How are social platforms powering mobile commerce?

[This post was originally written for socialmediatoday.com as a guest post and was published on Sept 1]

The world is increasing becoming mobile. The technology creators of today are creating goods for the SoLoMo consumer – the one who is social, location and mobile savvy. The social networks are realizing this fact and they know the social networking of tomorrow (and by that I mean in the next 2 years) would move vastly to mobile phones and the social web would be heavily accessed with a location layer. Here are a few stats to get a better idea:

• Research shows that one-third (33 %) of the Facebook postings are mobile
• Americans spend nearly 2.7 hours per day connected to mobile web, and a vast majority of their time goes into social networking with mobile phones
• Mobile users tend to be more ‘social’ than the traditional desktop users. This can be seen from a study that 91% of mobile phone users go online to socialize compared to only 79% of traditional desktop users

The numbers above along with the rising mobile penetration predictions clearly show the future shift in social networking towards mobile  and the social platforms giants, especially the big 5 – Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, Foursquare and Google, clearly understand this. Hence it is not surprising to see that almost all of them have come up with their own set of mobile strategies. Moreover these platforms also know that in order to generate revenues in the fast growing mobile world, to attract brands that want to go mobile and boost up their own revenue models from a mobile consumer they would need a heavy focus towards m-commerce.

Therefore, I thought it would be a good idea to see how the mobile strategies of social platforms are powering m-commerce. This article will tell you how each social giant is coming up with mobile strategies and how their mobile strategy is imapcting the mobile commerce of today and tomorrow.

Scope

I believe that m-commerce has a greater meaning than just monetary transaction using mobile phones. In this post I have tried to derive and work upon this greater meaning and not limited myself to the transaction part. Hence, I have tried to use m-commerce in the context of marketing, commerce, sales and CRM; basically the use of mobile to move a consumer across every aspect of the sales funnel.

Facebook

The social network is seeing heavy shift in its traffic on mobile phones. Here are few of initiatives for powering mobile commerce

Facebook launched Facebook places in USA and Europe. With this initiative, they partnered with a couple of brands that offered discount deals to consumers on checking-in at various places. The idea led a lot of brands to create marketing campaigns using Facebook places.Starbucks offered free filter coffee to those who check-in, while Mazda offered free cars and cars on discounts. Dallas airport offered discounts from hospitality brands inside the airport on checking-in while Jet Blue launched the go places campaign and a Facebook app that rewarded badges and real gifts to people who checked-in. You can see some of the most creative Facebook Places mobile marketing examples in this mashable article.

(An update here – Facebook recently ended its deals initiative after testing it in 8 cities)

Another mobile commerce initiative taken by Facebook is to facilitate Facebook credit purchase with mobile payment. What this means is, you can buy Facebook credits and the charges would be reflected in your mobile bill. Facebook has partnered with mobile payment companies Zong and Boku to help consumers buy credits with mobile payment. If you are wondering how you can do this, visit the help post by Facebook Help Center

Similarly, Facebook’s seriousness about m-commerce can also be seen from its HTML 5 efforts. It appears that Facebook is creating a platform that is fully mobile compatible so that users can access Facebook apps using the mobile browser. With this, facebook can sell credits via the mobile browser and keep the complete control of the platform to itself by bypassing the Apple and Android appstore. This would greatly help Facebook in increasing its revenues from the credit purchases made by the mobile phone users who will be buying virtual good while using the Facebook apps.

Twitter

For Twitter, having a mobile strategy is even more important as 43% of Twitter users access it from mobile while 9% access is through tablets. Moreover, Twitter’s mobile focus is obvious, especially as it started with an SMSing service. The Twitter’s 140 characters were decided to that they can fit within an SMS.

Twitter too has created tools to help brands in the mobile marketing. I find the FastFollow tool most fascinating through which you can SMS twitter handle of a brand to get its updates on your mobile by sending ‘follow (Twitter handle)’ to 40404 in the US. Similarly using the ‘Get’ tool you can get the latest updates from a user even if you do not follow him. [SMS ‘Get (username)]

Another of Twitter mobile strategy that is interesting for brands is the location tagging. This feature with which you can tweet with your location can be enabled if you have a browser that supports HTML5 and geo location, or with iPhone or Android phone. Your followers can see where are you Tweeting from.

The mass popularity of Twitter clubbed with location tagging and SMS features makes it a great marketing tool for brands. However I am yet to see some interesting mobile marketing campaigns with Twitter. The only campaign that comes to my mind is by Kogi Barbeque that uses Twitter to update users about the location of the food truck. The customers, who can constantly check the tweets on their mobile phones are able to know the exact location of the food truck.

Foursquare

When it comes to the mobile strategies for social networks, in my research, I have realized that foursquare has the smartest initiative for brands to power mobile marketing and commerce.

