One simple word……REVENUE

Typical areas of interest:

Counterfeit product marketing or sales
–product
–coupons
–manuals
Unauthorized agents/sales posing as representatives
Traffic Diversion Schemes and SEO
Document Leakage
Reputation
False Endorsement claims
Identity theft

For consumer products it has been estimated that there is a 1 trillion dollars in the market annually or 10% of GDP of purchased goods that are illegal counterfeit. Let’s put that in terms of your revenue. If 10% a company with a 3.5 billion dollar revenue stream was being stolen by counterfeit activities ($350,000,000), don’t you think management would much prefer to have that stream of revenue go to the company or shareholders?

Some may think that traffic diversion may not cost the company anything, but if you take into account your conversion ratios of how many customers come to your site and actually purchase goods or services, you can relate that back to a revenue number as well.

– Average monthly online visitors to your site 50,000
– Average monthly visitors diverted 10%, 5000
– Conversion rate to offending sites 1.5%
– Average monthly customers lost (5000) * (.015) = 75
– Annual loss of 900 customers
– Value/Customer $125
– Total cost of online diversion to competition $112.5K
If $112,500 in cash was missing, would you investigate?

These are just a couple of examples of how you can quantify the cost of ignoring the risks around social media. Start evaluating your company based on where you have seen your name in social media and what types of products or services you offer. How easily would they be subject to any of the above scams for diverting your companies cash?

My point is this: Fashion and Culture are inextricably linked. What’s popular in the culture finds its way into the fashions of the day. For example, if America falls in love with a little-engine-that-could film called Slumdog Millionaire, and we are moved by the story, and by the film’s Indian setting, then all things India will be hot for a while. Our interest in Indian culture thus piqued, new Indian restaurants will pop up, the rich saffron and curry color palette of India will find its way into our furniture, home décor, and fashion.

A case in point: On December 5, 2008 the AP published an article stating that Pantone had declared Mimosa (the yellow flower, not the drink) would be 2009’s hot color. This was after Slumdog premiered in theaters, but long before it swept all the awards. Then on March 3, post award season, I read a blog post on Philly.com’s fashion blog Mirror Image titled “Slum Dog Millionaire’s Freida Pinto in Pantone Color of the Year, Mimosa Yellow.” The article accompanied a picture of the film’s leading lady in that beautiful mimosa scarf that she’s wearing in the movie’s exhilarating final dance sequence.

Which came first? Fashion or culture?

Guest Blogger Solveig Muus of Silk Road Spirit started her business in theory when she was around 15 –  Her Mom gave her one of her favorite scarves (raiding her closet was not an option!). She became a scarf fan, even when it was clear no one else was into them. She sewed a lot in those days, and developed a great appreciation for fabrics. Then later, when she was traveling the world in search of adventure, she fell in love with the fabulous colors and the sumptuous textures of Indian textiles. The more she visited India, the more she came to appreciate the people, the land, and the vast array of handicrafts to be discovered there. Check out her blog and learn more about  sourcing in Asia.

Every successful sales person will tell you that a nice car and clothing is vital to a high closing ratio. People don’t want to buy from those that seem less successful than themselves. They want to strive to have more, be more, make more. And they want to, need to, believe that whatever you are selling, and whatever you have done, will bring them that result.  The same is true of services that an agency like ours manages.  A client won’t sign for you to do marketing for them, if your marketing is sub par.

So, today when we were approached by a potential client to help them with social media, and we went to their web site to find a site that wasn’t only outdated, but downright an antique, I was forced to have them revisit their brand position.  Their services require that a customer invest well over $20K with them. Yet their site screams “we don’t have any money, and don’t really know what we are talking about.”  While other agencies would have simply taken the requested business – and jump into social media – we talked them through the real need they had which was to redesign their website and reposition their brand to fall in line with their price points and expertise. Without that, all of the blogging and social media in the world isn’t going to help them. People won’t convert. And that’s not good for anyone.

So much like in junior high school where the right jeans mattered, the right website matters today.  Your brand and website that conveys that brand need to fall in line with where you want to be positioned in the food chain. It is a popularity contest, right or wrong. And much like you put on your best new outfit on the first day of school, you want to be your best dressed when a new potential customer finds your site.

Looking for online marketing results? We can help…

Specifically, really good agencies come out with GENIUS ad campaigns.  They can craft messages and long streams of advertising snippets that take life in various mediums, and sometimes, the very nature of the campaign is so creative and interesting that you have to commend whoever the idea came from in a cocktail laden planning session.  You see this a lot with Crispin Porter – always fabulous.

See, the beauty of a big agency is that they get paid money to do mostly really lame and easy tasks.  But, the 10% creative genius that happens in a good agency is where the payoff can be for a client.  There’s no art in writing a media plan, or really in doing PR, or even general ad campaigns that follow the standards that have been in place forever.  Where the “magic happens” is when you get a creative team that is allowed the luxury of time (based on crazy retainers and really high billable hours the client is paying) to come up with something that would really capture attention.  See this awesome campaign for LG that was just uncovered!

LG Electronics kicked off a $100 million global marketing push with a long-awaited event that promised to be the red-carpet premiere of a TV series by director David Nutter called “Scarlet.” However, the show, which had been previewed in the press and even listed in online movie database IMDB.com, was a promotional hoax designed to focus attention on LG Electronics’ new line of flat-panel TVs.

I was “victim” to their campaign seeing commercial after commercial thinking – “what an odd show, but maybe I’ll Tivo the first one to check it out…”

Genius. 

So kudos to the brand manager, and the “number of agencies” they say they used (who sadly didn’t get any praise from all the press attention – shame on your press..and shame on you Kwan-Sup Lee if you didn’t tell the writer to include them.)

