In her excellent recent article for Advertising Age, Kunur Patel outlined the struggles big-name social media pioneers have faced trying to implement effective social media content creation and approval processes.

One of the companies, Ford, stumbled on something really remarkable.

What the automaker found lines up nicely with what we’ve discovered ourselves: that the act of collaboration between marketing, advertising, PR and product development necessary to meet the real-time demands of social media has turned out to be an end in itself.

In Ford’s case, in order to create good social strategies and promotions, the company had to pull together people from R&D, PR, merchandising and marketing. In doing so, Ford forged connections through Scott Monty, its head of social media. It found it could leverage these connections through the social web to collaborate and respond to all kinds of business challenges, whether product-related, politics-related or promotions-related.

In the process, Ford’s collaborative media, PR and creative collective (what the company has dubbed “Team Detroit”) found itself at the natural center of strategy; newly empowered as the social hub – the “conductor” as some have taken to describing the role – of a wide range of marketing, product, PR and policy discussions.

A great example of the power of social collaboration is the organic evolution of The Ford Story, a site that started its life as a political advocacy effort and then quickly evolved into Ford’s frontline face. This, folks, is the new company “homepage.”

Ford’s story comes as no surprise to us. At Media Logic, we have found that solving for the social media problem leads to rapid evolution and a new, more strategic role for marketers. All of this is driven by the demands of the social web. But what is perhaps underappreciated is that all of it is possible because of the communication tools necessitated by the social web.

A range of applications for managing Twitter, Facebook and blogs – like HootSuite, CoTweet, Vitrue’s Social Relationship Manager and our own Zeitgeist & Coffee – are evolving into full-fledged collaboration tools that not only meet the communication demands of social media, but unleash the potential of social business.

Learn how to integrate, manage and maximize your company’s total social marketing universe. Request your Zeitgeist & Coffee demo now.

Josh:

Hey Fred, Edelman’s 2010 Trust Barometer was released recently. And one of the more interesting nuggets uncovered by the report is that “conversations with friends and peers as a source of company information saw sizable drops in the U.S.” On the surface, the report findings sound dire, specifically as they relate to social media – they seemingly crumble the foundational promise that makes social media so alluring for marketers. But, as aptly noted by some other sources (AdAge and SmartBlog and Going Social Now), the findings don’t really support the demise of social media as a marketer’s tool. Although, the findings made for an evocative story on APM’s Marketplace and good press for the annual report and the PR giant that conducts the research each year.

First, I believe that it is the isolated opinion of peers that consumers are losing confidence in, not the general notion of feedback from other consumers. When an opinion is expressed by a perceived expert or corroborated by a community of peers, consumers have faith in the veracity of the claim/opinion/advice. This provides strong support for those influencer- and community-building strategies that I know you have been pursuing with your clients recently.

Second, these findings seem to underline what I see as the natural evolution of social networks. The first phase seemed to be all about broadening social circles. “I should friend my brother’s best friend’s sister’s classmate.” It was all about the numbers – how many friends, how many followers. Now that we are getting a bit more sophisticated with social networks and building our social circles, the second phase seems to be about making sense of your network of “friends” and determining which people provide value and where they provide value. For example, I find value in your insight about the political dynamics of our industry. And you look to me for… well, I’m not sure, but you get the point.

What do you think? Am I missing the implications of Edelman’s findings?

Fred:

Don’t sell yourself short, Josh, I look to you for a lot of things. After all, you give me topics for pontification, and you know I love that.

It’s funny, because this hits on the “relevance” issue that we talked about last time in our last column, Mobile Ad Evolution. Of course, fewer people trust their “friends” now, than they did a year ago. Thanks to social media we now have a much broader definition of who is our “friend.” An acquaintance from high school might not know what I do for a living, so how can he know what products I’d like?

Awhile back, Clay Shirky gave a talk about the need for a better information filter. His main point was that complaints about “information overload” are not caused by too much information, but rather having no good way to filter and prioritize the information that we receive.

