by Paul Soon

Even as we near the middle of 2012, I can’t help but wonder if Steve Jobs were still alive, what he would say about today’s connected consumer. I’ve read and watched countless articles, books and videos on Steve, and I find myself applying my personal passion for consumer experience to his ideas.

Steve was the first to start a social movement around getting people to ‘Think Different’. His attitude toward considering people as human beings first, consumers second, has directly impacted the evolution of brand communications.

As marketers, we are so comfortable with mass marketing that we forget advancement in technology can also give us the chance to be personal in the way we build brands. We have the ability to translate brand beliefs and values into brand experiences that touch the consumer on personal levels.

From Facebook apps to sequential targeting, SEO and mobile games, we have all been there and done that when it comes to using digital. Yet there is still so much more we ought to be looking forward to. Internet TV is an undeniable opportunity, with branded digital content can be delivered straight to the consumer at prime time and on-demand. Maybe what we failed to take away from Steve’s legacy is the golden ticket of marketing: to make things simple, easy to use and most importantly, natural.

Learning from Steve’s legacy

No one said it would be easy. And with that I’m offering three important points to keep in mind as we plan for the next half of 2012:

1. Take technology out of the way
2. A great experience is better than a great discount
3. Never stop surprising.

Take technology out of the way

In 2012, I believe we need to get even more personal. ‘Big’ data and re-targeting give us opportunities to innovate and push the boundaries further. But this push requires marketing to embrace technology just as we embrace brand values.

With the right blend of technology and brand-centric strategy, brands can start building truly sustainable consumer experiences beyond the world of the internet and enter our living rooms, cars, mobile phone and virtually anywhere we spend our time. The technology used is the experience and the experience is the brand.

In one of Forrester’s latest reports, they touched on the growing trend to hire Creative Technologists, so I can only hope that we can embrace this change in Asia. With this in place, we can have the experts weigh in on the early discussions and help build better digital brand experiences.

An experience is better than a great discount

We often think too hard about launching products and not hard enough about how the brand will live and breathe behind the introduction stage. Mapping out a branded consumer experience goes far beyond any great one-off discount over a weekend. Great experiences bring about loyalty and engagement with any brand. Just ask the folks at Zappos, Starbucks, Nike, Singapore Tourism Board, Lego and the Ritz Carlton.

The faster we get together with our agency partners to map out that branded experience, the quicker the value of our investments will be felt. It’s about seamlessly connecting the dots and making sure the brand message is rewarding, relevant and meaningful.

Every first step for any marketer should be to embrace technology knowing that better brand experiences will prevail–delivering engagement and efficiency. Companies like Buddy Media and Adobe are doing it right by taking away the complexities of technology and focusing on the ease of use for the end user.

Never stop surprising

As the saying goes, there can never be too much of a good thing. Consumers today have greater appreciation for a brand that goes the extra mile to be seamless and add value to our lives. That extra mile can transform consumers into brand advocates. For any entrepreneur, marketer or digital professional, it is not always about being the first but rather the best.

We’ve already experienced world’s positive response to one man’s passion, vision and efforts to revolutionize consumer technology through simplicity and seamless connectivity. Thanks to Steve Jobs, we’re reminded to continue building personal connections with our consumers.

by Ernest Kim and Mira DY

The ROI, or lack thereof, of paid advertising on Facebook has been a hot topic of late. Starting with GM’s highly public and much publicized exit from the social network as a paid platform to comScore’s riposte (published in collaboration with Facebook) suggesting that the doubters are simply doing it wrong, important questions about the value of social media are finally being broached in polite company.

These questions got us here at XM Asia Pacific thinking … many of us in the industry—both in the client and agency worlds—have accepted as received wisdom the notion that Facebook Likes are worth pursuing, and the more the better! Case in point: the aforementioned comScore report, which just so happens to be titled The Power of Like 2, casually states that “Most of the brands with an active Facebook presence have focused early efforts on accumulating Facebook Fans, recognizing that there is a long term value associated with being able to continuously communicate with and market to these brand followers.”

The idea that Facebook Fans = value is so uncontroversial that comScore saw no need to substantiate this claim. After all, if you want to fish where the fish are, casting your line out to an audience of 901 million users sounds like a pretty good idea. While we don’t disagree with the theory, our field research suggests that Fan acquisition is a dead end, with questionable long-term value to either the brand or the bottom line. Instead, it’s conversations that matter, and offline engagement can deliver greater return—in both meatspace and the digital world—than even the best community management.

