I’ll be honest with you: one of the great things about working here at Area 224 is, frankly, cleaning up other people’s messes.
It’s challenging and fun at the same time. And here’s what usually happens – even for the smallest of brands or companies or whomever is on the social webs. We’ll use a hypothetical example of a company that has just purchased the social media silver bullet.
Day 1: This is awesome! We’re going to have customers tripping over themselves to buy stuff from us!
Day 7: Where are the customers? Wait, we should tweet more.
Day 14: We were supposed to have 1000 Facebook fans by now. What gives?
Day 20: John the intern is young, he gets this social stuff. Let him handle it for us.
Day 29: What sort of contract did we sign? Oh, it’s month-to-month? Whew.
Day 31: Social Doesn’t Work.
This mess is, sadly, rather common. And both sides of the social media spectrum – brands and the consultants who love them – are equally at fault.
The value equation needs to be designed up front: what you want to be able to do with your business and how you’ll rely on the agency or consultant to help you.
And consultants: stop selling a bill of goods – this stuff is actually hard work. Honest.
That being said, here’s what we recommend for the “NEXT 30 Days”
First of all, get some numbers. The numbers may suck, in your opinion, but get them.
Did you ask to “get on Twitter?” How many followers did you get? How much interaction? Any engagement?
Do you have a Facebook page? There had to be some activity – quantify that activity.
Whatever the platform, figure out what it is that you’ve spent – in time and dollars – on that platform and your social time.
There’s your benchmark. It’s what we’re going to look at for the next 30 days.
Next, go back to the $64,000 question – “What business problem are you trying to solve?”
Best. Question. Ever.
If you want to use social to gain insights into what people are saying about you, that’s awesome. If you want to use social to sell more of your widgets, that’s awesome, too.
But if you’re not trying to solve a problem – more customers, more traffic, why do our products suck? – then you may want to ask whether you’re barking up the wrong tree.
Your next 30 days can be spent working on whatever social media tactic you think is best. As long as it fits within a broader strategic context.
These are “brands” – but we all sometimes get confused on the difference between “brand” and “model.”
Ford Logos
Think about the experiences attached to the product or service. That’s your brand.
These Ford logos over here? Not the Ford brand. Symbols, icons, representing the company over the years. Logos. But not the brand.
Models: The Model-T, Mustang, Fusion, Explorer. Those are models – they represent the Ford brand.
But they are not the brand.
And product – heck, Area 224 is working on a few products right now. They are not our brand. They will represent our brand – just as I represent the brand myself when I’m out there in public.
Where are we going with this?
Well, we want to share three tips – you can use these ON or OFF-LINE – to help you maximize your brand-building power.
1. What does the brand stand for?
This can be as simple as “walk in, sit down, get the best haircut ever.” Cut through the BS.
Crap, I learn something new every day…Thursday, in the middle of the 4th of 5 meetings, I found myself asking this question of myself:
Why can’t you boil down the essence of this super-secret project into a dozen words?
So I went back to the drawing board – literally, yesterday evening, there was an actual drawing board, it was my kid’s art easel, I looked at it, but I digress – and here was the Area 224 brand essence, refreshed for a new digital millennium:
Helping brands use digital and social media to better tell their stories, online and off.
NOW, it all makes sense. The super-secret project? It dovetails nicely with the Area 224 brand essence. It can help clients big time. (Yes, our brand essence is 15 words, not 12. Sorry.)
2. Is what you’re doing supporting the brand? If not, why are you doing it?.
I can tell you from first-hand experience that you will drive yourself batty if you don’t have the brand essence down first. Once you do have that brand essence down pat, it’s off to the races.
When we didn’t have the brand essence down pat? Wheel spinning. Random requests from the front lines for marketing stuff. Bad advertisements showing up with faxed copies of the logo. No focus up top on the brand, thus no focus anywhere else on the brand. Missed opportunities right and left.
Digital Millennium Sidebar: Here’s where Social Proof is vital – if you’re in this social space. Engage, people. Trite but true. Engage. That means YOU, guy who has bots retweet himself 24-7.
3. Personal Brand Ain’t BS…BUT…
You are the brand. You live the brand. Be the brand. Etc.
The growth of the personal branding industry is great. And dangerous. At the same time.
Zappos – whole lotta love for that brand, and rightly so. Great story.
Tony Hseih is the CEO, has a book, has probably shared tweets with every single person in the universe.
Here's where our money is...Only one of the two businesses, to borrow from Jim Collins’ book title, is Built to Last. Our money’s on Gilt Groupe.
Much has been said about the Daily Deal phenomenon. When a two-year old site such as Groupon grows so quickly that it is able to spurn an acquisition offer from Google – to the tune of a much-ballyhooed $6 Billion offer – well, we’ve got a new phenomenon called “Social Commerce.”
