4. Kevin Kelly, “1,000 True Fans”
A True Fan is defined as someone name.
who will purchase anything and They bookmark the eBay page
everything you produce. where your out-of-print editions
They will drive 200 miles to see show up. They come to your
you sing. They will buy the super openings.
deluxe re-issued hi-res box set They have you sign their copies.
of your stuff even though they They buy the t-shirt, and the
have the low-res version. They mug, and the hat. They can't wait
have a Google Alert set for your till you issue your next work. They
are true fans.
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php
3
5. We use brands to tell a story about ourselves.
MUFC Harley Davidson Legend of Zelda
Playboy Apple Nike
Some brands are easier to co-opt than others
4
6. The spectrum of fandom
Mad Love Really Like Fairly Oblivious Actively Dislike
5
7. Superfans: True Fans with body paint & tattoos…
This fan… …creates the space for
these fans to exist
6
8. But I’m only talking about Facebook Fans
Not “True Fans”
Not “Superfans”
But “Facebook Fans”
7
9. Why is Facebook so important?
1000 Facebook growth: users and 100
estimated market cap
800 80
600 60
Facebook users (millions)
400 40
Facebook valuation ($bn)
200 20
0 0
Dec 04 Dec 05 Dec 06 Dec 07 Dec 08 Dec 09 Dec 10 Dec 11
Data: Facebook, VentureBeat, SharesPost, SecondMarket
8
10. European Web Usage
85 billion
user
minutes/mo
nth
Data: comScore EMEA August 2011
9
11. European Web Usage
163 billion
page
views/mont
h
Data: comScore EMEA August 2011
10
12. The most-loved brands on Facebook last week
Brand Fans • November 2007;
Coca-Cola 35,017,182 Facebook introduces
Starbucks 25,747,572 Pages
Oreo 23,271,622
Red Bull 22,673,250 • “We’ve built a way for you
Converse All Star 20,883,240 to connect to things other
Converse 20,410,948 than people”
Skittles 19,460,585
Pringles 15,855,303 • Effectively sets strategy
Monster Energy 12,504,459 for Brand Advertisers for
adidas Originals 11,273,177
next 4 years.
11
14. I won’t insult your intelligence…
(Of course it does. Now I can go home.)
13
15. The costs are fairly simple
Annual cost of
Annual cost Community
of Recruitment Management
Fans
14
16. Value is more complex
Valuation Method Publisher Date
$3.60 Media Vitrue Apr 2010
Value
$71.84 Incr. Spend Syncapse Jun 2010
$136.38 Agg. Value Syncapse Jun 2010
$2.53 Incr. Sales EventBrite Oct 2010
470% Incr. Spend WFA/Millward Brown/ Mar 2011
Dynamic Logic
$2.10 Incr. Sales Spinback May 2011
15
17. Why Brands like Fans
Sign of my brand’s popularity
Source of insight
Generate increased engagement with brand
Generate increased short-term spend
Generate increased long-term spend
Increased loyalty
Increased advocacy/recommendation
Source: SMG London Client Interviews
16
18. Why Brands like Fans
Earned Media Value
Direct Sales/Sales Promotion
Brand Preference Metrics
17
21. And where that model goes wrong:
Daily Active Users
Reach Pages reach between 5% and 20% of their fans
1m fans may mean 50K Daily Active Users
Frequency Smart advertisers cap frequency to avoid burnout
DAUs are exposed multiple times
Result? Hard to value this way – but let’s dig deeper
20
22. How people use a Facebook Page (real client data)
Audience Activity Day Part Week Day Competitor Activity
See Brand Ignore, Like See/Don’t
Like Page Post in or See Future
News Feed Comment Posts
Like source First exposure Responders Ongoing Exposure
0.6% 11%
36%
99%
0.6% attributed to Estimate Comments + Likes DAU
“on Page” Likes Total
DAU 21
Fans
23. Post engagement by hour and day
(most responsive days highlighted)
