Forbes pick the best social idea of all time
In 2010, we witnessed several very visible social media campaigns. They drew tons of conversations for a while and stopped. 
Under the radar, there are silent social media strategies that have kept going for years and are very social.
Back in August, after PG’s Old Spice ground-breaking success, Forbes picked their best ever social media campaigns.
If you’ve not seen the list, there’s really no surprise. They’re all blockbusters. They all come from Big brands with big media budgets.
I argue that Forbes is missing a big point. Dustin and Tom make some very good points around the risk of making those campaigns examples that all marketers should try and follow.
The point missed is that social media is about networks, relationships, people to people. The social component trumps the media one in it (it’s the new piece). Indeed, social media will alter marketing budgets and salaries will start to replace media buy as brands are stepping up to it.
The Forbes list contains campaigns that are social on the surface but not much more than that. Good old style campaigns with a coat of shiny social glaze on top.
A social media campaign should take advantage of the networks, the relationships, the people.
Of course, it’s less visible, it takes more time to build but the effect will be long lasting as networks and relationships are there to stay. They are sustainable.
Examples that come to my mind are defunct Sun Microsystems’ thousand of bloggers, IBM’s thousand of twitterer…which provide the foundation for social campaigns to unfold slowly following the natural path of influence between the brands and its ecosystem.
Last, for smaller brands, the kind of examples shown by Forbes are totally out of reach. However, a well thought out social strategy that leverages employees and advocates networks can be done.
Washington D.C.-based global marketing leader Ogilvy has embraced social media for a long
t
ime.
Their 360º Digital Influence hub has developed a leading expertise in social media and always looks for the best tools and technologies that meet their evolving business needs.
eCairn had the opportunity to talk to Laurent Francois, head of the 360º Digital Influence hub in France.
Laurent talks about how eCairn Conversation(tm) is used by his team to understand and model the influence taking place within communities and use this knowledge to develop targeted engagement programs for their customers.
Listen more here
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In just several weeks, Adobe’s Community team has aggregated 463 highly relevant bloggers for their flash technology, is able to assess individual influence and is now monitoring daily between 200 to 600 conversations that are highly relevant to their business.
NEWS: eCairn Conversation(tm) Updated
Today we’re excited to announce that eCairn Conversation™ has been improved with several updated features.
Now, eCairn is an even more powerful solution for your community and influencers marketing activities.
With this new release, you get:
- Enhanced Topical Filtering (Community tab)
-> Choose the proper time range and number of mentions for filtering your targeted list of sources
-> Get in one click the sources that have never talked about you - Suspect Source (Community tab)
-> Watch for the red exclamation mark in the blue icon next to the source title, this may be a source you want to remove from your project - Easy Access to targeted conversations list (Community and Dashboard tab)
-> Access in one click all relevant conversations from a particular source by clicking on the number located on the left side of the title - Fixed the Comment feed issue
-> There were a minority of cases where the application subscribed to the comment feed instead of the post feed. This issue is now fixed.
We also made some minor UI improvements such as: 1) Display the source name under the conversation name in the conversations list 2) Sort ‘recommended’ from ‘forwarded’ in the insightful option of the conversations list refine menu.
Watch those features in action in the videos below:
Choosing the right Metrics to Define Social Media Success
Einstein once said: “Try not to become a man of success, but try rather to become a man of value”. (or a woman 
In social media, how do you measure success and value?
Here’s my answer:
From time to time, I see success in social media portrayed by some as ‘thousands of followers or millions of fans’. I even see a business forming around “building up a follower base on a massive scale”.
Wow! And according to some, having a huge follower base does translate to a lot of value, doesn’t it?
Beyond questioning the validity of such calculation, one can first wonder if a follower is very different from an email addy in an email list? I don’t believe so.
Do you get more people viewing your tweets compared to people reading your emails? Probably not, though no real study exists to demonstrate what I said, only casual observations like here and one key learning of a recent Forrester study: A mass of followers that ‘like’ the brand but never return to the fan page is far less valuable than a handful of followers who frequently share brand updates with friends.
Recent data on Twitter seems to validate that brands and people are defining success in numbers and that Twitter has become a broadcasting mechanism. I’m not sure this is true. The ‘big mouth’ always skew the results when you mix them with others in your analysis.
If I’m right, those successes aren’t social media marketing successes. In social media, the value lies in your capital to influence.
So I have a problem with defining/buzzing success with such metrics.
