Screenshot of Facebook Timeline

October 2011 was a busy month for we digital agencies, especially those that involves in Facebook applications development. Facebook recently announced a major face lift for it’s profile and introduced the new Open Graph in Beta, they also officially discontinued FBML and now forcing pushing all apps to include SSL secure browsing feature, to name a few. What does that mean? It means what worked last month, is not working anymore now.

Like the CEO and Co-Founder, Mark Zuckerberg puts it, “You it is possible to create a whole new class of apps and change the industries at the same time.” We all love new things, but that also means we have to go back to the drawing board to rethink and rediscover what we’ve learned before this to adopt to new possibilities. None of us wants to be left behind.

Let’s discuss a bit on what are the changes and how will it affect the future of marketing activities on Facebook, as a platform.

800 million users worldwide, 75% are outside US, 50% logs in daily.

That sounds like Facebook has grown itself to be the third biggest country in the world. Measuring from the statistics based on the users logged in during the past 30 days, the biggest social network has grown over 50 million new users since July 2011. That’s crazy. Even with close to 6 million quit Facebook in June 2011 in US, the global growth keeps strong. With Asia as one of the fastest growing region on Facebook, businesses should start working on ways to further fuel their marketing activities on the social juggernaut.

Open Graph and Facebook Gestures

“Graph API is one of the most important elements for Facebook Platform. It allows websites to draw information about more objects than simply people, including photos, events, and pages, and their relationships between each other” (Wikipedia). Simply put, Graph is one of the defining factors why Facebook rose as one of the most prominent digital marketing channel. Brands can use the API to capture data, push wall posts and updates to your Timeline (used to be Profile, more next) from Facebook, applications and websites.

And now, Open Graph is even better with more Facebook Gestures. You can build applications that define your own action to an object. For example, Jack is “cooking” a recipe, Alan is “running” at a place using Runkeeper, you get the idea. Every object, piece of data and destinations can be fully connected with the social graph. Facebook has also changed the permission procedure, applications no longer ask permission every time they push a story to your Timeline, but instead it previews the story at the first time permission and it pushes to your wall automatically after that.

Mark Zuckerberg puts it during the f8 2011 recently – it will give birth to complete new class of social apps to make content discoverable, depends on the ambition of a brand to redefine what is social in their industry.

That’s a whole discovery of opportunities lying before us. We’ve experimented the new Open Graph with a few applications; it has been working fantastically to generate social impressions using created stories.

New Facebook Stories, Ticker and Timeline

Also part of the massive changes, I believe you’ve noticed that your news feed has changed. To sum it up, Facebook has redesigned the news consumption experience of the stories (it was called News) by combining Top news and News under one interface, and it intelligently arranges and defines what’s important to you (of course, you get to customize it along the way), most importantly, the Ticker was introduced to make sure you don’t miss any activities that your friends involved in.

The new Open Graph also powers Ticker, it pushes all activities of your friends on the tiny box at your top-right of your Facebook home page, and it works seamlessly with the “new class of social apps”, for example if your friend is listening to a song on Rdio, you’ll be notified and you can simple mouse over to the story and join the activity and start conversation around it.

The Timeline is a complete departure from the Profile. If you’ve cracked it you must have seen a different profile of your own formed by two major columns that chronicles your activities. It has got bigger photos display; grouped activities (things like friends added, pages liked, apps used, etc.) and most importantly, you can add a cover picture and also add activities as you wish. For example, you joined Facebook at 2008, and you’re able to add important events of your life before that, up to the day you’re born.

Basically, you can consider Facebook as your “Life Book”. Many are skeptical about the possibilities of people building their Timeline, but we see it as an increased cost of leaving Facebook for average users.

What’s next?

With all the new stuffs and drastic changes, brands and marketers need to rethink and strategize to stay relevant. Based on our experience at Tribeup working with over 20 brands nationwide, here’s how we see it.

