Why P2P?

People do business with people. They become friends with people. They form an emotional connection with people. Few businesses exist without some personal contact. In the new world of social media, the people who work for you and the people who have bought from you, have a voice.

Yet many businesses are uncertain how to best use social media. They fear exposure. They don’t know how to hand negative comments. They fret about the time spent to manage social media. Their fear is based largely on loosing control.

Let’s take a look at a good and bad example P2P marketing in action in the age of social media.

Dave Carroll is a Canadian musician who had his Taylor guitar damaged beyond repair due to extreme negligence while flying United Airlines. After being given the run around for close to a year, trying to make a claim for replacement against the airline, he took to Youtube. He recorded an entertaining video and catchy tune that told the tale of mistreatment by the airline. It became a viral hit, currently with 11.5 million views worldwide. Watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo
Within 2 days of the video hitting the airwaves, United offered him compensation. But Dave wasn’t finished. He went on to produce a total of 3 videos about how the company handled the exchange. He now makes a living as a musician and speaker advocating for good customer service and educating companies about how to handle social media complaints.

Virginia Sokolloff of Montreal felt she was mistreated by Air Canada when her outbound flight was first canceled, then had her return ticket voided while being issued a new flight. She was forced to buy a new ticket for over $700. The additional $25 baggage charge was the final straw. But instead of taking to the phone, Ms Sokoloff took to Facebook, posting her story not only on her own personal page, but Air Canada’s Facebook page. Within minutes of posting on the airlines wall, a social media representative from the airline contacted her. She was offered a refund for her ticket and a discount on a future booking.

Two airlines and two different outcomes. Company bureaucracy guided one. The other allowed a person to person exchange, and employee empowerment to make a wrong a right. Arguably that should have been done at the ticket counter without having to resort to social media, but at least they got it half right.

Many businesses are still learning about monitoring social media. The leaders will be the ones who empower their employees to make decisions on the spot and treat customers with respect, just like a friend would.

Good relationships are transparent. There is little to hide and each partner responds to the other in a timely manner with attention and respect. And they each realize that all humans have some flaws. It’s what makes them personable.

P2P (people to people) strategy is the new world order. I invite you to pause for a moment and consider the implications for your business. Perhaps you have a story of how social media played a roll dealing with a complaint? We’d love you to share it here!

I’ve been watching with great interest the growth of Google+. At 90 million users (Jan 2012) they are still a far cry from Facebook’s 800 million users.  Arguably with Facebook’s IPO announcement recently, that company has been garnering all the press. However, the power behind Google’s online clout and ownership of search can’t be denied. That and their ownership of Android with a major stake in the mobile market, along with the Google wallet mobile payment system recently launched in the US makes them in my mind, a bigger player. Oh yes, and they own that little station called Youtube. There is a major mud-slinging match being waged between these two titans that have the ability to aggregate human behavior on the web. They want to use that data to offer a predictive user experience, and of course sell micro targeted advertising content.

Commercialism aside, I think to ignore the potential benefits to a business that actively participates in content sharing on these networks is to do so at your own peril. Increasingly having a Google+ or Facebook presence will be as important, if not more important than having your own website, because that content will be tied to social media rankings and ratings, mobile search, and customer feedback in addition to what you want to tell people about yourself. Consider how after spending $3.5 million for their 2012 Superbowl spot “Seduction”, Fiat simply directed viewers to their Facebook Fiat 500 Abarth page rather than their website. They recognized their target was likely to be watching and browsing on mobile devices throughout the game. Viewers could immediately interact with others about the spot, and of course the car.  In a world where 54% of customers trust comments by friends, 35% trust comments by strangers, and 47% say even a single negative review can impact their potential purchase, that becomes important. (TNS Global Digital Media study)

