I just finished reading Razorfish’s report on Social Influence Marketing and I wanted to share my 5 key takeaways.
1. “Consumers do not always realize how much influencing they are doing and how much they are being influenced when they have conversations about brands across social platforms.” I mentioned this idea in an article I wrote about Skittles’ strategy when they relaunched their Web site to feature their Twitter page – Consumers are now playing a big role in shaping brand messages. For this reason, solutions, such as Sprout, that let consumers share personalized brand messages with friends in an authentic way should prove to be increasingly popular with companies looking to capitalize on peer to peer recommendations.
2. “Brands must provide a return on emotion to their consumers. Presently, loyalty between consumers and brands is asymmetric. The more consumers sense a symmetrical relationship, the more loyal they will be.” This is an idea that I heard a couple of weeks ago at our Social Media Summit. Bruce La Fetra from Rubicon Consulting presented a new model for brand/customer relationships based on the many new channels for having conversations and one of the phases is ‘Stability’. During this phase, there is no major mis-match of status between the parties. We all need to aspire to provide customers with the value that they provide us. Customers can perceive value in a well organized site, a price break, or even a fun experience.
3. “29 percent of respondents reported associating themselves with specific brands on social networks… 57% of respondents indicated visiting these pages every few months or weeks, and 27% reported interacting with them every few days or even daily.” Brands that haven’t created a Fan page or don’t foster community among their fans are missing the boat. Universal Pictures created a Fast & Furious 4 engagement campaign to reward loyal fans on MySpace. More than 26% of fans that entered the campaign published a personalized widget on their profile page. To me, this shows that rewarding loyalty pays off in the end and a fan page is a great place to harness your fans.
4. “…huge opportunity for brands to redefine display advertising and underscores the importance of ad units evolving to work with users’ behaviors in digital media, including social networks.” There’s no doubt that online ads can be way more personalized and engaging than they are today. I would love to see brands relaxing their brand guidelines to allow consumers to create personalized ads that brands pay to run on their friends’ pages.
5. “… the always risky “post and pray” approach has only grown riskier with the explosion of content and other networking activities; it is even less likely to produce results today.” Social media campaigns won’t be viral on their own. Brands must drive traffic to seed activity and optimize as they go. MySpace purchased 100M impressions to drive activity in the Rock the Space campaign. In addition to exceeding their goal for contest submissions on the first day of the campaign, MySpace is continuing to get 1M views a day of the campaign widgets created by the bands as part of the contest. That’s money well-spent.
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