To begin with, Foursquare has a lot of partner brands that reward customers for checking –in their store (something like Facebook places deals). Customers can exhibit their loyalty with frequent check-in and brands get to know and reward their most loyal customers.

But it does not end here. Foursquare has another offering of Foursquare pages for businesses. With these pages, businesses can add tips for their consumers at various locations. These tips can be brand’s way of sharing its expertise with its followers or engaging them around something more interesting.

Brands have made good use of Foursquare pages for innovative campaigns to increase sales and gain promotions. For example, New York Times partnered with Four Square during 2010 Winter Olympics and guided the visitors to the best tourist’s spots across Vancouver. Similarly, Foursquare partnered with restaurant reviewer Zagat to help users find the best restaurants around them with reviews and ratings. You can see some of the best Foursquare marketing campaigns at the following articles (1) and (2).

Another Foursquare feature that has great marketing and sales potential is Foursquare lists. With foursquare lists, consumers can create tips for their networks like best places to eat at a particular place, top things to buy or visit by tagging brands. Brands can use these lists to generate advocacy, know their evangelists and engage their customers through an effective CRM program. I will look forward to some interesting mobile marketing by brands using Foursquare lists.

Groupon

Groupon’s mobile strategy is more like a location layer above its deals model. You get the groupon experience but on your mobile phone that can help you customize your deals based on your location.

Groupon’s mobile apps help users purchase deals from their mobile phone, bypass the step where they have to print the proof of purchase and see the deals near their location. Moreover, with Groupon ‘now’, the mobile users need not even wait for the deal to get activated. They can check the deals around their location and grab them right away at the touch of a button.

Surely Groupon has some great ideas to facilitate mobile commerce. Their mobile apps are adding a location layer which is greatly improving the consumer experience of purchasing deals.

Another interesting aspect of Groupon’s mobile commerce strategy is Groupon’s attempt to become world’s largest mobile advertising network. Groupon is partnering with big mobile apps and app makers to run real time promotions of Groupon’s deals from its clients based on proximity. Hence, the next time you will use an app like Loopt and are near a Groupon deal, you will get a notification on your phone.

Google

With the recent launch of Google plus and the integration of search with social, it would be difficult to not call Google a social giant.

Google has some very interesting mobile commerce tools in its arsenal of mobile strategies.Google Shopper app helps users simplify their everyday shopping experience. The app can be used to scan barcodes or book covers to get more information about the product. The app can also be used to find products or know the best prices from online stores or even get information about the stores nearby your vicinity. Certain versions at certain geographies also give you daily deals and deals in proximity.

Google Catalogs, a free app for tablets makes catalog browsing and product purchasing a very engaging experience.  Users can browse across multiple catalogs, get rich media info like videos and high resolution images and really enhance their product research experience. The app helps users to share their findings with friends and even purchase them online or find nearby stores.

Google Wallet is another path breaking initiative by Google to make your payments quick and simpler. Google wallet will hold your payment cards that hold in your wallet today. The app uses NFC (near field communications) to make the fund transfer really simple. All you have to do is just tap your phone on the reader and get your payment done. The eventual aim of the app is to sync loyalty card, receipts, boarding pass, tickets etc all in one mobile app. Google even plans to use this apps for customers to avail Google offers.

I hope this article helped you understand how the mobile strategies of world’s major social platforms are impacting mobile commerce. You can find the research summarized below:

How top social networks are powering mobile commerce

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How are travel brands using social media

This post was originally written for social media today and published on August 11. You can see the original post here

Social Media has always been an attractive avenue for travel brands. The prime reason is that travel is a very social experience both as a purchase as well as an activity. People consult their friends for travel recommendations and seek their advice for places they should visit, airlines they should prefer and hotels they should stay. Moreover, people travel with their friends, make new friends during trips and travelling together (at least for holidays and leisure) is always considered more exciting that travelling alone.

Travel brands are trying to bring this social experience online for people to get travel recommendations, share their travel experiences and help make their customers’ travel better. Seeing the increasing excitement of travel brands for social media campaigns, I decided to look into some of the most interesting patterns emerging in the social media efforts by travel brands.

Scope: Here in this research I have tried to analyze how travel brands are using social media for their marketing campaigns. Here I have considered all brands that generate their revenues explicitly from customer travel or enthusiasm for travel as travel brands (and hence travel guides, travel media too falls in this category). 

Research: The research shows that there are broadly 8 social media campaign strategies being used by travel brands.