“I can’t remember if I Liked Starbucks on Facebook. If I did, it must have been a long time ago.”

This was a response from Lyon, one of 15 Singaporean students we interviewed to help qualify the value of a Like. Unbeknownst to Lyon, this question was something of a canard in that we knew he had indeed Liked Starbucks. Surprisingly, as the transcripts from our interviews piled up, we learned that Lyon was not the exception, but very much the rule. Of the students we talked to—all of whom had Liked the Starbucks Singapore page on Facebook at the time of our interviews—most had no recollection of having Liked the page, and only one in five could recall seeing any status updates from the brand in their News Feeds.

Our research suggests that, among young people, Starbucks’ welcoming retail environment is a more effective online conversation driver than their highly lauded—but seemingly ineffectual—approach to social media.

This is not some digital lightweight we’re talking about here: With over 173,000 fans for their local page, Starbucks is among the most Liked brands in Singapore. The brand is also widely recognized as a global leader in social media. Indeed, Starbucks was highlighted in comScore’s The Power of Like 2 report as a prime example of the potential of social media to deliver statistically significant lifts in in-store purchase incidence.”

Perhaps something was lost in translation across the Pacific, but we have a hard time ascribing much value to an action that consumers don’t recall doing or to messaging that they don’t recall seeing. But, and this is a J. Lo-sized but, Starbucks has successfully established preference here in Singapore—all of the students we talked to were regulars, choosing the mermaid over other nearby multinational and local coffee houses. So, if it wasn’t the brand’s own social messaging driving this preference, what was?

“[Starbucks] is more welcoming to students, in my opinion. I get to study at Starbucks, so I frequent it for that reason,” replied Yanqi, 18. Fellow Singapore Polytechnic student Arvin echoed this sentiment: “I prefer Starbucks, I find it welcoming … they have friendly staff, so it’s a better place to chill.” The availability of free Wi-Fi, ample power outlets and better music were also often cited as important factors driving preference for Starbucks.

The value of these amenities is perhaps unsurprising, but we were surprised to find that their impact extended beyond the physical. Cross-referencing mentions of Starbucks on Twitter, we realized that the qualities that make Starbucks an ideal venue for friends like Arvin and Yanqi to study and “chill” together in the real world also make the brand a frequent topic of conversation in digital media. This tweet from @krystletheseira is representative of the large volume of similar messages we uncovered over the course of our research:

“At Starbucks studying with @punkylemon because we’re not allowed to go into the art rooms in sch.”

In short, by making its physical spaces conducive to social engagement among Singaporean students, Starbucks has become an organic part of their online conversations. Facebook’s own global head of brand experience, Paul Adams, has emphasized the “incidental nature of brand conversations,” and our preliminary research suggests that nurturing these conversations offline is a more effective and efficient strategy for generating impactful earned impressions than traditional, Like-driven approaches to online community management.

Action Items

• Don’t be afraid to question the value of traditional, Fan acquisition-driven approaches to social media. Our research indicates that you can very effectively earn a place in your customers’ conversations by crafting an offline environment that fosters real world engagement.
• If you’re not able to leverage physical venues, consider social engagements that promote conversations between your customers. A prime example here is Nike’s Nike+ platform, which amplifies awareness by encouraging peer-to-peer messaging over the traditional brand-to-consumer model.

What do you think? Is this a breath of fresh air or a load of bunk? Don’t be afraid to let us know what you think by joining the conversation below. And, if any of the above piques your interest, let’s talk.

I’m sure you’ve heard it, you might have even seen it- those gorgeous photos on themed boards which fuel the urge in you to suddenly desire to purchase everything which you have “liked” or “repined.” If you have not already guessed (or seen the title screaming at you), the topic for this entry will revolve around Pinterest, the niche social network which has caught the eye of marketers in the digital platform.

Pinterest, as the title suggests, is a pinboard-styled photo sharing social website, allowing users to create specific themed boards and adding or repining images from other sources in different boards. To register and use Pinterest, new users are required to request an invitation directly from the Pinterest website or from friends who are already on Pinterest. Here’s an example of a brand on Pinterest; Travel Channel with 24 boards (categorized according to beaches, animals around the world etc.) and 483 pins (images).

