Ladder - Homepage for the Homeless

Classification: Creativity: 4,2;  Call to action: 4;  Empathy for the Brand: 4

Total: 4,1

Redirect your consumerism this holiday season and make your shopping benefit the 1 in 200 Australians who will be homeless this year. GPY&R Melbourne and youth charity Ladder present "Homepage for the Homeless." Click through to participating retailers' sites from the hompage, so 15% of what you buy will be donated to the cause by the store -- with no cost to you. - (via creativity online)

Advertising Agency: GPY&R, Melbourne, Australia
Executive Creative Director: Ben Coulson
Senior Art Director: Paul Meates
Senior Copywriter: Alex Wadelton & Katie Britton
Group Account Director: Julian Bell
Account Manager: Rachel Semmens
Producer: Carrie Burman & Jessica Krt
Designer: Kota Matsuda

Developers: Brett Harris, Chris Upjohn 

Engage With the Superfans

Most of Your Fans Are Dormant, but Active Ones Can Spread a Message Virally
By: Riley Gibson(adage)

Brands work hard to accumulate fans and connect with a large fan base on Facebook, but studies reveal that only a tiny fraction of those fans are engaging with the product. This is discouraging news. And it raises the question: What should a brand do next?

Brands should be focusing on identifying and activating their top advocates on Facebook, the superfans. These are a powerful species, masters of spreading content virally to households around the globe. Brand evangelists with a fervor, they can motivate into action even those who are typically dormant.

Here are the most important tips for getting the most our of your brand's superfans :

Reward loyalty. Superfans are a brand's most loyal fans. Most brands understand the importance of rewarding repeat customers, and this principle holds true on Facebook. Just as a store might reward loyal customers with early access to sales, brands should reward superfans. Surprising superfans with discount codes or branded SWAG delights them, making them more likely to continue coming back and spreading their viral word about a brand.

Make it mutual. Building a two-way, genuine relationship with superfans can be just as effective at driving repeat engagement as physical rewards. Just as regulars at a restaurant are more likely to return if the manager greets them by name or comes over to their table to say hi, superfans will be more likely to return if a brand acknowledges their repeat presence and constantly engages with them. Brands should go out of their way to build relationships with superfans by responding to their comments, answering their questions immediately and liking or commenting on the content they share.

Ask for their help. Superfans represent a brand's most passionate, dedicated customers, so brands should dedicate extra effort to finding out what these customers like. Invite superfans into experiences where they can openly share ideas and feedback to make the brand better. Most superfans will feel honored by the invitation and eager to help shape the future of a brand they love.

I'm not suggesting that brands ignore the rest of their fans, just that they pay more attention to their superfans. For every dollar or minute a brand dedicates to Facebook, the brand will receive more back from superfans than the average fan. So treat them accordingly.

The New Messaging Mandate a Forrester Report

Some reports excerpts from:

Executive Summary 
Direct messaging options have proliferated for marketers, expanding from traditional mail and 
telemarketing to now include myriad digital channels like email, social media, SMS, and mobile app 
push notifications. But while digital messaging has converged on consumer devices, most interactive 
marketers are still stuck in a siloed, channel-based approach to messaging. To meet user expectations 
and create business value, shift to customer-focused integrated messaging. This report will help 
interactive marketers prepare to message across digital touchpoints as channels overlap and customers 
increasingly use multiple platforms

Notes and Resources

Forrester interviewed more than 17 marketers and vendors, including ExactTarget, Gap, Knotice, Merkle, MTv Networks, Neolane, and  Oreck.

Related Research Documents

“how To Integrate Email And Mobile Marketing” 

November 22, 2011

“Emerging Innovations In Email Marketing” 

August 19, 2011

“The Future Of Interactive Marketing” 

April 4, 2011

“Evolving your Mobile Marketing Presence” 

March 3, 2011

User Already Integrate Digital Messaging 

Thanks to the mobile devices we carry during our waking hours and the always-on connections of 

desktops, laptops, and tablets, there’s no longer any downtime from messaging. Today we see that:

• Users access messaging in many ways. 
• And they expect relevant messages across channels.