You will see that these broad 8 social media strategies leverage 4 different social dynamics. Social Games, Social Media Campaigns and loyalty campaigns leverage the consumer generated content to thrive, while blogs and advocacy programs thrive on smart conversations by the brand or its representatives with the consumers.  Certain forums and social websites leverage the community social dynamics where consumers crowd source content for their passion towards travel while some other travel brands use social applications to connect people to travel better. Each of this strategy is detailed below:

• Social Media Campaigns

Many travel brands have explored social media campaigns to engage its audience and bring participation and fan base. One of my favourite examples is Queensland tourism campaign for ‘the best job in the world’. In this campaign, the organizers launched a user generated contest to offer the job for the caretaker of the Great Barrier Reef Islands. The caretaker would be supposed to communicate his explorations and his experiences to the world through his blog. The campaign was a great success. Some time back even European Travel Commission launched a photo contest on Facebook asking users to submit their morphed pictures at various travel locations

• Loyalty Campaigns

Social Media has given many new faces to loyalty campaigns and completely changed the way brands are rewarding consumers for loyalty. Take for instance, Jet Blue’s Go Places app, where Jet Blue is rewarding customers for checking-in at Jet Blue Terminals using Facebook Places. Customers unlock official badges and reward points for real rewards. Tripadvisor has launched a campaign to recognize its most loyal reviewers and community members. The campaign showcases Tripadvisor’s star reviewers and their reviews / forum posts

• Social Games

With the success of social games like Farmville, Mafia Wars etc, brands have realized the power of games in engaging consumers. Travel Channel has used a similar idea to launch a social game called Kidnapped. The game aims at increasing customer awareness and information about various interesting locations around the globe. The game challenges consumers to kidnap their friends and to escape, the kidnapped person has to answer trivia related to that city where he/ she has been kidnapped.

• Blog

Travel blogs by brands are an excellent way of communicating the brand’s passion for travel to the consumers. Lonely planet here does an excellent job of educating consumers about making their travel experiences better. If you visit their blog, you will see travel showcase, destination, tips and stories. Similarly Southwest Airlines’ blog – Nuts About Southwest aims at communicating to the traveller community how Southwest Airlines can make their travel experience better

• Advocacy program

Certain brands try to generate a word of mouth by providing an advocacy platform to experts to express their opinions and thoughts to consumers. British Airlines has created one such platform called Metrotwin to promote tourism between London and New York by ‘twinning’ the two cities and providing recommendation of best places at both the cities. The recommendations here are made by experts who bring out the best places to eat, shop and stay in the two cities

• Social apps to connect

These apps leverage the fact that travelling is a social activity and people prefer the recommendation of their friends or friends of friends to take travel decisions. Tripadvisor has a travel map app that maps where all the friends in your Facebook network have been around the world. Airbnb Social Connections app helps you rent places in your personal network. It shows you others in your network (friends or friends or friends) who have places to rent.

• Crowdsourced content

It is here that the travel brands leverage community dynamics to energize people to put meaningful content on their websites in form of reviews, ideas and comments to help other users get better information for travel.Tripadvisor and Lonely Planet do this with reviews, likes and ratings to help customers produce recommendations

• Travel forums

Travel forums have always been a popular destination for people researching for travel information. Now brands are hosting travel forums to participate and support such conversations. Virgin Airlines hosts v-flyer travel forum and traveller online community to facilitate conversations and social relationships. Lonely Planet hosts the Thorn Tree forum to empower such discussions.

Hope this researched help you look into some of the top social media marketing implementations by travel brands. The research above is summarized in the presentation below:

How travel brands are using social media for marketing

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6 formats for B2B blogging

I wrote this article for social media today. You can see the original article here 

If you are planning a blogging strategy for your B2B marketing or running a company blog, one of the biggest challenges you face is asking your colleagues to write blog posts.  And when you do that, one of the most common questions you get to hear is – ‘So what should I blog about?’

This question is not always easy to answer. After all how are you supposed to know what the other person should blog!  But the problem that your colleagues are facing is obvious. A hectic day to day schedule often does not leave much time to blog for the company and even if they are determined to create a post, thinking of the right topic is always a challenge for people who are not frequent bloggers.

Since a lot of companies must be facing similar problems, I thought it might be a good idea to create a blog styling guide to help people get an idea of various B2B blogging formats that they can explore.

However, please see that blogging is a way to socially express yourself and there can be no universal template. Hence please feel free to explore your own formats / styles to write articles. But if you are looking for ideas to write blog post or to suggest post to others, this style guide is for you.

What formats can you write:

A) Research - In this blogging format you share your research on certain topics and come up with a conclusion. Such types of posts make more sense when your job involves a lot of research. You can dig into a particular subject and come out with trends and insights. Here you can also talk about best practices in a particular domain, best examples of certain things etc

For example you can see a research post on benchmark examples of B2B  Facebook landing pages, a research post on how banks and financial institutions are using social media, 20 examples of F-Commerce beyond F-Stores and my post on how world’s top brands are adopting social media

B) How to-s - This is a format where you are educating or teaching somebody how to solve a particular problem. This very post belongs to the same category. Such blogs become very easy to write when you work on new problems

As examples, see this blog post by mashable on how to create online communities , Open Forum article on how to encourage your whole company to blog.

