via The Curious Brain. Disclosure – Tribal DDB works with Reebok, a competitor.

This post is definitely focusing on the blackhat part of social media. The dark arts that once you are exposed to, you will be forever tempted – but as good online marketers, who believe in the purity of social media and the sanctity of the platforms we try use to introduce brands to their consumers, I’m sure you will resist.

For every marketer who says that social media is not about fans, followers and views, there are likely nine who may be less sophisticated in their outlook and who see these things as primary success indicators. I’m not saying they’re wrong – in fact its likely as good a place to start as any.

Its equally true that while each of the major social media platforms has an advertising option to boost fans, followers and views, there exists a cottage industry around each one offering the black market equivalent for a blackmarket price.

So, if you were an unscrupulous marketer looking for as many fans, followers, views and +1s to your site as possible, no matter the quality, you could look no further than this list to get you started. Please try to resist…although $29 for 10,000 YouTube views does seem very, very tempting.

• Buy Facebook Page Likes and Fans – 20,000 for $900
• Buy Twitter Followers – 75,000 followers for $3,150
• Buy YouTube Views – 200,000 for $500
• Buy Google +1 Supply – 10,000 for $750

I do not believe in using these tools but by shedding some light on them, I hope we can discount them and dismiss them when they are proposed.

Levels of collaboration for brands.

1. Social Media Engagement

This is basically collaboration 101; brands engaging with people in online conversations. Think of Old Spice, Best BuyTwelpforce and Strip To Your SmartWool.

2. Crowdsourcing

These are brands that tap into people’s collective brainpower and invite them to submit ideas that deliver against a setof rules – a brief. Think of Pepsi Max & Doritos Crash the Superbowl or Virgin America’s Toronto Provocateur.

3. Co-creation

Co-creation involves working on new product and service ideas together with the customers who are going to buy them. An obvious example is My Starbuck, but I’m also really struck by Nike 6.0 ID Nation StyleLab, which effectively turns Nike ID’s original mass customization (people designing their own shoe) into co-creation (people being ableto buy shoes that other people designed).

4. Collaborative Consumption

With crowdsourcing and co-creation people help brands produce better products. But the other side of the coin, collaborative consumption, is also getting more popular, from car-sharing (Zip Car, Greenwheels) and bike-sharing (Vélib, B-Cycle) to group buying power (Groupon,Walmart CrowdSaver).

5. Collaborative System

Finally, new business models are emerging that place collaboration at their core. The brand is shaped by an ecosystem of participants. Successful recent examples are Threadless, AirBnB and American Express OPEN.

4 types of collaborative relationships

1. Pretenders

Many brands are jumping on the collaborative bandwagon with social media initiatives or creative competitions. For instance, 3M Submit Your Idea or Nokia Tune Remake. But there’s no collaborative relationship if people don’t know about the Empowerment tools, or don’t care about them. These brands have started their collaborative journey; next step is to either increase relevance of their tools or to better promote them.

2. Potentials

These are brands that people want to collaborate with, but the brands don’t yet offer the tools to do so – at the risk of losing opportunity or goodwill. It’s not a bad position to start from; next step is to start developing collaborative tools and put people’s energy to use. Harley-Davidson and DC Shoes are great examples here.

3. Newbies

In this case there’s hardly an existing relationship; both Empowerment and Common Ground are at a low level. This can be the case with existing brands that are out of touch or with entirely new brands and startups. Next step for existing brands is to become genuinely interested in what people are passionate about – otherwise they may soon become irrelevant. New brands and startups have the opportunity to build a brand from scratch and work with consumers to figure out what the brand will become, simultaneously building Empowerment and Common Ground. Brikki.com (crowdsourced children’s stories) is an example of a completely new idea that has the potential to grow with its consumers from day 1. AirBnB is an example of a startup that went this route already. By involving consumers early on AirBnB was pushed beyond what the founders initially envisioned the brand to be, with an active community as a result.

4. Collaborators

There are many possible scenario’s here, with the most iconic relationship type being the collaborative system where reciprocity can come from anywhere in the ecosystem. Not many brands have achieved this status yet, but many are well on their way such as Threadless, AirBnB and American Express OPEN. A typical next step for Collaborators is to increase engagement with all people (not just innovators and creators), consumer segments and other stakeholders. Other typical next steps include expanding the collaboration arena (e.g. beyond digital into physical spaces) and turning one-off collaborative initiatives into an integral part of a brand’s product offering and communication.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

It’s debated whether Ghandi ever actually uttered that quote but whoever said it, its a good one to describe our work with the Manulife Financial brand. Based on this Rick Mercer spoof, it looks as if we’re moving in the right direction.

via:

Saw this today and thought of my colleague @edlee twitpic.com/73bbr2—
Matthew Nelson (@apblog) October 21, 2011

Beyond amazing slogans, a great moustache and being indicted for voter fraud (you couldn’t make this up) he also has some pretty handy celebrity endorsements such as MC Hammer, Brian Wilson, will.i.am and Ashkon. Who made this quite astounding video.

