According to a recent Mzinga and Babson survey, 84% of professionals worldwide do not currently measure the ROI of their social media efforts. Pretty shocking considering today’s economic environment and the enormous pressures placed on marketers to deliver more with less. However, as is the case with any new medium, many marketers are experimenting with social media and are still, for the most part, trying to figure out how social media fits into their overall marketing efforts. As a result, measurement is often overlooked.

Therefore, when a company creates a unique and interesting program and takes the time to measure its success, it is important to share the inside scope so we can all learn. One interesting example is what Mint.com recently did by combining the power of email marketing with social media.

Launched in 2007, Mint.com has quickly become America’s No. 1 online personal finance service. Mint’s intelligent and easy-to-use approach to money management has quickly attracted more than 1.5 million users to date. Given its online audience and technologically savvy user base, Mint.com recently turned to the power of email marketing and socialized it to further drive new customer acquisition.

So what did they do? Working with StrongMail (disclosure – I currently sit on the board of directors at StrongMail) Mint.com took the time to understand user motivations and tested a series of incentives to encourage existing email subscribers to “invite” others within their social network (email, facebook, twitter, etc.) to join Mint.com. The winning campaign – one that not only encourage the most sharing but drove the most conversions -- appealed to Mint.com’s existing users by providing them “insider status” through access to beta features and products prior to their roll-out to general users. In the end, the campaign drove one new user/customer for every 2.6 invite clicks – impressive. While the testing of various offers was insightful, the ability to drive new users/customers and to tag existing users as “influencers” (based on their sharing activity, conversion rate and desire for insider knowledge) was even more impressive.

If you’re interested in learning more about the Mint.com case study check out my column or you can register for the upcoming DMA/PMN Social Media Spotlight event where StrongMail will be presented the case study in-depth. Details about the event can be found on our website. Space is limited so act now.

‘Til Next Time

Gen Y has spoken once again. In the latest PMN and Pace University survey we explored Gen Y’s usage and attitudes toward texting, mobile marketing, email, social networks and more. The results were enlightening. While Generation Yers do indeed spend considerable time on social networks, when asked what they would least like to give up for one week, only nine percent said social networks! In fact, the media Gen Y apparently can’t live without was…drum roll please….yup, old-fashioned email and texting.



So what’s going on here? Could it be that there is a clear division across media that includes “nice to have” non-essential sites (like Twitter and facebook) and “must have” productivity and communication tools (like email and texting)? Should Twitter and facebook be worried given they are considered less of a necessity? While no one is asking Gen Y to choose, the question is an important one for every social network and/or community player – what should you be doing now to avoid becoming just another community causality like GeoCities. For more information about our latest survey, visit the PMN website or check out some of the news coverage and let me know what you think.

Gen Y Holds Tight To Email And Texting
eMarketer: November 4, 2009 

Probing GenY'ers
MediaPost: October 27, 2009

Tech Additions: Email and Texting Top Social Media In Gen Y [Study]
Mashable: October 20, 2009

‘Til Next Time

I'm very pleased to welcome George LeBrun to the PMN family. As you may already know, last week we announced that George along with Bill Hanifin joined the new PMN advisory board. I’m very excited to have these two highly successful thought leaders on the board as we continue to build out additional benefits for our members. Both George and Bill will also be regular contributors to our blog.

Up first is George. Last week George and I spoke about some of the emerging challenges for marketers given the growth of new channels such as social networks and the micro-blogging site Twitter. Given George's experience as a lawyer I asked him to share our conversation on the topic with our members. The below post is a topic both George and I will be spending a lot more time on in the weeks and months ahead and it is an important one for marketers to not only acknowledge but address. We hope it gets you thinking and if we can be of any service, please do not hesitate to reach out. In the meantime, please join me in welcoming both George and Bill to the PMN Family.

Enjoy,
Michael
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Participation Blurs The Line Between Who Owns Traditional Corporate IP
By George LeBrun

Large public companies have been struggling with a variety of issues around social media. One of the more recent to come to light is more of a legal nature. Most employees sign agreements that anything they think of or work on during their employment belongs to the company. It's typical "work for hire" contract language. But as we know, social media changes everything. So, if I blog or twitter as part of my job and I amass a large group of followers and then I leave my job - who do my followers belong to, me or the company? The company would argue that the followers belong to them and that the list of people is their IP, but what happens if the lawyers try to enforce that. Even a legitimate legal claim could backfire on them causing severe brand dilution.

