The CMO Club Lets You In On Their Social Media Thinking

It is often pointed out that the disconnect from those in the social media trenches to those in the C-level corner offices is significant and often damaging to the marketing efforts of many companies. While it can be fun to generalize and then make those at the top of the marketing food chain the culprits in the “Great Social Media Under-utilization Caper” it is starting to become much less accurate.

One way to see that CMO’s are taking a real interest in social media and user generated media as part of their overall marketing efforts is to see the results of a recent study done by the CMO Club. That’s right. CMO’s hang out in a club while you slave away at your community building efforts. It’s all cigars and mahogany furniture around the fireplace for the CMO set. Just kidding. In fact, The CMO Club and Bazaarvoice surveyed 133 active CMO’s to get their real world take on social media. Here’s how the respondents were broken out

Of these, 42% focus on business-to-consumer marketing, 41% focus on business-to-business marketing, and 17% market to both consumers and businesses.

Leading participating industries include software/hardware (17%), finance/insurance (9%), travel/hospitality (9%), media/publishing (9%), consumer goods (8%), and retail (7.5%), among others. Annual revenues ranged from $6 to $50 million (25%), $51 to $999 million (42%), and over $1 billion (23%).

So what did they find? This chart is pretty telling as they attack the three letters that keep most CMO’s up at night: ROI.

ROI is certainly the Holy Grail of the C-suite with regard to every facet of marketing. What makes it difficult for social media is that there are not real clearly defined measurements or metrics that create a line to what is termed social commerce.

Whether you are a C-level marketer or a day-to-day social media practitioner what are your thoughts on measurement in the social media space? What do you use for tools? Where are you having success and where are you having trouble?

Feel free to download a white paper synopsis of some of the findings of the survey. Maybe the more that C-level marketers and the ‘rank and file’ of marketing work together there can be more advancement in this emerging field. Is that a reality at your work or is that just a fantasy?

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Cup of Joe: I am Awesome, and This is How I Remind Myself

So we all know how incredibly awesome I am, right? Well, even though it’s painfully obvious to me and you, I still like to remind myself from time to time. I do this by re-reading my favorite tweets, taking really good pictures of myself at my new favorite social media site, and sometimes late at night, I call my cell phone and leave a message on my voicemail just so I can listen to how awesome I sound!

Honestly, I could do all of those things over and over again all day long! But, my favorite way to pump up my ego, is to do something to make the world a better place. You see, when you volunteer your time and energy to helping others out, you feel great inside because you have helped out some poor schmuck that is nowhere near as cool as you, but maybe they might be one day, because you stepped-in to help! Now, I know what your thinking: Hey, Joe, you should volunteer your time because it’s the right thing to do, not because you want a shallow ego boost! Geez, you sound like my mother! Calm down! Honestly, does it really matter why I want to volunteer? People need help no matter what, right?

As internet marketers we are in a unique position to help make the world a better place this holiday season. The internet and social media are literally the new gateways of information in our quickly evolving world. As internet marketing vanguards we have incredible power to shape the dialogue. And we can use this power to help make the world a better place. Here are some ideas on how you can get started right now to help make the world a better place.

Organize an Online Fund Raising Campaign

As marketers it is our job to create wealth! Why not volunteer some of your marketing skills to help a nonprofit raise funds on the internet. How do you do that? Well, first start by picking a non-profit that you have a genuine desire to help. This is because many non-profits are approached by strangers all the time and sometimes their staff becomes guarded. However if you can show them that you have a genuine desire to help, they will be more open to letting you speak on their behalf. Develop a simple landing page that can collect donations. This landing page should briefly articulate the non-profit’s mission and ideals. Then write a small donations plea. Use your skills in social media and word of mouth to drive traffic to the page. Record the progress of the campaign with tools like ChipIn. There are other ways to run your campaign so get creative and have fun. But, make sure to clear all plans with the non-profit first!

Offer Your Services “Pro Bono”

Many non profits will already have someone in place to handle fund raising so it may be hard running a campaign along side another volunteer that has worked with them longer. If this is the case, you can always offer other services that they may need more. For example you might be able to get them started on twitter or facebook, or maybe they need some help editing their web site. These are all things that you might do for your clients that you could do pro bono for a non profit.