C) Share - In this format you start with sharing something thought provoking - a video / excerpt of another blog post / picture / podcast and add your opinion on top of it. This kind of format in increasingly becoming popular with bloggers since it is short in size and comes as an outcome of your daily research

For example see this blog post from 37 signals where the writer is sharing a video and adding his opinions on top of it, Kaushal Sarda’s post where he shares videos on designing next generation cameras

D) Documentation of ideas or upcoming projects – Many companies believe in open research, i.e. they believe in sharing their ideas and thoughts with the community. These companies believe in the philosophy that sharing emerging ideas with the community aids in making them better.

If you are a part of such a company and are working on a new idea, it is good to document and blog about it. Apart from the obvious benefits it brings as an added blog post, documenting your thoughts helps you clear them in your head and provides a ready reference you can hit back.

As examples, see Gauravonomics post on his idea of a novel and a complimenting social game and my post on how thought leadership in B2B companies can be gamified

E) Opinions - Your thoughts on a popular subject or trending topic etc. You can use various listening tools like Alterian SM2, Radian 6 or even Twitter to see what is trending in your areas of expertise.

You can see this post on why investors love social commerce and why single people should not start-up(interesting... eh ;) )

F) Cases and learning: You handled some situations in a project and learnt something valuable; hence you are documenting it, so that others in the company / community can learn. As an example you can see this post on learnings from Amazon outage – building fault tolerant systems on cloud

G) Any other format - there are actually many other possible formats / structures. If you use any other format - add to the thread.

7 Facebook commerce strategies for brands

[This post was originally written for Social Media Today. You can read the original article herewhich got published on June 16th]

Background: F-commerce is increasing generating buzz in the social media and social technology market. Growing upon the people’s social graph, Facebook is suddenly emerging not only as a place to connect and share interesting stuff with people but also as a tool for commerce for brands and customers. World’s biggest brands are selling on Facebook today. In fact, the top 3 brands on Facebook – Coca Cola, Starbucks and Disney, sell directly on Facebook. E-commerce leaders are predicting that within the next 5 years more sales will be happening on Facebook that Amazon.

Hence we thought it would be a good idea to research on some interesting F-commerce strategies and see what different things are being done by brands in F-Commerce (Hat tip tosocial commerce today for their excellent research on Facebook commerce, which was very valuable for writing this article).

Here are the top 7 F-commerce strategies brand owners should know:

• Facebook Stores:

Facebook stores (also known as F-Stores) are the typical stores on Facebook. The idea behind having such stores is to bring the store where the consumer is (i.e. on Facebook). Consumers can decide upon the product, make selections and transactions without leaving Facebook. Moreover, such stores get the viral advantages of Facebook like ‘likes’ and ‘Facebook shares’.

Many brands such as Tide, Gillette, Coca-Cola, 1-800-flowers, jcpenny and many more are selling on Facebook through Facebook stores

• Group Buying

Facebook might have jumped into the ‘group buying’ waters with Facebook deals, but some brands are already using group buying to pump up sales in their stores. Certain brands like W Hotels activate heavily discounted deals when a set number of people bid on it. Skoda, ran the ‘More you like… less you pay campaign’ on their Facebook store, which was an online auction where each ‘like’ reduced the cost of the car by 1 Euro until somebody bought it. Similarly Searsis using the same mechanism on its Facebook store where deals go live when they have received enough likes. This ensures each product on the store generates buzz from its fans

• Exclusive Offers

Since your fans and your Facebook store both are on your Facebook page, there are high chances that it will be your fans who will be shopping from your Facebook page. So why not use your store to reward them with exclusive offers to generate buzz along with sales.

Many brands are using this strategy to give exclusive offers on their Facebook stores. Pantene did this some time back when they were giving early access to their new products on their F-stores. Ketchup brand Heinz and Women shoes and Handbag brand Nine West are also using F-stores to give limited edition products to their fans

• Facebook connect for network recommendations

Some of the biggest e-commerce and retail brands seem to be using this for moving their customers ahead into the sales funnel. Such Facebook commerce applications leverage Facebook’s open graph to show valuable recommendations to potential customers and buyers.

For instance, Amazon’s ‘Your Amazon Facebook Page’ application recommends movies, music and other products based on the recommendations of your friends on Facebook. Tripadvisor’stravel map application shows you a map of all your friends and the places they have been across the globe, which is a simple but smart way of gaining travel recommendations. Similarly, Levis Friends Store displays jeans liked by other people and your friends.

