Brands, blogs & customer engagement.

1. Brands, blogs & customer engagement. Global best practices & local case studies. BogdanMihalaşcu www.MoneyWatch.ro Spoiler alert: How to buy 70,000 $ of quality cross-media exposure with probably less than the price of an iPhone

2. The most important global currency isn’t made of paper anymore—it’s made of relationships. How can any person, organization, or idea become more trusted and more believable? If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. — Nelson Mandela The Mass Perception Principle For the most part, there used to be a direct relationship between the money you spent and the perception shift you could buy. That meant if you spent a lot on buying advertising, you could pretty much shape what people thought about your brand. If you donated large amounts of money to a charity, people would assume you were a good person.

3. End of mass perception. Enter:Conversation. Connection. Relationship. Today, the world is different in three important ways: 1. Media is now fragmented. What used to be less than a dozen authoritative media outlets has now exploded into millions as the ‘‘long tail’’ of media has become the majority of what people consume. Except for Olympics, sports events, international events, there is no mass audience anymore. 2. Competition is everywhere. Hardly anyone owns an industry or a category anymore. And competition can come from anywhere. It is also increasingly harder to do anything that is truly unique. 3. The truth about anything is harder to hide. While perception was generally easy to shape through marketing, now people have more ways to share their real experiences with products and services through online reviews and publishing content online. As a result, any negativity from a single customer can influence thousands of others in the blink of an eye.

4. The Age of Equivalence = the age when almost every product or service will have a competitor (over time) that will become nearly indistinguishable from the original. vKontakte – Facebook of Russia 100 Mio users

5. The short life span of Originality • Copy • ‘‘There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.’’ • The ‘‘5 Cs of Chinese Innovation’’ – the first C comes from… 3 critical factors driving the age of equivalence: 1. Speed—When faced with the deadline-driven pressures of business, the easiest thing isn’t to create something entirely original but rather to refine something that already exists. This is the inspiration for the Chinese model of innovation. Unfortunately, it often leads to marginal differences and products that appear on the surface to be mostly the same. 2. Lower Barriers of Entry—Now people can work virtually, find an outsourced manufacturer, and create and launch new products in record times. 3. Reverse Engineering—Almost before any device hits the stores, there are teams of engineers looking at its inner workings to dissect and recreate it. Besides piracy or fakes, overall this translates into the fact that companies can improve their competitive products and release them rapidly after the market leader comes out. • What about equivalence of services? It applies even more. And MBA can teach us skills. But • there is no MBA for attitude…

6. Principles of brand communication Principle 1: Truth—There is no more important quality than the real truth, and we live in a time where people are more able to demand it than ever Principle 2: Relevance—The challenge to be relevant requires that you center yourself on the world that someone else already cares about. What makes something or someone powerfully relevant, and how you can do it for yourself or your business. Principle 3: Unselfishness—dramatically hard to consistently do it. Study of unselfish corporate behavior has proven about the role of idealism in branding, we will find that being unselfish pays off in many ways, and is a necessity for success. Principle 4: Simplicity Principle 5: Timing—Some of the greatest ideas in human history have succeeded or failed based entirely on timing.

7. Relevance always has to start with an understanding of what the people you want to influence care most about right now, and why they care about it. Relevance

8. Relevance Insight vs. Inspiration! • Don’t try too hard to be cool • The trend cloning issue – average approach, average results • Dove – Campaign for real beauty: started from Insight! -cross-geographic study in 10 countries -3.200 women 18-64 years -only 4% of them described themselves as “beautiful”, due to the fashion cliches -campaign success came not from the technology & platforms, but from getting to know the brand’s consumers Know your consumers – reach out to them!!! Know the communication channels you can interact with. Knowwhat they like, the way they use – and want to use – digital media.

9. (un)Selfishness 1. Assuming a zero-sum game. The most common reason people behave in selfish ways is because of the common assumption that if you win, that means I lose. This winner and loser mentality persists because, in some situations, it is actually true. Often, though, what may be true immediately is not true later. For example, if I charge you more for a bottle of water today, the fact is I will make more money. The real problem is that you may not come back to buy from me again. 2. Wanting to get without giving. The most common definition of selfishness involves people expecting something from others without reciprocating. Reciprocity is an important social behavioral principle that drives much of what we do, and when it is missing, this usually leads to one group feeling the other is selfish. 3. ‘‘Short-Termism.’’ One of the biggest criticisms of capitalism for some time has been how it tends to force companies and people to look only at short-term results instead of long-term effects. Focusing on the short term will often inherently lead to selfishness because you are only concerned about what happens right away and not in the future.

