Going Social Now

Add Organ Donor Status to FB Profile. Brilliant.

2012-05-01T11:00:52Z

Today Facebook is urging its US members (roughly 161 million of them) to add their donor status to their Facebook profiles according to the NY Times. There are around 7,000 patients waiting organ transplants. In addition to encouraging Facebook members to add their donor status, the company is also encouraging everyone to list their birth dates and schools to further create peer pressure to further push people to add their names to the rolls of registered organ donors.

I couldn't be more impressed with the initiative. It's been done on a smaller scale by other companies on the platform but Facebook is scaling it up. It's an imaginative idea and something only Facebook can do in a uniquely Facebook way on mass scale. Uniquely Facebook in how the social networking site is depending upon peer influence to spur action among millions of people. Best of all it takes very little effort by anyone for this to happen. More companies should think this way. It's a lot easier (and less expensive) to make a change, to positively impact the world around you than you may often realize.

As a tiny show of support, for the first 10 people that do this and tweet or DM me a pic of their Facebook profiles showing that they've done so, I'm going to send a free copy of Social Media Marketing Dummies to them (second edition which just came out)

Sosolimited via The Creators Project

2012-04-07T04:55:46Z

An inspiring perspective and worth watching. This isn't about digital marketing or about social media but how Sosolimited thinks about bits and bytes is how brands need to think too.

Breaking down the Paid, Owned & Social Media Chinese Walls

2012-03-26T03:54:30Z

It is easy to forget that social media marketing has one critical challenge. You cannot scale it consistently. If your plan goes really well, it'll scale on its own. Similarly, if things go really badly your marketing efforts (much to your irritation) will probably scale too. However, there's never any guarantee as to why and when your social media marketing efforts will scale. If you're trying to reach a certain number of consumers in a certain way in a certain time period, you simply can't depend on organic social media to do so. Even the most perfect marketer cannot depend on that.

Hence the rise of Facebook and Twitter as major marketing platforms. Facebook's revenues appear to have more than doubled year over year. They realized as did many marketers that while social media marketing is critical, it alone without highly synchronized paid digital media investments won't give the consistent scale that a marketer needs to achieve business results. That's why dollars are shifting to Facebook and Twitter so dramatically. The platforms allow for organic, authentic social media engagement to be scaled up with paid investments through advertising products like Reach Generator and Promoted Trends.

This leads to another challenge though - and that's in how you do budgeting. Historically in most corporations, social media spends have been tied to digital cash budgets and separate from the digital media spends. Those budgets were aligned more tightly with the TV, Radio, OOH and Print spends. Certainly not through the same lens as the social media organic spends. In many cases, they even had different budget owners and organizational hierarchies around them.

Now the two sides of social media marketing need to be executed together and therefore the budget needs to sit in one place as does the accountability. Separating out paid digital media as a separate budget bucket from organic social media makes less and less sense. Thinking of paid, owned and social media as fundamentally different is wrong too. They're intrinsically linked. However, your organization is probably not making that change. It probably even uses different agencies to manage the different dimensions of social media marketing. That's a problem. Break down the paid, owned and social media chinese walls right now.

For more on this read the 2nd edition of Social Media Marketing for Dummies.

Interview with MediaPost on how Facebook is growing up in the eyes of marketers

2012-03-24T12:10:58Z

Pepsi is among brands that have recently updated its Facebook presence, when the social net redesigned company pages. Online Media Daily spoke to me, to discuss the upgraded brand pages, the new ad offerings and analytics tools Facebook introduced in February. Interview below.

OMD: What's your take on the new Facebook brand pages incorporating Timeline?

Singh: The first version of brand pages did not always engage consumers around a brand. This version does a few different things. One is putting the Wall front and center even more strongly -- that's a big step forward. With Timeline integrated as well, it acknowledges brands have historic, deep relationships. Having a more visual feel to the pages helps us tell our story, and engage and interact with our consumers in ways that make sense for us and for them.

OMD: What about the fact that brands can no longer set a default tab on pages to drive "Likes" for particular promotion or content?