When Einstein wrote his quote, he was talking about the intention supporting our actions and self. Choose value instead of success. In general, value breeds success anyway. But if success is the sole intention powering your actions, beware; because the initial intentions have a tremendous influence on our actions! As a matter of fact, there are situations where success (as in “what’s in it for me”) appears easy so we feel tempted to dive in quickly. However, in a lot of cases, the lack of value (as in “what’s in it for them”) associated with the solution found makes it unsustainable.
The root cause of all this?
Some of the mechanisms to create connections are flawed (or misused). Twitter’s ‘follow us’ and Facebook’s ‘become a fan’ are too easy. Hire an intern for a few days, tasked with growing your follower base and you’ll get those huge numbers we see all over the place. Our herd mentality is impressed by them but there isn’t much into it really.
There is a category of brands and so-called social media experts that think communication is just one big mouth -> They’ll hire an intern.
There is also a category of brands and people believing that social is our best and default form of communication and that it’s made possible thanks to 2 ears 1 mouth -> They won’t hire an intern (or at least not with the task to grow blindly their base of followers).
The latter category defines success in terms of value. They aren’t looking for a large quantity of anonymous followers or fans. They want to ask selected people to ‘become a follower or a fan’ after they’ve determined there’s a mutual benefit in a possible 2-way interaction. You believe engagement takes place in small circles of interconnected communities of interest. You believe the network will relay your message if you do a good job at telling it in the first place. They don’t need control, it’s all about influence.
The brands and people in the first category define success in term of numbers. They want to broadcast. They hold the megaphone and talk to a crowd. They don’t care who the followers are. They’re just a name in a database. They need to keep control of them (of course it’s just an illusion of control). It’s all about them.
My advice: Companies should spend a little time finding those VALUABLE people they want as followers and engage with them so that 1) they become followers and 2) they evangelize the brand through WOM. This will certainly help them more in the long run.
The true measure of a brand’s social capital is defined by:
- The level of engagement with its network
- How much its network is talking about them to other people outside of the network
Give me your opinion!
Old Spice Campaign : A Social media example?
A story about how to spice-up an ‘Old Spice’!
Over the past 3 weeks, the Old Spice campaign has generated quite a lot of buzz within the social media marketing communities (~1700 SMM bloggers).
See for yourself with this trend on the number of mentions from zero before the campaign to several hundreds lately (actually 183 mentions 3 weeks ago and a 3.33% share of voice – percentage of the overall conversations from the community which is quite a lot):
What kind of social media was it?
Before I give my answer for Old Spice, let me expose a bit of our thinking here at eCairn. We often talk about ‘Marketing in Social Media’ vs ‘Social Media Marketing’.
The difference is that :
1) is one size fits all, broadcast, static, campaign oriented and so on…
2) is network/tribes/community centric, true 2-way communication, engagement forever and so on -
in 1) you may see customer involved in a dialog with the brand but rarely will you see customers talking with other customers like around a campfire . It’s not a sustainable dialog.
Before I get to my answer, I also did a very casual analysis of a sample to get an idea of the overall perception around the campaign.
Overall people thought it was a good camapgn (12 positive vs 7 negatives, some neutral).
On the positive side, people highlighted the following:
- Creative and rule breaking campaign
- Outstanding integration of advertising and social media
- Manage to update their image from an ‘old’ brand to a ‘hippie’ one
- Good response management as part of the campaign
Other people highlighted shortcomings and potential issues/risks:
- The use of a strong caricature and the risk of a backfire. Indeed if a target audience doesn’t like what they see in a campaign, they’ll use social media to retaliate. It has happen with Motrin 1+ year ago so the risk is real.
I like the “what happens in public can derail in public” sentence from Todd - Lack of listening and conversation
- Funny and cool videos but no real message to alter the brand image.
- User spoofing videos that can alter brand reputations as users don’t have the same restrictions as a brand (We’ve seen example of that in facebook with user generated brand pages more popular than the brand pages itself)
The purist in me believes social is our default form of communication. It takes place in small circles (10-50 people max who relay the story through their networks) where everyone takes turn in front of the group for the talk and listens. The conversation changes as each person share their experience and thoughts. There’s no real end to it. Brands, through their employees need to find those small circle and become one of the listener/talker.
Does the Old Spice campaign sound like it?
Not to me, it’s broadcast with a good dialog between the brand and the users (highly praised by all social media marketers) but nothing between users. It’s marketing in social media (aka, same old marketing at the core with some social media on the surface). Note that there’s nothing wrong with it, it doesn’t take away the greatness of the campaign itself but am not sure it will really change perception of the brand in the long run. It will be quickly forgotten as the next ‘creative campaign’ takes the spotlights.
