Louise McGregor Editorial

Go Home Black Friday

The latest import from the USA appears to be “Black Friday”, that day falling between Thanksgiving (on the last Thursday of November) and the weekend when everyone goes shopping and the retailers offer amazing bargains.

It’s got nothing to do with Europe, so why in the last 2-3 years have retailers here started offering Black Friday deals?

MediaMarkt – The Netherlands

“Giga-many offers on top products” for their Black Friday Cashback.

MediaMarkt – Spain

“Save on your Christmas Shopping”, and a countdown of the hours left to shop.

Amazon – UK

Amazon have a complicated series of offers for “Black Friday Deals Week”, extending their one day campaign to seven.

News promoting offers  – UK

It’s even making the news, where are the best deals for Black Friday, and Cyber Monday – that’s today, the day where there is apparently a peak in online sales. The video is set to the stirring tunes of Rossini’s William Tell Overture and the scenes it depicts are enough to keep me out of stores, I guess that means that I hate crowds more than I love a bargain.

This is all happening at the same time as a movement begins in the USA to point out how consumerist Black Friday is, this popped up on my Facebook feed;

 

But my favourite action come from Cards Against Humanity; They closed their site for the day leaving just a “donate” button on the site. They collected over 70,000 USD.

This is one American import I hate. I do understand the marketing angle on this; all sales are good, lets drive sales. But take a moment to think about it. We’re heading into the busiest shopping season of the year, discounting right before that can’t increase your profit. But it’s a race to the bottom, once one retailer jumps on the American Bandwagon their competitors are under pressure to do the same.

I did shop on Friday, I bought milk, coffee, soap and toilet paper. There were no “Black Friday” discounts.

Louise McGregor Editorial

What Does a Great Leader Look Like?

This month the Harvard Business Review asks a pertinent question; “what makes a great leader?” From the image accompanying question, the answer seems to be “a white guy”.

We know that images have a bigger impact than text, we know that role models are hugely important, so I decided to tease this out a little and have a look at what happened when I searched for images of “leader”.

The first search I did was “leadership icons” on Google. I thought that by using a search for icons the results would be relatively untainted by any news items. Here’s the result.

Most of the icons are explicitly male, and wearing a tie. Apparently that’s our standard impression of a leader.  In fact when I clicked on “more images for leadership” I still had to scroll past about 80 images to find one that had a figure that could be identified as specifically female. Let’s call her Eve, here she is.

You’ll notice that Eve is ahead of a group of people as if to lead them, but she’s not alone. Apparently Adam can lead alone, but Eve cannot.

If I search for “leadership” in Google there is an image using a fish metaphor for leadership that ranks higher than any image featuring a woman.

That’s just one search engine, do others perform any better? Bing and Duck Go Go deliver roughly the same set of images. My hopes rested on Yahoo!, with a female CEO perhaps it would be reflected in their search results. I tested it and the answer is, maybe. At position 45 there is an icon of a woman leader.

A leader who bears a passing resemblance to Marissa Mayer, in as much as icons can resemble people. However she’s very lonely on the page, I found no other representatives of women leading in the next 50 or so images.

Just for fun I tried the same test looking at “programmer icons”, the results were depressingly similar, although google did manage to have a female appearing icon in the first group.

I’m not blaming Google et al for this, search results are a reflection of our collective choices, over the lifespan of the internet we’ve created more images of men as leaders, and chosen images that depict tie-wearing males to represent leaders. I’d like to see this imbalance redressed; perhaps if we all started depicting leaders with a range of icons and images reflecting the range of people in leadership roles. And any designers out there working on icons, or photographers working on stock images, please include a gender balance and a mix of ethnicities in your depictions of all occupations. Of course changing the number of icons won’t automatically result in massive increases in the number of female CEOs, but it may help women leaders be seen as normal, and help young girls and people of colour to have that level of ambition.

Going back to the HBR issue; it features an article on the 100 best CEOs of this year, of which just 2 are women. The “white guy” on the front seems to be Lars Sørensen who topped the leader-board this year.

Louise McGregor Business, social media

More than a Tweet; Cold Hard Cash

It takes more than a tweet to make a company social. This is part 7 of a 7 part series.

It’s free to use social media as an individual, but that’s not the case for businesses. There is still a lot you can do on a small budget, but costs rise steeply with the scale, complexity and ambition of your social media strategy.

Beyond staff salaries the costs come in three buckets; content creation, tools and promotion.

Content Creation

The best content for social media can be in the form of text, long form articles, images – photography, graphics and infographics, video, and streaming video.

It’s a very rare company that has the expertise in house to handle the creation of all forms of all content. If you want great looking content you’ll need a designer. I’ve found that using freelance designers works well once they’ve built an understanding of your brand.

