In this episode Andrew shares that the best ROI for Microsoft in social marketing come from the owned and operated media network they manage. With over 650 million visitors a month to their owned and operated media assets (Bing, Windows Live, etc.), it easily represents the best place for Microsoft of promote and market their own products and services – but how do they get people there?
The flow of consumer awareness and engagement goes from the paid media Microsoft can buy, which helps create interest and engagement in consumers who produce their own content about Microsoft (both good and not so good) in the earned media network and ultimately, the engagement will draw consumers to Microsoft’s owned and operated media network where again, they can best represent the brand and products they sell to consumers and businesses.
Microsoft’s worldwide presence in social media requires a good deal of work, a dedicated team and hundreds to manage globally. So far in this podcast series with Andrew Pickup / CMO for Microsoft in AsiaPac, we’ve uncovered the 3 digital network he counts on for marketing online as well as how they handle the hundreds of millions of posts made in social media around their products and brand.
Even with the sophisticated tools at their disposal such as Radian6 and their internally developed tool called ‘LookingGlass’, Microsoft has to employ human-based screening, using agencies such as Brandtology to help aggregate and identify trends, accurately determine sentiment / tone of the messages and sometimes to help identify the influencers in the market.
How they manages the social marketing for the Asia Pacific region so it meshes with the rest of the world is by leveraging a broad framework provided by Redmond, but Andrew and his team tailor it to the needs of the extraordinary diversity of the region. Aside from the geographic challenges, the culture and technology differences have to be addressed. For example, while Australia has similarities to the US & Europe, Korea’s culture is much more introspective and lastly, connectivity in the developing market of Southeast Asia is much more mobile oriented already – each factor impacting how they approach the market with digital and social marketing elements.
A small business or individual can get a pretty good handle on their social presence with a few of the low or no cost tools our there; Tweetdeck, Seesmic (my favorite) or Sobees come to mind right away. When your brand gets hundred of millions of comments, posts, tweets, re-tweets and more your talking about a whole different ballgame however.
Andrew Pickup is the Chief Marketing Officer for Microsoft Corporation for the Asia Pacific region, based out of Singapore and in part one of this series we uncovered the 3 digital networks that Microsoft looks to for their online and off-line marketing.
In this episode Andrew shares the tactics and tools Microsoft AsiaPac uses in the tracking the “Earned Media” of which social media is a big part. These are tools that need to be able to encompass hundreds of millions of people making posts, tweets and the sentiment of the comments made everyday.
As far as tactics, Andrew and his team divide the stream into managed and unmanaged, or rather those posts that warrant a deeper engagement versus those in which an ‘aggregated’ engagement is more appropriate.
Andrew Pickup is the Chief Marketing Officer for Microsoft Corporation in the Asia Pacific Region. We were very excited to get the opportunity to speak with Andrew and find out about the work they are doing in Asia Pacific. Joining Guy Powell and myself for the interview also was our co-author, Jerry Dimos of LiTMUS Group in Singapore. Good to have you on the call Jerry!
We begin our interview with Andrew as he shares a few bullets from his presentation at the recent ad:tech conference in Singapore on the Windows7 Launch. The campaign focused on the aspect of the development of Windows7 that leverage consumer input and ideas and with 8 million beta users, the campaign put real users in front of consumer in a way that helped people to see themselves in the role of “I’m a PC and Windows7 was my idea’”. The campaign was a great success for Microsoft and helped support the worldwide launch very effectively.
Microsoft’s approach to social marketing comes from a perspective that they should be a leader in social media and able to engage very effectively. With 93 of out every 100 PC’s sold coming with the Microsoft operating systems and the majority of people are buying a PC today to connect to the Internet, most computer systems today present an opportunity to connect consumers with their social media presence.
Social media applied to business is marketing and we’re seeing the use of the phrase ‘social marketing’ being used more and more by marketers – we agree. Dan Marks and the gang at First Tennessee Bank are at the forefront of testing and learning what works best in social media.
Dan’s day-to-day concern is the question of “am I missing something that might be important?”. Based on what we heard during the interview, I do not think so. Dan shared an example of something that could not see the ROI on and they decided to test it. They placed an ad on a job hunting site – the job site was a social site for sure, but as it turned out job hunters were not good banking prospects. So they ceased the campaign.
The team at FTB keep an eye on the acceptance by consumers of messages by brands in social media. If they sense that social media participants begin to actively resent overt advertising and marketing, it might impact the ability of the bank of adopt social elements more deeply. Social is merging with traditional and fast becoming a feature of ‘Web3.0’. Dan sees that consumers will be able to interact in social regardless of the platform they use to connect to the web.
According to Dan, the issue for marketers advertising with social is a leverage point; if you got a good product people will know about it, likewise if you have a bad product, people will know about it. Product flaws and operational errors in the organization will be discovered and commented on, not in attempt to be derogatory, but possibly just a way to be more helpful. The ability to hide from the conversations is not feasible any longer; you’ll be a part of the conversation whether you decide to participate or not – how you decide to respond will impact the brand. Participation can enhance your brand, while ignoring the discussion will not.
Dan Marks and his team place a huge value in being able to measure the ROI of their marketing. In the evolution of the use of social media in financial services, Dan sees that right now they should just experiment a bit; try new tactics, growing follower counts and listening a lot. As they find what works and doesn’t however, Dan predicts that as they can put the ROI model around their efforts and see the results, they will likely make larger investments. Right now they are looking at how or if a Facebook ad might increase / improve click through for search marketing.