To date, Pinterest has garnered 2,702.2% increase in unique visitors since May 2011, with an average of 1.36 million visitors daily. In addition, users spend an average of 15.8 minutes on the website, exceeding that of popular social network platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

You must be thinking, so what’s so special about Pinterest and how can it help my business? Isn’t it just another social network platform for sharing of photos similar to the likes of tumblr, instagram and flickr? Well, you are right, and wrong. Although Pinterest is indeed a platform for users to pin and repin photos to themed boards, marketers have started to colonize this to their advantage, adding an emotive appeal to their brand.

Showcasing brand personality through visuals

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” With Pinterest, brands can now convey their brand message and value propositions through a great array of images. Without a doubt, many brands would have already invested extensively in professional photography to promote their products. They can now leverage on this platform to further increase their engagement as an interesting, personable, visually appealing brand when customers are given the leeway to repin photos which they can associate themselves with. In addition, brands such as General Electric (GE) have been using Pinterest to pin images which inspire them as a business. Boards such as “The Archives” reveal GE’s progress and success through the years while “That’s Genius” showcases founder’s Thomas Edison’s words of wisdom. To increase consumer engagement, GE dedicated “#GEInspiredMe” to a series of well-taken photographs submitted during GE’s search for the next Instagrapher.

Crowdsource

Consumer engagement is brought to a whole new level when brands adopt the crowdsourcing strategy on Pinterest. By categorizing photos into various themed boards, brands like west elm and TODAY are able to provide a platform for their consumers to upload relevant photos and tag them. “TODAY’s Life Illustrated” highlights viewers’ precious moments in life while west elm’s “Smilebooth!” gives a shout out to fans and potential consumers that current fans really like the brand. Through crowdsourcing, viral marketing is effective in building brand loyalty and forging new relationships with new customers.

Referral Traffic

Users who browse the brand’s pinboards will be able to repin the photos on their pinboard. This is particularly useful for brands with online store so that traffic can be channelled to their website. Nordstrom is well aware of this feature and is leveraging on this to their advantage. Users can share their interest for particular products with like-minded people on Pinterest. For more information, users will be able to click on the particular image and they will be then directed to the original source that is the brand’s website.

Apart from a business perspective, Pinterest is gaining a foothold in other aspects as well. Top areas of interest include quotes and inspirations, infographics, recipes, fashion, places, interior design, animal adoption. Videos can even be pinned as a value-add! Do check out Marketing Businesses on Pinterest and Top Brands on Pinterest to find out more.

Go on, enter the beautiful world of Pinterest and start pinning!

From NY TIMES: Kristen Nagy, an 18-year-old from Sparta, N.J., sends and receives 500 text messages a day. But she never uses Twitter, even though it publishes similar snippets of conversations and observations.

“I just think it’s weird and I don’t feel like everyone needs to know what I’m doing every second of my life,” she said. Read more.

In my previous article on Facebook’s usage in Asia Pacific, I compared Facebook with Kaixin001 and Xing in China. But it turns out that there are even bigger social networks in the Middle Kingdom. (Which just goes to show that if you aren’t as tuned into a particular market as you should be, you’ll miss important information!)

Thanks to a pointer at Plurk (which has since been deleted for some reason), someone mentioned that I should look at Xiaonei. That was a forehead-slapping moment! I had heard of Xiaonei, but for some reason, it didn’t cross my mind then to take a look at its usage.

That led to another forehead-slapping moment of realisation (and a really painful forehead!). I had forgotten about the other social network giant in China: QQ! QQ, of course, is more than just a social network. It has morphed into this giant portal-social network-instant messaging service, something that one would be hard pressed to find anywhere else (except perhaps in South Korea and Japan).
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Mention “social network” to anyone — especially a marketer — and you’ll probably get this response: “Facebook”. Facebook, the poster child for so-called Web 2.0 sites/services, has become so synonymous with the phrase “social network” that you will be hard pressed to think of another similar web service.

But while that may be true in a large and generally homogenous market like the United States, it does not necessarily apply in a fragmented market like the Asia Pacific. In this growing economic powerhouse, marketers have to consider the many different countries and languages, and the associated individual cultural eccentricities.
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