Online Homebuilder Marketing at the Big Builder Virtual Conference
Nov/095
Big Builder Online began hosting its Big Builder Virtual Conference for homebuilders today, and I had the honor of presenting a session on social media and online homebuilder marketing.
Through an innovative new delivery channel, Big Builder has taken what was formerly a traditional conference that required attendance in person and changed it into an online conference that attendees can access at any time. This is a great example of new media marketing at its finest, and what better place for me to talk about online marketing than at an online conference?
In case you missed it, here it is for your viewing and listening pleasure:
Measuring the Effectiveness of Twitter
Jul/092
Guest commentary by Jason Amunwa
We are uncovering more and more examples of people in the building community using Twitter as a marketing tool. Examples abound of those who have mastered this social media platform, and those that are just getting started – @HaverfordHomes, @WarmingtonHomes, @SummerhillHomes, @PonderosaHomes, @PulteHomes and @Lennar are just a few.
There has been a lot of talk about how to track the success of marketing activity on Twitter, with a focus on the number of followers that an individual is able to collect. On the surface, this seems to make sense – after all, this is the yardstick we typically use to measure reach and success in many general advertising channels, including magazine circulation, TV viewers, online banner impressions, list size, etc. I would venture that this is perhaps an overly simplistic view of the channel (yes, folks, I do believe it is a channel), and that a deeper analysis of the way people are interacting with your tweets can yield a clearer insight as to how much value is derived by both parties.
As with other one-to-one channels, especially email, the most important metrics to pay attention to depend on the ultimate goal of your message. Do you want them to click, to reply, to take action? Much like Twitter as a whole, what you get out of it depends on what you put in, and what your goals are. With this in mind, I propose a few common-sense, non-scientific metrics to get the conversation started:
 Wanna get retweeted? According to a new study, TinyURL and multisyllabic words are your friends. |
To measure engagement:
The Retweet Ratio
# of Retweets/Total # of Tweets
The Retweet Ratio can give you a simple view of how compelling or useful your followers perceive your content to be, i.e. whether it is ‘RT-worthy’ – 1 being super-useful, and 0 meaning it’s not interesting enough to pass along. Such a metric could be a simple measure of content quality, as well as follower engagement. A recent study has shown there are ways to improve this ratio, by simply adjusting the content, or wording of your tweets.
Reply Ratio
# of Replies/Total # of Tweets
How often does an individual’s content provoke a response? While the actual content of these replies is likely a better indicator of true engagement, this metric could be useful for identifying the best people to reach out to, in order to conduct, say, qualitative consumer research on Twitter.
 Twinfluence compares your reach, quality of followers, and other stats against other Twitterers. Think you can take on @aplusk, or @barackobama? |
To measure reach:
Effective Reach
# of Followers x (1 + Retweet Ratio)
Retweeting has the effect of amplifying the number of people you can reach on Twitter – think ripples extending from a pebble dropped in a pond. Therefore, the higher your Retweet Ratio, the greater your effective reach will be, especially if your followers have sizeable audiences of their own. Twinfluence has a robust tool that takes this approach above and beyond, to serve as a great measure of an individual’s influence on Twitter.
Bonus measurement idea:
Tagging URLs
Think about putting some kind of identifying clicktags (e.g. DoubleClick) on any URLs that drive to pages/sites under your control prior to shrinking them. Although it’ll slow down the amount of tweets you’re able to put out, you’ll at least know (by looking in your analytics package of choice) which particular messages are generating traffic more than others, and use those learnings to refine your style and drive more traffic.
What do you think? Do you have an ideas of how to measure Twitter activity in a meaningful way for marketers in the homebuilding industry? Let us know in the comments!
If Ford Can Embrace Chaos, What’s Your Excuse?
Jun/090
Much excitement recently as Ford unleashed the Fiesta Movement project.
To market the Fiesta’s introduction to North America, Ford selected 100 “Agents” from 4,000 applicants. The winners receive use of a Fiesta for six months, provided they create and post comments about their impressions of the vehicle, and participate in “Missions” Ford has cooked up for them.
Other than this social media content (which is likely to tilt heavily toward video, as many of the Agents have decent followings on YouTube already), the Fiesta is receiving little other marketing support. Essentially, Ford has outsourced its marketing to consumers (and therefore to people like me who will write about it).
Seriously? Ford, is a giant company in uncertain times, yet they are trusting the launch of a major new vehicle to the vagaries of user generated content? This isn’t a Skittles experiment with putting Twitter on the home page, or even Vitamin Water using Facebook as a key part of their social media strategy. This is something else. Bigger. Riskier.