But Marketers Don’t Meet Users’expectations

Unfortunately, marketers fail to deliver integrated digital messaging because they can’t:

• Create a unified view of their customers.
• Coordinate messages across organizational silos.
• Master the process of setting up emerging campaigns
• Manage content for different message formats.

Introducing Customer-Focused Integrated Messaging 

Today’s siloed approach to digital messaging focuses too much on generating channel-specific 

responses and not enough on creating overall customer value.

The need to tear down organizational silos and prioritize customer relationships over channel 

performance isn’t new. But today it’s more urgent and attainable than before. Why?

•  Marketers who don’t adapt to customer needs will perish.
•  Technology can now realistically deliver on the promise of integrated messaging.

Reinvent your current messaging approach.

Building CFIM within your organization means rethinking your digital messaging data, organization, and operation.

Unify Your Customer view

You can’t successfully integrate digital messaging with fragmented customer data and too many vendor partners that require their own unique processes. To create a more streamlined approach:

•  Tap your IT team and service providers to build a better database.
•  Offer multiple channel options in your preference centers.
•  Consolidate messaging platforms.

Organize By Customer Segments, not Channels

To get away from today’s channel-focused approach to messaging, firms must organize to support customer goals. Graduate to this structure by:

• Educating senior executives about the value of integrated messaging.
•  Turning channel managers into segment managers

Automate Campaign processes

The increased complexity of managing messaging across channels will demand automation. But automating every part of the process at once isn't realistic.

•  Campaign flows based on business rules. It’s impossible to manually manage sequenced, multichannel messages for millions of customers. Instead, implement systems that trigger messages through specific channels when particular conditions are met.
• Cross-channel testing. Testing offers, creative, and contact strategies will only become more important as message types and volume grow. To gain a competitive edge, move beyond manual  tests and automate cross-channel testing.
• Message mix optimization. Your future challenge isn’t just how to integrate messages across channels. It is also when to send messages and how much to spend on which type of message to get the most return.

What it Means

Integrated Messaging will boost interactive maturity

Marketers slow to adapt to customer-centric digital messaging will lose share to more nimble  competitors. We think the push to outshine competitors coupled with improved access to  customer insight — courtesy of less siloed data — will actually make marketers better at all interactive pursuits, not just messaging. For example:

•  Midmarket successes will compel enterprise marketers to integrate.
•  Marketers will make better, data-informed decision.
•  Integrating inbound and outbound marketing will become the norm.

Click here to download the full report.

Social Media Features in Marketing Automation Systems: Who Does What?

Social media is arguably overhyped as a marketing trend: it gets well under 10% of marketing budgets (different surveys have figures from 3% to 8%) and results are questionable (it was rated the least effective content marketing tactic in a recent MarketingProfs study).  But social is clearly growing fast and has great potential. So marketing automation vendors are understandably eager to support it in their systems.

I recently took a quick tour of vendor sites to see what social features they’re offering. Results are summarized in the table below. I need to stress that I’ve only credited vendors for features they list on their site. I strongly suspect that the data is incomplete, especially for basic features that are so common the vendors simply don’t bother to mention them. (Note: the table has been updated after the original post based on vendor feedback, so it's a bit more reliable than it was originally.)

The features fell into four broad categories:

• Basic posting and sharing: the most common features and the simplest level of social media marketing. As I wrote above, most vendors probably have most of them even though the chart doesn’t show them.

• Social media monitoring: watching social media for mentions of the company or other topics and responding when appropriate. Plenty of third party applications can do this, so providing it within the marketing automation system is mostly a matter of convenience.

• Importing social data: loading social data into the marketing automation database so it can be used for segmentation, analysis, and sharing with salespeople via CRM integration. This is harder than monitoring since it requires linking social identities to marketing leads and connecting to the social system’s API.

• Social platform integration: using native features of the social platforms by writing to their APIs. This can be tricky for the marketing automation vendors to build but it lets their clients take greater advantage of social media possibilities.


Looking at the chart as a whole, what stands out is the sheer variety: once you get past the basics, no features are common enough to consider them standard. This contrasts sharply with mature categories like email, landing pages, and nurture campaigns, where dozens of features are shared by most systems.  The reason is obvious – social media is still very young – but the disparity still provides interesting insights into what different vendors feel are most important to their clients.