To May 2011 Since May 2011
60 40
30
Count of Posts by Hour
40
20
20 10
- -
0 6 12 18 0 6 12 18
80 40
60 30
Count of Posts by Day
40 20
20 10
0 0
Mon Thu Sun Mon Thu Sun
Single client data. Your mileage will vary
24. The effect of EdgeRank
åuwd e e e
edges e
EdgeRank
See Brand Ignore, Like See/Don’t
Like Page Post in or See Future
News Feed Comment Posts
Like source First exposure Responders Ongoing Exposure
0.6% 11%
36%
Key take-out: if you don’t use them, you lose them
99%
0.6% attributed to Estimate Comments + Likes DAU
“on Page” Likes Total
DAU 23
Fans
25. Could we earn more value by posting more often?
• 80% of responses within 3 50%
91.4%
hours. 40%
• 90% within 6 hours
30%
• (There’s a small blip after 24
hours: engaged/non-daily users) 20%
• What does this imply about 10%
how often the page could
0%
post?
0 6 12 18 24 30 36 42 48
• How does post frequency Elapsed Hours
impact other KPIs? %age responses cumulative
24
26. Impressions & Reach grow strongly inline
with post frequency
15.5 -1.4
y = 1.108x + 11.63
15
R² = 0.943 -1.6
14.5
y = 0.400x - 2.346
-1.8 R² = 0.530
14
ln(7-day rolling imps)
13.5 -2
ln(reach)
13 -2.2
12.5
-2.4
12
-2.6
11.5
11 -2.8
0 1 2 3 4 0 0.5 1 1.5
ln(7-day rolling posts) ln(posts)
25
27. ..but Unlikes increase, too
• Nearly all Unlikes are a response to 7.5
post activity*
y = 0.459x + 5.523
R² = 0.577
• Post frequency seems to lead to fan 7
attrition:
ln(7-day rolling unsubs)
Increase from 1 to 2 posts = 46% 6.5
increase in Unlikes.
• Recent f8 changes suggest that 6
users may increasingly hide posts
rather than Unlike the page:
5.5
This should have a long term impact
on DAU/Reach – but Post
engagement may increase and 5
Unlikes decrease. 0 1 2 3 4
ln(7-day rolling posts)
26
28. Why direct media value isn’t enough
Incremental media value, not cost
reduction
Fan audiences remain small vs. total
target audience
Impressions not a proxy for subsequent
user behaviour or revenue growth
27
33. Indirect Media Value: Homophily & Social Proof
Nielsen BrandLift
Ad Exposure Social Ad Exposure Social Ad + Organic
+30%
+16%
+13%
+10%
+8% +8% +8%
+4%
+2%
Recall Awareness Purchase Intent
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/nielsenfacebook-ad-report/
32
34. How to make Media Valuation work for you
Remove focus from Fan growth at any cost
Reach/Frequency
Focus on
Sharing
Engagement
Integration with campaigns
Audience quality
Efficiencies & cost reductions
33
36. Why people “Like” Brand Pages on Facebook
To receive discounts and promotions 40%
To show my support for the company… 37%
To get a "freebie" 36%
To stay informed about the activities… 34%
To get updates on future products 33%
To get updates on upcoming sales 30%
For fun and entertainment 27%
To get access to exclusive content 25%
Someone recommended it to me 22%
To learn more about the company 21%
For education about company topics 13%
To interact (e.g. share ideas, provide… 12%
Data: ExactTarget/CoTweet September 2010
35
37. Example from a major multiple
493 Clicks 3,008 Clicks
£5 Off Code Half Price Sale
Tesco Data is in public domain courtesy of Bit.ly
36
38. Online Retailer
130,000 Clicks
Live Sale
ASOS data is in public domain courtesy of Bit.ly
37
39. How to make DR Valuation work for you
Obsessive Tracking Use [[Google Analytics]] (insert own choice)