• Shop and tell

You will find this as the emerging trend among onsite Facebook stores. With Shop and tell plugins brands can integrate referral features to their shopping carts so that whenever someone makes a purchase on the store, they can recommend the product to people in their network. In return they can avail rewards such as discounts, free shipping etc. Many companies like Flaunt it, Tip from me and Finz.it provide such type of plugins.

Another interesting shop and tell tool is Swipely which integrates with your card information to notify people in your network about your purchases. It also shows what is happening at the places you shop as a shopping feed.

Certain brands tweaked this model to generate recommendations and word of mouth. They are selling consumers content (books, papers, research reports, music) and products (beers, gifts) in exchange of a Tweet or a Facebook wall update about your brand. See pay with a tweet for more information.

• Facebook check in deals

Certain brands are making smart use of Facebook check –in deals for boosting up their sales. Facebook check- in deals allows users to find deals in their vicinity using their mobile phones and find offers. Such kind of campaigns helps brands since user check-ins, when they come up in activity feeds, act as a marketing channel for the brands. We see a great potential in Facebook check in deals for F-commerce since a lot of interesting stuff can be experimented in this space.

Brands like Gap used Facebook check ins to give free jeans to the first 10, 000 check ins and discounts to the rest of the customers who checked in. Mazda too used Facebook book check ins to give 20% off on Mazda Roadster customers who checked in.

• In store Facebook commerce

While some brands are trying to bring their stores to Facebook through Facebook stores, some others are doing the vice versa, that is, bringing Facebook to their on -ground retail stores. If your brand has offline retail stores targeting a lot of youth, then this strategy would definitely win you a lot of buzz and recommendation.

Coca Cola village is an interesting example of in store F-commerce, where there was a real life ‘like’ button that sent ‘likes’ to the users Facebook account by scanning their wristbands.DieselCam – an initiative by Diesel, had devices installed in trial rooms where people could take post their pics with Diesel Gear on their Facebook account.

Hope this research will help brand owners and social media research understand the wide scope of social commerce. It you know of any more strategies, please add to this list.

7 Facebook Commerce startegies for brands

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Facebook apps for marketing campaigns

[I wrote this post originally for Social Media Today and it got published on June 7th 2011. I am cross-posting the post. You can read the original post here]

Background: Some time back I had published a research about how brands are using Facebook apps for enhancing their CRM. In this post I would like to focus on the second value proposition that Facebook apps bring to brands – an amazing opportunity to run campaigns.

I have been increasingly seeing brands using Facebook apps to give a boost to their marketing. In fact if you see the list of Facebook preferred developer consultants, you will see some very interesting case studies of brands using Facebook apps. Therefore, in this post I would like to focus on why and how brands are using Facebook apps for their contests and campaigns

Just as a reminder, in this post I am only focusing and benchmarking Facebook apps that have been used as marketing centric campaigns. Apps which are powering commerce, driving sales, customer support and philanthropy are not a part of this research.

Why brands are using Facebook apps for campaigns: This is a million dollar question. Here are a few reasons why marketing and brand managers are getting so much attracted to Facebook apps:

• Getting campaign where the crowd is – this is the obvious reason. With more than 600 million active users on Facebook, a very large number of brands have realized that their target audience is active on Facebook. So why not use the good old strategy, take the show where the crowd is!
• I have x thousand facebook fans, what next! – You have a large set of fans on your Facebook page and your community manager is daily putting up interesting news content to keep them engaged. But then, the next question that comes up is – what next! What more can you do to keep your fans excited about your brand or to say, what is the next step of customer engagement? Here Facebook apps turn out to be an exciting way to engage your fans, give them something new and get meaningful conversations / creations out of them
• I want x thousand fans, how do I get them! – A lot of brands use Facebook ads to get fans for their page. But once a user lands on your page through your ad, how do you convince him that you are worth a ‘like’. Here Facebook apps come in handy, which help in providing relevant content, videos, information on the landing pages to grab user’s attention and help him decide. ( See Vans Facebook landing tab) Also many apps are have viral features to help them spread to your user’s network, resulting in more people getting in your engagement funnel
• Campaigns bring the attention, Facebook retains it: I was going through @gauravonomics’ slideshare channel where he talks about the active role a campaign plays for a community. Essentially, each Facebook campaign bring attention to the brand (in form of new fans), but even when the campaign dies out, your fans are still with you and you can launch more active programs to engage them. Compare this with a traditional media campaign, where each new campaign has to be started from scratch.
• Replicating an off Facebook social media campaign- Sometimes due to technical, design or functional constrains, brands prefer running social media campaigns using microsite or community platforms. Here building a facebook application helps you direct traffic to your campaign. For example, Pepsi built a Pepsi Refresh voting app to promote the Pepsi refresh campaign.

