Social Media compared with other medias

Some thoughts on how social media is compared with other 'traditional' online media

Left Brain, Right Brain

Designing website can take a LBRB (Left Brain, Right Brain) approach - to cater to 2 large group of web audience (presumably all the people in this world can be categorised into a Left Brain - more logical person and a Right Brain - more creative person)

So a website can have 50% real estate dedicated to a very logical-kind of treatment - ie brand/ messages / navigation can be very factual logical, text heavy describing in detail what this website is trying to communicate. And the other 50% real estate of the website dedicated to a very visual-kind of treatment to illustrate the message/ next steps into the website journey ,etc (example using images, videos, flash demo, etc).

The idea of this approach can help to drive a website design discussion so that there is less of a subjective view of the design, but rather a more objective approach helps to cut through the clutter to get every stalk holder to agree to one design. One design that fit the needs of the entire world - assuming all the people in the world can be categorized as Left Brain or Right Brain.

Things to look out for when reviewing creatives/campaign plans

Messaging

- need to identify key lead message among all the proof points

- requires legal approval on all messaging before usage

- key message may differ from country/region. Hence the right message has to be picked for the right country.

- message testing can be done to find out which message reasonate better with which country

Creative

- check if the country print can handle the the printout of the creative (e.g. printing black on newspaper will not turn out good in some emerging markets, perhaps better on magazine)

- creatives should cater area/real estate for local promotions (particular in demand generation campaigns) beyond key messaging

Digital

- Internet bandwidth in countries - emerging markets with lower internet bandwidth may require a HTML version of campaign website instead of a flash site

Multivariate Testing of webpage

Today I grasped the concept of MVT - multi-variate testing. It can even test specific elements on a webpage - down to a title or a masthead image. By creating a control group, and a test version, and with the right tool, one can deliver these 2 version to a 50-50 split of web audience who request for the page. And tracking can be done to look at the metrics gathered on the page - page visit, abandonment rate/exit rate, time spent, journey, etc.

Designing the test is an art/ skill in itself I feel. And there are expert who can do that to help optimize the website. however I think the gap of MVT skill set and the profound understanding of the site objective/design is still quite large, hence the progress of MVT in this area may not go far.

And MVT is considered very surgical in execute which is quite expensive to do and at the same time, the results are often not revenue-related. So I believe MVT will not go far in this industry.

Disrupt Your Marketing Mix

At one of the more interesting panel discussions was entitled, “Disrupt Your Marketing Mix.” which has the following panelists:

· Jeff Berman, president, Sales and Marketing, MySpace

· Chip Hall, senior vice president, Sales and Marketing, Teracent Corporation

· Mitch Joel, president, Twist Image

Here are some of the learning:

1. Start small and take baby steps to understand new media:

• Look up the top 15 videos every week
• Pick 10 people and follow them on twitter
• Look up top 5 musicians on MySpace
• Look up top blog sites on blogger.com

2. Online advertisement

• Display ad with no data/insights are better off not doing them in the first place
• The future of display ad is where its given by data insights from website / crm/ customer review on other sites.
• Locally marketing your products in a digital way - Robin Baskin has an interesting targeted selling based on temperature weather. When weather is between certain degrees, sell certain products, and so on... a bit too radical I think...
• Branding of online ad - impression also serves the purpose of branding if the marketing objective is awareness creation.

Quotes:

• Content is king and Context is queen.

Social Media Frameworks Overlay

So far there are various types of models and framework created in an attempt to frame up how marketers look at social media. I attempted to overlay a few models to create another dimension to look at social media.

Before I share the new model, here are some of the existing framework/model created by various company/individuals.

Social Technographics: Types of Social Media Users

(Source: Social Technographics from Forrester)

Social Technographics classifies people according to how they use social technologies

• Creators make social content. They write blogs or upload video, music, photos or text.
• Critics respond to content from others.They post reviews, comments on blogs, participate in forums and edit wiki articles.
• Collectors organize content for themselves or others using RSS feeds, tags, and voting sites like Digg.com
• Joiners connect in social networks like MySpace and Facebook.
• Spectators consumer social content including blogs, user-generated video, podcasts, forums, or reviews.
• Inactives neither create nor consumer social content of any kind.

Types of Social Media Platform/Sites

(Source: iCrossing – What is Social Media Nov 2007 & Wikipedia – Social Media)

• Social Networks : these sites allow people to build personal web pages and then connect with friends to share content and communication. (e.g. Naver (KR), MySpace(AU), Facebook(SG), LinkedIn(professionals))
• Podcasts: audio and video files that are available by subscription, through services like Apple iTunes. They are portable files that can be downloaded to a device and played anytime.
• Wikis: these websites allow people to add content to or edit the information on them, acting as a communal document or database. Creating a collaborative site or document is the key here.
• (e.g. Wikipedia).
• Blogs: perhaps the best known form of social media, blogs are online journals, with entries appearing with the most recent first. (e.g. blogger, wordpress, vlogs – video blogs)
• Customer Review/ Shopping Sites: communities or sites which allows customer to rate products and services or provide comments.
• Forums: areas for online discussion, often around specific topics and interests. Forums came about before the term “social media” and are a powerful and popular element of online communities.
• Content sharing communities: communities which organise and share particular kinds of content. The most popular content communities tend to form around photos (Flickr), bookmarked links (del.icio.us) and videos (YouTube, Todou(CN)).
• Microblogging: social networking combined with bite-sized blogging, where small amounts of content ('updates') are distributed online and through the mobile phone network. (e.g. Twitter)
• Q&A: Quick question and answer where user can rate best answer (e.g. Yahoo! Answers, Naver Knowledge Inn)

Types of Social Media Marketing Tactics

• Topic/ Forum Management - Engage in forums and discussion board to drive a message across or address support issues. It can be doned by agencies or even company's employees or even friends and family of company's employee (unbadged)
• Key Influencer - Engage key bloggers or power bloggers (> 1000uv per day) who will then write about your products/ services, etc
• Content Distribution - Create company managed blogs, group pages (e.g. in facebook, etc). Also include disseminating content into product review sites / comparison sites.

By combining these frameworks together, one can decide based on the % of users in the social technographics in different country (check with Forrester.. they have the latest statistic by country) and then decide which social media tactics to use in different types of social media sites. For example, China has lots of "creators", hence competitions like photo upload/ writing stories may work in China.

Any thoughts on this framework?

Brand Equity Pyramid

I came across this concept today. I think its not a new concept but I am quite fascinated by the framework. Its is similar to marketing funnel but this is in the context of loyalty.

Level 1: Bonding - Nothing else beats it

- Unique & Superior combination of benefits (Meets needs and advantage statements):

The relative importance of the advantages

The share of endorsement for the brand

The number of brands considered

Level 2: Advantage - Offers something better

- Endorse any of:

More acceptable price Appeals more

Works better Offers something different

Higher opinion Growing more popular

Most popular Unaided first mention

Level 3: Performance - Delivers

- Do not endorse:

Doesn't perform well enough

Level 4: Relevance - Brand that might be considered

-Meets needs or do not endorse:

Costs more than you are prepared to pay

Too cheap to be acceptable quality

Doesn't meet your needs

Doesn't appeal to you

Level 5: Presence - Know something about the brand

-Endorse:

Unaided brand awareness

Bought or used

Have an opinion about a pyramid attribute