It sounds similar to your second point. What if I could “score” my friends in Facebook and give more credibility to the ones who know me better or whose opinions I trust more? Facebook has tried to do this by allowing me to group friends, but we tend to do that based on how we know someone, not based on how much we trust him. I’m more likely to listen to the voice of a person – or even a brand – who I trust rather than buying something after five people have told me to.

Related articles

• 2010 Edelman Trust Trends. 7 Destiny-Accelerators and YOU. (agentgenius.com)
• How to Market to People Who Don’t Trust Their Friends (marketingvox.com)
• The Social Impact of Friendships and Lies (socialmediatoday.com)

Learn how to integrate, manage and maximize your company’s total social marketing universe. Request your Zeitgeist & Coffee demo now.

The key to an effective social media plan is to establish the importance of strategic content. It is the act of creating (or uncovering) and distributing this content that will help you achieve your strategic objectives.

Some of you may cringe at this suggestion, but it’s really about bringing the discipline of marketing and publishing to the seeming randomness of social media:

1. Staying on brand
2. Targeting content
3. Keeping content recent and frequent
4. Building an expectation of value
5. Providing a feedback loop

If you’re a victim of the “what are we going to post today?” syndrome, here are a few tips to get started with strategic content development:

1. Analyze your primary target audience. What value can you bring to them?
2. Audit your content assets. You’ll be surprised by what’s available in-house or from third parties.
3. Recruit contributors. Don’t be too narrow. Interest may come from some very unexpected places.
4. Develop an “editorial” calendar. Create a rollout plan that will provide your audience with relevant and timely content, but will also allow plenty of room for topical postings, following interesting threads or just reveling in the spontaneity of the social environment.

Now that the shine is off social media, isn’t it time to put it to work for your organization?

Josh:

Hey Fred, I was recently doing my daily perusal of The New York Times online (in my infinite quest to look cultured and smart) and came across this article: “Is the Day of Tiny Ads Finally Here?” In a nutshell, the author surmises that due to recent technology introductions – like the iPad and the Droid – marketers will begin to spend more dollars on mobile advertising, specifically purchasing mobile banner ad units.

Are we about to go through this again? Haven’t we learned from a decade-plus of web banner ads that the banner ad unit is a flawed advertising vehicle? It is disruptive in the wrong way, pulling consumers from the content they seek and dropping them elsewhere; and is often hijacked by marketers pushing messages unrelated to the desired content consumers have sought. As marketers, we’d be doing a disservice to advertisers if we tried to repackage this marketing tactic. We are still in the relative infancy of mass adoption of mobile devices. We still have the opportunity to get it right.

I think the author is missing the true advantages that mobile technologies offer marketers. As we move forward, shouldn’t the keyword be VALUE? Instead of “ads,” we need to help our clients develop applications and tools that offer value to consumers – that help augment their lifestyles, their day-to-day. This idea of finding a way to evolve web banner ads into mobile banner ads seems crazy to me. What do you think?

Fred:

You’ve got a good point Josh, but I think what the “analysis” from the article is trying to say is that the banner ad is not really good enough for the iPad and the Droid, and that marketers may need to invent new ad units. Of course, this ignores the fact that I already have tiny ads on my mobile device – there’s one for Target, The Home Depot, Sears, Amazon.com, ESPN, The New York Times, NPR, FedEx, my bank and my insurance company. These are the apps that you alluded to above.

And if we view apps as ads, then what’s missing is not only the value piece that you mention, but RELEVANCE and the ability to bridge the divide between my traditional online behavior and my mobile app usage. Right now these two ways that I interact with brands exist mostly in silos which misses a huge opportunity to give me the most relevant and targeted content in both channels.

Instead of inventing a new ad unit, marketers and media companies might be better served by thinking up a way to integrate these channels. The companies that come out on top won’t be the ones that find the perfect tiny ad, it’ll be the ones that figure out how to connect all the ways we already interact with their brand.

