New Site Aims to Incentivise Brand Promotion on Social Networks

A new social media marketing service, GaggleAMP launched it’s public beta site a week ago with the aim of making it easier for marketers to broaden the reach of their online communications. The site “provides a way for people who have affinity for an organization (both internal and external) to promote synchronized messages across social media platforms.”

The idea is that a company or brand invites people to be part of a ‘gaggle’ – a community of people interested in that brand/company. When the company posts a message online their ‘gaggle’ is notified and can access a branded website on which they can choose whether or not to share that particular message with their wider online social network.

GaggleAMP Dashboard

So how is this different from followers retweeting a company’s post on Twitter or sharing a blog post or Facebook post?

Well first of all their is inbuilt tracking and reporting so that the brand manager or marketer can easily see what messages are being shared, measure click through rate and gauge the spread of the message. The reporting is based on tracking a unique shortened URL.

Then there is a rewards scheme. Members of the ‘gaggle’ receive points when they share a brand’s message online so they are motivated to engage in the brand’s promotion as they are incentivised to do so. The GaggleAMP account holder can set the number of points rewarded for a particular message and specify the reward.

One of the sites beta customers, Robert Vernon from GolinHarris, states that in their few months using the service they have reached 104,414 people using the tool via a gaggle of 69 people. They currently support message syndication to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

My initial thoughts…

People who join a ‘gaggle’ may soon get sick of update alerts from a company/brand and would begin to become increasingly selective in what they ‘share’ so as not to run the risk of irritating people in their social network.

A person could ‘like’ many company Facebook pages and on occasion share information about special offers or interesting news with ‘friends’. However if you were part of many ‘Gaggles’ then your wall/status updates/Twitter stream could suddenly become overtly-promotional and you’d have to wonder if friends would start to zone out your posts or ‘unfollow’ as they would with a brand account?

There is also a question of credibility here. If I post a comment on Facebook about a brand/service there is an inherent credibility as my friends/network know that I’ve no vested interest in commenting either positively or negatively about that brand. However if I begin to post relatively regularly about a particular brand/company then it becomes apparent that I have an association with them, or in the case of GaggleAMP, that I am being incentivised to promote their messages. As a result the credibility of those messages are reduced over time. This could have a negative effect on brands who have developed online brand loyalty over time and who have not been incentivising promotion in that how are my followers to know what posts are my own personal views or those which I’m being rewarded by GaggleAMP to share?

One to watch for sure.

Associated Press Get Hoaxed & GE Get Lesson in Brand Protection

Associated Press (AP) journalists were left red faced today when they had to publicly admit they published a story about General Electric (GE) which was based on a fake press release.

So what happened? It all boils down to a single letter of the alphabet.

The press release looked authentic – armed with the GE logo and linked to a website which mimicked that of the company. However the site it linked to was www.genewscenters.com/ as opposed to the actual GE news site, www.genewscenter.com. The difference being an added ‘s’ in the domain name. Easy to miss by a busy journalist when the site design is similar.

That said, the press release copy should have raised a flag with someone in that it declared that GE, responding to criticism over the amount of taxes it pays, would repay a $3.2 billion tax refund for 2010 to the Treasury Department.

The AP published a 90-word story based on the release which they then withdrew just 35 minutes later. Commenting on the mistake, AP Business Editor Hal Ritter told ABC news that: “The AP did not follow its own standards in this case for verifying the authenticity of a news release.”

The moral of the story?

When purchasing a domain name consider ‘brand protection’ by buying variations of your company names, products or core services when possible. Similarly secure various Twitter handles, YouTube channels and other social media accounts to ensure that your brand cannot be hijacked as was the case with BP around the time of the infamous oil spill.

This story also underscores the importance of online brand monitoring. After all…if you aren’t aware of what’s being said about you online, how are you going to be able to react (in a timely fashion) to what’s being said?

To read the full hoax release click here.