I have to say, that in the short time since joining Google+ I have been able to connect with some brilliant minds in my industry and share valuable content. I have tended to use Facebook for family and friends primarily, while balancing some business use with closer connections and clients. I tend to use Twitter as a follower to gain insights, while pushing out what I think is important from a marketing perspective only when I can actually be insightful. I’ve reserved LinkedIn for a professional circle of business contacts, aiming to acquire quality over quantity. Together, these social media tools are a potent and powerful mix for networking, connecting and professional positioning. My initial experiences with Google+ have enabled me to combine the best of all the other networks combined.  I am able to create circles and manage who receives my posts and shared content. Facebook has also made changes recently to make groups easier, but I find the posting options in Google+ easier, since I can choose multiple groups and different combinations, depending on the content I am posting. With Google+ I am able to “follow” the public posts of leaders and influencers just like Twitter, which Facebook does not allow. And because the interface is built on circles of influence, there is an earned reciprocity based on professional reputation and value of content shared that gives it additional value over LinkedIn. Your digital footprint is aggregated in one place that connects out to everything else you have on the web which is used by Google to further boost your search engine results. Plus Google+ has some very cool features such as “meet up” which allows users to video chat. I participated in the Columbia School of Journalism’s Social Media Weekend global meet up recently. This feature puts a whole new spin on possibilities for conferences, education applications, business meetings and consumer focus groups. Of course, Google+ will only be as powerful as the uptake of users that get on board, and at this stage that is its limiting factor. But it is a tool that holds promise in the face of Facebook’s dominance.

In the end, I admit to continuing my double dating efforts between Facebook and Google+ as well as maintaining Twitter and LinkedIn. I’m just not sure where all this might be going, so I’m not ready to make a full commitment to one over the other. I encourage you to check out the benefits of Google+ for yourself and let me know what you think.

Get ready for 2012 to be the year where huge battles will be waged over the access to human behavior data on the web. And expect the friction between personal privacy and the freedom of information from legislation to be at the heart of it!

Increasingly competition is coming from outside your industry, or influenced by technology that changes your industry. Think of the iPad and the publishing industry, or the iPod and the music industry.

Grocery shopping is not exactly ripe for innovation. Or is it?

Enter the Tesco Homeplus virtual subway store in South Korea. They were solidly second as far as awareness and market share in the traditional grocery store model. However, they got creative with a campaign that involved growing their market share and sales without building more stores. They installed large poster images that depicted grocery store isles life size in subway transit areas. The idea was that viewers could shop by scanning the item with the displayed QR code on their phone and add it to their shopping cart. The items were processed using online payment and groceries were delivered to their home after they got home. Suddenly wait time had become productive and novel.

In doing this Home-plus disrupted the traditional distribution channel. No store, no clerks, no inventory. They had a warehouse and delivery trucks at less cost. They disrupted both the pricing model as well as the payment system. Payments were through a mobile wallet. They disrupted the product model. Items were not real, but rather virtual images. There was no spoilage, refrigeration, or restocking. And finally, they disrupted the promotions model. The endeavor attracted media coverage and was a natural for shared social media exposure. Earned media helped spread the word. Plus it was a natural for capturing data user insights for further direct marketing efforts.

What I love about this example is how it not only disrupts one of the legs that strategic marketing is built on (product, price, distribution, promotion), it disrupts all four!

Watch the Youtube video of how they did it at: http://bit.ly/krv39i

Of course, South Korea had the perfect conditions for this model: A high penetration of Smart phone users, availability, awareness and trust in a mobile wallet service. And they had the right demographic density in urban transit areas to ensure there were enough users to make it a viable endeavor.

I think this is the kind of innovative thinking we need more of. What are your thoughts?

Over time this could put them squarely in a public relations crisis, or worse destroy the brand perception of Google as “owning search.” That is their unique selling proposition in the market. They need to guard that position carefully.

This could be dangerous territory. Back in the dark ages, the 80s, when I worked in print media at the Georgia Straight in Vancouver, we realized the line between advertisers and editorial is one to be respected. If you start to play with advertising influence, your readers loose respect for the editorial authenticity. This is really the same fundamental issue 2012 style. If influence emerges that impacts the value of search results, and that influence is there because they use your products (Google+) you loose respect of users.