Teach Someone a New Skill

If you are having a hard time finding an organization to work with, you can always teach a new skill to an individual. As “web workers” most of us have some pretty unique skill sets. You might be able to teach HTML to someone that wants to get into web development. Or you might teach how to use software like Adobe Photoshop to someone interested in design. Or you could use your skills as a copywriter to help teach better writing.

These are just a few ideas of how you can start using your marketing skills to help make the world a better place. And don’t forget, the holiday season isn’t the only time for a shallow ego boost, you can volunteer any time through out the year!

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Tracking Santa Claus for Christmas 2009

Santa Claus Update: If you’ve not visited the NORAD Santa Tracker, you should head on over there. Google Maps is providing live tracking of Santa Claus–who’s currently in Ireland:

You can also track Santa via Twitter!

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As we’ve done for many years, it’s time to forget about marketing and focus on the whereabouts of Santa Claus (aka Father Christmas).

Fortunately, NORAD and Google make it easy to track Santa Claus each year, and this Christmas is no exception.

What to do next? Head over to the official Santa Tracking site, test out the new mobile Santa tracker, or just go play in the snow with your kids!

Merry Christmas!

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Facebook Set to Pass MySpace Revenue Ahead of Schedule

Facebook has drubbed MySpace on almost all fronts—in the media, with users, in growth, in traffic—except ad revenue. But expect that to change next year, according to eMarketer: “It will surpass its former rival, MySpace, in ad revenues in 2010, when marketers worldwide will spend $605 million on Facebook versus $385 million on MySpace.”

The projections for next year show MySpace on a downward trend, falling from $490M worldwide this year to $385M next year. Facebook on the other hand is still climbing: from from $435M this year to over $600M next year.

Meanwhile, overall social network ad spending is going up. eMarketer predicts 7.1% growth for total ad spend next year, bringing the total to almost $1.3B. Although they initially expected 2009 to see a downturn in revenue, now the stats show 3.9% growth over last year.

Back in September, we saw that 20% of all online advertising was on social networks, with MySpace slightly leading Facebook (9.2% to 8.2%). I suppose we can expect the social share of online advertising to continue to grow—but not MySpace’s.

The biggest factor contributing to Facebook’s revenue growth this year, according to ClickZ, is its growth. They reached 200M users in April—and just five months later, they’d added another 100M users. Now at 350M active users, Facebook has doubled in size since February of this year.

Yeah, I’d say that would drive some revenue growth.

What do you think? Will Facebook really pass MySpace? How has MySpace been able to retain its revenue lead for so long?

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Celebrity Death and Misfortune May Help Advertisers

It’s hard to believe that 2009 is finally coming to an end. As is always a very popular practice the media likes to take us on a stroll down Memory Lane but make sure we take a brief turn onto Morbid Court. Why? Because it is important to recap what celebrities either died or train-wrecked their lives in the past year. I admit that I read these lists more often than I should and often have the “I didn’t know they died!” moments which do literally nothing to make life better. They just happen.

So why not look at how advertisers may have or could have benefited from celebrity news that range from death to sordid trysts to you name it? Search Engine Watch has spoken to Blogads CEO Henry Copeland and came away with this

The sudden death of actress Brittany Murphy this week tied a morbid bow on a big 2009 trend — that of celebrities dying and falling from grace. According to Blogads CEO Henry Copeland, the unfortunate events provided advertisers on his network, at times, with a considerable amount of additional exposure at no cost.

At this point there are a million places to go with this one and most are not complimentary. I am going to stay on the purely business side of this one though which is sordid enough. Basically, there appears to be a little disappointment from CEO Copeland in the structure of the advertising world as agencies and red tape don’t allow for advertisers to fully take advantage of traffic spikes due to these ‘events’.

Though Copeland explained that his company could get campaigns “up and running in a matter of hours,” he said that Blogads didn’t receive any calls from marketers during the celebrity events. “Most major brand campaigns are planned weeks or months…ahead of time. So we haven’t had any ‘drive-by’ advertisers hop on a hot story.”

