What often happens is someone in the marketing organization dreams up a grand idea for a new tactic or social innovation program. They write up a brief and put it out to their agency roster for consideration. The agency team executes on the work, launches the initiative and no budget or bandwidth is set aside to iterate or tweak the program. The thing is, most often you don’t get things right the first time. You won’t have time to send everything through QA. What you should be doing is listening intently to your most ardent advocates; generally, they will be first to suggest improvements to a new program, app or initiative and will also be the first to let you know when something goes sideways. If you’re not listening to that chatter closely you’ll miss the insight and if you aren’t aligned with enough bandwidth to tweak the program, you’ll quickly lose your followers. If you follow the “launch it and move on” mentality, you’re almost guaranteed to have mediocre results. So think about how you can make listening a core part of your marketing innovation process.
3. Know When to Sunset
All things come to the end of their logical lifecycle. Bad programs that go sideways will get there a lot faster and if you keep pumping resources into it will drain your organization of energy, money and ideas. Back to my first point, you have to be willing to accept failure every so often and if you’re moving quickly and pushing out new marketing initiatives as fast as you can dream them up, you’ll probably hit a few sour notes. Shut them down and move on. Don’t pump resources into an idea just because it’s there. It’s OK to sunset ideas. Communicate clearly with your fans and consumers about the reasons behind it, move quickly to the next great idea and capture key learnings as you go to ensure you are moving through the ideastream strategically and not just flitting from project to project.
Combined these amount to a seemingly insurmountable obstacle for a lot of marketing organizations. Corporate politics, budgets and planning cycles do not always permit sweeping changes overnight. But be persistent and chip away at them over time. You can change how you engage your stakeholders and market products and services.
New wrinkle in Facebook advertising
May 20
Photo credit: Rob Pongsajapan
I wrote in January about the new Facebook advertising product – Sponsored Stories – that takes mentions a user makes of a product or service and allows advertisers to recapture that content and serve it up as an ad unit to the same user’s own Facebook community. It’s sort of a pseudo-endorsement product and Facebook contends that it respects privacy boundaries since it is only shown to your existing network which, ostensibly, would have seen the original comment anyway.
Fast forward to May. Facebook CTO Bret Taylor got a grilling in DC this week on privacy-related issues related to age and protection of minors. This same week, new criticisms emerged related to the Sponsored Stories product. The critics claim that since Facebook does not have built-in age verification (witness the reported 7 million-plus minors on the service in the US), there is no way for a parent or guardian to give consent for images to be used for advertising purposes. That violates the spirit, if not the letter, of state laws requiring adultconsent for usage of a person’s name or likeness.
This creates a legal quandary for marketers. We want to push the innovation envelope and tap new sources of innovation for building brands and sustaining interest in products and services. Products like Facebook’s advertising suite give us a very rich source of fairly turn-key solutions to do just that. But if it turns out that we’re reaching minors, will we be culpable? This is an area where I have witnessed marketing innovations teams and corporate legal do battle many times. The marketing teams want to rush in and capture the opportunity before the competition; lawyers want to study the issues and ensure there are no landmines about to be tripped.
I’m on the side of the marketer in most of those cases and generally my advice is this: start with something small and don’t try to reinvent everything in one big bite. If you want to test new ad units on Facebook, try testing it on a smaller product category rather than your core product. Partner closely with your legal team and learn together. I have often witnessed a marketing team go to their legal counterparts for blessing on a big new plan only to get a frustrating “smack down” and walk away. Remember that there are multiple legal issues at stake with social channels. Go bravely into the sun.
Follow the leader
May 12This week’s afterglow of the remarkable piece in Business Week about Sheryl Sandberg’s vision and leadership at Facebook was cut short by the discovery of an ethically-dubious PR campaign undertaken by PR agency Burson-Marsteller on behalf of Facebook.
First, on the Sandberg piece, I have to say that author Brad Stone did a great job depicting her character and her genuine nature. I had the fortune to work with Sheryl at Google and all of the things that he reports about her are generally true. She has an infectious spirit that inspires the team around her.
Now to the dirty news that tarnished the good vibe: it turns out that Facebook hired a PR agency to bring attention to what it believes are privacy-related issues with its competitor, Google. The concept – as reported by Chris Soghoian, one of those targeted by the pitch – involved pitching and working with a blogger to draft an editorial drawing attention to the privacy issues which Burson would then attempt to place in a major news outlet. The client behind the work, Facebook, was not disclosed in the e-mail pitch nor in the follow up conversation with Soghoian. Only after independent review determined that it was Facebook who was behind the campaign did the company confirm it. Shortly thereafter Burson also confirmed the report.
The shocking thing about this is the questionable ethics behind pitching something like an op-ed without disclosing the interests of the parties involved. It seems noone took the pitch seriously, and for good reason. Burson claims all of the information in the pitch is public information although it would appear that they employed the longstanding and reviled PR tactic of hyperbole to make the pitch more enticing. The statements of both Burson and Facebook seem to take some responsibility for the poor judgement but also levies blame on the other party.
After reviewing the stories I’m torn – I can’t decide what element of this story is worse. What do you think? Vote below.
Loading ...Mobile and the purchase funnel
May 11Mobile and the purchase funnel? No, it’s not the name of the latest YouTube phenom, although if you search on YouTube using those terms the first result is a wonderful recording of a live mobile event from Google:
That video begins and ends with this parable: in mobile, it’s not too late to be early. In this case, your opportunity to be early is rapidly vanishing and the crown being claimed by your competitors. If you are a consumer brand company of any kind – CPG, consumer tech, fashion, travel, food and beverage – why should you care about mobile?
There are some very long answers to that question but here is a simple analysis that should pique your interest: on the path to purchase for your consumer, mobile is at the tail versus the head. That is the say, when a consumer goes onto their mobile device they are most likely to ready to make a commitment to purchasing in your category and they’re looking for help. They want help finding a store, a phone number, a review or product rating or in many cases, a deal. This according to new data released today by eMarketer.
According to eMarketer’s research, nearly two-thirds of consumers visited a business after searching for it on their mobile phone. Read that again: two-thirds. If that statistic alone does not convince you to take action on a mobile strategy pronto, then maybe this one will. Overall, more than half of consumers made a purchase after their mobile session. That includes in-store, over the phone or online.
And that’s why mobile is at the base of the purchase funnel. At the point of engagement on a mobile device consumers are likely already considering your brand, they’re in the market to buy and they are seeking some guidance or direction in their purchase (which could quite literally mean a map to your nearest store or hotel). This is fertile ground for engaging consumers in a high-value transaction and should be high-stakes territory for you and your competitors. Looked at from a different perspective, if you haven’t conceptualized or realized a mobile strategy for your brand then you can feel confident in knowing that your competitors are probably celebrating as they pull in passers-by, would-be brand loyalists and deal seekers and capture that revenue for themselves.
So go back and watch that Google video above, listen to the insights then go read the eMarketer report. It should spark a discussion on how to jump into the mobile fray within your organization. Remember, it’s not too late to be early.