Singh: We never felt the number of Likes was the measure of success. Facebook itself has evolved to move away from a strict Like metric as the be all and end all. We're all about emotionally connecting with our consumers. So the direction Facebook has gone makes total sense for us. We look at all these metrics closely, whether for Pepsi or Mountain Dew or any of our other brands, and all the attention is on the Wall. The Wall is what matters to consumers -- we engage with them on the greatest scale on the Wall.

]]> OMD: Shifting to the new premium ad offerings Facebook introduced, how do you view the new formats and expanded analytics?

Singh: Facebook is bringing a lot more sophistication to their paid advertising formats, and the results of them, which we never had before. You can justify a spend only to a certain extent without the appropriate metrics. Now we're getting a lot more metrics.

OMD: You mean with the addition of real-time insights for brand pages?

Singh: Yes. It actually has two parts. One is the real-time insights, and the other is the relationship with Nielsen, with the Online Campaign Ratings. It's all the stuff behind the scenes they're bringing together.

OMD: What kind of data in particular are you looking forward to getting now?

Singh: One really valuable metric, which hasn't launched yet, is when we can see in real-time how well a particular post is doing. So for the performance of a post, we can give it additional reach by adding a paid piece to it. That, I think, is a game-changer. Someone on my team might post a message on the Pepsi page and it gets a lot of organic attention -- we know its resonating with our consumers and fueling engagement. In those cases, we want to double down on it with a paid investment.

Typically, we would only see those results several hours or a day later, by which time the moment has passed and you can't scale up that communication or interaction. With the real-time insights it becomes very different.

OMD: Do you expect PepsiCo will spend more on paid advertising with Facebook as a result of the changes?

Singh: It's hard to predict because there are a lot of factors that drive our budget and media planning process. For example, it depends on which consumers we're trying to engage with, how we want to engage them, which ad units are performing in the market, and how the Facebook programs are working. But I can say, with this latest round of changes, every day we get more bullish.

OMD: Do you have any concerns about users having a negative reaction to seeing ads popping up in the News Feed, both on the desktop and in mobile?

Singh: We do a lot of marketing on scale, and what we've found is people care less about the source of the message and more about the substance of it. If we do a good job in providing valuable, meaningful content that's aligned with our brand and connects with our consumers. that wouldn't be an issue.

Super Bowl Digital Advertising Madness

2012-02-01T04:11:43Z

Super Bowl is upon us as is the advertising madness around. There are a few key themes that will hold true this year for sure and are already surfacing:

1. Releasing ads online early is becoming table-stakes. Nearly everyone seems to be doing this and with good reason. It's about building momentum into the Super Bowl typically done with a mixture of paid and organic promotions of the TV ads online.

2. The smarter advertisers are constructing narratives around teasers, the TV commercial and what should happen after the ad airs. Some are even focusing on second screen social TV experiences (we being one of those).

3. A much smaller subset of advertisers are recognizing that there's more to the Super Bowl than just the advertising or their own advertising. As a result, they have a more integrated, cohesive strategy build around the entirety of the Super Bowl experience. More will move in this direction next year.

4. Hashtag mania is taking hold. Lots of advertisers will be promoting hashtags. Many over their Facebook urls or website address. Time will tell whether these are valuable or if they get lost in the clutter of the moment. How many people will use those hashtags that are promoted?

5. Ad-meters galore for certain. Last year we got to experience lots of different ad meters. This year there are going to be even more with many varied measures of success. What's certain every advertiser will probably have at least one meter that they will be able to point to and say that they did well! In another year or two, the ad meters will reduce in number.

For more on the Super Digital mania, read this Reuters piece and this Ad Age story where our Pepsi plans are discussed (there's more detail in the Ad Age story)

Two steps forward, One step back

2012-01-11T11:36:58Z

Working with very large brands in large organizations means not knowing whether you're taking two steps forward, one step back or one step forward and two steps back in any given moment. We all like to say that there's light at the end of the tunnel but working within a marketing organization versus in an agency, the tunnel is much longer and sometimes the light can seem much further away. You're thinking about how decisions you'll make today will effect your brand three or four years hence.