10. Timing – our time-shifted culture. Today, we live in a time-shifted culture where you can move everything from when you eat to choosing when you watch, read, or skim your media. Consider the following: • Apps like ReadItLater and Instapaper let you find and save articles for reading when you are ready to pay attention and read them. • DVRs let us pause, rewind, and save live television to watch at our own convenience. • Customer service happens on all channels (including social media as well as phone) and is expected to be available 24/7. • Entire jobs are being done at various times of the day and home-based working has been rising in popularity. With all of this control that we now have over the time we spend doing almost anything, the importance of timing is even more critical with regard to what we choose to believe and what we don’t.   Timing Formula = Urgency + Connection to a habit + Current Events

11. Social Media Marketing Industry Report 2012 Over 6,000 business executives were asked how confident they felt in their social media strategies. Only 14 % of businesses rated their social media strategies as ‘‘very effective,’’ and only 7% considered them to be ‘‘very revenue generating’’. Your Top 2 benefits of social media marketing: Increasing exposure – 85% Increasing traffic – 69% ‘‘Social media is kind of like peeing in a dark suit. We’re getting a warm feeling but no one else knows what is really happening.’’  

12. Usage of Social Media tools Marketers plan on increasing their use of YouTube/video (76%), Facebook (72%), Twitter (69%), blogs (68%), Google+ (67%) and LinkedIn (66%) in that order. Which social media tools do you want to learn more about? Google+ Blogging 3) Facebook

13. 1 Year from now 40% of marketers indicated determining how to measure social media results and how to find customers or prospects were the top social media marketing questions they want answered. 1 YEAR FROM NOW: Corporatescan see the landscape shifting in a few key areas: 1. 200% more companies will use social to develop better products 2. A third more companies will offer customer service delivery through social media 3. 95% more companies will use social media for market research 4. Social will become an even more important channel for marcomm message delivery and engagement 5. Social commerce adoption will speed up (though from a low base) 1+3: Companies are beginning to leverage the enormous amount of data generated by social media. Where once there were 8-person focus groups, now there are 40m-person Facebook polls, and deep social media analytics tools

14. It is bad that no real shift since 2011, when also 40% of people were confident they were measuring social media impact. The pressure on social media practitioners to show concrete results and impact is increasing – ROI is demanded. Yet little progress has been made in tracking this impact.

15. Looking at the used KPIs, the confusion on measuring ROI/Social Media Impact (SMI) becomes clear. First place: Web traffic, too simplistic to be relevant about SMI. Second place: Increase in followers of social accounts is a marginally more useful metric, but has its limits, too. Are the followers relevant or are engaged with the brand? Third place has a truly social metric –engagement. But the fact that engagement ranks third after years of corporate social media activity is… Yet, it turns out that while the metrics being used are under–optimal, we know this situation and understand which are the more relevant – and useful metrics. The biggest discrepancies between what is being tracked and what should be tracked are: 1. Activity/Engagement – from 14% to 24% 2. Conversion to sales – from 7% to 30% 3. Conversion to leads – from 6% to 28%

16. ENGAGEMENT MEASUREMENTS: • page views • tweets • RSS subscriptions • sales leads • downloads • registrations • time on site • unique visitors • returning visitors • comments?

17. 30 seconds break for our brain, before Case Studies. Blogger smiles 

18. 8 Fundamental Best Practices in Branding with Bloggers 1. Listen before you speak 2. Ask before you tell 3. Personalize, don’t generalize 4. Always be transparent about who you are and how you are related to the product or service being discussed. 5. Be open to feedback that doesn’t exactly sound like your marketing copy, but don’t feel like you have to take abuse 6. Set your own ethical policies and guidelines and be the ones to enforce them! Not only should you be transparent, but you should require similar disclosures from the bloggers with whom you work. 7. Create something that will engender authentic enthusiasm. Social media isn’t magic; it still comes down to the product! 8. Find ways to let the blogger experience your brand - or even live - with your brand. Your brand is a story. Tell it. Don’t just sell the product, sell the problem it solves, the feeling it gives, the status it conveys. Communicate with customers what you and your brand stand for. Accentuate the P-O-S-itive: Personalizable, Ownable, Shareable

