In 2010, Marketers to Follow Consumers Online, Focusing On Social Media

Posted on January 31, 2010 by Dukky

Last month, we saw a couple of interesting surveys released that help paint a picture of what 2010 will look like for marketers. First, consider the results of this report by Nielsen, which shows consumers moving online in droves to social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

For example, in December of 2009, consumers worldwide spent an average of over 5 1/2 hours on social networking sites, up 82% from an average of 3 hours in December of 2008.

Twitter was the fastest-growing social networking site in 2009, growing from 2.7 million unique visitors in December 2008 to 18.1 million in December 2009. However, despite Twitter’s amazing growth spurt last year, the more accessible Facebook is still the most popular social networking destination.

These statistics show that more and more, social networking sites are becoming online homes for consumers. Plus, with more and more people connecting to the mobile internet, consumers are increasingly able to take their online homes with them into the real world. The bottom line is that your company needs to be online too, interacting with your customers where they live.

Statistics like these make it hard to brush off social media as “just another trend,” and in 2010 marketers will be spending an increasing amount of time and energy connecting to consumers via social media. For example, according to a study released in January by Alterian, 66% of marketers plan to increase spending on social media marketing efforts this year.

Where will the additional money come from? 40% of marketers who planned to increase spending on social media in 2010 planned to pay for it by shifting at least 1/5 of their direct marketing budgets toward social media.

In an article on DMNews, Bob Barker (VP of corporate marketing at Alterian, not the former game show host), said that the results of the survey indicated “an increasing professionalism in marketing. We are getting to the phase of ‘yes, we can’ in social marketing. We can listen to customers on social media and engage with them in an interesting way on social media.”

None of this means that direct marketing is becoming irrelevant, however. For example, as we noted last week, direct mail can still be extremely effective, and companies that have discontinued direct mail campaigns completely have noticed their sales suffering as a result.

The key to successful marketing in 2010 is to integrate direct marketing, mobile marketing and social media to reach out to customers both in the physical world and in the virtual worlds where they increasingly spend their free time.

Dukky makes it easy to incorporate social and mobile media into direct response campaigns. With our platform, customers can share your offer via email, mobile and social media networks, so that when you reach out to one customer, you could potentially be reaching hundreds.

Plus, we’ll hook you up with what Alterian says almost 2/3 of marketers are still missing-analytics. Find out how your campaigns are performing in real-time, and see who your most influential customers are.

See how we can increase your response rates by 8 times more than traditional marketing.

Using Social Media to Defend "Who Dat"

Posted on January 29, 2010 by Dukky

Just in case you’ve been living under a rock, the Super Bowl is happening in a little over a week, and the Saints are playing for the first time ever. However, in the middle of what should be a season of celebration, the NFL has managed to stir up some controversy by laying claim to “Who Dat,” the iconic phrase that Saints fans use to cheer on their team.

It all started earlier this week, when New Orleans vendors, including Storyville and Fleurty Girl, were issued injunctions ordering them to quit selling T-shirts emblazoned with the “Who Dat” slogan.

The NFL is insisting it owns the rights to the phrase, but many fans disagree, claiming that since it was started by the fans, it belongs to the fans and the people of New Orleans. They’ve stepped up to defend the merchants involved and to try to get the NFL to reconsider its stance-and social media has played a big part in helping the movement go viral.

That’s not surprising- The Saints have a large number of social media-savvy fans, and #whodat is a popular hashtag on game nights on Twitter. In fact, one of the shirts that Fleurty Girl owner Lauren Thom was ordered to stop selling was inspired by the hashtag and said simply “#whodat.” She told Nola.com that the shirt was “designed to unify the Who Dat Nation, not within a tweet, but through a shirt.”

News of the NFL’s move spread quickly via Twitter and Facebook, inspiring Facebook groups like The NFL Can Kiss Who Dat Ass and Defend Who Dat, status updates, and the #defendwhodat hashtag on Twitter.

The story has now been picked up by the national media. Both Senator David Vitter and his Democratic contender, Charlie Melancon, have issued online petitions requesting that the NFL back down. According to the Wall Street Journal, Melancon used email and Twitter to gather 1,800 signatures in just an hour and a half!

The effort seems to be having an effect-NOLA.com reports that the NFL has backed down slightly, allowing that ” T-shirts and items with ‘Who Dat’ and a fleur-de-lis logo unlike the one owned by the Saints are allowed as long as they are not advertised as being Saints or NFL paraphernalia” and that “Who Dat’ shirts being sold at the Fleurty Girl shop on Oak Street would be acceptable as long as the shop removes advertising referring to the Saints.”

See how powerful Twitter and Facebook can be?

Super Bowl Advertisers Using Social Media To Get More For Their Money

Posted on January 28, 2010 by Dukky

At around $3.01 million for a 30-second commercial, Super Bowl ads are not cheap. This year, as the Saints face the Colts, advertisers will be using social media to try to get a little bit more for their money.

