Is it time for ‘marketing-as-a-service’ (MaaS)?

Snow Fall is a beautiful, interactive and immersive multimedia experience about the avalanche at Tunnel Creek in the US.

It was lovingly crafted by The New York Times in 2012 and was heralded as setting new standards in digital storytelling.

Seventeen months later, the publication’s internal innovation report was leaked. It points out that while projects such as Snow Fall are extremely popular, with more than 21m page views, they are not easily replicable.

The report acknowledged that:

...we have a tendency to pour resources into big one-time projects and work through the one-time fixes needed to create them and overlook the less glamorous work of creating tools, templates and permanent fixes that cumulatively can have a bigger impact by saving our digital journalists time and elevating the whole report. We greatly undervalue replicability.

In a memorable quote from Quartz editor Kevin Delaney, “I’d rather have a Snow Fall builder than a Snow Fall”.

Isn’t marketing, particularly digital, undergoing a similar change? We love a great campaign but perhaps they are not as valuable as creating a marketing infrastructure and set of marketing processes and capabilities that can deliver replicability.

This does not mean that marketing should be normalised but if we can create the right building blocks, including data, content assets, rules and logic, then we can create ‘composable’ marketing that is unique in discrete executions, yet more scalable, efficient and quicker to execute.

Marketing-as-a-service 

You should be aware of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud-based software. Should we not be thinking of marketing-as-a-service (MaaS)? If we can create marketing components that we can assemble on demand, then we can deliver new marketing experiences quickly and effectively.

Consider digital advertising campaigns. Mondelez’s vice-president of media and consumer engagement B. Bonin Bough recently said that he expected all media to be bought programmatically.

Procter & Gamble has stated it aims to buy 70-75% of its US digital media programmatically by the end of this year. American Express also suggested that it wants to shift 100% of digital buys to programmatic.

What becomes most valuable is less the specific creative execution, or individual campaign, and more the underlying models, frameworks and algorithms. To paraphrase Kevin Delaney’s Snow Fall comment, “I’d rather have an optimisation model for programmatic media buying than a great ad campaign”.

How about content marketing? Infographics have proved popular but creating great infographics as one-offs is time consuming and expensive. Using chart and graphic-building tools and services, such as Quartz Chartbuilder, makes more sense.

Syndicating and distributing content manually is too intensive; again, we need services and platforms to properly power content marketing.

Where could MaaS go? Imagine if we could draw on data sources, query that data and build segments on the fly, pull out marketing building blocks to deliver personalised messaging and experiences that are tailored to specific devices, medium and context of use.

IBM is already doing this in its own marketing. Platforms such as Bluemix and services like Watson (artificial intelligence as a service), enable the company to build propositions such as IBM Voices that allow anyone to discover the most valuable social content shared, created and discussed by IBM thought-leaders and subject matter experts.

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Social Media For Small Businesses: How To Harness The Hashtag (INFOGRAPHIC)

You've seen it everywhere: on TV advertisements and billboards, on Twitter and Facebook, on ironic T-shirts and baseball caps. You may have even heard a cheeky millennial say it out loud.

But the humble hashtag (#) isn't just a fad. In its true iteration — as early Twitter users truly intended — it served as a way to carry on a conversation with a diverse audience.

Today, the hashtag represents a golden opportunity for small-business owners to send a message across multiple platforms — quickly.

We've partnered with American Express OPEN for an in-depth look at how to harness the power of social media to build your business. With one simple hashtag, you can drive brand recognition, improve reach and engage in a give-and-take with your customer base.

Here's how.

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How to Add Value to Social Media Fans and Create Deep Loyalty

“Give and it shall be given to you” is one of the oldest proverbs from the Biblical gospels. Giving has a reciprocal reaction when done sincerely. If you add value to people with the intent of solving their problems, making their lives better, or just giving them a shout-out, you will receive back.

In my series on developing loyalty strategies that produce strong brand advocates, we’ve already looked atconversation building and crowdsourcing. When rating social media loyalty strategies, adding value is at the top of the scale. But it is there for a reason—it takes the most work, but it produces the greatest rewards. And when it comes to crisis prevention, the support you’ll garner from implementing value-adding strategies will be your strongest shield.