There are some ways to manage costs here;

  • use a standard format for infographics, particularly if you’re using a single data point for an image. This will cut down the designer’s time needed to create content and give you a more consistent brand look.
  • Look for tools that format images per platform, Canva is one tool, but there are others out there. Reformating/resizing can be done easily and possibly in house.
  • If you’ve got a piece of content that is valid for a longer term like a report, ask the designer to create a suite of infographics at once so that you can re-use and promote the content with original content.
  • Get your social media managers/community managers trained to use photoshop. This is NOT the same as replacing the designer, but it might allow them to work with quality templates to add variations to text.

Tools

There are a lot of tools needed to support an effective social media presence, and the costs range from free to big bucks.

For example social listening tools; for my current needs I use tweetdeck and google alerts, and there are other free/cheap tools around, but large corporations invest huge sums into tools like Radian6 (Salesforce), Engagor, and Sysomos because the volume of mentions in social and the complexity of their social media structure require it. The same range exists for social publishing; from free use of the native platforms – including platforms like wordpress and medium for longer form content – through to large-scale complex tools like Sprinklr and Percolate. These large scale tools enable companies to save costs of production, planning and publishing. They’re worth it in large complex companies – really, I worked on the business case for one.

How much you need to invest in tools comes back to the scale and complexity of your company and the ambition level.

Promotion

The open secret of social media; increasingly you “pay to play” on platforms. As an example, in a recent campaign for a new charity I’ve been working with the best performing post for organic reach had 295 views, the worst performing of the boosted posts in the same period had a reach of over 3000. Often the spend isn’t that high – in this case it was just 18 euro that gained that reach.

Spending for reach is strongest on Facebook, but Twitter and Pinterest also enable promoted posts and Instagram may follow suit.  Platforms allow you to target your audience based on demographics and interests, and the cost of “reach” will depend on the value of your target audience.

In my experience we’ve had better results promoting content rather than an account, promoting accounts on twitter may increase your follower numbers, but tends to decrease the total engagement in my experience.

CASE STUDY: NewArt Museum

The NewArt Museum decide to use free tools as much as possible in this initial phase,  they want to focus their efforts on Facebook and Instagram, and Facebook’s native platform offers plenty of scope for scheduling and reporting. Instagram doesn’t offer scheduling options and has had a history of closing any apps that allow scheduled publishing to the platform. The team do set up a shared calendar to plan and co-ordinate content for publication.

There is a web designer engaged to the project already, the scope of that is extended to included design of assets for sharing on social media.

A promotional budget is set aside, this includes money to promote posts on Facebook, money to work with influencers on Instagram and money to offer prizes as part of the campaign. The dream for Instagram is to curate a series that interprets the hashtag #NewArt in inventive ways.  The social team start reaching out to influencers.

Louise McGregor social media

More than a Tweet; Measure to Improve

It takes more than a tweet to make a company social. This is part 6 of a 7 part series.

As with most online activities you can measure pretty much everything. That’s both an advantage and a disadvantage!

There are two types of measurement to think about; measuring success and measuring the process.

Measuring Success

The really important measure is around whether you meet your business goals. These are drawn from the strategy you’ve defined earlier. For example;

  • Increasing sales (or qualified leads)
    If this is within your online sales environment it is relatively easy to measure using tagged URLs or cookies, but often people buy in a physical store based on their online experience. In which case you could use a discount coupon to social media buyers to estimate the social influence or you may need to research whether in store buyers did see your social media campaign.  The last option sounds complicated but it could be as simple as sales personnel asking “did you know about our Facebook campaign?”
  • Brand awareness and brand recognition
    If you’re using social media to build brand awareness and brand recognition you can measure via survey whether more people recognise your brand.
  • Brand Perception
    If your goal was changing how your company is seen then you can measure via surveys whether the public perception of you has changed.
  • Improved Service
    Some companies make significant use of social media to provide services to their customers, KLM the Dutch airline does this particularly well, solving thousands of customer queries per day on their social media channels. This has become a brand builder for KLM.

One of the tricky things about these measures is that the change measured might not be entirely due to social media, since it’s unlikely that a company will improve only its social media without other communications, marketing and campaigns happening at the same time. To tease this out you could use specific questions within a survey, ask customers, or ask your followers on social media.

Pick 1-3 KPIs that align with your business goals and measure those. The “K”  in KPI stands for “Key”, if you’re measuring more than 3 they are no longer the key performance indicators.

Measuring the Process

There is a loose relationship between the number of followers you have, the amount of engagement, and the number of people who take action. I have sometimes likened this to the traditional sales funnel, but it’s a very very leaky funnel.