As I write this, I’m also asking myself: “What would social media marketing be for a brand like ‘Old Spice’?
I’ll try to answer the question in a later post but suggestions are welcome as I have no idea at this point in time!
I was in a middle of a demo this morning, using the VC/Startup community as a show case (with a strong High Tech Biais) and I discovered that the buzz of the last days was “app inventor” (on the right side of the cloud)
( graph made with wordle.net)
I was curious about when this all happened so I trended this expression in the VC community:
… it looked to me I was too distracted by the World Cup and missed an important event.
I wondered how big that buzz was. I looked into Google trends:
NOTHING . I tried several spellings. It looked like Google trends was “blind” on App Inventor or Appinventor or Google app inventor or Android app inventor.
Then I looked into other communities that we’re already monitoring and see that
- in the mobile community, there was clearly a huge buzz on the topic. If you look into the graph, you’ll see that “app inventor” is 6% of all conversations in the Wireless community, whereas it was only 2% in the VC community
- and I ended up in my favorite community, Social Media Marketers and got this amazing graph:
The share of conversation of that topic is moderate (1 %) BUT two influencers already discussed that topic back in March:
Kudos to these bloggers who had the “flair” to write about Dr Peter Norvig conference! ( to me, one of the most relevant people on internet technologies).
Beside identifying influencers, we’re getting into identifying innovators … and great keywords to bid on.
I wonder what the market value of the “appinventor” keyword is. So far noone seems to be bidding on that keyword
Social Media is here to stay
Here’s an amazing data point for those who still have questions (a picture speaks a thousand words):
Still have a question?
Of course we’ve all seen the growth on the user side (Facebook, Twitter usage and so on) but it’s now clear that business, like Gatorade, are taking social media very seriously and staffing accordingly.
I like Nic’s views that salaries are replacing media buying in social media marketing and that brands are paying for a service fee to be associated with the “who matters” (sport star in his example but if you’re a high tech brand specialized in cloud computing, it will be more the ‘cloud computing bloggers’) . Indeed when I talk to fellow bloggers, they are not seeing themselves as media per say, but as people first. A long time ago, I read from a blogger “I’m not a click, I’m not a keyword. I’m a person”. So it’s logical that business would align on this new paradigm. They have no real choice.
To me it’s even funny that we use the term social media as media isn’t the core of it.
The trend above isn’t without consequences, some good and some bad.
- The Bad: If the number of social media marketers grows exponentially and the number of influencers (50% of blog traffic comes from 50-100k blogs according to technorati) stay roughly the same, there should be more pitches to the same pool of bloggers. Thus more Bad Pitch!!!
Bloggers that I talked to recently get lots of pitch every day and the vast majority isn’t at all relevant. Sometimes they complain and I see stories like that all the time in my daily musing. - The Good: More competition isn’t bad at all in any market. Often, it triggers change for the better and there is room for that in social media.
Thus, to stay relevant, marketers will need to:
- look beyond the A-list bloggers
- increase relevance
- focus on relationship building
Two strategies for Social Media lead generation
There are clearly two different approaches to lead generation in social media:
- online marketing on the social channel
- relationship building and consultative selling using social platforms
We have tried both – as did most of our clients- and both have advantages and drawbacks as described below:
1- Online marketing with social media
Here, the logic is: Online marketing and advertising have been fantastic at generating leads and sales (AdWords), consumers have moved to social media, so why not apply the same tactics to the new channel.
Most consumer brands have taken this direction:
- reach as many potential clients as possible
- spot a signal from these targets that make them a potential buyer (keyword in a tweet, joining a FB fan page, change in their profile)
- provide an automatic answer that bring people into the sales process.
The social part is in enabling clients/prospects to virally distribute the message (retweet, share…).
This is clearly a strategy for consumer brands. These brands have to keep in mind that “brute force” advertising may not be the way to go, and that the messenger is the message when they bet on the viral aspects.
To me receiving a car advertising from G Kawasaki is a non sense. Although he’s someone I enjoy reading on social media and entrepreneurship, he has no relevance in car and such message is just … spam.
This put some stress on deep targeting of communities and influencers.
2- Relationship/ Consultative selling on the net
Here, the reference is different. People use to make deals on the golf course or with Avon like settings. It is effective but expensive.
Social media enables this process to be conducted online at the fraction of the cost.
