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Inspiration. That’s the reason for Pinterest’s success.

Aren’t we all overwhelmed with the abundance of information published on the web? Doesn’t it feel like an oasis when you are in a place where you don’t have to read and analyze but rather see and feel?

That place is Pinterest. And the sudden interest of the audience, especially the female audience, led organizations to build boards, even if none of them are really sure about how to reach ROI using Pinterest.

There are many cases of success when it comes to driving traffic to a website. I have already commented on a previous blog post about the stories of LuxeFinds.com and Where’s the Funding for Lung Cancer?. Since then I’ve heard many more. Jewelry retailer Gemvara.com and psychotherapist and wellness speaker JudyBelmont, to name a few.

The reason why Pinterest boosts traffic is related to its viral potentiality. A user’s primary action is to repin an image they like. If the Pinterest account is connected to a user’s Facebook account, every action on Pinterest – repin, like, comment – will appear on their Facebook timeline along with the image itself. That’s an immense visibility for a simple “like”.

The grocery chain, Whole Foods, found in Pinterest a compelling channel to communicate their core values to customers. The eureka moment is when they create an emotional connection to someone in the community based on shared interest. One can hardly find a Whole Foods product among the boards though. And that’s how they are able to develop “organic” experiences with fans.

Everybody is trying to figure the metrics matter out, but the fact is that organizations have reported that Pinterest helps them to develop products, increase cause awareness and empower supporters.

I recommend that you follow the Pinterest Case Studies board by Pinterest for Business if you are interested in the subject (check their other boards as well). I love to learn about the different strategies that organizations are using on Pinterest.

The headlines above are all about scams and attacks in corporations. But whoever is taking care of these companies’ social media presence, they are people. And people can make mistakes and poor decisions when it comes to security.

If you make a mistake in your personal account, it is up to you. But in the business world mistakes cause victims. According to Osterman Research, 1 in 6 companies have fired someone due to social media posts. According to Ponemon Institute, 2 in every 3 companies blame employees for putting the company’s security at risk. On Facebook, for example, users were lead to copy and paste malicious code into their browser bars, probably expecting free or discounted products. Hackers then gained access to their accounts and post whatever they wanted.

If your company starts spreading spam, your fans and followers will be hit and this can defame your brand. Can you imagine the damage a company might face with such an attack? As shown on the above extracts by Veracode (see the complete infographic), hackers watch the Twitter trending topics and sent out spam trend messages with virus. On Facebook, free stuff is among the top categories of spam.

Some ways to be protected:
- Choose secure vendors
- Monitor, monitor, monitor, of course
- Educate social team members

I adapted the guidelines below from Abdullah Saad’s advice to bloggers. I believe these augment security in a social media team:

Finally someone smart enough to sing about their company on YouTube without embarrassing themselves.

It is a good-bye. It is about a Microsoft team. One could expect complaints and nasty jokes, but Karen X. Cheng delivers a touching, emotional parody of American Pie. She seems to have enjoyed the time spent with her Excel team members and builds a creative invitation to keep in touch with them. Apparently she is changing jobs to work for a new startup called Exec, created by the same guy from Justin TV.

YouTube stories do not always have a happy ending.

A guy put his work apron on over his underwear, then gets a guitar and starts singing about his job routine. Two months and 100,000 views later, he is fired. Surprise?

He wasn’t the first and won’t be the last to pay for using social media to point out not so glamorous aspects about his workplace. And Starbucks isn’t the first and won’t be the last company to misunderstand the creativity and humorous mind of its employees.

There is no freedom of speech when it comes to talking bad about your job, face it. It was always like that. The difference now is that your acid comment isn’t restricted to your circle of friends who might tell your boss. On the internet era, fame has its price. The Starbucks guy video has 1 million views by now (and a handful of copies). When he was fired and became famous, Christopher Cristwell  complained that he would have a hard time finding a job when all the interviewers can see him on YouTube and think that’s not the kind of attitude they want to encourage among the employees. Well, he should have thought about that before!