Yes, we absolutely live in a real-time world and we have to be hyper-quick. But at the same time changing consumer perceptions of a brand sometimes can take years just as meaningful competitive marketshare moves take time. Influences affecting consumers are more varied, more random and less controllable than ever before too. They're also global and hyper local all at once.

It is indeed a fascinating time to be in marketing. And while some facets of marketing make it an extremely sexy discipline, others make it a more difficult discipline than ever. In this world, the adage, don't mistake motion for progress gets infinitely more complex to recognize.

TV Ads' New Digital Role, HBR Piece

2011-11-12T21:38:28Z

Television advertising has undergone significant changes in the last 30 years. However, it is arguably on the verge of its greatest changes ever. From where I sit as the Global Head of Digital at PepsiCo Beverages, charged with navigating our brand's foray into the digital world, I see three big changes:

The value we put on an advertisement will change as we seek to account for engagement metrics in the pricing.
The narrative arch will change as we think of the advertisement as a trailer versus the whole story.
Location-aware technologies will force a greater degree of engagement on a format that had historically been passive, impersonal and certainly without any extensions.

When you look at the statistics, the reasons are obvious. According to a recent study, 60% of television viewers also look at their mobile phones while watching TV shows. 33% have their laptops open in front of them and most interestingly, iPad owners spend the most time in front of the TV with their tablet than any other activity. It makes sense for TV advertisements to be thought of as an element in a broader narrative arch for the brand - a narrative arch that allows the brand to tell a more complete and a more interactive story. But what are the implications for marketers today? Read the complete post on the Harvard Business Review website and catch the earlier piece that I had written for them too.

Physio-Digital + Cause + Shopper Marketing

2011-10-28T03:29:20Z

Probably one of the most exciting parts of working at PepsiCo Beverages is in seeing the physical and digital worlds come together especially as the whole cause marketing space gets more directly integrated with brand marketing. This PepsiCo 7-Eleven program is a perfect example of that and one that I find to be awesome.

For every 20 oz. Pepsi product bought from 7-Eleven, we will donate five cents to the good cause. If the person also checks in using Facebook Places, we will double that donation. Feeding America provides emergency food assistance to those who are food insecure. Its network of food banks supply food to more than 37 million Americans each year, including 14 million children and 3 million seniors. The program is being promoted both in-store and online, with case cards on Pepsi end-caps, and advertising on Facebook and participating food bank websites.

A Love Letter from Brand Marketers to Silicon Valley (republished from Ad Age)

2011-10-27T01:40:48Z

For too long, the digital industry has looked at brands like Pepsi simply as a monetization strategy. What's worse is that sometimes our digital friends view us as being uninformed members of the digital ecosystem - something akin to prey. Not only is that perception misinformed, its going to start impacting the bottom-line of many companies in the digital ecosystem.

On the brand side, marketers cannot afford to play that role anymore. We need to show a much stronger return on all our marketing investments just as we recognize that traditional forms of marketing (ie banner ads) aren't as effective as they once were. We also understand technology better than we're often given credit for. If you treat us as your monetization strategy, you probably won't get much attention from us.

So how do we think about our roles in the digital ecosystem? I like to think of it as four key points:

The role of brands extends beyond simple advertising and is evolving towards meaningful sponsorships, content curation and creation. The way Pepsi is partnering with the X-Factor across retail, in show and online (check outPepsi Sound Off and Pepsi Pulse) is an example of this. The same applies with our Call of Duty Mountain Dew partnership. Specially marked Mountain Dew packaging will feature codes that give double XP time to players in the multi-mode of Modern Warfare 3 when the game launches in November. This isn't traditional marketing.

This piece by me was first published in Ad Age.

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The future of marketing for brands means not just playing the traditional role of sponsoring experiences created by someone else. Instead marketers need to act like startups, media companies, technology companies and of course still as brands all at once. Whether it be through our PepsiCo Beverages Digital Labs initiatives or in how we partnered with Fashion Week around the Diet Pepsi Skinny can launch acting as a mini media organization, we are already playing these roles.