Related articles

• Predictions for 2010 part 3: Mobile advertising needs to grow up or ship out! (mobiletribe.com)
• Giving Mobile Ads a Makeover (online.wsj.com)
• Mobile Execs Less Optimistic (Except About Apps) (mediapost.com)

Why was I so intrigued by Jason’s post? The effort to demonstrate the value of his blog content was drastically sold short on its real value. This happened mainly because the value placed on the phrase “social media strategy” by keyword tool estimators is nothing short of wrong. The tools at Jason’s and everyone’s disposal are simply not able to accumulate and react quickly enough to the real-time value of key search terms, especially ones in which paid is only emerging around. To this day if you drop the aforementioned phrase into Google’s own Traffic Estimator tool, you will get a result that states we have too little data to estimate traffic, and the maximum cost per click on the word is estimated to be $0.05. So how do I know it is wrong? I am bidding on the phrase and have been for months in our paid search effort. The cost for the search phrase is skyrocketing and a bid of $0.05 would not even get you on the front page of results in Guam. Using another, slightly more real-time but still imperfect Google tool, Bid Simulator, currently the maximum cost per click bid on this keyword is $36.60. There still is no data on projected clicks and cost but it does get you closer to the real price people are willing to pay to be seen in the top tier of paid results.

In Jason’s post he uses a great term that marketers should add to their dictionary: “search traffic equivalency.” It is used to illustrate the results he achieved from organic traffic versus what one could anticipate spending to drive comparable paid traffic. The good news, his ROI is currently far more profound than he estimates. Don’t run, I am about to use a lot of numbers, but they are telling in the end. Right now Google Bid Simulator allows me to make a rough guess that I could buy 4,650 monthly impressions on the phrase “social media strategy” at the aforementioned $36.60. For sake of argument let’s assume all the monthly traffic Jason’s blog received from this term comes from Google search (my instincts and some anecdotal historical data say it is probably close to 97%). The traffic he generated then is roughly equivalent to 14% of the total clicks possible. At the very highest end someone bidding with the aim to achieve Jason’s results would need to spend $23,570 per month. That is a far cry from the $32.20 that crappy keyword estimate tools valued the phrase to be.

Now even if you wrote the greatest AdWords copy ever imagined I think we can all agree that achieving 14% click-thru is going to be a tall order. But achieving this type of traffic via a developed conversation marketing strategy is clearly achievable. Jason had a great and in my opinion very related post recently regarding inbound marketing. He maps out the time and effort he puts into a month for blogging and social network information sharing, which amounts to his equivalent marketing efforts. I am giving him the weekends off so what it amounts to on a Monday-Friday work week is about 8.75 hours per week, or about 35 hours per month. I have no idea what Jason makes per hour in his consulting work, but let’s assume again for the sake of argument his time is worth $100 per hour to develop his content (a price I am borrowing form Danny Brown’s very excellent piece The Real Cost of Social Media). Using this as the framework it would be a monthly cost of $3,500 or $42,000 annualized. Now I just told you above the paid search equivalent to the traffic Jason brings organically on “social media strategy” alone would cost $23,750 a month. The math is not very hard to follow; you can currently drive inbound traffic at just under 15% the cost of a paid search effort. That ratio of effort put into a content strategy in deference to paid marketing won’t necessarily last, but it is damn appealing and frames the value of the work. It is not perfectly apples to apples, but we are at least talking fruit.

One thing that cannot be overlooked in the paid versus organic search discussion (and frankly it is better to integrate and complement them – not duke it out) is the ability of paid campaigns to drive a clicking party exactly where you want them to be on your website. Consequently the conversions on paid clicks tend to be significantly higher than organic results. Well developed content strategies can achieve conversion but it takes additional effort which will only increase with the impact social media has had, and will continue to have, on search results.

I took a close look at a few of our better-performing keywords which do extremely well at driving traffic to our website. If I opened the faucet and was also able to ratchet up performance on CTR for both, I could spend $5,500 a month between the two. Being conservative on the estimates to develop a content-driven conversation strategy to replace the paid search efforts entirely, I could ballpark a number of roughly $4,375 a month. That number does not include the likely need to change directions slightly, revamp Meta tags for our website to align with a new blogging strategy as well as the extra time needed to begin creating an impact on the already established conversation. There is a savings not to be sneezed at, but in the end there is no small investment in a comparable content strategy.

