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Restaurant Marketing|Retail Marketing|Social Media|Social Marketing
New Facebook “Actions” Disrupt The Marketing Game, Again…
With over 700 Million users and a pending, massive IPO on the horizon, there has been a lot of talk about Facebook recently. I am surprised by the lack of coverage of the new Facebook Actions and how dramatic of an impact that I feel it will have on the brands that use Facebook as a platform. Actions will become the next evolution in interaction between brands and retailers on Facebook. Since the announcement in December, I’ve spent the past few weeks trying to wrap my head around just what this means for retailers, especially for those that spent a significant amount of time and money to get a lot of “likes”.
So let’s take a step back in time:
- First there were “Fans”, where someone could endorse a company by clicking on button on a “Fan Page”. It was pretty straight forward.
- Then came “Likes”, which reduced the weight of a specific endorsement (I’m not a fan of anything, but there is a lot of stuff that I like). It also permeated throughout the web (you can “Like” pretty much anything on the Internet these days). Likes became critical to the EdgeRank algorithm that Facebook uses to track levels of engagement between people (and companies). The more you interact with (like or comment on) a person or brand page, the more you see it on your NewsFeed. Just because your brand got a customer to “Like” the brand page, didn’t mean that all page updates would be seen by all users (wrongly assumed by many marketers). EdgeRank determined which updates were moved to the top of the list. For a much deeper understanding of EdgeRank, check out this Econstulantacy’s post.
- Then came the introduction of the Ticker. Ticker took the things that the EdgeRank algorithm decided were not as important, and put them in a scroll bar on the side, rather than in your main NewsFeed. This was done to try and reduce the noise created by a lot of applications that were built on the Facebook platform (Check-ins, Farmville updates, etc.). This changed the game significantly because with Ticker, the half-life of a Facebook post is only 3.2 hours. This meant that brands who were doing a good job of engaging with their customers online but only posting once a day (a commonly accepted practice) were not getting seen by many of their fans.
Now with Actions, brands will be able to create interactions with their customers that go beyond them “liking” something. They will be able to tie any action to any noun. So customers can “listen” to “music”, “eat” at “Dairy Queen” and “want” a new “iPhone 4s”. More importantly, it provides a mechanism for these updates to be aggregated on the new Facebook Timeline, versus completely lost (like say my Tumblr posts that chronicled my Ironman Journey)
In A Twist Of Fate, Target Is Getting A Taste Of Their Own Medicine
I wonder what the small businesswoman who runs a clothing boutique, whose business was decimated when Target came into town, thinks about Target’s recent letter to vendors looking for help in “showrooming”. It appears that after a disappointing holiday season, Target execs are looking for ways to avoid people shopping for items in their stores, only to purchase them online from a competitor. Don’t you just hate it when people purchase from someone with a lower price?
The problem is that Target is trying to treat the symptom and not the problem. The real problem is that they are forced to compete on price because they are not maximizing their online relationships (read: social media) and failing to build a level of engagement/trust/relationship with their customers in the stores. That leaves them with no option but to compete on price, where they have to deal with sales taxes (not levied against online retailers) and the “burden” of their stores.
But just like the local businesswoman who learned to survive by building deep and meaningful relationships with her customers, Target and other retailers will need to do the same. They need to focus on service in the store (so I don’t have to wait an hour to buy an iPad) and they need figure out really quickly how to build an omni-channel relationship with their customers, especially when it comes to social media and social networks.
I wonder if the traditional newspaper execs have seen this movie before?
Top Retail Brands Not Taking The iPad Seriously
Less than 22% of the top 50 retailers have an iPad application. None of them have optimized web content for the iPad. Seriously? 55 million iPads on the market and not a single-one has customized their web presence for iPad? 5 of the brands I evaluated had their iPads connections default to their iPhone interface (Horrible!).
The Research
I went to the National Retail Federation Shop.org site and pulled the list of the Top 100 Retailers. For each retailer, I identified their major brands (several, such as SUPERVALU, are made up of several retail brands). I took the top 50 on this list and identified each of their major brands, for a total of 83 (Apple was excluded for obvious reasons).
After listing the 83 brands, I used my iPad to search by the brand name, looking for either iPad or iPhone apps.
- 55% of the brands had an iPhone App
- 22% of the brands had an iPad App
- 61% (11) of the iPad Apps were purpose built for iPad, 39% (7) were a shared App on the iPad/iPhone platform
- 100% of the brands that had an iPad App, also had an iPhone App
Free Social Marketing Guide
Book Review
The Thank You Economy
Title - The Thank You Economy
Author - Gary Vaynerchuk
Biggest Nugget(s) - “When you spend money on social media, you are not actually investing in a platform, you’re investing in a culture and in customers who can eventually become your ambassadors.” Above all he promotes that we need to stop selling and start being a positive service to our customers (which I truly believe). He breaks down that companies who are “not seeing ROI” in social media, are doing it wrong.
Score: 10 of 10
Review:
Gary takes what he started in Crush It! and takes it to the next level by diving deeper into how social media can and should be used by corporate brands. I absolutely loved this book (it’s a rare thing for me to score a perfect 10), and find that Gary and I think in a very similar fashion about how brands can successfully use these tools. Most importantly, we both see how corporate brands are trying to use traditional marketing tactics on social media platforms and wondering why they don’t work.
The Backward World Of Loyalty: “I’d Like A VCR, A Wired Phone and a Plastic Loyalty Card, Please”
When it comes to loyalty, many retailers are stuck in the 1990s. Does anyone else find it funny that in a world where you can very easily have a video conference with your kids from a $500 tablet over free Wi-Fi from a random hotel, we’re expected to keep a 3.3- x 2.2-inch piece of plastic in our wallets to get benefits from some of our favorite retailers? It’s funny how technology can drive a blistering pace in some areas, but slow down to a crawl in others. Especially in an area—such as CRM—where the application of technology could directly impact a retailer’s top and bottom lines.
The problem is that many of these retailers are still considering launching a card-based program. After all, in their mind it’s, better than a Flock Of Seagulls-style haircut—I mean, punch card-based system. But if you asked these same marketers who are looking at these packages if they are carrying more than one of another retailer’s loyalty card in their own wallet, they would say “no.”
I believe the reason most retailers are stuck in a card-based approach is because there is no existing vendor in the stable that offers a comprehensive, technology-based up-to-date approach. Loyalty is not an extension of POS, nor is it an extension of your Web site development. And it is certainly not an extension of giftcard processing. Loyalty is a data-intense program that is as important as merchandising and should be treated in the same way. It is about mobile and geo-location, along with data-driven marketing and real-time offers at the POS. Loyalty is about leveraging technology to maximize your relationship with each customer.
One of those rare articles where you keep saying yeah! the more you read: http://t.co/4wtDFkbt Well done @todd_michaud #bigdata #hadoop2 days ago
Interesting read > #BigData Is Exactly What You Think It Isn’t http://t.co/NW0HesdB by @todd_michaud. #retail3 days ago
It's been a while since I updated this. Great visuals of relationships. http://t.co/BfbpTjhr4 days ago