When companies are trying to establish their corporate policies around the social media, they need to stop taking a "this is how we do it" attitude. The social web requires rethinking all of your traditional business rules and practices, it no longer matters how you did business last year, last month, or yesterday, but how you will do business tomorrow. This particular issue affects multiple business units and raises many questions. Should HR and legal be discussing re-writing their employment contracts? Can one agreement cover all situations? The company can argue that they provided the platform, but was the employee speaking for the company or him/herself, was blogging part of the job description, was it being done on company time? Should companies have plans and policies in place to purchase the list of these social followers? Does the company suffer from brand dilution when an employee leaves a company and no longer provides that communication between the company and its customers?

These are just a few of the questions that come to mind as more and more companies like DELL and Zappos start to encourage a large number of their employees to participate in the conversation with their customers...And what happens, if anything, to high-affinity brands like Apple who have a policy of not allowing employees to communicate in any way with its customer base. It is a hot issue for sure and one that Michael Della Penna and I are tackling head on as part of SuiteDialog/Rule 13's social media practices. For more information on SuiteDialog & Rule 13 visit the websites or drop us an email at info@thepmn.org.

Gen Y is like Ohio in my mind…so how Gen Y goes, so does the rest of us…eventually that is. And if that is indeed the case, then Twitter has some work to do. A recent survey of Gen Y consumers found that only 22 percent are using Twitter. This study compares very closely with another recent survey by Pew which found about 19 percent usage among 18-24 year olds in Nov/Dec. Probably lower than you would have expected right? With this generation, Twitter faces a ‘glass half full’ scenario. When asked whether they maintain an active profile on a social network (i.e. facebook, MySpace or YouTube), an overwhelming 99 percent of Gen Y indicated they did. It’s clear that Gen Y has an appetite for social networking, but still hasn’t fully embraced micro-blogging. Could it be that between texting and social networking there is little need? Could it be that social networks are more interesting and engaging given the array of applications now in use? Maybe, but one thing is certain, if Twitter is to have any real staying power, then Gen Y needs to be convinced of its advantages over texting and leading social networks. Twitter obviously provides a richer experience by enabling users to click-through to interesting articles, websites, videos, etc. Gen Y also needs to realize that Twitter offers users the opportunity to connect with others they don’t know – including experts users normally would never have the opportunity to interact with.

Marketers also play a major role and responsibility in how this communication channel evolves. To do that, it is critical we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past. That is – don’t spam. Let’s learn from email’s spam crisis – respect the channel, be relevant, timely and funny. Find a voice that works for your brand and provide insight that your followers will benefit from and appreciate. In the end it is really about creating value and a positive experience for your followers. Finally, I encourage you to also watch your stats including follow/un-follow numbers and survey followers to understand their interests.

For more information on Gen Y and Twitter including who they follow, visit our website.

And that is exactly what CVS Caremark is hoping with its new community “For All the Ways You Care.” The campaign officially launched last year with TV ads and an innovative contest that celebrated and honored women’s roles as nurturers and caregivers. It takes another step forward this week with a new and enhanced community website. An email invitation received on Monday officially announced that website along with a series of new community features that invites users to participate with others and the CVS brand. New member features include personalized profiles, customizable stories, forums and support groups, and resources.

It’s a great concept and an admirable effort but success is all in the details and execution. While CVS and its agency Hill Holliday should be commended for expanding on a good concept and successful contest that humanized the brand, there are a few lessons to be learned here. First a look at the traffic using Compete tells an interesting story. The site is struggling. After hitting a high of 35,000 unique visitors in December with the support of national TV ads the site now hovers around half that. That compares to over 4,000,000 monthly unique visitors for CVS.com. Next, referring url data on Compete site shows the majority of the traffic is coming from sites associated with the CVS brand - www.cvsadvisors.com (and advisor site and panel for CVS) and www.hhcc.com (Hill Holliday the agency). So what should CVS.com do to build the community site and facilitate sharing and interactions among visitors?

1. Leverage Existing Assets: With 4 million monthly unique users, CVS may have benefited more by integrating the program into www.CVS.com or at least promote it on the homepage. A visit to CVS.com’s home page today showed no mention of the “For All The Ways You Care” program – missed opportunity. And although I received a solo email announcing the official launch because I signed up for the alert, CVS should leverage its existing programs and communications including its ExtraCare loyalty program to further promote the effort.

