Tag Archives: Jay Baer

Real-Time Marketing Is More Than an Oscars War Room

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The Academy Awards, Grammys, and Super Bowl constitute the peak of real-time marketing season. Throughout February, brands ramp up their efforts to generate instant buzz by capitalizing on the unexpected and exciting drama that unfolds throughout the course of these high-profile events. But as my recently published Gigaom report indicates, real-time marketing is more than a brand tweeting from a social media war room during the Oscars. Real-time marketing has become more influential across the entire marketing funnel, from awareness building to customer retention. To maximize the value of real-time marketing, brands should stop treating it as a one-off tactic and instead connect real-time marketing to their strategies across the customer lifecycle.

Real-Time Highs and Lows at the Oscars

The widespread perception of real-time marketing consists of companies building brand awareness by creating content that capitalizes on a time-sensitive event, such as a news development. Oftentimes, brands rely on social platforms, especially Twitter, to engage their audiences in real time. The popular definition might be limited, but it’s one that marketers can understand intuitively, and it has taken hold.

In 2011, David Meerman Scott’s Real-Time Marketing & PR helped trigger the adoption of real-time marketing as we know it today, although many thought leaders such as Regis McKenna and Monique Reese paved the way for Meerman Scott. By 2013, brands were experimenting widely with the insertion of real-time content into current events, with spectacular successes and failures resulting.

The Oscars have encapsulated both the rewards and drawbacks of event-related real-time marketing. The 85th Academy Awards in 2013 saw many businesses dropping real-time duds. As Jay Baer noted on the Convince & Convert blog, brands such as New York Life, Special K, and Bing used Twitter to spread content that ranged from the confusing to the ham-handed. The real-time content that night was so bad that David Armano asked whether real-time marketing had jumped the shark. But at the 86th Academy Awards a year later, Samsung pulled off a real-time marketing coup when the brand supplied Ellen DeGeneres with the camera that she used to snap the star-studded selfie that shook the world, a joyous image that depicted stars ranging from Bradley Cooper to Jennifer Lawrence hanging out together. Within 45 minutes, her selfie became the most reweeted content ever, and Samsung was enjoying 900 mentions a minute on social media.

But the Academy Awards constitute just one night for creating real-time content — albeit an important one, as are the Grammys and Super Bowl. What are some ways brands create real-time marketing beyond a single event?

Real-Time Marketing Across the Customer Lifecycle

Brands continue to swarm around major events such as the FIFA World Cup to generate impressions and social followers by sharing real-time content. But brands, agencies, and merchants are using some of these same techniques for multiple marketing objectives across the customer journey, influencing marketing tactics ranging from website development to media buying.

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Why Your Brand Needs to Be a Youtility

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Ellen DeGeneres crashed Twitter with her Oscars selfie, but your business does not need access to Hollywood A-listers to make your own mark. On March 25, author Jay Baer and Anna Hrach of digital agency ethology showed how simply providing useful content can make your brand more valuable to your audience.

In their webinar “Help Not Hype: How to Create Content Your Customers Actually Want,” Baer and Hrach asserted that the key to creating customer relationships in the digital world is providing content that is inherently useful to people instead of pushing self-promotional advertising that might capture interest for a moment but fails to create long-term engagement. According to Hrach, formulating a strategy that balances the goals of your brand with the needs of your audience is essential to understanding how to support your business by providing content that your customers actually want and need.

Hrach

Source: ethology

Baer drew upon his book Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help Not Hype to state the case for why brands need to focus more on the unsexy attribute of being useful to hold the attention of your audience. Because both consumers and businesses are flooding the digital world with their own content, ironically businesses are competing with their own customers for attention. The solution for businesses is to avoid the temptation to simply stand out for a few seconds with marketing stunts and hype-filled headlines but rather become trusted utilities that people will want to come back to time and again for useful information that enriches our lives.

Baer

Source: ethology

“You must do more than create content,” he asserted. “You have to make youtility, or content so useful that people would pay for it. Youtility is marketing that people cherish, not tolerate.”

Youtility

For instance, through its @HiltonSuggests Twitter account, Hilton Worldwide provides helpful tips to travelers such as the best places to enjoy afternoon tea in London. The account responds to Continue reading →

New Altimeter Group report challenges social software vendors to grow up

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If you’ve ever felt that your company’s social media platforms have spiraled out of control, you are not alone. According to a new Altimeter Group report, brands manage an average of 178 discrete social media accounts such as YouTube channels and Facebook pages. The report, A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation, evaluates the equally complex web of software vendors designed to help brands manage their social spaces. The bottom line: the landscape for social media management systems is immature. Make sure you first have a well-defined social media strategy mapped to your business objectives before you attempt to hire a vendor.

“We see rapid growth in the market, yet no single solution stands out as able to satisfy all needs of mature buyers,” writes the report’s primary author, Jeremiah Owyang, after evaluating 27 social media management systems vendors such as Buddy Media and Engage121. In fact, the report classifies the marketplace as full of “immature vendors.”

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Marketing by helping, not selling

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The future of marketing is helping, not selling.

Those were the words of content strategist Jay Baer at the recent Content Marketing World conference, an event focused on helping brands become better content marketers. So what exactly does it mean to market by helping? On September 15, Internet security firm McAfee showed us by announcing the results of its annual “McAfee Most Dangerous Celebrities” study.

