I Think in Campaigns

It’s hard to imagine how pervasive social networking has become in the everyday consumer’s life in such a relatively short time.  Today, there are more visits to Facebook than Google.  It’s also hard to imagine how difficult it has been for marketers to integrate this new channel and medium into their everyday efforts.  Why?  We decided to do a little homework and actually ask CMOs and marketers.

Their answer? “Because all you vendors make it so damn hard.  And, because every time I ask about the ROI of the stuff, I hear something like ‘Well, what’s the ROI of putting your pants on in the morning?’  I don’t need cute, I need results.  And, results that won’t create brain-damage in the process.”

I’m paraphrasing just a bit – but, only a bit.  Marketers told us that they work in campaigns – that they spend $500 billion a year in a high-velocity bid to continually hit numbers and acquire new customers.  But, that beyond hiring 10 people to monitor Twitter or setting up a Facebook fan page, everything else in social required a 3-6 month project plan, complicated workflow design and rules, and a web-development team at the ready.  Their world, they said, moves much faster than that.  It moves at campaign speed.

I’m paraphrasing just a bit – but, only a bit.  Marketers told us that they work in campaigns – that they spend $500 billion a year in a high-velocity bid to continually hit numbers and acquire new customers.  But, that beyond hiring 10 people to monitor Twitter or setting up a Facebook fan page, everything else in social required a 3-6 month project plan, complicated workflow design and rules, and a web-development team at the ready.  Their world, they said, moves much faster than that.  It moves at campaign speed.

The Next Generation in Social Marketing: CrowdWorks Social Campaign

Well, that sounded like an opportunity to actually solve a problem.  Today, we are announcing the next generation in social marketing – the first Social Campaign application.  [hot link to press release] An application that allows marketers to incorporate social into all their campaigns in a matter of minutes; an application that shows them black and white ROI for each social campaign, for each social interaction; and an application that allows marketers to develop a social database for even better segmentation and targeting.

Simply said, CrowdWorks – Social Campaign delivers Social ROI. Easy.

Fast and Simple

When did people get the idea that we could all just stop doing marketing while we spent 6 months figuring out “what to do with social”?  Demands on the marketer come fast and furious – we don’t have time to wait for a complicated deployment plan or IT resources.  We need to move at campaign speed.

CrowdWorks Social Campaign is the first social marketing application to offer marketers a solution that is easy to use and fast to deploy – all without the need for IT resources.  How does ten minutes sound?

Tailor the Message

Just because the world is social doesn’t mean that we as marketers have to completely abdicate our ability and right to try and get our message out there.  Consumers like to hear – and spread – authentic offers and communications.

CrowdWorks Social Campaign is the first social marketing application that allows marketers to tailor messages to be carried across social networks in an authentic way.  Marketers can influence the offer and the message – and because the message is useful and consistent with end users’ experiences, they are excited to share them.  It’s a win-win.

Built-in Social ROI

Do you feel comfortable telling your boss that the ROI for social “is so obvious we don’t need to track it”?  I wouldn’t.  Social is a new behavior on the web.  Remember the “new economy”?  It wasn’t so new.  It turned out that the rules didn’t actually change – businesses still had to actually make money.  And, marketers still need to show an ROI for campaigns.

CrowdWorks Social Campaign is the first social marketing application to track click-level, individual-level, and campaign level data so that you can tell exactly how many conversions and revenue someone generated through their social activity.  I said it in the press release, and I’ll say it here, Social Campaign can make heroes out of marketers everywhere.

The Payoff

Customers that have already started using the new application are seeing results that range from a 4x to 15x lift on the return to their campaigns.  It is literally transforming the shape of the marketing funnel!  And, it takes 10 minutes to get live.  One analyst that we briefed said, “Your approach is so unique…you are driving simplicity…everyone else is making things more complex…don’t change a thing!”

The Conversation

Based on our customer discussions and the research we are doing with marketers, we’re hearing a strong need to make things simpler, faster, and more impactful.  The Social Campaign application represents the new frontier in social for marketers – easy-to-use applications that show direct ROI.  Our mission at Crowd Factory is to make heroes out of marketers everywhere.  Let’s start a dialogue…tell us what you need here. From here it gets interesting.

Are you fascinated by the social media revolution? Do you see the amazing statistics showing the effectiveness of Social Campaigns? There are a lot of players in Social Media right now, but how about being a part of a team that is creating and running a Social Marketing application that actually measures ROI?

Analysts and customers are impressed with the CrowdWorks Social Marketing Suite and they’ve called it unique and a step above the rest. If you’re passionate about Social Marketing and want to work with a team of other intelligent, driven folks to grow our leading-edge social marketing application, Crowd Factory is hiring, send your resume to us now.