Combine with (branded) short links
Track individual channels and posts/tweets
Form & test hypotheses
Learn from other channels
Optimise Earned Media Reach
Metrics Frequency
Sharing
Engagement
Audience quality
Efficiencies & cost reductions
38
41. Building loyalty. One fan at a time.
Customer Services does one-to-one
Marketing doesn’t 40
42. Social Interactions appear to impact brand metrics
SMBI: Impact on Brand Metrics
Visit Only Visit + Action
+78% +79% +79% +81% +82%
+74%
+41% +43%
+31% +34% +35%
+28%
SMBI is a Starcom MediaVest Product
41
43. What did we learn from the SMBI study?
Sharing/recommending is the key action we should
seek
Not simply because it reaches others…
..but because it’s a public commitment
…and has high impact on future
preference/behaviour
42
44. How to make Brand Metrics Valuation work for you
Invest in market research to justify activity
Compare across multiple channels
Optimise content and earned media metrics for
sharing
43
45. Don’t have to Like a Page to engage & share…
People want to
promote
themselves, and
they’re prepared
to let Brands
help.
Make the content
about them, and
they’ll share it.
44
47. Why do people become Fans?
To receive discounts and promotions 40%
To show my support for the company to others 37%
To get a "freebie" 36%
To stay informed about the activities of a… 34%
Mostly, they’re “Subscribers”
To get updates on future products33%
or “Permissions”, and not 30%
Tp get updates on upcoming sales “Fans”
For fun and entertainment 27%
To get access to exclusive content 25%
Should this make us think?
Someone recommended it to me22%
To learn more about the company 21% “Truly social”
For education about company topics 13%
To interact (e.g. share ideas, provide…
Channel duplication
12%
Data: ExactTarget/CoTweet September 2010
46
48. What if we unbundled the user journey?
From a consecutive model …to parallel streams
Fan acquisition & MGM
MGM & Sharing
Fan acquisition
Engagement
DR
Engage
DR
Sequential Parallel
• Orthodox model insists • Allow users to interact
Question: Does every brand need to maintain
that users “join with brand on own terms
community” before • Increased
a day-to-day relationship? focus on
receiving benefits Performance Marketing
or Brand Metrics
47
49. Caveat
Facebook changes fast & often
Marketers must be prepared to change minds
and direction
Seemingly established models are only 12 or
24 months old
Smart marketers are asking questions about
value of their fans
48
50. How is it changing?
Owned Space
Your
Your Your Site
Apps Pages
CRM messages
Your
Places
Social Signals
Your
Apps
Targeting Data
Friends
Fans
of Fans
User Data
Targets Your
Traffic eCRM
49
51. It’s less about your brand on Facebook,
more about putting Facebook in your brand comms
• Used in varying ways by
publishers
(HuffPo, Independent, TechCru
nch, Travelocity), retailers
(Amazon, ASOS), and
advertisers
(Aviva, Intel, Heineken Group)
• Recent f8 announcements
make it even more important to
begin integrating Facebook
elements into your site.
50
52. Are we looking at this the right way?
Valuation Approach Publisher Date
$3.60 Media Vitrue Apr 2010
Value
$71.84 Incr. Spend Syncapse Jun 2010
$136.38 Agg. Value Syncapse Jun 2010
$2.53 Incr. Sales EventBrite Oct 2010
470% Incr. Spend WFA/Millward Brown/ Mar 2011
Dynamic Logic
$2.10 Incr. Sales Spinback May 2011
51
53. So for our purposes, is a fan…
Someone who engages with your content?
Someone who promotes your products?
Someone who promotes your content?
Someone who buys your product?
Someone who becomes content for campaign?
52
Editor's Notes
So there's this social media revolution going on around us. Everything has changed. We need to change the way we think about everything.Only this doesn't help advertisers allocate their budgets. And if you're an advertiser or a planner, the way you allocate your budgets will play a big part of your ultimate success or failure.Everything may have changed, but we still need to be able to compare apples with apples.We can't just pretend that social media valuations exist in a vacuum. We need to find ways that we can relate them back to familiar metrics.One of the biggest questions that we have to deal with is "what's the value of a fan"? This is the most divisive questions in Social Media planning.
Let's take a step back. What do we mean when we say "Fan"?
Here's a definition from Kevin Kelly - from a brilliant blog post that you should all read when you have time.## Read QuoteThat's instructive, but unless you're a musician or anartist that's probably not relevant.