• Likes are still important, but there’s EdgeRank – Number of Likes is still the most important measurement (we believe it is actually the simplest) to determine the success of a brand on Facebook, but we also advise brands to stay engaged, interesting and relevant. Just like Google’s PageRank, Facebook determines the visibility of a Pages’ visibility with it’s ultra secret EdgeRank algorithm. We’re still unsure of the mechanism, but based on our experience, as long as a fan doesn’t like or comment on any of your posts over a period of time, they’re lost. Trust me, I’ve liked few hundred pages myself and those that actually appeared on my feed were just a handful. Stay relevant, campaigns help.
• Social apps for social activation – Just like Mark Zuckerberg puts it, be ambitious. Since the introduction of Facebook Promotion Guidelines, Pages actually are forced to build applications to host their campaigns. Building an application is simple; the essential is still the idea behind it. Be imaginative, be ambitious. With the current Open Graph that allows even mobile apps full integration, brands are able to create richer interaction using interesting campaign based or feature based applications. Marketers won’t want to miss this opportunity to maximize the ROI.

It is still at the early stage of the new Open Graph, and Timeline is yet to be fully released to all users on Facebook, we still have time to figure out the next steps for brands. We at Tribeup has been working on a social application tools that integrates most of the Open Graph features to send lightweight to the new Ticker and Timeline, which expected to be launched by end of 2011. You may visit Instapps.com to register for Beta Test when it releases.

My suggestion to marketers is simple – be innovative. While we still can’t see a trace of a challenger to Facebook (not even Google+, to my opinion), Facebook is still here to stay. With more and more people jumping on the bandwagon and users getting bored at a trick so fast, marketers are required to think faster than ever. While the “Social Personalization” era taking place, the game has just got more interesting.

(Written by Jason Gan. This article was published in the 4rd issue of LiBra – Living with Brands, a branding and licensing magazine, in January 2012)

Blissful Photography Contest 2011 by Blissful World - Prizes worth RM15,200 in total.

We’ve been running campaigns for clients with our own custom built Facebook apps, basically in the Asia region, which we believe it is quite unique itself as the cultural differences.

A few points to take away base on our experience for the past 2 years running over 20 campaigns in various sizes:

Smaller targeted giveaways can be more effective than big contests

We’ve done contest giving away as much as MYR15K (close to USD5K) and as small as giveaway of sample packs worth only a few bucks. Both drove good responds from the fan base and created incredible social impressions using applications. Maybe it is the local culture, if the prizes get too big, people tend to get personal when it comes to winners decision. Give away something simple but relevant to the fan base as well as the brand, it creates healthy discussions and positive sentiments

Use dedicated campaign applications

since we’re no longer allowed to use native Facebook features to run campaigns (else they will consider you spamming) building applications for campaigns is inevitable. Some finds it tedious, but if it is done right, the result is great as this is, afterall, a social network. We always help clients to identify opportunities around an idea to maximize the impact, Open Graph API has been incredible. We run ads for each campaigns to target specific groups, but often the fans opt-in from social impressions are always equal to those paid, if not higher.

Use Facebook Ads

You wouldn’t want to net fans out of your target group, and since the suggest page to friend feature is getting obsolete as people don’t check, best way to expose your page and campaign is thru ads, or capitalize on your opt-in lists.

Terms and Conditions set right

Many campaigns overlooked this, which is pretty dangerous. The biggest a campaign is, the higher the chance it will hit a PR crisis when trolling happens. Best is you set everything right before hand, and when things turn funny, you have something to fall back on.

Just my 2 cents, visit our case studies for more details.

Glamore Giveaway for Halfest 2011 was a unique campaign integrating online registration and interactions with offline road shows. Two road shows were integrated into this campaign – Halal Fiesta 2011 and Ekspo Barangan Buatan Malaysia. An application was setup to capture registrations and gives away redemption codes that registrants can either print screen the page or the email sent out after registration to redeem their free Glamore Travel & Trial Pack at either of the road shows.

We’ve integrated Facebook’s latest Graph API into the application that pushes a wall post on behalf of the registrants once they completed the registration. This helped to generate a huge amount of social impressions that drives new Likes to the page, at the same time driving some organic registrations too.

Key Measurements

• Increased number of fans – 1,300
• Captured emails – 672 (52% of total new fans)
• Total Facebook ads impressions – 2.93 million times
• Total unique reach – over 360,000 individuals on Facebook

Contact us for Free Proposal.