Having physical products with huge distribution (we're practically in every neighborhood of America) gives us digital scale for consumer engagement. Frankly, this is scale we've had all along but that we've never really had the tools to leverage before. Suddenly, everyday, physical products have become highly leveragable assets in the digital ecosystem. Whether it's our cups in food-service partner outlets with QR codes or the ability to photograph our logos and get access to exclusive content, we can now use our unique scale in the real world for digital.

The data that we are gathering now when linked to offline data gives us a view into consumers that we never had before. Last summer we ran the largest Foursquare check-in program with people around the country being able to check in at fun summer locations to get a Pepsi Summer badge. Think about the location data we've been able to capture there and how valuable it is when we co-relate it to sales data per location.

It is time for the technology industry to think more about how to work with us to build things, rather than attempt to sell us a finished product we don't need and never asked for. Indeed, perhaps its time for tech to learn a thing or two from marketers. As brands, we need to engage our consumers more deeply and more meaningfully in ways that enrich their lives and drive fierce loyalty to our brands. Traditional advertising is no longer enough to do that.

As a result, we need new kinds of partnerships where brands and technology companies co-create experiences for consumers that benefit everyone. If we are brought into the picture right at the end in a simplistic fashion, we will struggle to extract decent business value from those relationships. How will you partner with us in the future?

Note: This piece was first published in Ad Age.

Marketing in Steve Jobs own words. From 1997

2011-10-08T03:49:44Z

Enough said. Via Ad Age.

Google+ The Real-Time Marketing Promise

2011-08-01T02:04:10Z

Having played around with Google+ for a few weeks now, here are my raw thoughts on the social platform and its role in the Real-Time Marketing world. Some of these thoughts made it into this Ad Age story for which I was interviewed last week.

Finally a Google social networking bet that has a chance of surviving. There's no question, this is Google's best bet ever in the social networking space. There have been so many false starts and half hearted efforts that I had begun to wonder whether Google could every crack this space. The reason why things are different this time - rather than incubating the product in isolation in Google Labs, from the get-go Google+ is integrated into the rest of the Google ecosystem through single sign on, the navigation bar and the ability to add in contacts and friends. There's a lot more integration to do but it works effectively as a real-time stream of content being shared to you and from you based on social context.
Google's challenge is that we simply do not know how Google+ fits into our lives. Maybe Google+ been intentionally silent on that for a good reason. Facebook has become part of our digital habit -- I sit down for a cup of coffee in the morning and I go on Facebook to scan my newsfeed. I find some really compelling content while surfing the web and I tweet about it to the world. It's not clear if Google wants Google+ to be an add-on to my digital habits or a replacement. A lot of people -- the 20 million people who are playing around on Google+ are asking themselves that question. The funny thing is that Google+ has the best of Facebook and the best of Twitter -- you have the ability to broadcast and select closed groups who should receive that broadcast. So is it meant to be a bridge between the two but do we really need that? Targeting for brands in a real-time fashion this way is extremely powerful.
Google + misses a true radical innovation opportunity but all is not lost. Google's historic strength has been its search engine algorithms and its blistering fast, technology backbone. Simply speaking, it has the best scientists and its algorithms are unmatched. That's why its the undisputed leader in search. But in Google+ I have to manually find my friends and add them to circles manually. It is time consuming and can quickly get overwhelming managing all of these friends and circles.