But, did Groupon “invent” Social Commerce? You could argue about that til the cows come home but here’s a fact: Gilt Groupe has been around longer. It operates in the fashion and luxury brand niche.
And Gilt will “beat” Groupon. We’ll tell you why, but first a caveat.
We’re not defining “beat” as force Groupon out of business. But, in this case, we’re talking about long-term success. Groupon shows no signs of slowing – but we think that Gilt has a better long-term business model. Simply put, Gilt Groupe is Built to Last.
Reason 1: Product. Not only does Gilt have better product, in this case they actually HAVE product. Groupon is nice and all, what with the deep discounts on restaurants and other local experiences. The product they offer, though, is rather virtual. You buy a coupon, you go to the retailer, you take advantage of the deal, you get your stuff – food, services, whatever. Done.
Since Gilt focuses on fashion, they have the advantage of tangibility. Even though you’re not buying a Gilt-branded pair of jeans, you are getting the item from Gilt.
You don’t shop at Groupon – but you do shop at Gilt.
Reason 2: Exclusivity. “Membership has its privileges.” When Gilt started in 2007, it was downright impossible to get an invite. Only members could get access to the deals, and that kept the riff-raff away and also kept “scarcity” as a selling point.
Only 100 of these jeans will be sold. Only 10,000 of you have a membership. Fight for ’em. In…3…2…1.
Restaurants that use Groupon aren’t exclusive ones – they are ones that want to get people through the door and are willing to deeply discount their product to do so. This dovetails nicely to reason 3:
Reason 3: Valuing the Product. Let’s say you’ve got a restaurant and it costs you $50 to produce a meal for two people that you end up charging them $60 for. (20% markup is rich in the restaurant industry, but go with us here.) To work with Groupon, you’ve got to discount that $60 meal to $30. You’ve then got to give Groupon $15 of the $30 that you sell the Groupon for.
(Oh, and if you work with Groupon in the first place, you probably don’t have a handle on what your marketing budget is, so you’re willing to throw money at the next big thing.)
I won’t get into the math behind what it takes to get the people in the seats; but I will say that your restaurant experience better be really worthwhile – otherwise, you have conditioned your visitors to expect your food at half price, and you have soaked yourself in the process.
Meanwhile, back with the fashionistas…It’s widely known that markups in retail are huge. Like, well, sometimes it costs $1 to make a pair of jeans that gets sold for $250.
Since Gilt is dealing with an industry that is used to this – and since Gilt knows that the manufacturers have “stuff” leftover (maybe they ordered too many blue shirts in XL, or whatever) – they can turn the numbers into a win/win/win.
Quick, over-simplified example: Jeans that get sold at a boutique for $250 are probably bought wholesale by the boutique from the brand for $100. The brand itself makes a markup of at least $50 – covering its costs to get the product from the manufacturing floor to their own warehouse.
The brand is also sitting on inventory that must be sold – so if it sits there unused, the value of it keeps going down.
So Gilt approaches the brand and says they’ll buy the items for something north of cost, but south of markup. Let’s say $75 – but with the stipulation that they must move a certain number of pairs of jeans or else there’s no deal. Then, not needing an insane markup to make its “nut,” Gilt goes with a figure of $125 – a deep discount, but still, frankly, an expensive pair of jeans that not everyone can afford.
Win/win/win – jeans brand, Gilt, customer. The first two are big winners – and the customer also gets access to a product that still has cachet – it’s a luxury brand, but at a value price.
Reason 4: Long-term relationship building. I love this one the most as a brand marketer: the way Gilt treats the brands it works with.
Without getting into the vagaries – which you can certainly find if you do a little sleuthing – suffice it to say that every facet of the brand-Gilt relationship is structured as a win/win. From how they pay brands – wiring the money – to how they search for deals that are treated as exclusives (you’ve gotta love that if you’re an emerging footwear maker or make suits) – this is a brand marketer’s dream: a killer relationship with a partner that wants everyone to succeed.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that Groupon doesn’t want its partners and customers to succeed.
But the proposition to the brand starts off almost immediately on the wrong foot.
Groupon to Brand: “Discount your product at least half, then we’ll talk.”
Gilt to Brand: “What luxury items can we help sell for you in a way that makes everyone a winner?”
It’s not a question of which business model we like better – both are viable, both are built to scale. But, if you had to ask which one is Built To Last – our money’s on Gilt Groupe.
Here's our logo, copyright us.We have studied our 2010 Traffic in depth. Here’s what we found…
We looked at sources, looked at headlines, looked at click-through rates. Here are 5 things we learned:
1. Have a List. See the headline above? “5 Steps to…” is a great way to put a post together. Our second most popular post from 2010 was one that listed “40” things learned by this reporter upon hitting an age with a round number in it. (Read that here if you’d like: https://area224.wpengine.com/40.)
