IBM surveyed 1,000 customers around the world (including 350 executives) to understand what drives consumers to engage with companies via social media channels. The results show there is a major perception gap between what brands think consumers want versus what consumers really want:

• When asked what they do when they interact with businesses or brands via social media, consumers rank “getting discounts or coupons” and “purchasing products and services” at the top two activities
   

  but…
   
  In contrast, executives ranked getting discounts and purchasing products as the two activities consumers were least interested in doing (the exact opposite of consumers’ rankings!)

• Businesses are three times more likely to think consumers are interested in interacting with them to feel part of a community or engaged with their brand
   

  but…
   
  In contrast, those two actives were among the least interesting among consumers. Consumers are seeking value, whether it be information, advice, or a coupon. So while engaging with a company via social media may *result* in connectedness, the wish for intimacy with a brand is not what drives most of them.

The study advises (rightly so) that brands should not look at social media as an isolated program, but needs to be integrated across all other customer-facing initiatives. If you know your customer in one channel, you need to know them in other channels as well.

A successful Social CRM strategy is one that facilitates collaborative experiences and dialogue that customers value. But brands must understand consumers’ motivation for engaging with them.

At least that’s the question that keeps coming up in conversations with my current / future / probable clients as we look at how to integrate Social Media Marketing into their strategy for 2010. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, it’s no longer an uphill convincing battle of us trying to say to clients YES YOU ABSOLUTELY MUST DO SOCIAL MEDIA AND HERE ARE 1,052 REASONS WHY… now the conversation is more WE KNOW WE NEED TO DO IT SO HELP US FIGURE OUT WHAT WE SHOULD DO?

Lately most of those conversations can’t seem to exist without the mention of the one, the only TWITTER.

The Social Media Marketing landscape is a lot like the world of sports. It has some mainstay platforms (like franchise teams -  the Dallas Cowboys, New York Yankees, Atlanta Braves = Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr) and then it has it’s emerging greats – powerful players who people believe could become a franchise all on their own (like Jordan + Chicago, LeBron + Cleveland, Bonds + San Fran,… well you get the idea). The emerging greats – like players – can come onto the scene from nowhere and stick around.

Sticking around is what separates them from the majorly buzzed about but often prematurely hyped players – who come into the game and can leave it just as quickly – whether they leave it injured due to technology issues, an acquisition, a lack of providing that niche/unique experience that keeps them around or they simply get beat by a better competitor and bow out.

2009 is Twitter’s year. In 2008 many tech pundits questioned whether Twitter would stick. The most common statement about Twitter seemed to be “I just don’t get it.”

But this is a new year. It’s like Twitter has been drafted out of high school straight into the pros.

Entering into the Twitter game isn’t, however, a right of passage, as some might leave you to believe. Although Twitter is becoming as common a search tool as Yahoo, it still doesn’t necessarily mean that your brand HAS to have an account on Twitter. It’s a platform just like any other – and decision to engage has to be strategic and tie to your business objectives. Just like a team wouldn’t draft a really great point guard if they really are in desperate need of a center forward, Twitter might not be an absolute for your brand.

Without further ado (har har, I couldn’t resist! I’m cheesy!) a few things to consider when trying to answer the epic question “To tweet or not to tweet?” (if you’re asking it as a brand, not as a person…unless your person is your brand, of course…)

As a brand there are a variety of ways you can interact with your existing and potential consumers, or your target or aspirational audiences (or all of the above). It isn’t as simple as a micro statement. Like anything else – the tone, the audience, and the approach can vary based on how the deployment of Twitter would impact your business objectives.

A few common ways brands use Twitter (effectively) are as follows:

• To engage in conversation. At it’s core Twitter allows you to develop, facilitate and engage in B to C and C to B and three way conversations – with those who are talking about you, to you or about /within a marketplace segment you’d like to dominate (or you do dominate).
• To answer customer service questions. Are you in an industry plagued with power outages? Are you like Sprint PCS with your customer dissatisfaction chronicled across the web? Twitter is a great place to begin to answer or facilitate the answering of key consumer questions.
• To provide crisis communication and curb rumors. Celebs are doing the best job of this currently – but brands can as well! Don’t let the blogosphere or some stodgy press release that goes out to the AP tell your story.  Talk to your friends, tell them the truth in a simple, short statement that links to further details. They’ll spread it for you quickly, guaranteed.
• To share new product information and get feedback. Add a new item to your menu? Ask people to check it out and share their micro reviews.  Have something you want to seed? Give it away to some influential tweeters. Don’t let joe schmo rogue blogger from Detroit show the first images of your new concept car, break them on Twitter yourself in an ownable way. Give your consumers a backstage pass to the shaping and molding of your brand.
• To drive traffic to another online destination. Check the web analytics of any brand site who deploys social media marketing. I guarantee Twitter and Facebook rank in the top 5 traffic drivers if they are deploying good strategy within either.
• To host giveaways and other consumer promotions. Invite Tweeters to come to a live tasting of your product. Do a giveaway to your followers. Ask people to retweet a statement in order to win XYZ. Note: there is a fine line in executing this well and with good intention/strategy. I’d suggest not deploying this unless you are sure you’re doing it in a genuine way.
• To tell a story about a brand, experience or persona. This is really the reason to being. What/who/how/why is the voice of your brand? This is the essence of who you are. It blows my mind when people leave this voice to interns. This is your story on the front lines…directly playing with the key players who will BUY your product, make sure you are 100% confident in the storyteller.
• To develop your brand identity. See bullet above.
• To establish relationships by facilitating simple brand interactions. This probably should have been at the top of the list. 9 times out of 10, Twitter makes the most sense when brands really can benefit from relationship marketing with the right audience.  Before brands used to have to go through a third party to make that happen. Those days are gone resulting in an exciting (and often scary for the old school set) new set of opportunities.