  • Followers
    “Followers” is often dismissed as a vanity metric, and I agree that if you are running a twitter account with the goal of getting a million followers it is a vanity metric.
    But the truth is if you have zero followers you’re not having any impact, and the more followers you have the bigger your potential reach and the bigger your potential impact. I should qualify that – quality followers – fake accounts, dead people, and bots don’t count. That quality requirement is why you should never pay for followers. Follower and fan numbers tell you that you’re getting some traction with your activities.
  • Reach
    Measure how many people saw your posts – this is likely to be a lot less than the number of people who follow you. Twitter feeds move fast, and not all your followers on Facebook will see all your posts in their timeline.
  • Engagement Rate
    How many likes, retweets, +1s etc do your posts get divided by some measure of the audience.
    It’s a good measure of how  your content is being received but it should be treated carefully since it is presented as percentage. A large drop in engagement might be that your content got worse, or that your audience grew massively, and the new arrivals are less engaged. When using this measure I look at the trend, and at the underlying figures of total number of engagements and audience. It’s worth remembering that engagement by itself is not a strategy, it’s part of the process to reach your strategy.
  • Click Through Rate
    The number of clicks from social posts through to your website, divided by the reach of those posts. If your goal is to drive traffic to your site then this is a crucial measure.
  • Applause rate
    The number of shares/retweets/+1s etc divided by the number of posts. This is a measure of content quality, and is therefore useful for those creating content. However it doesn’t seem to be commonly used (Engagement rate is preferred) and it comes with a caveat; we know that pictures of beautiful babies or cute kittens will generate a high applause rate, but unless you’re in a very specific industry that won’t help you reach your business goals.
  • Fan value
    This is a perennial marketing question, and the real answer is that varies for lots of reasons, explained very well by Oliver Blanchard. To be pragmatic and arrive at a useful answer for you, you would need to calculate the value generated by your facebook page/youtube channel/twitter account, and divide that by the total number of fans/followers (on a per channel basis). This becomes a useful measure when you are trying to justify investment in the channel.

There are many more measures possible, as discussed in this handy  Guide to KPIs for Content performance.

 

But the reality is it’s time-consuming to measure everything. Pick the measures that give you information about how you are reaching your business goal, understand how each of those measures is tracked and what the limits might be and measure those.

Your process goals tell you whether you’re on track to meet your business goals. They also tell you whether you need to alter your content, frequency of posting, time of posting, or promotional budget. You should be looking at them at least daily.

CASE STUDY; NewArtMuseum

The NewArt Museum’s goal is to increase the number of younger people, between 18-30, visiting the museum.

The measurement for that business goal is very clear; number of young people visiting the museum should go up. Measuring that is trickier, you will need to ask visitors some information.

NewMuseum takes a baseline measurement by asking all visitors to complete a short survey as they leave the museum during a single week. One of the questions is around age; and gives age brackets for the visitor to choose from. They also ask which information source people would like for their museum news; (paper) newsletter, email, newspaper, social media, to help shape the future communications.

In about the third week of the new initiative they make the same survey, but ask those in the target audience some additional questions. One finding is that that the target age group works during the week, so could only ever visit on a weekend. This insight leads to the museum opening on Friday nights with music and events aimed at the 18-30 age group.

For the social media part of the campaign the goal is building an audience in their target age group. The chosen platforms are facebook, instagram and experimenting with periscope for some “behind the scenes action”.

On all platforms they measure follower numbers and engagement. When they get closer to re-opening day New Museum tries two things; Firstly a targetted discount ticket offer via facebook for which they measure click through rate. Secondly a campaign on Instagram using the hashtag #NewMuseum which asks people to post images of things they thing are design icons. The social media team will choose a favourite image of the day and reward that person with two free tickets to the opening. The social media team then measures the reach of the campaign, and looks for comments that indicate people want to visit the museum as indicating intent.

 

It takes more than a tweet to make a company social. This is part 6 of a 7 part series.

As with most online activities you can measure pretty much everything. That’s both an advantage and a disadvantage!

There are two types of measurement to think about; measuring success and measuring the process.

Measuring Success

The really important measure is around whether you meet your business goals. These are drawn from the strategy you’ve defined earlier. For example;

  • Increasing sales (or qualified leads)
    If this is within your online sales environment it is relatively easy to measure using tagged URLs or cookies, but often people buy in a physical store based on their online experience. In which case you could use a discount coupon to social media buyers to estimate the social influence or you may need to research whether in store buyers did see your social media campaign.  The last option sounds complicated but it could be as simple as sales personnel asking “did you know about our Facebook campaign?”
  • Brand awareness and brand recognition
    If you’re using social media to build brand awareness and brand recognition you can measure via survey whether more people recognise your brand.
  • Brand Perception
    If your goal was changing how your company is seen then you can measure via surveys whether the public perception of you has changed.
  • Improved Service
    Some companies make significant use of social media to provide services to their customers, KLM the Dutch airline does this particularly well, solving thousands of customer queries per day on their social media channels. This has become a brand builder for KLM.

