BT paid owned and earned for the second biggest wedding of the year

I quite enjoyed the 1min 34 second BT advert at the weekend showing the wedding of Jane and Adam.  I especially admire the fact that BT have told a consistent story that more recently had the input of their fans along the way.  They have once again modernised the BT family communication to connect better with todays consumer. Whether you like the ads or not is somewhat irrelevant, I think BT have put themselves out there much more than usual and have been innovative in their approach to capture some emotion and engagement from UK consumers.  480k votes were cast over what dress she should wear, what car they would travel in and what song would be their first dance.  As far as I can see they seem to have done things in the right way and showed the finished ads and extra behind the scenes content to facebook fans first as a reward for their input and fans even got the chance to be extras at the wedding.  Last year 1.6 million people voted on Jane’s pregnancy, based on numbers alone the wedding doesn’t seem as quite as successful but it certainly grew the facebook following.
BT have successfully used a long standing owned content asset to generate conversation and positive sentiment from consumers as well as delivering impact through traditional paid media channels.  This integrated campaign is a good example for other advertisers to see how a story can be told simply across multiple channels which encourages sharing and contribution along the way.

S-commerce, it’s better together

2010 saw the rise of social buying models and plugins to change the retail landscape.  Will 2011 be the year of S-Commerce?

We have always been influenced by our friends and networks when we buy new products, now social platforms are offering retailers a golden opportunity to bring the group shopping experience into every online purchase.

Whilst I sit at my computer browsing the latest collections on my favourite shopping websites I reminded, that whilst I am sitting here alone, my friends and their valuable opinions are just a click away.

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The last decade of web enabled living has empowered consumers be more informed, better advised and to achieve better pricing.  The value of the e-commerce channel has seen exponential growth with £250bn spent by UK consumers between 2000 and 2010.  In 2010 alone an estimated £56bn was spent online.  46% of UK consumers claim to shop online at least once per week.  Much of this was driven by items under £100.  For higher ticket purchases the internet has played a valuable role in driving offline purchase.  Over 2010 we have seen a new and very powerful trend emerge around Social-Commerce.  Where smart and brave retailers have capitalised on the moment in time where a consumer most wants to learn from the experience of the people they trust; their friends and people they consider to-have authority.  This, has been achieved by connecting where we buy and buying where we connect. i.e. taking commerce to social platforms like Facebook and taking Facebook technology onto retailer sites.

Social-commerce is born out of innate human behaviour

S-commerce is about making your business more sharable, connected, rewarding and personal.  Allowing the consumer to see your product in their world and to be rewarded for buying from you will bring greater referrals, advocacy and ultimately increased sales.  S-commerce thinking can drive both direct and indirect sales.  Directly through short-term incentive sites and platforms or through reward for fans or followers and indirectly through connecting the shopping experience to an individuals social network to encourage recommendation.  S-commerce allows business to benefit from innate human behaviours.  We all have mental rules of thumb that help us make purchase decisions and social technology is designed to capaitalise on this:

• Other people are doing it: we are reassured by other peoples actions, if they are buying then maybe we should too. E.g. Amazon, Facebook Likes
• Scarcity: Short term deals, group buying, deal networks and feeds keep us informed with the latest offers. E.g. Groupon, Voucher Cloud
• Authority: Referrals, recommendations by believable experts, and community tested products
• Relevance: If is a product is positioned as relevant to my lifestyle we are more likely to purchase.  If we can shop together with ‘someone’ like me we are also more likely to purchase.
• Reciprocity: If we can perform an action and gain benefit for both ourselves and a friend it plays to our need to be fair.
• Liking: We are more likely to like something if someone else we like agrees.  Giving us tools that full this need drives purchase.  E.g. Follow, Like, Share buttons on websites allow us to both demonstrate what we like to our community and to ask for their feedback.

The new model for driving impulse e-purchase

Deal sites around the world gained significant traction over 2010, including; Groupon, Living Social, Woot, KGB, Foursquare rewards and most recently Facebook deals.  In the US 44 million visited a deal site in November 2010.  2.5 million UK users visited Groupon in just one month alone, with a further 4.5 subscribing to their email database.  The majority of the deals available have been around low cost items, treatments or experiences across both well-known and independent brands.  The Groupon model relies on communities getting together to purchase, the offer is only released when enough members pledge to buy.  The Groupons drive both revenue and footfall since many of the deals require instore activation.  The Facebook model rewards locality and loyalty through incentivised ‘checkins’.  It is easy to imagine why low cost products like coffee, tickets for experiences like Thorpe Park and double value vouchers for GAP and Amazon work on these platforms.  However, make no mistake these platforms are also powerful enough to sell high cost products like cars.  Mazda were a UK launch partner for Facebook Deals and in China 1 Mercedes was sold per minute on the group buy site Taobao. The connected digital and real world mechanism can take advantage of the ROPO (research online purchase offline) behaviour that is now well established into our shopping behaviours.