I predict that the Fiesta Movement will be looked back upon as the event that made social media a real player in the marketing mix. When corporations began to not just realize, but act upon, the fact that companies today garner the customers they deserve, not the customers they buy via advertising.
Ford is embracing the chaos that may (and probably will) ensue as part of this initiative. Ford is not controlling the content created by the Agents. It’s a no-censorship policy. Content from the Agents about Fiesta is aggregated nicely on the Fiesta Movement site, and of course also appears in Agents’ own social media outposts. I like this aggregation model a lot, and foresee companies moving toward this as a curated, crowd-sourced newsroom in the future.
In my consulting travels, I hear from many companies (and agencies) that they just aren’t willing to engage publicly with consumers that may have a negative opinion of their products or services. To which I say, unless you’re in a highly regulated medical or financial environment, you HAVE to get involved eventually.
Ford’s Perspective from Scott Monty
I exchanged emails with Scott Monty, Ford’s Director of Social Media about the Fiesta Movement project:
(Jason Baer): Do you feel that Ford is more aggressive than other major corporations in understanding the power of UGC, or just less scared of UGC?
(Scott Monty): We understand that conversations occur all the time – that’s the very nature of the auto industry: people have always had car stories. We’re committed to being part of those conversations, either by engaging directly, or making them possible.
(Jason Baer): How did you try to find strong agents across multiple social media outposts? Or did you? Was there a specific effort to find folks that were socially influential on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc?
(Scott Monty): This was an extremely complex process to manage – not only did we have a lot of great videos to choose from, but we also wanted to have people that were influential in their own social networks, geographically dispersed, split between male & female, some automotive enthusiasts, etc. Oh, and then there were the background checks… It made for an intense screening and selection process.
(Jason Baer): I saw you mention the Forrester social technographics ladder in your interview with Allen Stern. No question the younger cohort is more likely to create video. But, how do you connect Spectators and Critics to these Creators? Or, do you figure they already have an audience, so it’s not Ford’s job to drive eyeballs to the Fiesta content?
(Scott Monty): The creators will already have a built-in audience, but beyond that, we’re posting their content across a variety of our platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube), as well as aggregating them on www.fiestamovement.com and www.thefordstory.com. Between all of those, we should see lot of the different cohorts consuming the content.
(Jason Baer): What, if any, expectations do you have for agents to engage in dialogue with the audience? I expect some of this content will generate more comments then they are accustomed to receiving on their usual work.
(Scott Monty): Absolutely, and we want them to do so. Where necessary, we’ll pop in and offer any expertise we can when called for, but this is largely going to be up to the agents to participate.
(Jason Baer): You mentioned that the factories are not finished for the North American Fiesta. Thus, do you see this as a living focus group, or a user-generated marketing program (like Doritos), or both?
(Scott Monty): This is both. We’re obviously trying to get some buzz going specifically for the Fiesta, as well as for Ford. But we’re also going to be sending the agents surveys, asking them questions, and getting their feedback on how the vehicle works for them. Our engineering team and our marketing teams will be learning from them along the way and making tweaks based on their input.
(NOTE: This is a huge point. Ford understands that negative comments aren’t a problem, they are an opportunity. Social media is the ultimate canary in the coal mine).
(Jason Baer): I know you have some sort of dashboard put together to measure effectiveness of this program. How are you looking at ROI?
(Scott Monty): Certainly the usual notion of number of posts/photos/videos/tweets, comments, sentimentality, etc. But beyond that, we’ll be watching how this unfolds and we’ll be measuring accordingly. It’s going to be a pretty fluid campaign and we’ll be looking to learn and adapt along the way.
(NOTE: I love this. Despite all the gnashing of teeth about social media ROI, here you have a giant company saying essentially “we’ll figure it out as we go along.” Let’s all stop freaking out about metrics until we actually better understand how social media works, okay?)
You Can Be Ford, Too
You can take the big step and help your company truly embrace social media.
First, you need to change internal thinking around negative consumer comments. It’s not a risk, it’s an opportunity. Plus, it’s inevitable. People are talking smack about your brand whether you’re engaged or not.
Second, YOU need to be Scott Monty. If you believe in social media enough to read this blog, YOU need to be the one to champion it in your organization. YOU need to stick your neck out, take ownership, and make it happen.
If Ford (not exactly the most historically nimble organization on the planet) can put this many chips behind social media, what’s your excuse for not doing so yourself?