Blissful Photography Contest 2011 (BPC11) was a unique campaign as it integrated offline activities into a digital media campaign (on site photo shooting sessions). We started by calling for registration among local photographers with a carefully crafted communication plan aided by moderate Facebook advertising. We built 3 applications that enabled this campaign in 3 stages – Registration, Submission and Voting. As there’s gap in between these 3 stages, we built in the first ever iPhoneography contest in Malaysia using Instagram as the side contest of BPC11, it was an interesting move and surprisingly we received over 80 submissions in 48hours time via Instagram. In total we’ve received close to 700 photo submissions (81 on Instagram, 600 for all full categories) on both platforms, a huge success for the brand calculating the values of the photos captured to be used in future marketing materials.

Key Measurements

• Increased number of fans – 2506 (up 350%)
• Captured emails – 1700 (70% of total new fans)
• Total registered photographers – 81
• Total photo entries received – 700 (on both full and side contests)
• Total Facebook ads impressions – 5.15 million times
• Total unique reach – 203,206 individuals on Facebook

Contact us for Free Proposal.

(Photo Credit: Steve Meyer)

While the whole world is talking about social networks (or the power of social media), discussing on its privacy issue, its way of affecting the internet world (and our lives), its IPO or potential IPOs, etc., most businesses are sleeping through one important change: Social Media Mobility.

Not just social media in fact, but the changes or should I safely say the rise of mobile was fundamentally geared by the social media and its rising importance in our daily life. Mainly the growing desires to connect and share.

Facebook indicates that 250 million out of its 750 million active users access Facebook through their mobile devices; Twitter is mainly built for mobile and we have Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places of course if we’re talking about geolocation social networks, and many more.

When we discuss about social media strategies, I realize most of the time we’re talking about content aggregation or nurturing communications on web platforms. In Tribeup we started with the web, in fact mobile is relatively new to us too, just like most of us here. I agree that we’ve already moved one step ahead from one-way-communication to content (value) creation and community engagement, but what’s next?

Here are a couple of new and rising niche social networks and its concept (and numbers):

1. Soundcloud – a social network for sounds or described as ‘Flickr of Sound’, Soundcloud has got 4 million users and growing, it’s founder believes that sound will be bigger than video.
2. Instagram – photo sharing social network that was launched on iOS only. 5 million users in 8 months, over 100 million photos shared from all over the world.

So what’s the big deal? Let’s do a little revisit to the root of why did we embraced social media as a marketing platform or toolset at the first place – to nurture, to communicate, to engage, to service, you name them. Social networks rise because of the users and content created by them. In Tribeup we believe that the market has really broken into tribes with different interests (one can be part of many different tribes), and marketers’ critical role here rather than being a good curator, is to be able to identify which network is potential to be used to rip the best result for the brand.

Back to the key success factors for social networks: users and content, which are also applicable to brands that embrace social media marketing. One thing made tinkled me was that I noticed a growing number of “Snap & Win” kind of contests running by brands on Facebook, but why not Instagram, or Foursquare? Maybe a mashup?

My argument is that marketers should start looking at mobile social networks to add value to their social media campaigns. The reason is pretty simple. First is the technology and gadgets; seriously more and more savvy users are already on smart phones that come with all sort of instant sharing functionalities. Then take a step back and recall, when was the last time we shoot photos and post few days later (and forgotten about it)? Or rather we shoot and post instantly with all available mobile applications that comes with our smart phones?

In Tribeup we’ve experienced many different campaigns and we see indication of declining interest among Facebook users towards participating in some kind of contests, especially “Snap & Win” kind of stuffs, so we decided to test something different with our latest campaign with Blissful World, a business entity that has Blissful Memorial Park Bukit Mertajam and Sungai Petani under their management – an iPhonegraphy contest – it was a bold move for Blissful World to accept the idea, let me explain.

By the way if you’re not sure what Instagram is, it is actually a photo sharing community that currently runs on an iOS app only. You can shoot and share your photos to your community instantly by applying provided filters to make them look super awesome. Users can follow and be followed, commented and liked. One thing it is different is that you won’t able to create an account on web, only preview, but you can set to auto-post the photo to Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Flickr, Tumblr and Posterous.

