ANA Marketing Maestros

Getting the Most Out of Your Social Media Campaigns

By Irina Skaya

A recent ANA/BtoB Magazine/Mktg survey reported that 66 percent of marketers utilized social media in 2009 compared to 20 percent in 2007.  In order to fund their new media efforts, 55 percent of marketers have already shifted funds from their traditional media budgets. In 2009 Web site ownership, search engine marketing and display advertising are among the new media platforms that received the most funding. And in 2010, blogs, mobile and video are supposed to be at the top of the list.

According to the survey, The top concerns for marketers when considering newer media platforms are the inability to prove ROI (45 percent) and having metrics to properly allocate the mix of traditional and digital media (43 percent).  Social media analytics is young and most marketers do not know where to start.  First thing is first: know what your objective is, what you are trying to measure. Do you want to know what people are saying about your brands? Do you want to see how people are interacting with your brands on specific social networks? Or do you just simply want to know upcoming social media trends or maybe what your competitors are doing in the social media space?

As the social media guru of the ANA, I always look for new measuring and monitoring social media tools. I came up with a social media metrics superlist-my favorite online tools that will help marketers get started with social media analytics.

PS. They are all free!

• Twitalyzer: measures brands' and individuals' impact and success on Twitter by reporting on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout.
• Keotag: monitors mentions of your brands across dozens of Web sites, including Technorati, Blog Pulse, Google Blog, del.icio.us, Blinklist, Twitter, Bluedot, Newsvine, Digg, Blog Lines, YouTube, and more.
• Trackur: a 14-day free trial allows you to monitor your brands' online reputation and your competitors', and track your campaign's effectiveness.
• Social Networking Media ROI Calculator
• Blog Metrics

The ANA Marketing Insights Center has a great number of resources for marketers who would like to utilize social media to learn more about their customers and engage them directly and involve them in their brands.  In the ANA Today newsletter, "How Social Media Transforms Marketing," and "Skittles: Follow the Rainbow on Twitter" are the top-read articles. The above articles are available for ANA members only. If you are not an ANA member, browse through our 101 library where we have an abundant amount of social media resources, including "Marketing with Twitter."

If you use other social media tracking tools, please feel free to share them with us. We'd love to hear from you! Leave a comment or email me at Irina@ana.net.

Social Networks

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Maximizing B2B Marketing

By Barbara Bacci Mirque

Eduardo Conrado, Chief Marketing Officer, Broadband Mobility Solutions, Motorola, regaled the crowd at ANA’s 2009 B2B conference with a marketing case study that was a primer about how to conduct B2B marketing and have a seat at the table as a growth driver.  I watched as his colleagues furiously scribbled notes and nodded their heads in agreement as he spoke.  Some key takeaways include:

• Work with the product groups at the start of ideation
• Evolve the marketing mix to go where the customers are
• Embed resources in all key areas early in the development cycle
• Have a single, comprehensive go to market strategy
• Start with the customer mindset
• Define solutions that address each segment’s needs

Tactically Eduardo addressed how Motorola activated social media to create an immersive digital experience.  A final thought he left us with: B2B marketers should not think of themselves just as transaction drivers but as relationship drivers.  

I know that I am going to use many of his learnings as I construct the ANA’s marketing plan.  If you are an ANA member you can access the summary of his presentation at the ANA’s Marketing Insights Center.  If you are a client side marketer who is not a member, shouldn’t you be?  To find out how to join, click here.

Golden Opportunities on Twitter

By Irina Skaya

Not a day goes by without someone asking me, “Why do you use Twitter? It’s so useless. Why do I care what you are up to every second of the day?” Wake up people! You are missing out on engaging with and learning more about your customers.  As Cynthia Ashworth, Vice President of Customer Engagement @Dunkin’ Donuts said, “We don’t have to justify Twitter. It’s free customer-service.” Indeed it is, Cynthia. It’s a free focus group and a cheap option for collaboration.

As I try to keep up with the cutting edge marketing trends, I enrolled in a two-hour course on Twitter Love where I learned how marketers can utilize the microblogging Web site to promote their products and services, research consumer insights, improve customer service, converse with and engage their customers, and group collaboration.  For instance, @JetBlue is using Twitter to help improve customer services and teamwork across business units.  As a customer service tool, Twitter’s benefit is that everything people say about your product/service is public on Twitter and is easy to find via using their built-in search tool. This makes Twitter an instant focus group with over 10 million participants, many of whom are your customers.  Collecting customer feedback via Twitter is easy and effortless, especially when you compare it to the number of responses you get back through email surveys.  Zappos is using Twitter to make personal connections among employees, and between the company and its customers.  For those marketers who want to improve their corporate culture and customer service, Twitter is a great tool.

So just like there was Facebook and then came LinkedIn, a professional social networking Web site, Yammer is like Twitter for business. Yammer offers groups for discussions on a subject between people in the same workgroup. It can connect employees from different departments, so if you work in a 500+ company, you won’t feel like just a number anymore.  Although some may argue that Twitter and Yammer may be distracting and may affect employees’ productivity, it can, if used moderately improve corporate culture by connecting employees to one another and letting them know what the organization is up to, its achievements and pretty much anything.