The scope and possibility here is way too expansive to be encompassed in this single post.

The point is that although in most cases we would likely determine that drafting Twitter as a new member of your marketing team mix is the right thing to do – it isn’t as simple as signing up for the account, slapping on a background image and tweeting.

There are lots of other players on the field, so if you want to really play, you better step onto it with your A game.

Note on image: The top tweet is one of my favorites, from the man… Mr. A-Z himself twittering about his experience with Surfrider Foundation at a Barefoot Wine sponsored event. Barefoot is one of the brands I have the extreme pleasure of working with on Social Media Marketing.

The primary change is that a majority of the page is now taken up with the “wall”, which consists of status updates and comments by fans. This is obviously a direct response to Twitter and the success it has given brands in engaging their followers in direct communication.

The biggest drawback is that pages now have the exact same layout as user profiles. Previously, many brands were able to highly customize the content and look of their pages using the large area available for images and multiple large application boxes. Now, there is only a small image on the upper left corner and a few small application boxes down the left column. As on a profile, the rest of the applications have been relegated to a boxes tab that many fans probably won’t take the time to explore. While it is possible to change settings to have new users start on this tab, once someone becomes a fan of a page, they will always start on the main wall.

The consequences are clear. Brands will not be able to rely on rich graphics or flashy widgets to create engagement and reinforce identity; the focus in now on the conversation. Brands that update their status will have it appear just like friends’ updates on their fans home pages where they will be able to “like” and comment on it. With the imminent redesign of the home page, this conversation will only gain prominence and become the primary way for brands to engage fans and grow virally through the social graph.

The challenge will be for brands to use these new touch points for communication effectively. People will not accept passively receiving broadcast information like an RSS feed of blog posts; they require real engagement and two-way conversation. Brands will need to find real people to convey their voices and identity. There have already been successful examples of this on Twitter such as Zappos and Comcast.

It will only become more complex maintaining and managing a brand’s conversation as it moves away from a brand’s own site to the distributed web. As more sites and services open APIs, new tools and meta-services will be created to facilitate this for brands as FriendFeed and TweetDeck have only begun to demonstrate for consumers.

It is awesome (and for us at Affinitive, very validating) to see how many different elements that are key to a brand’s success are considered to be grown positively the most by Social Media (outlined in the chart below) over other tactics like advertising, direct marketing, POS promotions, etc.

“More than 90% of companies believe that social media is most effective in building brand reputation and awareness. That result is followed closely by goals for attracting website visitors, according to exclusive research in MarketingSherpa’s new Social Media Marketing and PR Benchmark Guide.”

Indeed.

Upon reading the list, I was especially struck by the top two brands, the iPhone and CNN.  While one is a relatively new product that has revolutionized the way we use mobile and, most recently, doubled its Q4 sales over the previous year, the other is a nearly 30 year old news network competing with countless other organizations producing much the same product.  So why their congruent success?

It’s easy to understand why iphone topped the list.  The iphone has enabled the use of social media applications mobilely unlike any phone before it, and with a large majority of tech journalists and early adopters utilizing social media tools like Twitter, Digg, and Facebook, it makes sense why the internet was abuzz with the iPhone in 2008.

CNN, on the other hand, is a bit different.  Its product, journalism, is ubiquitous.  While there can be discerning attributes to the network’s journalism that may set it apart; journalistic integrity, un-biased coverage, evocative subject matter, it is only marginal in scale and certainly not enough to create large amounts of buzz, as the news is a product reproduced by myriad publishing organizations.  So why does CNN beat all but the iphone in social media mentions?  What makes it nearly as buzzworthy as the revolutionary iPhone?

I like to think of it as the “what” vs “how” differentiation.  The iPhone’s success is the iPhone.  It’s a product that’s buzzworthy for what it is and how it changes our everyday interactions.  Congrats to Apple and Jobs for developing such an amazing product.  However, CNN can’t rely solely on it’s “what,” the quality of its journalism.  Instead, CNN must rely more heavily on the “how,” the way it is delivered and the experience they provide.