One thing is certain; the cost to drive traffic via Google or another search engine is not insignificant, either organically or paid. As content creation in the social sphere ramps up the efforts to be found organically, increased time commitment will be required. The cost to do so via a content-driven social media marketing effort is not insignificant either, hopefully more folks like Danny Brown and the project Jason Falls referenced will be laying cost models out on the table.  We are trying to ourselves. Right now if your competitor is asleep at the wheel and you are active with an entrenched lead position the tea leaves read well. As referenced by Jeff Molander’s comparative case study of Adagio vs. Bigelow in the world of tea. If you need to play the role of chaser, you can’t afford to put your head in the sand and feel sorry for your brand. You need to dig in and develop your social media marketing strategy. The longer you wait, the more it is going to cost to make up for lost time. Content strategies have a cost and they are just beginning to become understandable.

It also alerts you in real-time, which, while nice, is a bit of an annoyance as it sends a Buzz alert to your inbox when a buzz you sent is responded to (this can be turned off by creating a filter that archives anything with label “buzz.” Instructions can be found here: Hide Buzz updates from your inbox.

Buzz can also be accessed via a mobile device if you’re an Android or iPhone user (Windows Mobile and Blackberry versions are on the way) by pointing your mobile browser to http://buzz.google.com. The web application is pretty slick, and may be its saving grace. I will also give Google some props, and say that I do enjoy the Buzz layer incorporated into Google Maps. This could be useful for a few things, like pointing individuals to a specific event that they may not have known about. It could also be helpful to alert those on the go to traffic or an accident, and help to plot out an alternative route to their destination.

As for this guy, I’ve already forgotten what the buzz was about, and won’t be migrating over unless some groundbreaking features are added in the future. What do you think? Will it be a success, or will people forget about it… much like we did with Wave? We’d love to hear your comments!

Related articles

• Blog – Google Buzz Aims to Tap Users’ Social Networks (technologyreview.com)
• Noah Mallin: Social Media: Is Google Buzz More Than Just Hype? (huffingtonpost.com)
• Google’s big announcement: Google Buzz is sharing, Gmail-style (downloadsquad.com)

But here’s the twist… it worked.

Through supporting tweets, Facebook posts and rampant word-of-mouth on the web, this video has attracted well over a million views in just a few weeks. But even more than that, it’s gotten people talking about the brand in a positive way.

“That just? made my day”

“If only all coca cola vending machines were like this one. I love coca cola”

“I was actually clapping during this commercial. ? <3”

So why has Coke succeeded where others have failed? Why are people reacting so strongly in favor of the same type of manufactured event that has been met with disdain so many times before?

The difference is authenticity.

What makes the video generate such joy is seeing people interact with the “Happiness Machine.” Yes, the moment itself is manufactured, but the reactions of the people are genuine.

(Or at least I hope they are… for now, I’m going to let my normally skeptical brain just enjoy the moment.)

What’s also interesting about this particular endeavor is Coke’s ability (knowingly or not) to repurpose an “older” web convention for something new. Using the overplayed convention of a “viral” video, they’ve been able to create an army of brand evangelists and a wave of goodwill.

Not too bad for the price of a video camera, some flowers and an 8-foot sub…

Related articles

• 712,000 Views and Counting for New Coca-Cola Happiness Video (marketingvox.com)
• Viral Friday: Happiness Machine (viralblog.com)
• Coca Cola: Happiness Machine Viral Video? (viralblog.com)

This is why Media Logic so excited to announce our new social media startup bundles
Z-Pac^SM for Business and Z-Pac^SM for Higher Education.

Visit our site for details and pricing.

Our Z-Pac bundles are designed to help the next wave of businesses and institutions take what has been learned about the power of social media by early adopters and put it to work for themselves.

Z-Pac – which bundles Media Logic’s Brand Amp^SM and Zeitgeist & Coffee^SM products – is a 3-month learn-by-doing program. The program includes a quick analysis to ensure a brand is conversation-ready; an asset analysis to uncover and optimize any content in-house experts, employees, partners, customers and fans are creating; and a conversation architecture analysis to make sure the brand is able to expose those assets easily.