Probably the first iPhonegraphy contest in Malaysia, we used Instagram and leverage on its open API and its instant ability to share in (almost) all platforms, and it was quite an interesting case study indeed.

The contest was built on a Facebook application that synchronizes with a contest website; we use Instagram API to call photos with dedicated hashtags and geolocation tagging from Instagram to be displayed on web and application. Voting was enabled on both platforms as they sync real time. Voters just need to allow the application and immediately we capture their data and push a link status to his or her wall.

The result was pretty interesting. Close to 200 photos of both Blissful Memorial Parks (Bukit Mertajam & Sungai Petani) were posted by over 50 photographers participated in 2 days (made #blissfulmy a popular Instagram tag on a night), over 10,000 votes by more than 1,000 voters casted in 3 days, close to 2,000 emails captured. That’s not the key; important is that with the extensive shares all around the social networks, discussions and comments that lead to switch of perspective happened among viewers towards the memorial parks.

It is actually about integrating all possibilities for ideas to flourish, and to maximize the impact for brands. Social media mobility to me is about tapping on the desire of users to share instantly and stay connected all the time, as marketers our job is to leverage on these desires to engage them with your brands. Just don’t limit yourselves to one platform.

Maybe we’ll try integrating Soundcloud in our next campaign, who knows?

(Written by Jason Gan. This article was published in the 3rd issue of LiBra – Living with Brands, a branding and licensing magazine, in August 2011)

(Photo Credit: Jacob Bøtter)

How to measure social media ROI

I think this is no longer a question, but yet again it is always important to look into your business model again before jumping in. One of the biggest challenge operating a digital marketing agency that base in Penang or overall Northern Region is that, we’re working in an environment where the awareness towards the social media marketing is relatively lower compare to other regions, i.e. Kuala Lumpur.

I have to admit that sometimes it is not easy to deal with the traditional mindset, if you do not have the passion in the business.

One of the most frequently asked question we experienced: can social media drive growth in their sales in short term? Our answer is yes, with conditions. How? Good question.

Let’s take a look at the process of strategizing a social media marketing campaign. Based on our practices and experience, rule number one is to dig as deep into the business itself for us to understand the marketing objectives behind. No matter how interesting or crazy an idea can be generated from your team or your digital marketing agency, nothing works without a solid set of objectives, which allow us to establish the measurement and tracking mechanism. I shall get back to this later.

The next important thing is to determine the correct platforms. Social media is definitely more than Facebook, Twitter and Youtube. We recently received an enquiry from a manufacturing company of a highly niche product line that only appeals to a very small group of people, and we were requested to help them to create a campaign on Facebook. We did a simple analysis; their potential target group is only about 0.0002% of total Facebook population. Does it worth the investment?

I believe being realistic is important when determining the best approach for a brand to adopt social media as one of their marketing outlets. We all understand that we’re in business and we mean business, and in businesses numbers speak louder than most of other things. Ditto that, hands down.

From my experience there are many ways we use to determine the success of a campaign, like I mentioned earlier everything should be objective-based but interestingly we found that most of the brand owners that engaged us did not really look for solid ROI, as in dollar and cents. Is it because of the awareness or we do not understand their objectives enough?

I agreed with Olivier Blanchard of The BrandBuilder Blog on his argument that “having a presence in social media is worthless unless you do something with it”.

We all know that social media isn’t free because we need to commit our resources into growing it; if you’re engaging an agency the fee can be quite a pain if you do not see something in return. Olivier believes your social media activities should do one of these three things:

1. Increase how often your customers buy from you. (Frequency)
2. Increase your total number of customers. (Reach)
3. Increase how much each customer spends with you. (Yield)

We helped brands embracing social media for a few reasons, such as building public relations, brand awareness, customer loyalty, customer relations, lead generations… My opinion is that whatever reason it is for you to embrace social media, the principle is the same that it should help you to achieve either one of the 2 (best both) ultimate objectives: to improve revenue or reduce cost.