FTB has also seen some ‘cross pollination’ between social and traditional too. In one effort, FTB leveraged unsolicited online testimonials to build proof points in traditional print ads. In the ads they turned it around and invited other customers into the online conversation. While sometimes hard to hear, they also took in the less positive comments and recognized that they served a useful purpose on what they need to be paying attention to in terms of operations or service.
FTB is one of the top 50 largest banks (First Horizon Nat’l is holding company) in the US with a history going back to 1864. Dan Marks, as the Chief Marketing Officer at First Tennessee Bank (FTB) is moving where bank or financial institutions fear to tread – to the social web to listen to their customers.
FTB is the leading blank in Tennessee and is committed to staying in contact with and listening to their customers. When Dan noticed that 11% or more of their target audience was already involved in social media, Dan decided that the bank needed to be finding ways to connect with them online where they already were are.
The social presence for FTB includes a Facebook Fan Page (http://www.facebook.com/firsttennessee) where they have 2,687 fans and a new Twitter ID (@firsttennessee) where they post the question to others who comment on FTB, “I work for First Tennessee Bank, is there anything we can do to assist you with any issues you may be having?”
The path to this point has not always been easy for the FTB team though. In this episode, Dan cites the biggest obstacle for the use of social media as a financial institution.
We’re doing well (we think) with the edits on the book and the publisher has the first version of the manuscript. While all that is being thrashed out, we’re looking a some of the branding and marketing. Here are three (3) ideas we’ve come up with and we’re interested in what you think!
Trying out the PollDaddy app from Automattic i this post, so we are only collecting 100 votes – When it fills up, just leave your comments below – thanks!
Yesterday we were able to deliver to our publisher the initial manuscript for book, ‘ROI of Social Media’ (which is the working title, we should have the final title here any day) and all we can say is ‘whew’!
The process of working with Guy Powell and Jerry Dimos has been a tremendous experience and I cannot begin to tell you how much I’ve learned in the process, but I do understand how it will impact the level of service I can deliver to my clients. The association with these two men allowed me, as primarily a social media guy, to really grasp the scope of what social marketing does and what it will mean to marketers wanting to honestly connect with the audience of influencers, consumers, and individuals.
The video podcast posted here (after the break) is one that Guy and I recorded as an introduction of us to others – we’ll be pulling Jerry into one here soon. In this episode, Guy and I talk about our backgrounds and how we came to meet. The process of connecting with one another and the work we’ve undertaken so far has been a fantastic case study in the power of social media (we met via Linkedin) and the ROI for a personal brand in social media.
Jeff observes that at least we can get some trending data from the existing tools, but the art & science of tone / sentiment analysis is still fairly human-centric and that organization would do well to put a person into the process. The vagaries of language, jargon and the constantly evolving nature of slang will make this a task fit for human for quite some time to come.
Where is Twitalyzer going and what’s keeping them up at night? The biggest concern for Twitalyzer is handling the continuing changes pouring out from the data providers, but they’re confident that the challenge is manageable and it is the work they are about. Twitalyzer recognizes their part in answering the question of how social media is used for business and Jeff cites that social media analytics tools are at about the same place web analytics tools were about 5-10 years ago – growing fast and changing often.
![AndrewPickup_thumb1[1]](http://www.stevengroves.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/AndrewPickup_thumb111.jpg "AndrewPickup_thumb1[1]")
In our previous episodes of this interview with Andrew Pickup, Chief Marketing Officer for Microsoft in Asia Pacific we’ve learned about the 3 digital networks that are an integral part of the marketing campaigns that Andrew and his team work with. We also caught a glimpse of the tools and tactics they use to manage the 100’s of thousands of posts in social media that are made about them every day and in the last podcast, Andrew talked about the challenges the culture, communications infrastructure and geography pose for him in managing the far-flung reaches of his region.![microsoft_logo_thumb[1]](http://www.stevengroves.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/microsoft_logo_thumb11.jpg "microsoft_logo_thumb[1]"){kind=logo}
In this episode Andrew shares that the best ROI for Microsoft in social marketing come from the owned and operated media network they manage. With over 650 million visitors a month to their owned and operated media assets (Bing, Windows Live, etc.), it easily represents the best place for Microsoft of promote and market their own products and services – but how do they get people there?![ROI_SMGraphics_LG_thumb2[1]](http://www.stevengroves.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/ROI_SMGraphics_LG_thumb21.jpg "ROI_SMGraphics_LG_thumb2[1]")
The flow of consumer awareness and engagement goes from the paid media Microsoft can buy, which helps create interest and engagement in consumers who produce their own content about Microsoft (both good and not so good) in the earned media network and ultimately, the engagement will draw consumers to Microsoft’s owned and operated media network where again, they can best represent the brand and products they sell to consumers and businesses.![microsoft_logo[1]](http://www.stevengroves.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/microsoft_logo11.jpg "microsoft_logo[1]"){kind=logo}
![ROI_SMGraphics_LG_thumb2[2]](http://www.stevengroves.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/ROI_SMGraphics_LG_thumb22.jpg "ROI_SMGraphics_LG_thumb2[2]")
![ROI_SMGraphics_LG2111111[1]](http://www.stevengroves.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/ROI_SMGraphics_LG21111111.jpg "ROI_SMGraphics_LG2111111[1]")