I just have to add that I do like the song. Both of them, actually. You just never know how your employer will take it.

Return of Investment (ROI) on social media is almost a cursing term to certain people. It’s hard to quantify abstract values such as brand awareness. That’s why many companies consider Social Media a cost and not an investment.

Although there are campaigns that run exclusively on social media, many others take social media tools as part of a broad strategy to reach customers in many different channels. Those who are more engaged will hear about the campaign on social media tools, but maybe others will see it on TV and that’s it.

Customer services are the next clearest ROI of social media. A company has to reply to the customers somehow. On social media, they are crying out loud for attention. Customers will make a brand reference on social media because it’s trendy, because there are many cases of contact success or because they tried other channels and weren’t heard. Once some brands started to listen to consumers on social media, a lot more people became attracted to the tools.

It is marketing 101: customer acquisition is more expensive than customer retention. Pamper the customers you already have. Even the angry ones. Customer experience matters and can be decisive to their relationship with the brand.

But if your customers are not on social media, maybe you don’t have to be on the platform anyway. Know your customers. Rule number one.

Pinterest has received attention due to its impressive numbers. The visual social network is reported to drive more referral traffic than Google Plus, YouTube and LinkedIn combined. According to Shareaholic, they were responsible for 3.6 % of referral traffic in January when they had just .17% back in July.

Companies are benefiting from the service. Luxury lifestyle search engine for women LuxeFinds.com used Pinterest for brand exposure after business rebrand and expansion. The company started seeing click throughs from Pinterest almost immediately and reached 1 million pageviews per month after 3 months. They have low bounce rate, with peaks of 300 page views per session. Results demand effort: CEO Phyllis Cheung typically spends about 2-3 hours pinning per day and try to find around a hundred images to pin. “I don’t think that every business can benefit from Pinterest’s traffic. Pinterest is a very visual website – if your business is visual, I would definitely say to go for it”, she says.

The non-profit , Where’s the Funding for Lung Cancer?, uses Pinterest to develop a line of products by pinning attributes and interacting with others. They also promote cause awareness through the “Anyone Can Get Lung Cancer” board that shows how the disease affects people.

Yes, Pinterest promotes image, but what is the image of your company? What does your company stand for? What stories can your company tell?

Pinterest is about building a community, and not another channel to display products. A company should sell a lifestyle on Pinterest, not its inventory.

Plus: you can track trends and monitor your brand, searching for mentions and images of your brand or products. Which means you can monitor your competitors as well, right?

Will your company benefit from Pinterest? I have already convinced an institute I work with to start an account. It looks like it is worth a try.

New to Pinterest? Email me and I’ll send you an invitation. Plus watch this cool tutorial video:

Social Media brought challenges to a lot of different professionals, but this statement is especially true for communication people.

Once everybody is a potential reporter who can announce an event in real time, what is the role of news people? Journalists can’t be everywhere all the time, and that’s a disadvantage for them. But it is also true that they are committed to publish accurate, checked information. The so-called Citizen Journalists don’t carry the same responsibility. Citizen journalism is the concept of members of the public disseminating news and information.

When it comes to prestige, journalists are losing space. Famous bloggers and twitters are called Influentials due to their power of spreading opinions and influencing other online users. “Social media influentials are treated the same way as journalists”, said Kim Johnson, VP Marketing of Parallels. It means they receive information about launching products before the public (and sometimes before the specialized journalists) and they are pampered and taken care of. “The more you engage Influentials, the more you see results.”

For Public Relations professionals, social media added a new skill requirement. Clients expect PR companies to have social media expertise in their portfolio, and there are agencies that only specialize in the new field. Sharelle Klaus, Founder and CEO of DRY Soda Company, says PR companies simply don’t get social media. She needs to hire a social media agency specifically to take care of her social media strategy, the basis of the marketing for her company. “If I had to choose between one of them, I’d probably go with the social media agency”, Sharelle says.

