Targeting Meets Time Travel

Whitney

The topic of targeting with social data is a constant refrain in my world these days, and I just learned about a use case that’s worth sharing. What makes it stand out is the fact that it’s focused on historical social data. Actually, this was the second time that historical social data came up in the last few months so here’s the story. This summer Disney launched a film which co-starred  Whiteney Houston who departed in early 2012. But they saw a unique opportunity to target promotion of the film to the community of people who celebrated Whitney’s life on Twitter in the days following her death.

Rewind the social data back to the days after her death and you’ve got a HUGE audience of people raising their hands saying they LOVE Whitney. Those people are still using social today and if they don’t know about the Disney film they’re about to.

Ok, here’s another use case just for those retailers in my audience. If you haven’t heard of MyBuys they’re a good example of a company looking for annual trends -of course, Oracle supports this kind of thing too- that help with ad and retail optimization. In short, when the holidays approach they start dusting off their cookies, building segments, and targeting personalized content based on how you shopped during the holidays last year. Pretty cool and yet another way to squeeze a bit more bang out of your buck.

This all begs the question, what value will your brand find if it starts rewinding your social data? Is it time to bring back the most engaging posts of 2011? Is it time to suggest a follow up interview with that journalist wrote a positive editorial about your technology last year? Granted, your content strategy team should be all over this already …. but they’re not. They’re all focused too focused on the real-time, right now, and what’s happening next playbook to look in the rear view mirror. Especially considering that no one’s really given them -or told them to use- a rear view mirror for social. And, in reality, this extends beyond social and is just a general reminder that those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it. Following this, retailers should be studying which pages/layouts/products/designs did best last year with their web analytics tool of choice. My suggestion, install your rear view mirror now. It’s a competitive advantage.

Or, maybe I’m just being a little nostalgic as we close out the year 🙂 Here’s one of my favorite posts from about a year ago … still as pertinent today as back then.

Sample Personas from Involver

This post is an update to my previous post on personas. I’m circling back to share some example personas that my team developed at Involver. Now that we’re part of Oracle these personas are out of date but they should be helpful as references. In my experience good personas must be developed/evolved iteratively.

I’ve found that it’s useful to print up our personas and hang them on the wall so that you can walk over and review them as you debate some business or design decision. If you do this, I recommend putting up a page that explains what personas are. At Involver it was fun to watch my colleagues and guests to the office read and react to them. Here’s what our explanation poster looked like:

involver_personas

And here is what one of our personas looked like. We developed a handful of these to round out the folks that we designed for or worked with. Remember, these are fictitious characters and are NOT based on specific individuals.

One thing that you may notice about these personas is that they are designed for marketing and sales use. Of course, you can adjust the format to meet your specific needs. Here I call out which collateral is most relevant to each persona along with selling points. If you’ve got other great reference examples please post links in the comments.

Becoming An Intrapreneur At Oracle

My career has primarily been spent at small and medium sized businesses -and for the last several years at start ups- but today I find myself at one of the largest companies in the world. In this post, I’ll share just a few initial observations on the move, though this seems like topic I’ll revisit. As I haven’t written about this before you may not be aware that Involver, a social tech startup where where I ran the marketing group, was acquired by Oracle back in September. in short, I just went form a tiny startup to a tech giant.

To Join Or Not To Join, It’s All About The People
There are entrepreneurs out there who think of giant companies as places where their ideas go to die. As you might imagine they don’t tend stay long after the acquisition process. Of course, acquiring companies have some compensation levers to encourage folks to stick around if they think they can thrive in the new environment. As for me, I can’t say that I wasn’t a little wary of Oracle but the thing that made that feeling evaporate quickly was the people in my group. At the end of the day, the people that your are going to work with have more influence on this decision than the size of the company.

Part of the OTN team at our recent offsite. This was "crazy shirt" day.

Part of the OTN team at our recent offsite. This was “crazy shirt” day.