2. Build, Listen, Grow, Activate: CVS has little to no presence on Social Network sites such as facebook, YouTube, etc. CVS.com’s Twitter presence is limited to a handful of twitter accounts with few followers – the largest of which CVSPharmacy has 464 followers but no posts. Part of being successful is being there. Social Networks are a great opportunity to listen and learn and best of all they cost little other than the time and effort you put into them. While “For All The Ways You Care” may be central and critical to CVS’s long-term community strategy it would certainly benefit from a presence on and integration with other CVS communities across the leading social networks.

3. Define and Refine Goals, Objectives, Target Audience – If the goal is to build a vibrant online community CVS need to rethink its approach. To do so across today’s social internet requires a deep understanding of the audience and where to find them. Are they creators or spectators, as an example? Knowing this will dictate the approach, tactics, content and ultimately success of the program.

4. Tactics - After knowing the audience, think about the tactics. Imagine if the $169K that CVS spent on just one Extreme Home Makeover :30 TV ad was applied to targeting key influencers online. My guess is we’d be seeing a ton of growth. Time to funnel a lot of the big budget into online marketing and communications to grow and engage the community.

5. Partner – Picking the right partner to grow participation is critical. While Hill Holiday created a very strong concept, it’s critical that CVS partners with agencies that understand the social web and how to grow participation.

Overall good idea that is struggling, but certainly capable of getting better with some additional thinking, new tactics and a lot of listening.

In a new campaign called “What do you play for?” Nike calls on teens to share their sports stories. The effort includes a collaboration among Nike, social network Youth Noise and social media firm Brickfish. Participants are encouraged to upload photos of them playing the sport of their choice and to share their individual stories. Visitors to Youth Noise then vote on their favorite photos. Prizes will be awarded for the Best Photo and Most Viral which will be selected by Youth Noise from among the 250 highest scoring entries. Winners will receive $500 cash or scholarship. In addition, five randomly selected Sign-Up Sweepstakes winners will each receive $100 cash or scholarship.

The campaign is part of Nike’s focused social media strategy to get teens to participate with its brand through online communities that encourage them to share their personal sports stories and the impact sports has had on their lives or the lives of others. According to Youth Noise,

“Whether a young person dances to build his or her self-esteem and stay healthy, runs marathons to benefit local charities or teaches soccer to young boys in Uganda, we want to hear the story.”

Since the launch earlier this month, the site has received over 230,000 page views, 869 entries, 1,560 reviews and 7,366 votes.  Visitors can sort entries by most popular, most viewed, most viral, recently added and highest ranking. A review of the highest ranking stories shows the diversity of real life stories --many of which are not only inspiring, but ones that millions of us can relate to.

“I dance for the empowerment of all women”

“Freestyling for fitness and fun! Swimming helped bring great benefits to my child, who had bilateral-coordination disorder.”

“Heart of a Champion: When I was 10 years old I was injured in an ATV accident that left me paralyzed from the waist down. I was introduced to the world of disabled sports, primarily water-skiing…I have never loved something so much in my life. I plan to fulfill my dream of competing at the World Competition doing what I love the most.”

“I run to stay sane, to escape from all my problems and stresses”

Nike originally built its brand showcasing the talents of unattainable superheroes like Michael Jordan. This latest effort demonstrates the company's evolution by now leveraging the power and participation of their customer base to inspire others. For marketers struggling to figure out how to connect with their customers and prospects, the Nike example demonstrates some of the key questions you need ask yourselves: How does our product or service impact the lives of our customers? How can we get those consumers to be active with our brand in the most powerful and engaging way? The “What do you play for?” sweepstakes ends May 20th.

Last week I received another great example of Participatory Marketing at its finest via an email alert from Upromise. The alert was an invite to attend a live seminar in NY on March 24th called Tuition Tuesday. The 2 hour event, held in conjunction with Leap -- a non-profit organization that works to improve the quality of public education through art-based learning, promises to offer advice on planning for and managing rising college expenses. This is particularly relevant given the hit that many of us have taken on our 529 plans. In addition to the opportunity to mingle and converse with other portfolio battered families, the effort also includes a video contest called Tuition Tales. Tuition Tales gives participating individuals the chance to win $10,000 for college. Reaching across generations, the contest encourages students, parents, grandparents and friends to get involved and create a personal 30-second video detailing why they or somebody they know deserves $10,000 for college. Submissions across three categories (saving for college, in college now, paying it back) are due by May 5, 2009 and voting online begins May 12, 2009. Participating individuals are also encouraged to rally their friends and families to vote. Winners will be announced on May 20, 2009. You can sign up for additional details about the program via email alerts at the Tuition Tales website. 