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Social commerce is undoubtedly changing the face of retail, arguably for the better.  It is becoming more consumer centric, more personalised and better connected giving retailers a new approach to CRM that drives sales and advocacy.  On the downside for retailers it will further expose brands that don’t live up to their promises or who don’t recognise the importance and power of both community and technology to change their businesss.

Some of these ideas and platforms will just be part of the journey to a more socially orientated retail world and may fall by the wayside or evolve into something new, others and certainly some ‘social actions’ will be here to stay.  A social action is value exchange that consumer is learning to have between a brand and themselves which rewards loyalty and advocacy by giving something back. In 2011 consumers want the best deal and the reward for spreading the word, now surely that has to be worth testing….

The social network

I went to see The Social Network last night, the cinema was packed full of young people, it is not that often that I see film where pretty much every seat in the theatre is taken, I suppose this is indicative of just how big an impact Facebook has made on our lives.  Most book lovers always claim that the book is better than the film but I am not sure that stands this time.  This is  story where who you know and what you know take equal measure in their contribution to success.  Genius can exist in small pockets and never penetrate our culture until someone with connections and an understanding of what the next big thing looks like comes along.  I am continually amazed by how the ‘geeks’ of this world can fluently speak the language of the web and how it flows out of them like it is their purpose in life to code.  I am now reading “The Facebook effect’ a slightly different take on the story in the first half and the second part is more about Facebooks effect on our world.  Go see the film if you haven’t done yet…

No Place for advertisers

The industry seems excited about Facebook Places launch and so they should be to a point…  Facebook places will certainly make it harder for the smaller players to compete given they have a ready-made network just waiting to update us on where they are.  The application of places adds genuine value to a social network.  The problem for me is that the majority of requirements to ‘check in’ will be on-the-go, out-and-about and currently Facebook don’t allow any commercial messages on the mobile platform, so it seems advertisers will have to look elsewhere for there LBA opportunities.

I have said it before

so will say it again.  Coca-cola are leaders in social marketing.  This case study shows a very smart way of linking facebook fans to real world experiences.  Using RFID codes to generate likes and content back to the fan page.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUv0GU5rfHg

Blown away

So you already know that I think that flipboard is pretty cool but this morning I am literally blown away by the Facebook and Twitter integration. Flipboard accesses your accounts and pulls in the latest posts, photos, tweets, links and then publishes it into a magazine format. You have to see it to truly get how impressive this is. If you don’t have an iPad find someone who does and check it out. With personal publishing like this traditional options continue to become less significant in my world. Any publisher putting up pay walls or barriers to their content should think about what technology like flipboard means to their business.

Coca-cola setting standards in social

Coke have long been a brand to watch in social from their smart thinking around the take over of the Facebook fan page to their recent activity around the World Cup.  They were one of the first brands to test out the new Twitter ad model in trending topics and have been reported to have grown their social following by 630,000 with their longest celebration activity: http://celebrations.coca-cola.com/youtube.  The twitter activity was reported just in just 24 hours to get 86 million impressions and engagement rate of 6%. These numbers are clearly very impressive to get that level of engagement at that voloume, time will tell if this is just novelty factor.  From the outside Coke appear to have a strong focus on social and are embedding social thinking in their marketing stragies and are not just employing its tactics.

What is it worth to you

To be able to send a message to a fan when ever you have something to say?  I have been following the stories and ideas of bloggers and journalists about the value of a fan to try and form a clear POV on this. Some ideas verge on the ridiculous and others seem a little more sensible but there does not seem to be a one size fits all answer to this question.

If you know how much a group of people spend on your products then you are probably on a sensible path to answering this question.  Adidas say that their 2.7 million Facebook fans are worth more than $200m a year with the average spend on footwear being around $100 per person.  This value equation is based around build fan groups of your most loyal customers which could become your CRM programme, with a downside of not knowing the actual names of your fans.  Does the switch to ‘Like’ from ‘fan’  change this idea?  Time will tell.

More to come…

How many fans is enough?

If brands have fans in the form of facebook fans how many should we be aiming for? Coke have 3.6 million, Nike football have 200,000, Guinness have 268,000 and Breast cancer awareness have 979,000. So what is the right number? I think we should be ambitious for our brands but quality is much more important than quantity. If fans are going to make difference to a brand and product then there has to be a critical mass and I think you need at least 200,000 to get results.