I really think news people and PR people are needed as they are responsible to professionally address news-related issues. They just need to figure out how they fit in this new collaborative environment. I can’t wait to see how these new roles are going to be defined. Any guesses?

http://www.drysoda.com/

The challenges of group buying are as big today as the size of this business. The Daily Deal Market is expected to have $ 2.7 billion in revenue only in the US this year. Groupon is a synonym of social deals, such as Google is for search, and is worth $12.5 billion.

Groupon, LivingSocial and similar services are based on collective purchasing. A deep discounted service or product will be redeemed only if a certain number of customers complete the purchase. It is appealing to customer compulsion. Everything is just one click away, on the smartphone screen.

This market is oversaturated though. There are hundreds of similar Daily Deal sites out there and nearly one-third of them —around 170—shut down or was sold this year. Facebook Deals was discontinued after only four months of testing.

How can the daily deals services differentiate among themselves and conquer the customer? Personalization is the key!

Groupon asks you to choose among types of deals so that they better match your interests. When you sign up for Google Offers, you let them know where your work, your home and your hangouts are located so that the send you offers that are relevant to your likes and to your location.

The big players are already beyond the daily deal now. Groupon and Livingsocial offer instant deals for lunch or dinner that have to be redeemed that same day. They have also escapes or adventures offers for short getaways as well goods or gifts.

Smaller services like the Seattle-based zulily focus on target audiences. Zulily’s focus is moms and they are said to have 4 million subscribers and $ 150 million in revenue this year. Dealometry is smaller but also Seattle-based and also focused on an audience: men. They say other services have mostly deals for women – like 80% – and there’s a lack of offers for men in goods and services.

The founder of Dealometry, Bob Crimmis, told me that Groupon and Living Social are considered a deservice for the segment. Merchants don’t even want to hear about another group buying site. In fact research show that Daily Deals are not always profitable: 56% of businesses made money from daily deal promotions, while the rest either lost money (27%) or broke even (18%).

How can the merchant benefit from Daily Deals then?

Well, each case has to be analyzed. Is it an event that is going to happen anyway with less people, like concerts or cuises? Does the business need exposure or visibility? Is there a new product that needs to be tested? Daily Deals make sense in all these cases.

Critic: Groupon doesn’t build loyalty
Well, merchants can build loyalty! They can use social media for promotion and for positive feedback. Merchants should provide a unique experience for Groupon people and ensure nice ratings and Twitter followers and Facebook likes.

Critic: Groupon buyers are deal hunters
Merchants can use social media for additional discounts and promotions like a 50% off to bring in someone new.

Critic: Groupon does not bring profit
Is Groupon for your business? Is Groupon for your business right now? If so, merchants can use marketing budget to invest in group buying. Also they can negotiate with daily deal services for a smaller cut of voucher sales. Other possibilities is to shorten the redemption period so that one can be prepared for the rush of customers.

Finally, merchants can offer loyalty programs via text message, email, Twitter, Facebook. Or their website. Last week the flight company TAM launched a collective buying program. Their first offer reduces the price in 78%, and the offer is valid only if a certain number of people buy it. Well, they have to fly anyway, and they can promote the deal to fill empty airplanes. Plus: no need to share the gains with any group buying service. That’s was a smart move that can inspire a lot of businesses.

Business goal: to not have to advertise to gain customers, since advertising is the cost of being boring.

This statement was not said by me but by Rob Brooks who is the CMO of Pemco Insurance and president of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). Brooks was a guest speaker for my UW Social Media program. And one hour wasn’t enough for all the good insights he had to provide us.

The provocative statement that begins this blog post refers to the importance of a referral-based growth customer base. Much better than paying high amounts in customer acquisition advertising is having your loyal customers recommend your service to others. Customers are talking about brands anyway, whether business people want it or not. You’d better provide good reasons for your customers to say things about you.

Pemco invested a lot on that and now they see the results. 2010 was the first year that referral was as important as price for customer decision-making on choosing a Pemco insurance plan. They responded for about 30% of customers’choice. In 2001 these number were quite different. Price was the most important deciding factor (60%) while recommendations were very low (only 10%).