For example, while Pepsi has decided to forgo advertising during the Super Bowl altogether this year in favor of a social media-based philanthropic campaign, Pepsi’s arch-nemesis Coca-Cola is trying to have it both ways, premiering 2 commercials during the game and incorporating social media and charity via a Facebook promotion.

Coke’s Facebook promotion lets fans give virtual Coca-Cola-themed “gifts” to their friends on the site. In return for giving a gift, Coke gives you a sneak peak of one of the commercials and donates $1.00 to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America.

According to the New York Times’ Media Decoder Blog, by 2:00pm Eastern yesterday, Coca-Cola Facebook fans had already given away more than 2,500 gifts.

According to this article by the New York Times’ Stuart Elliott, other Super Bowl advertisers are hoping that their ads will go viral on YouTube, which has a channel, the Super Bowl Ad Blitz channel, dedicated solely to Super Bowl commercials.

A survey conducted by Venables Bell & Partners found that viewers are likely to go online to see the commercials again and to share them with friends and family: 41% of respondents said that they would watch the commercials online after the game, and 26% planned to pass on their favorites.

As Kathy O’Brien, vice president for personal care at the Unilever United States office, explained to the New York Times, “That’s the way you have to go to market now. The Super Bowl is an element of a complete, 360-degree campaign.”

That goes for direct marketing, too, where integrating traditional direct mail and email marketing with social media and mobile marketing can also help you get more bang for your buck.

That’s why Dukky makes it easy to begin integrating print, email, social media and mobile. With our platform, it’s easy to powerful campaigns that combine all of the above elements to improve response rates by up to 8 times!

Backroads Uses PURLS to Create Winning Direct Mail Campaign

Posted on January 24, 2010 by Dukky

Last year, Backroads, an adventure travel company based in Berkeley, California, decided to revamp its direct mail strategy and make it more personalized. So, instead of sending generic postcards and catalogs to its previous customers, the company decided to send customized postcards that used PURLs to encourage them to rebook.

The company mailed out 40,000 postcards to people who had booked trips from the company before. Each postcard had a picture of the last destination that the customer visited with Backroads, plus 3 pictures of other destinations that their travel history indicated they might be interested in visiting in the future.

In a case study of the campaign on the Chief Marketer blog, Massimo Prioreschi, vice president of sales and marketing, explained why the PURLs were such an important part of the strategy:

“Basically, we were trying to elicit a bit of an emotional response from them based on their experiences. If they can remember what they’ve done in the past and we can rekindle those memories, then they have a greater chance of traveling with us again. The variable print portion and the PURLs are important for that.”

The results of the campaign were quite impressive: the initial mailing, in March, generated conversion and response rates better than 12%, according to the Chief Marketer blog. That’s twice what Backroads was accustomed to based on previous mailings!

Also, in another case study of the campaign on DM News , Prioeschi said that the company noticed “100% lift in response of clicks through to the PURL and browsing, and 50% increase in sales over generic postcard.”

Looking for an easy way to incorporate PURLS into your next campaign? At Dukky, our unique multi-channel toolkit can help you harness the power of PURLs in just a few clicks. Even better, our platform also allows you to further increase the reach of your campaign by making offers shareable through email and social media. Get the scoop on the solutions we offer here.

Finding Red Balloons

Posted on January 20, 2010 by Dukky

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of ARPANet, the progenitor of the Internet that we know, love and can’t live without, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) decided to play a game: They scattered 10 red weather balloons in locations across the country, and challenged people to use the Internet to find them. The winner would receive $40,000 cash.

Just 9 hours after the contest started, a team of researchers from MIT took the prize. How did they manage to find the balloons so quickly? By harnessing the power of social networking and viral collaboration.

Here’s what they did: they offered to share the prize money with people who helped them find the balloons. People who found a balloon and told the MIT team where it was would get $2,000 for themselves and $2,000 donated to charity. The person that referred them would get a $1000 for themselves and $1,000 for charity. In turn, the person that referred that person would get $500 for themselves and $500 for charity, and so on down the line.

News of the contest quickly went viral, spreading like wildfire through a variety of channels that included social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Dr. Riley Crane, the researcher who headed the project, sees a variety of potential applications for real-world situations that require information to be distributed quickly, such as disaster response (we’ve all seen the impact that social media has had on marshaling resources for Haiti) and finding missing children. But the kind of response that the MIT team generated is also a marketer’s dream. So, what can we learn from it?

Probably the single most important lesson for marketers is that if you want something to go viral, people need an incentive to share it. For example, on Dr. Crane’s website, an article about the contest quotes Toshiba Professor Alex (Sandy) Pentland, head of the Human Dynamics Group at MIT:

“What was most rewarding about this was how we demonstrated the enormous potential of human networking. It was great that we won the contest, but more significantly, this exercise showed how building the proper incentives into a viral collaboration can quickly harness a large population to work together to address broad societal needs. It has helped us better understand how information spreads and why people cooperate.”