So for the Twitter rebels, get on it, add ANAmarketers to your list of the following, and most importantly, start talking and listening to your customers.  And here are some Twitter tools to get you started:

TweetLater.com – helps you in following everyone who follows you; includes auto DMs and a tweet scheduler.

Twitter Karma - keeps a follow-to-follower ratio in order for you unfollow those who are not following me, with a few exceptions.

TwitterCounter - see my followers in graph form. It also predicts how many followers you will have in 30, 90 or 365 days.

TweetDeck – as an Adobe Air app, TweetDeck allows you to see your @replies, direct messages, timeline, and a lis of folks you follow whose Tweets you want to make sure you read. You can also use it to update your Twitter and Facebook accounts simultaneously. I use and love this tool!

PS.  Download our most-read 101 on Marketing with Twitter. 

Recession: Glimmer of Hope?

As a follow-up to my blog, "Is an economic recovery near?" I would like to share with you are new video snippets from the 2009 ANA Building in Tough Times Brand Conference where heavy-weight executives from Dunkin' Donuts, MillerCoors and Wal-Mart shared their insights and best practices in regards to overcoming tough economic times.

Thank you to AdAge for these valuable video highlights. If you have any best practices on coping with the recession, please share in our comments section on this blog, YouTube page, or email me at irina@ana.net. I'd love to hear from you!

The Psychological Boost of Coffee Marketing

Turning Beer Temperature Into Marketing Gold

Partnerships, Not Brand Renovation, Best Growth Strategy

The Twitter Revolution

By Irina Skaya

You know Twitter is powerful when the tiniest and the poorest country in Europe, Moldova, where I was born is tweeting to draw thousands of people to antigovernment demonstration in its capital, Chisinau following preliminary election results that show that the ruling Communist Party has won the majority in weekend parliamentary elections. Not only are the Moldovans are using Twitter to announce information about the organized protests, but are blogging and tweeting to spread the word to the West. In my opinion, that is their exact intent—if you did not know that Moldova was a country, now you certainly do.  If that wasn’t the case, they could have easily used Friendster and LiveJournal, which is still the number one choice of social networking sites for Eastern Europeans.  So how powerful is Twitter?

To illustrate just how powerful blogging is, one of the leaders of ThinkMoldova youth movement has posted a blog to spread the word about the demonstrations, and within hours, she was able to recruit 10,000 people to join the rally. That’s a staggering number period, but for someone who comes from a town of a population of 10,000, that is ‘ginormous’. 

This is not the first time the Internet has been used to gain support in political rallies, but this is the first Twitter revolution to date.  Why was Twitter so effective in organizing the demonstrations? One microblogger said, “When you follow somebody, you usually know this person, so you trust this person — it is coming from a real person, not an institution.”

In tough times, most companies do create new brands—they still to the well-known existing brands to avoid risk. My theory is as long as we create good products, consumers will use them and spread word about them via the Internet. But the Twitter revolution that took place in Moldova shows that social media and blogging is so powerful and is truly changing the way we communicate, marketing online, and do business. 

To Twitter or not to Twitter, that is the question…

By Barry Garbarino 

As a former employee of AOL and a few other hi-tech companies, I have always felt the need to be on top of whatever new technology that comes my way.  It could be said that I wanted to be an early adopter from an early age (well, as early as I could get, considering that I typed my last senior high school English paper on an IBM Selectric typewriter, but I digress.)  Social media and user generated content seems to be all the rage now.  I will fully admit that I do the occasional status update on Facebook and give a peak (to my friends) on what is happening in my life at that point in time.  From time to time I will also post the lyrics to certain songs (or YouTube videos) that I know will get stuck in people’s heads – it’s a public service that a few of us started a few years back and believe me, there are some whoppers that will take weeks to get out of your head.

For example the following was posted some time back on my Facebook page.  See if it gets stuck in your head (you got to love digital technology!)

That brings me to Twitter.  Some people absolutely love it and others have no idea why people would want to share all this information.  Many companies are jumping on the Twitter band wagon and are utilizing this tool to inform, entertain and connect to their consumers.  Consumers are utilizing Twitter to stay informed and to connect with a larger audience then they may have on other social media sites like Facebook and MySpace.

I came across the following videos on YouTube and thought that anyone who has an opinion about Twitter would get a kick out of them.  Let us know what you think!

Geiko's Gecko Gets Jiggy With It

By Irina Skaya

Having been around for almost ten years and gracing the screen with funny television commercials and 30-minute vignettes on National Geographic’s Dangerous Encounters with Brady Barr" and "Wild," Geico’s Gecko has become the most popular ad icon since Taco Bell’s Chihuahua brand mascot. In 2005 it was named the top advertising icon during Yahoo’s Advertising Week in New York. This week, Geico launched a new marketing campaign that combines viral video stars such as the “Numa Numa” guy, Gary Brolsma with the green lizard.