So, I’ll say it again – use ad agencies (good ones) to craft genius stuff – let them spin their wheels and come up with cool ideas that get attention from multiple streams (goodness knows you won’t pay your interactive team to spend time THINKING or CRAFTING) and then let them work with us to help implement these creative streams to even higher success (like, why isn’t LG blogging about this, or posting it on their site and pushing it out into the relevant blogs with trackbacks, etc. – see, there’s where the agencies go really wrong…)

1. “We meant to do that” – a response when we pointed out that a site a client built (who claims to do web development on the higher end levels) wasn’t visible in Google.

2. “We have too much business” – their continued rebuttal which I found incredibly odd in general, but especially in a down economy. I’ll be sure to check back in with them in 3 months.

3. “We didn’t have any business in January, so we are not going to do any advertising in February” – well, you can see where the flaw is in this one if you know about my rants, but more importantly, the client was on vacation all of January so his phones were not answered. You know how I feel about that.

4. “The internet has only been around for 10 years.” This came from a guy who sells interactive advertising.

5. “There’s not a whole lot of people using the Internet yet.” Self explanatory.

6. “I don’t think we should deal in that social media stuff.” – This from someone who has no ranking in Google for his own name, but there are over 10,000 NEGATIVE posts ABOUT him in Google. 

Got anymore? Share them here!

Shortly after that, you saw a deluge of new sites come up across all industries all with one special moniker…”e” or “i” something or other. For what was really YEARS after the web was already in use, the rest of the world outside us nerds got on board and agencies all over the nation were quick to set up web pages and give them all clever URLs like “eINSERTINDUSTRYHERE.com” or “iINSERTINDUSTRYHERE.com” over and over.  It was maddening.  

Now with the new recognition of what many of us have been doing for years (blogs, community sites, forums, video,) we see the rest of world calling this “Web 2.0″ which is great in so many ways, but also showing the non-creative side of traditional minds getting on board with something us old zealots have been preaching for years. 

So now, you see “Web 2.0″ churning out numerous followers to this tagline.  ”Sales 2.0″ “Real Estate 2.0″ and the “Economy 2.0.”  It makes me wonder though, now that the leaders in our space are forging into “Web 3.0″ to give a name to the NEXT level of integration, will we now see “Dating 3.0″ or “Banking 3.0?” 

And, let me also offer up a pre-response rebuttal to anyone that uses the “do you know how much spam I get in a day” argument because (a) we get over 200 pieces every 4 hours – which is not uncommon for those of us that are heavily involved in social media and interactive advertising for our clients as we are forced to subscribe and leave our email for thousands of sites and advertisers and the like to do our appropriate job of finding AS MANY outlets to reach their clients/customers as possible, and (b) it really takes like less than a second to scan and see what is spam and what isn’t so how much time are you REALLY losing. Let me also add to those that love to banter back the whole “cost” issue (usually people that really don’t know anything about bandwidth or email server space, and 9 times out of 10 are freemail users who miss the point completely – yes, you AOL, HOTMAIL, and GMAILERS, this means you…) because a media outlet should be already invested in a surplus of backup and space due to heavy inquiry from PR as well as customers. But more importantly…

Here’s the crux. There is a symbiotic relationship between writers/producers and the public relations professionals that is often misunderstood and unappreciated from both sides of the fence. For media professionals that fall outside the “news” category, a large amount of your story ideas and delivery depend on the PR companies feeding you information in form of release, inquiry, or even direct access to the top dogs that you need quoted in your story to make it more impressive. That being said, I would think that part of your very job description and daily task would be to sift through thousands of emails and (for those old schoolers) faxes. So, why then if you get something that isn’t a good fit, do you feel the need to flame the sender? Even more to my point, if you are SO limited in your time, then how did you find time to send a mean email?

The bottom line is that you need us as much as we need you. And, many of you probably don’t know this, but we are also at the mercy of the companies that provide the tools to us. While our agency specifically does the best we can to funnel through every contact and look at their beat and also READ their publication, there are ti

I had a wonderful interview with Tim and we talked about a bazilion things that center around social media and where it’s going. Some of my other points I shared were that (a) companies are now trying to embark on a social media plan, but most do not have a clear strategy that ties into their overall business plan, and (b) many companies want the cool “blogs” and “podcasts” but don’t want to do the work involved to maintain them (nor do they want to pay companies like ours to do it for them, and (c) companies come to agencies like mine and others that offer social media as a service, but immediately want to know how they are going to generate revenue off of it…and really don’t like the answer in most cases…there isn’t any to be had, but social media participation is an insurance policy you can’t afford not to carry.

Great stuff, Tim! I can’t wait for the article on the YouTube lawsuit!

There are so many things to discuss over the coming week with regard to this conference, but a specific highlight of course was finally meeting Chris Heuer, the founder of the Social Media Clubwho truly has grasped not only a vision of social media and it’s impact on business, but more exciting to me personally, the once again realization that this “new media” or “internet world” has completely changed the rules of business, entreprenuership, and the economy.

I was joined by many esteemed panelists including Allan Sabo, Pamela Slim, Max Fose, Celia Blackwood, Kevin Donnellan, and
Ben Gordon.

Last, but not least, Robert Scoble closed out the day with many quips from a blogging fanatic – most importantly, a point that I think many missed but really need to remember is to simply pay attention to your customers. Acknowledge them. Period.

I’ll have more in the coming days to chat about, such as a warning not to dislike ice cream or you may be sued, how companies should see blogs as insurance rather than cost centers, and of course why old schoolers tick me off.