How brands are using Facebook for campaigns and contests

Although brands are being very creative in their campaigns and many digital agencies, creative agencies or consultants are helping them to come up with the best campaign to suit their needs, however most of the campaign focussed facebook applications can be divided into 8 broad categories:

Static content campaign for awareness: These are probably the most explored type of Facebook applications. These applications focus on awareness campaigns, providing rich media, videos, pictures to their fans in a shareable format. For e.g. Levi’s ‘Water talks about Levi’s efforts to save millions of litres of water. The application shows videos associated with the cause and helps people spread awareness about the Levi’s innovation. Hot Wheels hasa landing tab application that runs viral video campaigns for team hot wheels.

Sweepstakes, quizzes and polls: Sweepstakes, quizzes and polls form a low engagement – low virality campaign app model for marketers. However many brands use them since they trigger participation and have valuable buzz generation capabilities. For example, Southwest Airlines runs sweepstakes and polls on their Facebook app.

Apps for viral campaigns: These are again low engagement campaigns designed to spread a message, virtual product by fans. Coca Cola gifts app allows user to gift their friends virtual coke products

Photo / video contest: It is from here that the apps start becoming more engaging, and the scope to have a remarkable campaign increases. These applications ask users to submit photos / videos around a certain theme and ask other users to vote for their favourite photo / video. The campaigns become viral since the participants start spreading it to get more votes / attention. Sony in its video contest on Facebook asked users to create trailers for the promotion of the movie ‘the priest’ and submit it as a contest entry to the Facebook app. Nike’s Free Arena contest asks users to submit videos of their sporty moves and stunts and get community to vote for the best video. Similarly Levi’s ran a video contest for their Facebook community to find the next ‘face and voice’ of their women’s wear brand.

Ideation contests: Ideation Facebook contest apps focus on asking the community ideas around a certain theme, lifestyle, passion or cause and ask the rest of the community to curate (rate, vote, comment, share) the ideas. The result is a user generated and community selected best idea which can result in a improved product, a new innovation, business idea, customer feedback, market research etc. For example Kohl ran an ideation campaign some time back where participants were encouraged to nominate and vote for the school they felt was most deserving of funds, and submit their ideas about how the funds could best be used by the school.

Loyalty campaigns: It is fascinating to see brands using Facebook apps for loyalty campaigns. Certain brands are leveraging Facebook apps to power up their loyalty cards. Starbucks card app allows users to manage their card through Facebook, edit profiles, reload, see transactions and get points for loyalty. Users can even reload their friends’ cards. (reference)

Other brands like Jetblue are leveraging apps integrated with Facebook places to power their loyalty and this brings a very interesting value proposition for the brands since Facebook platform provides them the social graph of users (friends, activity, profile), Facebook places provides the ability to check –in and gain loyalty points and the Facebook application integrates the two. The result is a powerful brand app that users can use to check-in when they reach official jetblue terminals, receive loyalty points, see friends’ activities for Jetblue and see leaderboard for the most loyal customers.

Social Games for engagement: Social Games are again are great way to build a campaign application. They are engaging, they attract high user activity, they are viral and can generate a lot of buzz. Certain brands like Travel Channel build their own social games like Kidnapp! to engage their audience (The game challenges users to kidnap their friends to their favorite international hideout city. To escape from the hideout city and begin kidnapping their friends, kidnapped players must answer a trivia question related to that city.) Certain other brands are using existing Facebook games for their campaigns. For example, Bing some time back advertised on Farmville to acquire a large number of Facebook fans. Similarly, Dreamworks used Cityville to promote their Kung-Fu Panda 2 movie where users could build drive-in movie theatres in their city, get collection items etc.

Referral campaigns: I have not seen many brands using Facebook apps for referral campaign. But Appirio Facebook application allows users to make effective referrals to their friends. Once somebody signs up for the app, he / she can see who other people in their network would like the product too based on their interests and likes and other information on Facebook. The app makes appropriate suggestion to users to make effective referrals to other in their network. See the case study for Mark. for more information.

Facebook apps can be a very effective tool for referral campaign since a social network works best in making referrals.

Hope this article would help marketing managers and brand managers understand how they can use Facebook apps for their campaigns. Would love to know more use cases from you. You can find a summary of this research below:

How brands are using facebook apps for marketing campaigns

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World's top brands social media adoption

[This post was originally written for pluggd.in and posted on June 7th. You can read the originalpost here]

I was going through the BrandZ report on the world’s top brands for the year 2011. It was great to see that some of the top brands in the world are also the ones which are heavily adopting social media for their marketing.

