Brands are not yet settled into G+, but it’s reported that Google is looking for the optimum combination of brands and consumers so that it’s a more natural extension of how consumers want to connect to brands. My hope is that it is not yet another iteration of the interruption driven model that has predominated marketing for decades, but I got to wondering what would it look like if G+ actually addressed the paradigm and sought to try something better, what would a brand interaction in G+ look like? Here’s my take on what it might be like.

For brands to connect with consumers on G+, (when they can) the consumer will have to opt-in to the brand and include them into a Circle that they see regularly. I think we’ll see a permutation of the Google AdWords product that is smarter. Keywords will be scanned and the connection between the conversation and the offer will take on a better meaning. I think that brands will be able to better identify the real influencers in respective markets IF (and this is a big if) the brand can be given access to the social graph / Circle stats of the consumer. How will they get access? Consumers will grant it – usually in exchange for something of value. What kind of value? Some people will trade access to their social graph for a cup of coffee at , others will require a bit more consideration.

Accelerators to adoption will include connections between products like +Personal.com, which I really like, but do not yet understand how they’re going to be relevant if I cannot connect my permissions and profile to the social networks I’m using – profile fatigue is starting to set in with consumers and we, as an industry, have to find a solutions.  OpenID, Google profiles and Facebook Connect are just placeholders for now and the real power in this space I think has yet to emerge.

What to do for now is to develop a presence in the social space in a way that is both genuine and in a way that recognizes that your persona can vary relative to the audience you wish to address without being disingenuous.   Learning this, knowing it and being able to act on it for a brand though will be a challenge – too many of them are wrapped up in an old-school mindsets that places monthly and quarterly.

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Working at the intersection of ROI, marketing and social media in particular has been a topic that has drawn my interest since the early development of social media as a connecting consumer technology.

As social media came onto the scene, a debate cropped up that social media was a ‘tool of the people’ and that to propose its use as a business tactic was heretical.  We still see vestiges of that debate now and then, but by and large, we do not see much of it I think because the flood of early practitioners has subsided and the bar for entry as a social marketer has been raised past the point that creating a Facebook page and opening a Twitter account suddenly launched a new consultancy.  The discussions by marketers has risen to a point that business people recognize that marketing has an ROI that can be associated with it and that social media marketing can have a VERY high ROI indeed.

Social marketing ROI is not a dark, foreboding concept that only technocrats understand, at it’s base is the correlation of information from multiple points that helps us all understand how a marketing strategy that includes tweets or Facebook posts can impact revenues and costs.  The red-herring discussions of the ‘ROI of your phone’ or a ‘return-on-influence’, or ‘return-on-engagement’ are getting more and more hollow by the day.  I think it’s because we’re recognizing that these metrics are made up and promoted by evil minions of misdirection who may not know how to speak otherwise.

Truly savvy marketers are realizing that the only ‘I’ that matters in ROI is ‘Investment’ and that if marketing is going to get increased funding for their efforts, the rest of the organization (particularly those that manage budgets) speaks in business terms like these – so marketers are learning the particulars of ROI or facing the prospect of being replaced by someone who can talk the talk of the executive suite.

Just how much longer do we need to allow these minions of demonic misdirection to suck the life out of marketing initiatives and render them useless to management? *sigh* obviously longer than we should, but in order to get the conversation back on solid ground, I know we need to start with committing to a broader conversation about 1) where your customers are congregating and 2) then asking how best to reach them, always 3) seeking the genuine ROI along the way.  Either that or 4) drive a wooden stake thought their evil little hearts.

Steven Groves is co-author of “ROI of Social Media: How to improve the return on your social marketing investment” and your host at www.ROIofSocialmedia.com

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I was not sure if his question was for a survey, if he was looking for engagement or if it was a professional question he is trying to answer for CoursePark,  but his question made me think for a moment to a blog post series from July 2009 on ‘The Trinity of Social Media” that suggested the trinity should be a blog, a micro-blog and a social network.  I have thought of the post often and continue to wonder if the trinity might need an update eventually.  The 2011 edition of the Trinity I think does warrant a refresh and this will be the first in the series.

Let’s put the construct of the Trinity in context here for a moment; we’re talking about a business presence, not personal and we’re talking about spanning two of the relevant media networks; Owned & Operated (O&O) media and Earned media, which relies heavily on social media.  There is no distinction at this level of a B2B company presence or a B2C.

What’s changed for 2011 and beyond?

The objective has not changed – we want to drive traffic to the O&O site or network of sites.  Eyeballs on pages, not revenue at this point, but traffic – which is a proxy for awareness of our product, service or brand.   What has changed is the social technology and the features and capabilities of the various platforms.

Do any of the changes warrant a change in the model?

Yes – in one particular area: the social network component.  When the original Trinity model was introduced, Facebook Groups were supported and Business Pages were not yet introduced.  Are there be other changes?  Yes – but not in the tool selection I do not think.  The fundamentals are holding and IMHO the foundational tools and technology for an effective social presence are still a blog, micro-blog and social network.  The tactics we deploy however are different today than they were in 2009 and as we cover the new state of the Trinity, we’ll discuss the changes.