I do however see an interesting and appealing business model in combining a search offering that considers your circles of interest and influence. Maybe Google needs to introduce a tab that allows both options. Either way they should come clean with what they are doing and allow transparency so the benefits can be appreciated. It’s pretty obvious how search results are different now depending on if you are logged into Google or not. I wrote about that and potentially how business could leverage it to their advantage in my blog last post.

What are your thoughts?

I pulled it off the shelf. That’s when things got interesting.

Behind it was a red-colored version of the same magazine, but with Steve Jobs face on the cover and a headline, “Why Apple Will Win.” A little more rummaging lead me to find a total of four versions of the same Nov 2011 issue, a clever ploy to promote the article. The other versions exclaimed why Facebook or Amazon would win.

The quandary then became, “Which cover to purchase?”

All 4 companies have disrupted various industries. In a period of less than 5 years they have changed the entertainment, music, publishing and media industries. They had also disrupted gaming, retail, mobile, communications and advertising. Payment systems and cloud computing are on their radar.

Initially I gravitated towards the Apple cover, but Steve Jobs prominent photo started looking like a question mark to me with his recent death and the uncertainty of continued innovation.

Amazon is brazen and innovative, but anchored to the end of the commerce funnel. Not a bad place to be, but limited. I figured it would come down to who controlled insights on people and information. Facebook arguably knows more about our behaviours than we do ourselves, and they have the muscle to leverage that knowledge. But in the end I chose the Google cover. Why?

Google owns search. When we are searching, we are seeking. And seeking is the beginning of every desire. Now that they have entered the foray of social media with Google +

I believe they will ultimately hold the trump card. They can access our profile and the gateway to our desired transactions. They will have the ability to utilize our preferences and the influence of our social circle to control our individual search results. Suddenly, it’s not just a Google search, it’s “knowing you, I would suggest,” and that becomes extremely powerful. Powerful ultimately, since marketers will pay attention to it.

My own personal example: I received an invitation to join Google+ from a colleague. I created a quick account, putting minimal content on it. Doing a search a week later, to my horror, the Google+ link had outranked my company website and fiveminutemarketing.com blog, each with a long history, massive content, and multiple links on the web. I have since made the account more robust and now monitor how content ranks.

Here are my take-aways:

1.     Google+ is in search results like never before. A Google+ profile outranks other content. You may feel that using their clout to adjust rankings in their favour is unfair, but it’s a compelling reason to claim a Google+ profile.

2.     You will want to create large circles. Everything you share on Google+ will be ranked higher, and if you have more people in your circles it will be ranked higher still. Because Google now appears to favour quality content, you can use that to position yourself. You would be foolish to not share everything through Google+ to boost your search rankings.

3.     Their recent “Google Search Plus Your World” introduced the influence of your social circle into search results. Logged in users receive socially shared content from their circles in the results – essentially tying social media into search results. Although the bias appears to diminish when logged out, Google+ linked content still rises in the search rankings. Facebook’s power is its 800 million users. Google+ with a current 90 million users may seem small by comparison. However when you combine the billions of people doing billions of searches daily on Google, the user group and influence is exponential.

Is Google+ just another social media tool to maintain? Yes, but the choice not to participate could have far reaching implications on your business. In the end I bought the Larry Page cover of Fast Company because I am not willing to bet against Google. Are you?

Want to connect on Google+? http://bit.ly/xcTbco

Service guy: “Well, they’re expensive, and you don’t really need them. Your car is going to be dirty in the winter anyway. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Me: “So after spending $1,300 I get to drive a car around that looks like crap?”

Service guy: “Oh, you’re one of those.”

Not sure what “one of those” puts me in the company of, but it didn’t sound good. However, judging by the reaction of women I relay the story to, most of them shared the same thought. Aesthetics are important. If you believe a vehicle is an extension of who you are, the care you take, and what you value, the tire caps matter – even if it is a minivan! While function is important, women will always consider the design in the context of function.