If I could log in and have Google+ make recommendations based on how I have interacted with people in the past that would be valuable. The home run would be if they could add a "Suggested Circles" functionality that helps me manage my networks. They do something similar in gmail today with "Important first" and the "Priority Inbox" functionality, so this wouldn't be a big step for them. After all, who wants to go about adding friends and categorizing them yet again. To take that thought a step further, Google+ could also suggest brands and products in a similar fashion.
Google+ can really work for brand marketers if we're given the right tools. From a brand perspective two things matter most - knowing where, when and how we can engage meaningfully with our consumers and in turn being mindful of how they'd like us to engage with them. As marketers, we absolutely want to find ways to engage with our consumers on Google+ that are organic to the Google+ philosophy and in ways that consumers are using the platform. But to be effective we need very strong analytics. We have to be smart in how we engage -- we can't be everywhere or do everything, so we need analytics that help us make decisions on how and where to best reach our consumers at moments in time when we matter. Google has said that when they do launch brand pages they will have strong analytics. Google understands brands because they have worked closely with us on search and they know what analytics we need, so I am happy to wait for that.

Keeping in mind the importance of people's privacy, we'd also want to know psychographic information about who are engaging. This is not an anonymous platform, so we always have to respect that. If Pepsi could reach out on Google+ and engage a Pepsi fan and then also be able to engage with their friend circle or their work circle that would be a win. In the end we want to participate in a way that makes sense for the platform, consumers and the brand.
Google+ functions effectively as a real-time sharing engine. There's no question in my mind that Google+ is strongest as a real-time content sharing engine for me to push out specific pieces of content to specific people circles. Google+ integrates more seamlessly with YouTube, Google Photos and Google Music as Ian Schafer emphasized in an Ad Age piece. That is its greatest strength. Its something that I cannot do with Twitter (lists are for viewing tweets from select people not for sharing out tweets to groups) and while I could do it with Facebook, the people management feature has gotten cumbersome. It is also symmetrical limiting me from controlling distribution the way I may want to.
Google + streams are very different to the Facebook newsfeed. That's an advantage. If someone gave me one wish in the world, I'd probably use it to understand how Facebook's edge rank system actually worked. Like the Google search algorithm its a black box and I'm not exactly sure how many users (and which users) may see a specific post of from one of my brands. From a marketing standpoint, that's a bit of a problem.

However, in the case of Google+ everything published appears in the stream in chronological fashion. I have a much better sense of what a user will see. Now, this can certainly get overwhelming but there's absolute clarity in terms of what will make it into a user's feed. You could argue that the Google model is simplistic and not scalable but what's certain is that it forces you to take those circles seriously. And for Google that's a good thing and for marketer's it makes Google + more valuable.

It's going to be fascinating watching the evolution of Google+ To get 20 million people to play with it in a manner of weeks is no joke. The social network is definitely off to a good start but there's obviously a lot more to do to create true stickiness of the Facebook variety. One thing is for sure, if Google were to integrate the Google+ stream and comments into its search engine algorithm, that alone may provide enough incentive for a lot more people to take it even more seriously. Only time will tell whether Google decides to go in that direction or not.

When a trillion impressions aren't enough

2011-07-24T04:32:27Z

There's a much ignored side effect of the social media phenomena. A side effect that has immense ramifications for the marketing world but gets no attention whatsoever. An effect that we as an industry must pay much more attention to. Otherwise, we're at risk of trivializing what we do, hurting each other's interests whether that be advertiser, agency, publisher or consumer related and wasting millions in marketing dollars.

I call it the trillion impressions problem. Largely thanks to the social media phenomena, we now live in a world which has many billions more (if not trillions) brand related media impressions that can be monetized in some form or the other. Most of these additional impressions are driven by the fact that consumers now are the ultimate marketers endorsing brands, advocating for them and talking about them across the social networks. It's a because customers are creating customers.

But there's a problem with these trillions of media impressions about brands. We don't know what they're worth and we're not putting enough thinking into understanding their value especially as triggers for deeper engagement. We're not putting enough effort into figuring this out. Instead we have every media company and startup trying to selling brands a new kind of impression without anyone helping companies understand their worth.

For example, I cannot accurately quantify the value of a Pepsi display banner advertising impression versus a paid search impression, a mainstream news story about Pepsi impression, a FourSquare check-in impression at a Pepsi location, a Get Glue impression of a Pepsi branded sticker, or a Facebook edge ranked surfaced newsfeed impression of something the brand is doing. I'm not even sure if the Pepsi target consumer is seeing these impressions. I also don't know exactly which is more important, how do they influence brand affinity and which drive purchases the most. And this is just the beginning of it. What I do know however, is that every publisher, technology company and many an agency wants to sell me a lot of these new brand media impressions that are now in our ecosystem without anyone knowing or assigning an accurate relative value to them.