Audience Participation Notice

I’ll write the articles, but I’d like to include your comments.  Whose comments – you, the person reading this right now.  If I could reach through the screen and point at you I would.  Comment below on what you think the changes might be for you or send me an email with whatever your thoughts are.

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What is most obvious to me is that social elements in marketing should not be considered apart from the traditional, non-social elements. Second is that the return on each part of the marketing mix can actually be measured pretty well – the social is actually the easiest part of it.  Today with the tools, tactics and technology at our disposal, we can definitely get the answer to these questions about what’s working.  The next question that seemed to come up then was “should the investment be made to measure ROI?”  Imagine it cost $20 to find out that a marketing campaign brought in another $5 in incremental revenue?  The investment in measuring the return on the campaign would just not make sense – it’s a question then of can we afford the ROI data itself?

What we’ve seen is that most marketers simply put no budget into measuring what the effectiveness is of the marketing effort at all.  Larger CPG or FMCG marketers appear to be spending 5% to 8% of their marketing budget on just getting the data and putting the tools to work to help determine what’s actually working, but other companies (small, medium & large alike) just are not getting data on what is actually working in their marketing.  Keep in mind that this is the investment set aside for just getting the data and putting in the tools and systems to know what is working – nothing on the actual creative or media buys.  Compare this for a moment to how much finance invests in measuring cash & cash flow in their relationship with banks – much more than they spend on finding out what marketing is actually working.  Seems a little backwards doesn’t it?

What we began with, as a class was a desire to connect social media marketing investments to data that helps with funding and increased investment in marketing and what we end up with is a well developed understanding that the ROI of all marketing is where a company really needs to start – not one media type vs. another – all marketing should be measured.

What I’ve also seen is that demanding a return on just the social part of a marketing effort has dropped off in 2011 vs. the last few years and investment in online & social media is growing.  What I am looking for is that we’ll see is a demand for ROI methodology in marketing overall – it might not manifest, but to their credit, marketers appear to be more interested in being able to state clearly the impact on revenue of all their efforts. 

How ready are marketers to pursue an ROI-based strategy?  An indication of the readiness of marketing in being able to connect their marketing with revenue was the answer to the question of “how many of you can produce within 1/2 an hour, a spreadsheet of current and past campaigns?”   It was an illuminating response for sure – most could not.  This is the kind of response we seem to get from marketers regardless of location; when we narrow it still further to just social campaigns the response is even more sparse.

Where to go from here?  I for one am happy to be carrying this question forward and to be an evangelist for marketing and social media ROI.  There’s not a quick, single post answer to the question, but rest assured, there is one – welcome to the journey.

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2011 will be the year that focuses on who really owns the data about the consumer though; the ramifications will be felt throughout advertising and marketing from now on.  The vendors that support transparency in the consumer dataset will prosper; those that do not give consumers access and control over their data will diminish.

The drivers for this initiative are varied, but let there be no mistake that the consumer will want to be in charge of their data.  I’ve been following the posts in the ProjectVRM usegroup that Doc Searles and a number of others have generated on Vendor Relationship Management (VRM), which in it’s simplest terms is CRM stood on it’s head – the conversations are very forward leaning in terms of where we’re going and what’s possible even today. 

A Wall Street Journal series has been tackling the issue and the article by Emile Steele outlines a new initiative from several industry data collecting companies.  It is going under the name of the ‘Better Advertising Project’ (BAP) and the Open Data Partnership (ODP).  The partnership is promising to provide consumers the ability to:

• get a snapshot of the information that companies have collected about their interests

• gain more control over that information, from editing to opting out

It looks like they are trying to get in-front of  the rising consumer sentiment around their privacy by providing an opt out capability; notably absent from the list of participants are Google and Microsoft / Yahoo however.

I think BAP will be successful in providing consumers an opt-out capability in alignment with the FTC guidelines, but I think there will be a good deal more noise in 2011 and businesses will want to make sure they dodge this bullet by making their involvement with BAP noticeable from day 1.

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I read an article today over at AdAge.com by Pete Blackshaw titled ‘Who Owns Social Anyway?’ and enjoyed one thing in particular in his article.  Pete pointed out the left-brain, right-brain battle many of us feel in social media. 

For me at least, there is a desire to place some structure around our behavior and activity while simultaneously wanting to rebel and rail against structure in the pursuit of a social presence that is genuine and honest in the content and thus, often produced in the spirit of a just-in-time, get it our the door to share mentality.

This pushmi-pullyu split personality then asked if the advent of social media might have unintentionally lowered the bar for good creative efforts.  Witness the amazing visitor counts ‘Fred Figglehorn’ has produced on YouTube (471M at last count) and his stuff is, hmmm… to my ears irritating, to say the best and the product demonstrates low production values to say the least, but that is all a part of Fred’s allure – it’s fresh and edgy, which is appealing to that audience segment.

Contrast it to the segments of WillItBlend.com. This is another YouTube channel, this one for the people at BlendTec.  They have a higher degree of production values (sets, multiple camera angles and audio editing) and the content is directly aligned with their product, high-quality home blenders that can take what you throw at them.  They have a little over 108M views vs. Freds 471M, albeit Fred has a years head start on them.