 

It’s A Different Kind Of Maze
I’ve been struggling to come up with a sensible metaphor to describer small vs big companies …. and I’m not sure this one really does it justice, but here it is. If you think of working at a company as navigating a maze than at small companies and start ups it seems like you’re often being judged on how quickly you can move through the course. You have to get very creative and work with very limited resources but you can typically find your way around challenges. Whereas at big companies a big part of what matters is how effectively you can break down the walls and establish throughways. This is more about finding ways of tapping into resources that will demolish barriers.

My New Role
My new role at Oracle includes a range of responsibilities but my primary focus will be on managing the Oracle Technical Network which is the largest developer community in the world. I am, of course, excited to implement a lot of the technology that I’ve helped build and market over the last several years. If you’re interested in learning more about OTN visit us at: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork. One other aspect of this role that excites me is the fact that marketers will have to become more and more technical to be competitive, for this reason I’m already thinking about how to build interaction points between the technical community at Oracle and the larger community. If you have ideas, I’d love to hear them.

How To Blow Up Your Klout With Promoted Posts

Having worked with Facebook for a long time, I’ve had a pretty good idea of where their ad strategy was headed for a while. I understand how Open Graph is really a foundation for improved targeting, and I thought I understood what promoted posts and sponsored stories would mean for brands. However, after a conversation with Jascha Kaykas-Wolff and Brad Cohen at The Oracle Social Summit, I realized that promoted posts may be as much -if not more- for consumers.

In short, if Apple can train kids to buy songs for a dollar why can’t Facebook train kids to drop a buck to reach their friends? As a backdrop there has been research recently that points to the fact that you may only be reaching about 10% of your friends when you post.

Research conducted by Group M Next (a unit devoted to sourcing new technologies) into pages operated by 25 brands finds that the share of Facebook users seeing organic posts from a brand they “like” was down 38% in the five weeks after Sept. 20, from 15.56% (consistent with the average 16% Facebook has often reported) to 9.62%.

 While “liking” a brand is not quite the same as a friending someone in your network, I suspect that the stats are comparable. So Facebook is giving kids a paid channel to reach their friends while slowly reducing organic reach. Nice. Were you wondering why folks weren’t engaging with your posts quite as much as they used to? Well promoted posts could be for you … I mean, if you really want your friends to know how cool you are or what you had for dinner.

And there’s an added bonus if you care about your Klout score. I happen to think that what Klout -and Kred for that matter- are up to is very interesting. It’ll be interesting to see how they stay a step ahead of folks who are rolling their own “influence scoring” but that’s an aside. Today, Klout does not factor in that some posts are promoted. Thus, it’s theoretically possible to impact your Klout score with promoted posts. Which means that it’s possible to buy influence.

Now if you’re even a slight bit cynical this won’t be a surprise or even be inconsistent. People buy influence all the time. We did just have an election, remember? With Klout, your posts still have to generate comments and likes and such (my content does that). So, promoted posts get me more comments and likes and such. I suspect that Klout and others will address this as their application evolve. Let’s face it, promoted posts should count though perhaps not quite as much?

Subscribe To Me 

Facebook, of course, has a solution for those of us who don’t want to promote posts but who do want to see our friends’ updates. It’s called “subscribing” and it works. Thus, those savvy personal brand builders will encourage their friends to “subscribe” to them on Facebook. Hint hint.

An Experiment

If I weren’t so damn busy, I’d test out my promoted posts theory just for kicks because I’m really curious to see if it works. My colleague Marius Ciortea told me that he might give it a shot. If he does I’ll circle back to share the results. And, if you’ve done it please comment.

 

UPDATE

Here’s some data on my promoted post for this article:

 

Getting Back to Blogging

For those of you who still subscribe to this blog, I know I know … it’s been a long time since I wrote anything. I’m planning on changing that in the upcoming months. Lots has happened since I last checked in and I’m going to start sharing again. More to come soon, I promise.

 

In the meantime, here’s a talk that I recently gave about how social is working it’s way into the enterprise.