The variety also illustrates that a great number of social media applications are possible (with plenty more to come). Naturally, the vendors will borrow features from each other, so we can expect some convergence over time..  A standard set of features will emerge as the industry figures out what’s really important.

The list below presents each vendor with a brief explanation of the table entries. Links on the vendor names go directly to the vendor Web page or press release that described their social media capabilities.  In cases where the data came from different sources, I've put the link on the items themselves.

Neolane
- posting: central panel to post tweets and Facebook updates
- sharing: place sharing buttons on emails
- tracking: measure clicks on links in system-generated posts.
- Facebook forms: use forms within Facebook pages and apps to gather customer permissions
- social sign-in: use social media sign-in services to replace marketing automation forms
- personalized Facebook ads: display different ad versions on a Facebook page based on the user’s profile, including both Facebook and non-Facebook data


Marketo
- sharing: place sharing buttons on landing pages
- tracking: measure visitors from the shared pages
- load Twitter feed: connector to load Twitter conversations to lead profiles and use the conversations in campaign rules


Eloqua
- sharing: place sharing buttons on emails and other marketing materials
- social sign-in: use social media sign-in services to replace marketing automation forms
- Klout segmentation: add Klout scores to lead profiles and use them in campaign rules
- show Twitter feed: let salespeople see a lead’s Twitter posts on their Profiler dashboard


IBM/Unica
- social monitoring: use CoreMetrics Social to find social media mentions of company


Aprimo 
- posting: manage blog posts with review process and SEO recommendations
- sharing: place sharing buttons on email and microsites
- tracking: integrate with third party web analytics to track social referrals
- monitoring: integrate with third party social listening tools for monitoring


Pardot
- posting: central panel to schedule and send social messages
- load social profile: use Qwerly to import social media profiles and add to marketing automation lead profile
- show social profile: show social profile data in CRM


Silverpop
- posting: send posts to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and/or RSS feeds along with email sends
- sharing: place sharing buttons on email
- social sign-in: use social media sign-in services to replace sign-in forms
- Facebook forms: add registration forms to Facebook and blogs
- badges and buttons: embed buttons and badges in email for Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, StumbleUpon, XING


Act-On Software
- tracking: embed trackable links in system-generated posts
- social prospecting: find relevant social conversations and send to in-box; send template-based responses


SalesFusion
- sharing: place sharing buttons on email and landing pages
- tracking: embed trackable links in system-generated posts and online documents


TreeHouse Interactive
- sharing: place sharing buttons on email and landing pages
- tracking: embed trackable links in system-generated posts
- Facebook forms: build advanced forms that can work within Facebook pages


Net-Results
- load social profile: find data about visitors on Jigsaw, Linkedin, Twitter and post to marketing automation lead profile


Genius
- tracking: embed trackable links in personalized web promotions and chat messages


Loopfuse
- social monitoring: use Collecta realtime search to find social media mentions of company


HubSpot
- posting: send social media messages and blog posts
- sharing: place sharing buttons on blog posts and other content
- social monitoring: find social media mentions of company and respond
- Facebook forms: build ‘welcome’ app to capture leads on Facebook page

article written by David Raab on Customer Think

5 essential spreadsheets for social media analytics

Social media analytics and tracking can be very time-consuming and expensive. You’ll find quite a few smart social media monitoring tools, but what if you can’t afford them?

That’s why many social media marketers and power users are in constant search of free, efficient alternatives. Here, we’ll share a few ready-made spreadsheets you can copy (navigate File + Make a copy) and use for social media analytics. They are free, highly customizable and extremely easy to use.

Most of the scripts that run the spreadsheets are “public,” meaning you can access them from the Tools + Script Gallery menu (this also means they were reviewed and approved by Google Spreadsheets team).

1. Fetch Twitter Search Results

GetTweets is a simple and fast Google Spreadsheet script that lets you quickly export Twitter search results into a spreadsheet. You can play with the spreadsheets in two ways.

• Increase the number of results returned — up to 1,500. I managed to fetch about 1,300.
• Twitter search operators can help you filter out links (search “-filter:links“) and find tweeted questions (search “?“). Check out this article on advanced social media search as well as this list for more search terms.