It is the same as how you plan your marketing campaigns. Just that now we have more tools available to make all things measureable from one step to another, rather than creating an ad on magazine last time that you don’t even know if your adverts were read.

So how do we measure success on social media? Let me walk you through with a campaign idea (let say a contest), breaking down into a few stages.

Imagining the end from the beginning

Any campaign needs money; man-hour, expertise, technologies and even ads spending… all these are your initial investment. I repeat again: establish your objectives correctly. Drawing a line here is important, by understanding the quantitative and qualitative measurements established for the campaign, and the steps to measure them. Don’t be afraid to commit into numbers, even last time marketers do that why not now?

Draw your action plan right

Everything must be planned, with a backup plan ready. Have your communication strategy planned alongside with your application building and visual development process. We’re obsessed about content because that’s the most important tool to drive conversation and word-of-mouth. Get your blog posts, status updates, tweets and videos planned, get a communication kit ready and communicate it thoroughly with your social media team together with the end picture you wish to achieve. You might wanna get a crisis plan ready as well.

Manage and measure

Social media marketing campaign is about driving interaction, content distribution and also tracking reaction. But the key is the tracking mechanism. I always like to put a call-or-action in the process of my campaigns, what I mean is getting permission from target audience, such as email address. While tracking mentions, shares, likes, backlinks, tweets, number of installs of application and the rest could be exiting, my favorite part is to see the number of solid numbers like number of subscribers, email addresses or even phone numbers, growing. The reason is simple: while the values of each follower on Facebook or Twitter remain arguable, we are able to establish the value of a lead better, in comparison.

Measuring the end numbers

While putting purchase-of-product as one of the contest criteria is not something I advocate, I still believe it is good to put a call-for-action at the end of a campaign. While we should focus on building good will and positive sentiments towards the brand among the target group in the process of a campaign, putting a special discount at the end can be quite a good idea. I believe all businesses should have a set of numbers for the lifetime value of each customers, put that into perspective together with the number of leads you get while tracking the increase of store/website traffic, then you can have a better picture on what you’re getting from a campaign.

Well, I hope you get a better picture from the illustration above. All I wish to share in this post is that social media marketing can actually generate solid ROI if properly planned. I am not ruling out the non-financial measurements that I do believe these metrics can actually benefit brands in the long run but trust me, this article can help you convince your management for releasing the budget you need for your next social media campaign.

Here’s some insights about measuring social media from David Berkowitz, Senior Director of 360i, an digital marketing agency based in US.

(Written by Jason Gan. This article was published in the 2nd issue of LiBra – Living with Brands, a branding and licensing magazine, in May 2011)

20 questions were designed with reward of RM50 for each question releasing at 10am and 3pm daily during weekdays; only the fastest that got the answer right within the first 20 answers will be rewarded. Our team carried out the project from campaign ideation and design to application development and also the campaign management during the contest period.

Know-the-Web Facebook application was designed to achieve the objectives effectively with a few key features:

1. Push updates to wall when users (i) install and register to the application and (ii) submit answers to the contest
2. Auto block answers submission when 20 answers received
3. CMS system – Questions are pre-set to be released at the time set (10am and 3pm daily)
4. One click to confirm winner with all information shown (easier to contact winners)

Some statistics

Overall the application worked well despite the “Page-down” period suspected due to heavy traffic or possible Facebook server maintenance. In record the application were added 850+ times where all almost 60% of them turned into registered participants in the contest. 43% falls in the age group of 18-24 where another 40% comes from the age group 25-34, more than 90% are Malaysians.

More than 800 pushed updates on Facebook profiles created (auto push once user registered and participated in the contest) and more than 24K canvas page views (FBML page on Exabytes (MY) page) were generated. Over the campaign lifetime, 1046 application requests generated.

Key Results (within 2 weeks)

• Increase number of fans: 800+
• Captured emails: 500
• Facebook application active users: 3,400
• Canvas pageviews: over 24,000
• Contest ads social impressions: over 8 million

Contact us for Free Proposal.

