NOTE: Rick Mathieson is the Author of: The On-Demand Brand: 10 Rules for Digital Marketing Success in an Anytime, Everywhere World (AMACOM; May 27, 2010)
5. With more than 92% of American business having less than 100 employees, how do you recommend that they make use of your 10 Rules for Digital Marketing Success? Is this reasonable for the "average" business, or is this only for the "Burger Kings" and "Unilevers" of the business world?
These rules apply whether you’re talking about a major consumer brand or a mom-and-pop store. Obviously the larger brands are going to have bigger budgets and have the ability to leverage popular culture more adeptly than small companies. But on the flip size, smaller companies are more nimble, and are able to apply many of these rules more rapidly than their larger brethren. In the book, I look at how Jones Soda essentially built its small but growing brand using social media. Here’s a beverage brand that could never hope to compete with Pepsi or Coca-Cola on their own levels.
So the Seattle-based company long ago began enabling users to send in photographs to use as bottle labels via its website. Today, it has over a million submissions and has used upward of 4,500 of the photos on its bottles – which consumers can collect and trade. Even if your photo isn’t selected, you can order a case of soda in your own custom bottles, featuring your image or design, for a small fee.
As Jones Soda founder Peter van Stolk recently told Business Week: "We allowed the labels to be discovered, and that gave consumers a sense of ownership. It makes it more relevant to them and provides an emotional connection. With big soda brands, the 'Britney Spears model' – paying a lot of money to some hot artist to sponsor your beverage – is just so done. The wonderful thing about our competitors is, for all the money they have, they should be thinking more originally but they don't. If they ever do, I'm dead."
You also look at small cafes and pizza shops that use social media to drive people into restaurants. One shop, called GoldenKnights Pizza in Orlando, found that 40% of its business can come from social media efforts. In fact, according to a recent Rice University study, Facebook fans of one Houston-based café chain visited 20% more often and spent 33% more per visit, than non-Facebook fans.
Small businesses aren’t at a disadvantage in the digital era. They may just have the upper hand.
6. The book describes numerous successes in the social media arena. On what does the success of these campaigns depend? How can these successes be replicated by other organizations?
The definition for success is going to vary from brand to brand and from initiative to initiative. The easiest metric is probably direct sales. Special, limited time offers to your most fervent fans is proving to be a very powerful driver to the bottom line for a lot of companies. But others will measure engagement as the key metric. So it really depends on the objective.
7. Should digital marketing focus on increasing traffic (either web or in-store), brand building or revenue generation?
I guess the same answer applies here. It really depends on the objectives. You look at an effort like Pepsi’s Refresh Project, a social media campaign designed to help raise money for local charities. Users vote on which organizations should receive funds. It’s unlikely that will ever be directly tied to an increase in sales of soda, but it will no doubt help build good will and affinity for the brand – and maybe even sales. Likewise, Nike Write The Future – the interactive World Cup video for Facebook fans – may or may not boost sales, but will no doubt burnish brand cred with key audiences. But for many brands, it will come down to sales alone. Dell has made millions off of Twitter-only, limited-time offers. Others have as well. It just depends on objectives. It’s important to note that the rules in this book are meant to help you connect with consumers in powerful new ways whether your efforts are aimed at general brand building or even the hardest of hard-sell tactics and promotions – which, ultimately, are still brand experiences.
8. Most businesses feel overwhelmed, when looking at social media. How do you suggest that they get started?
Forget about what you think you know about social media. It’s irrelevant. Find out what your customers are doing in social media, and develop innovative ways to capitalize on it. I do think it helps to at least immerse yourself in social media for your own edification – it’s like someone in marketing saying they don’t watch TV; you can’t have great ideas or connect the dots for your brand if you yourself don’t even know what’s happening in a specific medium. Same with social media. But ultimately, you’ve got to understand your customers. Otherwise you’re just shooting in the dark.
9. What did you learn from writing this book, and from interviewing the ten marketing gurus?
In many ways, the entire book is an explanation of what I learned by researching digital marketing and speaking with literally hundreds of marketers. I pulled out 10 for special Q&A’s because they did a particularly good job of articulating key tenets in the book. I mean, when you’re talking about Alex Bogusky, the cochairman of Crispin, Porter + Bogusky and the man behind things like Whopper Sacrifice and the system that lets you order Domino’s pizza through your TiVo, you want to hear directly from him on key concepts. Ditto for Laura Klauberg, the senior vice president of global media for Unilever – who at $4.5 billion a year, has the second largest media budgets on Earth. Or Adrian Si, who has reached out and touched the brand-adverse young tuners who make up the core target for Toyota’s youth-skewing Scion brand. Or Ben Relles, who turned a user-generated video – “I’ve Got A Crush on Obama” – into a pop culture sensation, and built a company to do more of the same. The list goes on and on, and readers are going to value the insights these and other marketers have to offer.