I found following noteworthy things from the rankings:

• 4 out of world’s top 5 brands are technology brands and among the top 100, 18 brands belong to technology sector
• Many online brands emerge in the list like Google (2), Amazon (14), Facebook (35), Ebay (82) and Baidu (29)
• 11 out of top 50 brands are using online communities as a growing and sustainable social media tool for marketing

The last point was most interesting to me. If you see the overall social media adoption among the top 50 brand, you will see that most of these brands are moving beyond the traditional channels like Facebook pages and Twitter accounts to blogs, social applications, content thought leadership, viral campaigns, consumer generated campaigns and eventually models like sustainable online communities to engage their audiences, energize their loyal fans and facilitate word of mouth.

Hence in this post, I will like to talk about how 11 of the world’s biggest brands have adopted to sustainable social media solutions such as online communities to engage their customers, partners and employees.

IBM (rank 3):

IBM, in its continued efforts to build a smarter planet, has powered ‘A Smarter Planet’community. They believe that a planet is built smarter at an industry level and wants to facilitate related conversations on various topics like banking, energy, retail, traffic etc.  Apart from that IBM powers developer forums and support communities to help users learn from one another

Microsoft (rank 5): Microsoft is another brand that really understands the power of online communities. They have built many communities and networks to individually cater segments of their target audience. For e.g. Microsoft Developer network is targeted towards developers,Microsoft partner network is targeted to provide tools and resources to Microsoft customers and partners to get more out of Microsoft products, Microsoft Dynamics Community is targeted for professional using Microsoft dynamics products and solution and Windows community provides users forum to hold discussions about various windows products

Coca Cola (rank 6) – Although the beverage major does not have a separate community site to engage fans, this is one brand that has made maximum use of its Facebook page. Legend has it that this page was originally created by 2 Coca Cola fans Dusty Sorg and Micheal J and is managed by them and not the Coca Cola Company.

However, with more than 27 million people present on the fan page and high volume of fan activity, news, promotions, and campaigns running; Coca Cola is doing a great job engaging its fans. They even have a social media policy on their Facebook page to help manage sanity in the community. They keep on launching social media campaigns to engage their audience and use the Facebook page to promote the campaigns. So you can see Expedition 206 app to promote the Expedition 206 campaign. Also coca cola has launched a community campaign – live positively to mobilize fans to lend a helping hand to the global community.

GE (rank 10) – GE’s Ecomagination Challenge is the benchmark example of how business can become social enough to crowd source innovation. Ecomagination is a fabulous user generated innovation contest that leverages the collective wisdom of crowd to come up with the best ideas on how to improve our energy future. The contest operates in phases (phase 1 was about building energy efficient grid and phase 2 is focussed at building energy efficient homes), where users give ideas and other vote for the ideas they support. GE plans to invest $200 million to winning idea to bring the concept into shape.

 Walmart (rank 15): I really love the Walmart’s advocacy program for Eleven Moms. Eleven Moms is a mommy community lead by twenty (and not eleven) moms across USA. The moms are popular bloggers who talk about topics like parenting, value for money and this helps Walmart engage with a big set of their target audience. To engage their other sets of audience, Walmart powers discussion boards around parenting, health, lifestyle etc.

HP (rank 18) – HP leverages a lot on support community to help reduce support center costs, empower their consumers and partners to solve each other’s problems and generate consumer insight on support related issues. You can check out their support community on Facebook, HP support forum, HP Enterprise business community and support forum for their software solutions

SAP (rank 19) – I truly love the way SAP has built a community (SAP community network) of SAP professional to learn, teach and network with other SAP customers, partners and employees. Users can learn from each other through blogs, wiki, discussion, collaborate on projects and crowd source innovation on ideas for better SAP products

Loius Vuitton (rank 26) – The luxury brand runs an digital social magazine called nownessshowcasing stories of contemporary culture, global lifestyle, music, art, travel, sport and fashion. Some of the world’s foremost designers and creative thinkers in luxury industry participate in this community.

BMW (rank 30) – BMW’s Mini has built a one if the most interesting online communities I have seen, called ‘creative use of space’. While most of the brands build their communities around a lifestyle, passion or cause, BMW has built an urban community around a value – making creative use of space. This community is about taking part in events, competitions and projects about making creative use of space. Basically, it is a hub of creative people and designers to connect around event and information. This is how the community explains its purpose:

“When Sir Alec Issigonis invented the MINI he thought of a car that maximizes use of minimum space. Keeping issues like declining energy resources in mind, he created a functional and exciting car that is the ultimate creative use of space.

As urban dwellers we too are constantly thinking of new ways to explore or re-imagine the spaces around us to be more functional, beautiful, and available. MINI Space (the online community) puts up an inspiring framework for you to make creative use of space.”