About YC: YC is an Internet marketer/consultant and founder of iBizClicks. He is a certified Google AdWords and Google Analytics Qualified Individual, and also a member of SEMPO (Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization) and Institute of Marketing Malaysia (MIMM). Started involving in Internet marketing since 2003. YC specializes in search engine optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC – Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft Advertising and Facebook Ads) and web analytics. Has been implemented many successful SEO & PPC campaigns.

Search Engine Marketing: SEM & SEO Services

Having a website without marketing and any optimization is like open a shop in the jungle where nobody can find you.

In a single month alone, there are about 113 billion searches conducted worldwide. With so many people using the web to search for products and services, how does your website get noticed? And how can you boost your online sales?

Search Engine Marketing is a revolution in the marketing world. It is part of the marketing mix that will bring valuable traffic to your website and to help convert potentials into customers. The methods are precise and measurable, and market your products and services directly to those who are interested in your offers at the right time.

We provide a suite of services to fit the demands of clients with a variety of needs and budgets:

Google AdWords (PPC) Management

This is the quick solution to get your site in top 10. We provide Google AdWords campaign setup, optimization and management services. We can maximize the return on investment for your existing or new campaigns by integrating the analytical and results-driven method.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

We will optimize your products or business keywords and get them on Google top. We take a 2-step approach to SEO: on-site search engine optimization and building relevant links to help develop search engine trust over time to increase visibility and visitors.

Contact us for your Search Engine Marketing proposal now.

About Kizapps: We’re a bunch of dudes from different fields whom love Apple products that much (4 of us own 4 macs, 3 iPhones, 1 iPad and 1 iPod Touch), and after a few meetings sharing about apps, we decided to come together to assist brands to leverage on the platforms to create edge bleeding interactions with your users.

You know the best about your brand, and we do best in helping you to bring you the best result leveraging on the mobile platforms by creating awesome apps for all your needs. May it be as simple as a branding app or a campaign specified app that aims to bring the max result within a short period of time, we’re game.

This is a team with accumulated more than 10 years in digital marketing, strategic planning, web design, application development and programming. One thing we have that separate us from our fellow peers in the industry is our deep understanding in digital marketing. Supported by one of the leader in regional creative digital marketing industry, Tribeup; we don’e just build apps, we build marketing experiences.

We can’t help to say that this is an awesome team, work with us to find out more.

(Photo Credit: Petter Danielsen)

Social media is a phrase that was coined not so long ago, combining the development of technology that puts the power in the hands of people, changing the way people consume information, interaction, and also how businesses interact with their consumers, and how brands are perceived in the new media world.

From the time blogs started to challenge the mainstream medias, which is the era of Web 2.0, many predicted that printed media will die. And now we have more, started with Friendster, Hi5 and many others (which eventually fading away) and now the sizzling hot Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Foursquare, Posterous, etc. Once again, many are saying the old media will die, TV channels, newspapers, magazines… I don’t think so.

My argument is that we’re at the crossroad of a revolutionary change of information flow, those that’s been here for long will stay, and those that’s popular now will stay, too. Things will change definitely, by merging. New media is not about the social media replacing the old media, but it is symbolizing the birth of a new form of media, combining the best of both world, a merged new media.

While new media is taking form, the situation is a little bit confusing, definitely. In many of my discussions with brand owners, one question was always asked: How do we make use of the social media to the advantage of my business? My answer is simple: You don’t make use of social media, you be part of it.

The only thing that has changed in the era of social media, is the way people consume information and manage them.

Be one of us.

In order to help people understand the concept of social media marketing, I always ask a question before illustrating a scenario: from the morning until now as you’re reading this article, name me 3 advertisements you remember, may it be from newspaper, TV, internet, anything.

Many can’t, and here’s the scenario. Imagine you’re living in a society 500 years ago, and you’re looking to get something new, what will do you? There’s no TV or newspaper ads, no yellow pages, there’s only people. Yes you ask around, and that’s word-of-mouth. In order to drive word-of-mouth at that era, you have to be there physically, made a few of the stuff to people in that area, and make sure they satisfied so that they will tell their friends, and your job is done.

The scenario is the same today, nothing much changed but the expectation part. People are already swarmed with information and they learned to ignore. Your ads can no longer penetrate into their life as new generation (which is the coming up biggest spending power in economies) hardly read newspapers, watch TVs. We (yea we, am at that age group too) practically consume all the information we need on social media, as we get to create their own newspaper (Facebook stream, Twitter feeds, etc), and our very own TV channel (Youtube, Vimeo, etc).