He continued, “We don’t anticipate this kind of demand going forward because of the way the ad agencies and their clients are structured… There’s just [too many] decision-makers and [too much] budgeting, time-lag, and iterative looping built into the process. A really agile and smart advertiser should jump into these stories; but the structure of the ad industry makes it almost impossible.”

Well, this just seems too good of an idea to pass up! I have the solution to this and I sure hope that no one takes this one and runs with it. I am going to hang out my shingle for my new ad agency called “Advertising Ambulance Chasers”. I think I will add the tag line: “We Get You There Even Before the Lawyers”.

I understand traffic is critical for advertisers but are we going to be heading down this road to make sure that we advertise around tragedy because its good business? I hope not. We can leave that to the cable news networks who don’t realize just how pathetic they look when they make all of their pretty graphics and pithy sayings around the major headlines of the day which are always about some form of pain and suffering. Maybe I am just being naive and it doesn’t really matter how you get the exposure just as long as you do. Imagine though, that people get used to your brand showing up around tragic events? Just seems odd to me.

As an advertiser or just an Internet marketer in general, what are your thoughts on trying to be ‘agile enough’ to advertise where the trouble is? Is this how you would like to have your brand known? Is there any potential harm in trying to be a morbidly opportunistic marketer?

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Sherlock Holmes Uncovers TweetDeck Promo Potential

In an informal survey it would be interesting to know how many of our readers that made it this far into the post use TweetDeck as their third party Twitter app. I for one do on the desktop and as my mobile Twitter app in an iPod Touch. Alas, the old Blackberry disconnect ends my ability to be a full fledged TweetDecker. Are you a TweetDeck user? If not what are your preferred third party Twitter apps. Just let us know for kicks.

So why the interest in TweetDeck? Well, it looks like they are at least finding a way to generate some revenue. In the past the application provider has offered skins for their service for bands like Blink182 but now the film industry is getting on board. Mashable reports

TweetDeck kicked off the series with a Warner Brothers partnership for the studio’s upcoming film version of Sherlock Holmes — the accompanying theme, “TweetDeck Telegram Co.,” is now available for download.

While I suspect I am not the target market for these things it could be interesting to see just how this kind of promotional option pans out for Warner Brothers. It’s certainly worth a try right? If there is a chance to customize your TweetDeck and be tied into something that is important to you (even for a short time) I imagine there is a decent amount of TweetDeckers who could be takers. In the age of quality trumping quantity in marketing (finally!) it could be a good play if the price is right.

TweetDeck says it will be partnering with record labels, bands, movie studios and other media companies to release more themes over the coming year……….Each will present a custom look and feel as well as a dedicated channel for the artist or film alongside the user’s existing TweetDeck columns. In the Sherlock Holmes theme, the dedicated channel features a window into the 221b game.

So what’s your take on this kind of promotion? Is there something you would like to see from the folks at TweetDeck? Let’em know!

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Yahoo’s Employees Home for the Holidays

Would the last person to leave Yahoo, please turn off all the lights?

You may think I’m mocking the gradual decline of the tech company, but I’m not. Not this time.

Apparently, in a measure of frugality, Yahoo is sending home all but its most essential employees for the Christmas break. According to AP:

It’s the first time that Yahoo has required most of its 13,200 employees to use vacation time or unpaid leave during the holidays. Only employees performing essential duties will be working from Dec. 25 through Jan. 1.

You can expect more spam in your search results, viagra offers in your Yahoo mail, and porn on Flickr during this time. OK, maybe not that last one.

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YouTube Gets (Not Really) Shorter Links

Just a week after Google launched its URL shortener, Goo.gl, it’s premiering another one, this time for YouTube. And because we can’t stand to learn yet another URL shortener name, they’re going with youtu.be. To use the new shortener, you just append the video ID to youtu.be/, so http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKOTClyVrIc become http://youtu.be/PKOTClyVrIc.

Shall we count them together? That saves us 13 15 whole characters. Now, in a limited-capacity message, like Twitter, those 13 15 characters might come in handy (“no rickroll!!”). Clearly, youtu.be is not intended as a full-featured URL shortener: it won’t work for other domains, there are no custom options, and it’s not as short as possible.