Crowd Factory is the leading social marketing platform enabling companies to run compelling social marketing campaigns that dramatically increase new customer acquisition and capture actionable analytics to further optimize marketing results. We power such renowned brands as HBO, Nielsen, Universal Music Group, Billboard, VEVO, Harvard Pilgrim, The Golf Channel, Rachael Ray, and can help any marketing effort accelerate and optimize results using social marketing. The company is privately held with headquarters in San Francisco, CA and a development office in Portland, Oregon.

We’re hiring in Development (descriptions below). Please send your resume to info@crowdfactory.com . To learn more about Crowd Factory, visit: www.crowdfactory.com.

Product Director, ref #BPD1

• Hired!

Product Manager, ref #BPM2

• Hired!

Java Script Engineer, ref#BJSE3

• 5+yrs of JavaScript programming
• Expert-level JavaScript/Ajax knowledge
• Experience with multiple object-oriented JavaScript patterns
• Experience with jQuery (other JS libraries a plus)
• Experience using JSON/XML REST APIs
• High level of skill with HTML/CSS
• UI interaction design/implementation skills
• Graphic manipulation skills for slicing images to build HTML/CSS sites
• Experience building Cross-browser UI in JavaScript
• Advanced browser compatibility troubleshooting knowledge

Social leads are better

Our thesis: “A lead obtained through Social Marketing activities is of lower cost and delivers a higher value than leads obtained through other digital marketing means (i.e. search, display)”

We have a handful of solid data points to support this thesis:

• A study of 33 million unique users from Chitika’s network in September 2009 showed that visitors coming from Facebook and Digg were more loyal than those coming from the three major search engines… (Chitika defined “loyal” visitors as those who came to a site four or more times in the same week.)
• More than two-thirds of US Facebook users said a Facebook friend referral would increase their chances of purchasing a product or visiting a retailer, according to research and consulting firm Morpace.
• 67% of shoppers spend more online after recommendations from online community of friends. (Internet Retailer, September 2009)
• According to Hitwise: “..among the top 5 Print Media websites in the week ending March 6, 2010, 78% of Facebook.com users were returning visitors compared to 67% from Google News”
• According to a study by HubSpot: inbound marketing dominated businesses experienced a 60% lower cost per lead than outbound marketing dominated organizations
• And many more…

Not all rings are created equal

But; why does it work this way? IMHO this is an expression of the power of the feed: the combination of presenting relevant information in context (i.e. an expression of satisfaction by someone that shares needs and tastes with me) and coming from a trusted source (a peer that I trust) makes for a very effective lead generation capability.

Buying products and services in our time-starved economy is very spur of the moment – a trusted source giving the nod to you removes the barrier to purchase.  Spending  time on a referred link is a “purchase”; of your time relative to “spending” that time on something else.  Humans are meme followers, and interest is piqued when contextually  interesting information flies across our radar and one of our colleagues or friends underlines or puts an exclamation point on the context by bringing it into the feed.

This is why we are so excited about our products and how they help marketers leverage end users to generate leads in a contextual and relevant way, monitor the effectiveness of the efforts and enable to act on the data to optimize the investment of resources.

What do you think about this? We are interested in your comments.

I’ve been involved building companies with customer acquisition since early in the internet.  From registration forms, social networks, CPM, CPA and CPC, the web has grown up nicely with rich multi-channel marketing channels.  For every marketer, most equations filter down to what is the ultimate cost of acquisition.

There is a new funnel in town.

Google AdWords and the notion of picking off customers at the heightened point of interest when they search created an incredible channel for customer acquisition.  Now, social has multiplied beyond everyone’s expectations.  People now share everything, and more people now visit Facebook than Google (thanks Experian). The feed is the new way people find, well, everything.

Potential customers have have changed their way of buying things.The “Oracle of Google” has made people very smart, very busy and very empowered at finding what they want, immediately.  The noise, however, has created a new set of market dynamics.

They don’t trust you

People don’t trust brands.  They trust each other.  You see from this research by eMarketer that they only respond to 3% of brand messages, but they respond to 38% of each others messages.

That sounds great, but where is my email gun that lets me run campaigns into the feed like you’ve become accustomed to with your email marketing channel?

The feed is the new email.  The feed posts that individuals share on their social network is the subject line.  It’s already open, but enticing the right messages in the feed get people to click through to your website and landing page.  Crowd Factory has scaled to a billion social transactions per month.  Now we’re gearing our efforts to help you solve this challenge, in a way that gives you powerful campaign tools right into the feed. 