McAfee is a lot like its owner Intel. Both companies provide services that are essential but kind of boring to talk about. McAfee provides unsexy but important security products and services to safeguard your personal and business computers. It’s the kind of company whose website features stock photos of bland, smiling corporate types dressed in power suits out of the 1980s.

That’s why the McAfee Most Dangerous Celebrities surprises and delights. Each year, McAfee analyzes which celebrities are most dangerous to search for on the web – in other words, the names most often used by cybercriminals to lure web searchers to sites containing computer viruses and spam.

This year, McAfee revealed that searching for Heidi Klum’s name yields a nearly one-in-ten chance of landing you on a malicious site. So take a bow, Heidi Klum: you’re the most dangerous celebrity in cyberspace for 2011, unseating Cameron Diaz. The most dangerous male celebrity, by the way, is Piers Morgan. Ironically Lady Gaga ranks a relatively tame 58.

The McAfee Most Dangerous Celebrities list qualifies as helpful content marketing for two reasons:

It’s useful

McAfee raises awareness about the vulnerabilities of web surfing for celebrity names. Searching for phrases like “Heidi Klum” and “free downloads,” for instance, expose you to risks for encountering sites that will steal personal information.

In a press release, Paula Greve, director of Web security research at McAfee, comments, “Consumers should be particularly aware of malicious content hiding in ‘tiny’ places like shortened URLs that can spread virally in social networking sites, or through e-mails and text messages from friends.”

You might think you’re beyond falling for malware traps, but in our multi-tasking society, even the most savvy among us can be vulnerable. McAfee earns our attention by helping us understand an important issue.

It’s engaging

McAfee could have relied on a perfectly functional but boring video featuring a security expert to remind us of the dangers of reckless web surfing – perhaps valuable but not very helpful if the video fails to engage you.

Instead, McAfee finds a fun way to keep our attention by tapping into our national fascination with celebrity culture. McAfee gives us an amusing version of the Vanity Fair annual New Establishment list, providing little tidbits of fun trivia that manage to educate. For instance, although Charlie Sheen might post a danger to himself (and his publicist), he’s not too dangerous in cyberspace.

“Hot movies and TV shows, awards and industry accolades seem to be more of a factor than headline-grabbing activity,” explains Greve.

The McAfee Most Dangerous Celebrities List works as content marketing also for what it does not do: hit you over the head with a hard sell for McAfee. To be sure, McAfee slips in a reminder to use McAfee security software to safeguard our computers by performing a variety of tasks such as blocking risky websites. But the message feels earned in context of a larger and informative discussion about Internet security.

Since McAfee published its 2011 Most Dangerous Celebrities List on September 15, McAfee has quickly gained attention on news outlets ranging from CNN to Entertainment Weekly.  The PR returns alone, gained in a matter of hours, are priceless.

By sharing useful and engaging information instead of pushing product at us, McAfee defines helpful content marketing.

Spammers, Baby Boomers, and Google+

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Boy, do I feel like a digital slacker.

On June 28, Google invited me to a Field Trial of Google+ — and you better believe I interrupted a family vacation to get involved lest I miss out on all the fun.

But unlike Jay Baer and Chris Brogan, I’ve failed to contribute to the pithy Google+ commentary that has flooded the marketplace. (Reason: school’s out, which means more time with family, and less time for blogging.)

And at this point, I certainly am not going to write an opus on Google+ Instead I’ll ask a few somewhat annoying questions and provide comments smackng of personal whimsy:

  • Google+ is a boon for Baby Boomers like me. We like clean layouts, big pictures, and easy-to-read text. We are too tired of squinting to find content designed by people who fail to comprehend the fundamentals of an engaging user experience.
  • I love how you can add anyone to your Google+ Circle even if they don’t add you to theirs. I’ve always thought it disingenuous of Facebook to suggest friends to you and then ask, “Do you really know Mark?” when you follow through on Facebook’s suggestion. On Google+, I can pretend Mark Zuckerberg really is my friend even if he doesn’t add me to his Circle.
  • I am shamelessly promiscuous about adding people to my Circles. If Google thinks you can add value to my life by suggesting I add you to one of my Circles, I’m going to do so. I like the idea of having a river of ideas from all walks of life flowing through my Google+ stream. That said, as of July 27, I have 1,717 people in my Circles, and only 454 have added me. Does that make me a Google+ loser?
  • I don’t mind admitting that within 10 seconds of joining Google+, my first to-do was claiming my own vanity URL (gplus.to/davidjdeal).
  • If you have created more than six Google+ Circles to curate your interests, you have way too much time on your hands.
  • I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to become a member of the Circle for CEO Celebrity Hedge Fund (gender: male; in a relationship).
  • I am learning more about Google+ from all the third-party commentary resulting from the Google Field Trial than I am from Google itself – and I’ll bet Google likes it that way.
  • Google has a chance to differentiate itself from Facebook by providing more personal service  on Google+ — like actually responding to you when you encounter a problem (unlike Facebook, which treats its members like second-class citizens). But I have a feeling Google will also take the DYI approach to customer service with Google+.

Finally, a word of sincere counsel: I keep hearing about people leaving Facebook for Google+. You’re seriously going to leave behind 700 million people? Sorry, but if you want to be active in social, there is no either/or choice – you have to find time for both Facebook and Google+.