The real magic comes through implementation of Media Logic’s Zeitgeist & Coffee 2.0 dashboard.

Z&C is web-based tool that makes social media content development and communication management easy and exciting. The Z&C dashboard rationalizes and simplifies the whole social media process. With Z-Pac, Media Logic allows customers to distribute the Z&C dashboard freely to all its key content creators, communications managers and advocates.

Media Logic is offering special pricing on its Z-Pac bundles through 3/31/10.

So what does this mean for marketers? Moms’ blogs and time online provide a plethora of listening opportunities – and provide a wakeup call to brands everywhere. Women are the CFOs of most households and make most purchasing decisions on their own; being active in social media is becoming a must-do for any brand that wishes to remain relevant. Why? This group doesn’t have dormant pages on Facebook but are in fact among the most active on the site. A few quick facts:

• Over 67% of this audience is on Facebook at least 2-4 times a day
• Over 30% are on 5 or more times a day
• Only 5% are annoyed by or dislike ads on Facebook

All of this activity and this open-to-advertising view provide marketers with ample opportunity and reason to use Facebook’s targeted advertising to reach this critical audience.

Another key fact uncovered by this research? Moms want to interact with brands and are actively looking for deals or reasons to become fans. In the open-ended areas of the survey, the target showed a lot of savvy and insight, providing clues for marketers to take advantage of. A few highlights:

Provide exclusive offers (e.g., printable coupons, etc.). Exclusive offers would entice me to respond to the message (not just read/glance at [it]), and I might look them up on Facebook and become a fan.

[Be] more interactive. Starbucks is a good example – they just had a Facebook campaign where you could send a coupon for a free Starbucks ice cream to a friend on Facebook.

[Be] a little more targeted with online store specials.

The bottom line? This is an incredibly active, vocal and influential group in the social space. They are the most likely to seek out and share opinions on products, brands and services with those most likely to buy them. They are looking for brands to speak to them and provide them with a reason to start talking to them or about them. So it’s up to you: be a part of the conversation… or become irrelevant.

Learn how to integrate, manage and maximize your company’s total social marketing universe. Request your Zeitgeist & Coffee demo now.

Who’s Ted McConnell? He’s the “general manager-interactive marketing and innovation” for one of the world’s top consumer goods companies — makers of everything from potato crisps to detergents to personal care products. And in a talk at a digital media forum back in November 2008, he was quoted as saying:

I have a reaction to [Facebook] as a consumer advocate and an advertiser: What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend?

Ted also reportedly said:

Who said this is media? Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren’t trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it.

Ah, monetizing. That’s old-school advertising thinking. Fourteen months later (an eternity from a technological and consumer adoption standpoint), we know that conversation-centric marketing is not about buying ads around the conversation… it’s about spurring and participating in the conversation.

But back then, Ted’s sentiments were greeted by some as refreshingly honest and true, as in this blogger’s reaction. Finally, someone would expose social media as the marketing fad du jour.

Well, things have changed.

In fact, P&G just announced that it will be making a major push in social media in 2010. You may also want to check out P&G’s Pringles fan page on Facebook, home to nearly 3 million fans!

Now, to be clear, this is not about mocking Ted’s certainty about the frivolousness of social media as a marketing channel. It’s to point out one simple truth — a lot of people felt that way. Just like they did when “this internet thing” was getting started. And it’s less important to dwell on the past, and more important to see the opportunity now.

I think we should offer kudos to P&G for joining the party, in a very big way. Heck, you may even want to send a congrats message to Ted.

On his Facebook page.

Related articles:

• Mike Fruchter: P&G Embraces Facebook as Big Part of Its Marketing Plan (adage.com)
• Proctor and Gamble embraces Facebook (nevillehobson.com)
• Facebook, Twitter and P&G (ventureblog.com)

Harness the power of social media. Register for your free presentation today and find out how you can use social media to build your brand and business.