Please watch and if you’re in San Francisco, please vote on November 8.

Here is this year’s edition:

And her key trends are:

1. Globality: we aren’t in Kansas anymore
2. Mobile: early innings growth, still
3. User interface: text -> graphical -> touch/sound/move
4. Commerce: Fast/Easy/Fun/Savings = more important than ever…
5. Advertising: lookin’ good (phew!)
6. Content creation: changed forever
7. Technology/Mobile leadership – Americans should be proud
8. Mega-trend of 21st Century = empowerment of people via connected mobile devices
9. Authentic identity: The good/bad/ugly. But mostly good?
10. Economy: lots of uncertainty
11. USA inc: pay attention!

The Very Necessary Twitter Guide | Marketing Magazine

The usual caveats about disclosure  apply – there are plenty of client and client competitive examples here.

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Question: Is Twitter more than a reactive tool (dealing with consumer complaints)?

Answer: I see Twitter as a channel rather than a tool – it can be bent to whatever use brands want. Because of the immediacy of twitter, it does tend to see a lot of knee jerk reactions and content from consumers. Organisations have to make a decision how they want to deal with these reactions or if they want to lead the conversation around their brand. Twitter is also a tool to gain better visibility on online search. Bing and Twitter have recently resigned their partnership and indicated that more collaborative approaches to search by combining the two will be coming.

Q: Can Twitter be used as a brand building tool? Why or why not? And how?

A: The way the platform has been built and used, it lends itself to personal branding and as a result, brands with defined personalities (ex @BlackBerry), personalities behind the brand (ex @Zappos) or personalities within campaigns (my personal favourites are @TheKevinButler for Playstation or @SaltysLife for Knorr) have been the most successful, from a “branding” perspective. I’m unaware of a brand that has been built purely on twitter…but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t, can’t or won’t be done.

Q: What Canadian brands are using Twitter right? Can you give a specific example?

A: Without knowing the strategy behind the execution, it’s hard to say. That said I think @McD_Canada has done a fantastic job, and has received deserved kudos, of continuing to engage its user base at scale. I’m not being obsequious when I say that that @marketing_mag has done a phenomenal job of really speaking to a niche audience while providing valuable content.

Q: Who should manage a brand’s Twitter account – third party community managers, agency partners, or in-house communications/marketing team? And why?

A: The answer that no-one likes is that it depends. It depends on the brand, the in-house resources, the agency and its competencies. Budget comes in here as well – to do twitter right can take considerable resources. Speaking from an agency perspective, some of our clients want to take this in-house and use us as strategic resources, while others ask us to take on everything from strategy to content creation to engagement with consumers…within certain pre-agreed parameters and supported by the necessary response protocols and escalation procedures.

Q: What are the common mistakes brands make on Twitter?

• Looking at twitter as a broadcast channel, being selfish and only sharing its own content
• Not having a clearly defined vision of where twitter fits within the overall marketing activity – the platform doesn’t help this though. The measurement tools for those using the basic account are very weak so it is easy to flounder with no clear direction or measures of success beyond followers, clicks and “engagement”. But for our clients participating in the beta, we have been able to tightly focus on a particular demographic/mindset/interest and show how our followers are the right followers and we’re not just collecting followers for its own sake.
• Not providing the platform with the correct funding either in terms of time or media (see above)
• Seeing Twitter as a standalone as opposed to being a component of the overall Paid, Owned and Earned media ecosystem. It does not stand alone and still needs to be planned in alignment with marketing activities such as the digital strategy, PR, web-site updates and other social media outreach activities such as Facebook or blogging etc

Q: Do consumers expect too much from a brand’s Twitter feed? They expect an answer too quickly, or that any problem can be solved by complaining about the brand openly.

A: There are a lot of myths and misconceptions around using twitter for customer service that marketers hear and can be easily seduced by. I strongly believe that brands using twitter to facilitate customer service has encouraged consumers to “shout” for help, rather than using formal customer service channels. In her book, “Open Leadership”, Charlene Li looks at the famous Twelpforce case study, from Best Buy, but what most people don’t realise about this case is that the business problem was identified first, then came the solution and twitter just happened to be the facilitation channel. The “idea” was never to use twitter as a customer service tool, it was to use the latent time of the thousands of best buy employees to better serve their customers and answer questions or solve problems.

For a pitch, my team looked at the consumer sentiment of a well-known brand that uses twitter for customer service. We saw that the volume of conversation around the brand had increased since they started this initiative, but so had the negative sentiment – this brand had trained its customers to shout about any negative issues.