Further driving this lesson home was an outing to replace the rechargeable battery on a movie recorder. My previous battery was small and light. I was told that I could get a battery that would hold a far longer charged for half the cost. I initially thought that the extra size and weight was an issue, but I succumbed to the salesman’s persuasive argument about increased function and cost savings. To this day I curse the extra size and weight and regret not sticking to my intuitive and more expensive tastes to buy the smaller battery. In both the tire and battery cases, I was an easy up sell to spend more by recognizing the importance of aesthetics and ease of use, which are both important for women.

One of my girlfriends recently remarked at the archaic state of paint can design. Lamenting that skinny little wire to carry a heavy can and the inevitable drips down the side of the tin and the gummy top that would never seal properly again, she wondered why paint cans haven’t been improved. I told her about Dutch Boy’s twist and pour cans, complete with a side handle, drip catching moat, and tool free twist cap, that had won one them a best package design award and had tripled their sales in 6 months after introduction. She wondered why it hadn’t caught on. Good question, considering the buying power of women making paint choices. She of course was considering the entire experience of carrying the can and applying the paint, not just the final result, which is reflective of women’s holistic approach to purchase decisions.

Giddy with excitement, a friend declared over drinks recently, that she had bought “hot pants” through a Groupon offer. These hot pants were in fact HOT pants, which promised to heat up the mid section and cause weight loss. Once we all recovered from the laughter of her plans to wear them while lying in bed watching TV and eating licorice, we inquired about the advertising details behind the promo. It obviously had to be good, since apparently 100s of other Vancouverites had signed up to have them shipped from England. After she recounted the endorsements, relatively low cost, and promise of quick results, we agreed she had not only bought hot pants, she had bought hope.

A summary of these random consumer encounters reveals some lessons: Women care about aesthetics. Both form and function matter. They are critical of good design. And they buy hope. Considering she makes or influences 80% of purchases, these are worth noting.

Although the bottom line is ultimately what business is striving to improve, there are at least three good reasons apart from sales for using social media: to gain market insights, to increase brand or business visibility and to increase customer loyalty.

1. Gain market insights: I rank market research as one of the most critical benefits. Business owners can pay a lot of money for research and insight on their brand. However, courtesy of the web and social media, often many of those insights are available for the taking. You just have to know where to look, be tapped in, and be monitoring activity actively. Add in the benefit of timeliness and truthfulness, and it starts to look like not a bad anecdotal qualitative research tool. Learning what your customers think about your brand, products or services through the unfiltered and unfretted social media consumer window is priceless. In a recent Marketer’s benchmark survey conducted by Focus.com, 49% of business to consumer brands cited improving client understanding as the highest strategic priority for 2011. Social media will be at the heart of those efforts.

2. Increase visibility: Brand or business visibility can be increased substantially using social media. Social media has a bearing on search. Most search engines use a form of blended search, which means they don’t just pull from traditional websites, but from various media – Youtube, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Flickr, Yelp. If you don’t have a presence on some form of social media, you will have less ubiquity. Neilson Media reports that 70% of consumers trust consumer opinions posted online, and that 90% of major purchases are researched online prior to purchase. How you show up on your website is important, but increasingly important is what others now say about you online.

3. Improve customer loyalty: The customer loyalty loop is increasingly important, not only for its role in influencing the initial purchase, but also that customers role in potentially influencing other customers in the future. A loyal customer online using social media can be a friend indeed. And as consumers increasingly turn to the web for research on brands before buying, that existing loyal customer in actually an extension of your sales and marketing force. Social media fosters the building of community around the brand. Fans and those they influence don’t require nearly the intensity of sales focus that less engaged prospects do. Again, the Marketer’s benchmark survey revealed that 49% of business to consumer brands planned to improve brand awareness, and 40% planned to improve customer retention in 2011 using social media

To me it seems obvious that these three factors do ultimately effect the bottom line, albeit indirectly, and that has been the challenge in justifying investment of both money and time for many small businesses.

Here is a great resource for businesses wanting to get up to speed on this topic: www.socialquickstarter.com. This site is geared to both those getting started and more sophisticated users, guiding you with both video and written content on areas such as: an introduction to social media, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogging, Youtube, ratings and reviews tools, location-based services, QR codes, and email marketing with social media. It’s a great one-stop-shop and how-to-guide in helping you understand and use social media to your advantage.

