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consumer generated mediaThe emergence of social media several years ago changed the way brands communicated with and to consumers – forcing them to completely change their approach to marketing products and services not only online, but offline as well.

The vast networks of people who participate on various social platforms has made it possible for one person to communicate with hundreds or even thousands of other people about products and companies. As you’d imagine, this emergence of consumer-to-consumer communications has been greatly magnified in the marketplace – and become an essential piece of the marketing puzzle for brands.

As I’ve written before, your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room, which is why finding unique ways to leverage these consumer conversations into marketing strategies is essential and integrating user-generated content is an important component of brand building.

Unlike traditional marketing communications, where brands and marketing managers had a high degree of control, today’s marketers have to learn how to best leverage and shape consumer discussions and generated media. In recent months, more and more brands have realized the power in using consumer-generated media from social networks to help power their campaigns (read “5 Best Social Media Campaigns with User-Generated Content”).

The power of sourcing user-generated content has not been lost on many of the major brands and agencies. In last year’s Super Bowl, half of the national advertisements mentioned a Twitter hashtag in the ad (encouraging viewers to participate in the conversation well after the ad aired).

In fact, many major brands are not only incorporating consumer content into their websites, billboards and television commercials, but are also using it on ecommerce pages and in retail displays.

Here are some examples of innovative brands using consumer-generated media to help propel their marketing campaigns, drive awareness and increase sales:

Keen – Letting Consumers to Fuel a Campaign

Keen and their agency North was recently nominated for a SoMe Award for their campaign for Worldwide Recess Day.  The campaign encouraged people to take 10 minutes to get outside and move, and aimed to amplify awareness of the Keen brand and social media channels, as well as drive traffic and sales through their website.

Keen encouraged people to upload photos and tweets with the hashtag #Take10, and then aggregated all of that social content on a hub page using Postano.

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Marketing is changing at a lightning pace, with platforms, strategies and media continuously evolving. In fact, in today’s world, it is essential that marketing departments become media and research departments as well.

As I wrote previously in “Brands as Publishers and How It’s Changing Marketing,” many major brands’ marketing departments are churning out incredible amounts of content in order to connect with customers and amplify their messages – a concept that has grown in popularity only in recent years.

Major brands and organizations are also using social media as a key component of their marketing strategies. Social networking platforms are used to source user-generated content for campaigns, spread messaging and content, and engage brand communities and consumers.

In fact, according to Ogilvy’s 2012 Social Media Study, while only 15% of B2B marketers reported using social media in 2007, by 2012 91% of those marketers reported using social media as part of their marketing strategy.

Here’s a closer look at how exactly social media marketing has changed and how more and more marketing and advertising campaigns are integrating social as a key component:

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vine and postanoWe’re happy to announce Vine as the latest social media network available to stream, aggregate and curate within Postano. Options include the ability to stream Vine accounts, hashatgs and shared Vines from fans and the community.

You can choose to either automatically include Vines to your Postano, or moderate for a more curated experience. The six-second videos will also play automatically in any of the Postano platform options, whether it be a social hub, event display, mobile app or retail display. Vines can also be integrated with content from the thirteen other social networks we support including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and more.

postano and vine

Vines with the hashtag #bulldog in Postano

Ever since Twitter acquired the mini-video-taking app last October (before it even launched) and then launched the app in January, our team has been eager to add Vine as the 14th social network supported by the Postano platform.

Vine hit the number one spot for downloaded free apps in the U.S. back in April, and has continued to grow in popularity since then.

Many major companies and brands like General Electric, Urban Outfitters, Neimen Marcus and the Booklyn Nets have already come up with innovative and creative ways to use Vine as part of their social media marketing strategies and campaigns (read Media Bistro’s post, “10 of the Best Brands on Vine”).

 

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We were proud to be part of a a successful social media campaign run by Portland agency North for their client Keen Footwear promoting Worldwide Recess Day that was recently nominated for a SoMe Award. The campaign aimed to encourage people to get out and take 10 minutes to get outside and move, as well amplify awareness of the Keen brand and social media channels and drive traffic and sales through their website.