Q: Give three tips on how to manage a corporate Twitter account.

1. Know your objectives and strategy – and more importantly how they fit in with the business objectives and culture. If it’s appropriate, give your employees permission to engage on Twitter without constraining them too heavily. They are your people, they epitomise your brand and can be your greatest salespeople
2. Know your audience – and, more importantly what content they want to see. Hint: it’s not just your content
3. To paraphrase the British army adage: no plan survives contact with the consumer

I don’t pay a lot of attention to my Twitter stats (number of replies, favourites, retweets and followers) in as much as I look at them from time to time, but I don’t track them.

So when it comes to validate the stats provided by Buffer App to Michael Brito, I can’t confirm or deny.

• Buffer users increased clicks on links they posted by 200% within 2 weeks of using
• The amount of retweets doubles on average
• Buffer users increase their follower count by 104 followers within 3 weeks on average

I have noticed an upward trend, as told by my gut, that it feels like I’m getting more official retweets and more @ replies, although that could be because I get replies from tweets I’ve buffered and forgotten.

One thing I like a lot is the reporting which looks a lot like the by-tweet reporting from the Promoted Products beta.

I’ve noticed that Buffer App is scheduling tweets at the same times each day so if Buffer App is optimizing tweets from all its users based on their secret sauce, then it is an excellent service. Either way, I’m going to keep using it – it works for me in that I can store tweets and it seems to work for my followers who don’t get bombarded by umpteen Twitter messages all in a row. Check it out yourself.

Source: Buffer App Increases Engagement on Twitter | Edelman Digital.

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Tell a room full of marketers that “We are in the midst of a Digital Revolution,” and you’d expect to see some eyes roll. But not at IAB Canada’s MIXX conference, which I attended today on behalf of Tribal DDB Canada. Attendees here were looking for proven ways to harness the digital advertising space to stay ahead of the curve as the space continues to grow so quickly. And, as I sift through the influx of #mixxcanada tweets, today’s conference accomplished exactly that. Below are my key takeaways from this year’s MIXX.

The Power of Social Data

Keynote speaker Terence Kawaja from Luma Partners drove home the importance of data-driven advertising, or as he called it “science-ified” media. To Kawaja, we’ve entered an era of personalized consumer choice moving at the fastest speed the world’s ever seen, reminding us advertisers that we face real-time push content delivery and, more importantly, discovery. So, capturing data from those resulting conversations from your digital creative and learning what else is important to your target consumer enables better, forward-thinking marketing decisions. After all, as keynote Sarah Thompson from Networked Insights pointed out, you can’t get be on the cutting edge if everyone’s using the same data.

Nussar Ahmad from social targeting company Addictive Mobility says they scan 9 million tweets per hour in order to serve up contextually relevant in-app ads on behalf of its advertisers. Why bother to go to such lengths? Thompson would argue it’s because social data informs. Social data identifies new or hidden audience segments to target. Social data helps us optimize our clients’ media buys and makes them more efficient. And most importantly, it helps us determine consumer intent.

Marketers can’t afford to ignore the potential and power of 2 billion social interactions per month and the resulting data these interactions can generate. Take a look at how Luma Partners maps the companies who are already taking advantage.

Canadians Love Our Online Video

In what was easily the best presentation of the day, the Managing Director of Digital Media Strategy for Google (Americas), Eileen Naughton, shared some staggering statistics about our YouTube usage:

• 55% of Canadians have a social profile, 89% are watching online video
• Canadians are watching 19 hours of YouTube videos per person, per month
• 30% of YouTube viewers share videos with friends
• 400 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute
• 150 years of YouTube video is viewed on Facebook daily
• 6 billion videos are watched each month globally

Yet, as TidalTV’s Mark McKee pointed out in his presentation, only 2% of the industry’s digital advertising spend (approx $50 million) is in online video. TidalTV was one of a few companies at MIXX who are trying to change that. In fact, Mark shared some new technologies that digital advertisers can take advantage of, including enhanced pre-roll ads where utilizing an ‘Add to Calendar’ overlay to your video actionizes what you’re promoting. Meaning, if you’re promoting a new TV show, in one click, a viewer can add the date and time of the show’s premiere to whichever calendar they use. The lesson here – Canadians are leading the space in online video consumption, so make the experience worth our while

The overarching theme of today was that the purported  “Digital Revolution” was more like “Digital Revelation” for many attendees. Goodbye are the days of following the leader. Instead, say hello to the power of entertaining, informing and providing real utility to your digital audience.

See you next year, MIXX!

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Laura Muirhead is a Community Cultivation Manager at Tribal DDB Toronto. She can be found on Twitter as @lauraroni.