The CMO’s Guide to Pinterest

February 16th, 2012     by ddeal    

Pinterest is a lot more than a shiny new tool to help you decorate your home – it’s a platform for marketers to build connected brands in visually compelling ways. In a  newly published point of view, The CMO’s Guide to Pinterest, my iCrossing colleague Sarah Kuntsal discusses how brands ranging from Real Simple to Nordstrom are thriving with Pinterest.

As Kuntsal asserts, any marketing executive who cares about creating close customer relationships and driving sales needs to take a close look at Pinterest. Although Pinterest is new, the social bookmarking tool has already attracted a loyal base of subscribers. The site is especially popular with female and arts/crafts enthusiasts between the ages of 25 and 44 – and this audience is highly engaged on Pinterest, which is a reason why major brands are taking notice.

According to Kuntsal, brands using Pinterest are realizing substantial increases in referral traffic. Real Simple reports that at times, Pinterest has even bested referrals from Facebook.

The CMO’s Guide to Pinterest provides brief case studies on how Real Simple, Nordstrom, and Lands’ End Canvas have generated brand love on Pinterest. The report offers six Pinterest best practices for your own brand, such as integrating Pinterest into your content calendar.

Pinterest continues to generate no shortage of attention. Other examples related to Kuntsal’s white paper include this Quora thread about brands on Pinterest, a recent TechCrunch article, and Brands, Businesses, and Blogs on Pinterest.

Social Media Strategists Grow Up

Complements of David Armano, Edelman & Information Visualization Strategiest!

Social Media Strategists Grow Up
Report: Career Path of the Corporate Social Strategist: Be Proactive or Become Social Media Help Desk
View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.
Edelman colleague Steve Rubel and I (*David Armano were interviewed with a host of other active practitioners for Altimeter’s latest report on the state of social strategists and to some degree social business in general. Here are a few findings that I thought were interesting as well as a few personal opinions that I have on the findings based on personal experience.

Social Strategists come from a digital or marketing background.
While social media is an emerging technology set, most Social Strategists are already seasoned in digital technologies or marketing. Hiring managers sought 6 years in digital or marketing and 3 years experience in social media.

My Take
I believe this is accurate as the initial wave of social media has been pounced on primarily by marketers who are conditioned to react to the fickle behaviors of consumers especially in the digital space who seem to change user behavior as easily as one would change a shirt. The next several waves will likely see professionals with mixed backgrounds ranging from customer service, to public relations to even HR. But I believe the common denominator will be a proficiency in human to human interaction vs. one way communication.

They act more like program managers and resources for the whole corporation.
In our analysis of 50 LinkedIn profiles of current Social Strategists and job descriptions, we found these common job responsibilities:

Screen shot 2010-11-14 at 1.54.25 PM

My Take
You know that the field is still in in its infancy despite signs of early maturity by the focus on evangelizing initiatives and figuring out measurement vs. implementation of policies and processes which is still low in relationship. Expect this to shift over the next few years as initiatives become integrated and implementation becomes more common across organizations.

Screen shot 2010-11-14 at 1.58.46 PM

Their programs are organized into a “Hub and Spoke” formation. The culture of a company directly influences how they develop their organizational formation.
My Take
I also recommend “hub and spoke” organizational structures, but there is another dimension to this structure:

Centers of Excellence:
Centers of excellence typically reside within the “hub” of the structure and are responsible for cross discipline education, infrastructure (such as policy) and knowledge/best practice sharing across the organization.

Core Teams:

High Level Structure

Once an organization has it’s policies and general infrastructure in place, the “center” or hub begins to serve a different purpose. A core team exists primarily to act as a group of “internal consultants” actively working with teams that exist at either the brand or product level where channel strategy and implementation take place. The core team still loops in to a multi-disciplinary committee so that essential practices can be incorporated into initiatives that occur across the entire organization.

There are some really great findings in the analysis and the document is worth previewing and downloading if you are working in this space or thinking about it. The overall theme? Social media adoption for organizations is still in its infancy but growing up rapidly.

The Social Planning Framework v.1.0

The Social Planning Framework v.1.0

This could be my Jerry Maguire moment. Putting my neck on the line and saying, I don’t agree with alot of what goes on within the social media industry. There is a lack of clarity in what we do, even though we tell clients to be open and transparent. There is a lack of rigid and reliable understanding of effectiveness, with little use of the genuine meaning of effectiveness e.g. business, campaign, advertising ROI.
It also feels like the planning side of things is covert, meetings I have been in have talked about “complicated tools”, “dark arts” and some clients I am close to refer to it as “smoke and mirrors”. They also complain of agencies putting the same outreach blogs and partners sites on their plans everytime.