This is where CNN levels its competitors.   CNN has joined the social media space in an innovative way that provides utility to its audience.  Case in point: the presidential inauguration.  CNN, like most other major networks, streamed the inauguration live on their website.  But while the majority focused on the quantity and ease of access to coverage, CNN focused on the social media integration.  CNN allowed their audience to connect and interact with their Facebook friends with a click of a mouse.  After the inauguration, CNN set up “The Moment,” a Microsoft photosynth experience encouraging inauguration attendees to submit their photos, creating a 3D image experience created by the people, for the people.  Gimmicky, sure, but it’s buzzworthy.

I recognize that the particular examples cited previously occurred in 2009, I cited them as the freshest examples of CNN’s innovation.  In 2008 CNN impressed us with Rick Sanchez et al. incorporating Twitter into on air segments, iReports, and essential tools and features such as RSS, bookmarks, and embeddable video (not to mention tech-geeky stunts including holograms and complex touch-screen maps.)

CNN continues to pursue what gives them that ‘purple cow‘ effect that inevitably draws the spotlight on a brand.  While their ‘what’ may be good, it’s their ‘how’ that is exceptional.

This can be seen in My Starbucks on Facebook. It is a very well done gifting application, so well done in fact, that most people probably think it is an official Starbucks application. The Starbucks logo and numerous graphical assets of Starbucks products have been incorporated into it. This association with Starbucks, which has many avid followers, is a major factor in its popularity. It has over half a million installs. If it were just “my coffee”, it would likely have gotten nowhere near that many users.

The two college students who created it are not trying to hide the fact that they did this without Starbucks’ permission and include a disclaimer on the app’s about page. They are making money from advertising incorporated into the app, none of which goes to Starbucks, but they probably feel they are actually doing Starbucks a huge favor by promoting their brand. Maybe they are. It is certainly the view shared by many as represented by Nick O’Neill of AllFacebook who wrote, “If I was a brand I would be extremely happy about this.”

Perhaps nothing serves as a better example of the issues involved than the saga of Scrabulous, an online version of the game Scrabble which has become a huge hit and makes $25,000 a month for its creators, two brothers in India. Hasbro, the owner of the brand which has licensed the online rights to two other companies, has threatened to sue to have it removed from Facebook. Needless to say, the fans of Scrabulous are upset and many bloggers seem to hold the opinion that Hasbro should buy out Scrabulous as exemplified by Josh Quittner of Fortune:

If I were an evil genius running a board games company whose product line spanned everything from Monopoly to Clue, I might do this: Wait until someone comes up with an excellent implementation of my games and does the hard work of coding and debugging the thing and signing up the masses. Then, once it got to scale, I’d sweep in and take it over. Let the best pirate site win!

Is this the new business model for aspiring entrepreneurs? Don’t bother to negotiate pricey licensing deals; just find a hugely popular brand and leverage that popularity to create successful unofficial products, and then wait for the big pay day from the brand that is either grateful for all the hard work or fearful of the backlash from fans.

It certainly puts brands like Hasbro in an awkward position. Who would bother to license rights anymore if the people who simply steal intellectual property are being rewarded? On the other hand, these unofficial products are helping to promote brands and fighting against them would result in negative publicity. But isn’t this “pay me off or face harmful consequences” attitude a little like extortion?

It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. In the long run, technological changes and evolving cultural attitudes will certainly transform business models and intellectual property laws.

So says Andy Sernovitz (the founding CEO of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association) in this iMediaConnection article, where he gives some nice props to our work for Square Enix. Andy also talks about the The Five Ts of Word-of-Mouth Marketing - components that any successful word of mouth campaign shares:

Talkers: find the people who like to talk
Are they your customers? Neighborhood moms? Doctors? Bloggers? Think about the people who are most likely to tell a friend about what you’re doing. Make sure they know about your new topic of conversation.

Topics: give them a reason to talk
Give people a reason to talk about you. It doesn’t need to be fancy. A special sale, good service, a cool, new feature, a better flavor, a funny package. (Remember the Gateway computers that came in cow-patterned boxes?)

Tools: help the message spread faster and further
Do everything you can to make it easy for talkers to pass along your topic. Include postcards and stickers in the box when you ship a package. Put up a chat room so people can talk to each other. Join a blog conversation. Hand out samples. (Did you ever get one of those emails with a “secret” coupon that was supposedly for employees only? Did you forward it?)

Taking part: join the conversation
Conversations die out when there’s only one person talking. When people are talking about you, answer them. Reply to their emails. Comment on blogs that write about you. Send a lot of thank-you notes.

Tracking: measure and understand what people are saying
The word-of-mouth conversation is the best feedback you’re ever going to get. It’s far better than any other kind of market research because it is the authentic voice of the consumer. Hear what people are saying, learn from it and use it to be a better company.

Read this Book!
If you haven’t already, I highly recommend you get a copy of Andy’s new book, “Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking,” which is a great guide full of ideas on implementing successful word of mouth programs, regardless if you are a major brand or a mom-and-pop restaurant.

see also:

iMedia Connection: Chrysler, Coke: New Brand Buzz Leaders
Square Enix: Slime Knights case study