One of the tricky things about these measures is that the change measured might not be entirely due to social media, since it’s unlikely that a company will improve only its social media without other communications, marketing and campaigns happening at the same time. To tease this out you could use specific questions within a survey, ask customers, or ask your followers on social media.

Pick 1-3 KPIs that align with your business goals and measure those. The “K”  in KPI stands for “Key”, if you’re measuring more than 3 they are no longer the key performance indicators.

Measuring the Process

There is a loose relationship between the number of followers you have, the amount of engagement, and the number of people who take action. I have sometimes likened this to the traditional sales funnel, but it’s a very very leaky funnel.

  • Followers
    “Followers” is often dismissed as a vanity metric, and I agree that if you are running a twitter account with the goal of getting a million followers it is a vanity metric.
    But the truth is if you have zero followers you’re not having any impact, and the more followers you have the bigger your potential reach and the bigger your potential impact. I should qualify that – quality followers – fake accounts, dead people, and bots don’t count. That quality requirement is why you should never pay for followers. Follower and fan numbers tell you that you’re getting some traction with your activities.
  • Reach
    Measure how many people saw your posts – this is likely to be a lot less than the number of people who follow you. Twitter feeds move fast, and not all your followers on Facebook will see all your posts in their timeline.
  • Engagement Rate
    How many likes, retweets, +1s etc do your posts get divided by some measure of the audience.
    It’s a good measure of how  your content is being received but it should be treated carefully since it is presented as percentage. A large drop in engagement might be that your content got worse, or that your audience grew massively, and the new arrivals are less engaged. When using this measure I look at the trend, and at the underlying figures of total number of engagements and audience. It’s worth remembering that engagement by itself is not a strategy, it’s part of the process to reach your strategy.
  • Click Through Rate
    The number of clicks from social posts through to your website, divided by the reach of those posts. If your goal is to drive traffic to your site then this is a crucial measure.
  • Applause rate
    The number of shares/retweets/+1s etc divided by the number of posts. This is a measure of content quality, and is therefore useful for those creating content. However it doesn’t seem to be commonly used (Engagement rate is preferred) and it comes with a caveat; we know that pictures of beautiful babies or cute kittens will generate a high applause rate, but unless you’re in a very specific industry that won’t help you reach your business goals.
  • Fan value
    This is a perennial marketing question, and the real answer is that varies for lots of reasons, explained very well by Oliver Blanchard. To be pragmatic and arrive at a useful answer for you, you would need to calculate the value generated by your facebook page/youtube channel/twitter account, and divide that by the total number of fans/followers (on a per channel basis). This becomes a useful measure when you are trying to justify investment in the channel.

There are many more measures possible, as discussed in this handy  Guide to KPIs for Content performance.

KPIsforContent

But the reality is it’s time-consuming to measure everything. Pick the measures that give you information about how you are reaching your business goal, understand how each of those measures is tracked and what the limits might be and measure those.

Your process goals tell you whether you’re on track to meet your business goals. They also tell you whether you need to alter your content, frequency of posting, time of posting, or promotional budget. You should be looking at them at least daily.

NewArtMuseumCASE STUDY; NewArtMuseum

The NewArt Museum’s goal is to increase the number of younger people, between 18-30, visiting the museum.

The measurement for that business goal is very clear; number of young people visiting the museum should go up. Measuring that is trickier, you will need to ask visitors some information.

NewMuseum takes a baseline measurement by asking all visitors to complete a short survey as they leave the museum during a single week. One of the questions is around age; and gives age brackets for the visitor to choose from. They also ask which information source people would like for their museum news; (paper) newsletter, email, newspaper, social media, to help shape the future communications.

In about the third week of the new initiative they make the same survey, but ask those in the target audience some additional questions. One finding is that that the target age group works during the week, so could only ever visit on a weekend. This insight leads to the museum opening on Friday nights with music and events aimed at the 18-30 age group.

For the social media part of the campaign the goal is building an audience in their target age group. The chosen platforms are facebook, instagram and experimenting with periscope for some “behind the scenes action”.

On all platforms they measure follower numbers and engagement. When they get closer to re-opening day New Museum tries two things; Firstly a targetted discount ticket offer via facebook for which they measure click through rate. Secondly a campaign on Instagram using the hashtag #NewMuseum which asks people to post images of things they thing are design icons. The social media team will choose a favourite image of the day and reward that person with two free tickets to the opening. The social media team then measures the reach of the campaign, and looks for comments that indicate people want to visit the museum as indicating intent.