In December 2010 Harvard Business Review published an article called Branding in the Digital Age: You’re Spending Your Money in All the Wrong Places. Since reading the article I’ve found myself constantly reevaluating how consumer decisions are influenced. We have moved from the traditional funnel of consistently narrowing our choices from many to fewer and finally a purchase, and are now moving towards the loyalty loop where choices are added and subtracted during an extended consideration and evaluation phase, then once a purchase is made, we openly share, exchange and advocate while fueling the influence of others online.

Allow me to elaborate with my three unusual examples to illustrate the power of the loyalty loop.

1.     The long tail economics of successful indie writers selling e-books online. 26 year old Amada Hocking http://amandahocking.blogspot.com/ has self-published 8 novels online since April 2010 and currently averages sales of 100,000 e-books/per month through Amazon. Top Kindle Indie authors typically sell 2,500 – 100,000 books/month, with many in the 10,000 range. At an average of $3/book, and Amazon taking 30%, the remaining profit looks pretty sweet. Sell books at a low risk, low price point, to lots of people. This model is only possible with the loyalty-loop marketing model. It’s one thing to write and publish an e-book. It’s quite another to actually cultivate a following online to generate those kind of sale numbers. Amanda Tweets and is well connected in the blogging community where she sends advanced reading copies to influential book bloggers. Her urban fantasy and romance appeals to youth. Readers and the connected blog community advocate and feed the loyalty loop, which in turn influences more buyers online.  Recently her success has garnered TV and magazine stories. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qWOy4p4MvM She doesn’t pay a cent for marketing.

2.     Groupon’s Superbowl Tibet ad blunder. Of course the loyalty loop can work in reverse. Advocacy can turn negative; as it did following Groupon’s attempt at self inflicted humour. In case you missed it, Groupon paid over $1 million for a 30 second spot during the Superbowl. In it, actor Timothy Hutton appears to make light of the political struggle in Tibet in the name of a great Groupon deal at a Tibetan restaurant. Supposedly they were making fun of themselves talking about discounts as a noble cause, and viewers having seen humour in the parody, would appreciate the philanthropic donation that Groupon had set up for Tibet. Too bad the connecting website never appeared in the ad. And too bad the great unwashed tuned into Superbowl were largely more receptive to crass objectification of women in their advertising than obtuse connections. So how did the new loyalty-loop marketing model fail them? Arguably much of the value of purchasing a Superbowl ad goes beyond the high reach of the TV audience. Chatter before, during and after the event online is where the real value is. In Groupon’s case, they didn’t frame the spot before to build anticipation and understanding, and then they failed to respond quickly afterwards. They dropped the ball where the loyalty-loop mattered most – online. Talk turned negative and they never really recovered. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPbfRTAES7Y

3.     Headblade’s crazy shaving helmet video. So you’re a small company that designs and sells razors to a highly targeted segment – people who shave their heads. How do you let the world know your razor is the best? You create a hokey looking home made video demonstrating a helmet that when worn, will lather and shave your head with motorized razors in about 30 seconds. Sound scary? Sound unbelievable? This Youtube viral video marketing campaign was fresh, edgy, and most importantly sparked conversations about head shaving. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bgRszdUdhQ It featured one of their razors in the helmet and demonstrated how it works. The helmet, later revealed as a hoax, actually generated countless purchase inquiries for the company. The online chatter grew exponentially, and flooded over to mainstream media. The company experienced record hits to their website where they featured the real products they sell. http://www.headblade.com/ In the loyalty-loop marketing model they gained incredibly positive traction in a rather obscure category.

So the big question to ask is this: is your marketing feeding the marketing funnel or the loyalty loop?

1. The traditional model of unearthing the “big idea,” then using push media and repetition to gain recognition is over. Launch and leave is simply not as effective in an age of social media. Agencies now need to monitor and manage a brand. Call it nurturing the garden, not just planting the seeds. This is challenging both the way ideas are approached and executed as well as how agencies get compensated.