For Upromise the program is not only an opportunity to engage existing Upromise members and to build upon their community efforts, but to extend the visibility of its brand to friends and family who they hope will also sign up to help those members save. Overall a good example of how a community focused program combined with a “social” contest and email marketing program join together to form a robust participatory marketing program that will help Upromise drives memberships, engagement and savings activity.

Part two of our exclusive research is out and the results confirm what a lot of us in email have felt for a long time – email is in desperate need of an overhaul. Look, email has changed very little over the last 15 years, despite the evolution of the Internet into a social gathering place. In fact, what little innovation there has been over the last 8 years has been protectionist in nature in order to save the medium from spam. At the same time, the shifting online paradigm and rise of social networks are challenging email for the attention of the online consumer. In fact, according to a recent study by Nielsen, "member communities" now exceed email participation by 67 percent to 65 percent – and that difference is even more pronounced with Gen Y users. So we asked our Gen Y panel about email and the social internet and here is what they had to say:

- Marketing email is not relevant according to Gen Y consumers – only 28 percent of those surveyed believe the email they get from companies is relevant

- Gen Y consumers are eager to see “innovative services” that allow them to better control, organization and manage email coming from brands. Specifically, 
    o 78 percent would like their email client to automatically categorize and delete expired promotional messages 
    o 62 percent would like to communicate directly with retailers about their favorite products in exchange for getting the best prices from them 
    o 44 percent say they’d subscribe to an email service that collected and summarized multiple offers of interest to them     
    o 32 percent say they’d share promotional email offers with members inside a social network and open emails from others

- More than half of Gen Y consumers (51 percent) say they’d join a separate social network dedicated to managing brand interactions

It seems to me Gen Y is not asking a lot from email, especially in today’s semantically intelligent digital world – or are they? Let us know what you think.

PMN members interested in getting a copy of the complete survey can email info@thepmn.org.

It has been interesting sifting through the reactions to our recently released Gen Y research. One of the most interesting was a blog by econsultancy.com. The blog concluded that Gen Y tend to see “brand interactions on social networks as being primarily informational and transactional, not social” given their overwhelming interest to visit fan pages for news updates and promotions.

This raises an interesting question: Are we, as marketers, guilty of applying traditional approaches i.e. “push” marketing tactics (informational/transactional) to a medium that requires a different approach? Take a look at fan pages from some of today’s leading brands and I think you’ll agree that just may be the case. If brands do indeed want their fan page to be the kind of destination where visitors can truly interact and participate with their brand, they need to re-think their approach. That will require going beyond promotions, videos and photos and adding more robust functionality that helps facilitate conversations through the exchange of ideas and opinions. For many marketers, embracing social media in this way has been difficult. The thought of engaging customers in a conversation often sends the most experienced marketer into a cold sweat. However, with the recent facebook fan page redesign, it may just be the perfect time. Think about leveraging the medium to not only deliver your message, but converse with your biggest fans. When you do that, you’ll be well on your way to creating real brand fanatics. If you’ve come across a brand’s fan page that seems to be getting it right, I’d love to hear about it.

Yesterday we officially released the results from our first Gen Y research study in partnership with Pace University’s Lubin School of Business’ Interactive and Direct marketing (IDM) Lab. The study conducted among 220 PMN panel members and consumers between the ages of 18-24 explored Generation Y behaviors within social networks. Highlights underscore that fact that brands continue to not only struggle connecting with Generation Y in Social Networks but advertising remains a tough sell in these environments. Specifically:

- 62 percent of Gen Y’s have visited a brand or fan page on a social network, but only 48 percent have joined
- 84 percent noticed ads on social networks, 74 percent say they click infrequently/never (36 percent saying they don’t click on ads at all).
- Only 19 percent say they find ads on social networks relevant.
- 51 percent say they’d prefer a separate social network to manage their brand interactions.

While the research doesn’t suggest social networks are a lost cause, it does indicate marketers and brands need to work harder to understand what drives participation and engagement within social networks. When asked about their reasons for joining a brand or fan group on a social network, the top 5 reasons included: to “get news or product updates” (67 percent), “view promotions” (64 percent), “view or download music or videos”(41 percent), “submit opinions” (36 percent), and “connect with other customers” (33 percent). Social media is about making connections and igniting participation and our findings validate the incredible role social networks can play in that process. Let's hope that facebook's forthcoming changes to fan pages (which will be announced today) and marketer's increased attention to building programs that encourage participation grow these numbers.

The study, including additional results will be released and available to members only over the next several weeks. To download your copy, visit the members section of the PMN. If you are not a member yet and would like to join, click here.