Of course, in most cases we can’t offer the type of large cash rewards that got people excited about the MIT team’s project. But that’s okay-while cash may be one of the best motivators, it’s not the only incentive that makes people want to share. People share content for free all the time for a variety of reasons: because it makes them laugh, because it tugs on their heartstrings, because it makes them appear smarter, cooler or “in-the-know.”

At Dukky, our promotions can be shared easily via e-mail and social media, harnessing people’s natural desire to impress other people and make them happy by sharing discounts and promotions.

What incentive are you providing your customers to spread the word about you?

Social Media Marketing Complements Direct Mail, But Doesn't Replace It

Posted on January 18, 2010 by Dukky

Should you ditch your direct mailing program in favor of marketing via email or social media? Not so fast, says the Wall Street Journal, which recently did a story about the decline of direct mail and the potential consequences for businesses.

According to the article, small business owners have been slashing direct mailing campaigns in an attempt to save money, only to find that their online campaigns aren’t producing the same amount of business.

For example,the article profiled Alicia Settle, president of Pro Annum Inc., who dropped a $20,000 direct mail loyalty campaign in favor of marketing through email only to find that the business’ orders dropped a whopping 25% from the previous year. Her company was able to recover the lost business by sending out the postcards to customers over the summer. The direct mail campaign, which had seemed like an indulgence, was actually an important investment.

Instead of dropping direct mail altogether, the Wall Street Journal notes that savvy marketers are working smarter, creating more personalized campaigns that catch recipients’ attention and generate higher response rates.

In the article, Eric Anderson, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, said that the ideal direct mail campaign for 2010 is “something that’s more appealing than “junk” mail and potentially more noticeable than an email message.”

Targeted direct mail campaigns may still be indispensable for many businesses, but that doesn’t mean that you can ignore social media, either. For 2010, many companies are trying to integrate the two. From the Wall Street Journal:

Prof. Anderson says other business owners are trying to figure out how to integrate Web marketing—such as email campaigns, banner ads and social-networking sites—with direct mail. “The introduction of new media has forced [business owners] to go back and revisit the whole playbook on what’s the best way to communicate with customers,” Mr. Anderson says.

Dukky’s platform offers an easy and effective way to integrate traditional direct response with social media. Our platform lets you send personalized offers to recipients using personalized URLs, either by direct mail or email. These offers can then be shared via email and social media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

With just a few clicks, customers can share your discounts and promotions with family and friends, helping them spread like wildfire. Dukky lets you harness the power of personalization and social media, improving ROI so that you get more out of every dollar you spend.

Meet Your Match (Literally) With Coke Zero's New Facebook App

Posted on January 5, 2010 by Dukky

In October, Coca-Cola introduced a new Facebook app aimed at marketing their Coke Zero product. The app, called Coke Zero Facial Profiler, uses facial profiling software to analyze your face and help you find people on Facebook who resemble you. Basically, it’s like one of those “which celebrity do you look like?” apps, except that the matches are ordinary people, not celebs.

The application takes full advantage of Facebook’s ability to distribute content virally, enabling users to share their “matches” via Facebook, Twitter or by posting a link on their website or blog. Of course, you can also invite your friends to play, too.

When the application was launched, Coke Zero didn’t have enough pictures on file to match anybody, so users had to wait until December to see who their Facebook doppelgangers are. This seems to have frustrated some early users of the app, at least if the comments on this Mashable article are any indication.

Even now, the application leaves something to be desired when it comes to accuracy. I tried it out and got a match that looks nothing like me, while the reporter who wrote this New York Times article found that “the matches didn’t look like doppelgangers — they seemed to be based on the position of the face in the photo, and things like the shape of lips, chin and eyes. “

Of course, the real question is, as always, “Is it working?” Is the Facebook app helping Coke Zero get its message out? So, far, according to the New York Times, the data has been encouraging but inconclusive:

More than 288,000 people have installed the application, and the average time spent on cokezero.com (Coca-Cola does not have access to time spent on the Facebook version) for the week of Dec. 7, the most recent week available, was more than five and a half minutes. That time is “comparatively high relative to other programs,” Ms. Cronin said.

Unfortunately, the average rating that Facebook users gave the app was 2.1 out of 5 stars. That seems to indicate that a significant number of users didn’t feel like that average five and a half minutes was time well-spent.

In the New York Times, Linda Cronin, director of media and interactive communications for Coca-Cola, said that she felt the campaign has been a success so far: “Internally, we call it a worldwide social experiment to see how this is doing, what does it do for our brand-health measures. We feel like it’s creating the buzz that we want.”

The facial profiling idea is neat, but it takes more than just a cool concept to create a successful social media campaign. Ideally, you want to create something of value that your fans will want to share with others. When I tested it, the app seemed buggy and slow, and when I went to the official Coke Zero Facial Profiler page, I found others echoing my complaints. It seems like less-than-optimal user experience may be a bit of an obstacle for Coke Zero’s new app.