In the YouTube blog post, they say that this integrates with the AutoShare features of account holders to link up with Google Reader and Twitter. However, if you haven’t enabled AutoShare, or are not a signed-in member, and you want to just Tweet from the Share menu below the video window, they haven’t put youtu.be into action yet. In fact, a lot of the time, if you want to use it, you’ll have to manually remove the other parts of the video URL.

The feature does have its good points: as the blog post points out, when you see a youtu.be link, you know you’re going to a YouTube video. Its integration with Twitter allows developers to show thumbnails, embed directly or track stats in real-time.

What do you think? Will you use youtu.be?

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Cop Draws Gun at Tweetup Snowball Fight; Is It So Clear-Cut?

While it’s easy for us to predict the decline, and ultimate death of mainstream media, I wonder if we know what we’re letting ourselves in for. Take, for example, the recent incident that involved a Washington D.C. detective and a “tweetup” snowball fight.

Mashable alerted me to the story. With a couple of pics and a video, it’s easy to believe that the cop overreacted and should lose his job:

Now, I’m certainly not bashing Mashable here–they took the social media angle that appealed to their readers–but let’s look at the “citizen journalism” side of this. Viewing the photographs and cell phone video, you might confidently predict that there’s not much the police officer can say to defend his actions.

He pulled a gun on a bunch of kids having a snowball fight!

But, if you take the time to read the Washington Post’s lengthy account of the incident, and you learn that this was, at worse, a misunderstanding and, at best, the correct reaction for a cop being pummeled with snowballs.

Personally, I still believe the cop overreacted–and should face some kind of discipline–but that’s part of my point. I’m a citizen journalist–aka blogger–and I make my living by imparting my subjective views on you, our readers. The Washington Post however, while not able to shake completely the latent bias of its journalists, does a much better job of presenting the facts–and leaving the reader to form their own opinion.

In Radically Transparent, we talk about “professional detractors”–those that are paid to report on your misfortune, yet without any apparent modus operandi–such as journalists. While we may not like what they write about us, we know that we can somewhat trust their structured gathering of information and procedures for correcting any erroneous reporting.

As citizen journalism continues to take the place of professional journalism, I wonder how this will affect reputation management. Are we ready for a world of biased reporting?

I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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Starting Up the Social Media Marketing Prediction Engine

Well, since everybodyrolled out the trends of 2009 at the beginning of December, there’s really nothing left to do this year but make predictions for next year, right? Forrester is going to kick us off with predictions for marketing in social media.

Naturally, they see major growth coming in the SMM arena (which they call “social computing,” but I think that’s something different . . . ). In fact, they see 2010 as they year social media marketing reaches maturity, with marketers (and not just SMMs) focusing on measurement and even getting budgets.

The rise of SMM will lead to more transparency and interactivity, Forrester predicts. And that will make SMM even more valuable to companies. Oh, and Twitter will reach profitability—or be acquired.

Of course, all this won’t come without challenges. With much of social media still a highly fractured, siloed space, many marketers will have to prioritize various social networks—will they spend their time focusing on getting Twitter right or really interacting with Facebook fans? Meanwhile, they’ll also have to make sure their social media is ready for the mobile web.

And of course, measurement continues to be a challenge. Says Forrester:

Marketers don’t think they’re very good at measuring social media: On average, they rate their own efforts to measure social initiatives at 4.5 out of 10.3 And there’s no silver bullet — depending on marketers’ objectives and the technologies they’re using, any of dozens of different metrics could be appropriate. But one thing’s for sure: With the need for accountability rising, marketers can’t keep pretending that fans and followers are useful success metrics. In 2010, marketers will finally start to focus on the metrics that match their objectives — and metrics that their CMOs already know and trust.

Forrester also explains how they can do this—just like we measure just about anything else. Set a goal, then figure out what metrics will help you meet that goal and track them. (Forrester notes that a lot of these metrics may be more intangible,” like brand awareness and likeability requiring “brand surveys, sentiment analysis, and Razorfish’s SIM score,” in addition to more traditional hard numbers in sales.)

What do you think? What metrics are most important in your social media marketing? How do you track them?

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