The campaign is expected to release nine parodies of popular videos by April 9, three of which have already been created. The campaign created by The Martin Agency and promoted by Geico’s media agency, Horizon Media, is a new way to engage the viewers without bombarding them with direct response messaging.  The parodies are featured on various video-sharing Web sites such as YouTube, Metacafe and Slide, next to the amateur-produced superstar originals. The views of the online videos are already racking up traffic numbers, but only time will tell whether or not these videos will generate leads and drive sales.  

Check out the parody of the “Numa Numa” video (that has generated over 18 million hits since 2004) with the dancing Gecko (my favorite of the three-I think I am addicted!):

You can watch the Numa Numa Kid's original lip-synch performance to the Romanian "“Dragostea din tei”" pop song here.

Here is another parody video that depicts a girl who photographs herself everyday for three years:

Watch the original here.

Keep up with all nine parodies at http://www.youtube.com/user/itsthegecko. I certainly will!

What do customers really want

By: Michael Palmer

What is marketing?

Marketing today according to a recent ANA study is less about pushing messages at consumers and more about co-creating experiences with consumers. Okay, but what does this mean?

We need to know more about our customers than ever before.  We need to clearly understand their unarticulated needs so that we can offer them a product or a suite of products/services that will satisfy a need none of our competitors will.  Too often marketers ask their customers what they want.  They can’t tell you that.  Henry Ford aptly said that if I asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.

Finding unarticulated needs is not easy.  It takes digging through reams of data.  It takes not just talking, but living with people.  Procter & Gamble has become a master at understanding their customers–and it shows.  They now have a stable of billion dollar brands, all because they were able to offer innovations that their customers were ready for, willing and able to buy, but could not specify.  By spending time with customers, in their homes, at their place of work, or where they play is the only way to experience what they have and want to have.  Have you changed your method of extracting customer data or are you still using the antiquated focus group method? Putting people in a sterile environment and asking them what they want is no way to be on the leading edge today.

Want to learn a new approach, turn to the ANA School of Marketing.  We’ll introduce you to “Precision Research™”. Just as a doctor diagnoses patients, Precision Research™ upends the classical research process to sync better with today’s consumer in a more logical and productive process. Companies such as Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, Vizio, Pep Boys, The Ritz-Carlton and others have used Precision Research™ to gain important insights to build their business.  Here’s a link to ANA School of Marketing’s Web site–check out the many ways you can get yourself ready for tomorrow’s marketing challenges today.

BIG Ideas in a Shrinking Economy

By: Irina Skaya

Having BIG ideas and being creative is crucial more than ever in today's tough economic climate. Being innovative will make your company stand out from the competition. Everyone gathers around the water cooler to talk about creative ads no one talks about dull ads. Even in a recession, customers will spend money on things they like and enjoy. This means that marketers must work even harder to produce creative ads in order to engage consumers emotionally and want their products more.  Here are a few of my favorite creative ads from around the world to inspire you to think outside the box. If you d like to share ads that inspire you, feel free to comment on my blog and respond with a link.

Who said car ads can't be creative?

Subaru Forester 2009 commercial

Below is an example of bagvertising at it's finest: YKM, a Turkish department store chain.

Below is a bus stop ad in Australia advertising customized stamps.

Below is the "Express Yourself Ad" from Samsung

If you want to view more winning, creative ads, visit: http://adsoftheworld.com/blog.

How Great Marketing Led Barack Obama to the White House

By: Irina Skaya

Today, Barack Obama will be sworn in as the 44^th president of the United States. Successful Internet marketing is the cornerstone of the 2009 historic inauguration. How did Obama connect with today’s diverse general market? How do we as marketers engage, inspire and motivate today’s consumers?

History was made when Barack Obama was elected President, but his win is beyond historic – his superb use of online marketing to promote awareness and create a loyal following has earned him AdAge’s Marketer of the Year award at the ANA Annual Masters of Marketing Conference. It also became be the template which all future presidential campaigns will draw inspiration from.  

Thomas Jefferson was the first President to use newspapers to promote his presidential campaign, Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first to use radio, John F. Kenny used television. Barack Obama is the first president to have the power to leverage Social Media in such a way as never seen before by our Presidency or Government as a whole.  

The secret behind any successful marketing campaign is to put yourselves in the shoes of the consumers. Sure, his multiracial and multicultural background represents today’s generation, but Obama has also appointed the best marketing staff that represents and knows its target market inside and out. That’s why his campaign has embraced social media. Youth vote had a major role to play in the landslide victory, and the role of the internet - the living space of the youth. His inspirational message of “change has come to America" has remained consistent throughout the presidential campaign. This message became even more important in the economic downturn.

On February 12^th, Jim Margolis, Senior Advisor to the Barack Obama presidential campaign will discuss the power of social media and share lessons from Obama's campaign at the TV & Everything Video Forum.