Spreadsheet details:

• Public script? Yes.
• Copy the spreadsheet here.
• Spreadsheet credit: AutomateAnalytics.com.

2. Count Facebook Likes and Shares

FacebookLikes script evaluates Facebook user interaction for any given range of URLs. It will display:

• Facebook like count.
• Facebook share count.
• Facebook comment count.
• Overall Facebook interaction.

Additionally, the spreadsheet’s embedded chart lets you compare Facebook interaction for the number of pages provided.

Spreadsheet details:

• Public script? Yes.
• Copy the spreadsheet here.
• Spreadsheet credit: Facebook Likes Counter.

3. Compare Facebook Pages

Like the previous spreadsheet, FacebookFans is a Google macro based on Facebook API. For any Facebook page ID, it fetches the number of fans. It also visualizes the data with a pretty pie chart. Track your as well as your competitors’ Pages using the script, and the numbers will update each time you open the spreadsheet — easy!

Spreadsheet details:

• Public script? Yes.
• Copy the spreadsheet here.
• Spreadsheet credit: Facebook Fans Counter.

4. Monitor Social Media Reputation

This spreadsheet not only generates Google search results for the term you provide, but also fetches Twitter and Facebook counts for each page returned. Anyone can easily run a search for his or her brand name and see how actively it’s being discussed in social media.

Try using a few search Google operators, for example:

• ["brand name" -intitle:"brand name"] to find in-text brand mentions you are most likely to have missed.
• [inurl:"guest * post" search term] to find recent guest blogging opportunities on the topic of your interest. Note: if you are getting a “too many connections” error, try another search to refresh the scripts. Or re-save the scripts from Tools + Script Manager.

Spreadsheet details:

• Public scripts? Yes.
• Copy the spreadsheet here.
• Spreadsheet credit here.

5. Extract and Archive Your Followers

This spreadsheet is the hardest to set up, but also has the most complex functionality. It lets you extract your friends and followers to easily search and filter your Twitter contacts.

The script requires your own Twitter API key (which is pretty easy to get), and provides easy-to-follow set up instructions. Try running the scripts a couple of times to get them working. Go to Tools + Script Manager and run Test script.

If you have done everything correctly, a Twitter Auth will pop up. Then, you’ll be able to authenticate your own application. After, go to Twitter + Get Followers and you should see the tool importing your following list. However, if you have large following, you likely won’t be able to import it all (for me, that meant about 5,000 recent followers).

Spreadsheet details:

• Public scripts? No.
• Copy the spreadsheet here.
• Spreadsheet credit: Export Twitter Followers and Friends.
Are you aware of any other useful, social media-related Google spreadsheets? Please share them in the comments!
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Jirsack

article written by Ann Smarty on Mashable

“A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation”

Earlier this month Jeremiah Owyang and his team at Altimeter Group published a report called “A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation” – The SlideShare version is below.

ExecutiveSummary

Like a disease, social media proliferation will leave companies crippled unless they develop a strategy to manage now. Some companies have opened a virtual Pandora’sbox: We found that global corporations are struggling to manage an average of 178 business related social media accounts— a number likely to grow if unchecked. Beyond coordination challenges, unchecked accounts and disparate customer interactions expose brands to a host of legal, compliance, and fragmented brand-perception risks.

Internally, few companies are prepared with proper roles, education, or clearly defined goals. Externally, brands are confused by dozens of vendor options. Employees and business units are adopting commodity technology haphazardly, resulting in inconsistent customer experiences and measurement. As a result, companies have begun to harness Social Media Management Systems to manage the multitude of customer touch points in social, while leveraging services that range from education, integration, community moderation, and beyond.

Companies must follow these pragmatic steps:  

1) First prepare the company internally, and conduct audits to verify readiness.

2) Determine which of the five social media management use cases, defined in this report, the company aligns to.

3) Select vendors based on business needs, not marketing.

4) Tap into services, support teams, and outsourced community management services.

 5) Roll out internally in a systematic way that starts with education, training, mock work flows, and thorough testing

A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang

click here to download - It's necessary to have a slideshare account (free)


p.s - slideshare scrolling is BULL!!!