Keen encouraged people to upload photos and tweets with the hashtag #Take10, and then aggregated all of that social content on a hub page using Postano.

keen + postano

The campaign was a huge success. Here are some stats:

  • Keen gained over 20,000 new Instagram followers
  • Keen earned a spot on the Outdoor Industry Association’s list of Top Brands on Twitter
  • Keen gained 3.5 Million new followers on Pinterest
  • During the height of the campaign, there were more than 3 million results for Worldwide Recess Day found on Google
Watch the video to learn more about the campaign:

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Postano Continues to Evolve; Thomas O’Keefe Joins TigerLogic as Senior Vice President of Sales and Services

Portland, OR – May 7, 2013 – TigerLogic Corporation (Nasdaq: TIGR) today announced the release of a significant upgrade to its Postano social visualization and content distribution platform, which now includes Postano Mobile, the result of integrating Storycode technology. In addition to this new mobile offering, the Postano platform includes Postano Events, Postano Retail, Postano Social Hub, and the built in Postano Monitoring dashboard capabilities. TigerLogic also announced today Thomas O’Keefe joined the company as Senior Vice President of Sales and Services.

Postano is a powerful aggregator of social content across Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and other social platforms, bringing together the visualization of the digital conversations and content streams from brands and their fans, from across the web. Within Postano, these content streams can be moderated, curated, analyzed, and then displayed in physical store locations, at events to increase brand awareness, on website social hubs to amplify engagement, and on hashtag campaign landing pages to create brand conversation and increase participation.

“The evolution of our Postano social marketing product culminates with the integration of Postano Mobile,” said Justin Garrity, Vice President, Marketing and Product. “Brands now have the ability to publish dynamic magazine apps to iOS and Android platforms. With Postano Mobile, we can now bring in all the social channels that the Postano platform connects to.”

The Postano platform is designed to enable customers to quickly create unique configurations of social media products from today’s leading social networks and syndication sources. Once the right mix is created, brands can curate fan content, ensuring the Postano experience is on-brand with real-time moderation capabilities. Custom posts allow brands to integrate promotions and ads directly into the content stream, linking highly visual content directly to online shopping channels

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brands as publishersWhile certainly not a new concept, more and more brands are increasingly turning into media machines in today’s marketing landscape. While brands, media and audiences used to have distinct roles in the marketing relationship, in today’s world, these roles overlap, with brands and audiences becoming two of the major media makers. This creates new opportunities for brands to leverage the content they, and their audiences are creating.

While media and media outlets used to serve as the meeting place for brands and audiences, today this is no longer the case. Now, each party is both a content creator and distributor. There are a few major takeaways to remember with this shift:

Audiences/people now act as their own publishers

social content distribution With the explosion of social media and the ability to easy create and share content, your consumers and potential customers are now the publishers of their own opinions, preferences and experiences. In many ways, audiences have commandeered the function of marketers. They are often the ones driving product awareness, influencing purchase decisions, and telling brands and their own networks what they think publically.

The smartest brands are realizing the power of harnessing this user-generated content in their own marketing efforts. Read our post on “Building Your Brand by Integrating User-Generated Content,” and “5 Best Social Media Campaigns with User-Generated Content.”

Brands are expected to not only create content, but also engage with user content

social content distribution As audiences increasingly talk and share about brands via social media and digital channels, they are expecting that these brands do more than simply promote their own products and services. Every day, millions of people are actively reaching out to connect with brands, and they want to hear more than just what they have to say. These audiences also expect brands to engage with them and interact, use and respond to the content they are producing.
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Here at Postano, we’ve been working closely with our customers to build out exciting new options for events and retail displays.

Common feature requests are:

  1. More immersive full photo visualizations. Our customers love our many visualization options, but sometimes they want to break out of the tiled look and go full screen. This is particularly effective if they have a multi-screen setup where each display can be dedicated to a single post at a time.
  2. Show metrics. It’s all about engagement. How many favorites, likes, or comments a post has is important and is an easy way to convey popularity to the viewer.
  3. Show the publisher of posts. By displaying the avatar and aname, this conveys the post authenticity and lets viewers find the poster on social networks. Even when the publisher is the brand itself, it better allows viewers find the right account to follow.
  4. Movement, but not too much movement. Displays that show still photos can seem stale or non-dynamic if there isn’t some movement or animation. If there is too much movement, however, it can quickly go from an immersive experience to an obnoxious one. Slow, smooth movement to the photos helps bring displays to life.
  5. Remote control. When you are using a TV, the remote control is a familiar concept. It allows the user to quickly change the content on the screen. However, with computer displays, typically, the way tochange content is is for a user to remote log into a computer and adjust the content with a mouse while viewers of the screen witness the entire task. No one likes to watch other people use a computer.

With our Postano Command Center project, we have solved all of the feature requests above with a beautiful and innovative new solution.

First, in addition to the incredible new visualizations that our user experience team has introduced over the pasts three months, we have new HD full screen visualizations for large photos. Any photo 600px or larger looks great, even with full HD resolution.