What motivates people to become a fan of something? Briefly, fandom helps us tell a story about ourselves, about who we are and where we belong. They are badges we adopt to identify ourselves as individuals, and as part of a group.
Of course, there's a whole spectrum of fandom. What you should notice here is that most people just don't care very much.Another way of looking at it is that you can only reasonably be a fan of one or two things. Otherwise you're not really a proper fan, are you? For example, how many football teams could you support and still call yourself a supporter?This is interesting for marketers; we're mostly used to targeting and engaging with the fat belly of the distribution curve, and not the mad bits at the edges.
Here's an interesting thing. Those people with the mad love create the space for the ordinary fans to exist. The more mad fans you have, the more you'll find that your average fan population grows. You could argue, for example that the existence of a few hardcore Apple fans makes it possible for lots of other people to call themselves Apple fans. After all, no-one calls themselves a Dell fan, or an HP fan.Have you noticed how people will take their iPhones out in meetings or at a bar or restaurant and *put them on the table*? No one does that with a Nokia.So these Superfans create the space for this behaviour.It would be good if we could create a measurement for that; if we could understand the correlation and causality.
This is all very interesting, but that's not what I'm here to talk about. I'm not talking about True Fans or Superfans, but about Facebook fans. Statistically speaking, Facebook fans aren't True Fans or Superfans. So why am I talking about Facebook? What's so important about Facebook?
Well, for one thing, Facebook is very big. It's currently valued at around $100 per active user, and it has around 800 million users. That whole "value per user" is all very late nineties, isn't it? All very dot com boom. A bit devalued.But Facebook’s numbers are BIG
Just looking at Europe, Facebook accounts for 85 BILLION European user minutes per month. If you were to go back in time 85 billion minutes, then the Neanderthals and wooly mammoths would still be around.
And those users consume 163 billion page views.That circle there is Google. And that one is Vkontakte.
So brands are understandably interested in how we capture a share of that audience attention.About 4 years ago, Facebook introduced advertising and brand pages.They told their users "we've built a way for you to connect to things other than people". What they meant was "now you can tell people WHOyou are based on WHATyou like." Fan Pages were originally intended to be a bit like t-shirts, mugs and tattoos.Brand Pages are free to build. When Facebook introduced them, they effectively set brands' Facebook marketing strategy for the next 4 years.We were going to make people LIKE our Page.
So now, four years later, Brands are beginning to ask this question: “I’ve got all these fans. Which is great. But what are they worth to my business as a marketing asset?”
Now I could just tell you that every business case is different. This is a great answer that you’ll hear from time to time. You can’t fault it. It’s true.But it’s not very instructive, is it?If I tell you this at any point in the presentation or the Q&A you have my permission to throw stuff at me.I want to give you some framework for thinking about and answering the question; three simple general approaches. And I’ll try to tell you how to make the most of each of these approaches.
When Facebook introduced Pages, it decided that they would be freeBut it still costs money to recruit fans and it costs money to maintain that community.So we know what our cost-per-fan. That's fairly simple.
But when it comes to public Value of a Fan studies, there's a massive discrepancy. How can this be?Actually, let's get rid of these two -- even though analysts refer to them as "Value of a Fan" they're actually just sales referral values; nobody became anyone's fan in those calculations.
When we started in this space, we asked some of our clients why they wanted fans. Here's what it boiled down to. There are some good reasons here; and we shouldn't dismiss the top one. It’s not stupid.
We can reduce those reasons even further to this short list. We want to value our fans by:- the value of the Earned Media that they deliver- the value of the sales that we can directly attribute to our fans- and how recruiting fans improves brand measures like preference and likelihood to purchase
Let's look at these in more detail
Here's that Earned Media Value model that Vitrue published last year.The calculation's fairly straightforward - But I won't waste time reading it out to you -- it'll be in your packs.# http://www.vitrue.com/360-facebook-fan-valuation-is-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg# http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/value-fan-social-media-360-102063
Instead I'll touch on how that model falls apart.Most importantly - brand posts don't reach every fan. We find that only 5-20% of fans receive the impression.When we're planning media campaigns, we try to cap frequency. That avoids wastage and burnout. We've no control over how often Daily Average Users are exposed.That's OK, but it's hard to value those subsequent impressions as much as we'd value the first ones.Are 20 impressions against 50K users the same as (say) 2 impressions against 500K?I'd like to take you on a bit of a detour now to look at how this works.