Pampers (rank 34) – Pampers is one brand that really understand the concept of a social business and this is reflected by the fact that their website – www.pampers.com is actually a community around parenting! Thousands of parents engage around helping and learning about taking care of their children across various stages of development. I think this is a great way to engage your target audience (parents) by providing them an online space that they will repeatedly visit to learn more about parenting. Pampers gets a platform to run promotions, listen what they are saying and engage with their audience

American Express (rank 40): American Express has built an online community for small businesses called Open Forum. Undoubtedly, this is a smart move since companies like AMEX have a large focus towards targeting small businesses and engaging them on their network is perhaps the best way to do that. The community provides tools and information to small businesses to connect with others and learn about managing their business better.

Hope this research help you understand the power of online communities for marketing and brand building. It is great to see some of the world’s biggest brand making serious efforts to engage with their world. Find the presentation below that summarizes the research.

World’s top brands and their social media adoption

View more presentations from Kuliza Technologies

Marketing with online cricket communities

With IPL being the big news everyday for the past two months, it is great to see how various IPL teams are leveraging the concept of online communities to promote their teams and the game itself. I see almost all of the IPL teams having websites which have community elements where fans can engage around their passion for game and support their teams.

How are these online communities engaging fans?

When I started working in the field of social media, one of the first projects I was exposed to, was an online cricket community of a major IPL team. It was fascinating to see social media as an outstanding tool to connect these fans, get them engaged around this event (IPL) and side-by-side create a huge task force of your team fans and enthusiasts. It made me realize that no other tool or medium can help a team energize its fans, know them better and create a community that will take the burden on promoting the team on its own head!

If you see the overall engagement level on such communities, you will realize that they are doing pretty well. For example Delhi Daredevils has more than 32,000 Facebook fans (I could not find the exact number of members), Rajasthan Royals has more than 4000 discussion threads on its forum and Royal Challenger Bangalore’s online community has generated more than 600,000 support votes for the team from fans.

Hence I thought it might be a good idea to look into how these teams are engaging its fans. Some of these are benchmark practices to be followed by marketing managers for leading their social media marketing initiatives:

• Promoting passion and not product: One of the key things you will notice is that these communities are selling a passion (i.e. cricket) to its users more than a product (the team or tickets). This is important to create consumer activity since people will connect to each other around a passion (or a lifestyle or cause) more than a product.
• Content to create conversations: One can see that the content teams of such communities are actively feeding new content to the users in forms of news, media (photos & videos) and blogs. This is important to increase fan activity and provide triggers to fan engagement. See below how Deccan Chargers andRajasthan Royals are promoting team and cricket related content on their blogs

• Conversations to generate connect: These communities have built forums and discussion boards to its users to facilitate conversation around news, interesting happenings, developments, upcoming matches. When it comes to cricket, tools like forums are an excellent way to get users to connect around interesting topics. Some teams like King’s XI Punjab and Royal Challengers Bangalore also allow users to create blog posts and articles
• Tactical programs and online campaigns to rejuvenate interest: Your online community is like a social event of which you are the host. You will have to keep on doing interesting programs after short periods of time to rejuvenate the interest. The good thing is that these communities’ managers understand this well and bring periodic contests to pump up the interest of fans. For e.g. for the 2011 season of IPL, you can see Delhi Daredevils running a bunch of microcontest on itscontest page, Chennai Super Kings is  managing the Super Blog Contest, Mumbai Indian is running a Chief Fan Contest to recognize the most active community participants and know your Mumbai Indians contest. RCB in the past has run the xyz contest to where they chose a photographer, a fan and a blogger to accompany the team
• Online- offline integration in form of events and meetups: I strongly believe that for a community to succeed, things cannot just remain virtual. You need very strong offline integration with online activity. Online communities like RCB understand this well and facilitate offline meetups and events for fans.
• Bringing celebs to the fans: Such communities bridge the barriers between the celeb team players and the fans by bringing news, interview, exclusive write-ups to the fans

How are such communities promoting the game and the brand?

Needless to say, such communities are an immense asset to the game of cricket. It is adding an additional online layer to the excitement that thrives in cricket stadiums, beer bars, car radios and in front of television sets in homes. But the interesting thing to note is the way it is helping out in revenue generation and brand building initiatives of the teams’ parent brand.

Leaving aside the obvious eyeballs grabbing and focussed banner and branding opportunities that such communities bring (for e.g. see the bottom of the Kolkata Knight Rider website), such communities are helping brand sell merchandize, tickets and premium memberships too. But the most important asset such communities are bringing to the brand is that they are providing a round the year platform to engage the audience rather than the IPL event which generates buzz for at most a quarter. For e.g Royal Challenger brand would get a 12 month buzz, attention and user activity from its online community as compared to a season long buzz and attention generated by offline campaigns.

Hope this post would help marketing managers understand a particular use case of online communities and the value they bring to the brand.

[As a matter of fact, Kuliza helps brands build online communities to connect customers, partners and employees and run social media campaigns. For more information, see ouronline community offering or learn about our featured work for txtWeb]