Foursquare and billboards: checkin for dogfood.

von | März 30, 2011 | Blog, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Mobile Marketing, Social Media Marketing

This is an interesting example of how you can leverage a location based service like foursquare to make your billboard ads more engaging: every time you check in at the billboard location, a dispenser – part of the „interactive“ billboard – releases some GranataPet dogfood.

Of course, you could have chosen SMS or Bluetooth as a way to interact with the billboard. But in that case, there wouldn’t have been any connection with the social network of the target audience. Using foursquare, the dog owners could inform not only their foursquare friends, but also their facebook friends and their twitter followers of the new way to access GranataPet dogfood…

(thanks)

Measuring brands fan engagement on facebook.

von | März 18, 2011 | Blog, Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing

You think „Fans“ on facebook, i.e. people liking your brand’s facebook page, are a useful currency for measuring success on the social web? Well, think again.

(First: the social web is more than just facebook.)

The number of fans is not a very relevant social web KPI, if they’re not active at least some of the time. Inactive fans might have shown some interest when „liking“ the facebook page. However, a large amount of inactive fans shows, that after an initial „liking“, engagement by the brand wasn’t very successful.

Hence, there is list of „top engaged facebook pages“ on facebook compiled by FanGager.

The idea: forget about the ranking of brand pages on facebook by „fans“, instead rank them by „active fans“. Nice approach, but when comparing success on facebook, I think the percentage of active fans is a much more valuable figure to measure engagement.

Popular brands will always have a larger fanbase and hence  are more likely to have a larger base of active fans, too. But brands with fewer fans but a higher percentage of active fans seem to doing a much better job on facebook. (Alternatively: they are much more engaging brands to start with.)

The full list can be viewed here. Here is a screenshot of the top listed pages:

Fangager Screenshot

11 Trends by Armano and Rubel – and my take for Germany.

von | Jan. 5, 2011 | Blog, Digital Marketing, Marketing, Marketing Trends, Social Media Marketing

Steve Rubel and David Armano of Edelman  just released 11 trends to watch in 2011. Most are to be expected, when reading the tech / social media blogosphere. But still a good curation, as they call it themselves:


.

The trends overview:

  • Attentionomics – Marketers begin to realize the value of attention and not just reach in driving conversion
  • Digital Curation – The plethora of content will give rise to digital curators who can separate art from junk
  • Developer Engagement – Marketers typically don’t try to court developers, but that’s all about to change
  • Transmedia Storytelling – If there’s one constant it’s that humans crave stories. Technology creates new expectations
  • Thought Leadership – Companies recognize they must activate credible individual expert voices who can create content
  • The Integration Economy – Social media efforts can no longer exist in fragmented, non-formal initiatives. They begin to integrate
  • Ubiquitous Social Computing – As competition heats up mobile devices, consumers closer to being socially connected anywhere
  • Location, Location, Facebook – If 2010 belonged to solely Foursquare, it’s likely that Facebook will rain on their parade in 2011
  • Social Media Schizophrenia – Social overload is no longer a problem for tech mavens, but a broader population
  • Google Strikes Back – Google proves that the best way to beat Facebook & Twitter is to do what they do best: index them to pieces
  • Viva La Social Web Site – Businesses realize that integrating social functionality into their existing web sites is what users now expect

(Taken from Dave Armano’s blog)

With respect to the German landscape, here are some of my takes on it:

  • I really hope that the discussion moves away from „reach“ towards „attention“, and that we will find adequate KPI. But somehow I doubt that either will happen in 2011 already.
  • I am sure we’ll see a lot more transmedia storytelling (which I like),
  • as well as more integrate approaches, at least within the bigger and more advanced companies, after having done their baby steps on the social web in the last years.
  • Facebook will increasingly dominate the social web in Germany, with nearly 14 Million Germans having joined the network. It will also dominate marketing efforts and agency briefings.  One should hope that users won’t get fed up by too many lame marketing approaches.
  • Location, Location: this will get bigger every year. However, whether or not Facebook will make the run really depends on their next updates to „places“. In it’s current state (in Germany), Places is simply boring.
  • Social Websites: this has already started well in 2011 in Germany, it will just be a strong continuation.