19. Case Study: GM- Drive a car; change a mind Scope: building positive association with its vehicles among women who blog. Rather than try to influence bloggers with written communication, the company offered to provide bloggers with real experiences with GM-branded vehicles. GM invited participants at a women blogging conference to test drive a variety of their vehicles, requiring nothing of bloggers, just a driver’s license. • Bloggers who test-drove the vehicles tended to make their drives social activities and brought other bloggers with them. • After returning from their test drive, most of the bloggers provided feedback on their experience and agreed to provide videotaped testimonials. • GM secured their permission to post these testimonials on the brand’s YouTube page. • Approximately one-third of the event’s 750 attendees had an experience as a driver or passenger in a GM vehicle. • 10% blogged positively about their experience and about the cars. • GM has repeated the campaign at other events and found dramatic increases in brand perception among women who test-drove vehicles. Opinion polls showed a 57 % increase in the number of women who said they would now consider buying a GM car.

20. Case Study: GM- Drive a car; change a mind • Allow bloggers to have their own experience with your brand. Don’t overorchestrate what that experience will be. • Never initiate a quid pro quo system; give bloggers opportunities, and trust that some will write about your brand. Those that do are your best advocates. • Establish reasonable metrics. Even if you can’t trace a campaign back to live sales, there are ways to measure brand preference and awareness. • Works best when the brand aims to help bloggers do what they want to do or something relevant to the blogger, vs. striving for a brand-centric experience. • First aim should be to build relationships, not drive sales or achieve positive posts. Great example of Best Practices 1, 4, 5, 7 and 8: Listen + Transparent + Feedback + Product + Brand experience

21. Case Study: Retailer – living with the brand • 12 bloggers sent shopping with $500 gift cards to be used in the retailer’s new furniture department, to purchase new items to decorate their home. • Each blogger that participated disclosed that she had been given the gift card by the brand and posted a video of the shopping spree on her blog that was cross-posted to a YouTube page created for the promotion. • A cobranded widget drove consumers to the bloggers’ reviews and to the chance to win a shopping spree at the retailer. • 12 bloggers posted reviews on their blogs & YouTube videos of their shopping experiences. The videos generated 3,816 YouTube video views. • The chance to win section also generated great activity. • Great level of engagement with the retailer’s website. Entrants were required to visit the retailer website and pick an item they would buy and leave a comment about it on the site Great example of Best Practices 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8: Transparent + Disclosure + Feedback + Product + Brand experience

22. Case Study: Retailer – living with the brand • Disclosure is key to protecting the bond of trust bloggers have with their readers. • Select credible bloggers who will provide a balanced review, not a guaranteed endorsement. • Context is critical: if sponsored content or product reviews are placed where readers perceive it to be editorial, then it may subject your brand to criticism and undue scrutiny. Insist that any content associated with your brand be labeled and showcased somewhere that is clearly demarcated. • Your customers trust each other more than they trust you. Leverage that trust by enlisting them to talk about your product, and don’t control the conversation. Great example of Best Practices 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8: Transparent + Disclosure + Feedback + Product + Brand experience

23. Customer engagement in the land of user generated content (UGC) • Not any request for user creativity will automatically become a success • Is crowd sourcing really worth it? • Maintain the right as a company to validate the user generated content • Instead of user generated try user CUSTOMIZED/Personalized content (Mastercard – priceless.com) • Embrace risk, but ensure reward: • User motivation should not be a financial one • It’s not consumer-created if it comes from a pro

24. Technology companies: key communication message Don’t plan to invade the living room, just get cozy on the couch. Offer an experience (not just a product or service) and focus on communicating that it is simple to use, personal, easy to control, trusted, relevant, and delivers an emotional connection. Homes are about comfort, not productivity. The living room is only the beginning of the relationship, and as technology becomes more and more integrated in the home life, it must connect with consumers on the basis of what people expect from their home experience. Focus on the intrinsic qualities of the brand and deliver marketing materials that translate those qualities in a visual and verbal language that connects with audiences in an intimate and warm manner. Tech companies are all too used to focusing on efficiency and productivity, instead at home the drivers are comfort and warmth. Be a part of the ecosystem. The living room is a mix of multiple types of technology and this will continue. Expecting to be able to enter the living room and dominate all other brands is not realistic. The key to success lies in the understanding that each solution is part of an ecosystem, and that interoperability will be key. The brands that will succeed are the ones that focus on creating a positive and personal experience - one that stretches beyond the features and benefits of any product or service, but connect with audiences in a relevant and emotional manner.