Team Crowd Factory has been paying attention and discussing the implications and impact of the announcements Facebook made at their F8 Developer Conference; clearly the announcements impact end users, publishers and Social Marketing providers (like us); this post discusses a few points from the point of view of the latter.

We are excited:

Facebook as company, platform and phenomena is exciting for us… there are many reasons why but here a few key ones:

• Facebook numbers make the point for Social; end of discussion.. The question now is: how do you make it work for your business objectives?
• Facebook helps the Social Marketing solution provider ecosystem the way Microsoft help the application developer ecosystem in the early days: provides common services, creates de facto standards, educates and makes it normal for the end users to perform certain type of actions (i.e. Like).
• If the Open Graph becomes widely adopted there will be more data and metadata (relationships among individuals and objects) available and that will result in improved services and capabilities.

We are interested:

Exciting times! What will happen? how will the stakeholders affected by these announcements react?

• The Publisher: will they adopt Open Graph? What data and metadata will they make available and what services and capabilities can we offer to leverage that?
• The End User:  most End Users remain unaware of how much they give in exchange for these services that are considered “free”;  will this be the wake up call to pay more attention? (You may not remember that, but there was a time when people didn’t hesitate to give their social security number for any transaction.. that doesn’t happen anymore).

What are your reactions? We would love to hear from you and talk about this.

The social revolution has occurred.  People all over the world have given up their TV sets in favor of the Web and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.  400 million Facebook users can’t be wrong.  The only question has been, “How will businesses and brands not only react, but take advantage?”  To date, many leading companies have already jumped in with both feet because they believe that this is the wave of the future.  Others have been more reticent, because they can’t take it on faith alone — they need to know.  This ability to leverage the social revolution, drive customer acquisition, and actually know — and show — the ROI has been the elusive grail for marketers.  When will we get there?

It’s Here

This next generation has arrived. Today, I am thrilled and honored to announce that I am joining Crowd Factory as CEO.   I have been blown away by the powerful social marketing platform that is already driving 1 billion social interactions a month for companies like HBO, VEVO, and Nielsen’s Billboard.  But, what is even more exciting are the new, next-generation, applications being built on top of this platform.  These directly address the value that marketers have been seeking for so long.

I Should Know

Having had operating responsibility myself for the better part of 10 years for customer acquisition — whether as GM of a $100M business unit or CMO of a leader in the Social CRM space –  I have a keen appreciation for the pain and needs of the marketer.  Having also spoken at numerous social industry conferences, I have heard the same needs reflected in the voice of other marketers. Just last month, in Brazil, I patiently waited for the translation of an audience question after a keynote.  It came through the headset, “How do I know what the ROI of marketing on Facebook and Twitter actually is for my business?  And, how do I actually integrate it with all of my campaigns?”  I smiled to myself and thought, “Different hemisphere…same questions.”

Tremendous Opportunity

It is questions like those that have me so excited about joining Crowd Factory.  I just flew up to Portland, Oregon today, to start my new position as CEO of Crowd Factory.  I can’t tell you how I excited I was to sit around the conference table with the team and introduce myself (we have a sizable team here and are continuing to build out headquarters in San Francisco).

I’m jumping out of my chair for several reasons:

1.        Social is growing astronomically.   A couple of weeks ago Hitwise reported that Facebook has more traffic than Google.

2.        And businesses know why it is mission critical.  People trust each other.  eMarketer reports that 38% of people trust each other, while they only trust about 3% of marketers.  If a business wants to acquire new customers effectively, it will need to leverage social.

3.        Overall marketing spend is huge — and can be optimized.  Marketers spend over $500 billion a year worldwide.  Google built a multi-billion dollar business redirecting a fraction of that to Search advertising and offering clear tracking and ROI — the same thing will happen for social campaigns.

4.        This team.  I’ve been very impressed with the caliber of folks at Crowd Factory.  Many of you who know me know that I always want to “be the dumb guy in the room” — i.e. surround yourself with great people and good things will happen.  Mission accomplished. I’m humbled and proud to be on this team.

5.        There is lightning in the bottle.  Many of you that know me also know that I can be prone to hyperbole — but, this time I honestly don’t think that is the case.  The applications we are currently testing with customers really do look like the next-generation to me.

Watch this Space

This is the Next Generation — for me professionally, for marketers everywhere, and for the social technology market.  It’s an exciting time for all of us in this great space.  And, I’m excited to have this conversation with you.  Please let me know how you are thinking about the opportunities, challenges, and needs in this rapidly developing industry.  And stay tuned here, as we’ll be sharing lots more exciting news over the coming weeks and months.  You can follow @crowdfactory and me at @sdholakia.  Read the official press release here.

Proud to be on this team!