2. Be topical. The most popular post last year* was one that talked about the Gap logo kerfuffle. But our take on the topic was that Gap threw the creatives under the bus, and should have stuck with the logo a little longer. Oh and “logo” does not equal “brand.” Oh and no one ever decided not to shop somewhere because they didn’t like the logo.
3. Start with “How to…” That Gap story was enormously successful for us because it started with the words “How to.” And, two of the other top 5 posts from 2010, the ones along the “Buzzword Watch” theme (see below), had “How to” right after the “Buzzword Watch.” People love to learn, and if you back up the “How to” with valuable information, you’ll get repeat visitors.
4. Have a Theme. No, not THAT kind of “Theme.”
For the uninitiated – “Theme” is what WordPress calls its templates. The one we use is called Thesis and we love it. [DISCLOSURE] Affiliate link follows – if you get it for your blog, we get a little bit of cash.
Back to point 4 – the “themes” that worked best for us in 2010 followed along with this idea: “make fun of buzzwords.”
“Innovation.” “Engagement.” “Game Change(r).” Each one of those posts was viewed in excess of 275 times. While that may not seem like a ton, considering the bulk of the traffic for each came in one day…that’s pretty respectable.
5. Use Traffic-Generating Keywords and Logos. This makes sense, but it’s NOT what you think. The traffic-generating keywords that worked best in 2010? “Gap.” “Etsy.” “Quora.” Also note that they were “in the news” (see above) and we borrowed their logos (or, in Gap’s case, their proposed, then-scrapped, logo).
Oh, and the asterisk (*) above? Last week, we told you that the most popular post from 2010 was this one, an interview with Chris Brogan. It was wildly popular – on the day of. But that was studying just Google Analytics traffic, and matching it to day-of numbers.
It took us a little while longer, but adding su.pr traffic stats, studying the analytics more, we were able to come up with numbers that give us a more accurate picture of 2010.
What can you do with this info?
Well, first of all, know who you’re writing for. We write for the marketing, public relations, corporate communications, advertising and creative industries, with a focus on startups and “emerging brands.” We study those industries, see what’s happening, take the pulse of our contacts, and write from there.
If you’re writing to position yourself in your industry — maybe it’s a B2B blog, or maybe you’re in a medical or technical field — you can still follow the same advice above.
Take cues from others — there’s a site covering your industry; if not, maybe yours should be the site covering your industry.
You’re not looking for MORE traffic, you’re looking for BETTER traffic. Having things like the right Theme (like Thesis) can help with your SEO. Using Twitter and Facebook and su.pr certainly help with reach. Add those to your arsenal, no matter the reason for your blog.
Imagine a process, or discipline, that can call itself an “industry.”
For instance, let’s say there are a couple of factions in this emerging industry that are almost constantly at odds with each other. One side has always done things one way – the other side has always done things another way.
And a third group emerges – they have their own ideas, and they are dead set against the normal ways of doing things. They are the cowboys – and cowgirls. They are going to win the overall battle – because they’re the loudest and most boisterous. Not necessarily because they know the most stuff.
While they can argue, disagree and have spirited debates, it is obvious that, for their industry to be successful, they absolutely have to work together.
What Industry Am I Talking About?
The “Turnaround” Industry, also known as “Corporate Renewal.” Circa 1999.
Gotcha.
I was there, in the middle of it all. I had a “cup of coffee” as the Director of Public Relations for the Turnaround Management Association, circa 1998 and 1999. And I watched this battle unfold – between three distinct groups that made up the membership.
Group One: Bankruptcy Attorneys. Staid and by the book, their mission is to follow the rule of the law and make sure that assets are redistributed accordingly. Don’t piss them off.
Group Two: Asset-based Lenders. They want to know two things: what do you have as collateral, and what are the odds you will pay back a loan. While you’re at it, don’t piss them off, either.
Group Three: Turnaround Managers. These folks were unknown a few years prior to my arrival. And there were a few “Turnaround Artists” who gave the moniker “Turnaround Manager” a bad name.
What is really interesting, as I think of the parallels between Social Media Marketing and Turnaround Management, is how there were no absolutes.
Really – it wasn’t as simple as ticking the Yes box next to “Did you turn that business around?” There was always a complex give-and-take between the groups.
And the objectives would differ in each case, meaning the strategy could be markedly different. Boil down turnaround management to its essence, and you get one of my favorite questions.
What business problem are you trying to solve?
Which is why it is an apt discipline to compare to Social Media.
You’ve got the three groups – Ad Agencies, PR People and Social Media Marketers.
They can argue and complain; they can claim that they were here first.
Or they can work together and answer the “What business problem are you trying to solve” question.