This is by the way closer to the initial promise of social media.
It is very appealing for companies that were already doing consultative selling or for the ones (like us) with a customer lifetime value that make this sales process cost-effective.
One easy trap is to mix both worlds and bet on relationship building that scale with similar numbers as online advertising. Really the trick is to find the right number of the right people that like your brand.
Companies can use technology to make people productive at it but have to keep in mind that relationship building cannot be done with an algorithm or an automate.
eCairn is looking for Inside Sales Reps
Job Title : Social Media Inside Sales Rep
Location: San Francisco Bay area
eCairn is a fast growing startup with a unique software solution (SaaS) for marketing to online communities, finding high influencers, and listening to relevant conversations.
We are currently looking for Inside Sales Representatives to accelerate our growth. These Sales Reps will focus on new business sales to marketing, PR and ad agencies in the US.
Responsibilities include:
- Achieve individual revenue target and support company goals.
- Identify potential customers, maintain full sales pipeline and manage sales process.
- Lead generation using social media tools, relationship building in relevant communities, outreach to prospects and prescriptors.
- Deliver webinars and product demos
- Follow up on leads, qualify customers.
- Report customer relationship into CRM tool, timely and accurately.
- Share best practices with sales team to improve sales process.
- Train on latest product offering to improve sales turn around.
Required Skills:
- Minimum 2 years of sales experience, have a passion for sales
- Proven ability in B2B sales
- Strong interpersonal and communication skill
- Social media savvy Self-starter who can work autonomously
- Flexible, quick learner,with a desire to work in a fast paced environment
- Professionalism, Transparency
If you’re interested please contact us at conversation+jobs@ecairn.com with title Inside Sales Rep
Adoption of Social Media by the Gaming Industry
The presence of social media is not something that big developers and publishers like Electronic Arts and Activision have ignored. Just last week, developers of the highly anticipated Starcraft 2 announced that they will be adding Facebook integration into their upcoming title. Big players in the video game industry always play on the bleeding edge of developments in technology, marketing and business models; social media is no exception. So, if social media is the new marketing frontier, where do game developers stand?
Let’s take a step back first; before the social media boom, publishers were already creating online forums and moderating feedback from users. You would easily find feedback from users on what features they liked the most, and what features they hated. Sentiment was as simple as collecting and organizing feedback from magazines and website reviews. Marketers and producers who were tech savvy enough would post forum polls and track discussions from commercial and independent forums. User feedback on the internet was manageable, and located in pockets of communities that the astute marketer would easily find.
Today, the widespread presence of syndicated, published and independent blogs, news about upcoming titles spreads faster than publishers plan for. Biased news leaks and raw speculation leave poor impressions in the minds of discerning gamers. It is difficult to predict and find key community influencers who spark the strongest opinions. This puts developers in a position where they have little to no control of community sentiment before the release date. There are so many different influencers and communities that affect sentiment about a product; it is beyond the control of marketing directors and community managers to find the right one.
The video game blog community is large and extremely active.
Some developers have found a way to regain some of that control. Bioware Corp, well known for creating large open ended worlds for gamers to explore, created the Bioware Social Network. http://social.bioware.com/home.php? This network has become a haven for fans to create their own dedicated blogs, share media, experiences and provide essential feedback for the developers. This gives Bioware increased ability to monitor continued sentiment, maintain customer retention, and build up reputation and hype for future game releases.
By creating their own pocketed community, Bioware hopes to bring a majority of the conversations into a community they can easily monitor, just like in the old days. That alone is not enough; creating an in house community excludes the tens of thousands of conversations of lesser known small to medium gaming influencers and blogs that heavily influence the opinions of readers and writers of larger communities.
There is no doubt that it takes quite a lot of resources to develop and maintain social networking campaigns, let alone the metaphorical social media crusade Bioware launched. In an industry where even small developers have a great chance to make it big, where do they find the tools to reach out to these gamers and influencers? Let’s face it, most developers don’t have the resources and manpower to launch their own social network. These guys need to partake in guerilla marketing; they need to find efficient yet effective methods to bring themselves closer to the tipping point. They need to stimulate the nodes where conversations between gamers and influencers generate the most buzz for their brand.
In short, it’s expensive to launch large social media networks and campaigns. The little guys are going to have to play smart to stay on top of the game (no pun intended). If only there were a powerful yet inexpensive way for small to medium developers to engage the communities and influencers that make a difference for them… =]
Posted by: Arthur Huynh
