This is a recap of a presentation by Michael Lazerow of Buddy Media from the Web 2.0 Expo

Social Networks are clearly here to stay with almost 50% of the population is using these sites (70% of teens).

Social Network have all opened up their platforms which means that brands have cost effective access to more than 500M engaged users (250M of them on just Facebook and MySpace alone!)

This is a massive distribution channel for any brand but still <1% of digital ad budgets are going toward Social Networks – why?

Because Social Network ad impressions are worthless – the old model of buying impressions is like shouting at consumers – you buy ads to “get in front of them” and “give them a message” – but that’s not going to work in a “social “ world by definition!

The new ad model will be about creating social brand loyalty by creating Social Branded Applications that allow users to interact with your brand attributes. That’s when we make the pivot from finding a target audience and moving messages to them – to creating Social Branded Applications that give away the message and letting the audience tailor it to the social graph.

Here are some examples of brands benefiting from Social Branded Applications …

FedEx

Created a Social Branded Application called - “Launch the Package” which is very in line with the FedEx brand. It is simple, fast, easy to use etc.

Has had the most activity of any application on Facebook with 72,000 packages delivered per day, 100,000 installs in 72 hours more than 300,000 active users in 6 days with less than 10% uninstall rate.

New Balance

Created a Social Branded Application to get in front of key customer and influencers. It’s a game called the New Balance Run-devouz where you earn points and redeem for shoes, kinda like a Chuckie Cheese but for Facebook.

So far they have 250,000 active users, with 86% returning at least once, 57% of which came back 9 times or more! And so far $1,000,000 in virtual dollars have been earned by customers which can be redeemed for actual shoes.

BudLight

Created a Social Branded Application that utilizes Facebook’s “age gating” so only certain age groups can use this application. So they created the Dude Campaign which connects to the BudLight ad Dude ad campaign but allows the user to determine through a series of questions what kind of dude they really are: Examples Game On dude, Red Neck dude, Gangsta dude etc.

So far they have 200,000 installs in 5 weeks, 14% average daily growth, 6000+ daily users, 19% of users visited every day during the campaign.

InStyle

Created a Social Branded Application for hair makeovers where you can grab celebrity hair and add it to your Facebook picture once you find the new hair style you like you can then save it and add the InStyle banner and upload it back to your Facebook profile for your friends to vote on.

So far they have 185,000 installs in 6 weeks, 78% of the user base is InStyle’s target demographic, average time spent is 7 min, with over 50% of total users returning to the application more than 25 times and an average user did 3 hair styles.

Why do some ideas go viral and others don’t?

People who are “bored at work” are a network bigger than any major network: CBS NBC etc

If ordinary people see something online and start passing it around THEY decide what is popular out of main stream media. And today they can make a huge impact on a brand.

Who can make something popular on the web?

Duncan Watts said there are not some special people who do all the viral work – it’s the network that makes it popular.

Take for example in real life: a forest fire – once a spark hits a dry forest and the forest starts burning the whole forest will burn down – no one would say there was a “special spark” that burned the whole forest down.

If you remember The Tipping Point – East village hipsters wore lots of ridiculous clothes besides Hush Puppies but the problem is after the fact influential people seem like the key factor.

The problem is hindsight bias is not a repeatable event in the future.

Here are 6 strategies and solutions for predicting success with the Bored at Work Network

Solution 1 – Contagious media – include some sort of social imperative like “how to make your husband behave” - there is a social reason to share this on the Bored at Work network and it will catch fire. Other examples include: Nike Sweatshop, The Rejection Line. Limits of contagious media – is that it is usually silly or free, shocking, simple of fun. But businesses create drag on the message because they aren’t simple or free shocking etc.

Solution 2 – Big Seed Marketing – small seeds lead to failure: 10 people recruit 5 people etc. But sub viral growth is still growth. Big seeds lead to success: 1 million people recruit 500K people etc – examples: Tide Cold Water by P&G can seed a campaign with 4 million people and got 40,000 extra. Oxygen media seeded with 7,000 people and got 30,000 more.