Second, we have overlaid information on the displays that give information about the publisher of the original post, their avatar, when they posted, and the engagement metrics. This addition makes it easy for viewers to find and follow the publishers they love and who are creating the best and most engaging content.

And finally, we are introducing the mobile remote control. With the combination of the Storycode mobile platform, now called Postano Mobile, and the Postano social platform, our integrations are paying off. It is now easy for a store manager or an event coordinator to change the content on the screens as easily as changing the channels on their home TV.

In the example video, you will see Julie, our resident blogger, control eight displays at once by switching content filters. We set the displays to show Portland content, our hometown. In the video, she changes the displays from Portland Timbers to Portland Fashion to Portland Food and more.

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boston cares and postanoLike millions of people around the country, our team at Postano was deeply saddened by the tragedy at the Boston Marathon in April. Despite being located on the opposite coast, we all wanted to find a way we could help the community and people of Boston heal and move on after such a horrendous event.

We were very happy to donate our services and use of the Postano platform to Boston Cares, which is the largest volunteer mobilization agency in New England.

After the tragedy, the Boston Cares office was flooded with calls and emails from people in Boston and beyond looking for ways to help. With limited opportunities for volunteer positions the organization could provide, Boston Cares launched a campaign that sought to encourage people to share via social media what they were doing to help.

“We were inspired by the good-hearted people of Boston – everyone wanted to help as much as they can after such a tragedy. There is such compassion present in our city, and our campaign is meant to reflect that,” said Alia Hamada Forrest, the Program Manager of Service Projects for Boston Cares.

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Nike – #MakeItCount

#makeitcountNike’s #MakeItCount campaign started in 2012 as part an effort to publicize the release of the Fuel Band. It started with a viral YouTube effort, and then expanded to include Nike encouraging their fans and followers to tell them how they planned to “Make it Count” in 2012.

Nike promoted the hashtag on Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest (and set up their own accounts on the networks, which posted images and statements related to the campaign). Nike also incorporated the hashtag into print and television advertisements as well.

The campaign was so successful in 2012, Nike extended the campaign, incorporating the hashtag into in-store retail displays and continuing to push the message well into 2013.

In fact, the Nike store in London is now featuring several prominent posters, which show the athletes at the most intense (and at times painful-looking) moments during training. Each athlete’s pledge is then written on top of the image, with the athletes’ Twitter handles and the “#MakeItCount” hashtag.

HGTV – #lovehome

hgtv #lovehomeIt’s not unusual to see a television network advertising itself, but HGTV recently tried to expand their marketing efforts beyond the television spots they ran spots on-air by to promote its “Love Home” social media campaign.

The network asked fans to share photos on Twitter or Instagram and label them with the hashtags #lovehome and #hgtv. Some lucky fans then got to see their images included later on in the later TV ads, as well as on the company blog.

Fully taking advantage of the growing trend of people who watch television with a mobile device within reach, the campaign was a success. HGTV also had a win with the campaign by focusing on personal expression, and the campaign got a huge response from its viewers. According to an official blog post, the channel received more than 40,000 submissions for the campaign.

The cross platform campaign also was able to promote its social profiles through their TV spots, and encouraged viewers to deepen their engagement with the brand by getting more involved with HGTV digitally.
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The case for the full integration of social media and eCommerce is not subject to debate.  Anyone who has been remotely interested in the digital space for the last few years understands that social media influences purchase behavior.  Some of the latest studies, such as the one conducted by Chadwick Martin Bailey, in connection with iModerate Research Technologies, confirm that consumers are “67% more likely to buy from brands they follow on Twitter, and 51% more likely to buy from a brand they follow on Facebook.”

Additionally, our own experiences with Postano social hubs indicates that consumers want to see a brand’s social media content on a brands’ eCommerce websites– those brands that have implemented our Postano Social Hub generally see a 2-3X increase in average time on site, and a 3-7X increase in social sharing of that content.

Challenges with Integrating eCommerce and Social

So, integrating social media with eCommerce should be simple – a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup type scenario where the marketing folks and the eCommerce team should realize that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  But in general, most brands struggle with the task.

Many companies are either unaware of the social hub platforms available for use, or are not willing to devote the real estate necessary on their eCommerce sites to show off their brand’s social media content at its best.

aggregate social media

Tommy Hilfiger's social hub, which aggregates curated social media content

Instead, they may make use of the many plugins and widgets that are available, but are then either unhappy that the widget does not look brand right, and/or become distressed that their web traffic, acquired at great cost end effort, is diverted away to visit external social media channels.
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