In the aim of being open, I thought I would share something which I have called The Social Planning Framework v1.0. 1.0 because I want people to feedback on it, to make it collaborative. To be honest, alot of people might not view it as completely groundbreaking, but groundbreaking isn’t always best. Some people may think it is basic, but for me it feels like the right framework to build a social plan from. Its based on a number of things which I have found interesting and relevant, others which I have simply found frustrating.

None of it is based on traditional social media theory and if you look at books like “Business Model Generation” you might find some very similar traits. It is effectively a business planning model but with a social twist. I think we need more of this sort of thing; planning frameworks and social tools which create a long-term credibility around the industry. Something which I believe we are in danger of losing if we don’t continue to prove ourselves, demonstrate our brilliant planning capabilities, and stop that “close our eyes and hope” mentality which alot of clients talk about.

Social Media Metrics 101

by: Randy F. Price

Our clients, potential customers and the brands they represent continue to challenge the notion of social media marketing. I believe this is a good thing, keeps us on our toes. There is an ongoing discussion (similar to the internet and web marketing circa 1999) relative to Social Media Marketing’s (SMM) significance in the marketing mix, ROI and about which department, agency or functional team is best qualified to manage this new hybrid of  market research, CRM, PR/Outreach,word of mouth and advocacy marketing vehicle, channel or platform. . Take your pick of definitions du jour. Oh, and if you didn’t partake of this month’s survey, please do, love to get your take. But I digress. http://social-arc.com/blog/

Here is the logic flow of a presentation recently made to a billion dollar company that asked about the engagement value of social media marketing.

Customer Behavior

The research shows that consumers who research options online are social media participants and by the way that channel yielded the highest number of applicants (lead generation). Customers (current or potential) trust “someone like themselves” to the tune of 68% (vs. 30%, radical change in 2 short years) as reported by Edelman.

Research from London School of Economics and Bain Consulting documented that the brands with the most recommendations online in its category grow 2.5 times the category average. This key research is the fundamental underpinning of the Net Promoter Score systems.Clearly the goal (at least one of the most significant ones) of social media marketing is to inspire and lead positive conversations, engagements and ultimately recommendations.

These “discussions” also impact search results especially if accompanied by a relevant link, and not mention the straight forward approach of providing  compelling call to action, measurement and optimization analysis.

When you look at the share of voice  (actual social media mentions or conversations) split out by competitors, correlated against  social media spending,, it strongly indicates (and validates)  impact.

Spending is not the only criteria, compelling content is also critical. And of course, determining if those conversations achieved the desired result is important and should be defined upfront.

It should go without saying that benchmarking and optimizing should always be a key performance goal and a fundamental objective of any SMM initiative. If you believe, as we do, that this is just the beginning of a new interactive and truly 1-to-1 dialogue with your customers, then establishing real empirical metric targets for success measurement is critical.

To be clear, ultimately sales is the goal. However, building a model that allows for evolutionary precision as well as a variety of key performance indicators  which take into account how the social media tactics you are using are impacting your business objective is always part of the roadmap to success with any innovative approach.

Being a fan of K.D. Paine, I found this podcast interview with her to be spot on and does an excellent job of articulating the symbiotic relationship between objective and key performance metrics.

An amusing take on marketers and social media

Happy New Year~!

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Strategic Social Media AT&T

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Social Media Predictions 2009

Peter Kim recenlty sent out an email asking for predictions around social media for 2009, the results are below.

View this document on Scribd

2008 In Review

Thanks to Jerimiah Owyang at Forrester. This sums up at least one of the key social media topics of the year. Influence and conversation acceleration.

I happened to stumble into Kmart in my local area, went for the Motrin and created this mashup. Popart? Brand Mashup? A case study in a jpg? You be the judge.

If you’re not familiar with how these two brands are related, read the Motrin Moms backstory (they have recently removed the apology from the corporate homepage), and the Kmart sponsored post story.

In reality, when these debacles happen, they are actually brand opportunities. several of the companies on my punk’d list have been able to turn this to their advantage.

Update: I just learned that Burger King has served a ‘cease and desist’ by tweeting for someone creating the ‘whoppervirgins’ account. It’s a going to be an interesting year.