Simplified, adding value has three tactics:  give nods, give gifts, solve problems. It’s not about you or what you want the customer to hear.  This model is the most time consuming because it requires you to dig deep and find out what your customers really need. Adding value to fans means making a commitment to know them as people, not acquisition numbers. Not necessarily each and every one, but it requires well developed personas.  This piece from Heidi Cohen illustrates the importance of using personas in marketing. If you’re not familiar with how to build and use personas, my new book has some good information on how to engineer personas for social media strategy.

Give nods. Shout-outs, thanks, links to outstanding brands—these are all examples of how to give nods. Nonprofits and higher education are experts at the thank you video. Businesses would do well to follow their example. AT&T put together a highly successful campaign of thank you videos on YouTube. It’s an inexpensive way to draw attention to your supporting fans. “Fan of the week” campaigns would also be a good example here.  Also, draw attention to your fans that solve the problems of other community members.

Give gifts. Who doesn’t love coupons? But there is a caution here. A Constant Contact consumer survey  recently found that the majority of people follow brands in social media to receive discounts and deals. The missing link in this research is that there was no correlation to engagement levels. We know we can hook people with promises of discounts and freebies, but does that “value” foster growing loyalty? My husband loves to buy anything on sale, whether he needs it or not.  The value, for him, is in the discount, not the brand. To connect gifts and loyalty, make sure your gift solves a problem for your fans.

And what if you are B2B? You can offer discounts on event tickets, a free hour of consulting, or free enrollment in a service. Use your imagination here.

Solve problems. American Express has developed a large group of invested fans in their OPEN forumwhich concentrates on solving problems by interest and need. It allows small businesses to connect immediately with people who have similar needs and situations. Also they enlist experts to write articles and answer common questions for small business owners. 

Find the sweet spot of value for your fans, and design content and rewards that hit that spot. That may be a combination of discounts, shout-outs, problem-solving, crowdsourcing, reward points for new products, or many other options. Even though value-adding takes a lot of research and work, it pays the highest rewards. How do you add value to your fans? Leave some suggestions for the rest of us in the comments.

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How American Express Found Its Social Media Groove

American Express went from virtually zero social media presence in 2009 to being hailed by Advertising Age as the “real winner” at South By Southwest this year.

How did AmEx do it? Leslie Berland, SVP of digital partnerships and development at the company, attempted to retrace the brand’s steps during a talk at Mashable Connect, and then dispensed a few social media tips on Friday.

Berland highlighted two major inflection points in AmEx’s social media marketing history: its introduction ofSmall Business Saturday and its promotion of Sync at SXSW. The former started with a “lofty goal,” which was to “start a movement,” Berland said.

Launched in 2010, Small Business Saturday was designed as a response of sorts to Black Friday, which comes the day before. The idea is to motivate consumers already in shopping mode to spend their cash at their local mom and pops. Berland says her aha moment with the program was realizing that it was a great fit onFacebook, where the SBS Page drew 1 million fans in three weeks. (It now has 2.8 million fans.)

That’s a respectable showing considering the brand only began focusing on social media in 2009, when it set up AmEx’s first Twitter account. Berland recalls that it took three weeks to come up with the account’s first tweet. No wonder she likens getting a large brand on social media to giving birth.

Berland’s coup de grace was this year’s SXSW promotion for AmEx Sync‘s Twitter tie-in, which appears to have captured the hearts and minds of much of the event’s attendees.

The effort, which introduced a program that offers cardmembers discounts for tweeting advertised hashtags, began before SXSWers even arrived. Berland secured 30 minutes of free Wi-Fi from GoGo to 80% to 90% of the flights to Austin, Texas, that included a plug for Sync. Then, once in Austin, AmEx offered 700 tickets to its Jay-Z concert. The concert became a major draw at the show, an outcome that reflects Jay-Z’s popularity as well as AmEx’s exacting standards as an entertainment partner. As Berland recalls, there was a long list of potential concert draws, but the brand was seeking someone who was both hip with the local crowd and popular nationally. (Justin Bieber was among those who didn’t make the cut.)

Though Berland’s talk included some trite advice (“Think like a startup”), she was more candid in her Q&A with the audience. When one attendee challenged her about her statement that “90% of our strategy is defined by the things we don’t do,” Berland said she meant, for instance, that it’s wise to resist the pressure to embrace all formats. “What I’m often challenged with often is a lot of ‘I want this, we want that’” she said, referring to internal pressure. However, “It’s not a ‘build it they will come,’ thing.”

Berland also said it doesn’t make sense to back a Facebook campaign with traditional media like print and TV ads. “If you’re running a program on Facebook, buy ads on Facebook.”

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