This is a very simplified model that shows how fans interact with Facebook Pages.This is taken from real client data.And here are some real client numbers.What you need to see here is that users see and engage with Brand content on their News Feeds. They don't really visit the Page very often.And one of the key factors controlling whether they see that content is timing.Are they online and active when you post your content?How many other voices are competing for their attention? That's partly other brands, but most of the competition comes from their Facebook friends' photos and status updates.# Like Source: At least 36% of Likes in the past 6 months have come from Advertising. 0.6% attributed to “from Page”# First exposure: assumes that (since recency has a heavy impact on EdgeRank) that 100% of posts get to News Feed, but that not everyone is there to see them. Early stage pages show very high correspondence between DAU and Total Fans.# Data: Facebook Insights for Client A during 100 day period from1 June to 8 September 2011
So we pay particular attention to timing. Here's some before and after charts that show how one of our clients has responded; We found that audiences were more active, and more likely to engage at weekends -- so they've upped their posting activity on Saturday and Sunday.Timing isn't everything; it's only half the story.# Poststo May n=286# Posts since May n=216# For this analysis, we analysed Comment engagement only; for robust EdgeRankoptimisation, we are increasingly recommending looking at Like engagement.
Facebook uses an algorithm called EdgeRank to try to make the stories that appear in your News Feed as relevant and interesting as possible. I hope you're all at least vaguely familiar with this, but if not, I'm happy to chat about it afterwards.Here’s the thing: Facebook owns the relationship between you and your Fans. That relationship lives as a record in THEIR database, not yours. And Facebook decides what’s interesting to your fans and what isn’t – not you. Facebook owns the content that your fans post on your Wall, and the rights to anything that you post there. If you haven’t read the Terms & Conditions you signed when you created your Page, now might be a good time!For now, the thing I want you to understand about EdgeRank for now is that -- if users don't engage with your content, EdgeRank will - over time - show them less of your content, till they no longer see any of your content at all.That's how you can have 1m fans, but only reach (say) 200K of them.
The Vitrue model assumed that Pages were posting twice a day, every day of the week. Our own research shows that our clients' posts have an active window of engagement between 3-6 hours long.That implies that we could profitably increase impressions by posting twice in a day.And if we were chasing Earned Media Value, then more impressions = more value.So there’s a lot of pressure to increase frequency.What might the impact of that be?
Our research shows that it has a strong impact on impressions; if we double our post frequency, we more than double our impressions.Reach grows too; less strongly, and there's an upper limit – only a certain portion of your audience will be online in any given day.
But unsubscribes also increase sharply. If we increase post frequency, we have to be prepared for fan attrition.# A Page that never posts will likely maintain its fan base – but to what end?
Here are our big problems with the Vitrue model;- This is incremental media value. It's not like we're saving media budgets. So we can't count that as real ROI- Fan audiences are small relative to our total target audiences.Even Coca Cola only has 35m fans -- and in theory they have a global audience of 7 billion people. So that’s 0.5% of their audience they can reach through Facebook Of course, because of EdgeRank they can only reach a minority of those fans.And how much does Coca Cola NEED to advertise to people theycall Fans? How much more Coca Cola can these people drink? - Thirdly, impressions aren't a proxy for incremental revenue growth. Media impressions need to be carefully planned to have any value. One impression is not the same as another.
That's the bad news. Here's the good. Social Media is all about taking advantage of homophily and social proof. What's that?