The Witness: The First Movie in the Outernet

This is really clever…in Germany, to promote the relaunch of the crime drama 13th Street Universal, the promoters wanted to get people ‘interested in the genre thriller/crime like never before‘. So NBC Universal created ‘the first movie in the outernet‘ -- essentially an interactive game based around the film. People applied online to be a ‘witness’ to a crime and were brought to the crime scene where they become part of the drama.

The smartphone essentially becomes their key to the sordid world of the Russian mafia. The augmented reality game sees people watching video clues on an iPhone as they stand in the location the video was shot, giving them the sense that they are really part of the scene.

Using the phone’s GPS the players have to travel around Berlin on an intricate scavenger hunt. They check-in using location-based technology at various places around the city, collecting clues by scanning QR codes in order to save the day.

Check out this video which explains the promotional campaign…

Google’s Dan Cobley on Driving Innovation

I took a few hours out of a busy week to attend the Dublin Web Summit. Last year, like many people, I found the event fairly light on marketing and sales speakers as it focused largely on start-up businesses and issues such as sourcing funding. This time around the speaker line up was quite diverse, including James Whelton (@jwhelton), the Irish teenager who was the first person in the World to hack the iPod Nano, Jerry Kennelly, founder of Tweak.com and great speakers such as Ben Parr (@BenParr) of Mashable.com and Dan Cobley, Google’s Director of European Marketing.

Cobley gave a presentation on Google’s approach to innovation and the ten principles behind their success…

1. Hire the right people – Google look for ‘curious problem solvers’
2. Ideas come from everywhere - Cobley stated your shouldn’t ‘always look to the subject matter expert for ideas’. Google allow staff to spend 20% of their time on projects outside of their ‘core’ work…work that isn’t necessarily part of their job descriptions which allows people to develop ideas for a range of initiatives
3. Share all information – ‘It is hard to innovate in a space when you don’t have all the information.’
4. Data drives all decisions – ‘It’s cheap now to run data driven tests’. Google regularly run ’1% tests’ across their network to ensure that all decisions are made based on user usage stats and not on presumptions. Dan used the example of Google’s blue links to highlight the importance of conducting research before making a decision. They ran a test using over 70 shades of blue in their links across their network and found people were more receptive to blues with a purple hue. Because they identified the best link colour through research the company now makes an amazing $200 million more each year.
5. Launch early and often, kill fast
6. Balance resources
7. Prioritise ruthlessly
8. Do quirky stuff – Cobley defined this as ‘fun for your team, your customers and the media’. He gave an example of an employee who had the idea of sending an Android phone into space [click here to view a video on this]. The company are now in talks with NASA to launch a similar project.
9. Put users first, then money
10. Bet on the future – He cited how people said bandwidth costs would cripple YouTube’s profit potential and questioned Google’s strategy is that regard. Bandwidth costs fell rapidly and YouTube is now profitable.

His slides from the Web Summit are available online here.

For more insights from the Dublin Web Summit, read this post from Brendan Hughes who jotted down some of the speakers pearls of wisdom from the event.

Cobley spoke gave a TED talk last year on ‘What Physics Taught me about Marketing’ and it’s well worth a look…

Falling Out of Love with Brands Online

We all know that social media can bring consumers and brands closer together. Brands no longer just shout messages at consumers through adverts but can actually talk with them – getting real time customer feedback, dealing with queries, building on offline promotions, rewarding loyal customers and building lasting relationships…all of which ultimately fuel sales.

According to recent research, “almost half of the Active Internet Universe has already joined a brand community” (Wave 2010 – annual social media tracker survey – Universal McCann).

So what can cause these newly forged online relationships to break down and have consumers saying “it’s not me, it’s you” and moving to “unsubscribe,” “unfan,” “unlike,” or “unfollow” a brand?

Email marketing service provider ExactTarget has released a report which looks at exactly that – the motivations and actions of US consumers as they terminate their relationships with brands through Email, Facebook, and Twitter.

This survey highlights that consumers don’t want the brand to be their friend. They want relevant and useful info, discounts and special offers, customer support, to find out about the company and it’s products and to connect to like-minded people. However it seems many brands are ‘coming on too strong’ with too many posts being the top reason for people giving the brand ‘the elbow’. Continue reading »