And that's the problem. Marketing budgets haven't grown at the same pace, and we have no way of qualifying the relative value of one type of brand impression in the media ecosystem to another. We also do not have the tools in place to tell us which type of impressions lead to the greatest consumer engagement and do the most to drive brand equity, brand health and sales of products.

Just because there's a lot more to buy, it doesn't mean we can or more importantly, we should. Let's not forget the basics. A trillion impressions are worthless if they don't move a business forward.

Do $185,000 Domain Names make sense?

2011-06-26T11:41:40Z

Last week I was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal for a piece about the new branded domain names that ICANN announced. Starting in 2012, companies or individuals will be able to apply for custom domain names that instead of ending with ".com" or ".uk" would end with ".brand" like dot pepsi or dot mountaindew. It'll cost $185,000. Here's my more unfiltered take:

I'm not convinced this is a good decision. Yes, it is a more branded domain name but it causes confusion among consumers. For every brand that forks out the money for a branded domain, there will be two that don't.
The pricing seems atrocious. I'm not sure where ICANN got the $185,000 figure from but it appears that the business community wasn't consulted. $185,000 is a lot of money and ICAAN appears to be trading on the insecurities that digital marketers may have about their brands.
It also seems that ICANN wishes they had benefited more directly from the domain name squatting gold rush of the 1990s and are now trying to make up for it. From a industry standpoint, I don't think it makes sense. And nor does Esther Dyson, former ICANN chairwoman.
Other domain name formats have come and gone in the past but they've failed. Remember dot biz and all those domain names that were actually meant for tiny countries? With dot com and the country domain names we have a standard. It's a vocabulary people are used to.
ICANN is supposed to be in the business of reducing digital confusion and making findability of websites easier. They say this will unleash global imagination.This does the exact opposite. Even Google thinks so.
ICANN seems to have confused the opportunities to have more top level domain names with the specific needs of marketers. I can maybe understand the value in having more top level domain names for generic topics like shoes but pushing brands into that space is a mistake. Read this insightful interview with a former ICAAN Chairman for more.
I can only imagine the copyright and trademark infringement issues that will arise in January. Without clear rules around this, we could have a lot of chaos.

I think this is a mistake and most importantly, it is guaranteed to cause user confusion. It'll also cause angst among marketers like myself who feel pressure to fork out the money to purchase a domain name. Similar to the whole net neutrality debate, we as an Internet community, are running the risk of enacting laws, policies and guidelines that hurt the Internet rather than help it over the long term.

Update: @38enso said it best in a tweet reply to my post. - Content drives traffic not URL name. That matters the most.

Conversational Marketing Summit Presentation

2011-06-21T03:13:54Z

Here's the video of my Real-Time Marketing presentation from the Conversational Marketing Summit. Enjoy.

View more videos from CM Summit: Marketing in Real Time

Your 30 Billion Competitors

2011-06-10T11:20:22Z

I work in one of the most hyper-competitive industries that keeps getting more competitive. 30 billion times more. That's roughly the number of status updates published each month on Facebook. Arguably, by the end of the year that number may have doubled or quadrupled.

Lifestyle brands compete with those 30 billion status updates for attention, relevance, interest and mindshare everyday. It's the new battleground. If the brands I work with were mentioned meaningfully in just 5.0% of those status updates, it would change my business dramatically. Brands succeed when they have cultural resonance and whether it is Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Sierra Mist, AMP Energy, SoBe or Propel, those 30 billion status updates are the competition, more competition than another beverage company.

We live in a world where everyone and everything has become media. Brands, people, objects and technology are all media in some form competing with each other for attention and for the attention of each other. That's the world we live in. Knowing how to compete in this new world order on a global scale and in ways that benefit your brands is worth having many sleepless nights about.