We all prefer to hang around with people like ourselves -- that's homophily. You instinctively prefer the company of people who share your values and beliefs and preferences.# If more than 1.89% of your Facebook friends are gay... then you probably are too# Jernigan, Carter, Mistree, Behram. "Gaydar: Facebook friendships expose sexual orientation" First Monday [Online], Volume 14 Number 10 (25 September 2009) http://bit.ly/8YTy2X# Photo: William Murphy http://www.fotopedia.com/users/infomatique (CC Attrib/Sharealike)
And conversely, a lot of our decisions are based on unconsciously copying our friends, their values, beliefs and behaviours.This self-reinforcing behaviour is very important for advertisers.# 171% increased risk of obesity if your close friend is obese# ‘The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years’: Christakis & Fowler, (New England Journal of Medicine, July 26 2007)http://bit.ly/9TcH3W
Because it allows us to find more people like our fans. And it allows us to use social cues from fans to make our messages stronger, more noticeable.For example, targeting friends of fans with increases our media efficiency by around 20%.And running Facebook's sponsored stories (where the message comes from the friend, and not from the brand) increases efficiency by between 300% and 400%
Here's the output of some famous Nielsen research:- Facebook ads improve brand metrics, but not as much as Facebook Ads that contain a friend's name. It seems that peoples' eyes may naturally be drawn towards their friends' names, and dwell there a little longer.And if there's an organic impression, a spontaneous, untargeted earned impression, that seems to improve brand measures further.# 800,000 Facebook users in response to more than 125 Facebook ad campaigns from 70 brand advertisers# http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/nielsenfacebook-ad-report/
So here's my advice about how to make the Earned Media Valuation work for you;- Don't focus on fan growth at any cost.- But DO focus on the fundamentals, and on what makes social interesting. Look at how you can encourage sharing.SHARINGis very important. Focus on fans as a means of reaching friend-of-fans.
Let's take a look at the Direct Response value.
After all, survey data shows that a good proportion of fans Like a Page so that they can be alerted with news and deals. We should be able to convert some of that interest to value.# http://www.exacttarget.com/subscribers-fans-followers/facebook-x-factors.aspx
Here are some casual examples - not from my clients. Tesco regularly posts deal links on its Facebook Page. They seem to drive a lot of traffic; some of that has to convert. So Tesco can begin to work out some kind of Average Lifetime Value for their Facebook fans.Obviously it has to be Average Lifetime Value because Facebook owns the relationship; Tesco can’t segment or target. But it’s still good.
Here's a lovely example. ASOS, an online clothes retailer, got 130K clicks in a single day when they ran their live sale last weekend. That's pretty impressive.You’ll see that they were offering dresses for £1 – but believe me ASOS aren’t in this business to be generous fools. You can bet they were making money off the back end.
Here's how you make Direct Response values work for you.Track everything.Make sure that you use unique links, and that those links pass campaign data to Google Analytics (or whatever site analytics package you're using.) Never use the same link twice. Track source, message, campaign.And make sure that you continue to optimise your Earned Media metrics.Focus on being able to compare your performance here to other non-social channels. How does your fan base compare?
Of course, if you've not got an e-Commerce (or a publishing) business, this isn't going to mean anything to you.You'll want to focus on brand measures.
1-to-1 engagement is great. Here's an example from some activity we ran for our national bakery client, Hovis earlier in the year.That personal touch is great; it's really meaningful, and has tremendous impact.Only no-one sees it.I'd argue that this is a customer service role. Customer service is a brand attribute, it's part of the product that people offer. Tony Hsieh at Zappos built it into his business; everyone in the company has to spend some time on Customer Service. As a result, he was able to cut back his marketing costs massively. Customer Service is great, but it's not what I'm talking about.
So we've been running a series of major surveys across Brands "Leased Spaces" -- Twitter, YouTube, Facebook.And what we find confirms others' research: people who engage with a brand show improved measures against brand metrics compared to people who only visit those spaces.Which sounds like common sense; and which continues to leave us open to the question - "Is this a causal relationship? Do they engage because they like you, or do they like you because they engage?"We've got smart people working on that question.But we now have access to a level of granularity that's useful when it comes to planning activity.# Basedon a survey of 6,000 regular Facebook/YouTube/Twitter users
And that granularity tells us that what we REALLYwant people to do is share our content or recommend our product. It's about making a public declaration.Psychologists will tell you that people want to behave in a consistent manner (it's all to do with preserving a sense of self.)Previous behaviour isn't just a predictor of future behaviour: if I have committed to something on a small scale, I'm likely to eventually commit to that same something on a larger scale in order to be consistent to myself.So asking people for a small public commitment is a fairly secure method of confirming their brand preference.Essentially we can create fans simply by asking them to identify themselves as fans.This is social media at its BEST.