Solution 3 – Multi Seed Marketing – try lots of creative ideas – nobody can predict what will be popular – test to see what is working using real data. Then Big Seed the stuff that is working best. More data enables more creativity. Example: BuzzFeed – Sarah Palin vs Tina Fey – most of the traffic was from the bored at work network. Unlike the Carl Sagan blog-a-thon which didn’t catch fire with the bored at work network, surprisingly. Got to try lots of ideas and remove what isn’t working.

Solution 4 – Mullet Strategy – best for businesses – all business up front but party in the back. Ex Huffington post – all business upfront with huge comment section in the back. The nerve center of the Huffington post is like Home shopping network for blogging. YouTube and Digg manage seeds in the same way the most popular stuff sits on the front page – as it starts to decrease they pull it and replace with a hotter story.

Solution 5 – Personality Disorders – examples include Perez Hilton, Ron Paul, Apple lovers. Help your audience engage with others passion. Especially appetizing are personality disorders like: paranoid behavior, schizoid behavior, antisocial behaviors etc…

Solution 6 – Learn from the Mormons – Mormons want you to be Mornom – make evangelism core to your strategy. Focus on the mechanics of how an idea spreads not just the idea itself.

Drop.io’s CEO Sam Lessin presented “A Brief History of Privacy in this Data-Deluged World” at the Ignite II kick-off of Web 2.0 in NYC.

I loved Sam’s thought captured in the following quote: “For the first time in history it is now cheaper and easier for people to be public than to be private. What I mean by this is that for thousands of years publishing content about yourself was expensive and time consuming, and privacy was the default state… The web, and specifically the web 2.0 model, is turning that on its head in a very big way…. Even just a few years ago online ‘privacy’ meant little more than protecting your credit card information and identity, now it means thinking about every single thing you say, do, or write, online - and how it will be perceived, saved, and used - now and in the future.”

“In the end, privacy has been central to western civilization forever. It is something that has value. All that is changing is that something that used to come totally naturally is now something people have to both defend and actively invest in maintaining.”

To view his presentation materials, speech transcript and video online at http://drop.io/ignitesam

Two years ago less than half of all consumers used search to find a local business but today that number is upward of 74%!

However, most small businesses today still don’t have a website in fact less than 10% of small business owners are online. For them the problem is not just that they don’t have a website but promoting their website as well.

Enter Yodle

Yodle helps small service based business get a web presence and then help them promote their business by buying lots of niche keywords and syndicating the results to local businesses. (ex Teeth Whitening Union Square NY)

Yodle growth has been outstanding (around 700% year over year) which should come as no surprise since their customers are long tail and so are the keywords they buy for them.

Check out my podcast with their CEO Court Cunningham …

Link to Original Audio Source

Signup for this Podcast Series

About Court

Court Cunningham is the CEO of Yodle, Court oversees all aspects of operations and strategy, including technology, product development and sales and marketing. Prior to joining Yodle, he held the position of COO at Community Connect, a niche social networking company, where he lead consumer marketing, product management and development efforts. Before that, as SVP/GM of the Marketing Automation group at DoubleClick, he was instrumental in establishing DARTmail as the industry leading email marketing solution.

Court received a BA in English from Princeton University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

 

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

They may not be the ones you think I mean. No not the internal customers or your bosses boss like the CEO, CFO or COO. I mean real customers of marketing. Let me explain …

If you are like me working to drive thought leadership out of our organization and into the hands of would be prospects, then you know the first place that this phenomena of Marketing’s Customers happens is online.

A person who downloads the paper and opts into our database becomes a lead start (notice I didn’t say lead). And with the lead nurturing system we have in place we can then develop a lead to the point that they are willing to talk to someone from our sales organization.
In a recent meeting with Forrester analyst Peter Burris he pointed out to me that this customer is not a customer of sales but a “customer of marketing”! Which is an interesting notion if you stop and think about it?

Perhaps this accounts for some of the Not Invented Here feeling we can sometimes get from our sales team on these leads. But love them or not they are still interest and much warmer than any cold call a sales person could ever have.

How are you bringing in new customers?