25. Case study: SuperBlognational blogging competition 2 months period 30 articles to be written by each blogger The articles are on topics requested by the Sponsors Jury of each Sponsor ranks the articles of its proposed themes The blogger obtains a total ranking summing the points obtained on each topic

26. Media exposure 2008: 70 K EUR

27. Media exposure 2010: 70 K EUR

29. ASUS Toyota NH Hoteles real,- Hypermarket Autonom Rent-a-Car Aventuria Oktal.ro AMD Edimax Borealy Gifts Aventuria.ro Hostway Quelle Azerty Tara Fashion Disney Nemira Coty Delaco TMI

30. Examples of blogging topics given to participantsin SuperBlog: • Which of our products would you choose for your loved ones? Why? • Create a slogan for our product • Tell us how do you think our product could help you • How would you spend your day if you had 12 hours of laptop battery time? • Integrate our product’s features & utility into a story • Where do you think the industry of X would be in 20 years • This is our company’s environmental strategy. How would you contribute to the environment? • Visit our online shop and choose your favorite items. Tell us why • Write about the most loved sound from your life [client promoting a product with extraordinary audio features] • Imagine a route for your foreign friends visiting Romania [client promoting off-road vehicles] Relevant general patterns: Give us feedback/your perception about our [product/service/online shop] Integrate [key selling points] of our product/service into your everyday life story How could your lifestyle connect with what we offer?

31. real, - Cook (Bucatar Real) • First blogging competition organized by a retailer in Romania • Promoting the Pyroflam cooking instruments & 50% discount promotion in the next quarter • Scope: customer loyalty campaign, brand-awareness, increase sales • Competition had 2 stages, in May 2012 Stage 1: Bloggers had to imagine and share with their audience a cooking recipe which they would put into practice if they would have the great Pyroflam cooking instruments (features of the products were described extensively in the brief of the campaign) Stage 2: The best ranked 45 bloggers received as intermediary prize a Pyroflam cooking vase Then they would have to cook in the received vase, share the recipe & the experience on their blog. • Dedicated Facebook page & community. Participants’ recipe posts were promoted on the wall. • Facebook community still active and will remain so, as per the retailer’s strategy to connect with the food niche. Jury of the competition: blogs in the food niche, company’s Head of Media

32. real, - Cook (Bucatar Real) Brand assets: 1. The naming. Semantic relevance: "Bucatar real,-“ combines the concept of cooking (Romanian word bucatar means cook), and real,-'s brand 2. a professional logo 3. Dedicated webpage: http://www.realhypermarket.ro/pyroflam/concurs-bloguri/, including the competition's details and rules, its agenda, the competitors' brief, a presentation of the jury, the rankings of both phases of "Bucatar real,-", and the recipes that bloggers prepared 4. Dedicated Facebook page, where the competition's organizers interact with the community, communicate real,-'s news, and ultimately build brand-awareness 5. online banners for the advertising campaign on real-'s Pyroflam offer and announcing the blogging competition, banners stating "SuntBucatar real,-" (I am a real,- Cook) for the top 45 bloggers, finally banners expressing real,-'s appreciation for the jury's support, and promoting the top 3 finalists and their recipes. 6. short video material presenting real,- Hypermarket's representativefeedback on the competition Our product. Your lifestyle. Your experience. Your feedback. Joint communication. Connection. Relationship.

33. Asus Mobility Tour Campaign • 3 weekends in Bucharest • Take your ASUS laptop or tablet outdoor into parks • Communicate wireless and enjoy your mobility lifestyle Scope: Promoting Zenbook premium ultrabook product line (iMac killer), which features: cool design + slim shape + fabulous multimedia + obscene amounts of battery time  All park visitors entered a draw having as prize the coolest tablet from ASUS People having with them ASUS products entered in an additional draw for a Zenbook Everyone had the opportunity to test-drive a Zenbook! Reach out to your consumers. Don’t just tell them your product is light or X or Y or Z – put it in their hands! You are not RAM, Gigabits, Screen size, Processors, USB ports. You are an experience company!

34. Marketers for a long time enjoyed saying that the consumer owns the brands. But did they really believe it? Because they didn’t have to believe it. Because the consumer didn’t have the tools to own the brand. Maybe what they meant was the consumer talks about the brand or occasionally thinks about it, and what they think is what the brand is. But now the consumer—whether you embrace it or not—is involved in the creation of your brand. So they’re active participants—not just when you invite them to create content, but even if you just make something interesting—they just start to make content around it. The ROI of Social Media is that your business will still exist in 5 years Thank You!!!