What do you need to make the Brand Metrics Valuation work?You need to invest in market research. And you need to be able to compare your social media research with your press and TV and PR market research. Otherwise, I'd argue, you're just taking a shot in the dark.And - again - you need to optimise your earned media metrics; with a strong focus on how people are SHARING your content and messages.
Now -- just to make things a bit interesting, I think it's worth pointing out that someone doesn't need to be a Facebook fan in order to share your content.These are four examples of brilliantly shareable content. They all use the same method, more or less; they allow the user to make the story about themselves, and not the Brand.Remember those tattoos from the beginning of the presentation?Remember Facebook's initial reasons for allowing users to connect to Brands?To tell stories about THEMSELVES. Not to tell stories about the brands.These four examples all make great use of Facebook. And only one of them (the Aviva case) insists that you become a fan first.They all care more about the Share. About the Brand action.# Intel: Museum of Me# Heineken Group: Desperados# Aviva: You are the Big Picture# Orange: Glastotag
So where does this leave us?
Let's take a look at this survey data again. We should notice that only two of the reasons given are "Truly Social" -- the others are a bit self-centred.Arguably, the other reasons could apply equally well to (say) subscribing to an email list. It's all old-think. Not new-think.These people are subscribers; only they're subscribers whose data you don't own.Look at the Terms & Conditions of your Facebook Page. Facebook - quite rightly - owns the data, and the relationship.Through EdgeRank, Facebook controls which of your fans see your content, and which don't.Should this make us think?
On the left is the traditional Social Media funnel. If we follow that, we recruit people in at the top of the funnel, keep them engaged, then occasionally try to sell them something.On the right is an alternative way of looking at things. What if some brands are making a mistake with all this fan stuff? What if we unbundled the user journey?For example, what if we DIDN'T insist that they became a fan before they engaged with our content, or bought our products, or recommended us to a friend? What then?Here's the big question - does every brand need to maintain a day-to-day relationship? Because in this competitive world, in a world where your Facebook Page automatically becomes a new customer service channel that needs maintaining in public, and with EdgeRank breathing down your back, day-to-day is what it takes to maintain a Page
Here's more for you to think about:Facebook has changed almost beyond recognition since they introduced Pages 4 years ago. Remember that graph?Back then they only had 50m users. Not 800m. Back then, MySpace was worth $65bn. Facebook was barely a fraction of that.I'd argue that Facebook has begun quietly to change the rules. And smart marketers need to change along with that.
Here's how Facebook used to be: you had all your leased spaces, Pages, Places, Apps INSIDE Facebook, where your audience was.Today, Facebook provides a platform that lets you connect Facebook to your Owned spaces OUTSIDE Facebook.You can pass data and communications back and forth between the two spaces. You don't even need to have a Facebook Page to make Facebook work for you. In fact, if you're thinking about Fan recruitment, that may even be holding you back!
So it's not about building your brand on Facebook. It's about building Facebook into your brand's products, services and communications; and about understanding how you tie your Paid and Earned Media together.
Before I dismissed the valuations from EventBrite and Spinback because they weren't really about fans.What they are is a valuation based on incremental sales delivered through the Facebook sharing mechanisms built into their sites.These are reports of REAL money being made by REAL businesses, not interesting models and theory.Was I wrong to dismiss these?
I'd like to leave you with a thought.Is a fan someone who likes you on Facebook?Or is it someone who engages with your content?Or someone who buys your product?Or someont who promotes your contentOr your product?Or is it someone who by using your content to promote themselves becomes themselves compelling content for your campaign?Why not ALL OF THESE!?Here’s what I say. A fan isn’t worth ANYTHING unless they DO something.Focus on what you want them to DO.You define and control the relationship. You decide what the value is. Make sure that you're in control, and not some 4 year old model of how we might do business in the future.