Immersion Blenders

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Keith

Do you own an immersion blender? They’re the Foodie Friday Fun topic this week.

This is a wand blender (also known as a stick ...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Maybe you call it a wand blender or a stick blender or maybe you call it the “boat motor” as do a few TV chefs. Whatever you call it, the tool is a sharp blade at the end of a stick that a cook uses to blend food in a pot or bowl. Soups, whipped cream, mayonnaise, and pesto are all things for which I’ve used mine.  Restaurants use much larger versions in their kitchens and they’re really useful to have in the home kitchen.

There was an article on them called “Bandages Not Included” in the NY Times two months ago.  One thing that happens fairly often in the home kitchen is that cooks try to clean food off of them while they’re still plugged in.  The blade is very sharp.  The on/off switch is under your thumb by design.  What could possibly go wrong?   While I’ve been fortunate never to have pureed a finger into a stew I was thickening, the article got me thinking about business.

A lot of firms use the business equivalent of an immersion blender: social media.  Like the stick blender, the tool seems very simple and is easy to use.  A business can also cut off a finger pretty easily.  In the last year, KitchenAid, McDonalds, StubHub and others have been in the spotlight for doing exactly that.  Personal tweets sent from a company account, commercial messages tied to trending topics without understanding why they were trending, and “set and forget” use of automated tools have caused brands massive headaches and public black eyes.

Companies perform the  social equivalent of cleaning off the blender blade without unplugging it first every day.  Simple tools often lull us into a sense of complacency and that’s dangerous whether we’re in the kitchen or on the Internet.  That’s why your business’ social media activity needs to be managed just as professionally as the rest of your business and not by an unsupervised intern or someone unfamiliar with each medium’s particular potential pitfalls.  These tools are dangerous even though they’re incredibly useful.  Like the immersion blender they can be the best way to accomplish a branding task.  Provided, of course, you do so and hang on to all your fingers.

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Social and Shopping

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Keith

How do you think social media influences what people buy?  If you believe a recent report on the influence of social media on shopping this past holiday season, the answer is not much.  As the article said:

online shoppers mostly ignored social channels as purchase influencers,according to survey results from Baynote. Pinterest and Twitter influenced online and in-store purchases for just 1 in 10 shoppers surveyed, with Facebook garnering only slightly more interest. Instead, online ratings and reviews were most likely to influence both online and in-store purchases (33% and 24%, respectively), with Google search results including a pictured product available by the retailer coming in next for online purchases (26%) and paper catalogs (21%) second for in-store purchases. Not surprisingly, social channels were most influential among younger consumers (aged 25-34), while paper catalogs got the attention of the 45+ crowd.

This was accompanied by another piece which announced that “only 2% of traffic to retailers during the holiday season came from social networks, per figures released by Adobe Systems.”   The article then goes on to say “Adobe isn’t the first to detail social media’s rather small influence over the holiday season.”

I could be wrong about this but given that Adobe is the parent company of one of the large analytics firms, I’m assuming they looked for traffic into shopping carts from social media.  Their question – is social media converting into sales – isn’t the right one.  How about “does social media influence sales?”  I’m willing to bet that a large percentage of what’s on Pinterest is aspirational - something the user wants or acknowledges as desirable.  Maybe it’s a place people use to research gifts for friends?   You will have a hard time convincing me, just based on what crosses my Twitter stream and Facebook news feeds, that people aren’t researching purchases via social media.

The Baynote data is a survey – let’s always remember that what people say and what they do sometimes don’t align.  That said, I think taking “catalogs” as a whole while segmenting digital into pieces (search vs. social vs online stores) is a bit misleading.  It also doesn’t reflect how users may begin with a search, move over to social to check out their connections’ thinking on what they’ve found, and then their use of the online store to buy, perhaps several days (and sessions) later.

Given the continuing and impressive growth of online shopping during the last holiday season I’m a believer in social as a influence.  People spend more of their lives online and that includes shopping.  Maybe these folks are asking the wrong questions.  I’m sure they’d have just as hard  time proving that TV or print resulted in the conversions they’re discussing yet very few people deny those media have an impact.  What do you think?

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A Social Marketing Study

Posted on January 16, 2013 by Keith

I’ve been meaning to write about the Chief Marketer 2012 Social Marketing Study for a little while now.  Even though it came out a couple of months back, what it found is pretty relevant and I think you might find some of those findings relevant to what might be on your marketing mind.  At least I hope so!

As one might infer from the name, the topic is brands’ use of social media for marketing purposes.  You can get the study by clicking this link (registration required) but here are some of the key findings:

  • 76% of overall respondents to the survey said their brands were conducting some level of marketing within social media, and a further 16% reported plans to begin do so by the end of this year, making for a potential social marketing contingent of 92%.
  • More than half of respondents cite the difficulty of calculating an accurate return on their social marketing outlays as a prime frustration with the channels. That difficulty in turn grows out of their second most often expressed complaint in this year’s survey: the difficulty of accurately tracking sales to social campaigns. Those response rates held true for both B2C and B2B marketers.
  • Marketers are also troubled by issues of content: specifically, by the amount of time their staffers spend curating social media and by the need to keep social media supplied with a constant stream of new, fresh, engaging content.

Other not so surprising data points are that the primary purpose marketers have for using social is to drive web traffic and that most of their efforts are on the big three social sites: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  What all of this said to me was not so much about how quickly marketers adopted social as a channel but how their efforts are really just sort of fumbling along.  Not every brand should be on Facebook yet all seem to be.  While I’m a firm believer in having measurable outcomes to help with ROI calculations, it seems from the study as if the standard to which social investments as being held are out of whack with both how social is being deployed as well as with the standards applied to other channels.  Finally, the emphasis on creating new content is a good one but it sounds to me as if that content is being used in the context of social media as a megaphone – yet another broadcast medium.  I could not disagree more with that approach.

Does your company use social media for marketing?  Are the study’s findings in line with your experience?  Am I missing anything?

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