Oh we also don’t check on Yellowpages anymore, not even online. Because we have Foursquare (geo-location social network) and our Facebook and Twitter friends are always there to tell us where to find good food and what’s the phone number of the locksmith nearby.

Awesome! So what you gonna do? You be there, of course. Then what do you do there? You be part of us. Blend yourself in the community with the right approach without annoying us, and listen to our need and give us what we need. We don’t mind introducing you to our friends then.

Be a story teller.

Many says it is harder and harder to become a good marketer now. Last time we have TV, newspapers, magazines, billboards, etc. Media buy was the king and no one cares if the budget is way too high while generating too little ROI, they called that branding and marketing. Which was heavy on branding side, because most of the time they don’t need to explain on that part with stats and facts.

I love being a marketer now, on the new media. Because it demands me to crack my head to understand rather than guessing, to be in touch with my customers is the best way I can get my insights. I get to be a story teller telling them awesome stories of this brand or that product, I love the feeling of receiving feed backs, may it be positive or negative, from my tribes because it shows that they care for me.

Now that’s the thing, many brands shy away from social media because they worry about what people are going to say about them, what if they don’t like it? What if the brand got trashed? Actually the biggest “what if” you should ask is, what if whatever I’m doing now doesn’t matter to the customers at all? Because be it you’re on social media or not, you have no way to stop people from talking about your brand, worse still is people are talking but you’re not aware.

So the key is is this: be on social media to listen and engage, not selling. Do not advertise in the way you used to, do not shout about yourself and attack others like you used to. This is not a competition, this is a global party. Don’t be like the CEO of MOL that gate-crashed the Facebook page of a smaller competitor and claiming himself to know more about social media than others, and ended up earned himself a Twitter hashtag #moltroll and lost the respect from people. Period. (Further reading: http://bit.ly/9sqfxg)

Create value.

Okay, now we have a better idea on how to become part of the community on the social media, and how to actually participate in order to further engage and “be one of us”. Now what?

I’ve met many brand owners, especially SMB brands. One of the thing that’s always on their minds is the ROI of everything, dollars and cents I mean. Well that’s nothing wrong to talk about that, as a marketer I do understand that if we’re not looking at ROI, what’s the reason we do marketing? And many believe that it is the same as social media marketing.

Nothing wrong, but how about thinking deeper? As Analyst and report author Augie Ray quoted in his blogpost recently:

Many marketers can draw a straight line between investments in social media marketing and financial results, but many more cannot. This doesn’t mean social media marketing is ineffective; it just means that marketers have to recognize benefits beyond dollars and cents. Facebook fans, retweets, site visits, video views, positive ratings and vibrant communities are not financial assets–they aren’t reflected on the balance sheet and can’t be counted on an income statement–but that doesn’t mean they are valueless. Instead, these are leading indicators that the brand is doing something to create value that can lead to financial results in the future.

How’s that? Take a step back to look at the whole situation in a different way. Remember you’re dealing with people, and now everyone is a media themselves empowered by the technology. Nurturing the community may not bring you any solid ROI in the short term, but having a group of good brand advocates is definitely a long term asset you won’t want to miss.

Make remarkable products/services.

We have the principle to relate to passionate brands. We understand entrepreneurship as a way to make the world a better place by creating better products or services to help enriching people’s life.

This is because we are consumers ourselves, and in the past, often we were somehow misled by brand ads before so now we’re very cautious about what is being told. Before we purchase the goods and services without futher referrals. Today people now use Facebook or Twitter to check with friends who bought the product or their friends did. Nothing for brands to hide, so the only way out is to create products or services that’s remarkable and worth talking about.

Bad products and services are not here to stay, as simple as that.

The illustration below might help to give you some basic idea about social media marketing, enjoy.

(via pensiericontingenti.tumblr.com)

(Written by Jason Gan. This article was published in the inauguration issue of LiBra – Living with Brands, a branding and licensing magazine, in January 2011)