So does social media lower the bar for creative? Is it more important to get something posted and out there than spending a lot more time & money on quality creative content?  *sigh* I think so… I believe it is much more important to engage the audience than to refine, refine, and refine again to the point the content is so flashy and the message is well presented, but the urgency and edginess that connects the producer to the audience to the moment is lost.

Should you do any production work then?  Yes, some scrubbing of video or audio prior to posting is good, you can lightly massage the content, leave in all the message, but the real message here is to get the content out there and let the audience decide what the value is.

Social Marketing Conversations Soft-launch

To that end I present to you all the new brand of ‘Social Marketing Conversations’ – a relaunch of my evolving personal brand and company around the upcoming book Guy Powell, Jerry Dimos and I are writing on the topic of ROI in social media – it is not done yet and there are several components of the business model that are still in process, but I felt it important to get the name and the company launched. 

I will put up a separate post on the new company, update my ‘About’ page and connect it to the new Facebook page (www.Facebook.com/SocialMarketingConversations), so you can get a sense on what it is all about, but the last several weeks have been a real grind in getting the manuscript to the point where we’re all about ready to release it and get it to the publisher (John Wiley & Sons – the same people who do the ‘Dummy’ series).

I read the Adage article and have been doing a lot of busy work, but this subject came up and I knew that a post on just get it out there was relevant and a great topic to get me posting again here at SocialMarketingConversations.com. 

Thanks for visiting and reading – see you in social media!

Image Courtesy of Shane Willis / MC MECHANIC – HAND FIXING HAND – Homage to MC Escher

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These options assume a text blog, but even if it is a video blog or any other type of social platform, we agree that the actions that might be taken are not infinite. 

Is One Action More Valuable Than Another? I think so.  Subscribing to a blog, or opting-in to receive more content from the same author or source, is a much higher value action than just dropping in to consume a single article.  Thinking enough of the content or the author to share with others in your network begins to establish you as an advocate of the content, not just a visitor that consumes the content – this is a holy grail of online marketing, to have advocates for your brand, not just consumers of your content.

The process that takes a content consumer from one level to another is worthy of evaluation by the marketing community and as the content consumer moves along the continuum, ranking the value of one activity over another becomes meaningful.

Why Try to Establish The Value of an Activity or Mention? By assigning a value to the activity, you can develop a more easily conveyed ‘score’ that allows you to determine in non-financial terms, how well you are doing in the effort to leverage social media as a marketing tactic.  The score needs to be couched with other data I imagine, such as number of posts contained in the score and some factor that recognizes the age of the post, but if we are intent on establishing an ROI at some point of the effort, this kind of key indicator data serves a meaningful purpose.

Meet the Social Interaction Scoring Table.  My associate, Guy Powell and I have been discussing and working on the ROI of Social Media and during the conversation this notion came to me.  From that point I developed this table as an example of the scoring that might apply to not just a blog post, but a wide variety of social media platforms.

I share it here for your comment and to open a community dialog on the concept of being able to score the Social Interaction and how it begins to support the process of measuring mentions.

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They were coming from a position that they were getting tired of the mainstream usage of the phrase ‘social media’ and I was coming from an observation that in the very near future, all media will be social and that as a culture, we will expect, nay demand, our interaction with the media around us to provide the opportunity to be social.

The model of interaction and development of advertising, marketing and corporate communications is destined to undergo still even more radical changes based on the principals and paradigms of what we call today, social media.

The dampener on the explosion of social media is the inability of brands and corporation to control the messages related to their brand.  When this comes up, I find myself stating that “control is an illusion, at best, you can try to herd cats” when it comes to social media.

Case in point is a blog post I came across by a UK blogger, Henry Tapper, who writes at henrytapper.wordpress.com.  He posted a link on a LinkedIn group to his blog asking, “Do we understand the risks to our business of social media?“

I clicked through and read his post, in which he commented about the attention that needs to be paid to staff participation in social media, particularly when it involves a financial service company.  There is the potential for quite a lot of damage to be done by a rogue employee who posts trade secrets or confidential memos online.

At TheSocialMediaBible.com, this question comes up quite a lot from all types of companies.  While I cannot disagree with the sentiment, I predict that we’ll see companies who can withstand the scrutiny of an open, public examination prospering and those who try to shrink or control a social media-based interaction diminishing.

The impact that social media supports or, in another perspective threatens, is a function of the open, all inclusive characteristic of the genre – it’s organic, based on human need / desire to interact and I’m not at all sure that it can be contained.

If we look at it from another angle, I’ll ask how CAN you prevent staff from participating in social media?  With the growth of smartphones to facilitate access and short of making non-participation in any social media a condition of employment, I am not sure that this does not bridge over in to 1st amendment territory in the US.

So if the overwhelming movement in media is to a model that demands more and more social interaction, I wonder what the outcome will be.  An anarchy of uncontrolled messaging that impacts brands and companies at will, or even more attempts to contain the uncontainable nature of human interactions?

We live in interesting times, yes?

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