2. Social media needs something to talk about, which makes storytelling even more relevant. Start your story in one media and then extend it to another. Stephan Hawes, Managing Director, TBWA Vancouver coined the term “transmedia” as a new approach to integrating communications, where each media gets a piece of the message and consumers are allowed to put it together by engaging and exchanging. Lance Saunders, Executive VP, Managing Director DDB suggests, “We need to create a story where people can insert themselves.”

3. Accept that you may no longer be in control. New social media tools, in the hands of consumers, have changed the power relationship. However, a powerful insight emerges: people trust people. The less control you have over your marketing, the more credibility you will have. Saunders suggests, “Stop, listen and lasso the conversations that matter to your target and engage them.”

4. Mobile is very important for some markets. Although penetration of smart phones is still small overall, it is significant for some audiences, such as small business and millennials. Neilson Online reports 5 million Canadians using mobile devices to access the internet in 2010. By 2014 half of internet impressions are expected to be off mobile devices. That may change the content, context and interactivity considerations for your website.

5. Traditional media is not dead. Media such as print and TV are still big and relevant, however there is no doubting that PVR’s pose a threat to commercial viewing, and tablets like the iPad threaten how print content is delivered and paid for. But consider the success of the Old Spice commercials and subsequent engagement online through Facebook and Twitter with custom video responses to an online audience. They spend handsomely on a TV campaign initially to reach a mass audience. Then the online component kicked in. They gave people something to talk about, and then selectively engaged certain conversations. Flash back to points 2 & 3.

6. If the idea is king, data is queen. I have to give credit for that line to Tom Shepansky, Founding Partner, Rethink. ROI is driving decisions, and the increased influence of digital and social media means that IT is at the creative table. He suggests hiring “digital citizens” (those under 30 who have grown up immersed in this stuff) to train the “digital immigrants” (those over 40 who think they’re knowledgeable, but secretly go to bed every night afraid of what they DON’T know).

The Harvard Business Review published an article in December 2010 called Branding in the Digital Age: You’re Spending Your Money in All the Wrong Places. Do yourself a favour and read it. Research based, this article challenges the traditional funnel of  consumer decision-making process. It reveals how we have moved to a loyalty loop, which profoundly changes where advertising messaging should be placed. As a marketing profession at Sprott-Shaw Degree College and University Canada West, I found it compelling. Textbooks will be re-written. I made it mandatory reading for my students.

Of course with any good forecast session, the usual caveats prevailed. Noted Suanders at the the end of his presentation, “On the other hand, I could be totally off.” Indeed, but not far off.

That little square moniker along with an explanation of how to download the smartphone app and use it arrived on every door on the North Shore, an area rife with middle age folk and the financial affluence to have a disproportionate number of smart phone users. QR stands for ‘quick response.’ The idea started in Japan over 15 years ago, but has only taken off since smartphones were fitted with digital cameras. They are printed everywhere in Japan – on billboards, brochures and product tags. They have only just begun to appear in North America. Once a user has a free APP (Google QR code app and you’ll get easy download directions), they simply hold their phone to the QR code and it immediately links them to whatever the code was created for – a website URL, a coupon or offer, a text message, a Google map, music or a short video etc. QR codes have been used by Coke to generate a coupon that could then be held to the vending machine to generate free prizes or drinks. Response has far surpassed regular coupon redemption rates.

So how might you use this in your business? Suppose you were speaking at a conference and wanted to direct attendees to your materials, a special offer or email list sign up. Print the little square on your hand out or flash it up on your Powerpoint. Or suppose you were a business that wanted to give more detail about the product than the little hanging tag would allow. Print the square code and it’s all there. The great thing is it immediately allows you the ability to capture and track self selected interested people. And at this stage in the game, it still allows some demographic and psychographic segmentation of the tech savvy affluent.

Generating a code is easy and free. Go to: http://delivr.com/qr-code-generator

Plug in your URL or desired link and voila! a graphic file is downloaded and ready to display. If you’ve got the app, try it in this QR code. It should link you to my website.