Brooks says that advocates have to not only love you, but also to defend you. That’s the level of customer loyalty Pemco is cultivating – and frankly, most businesses would kill to have such an engagement. And when you make a mistake, Brooks advises, there are two things to do. Say “Thank you” and then “I’m sorry”. “Thank you” for letting you know and “I’m sorry” for not knowing better, it was a wrong judgment and here is what is being done about the issue. Being nimble, authentic, humble and quick, Brooks teaches to face a disaster. Customers appreciate honesty and will respect you for that.

From the numbers Rob Brooks presented in class, online word of mouth can spread a lot more. Only 10% of the recommendations are online, he says. But in fact many online referrals trigger offline conversations, the other 90% of the amount.

What can make a customer go out of their way to provide a recommendation? A great product or service, a great experience, a customer reward, for example. Word of Mouth Marketing can be defined simply as any business action that earns a customer recommendation, as you can see in this interesting WOMMA video.

The five principles for the best Word of Mouth Marketing are as such:

• CREDIBLE – honest and authentic marketing messaging
• RESPECTABLE – transparent and trustworthy behavior
• SOCIAL – listening, participating, responding and engaging brands
• MEASURABLE – define, monitor, evaluate your success
• REPEATABLE – the ability to do all that over and over again

The result? A talkable brand! That’s the dream of every brand. And social media can play a crucial role in that.

PM. I had a great guest writer posting on word-of-mouth here.

I already commented here how complaints on social media lead to a faster response, compared to other channels of communication with a company. Bad review tales spread fast on the internet. And companies are attentive to potential fires, containing them as soon as they can.

If time is key to the solution, let the customer services department deal with the complaints. They know the customer, they are used to hearing from them via phone and email, they know how to respond, and the know who has the answer for every request. Marketing and PR people are not as responsive. But I still think they should monitor and decide which request originating from social media should go to each team within a company. Maybe it’s just my past in Journalism speaking out loud.

Blake Cahill, president of Banyan Branch and, more importantly, my teacher at UW, says 90% of being social is being “there” for the customer.  Let them know they are heard. And that you are doing your best. And that you are sorry that they had a bad experience with the brand, if it’s a case of complaints. The ability to have questions answered, closing a cycle of interaction, is the basis of social media for companies, small or big. The difference is basically that in a small company the owner is having all the trouble while a bigger company will have money to hire someone who knows better.

Easy tools are out there for posting and monitoring. The most important, though, is to provide good service and products. Social media will reflect the quality of the company. More: it will amplify what is good and bad in your company. If there is no other reason, be on  social media to defend yourself. When you start doing it right, your loyal customers will start defending the company in your place.

I love to have guest writers! It makes me feel like a technology editor again, position that I held for seven happily years in Brazil.

This time we have Alessandra Marseglia who is an Italian professional journalist. She worked as a media and advertising editor and lately as a political reporter from the US. Alessandra built this interesting portray of Social Media in Italy politics. Great lessons to learn. Enjoy!

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It’s not USA, where the 2008 Obama campaign made history and will be the benchmark for every future political campaign all over the world. It’s not one of the Arab Spring countries – Algeria, Egypt or Libya –, where Twitter and Faceboolk helped the revolutions in the making. It’s Italy, one of the countries that more in the world embodies the concepts of history and tradition and where even the media market, dominated today as 30 years ago by free TV, seems old and falling as the Colosseum.

However, in the last year or so, the “Bel Paese” experimented the “disruptive power” of Social Media as an unpredictable force that changed the game’s rules in, at least, two political elections. In the first one, a successful SM campaign helped the candidate to win; in the second election, on the contrary, the misuse of SM cost the election.

November 2009, Apulia, South Eastern Italian region. The incumbent Governor Nichi Vendola struggles with Democratic Party to get nominated for the reelection. What casts a shadow on his nomination is a scandal inside his administration, which pairs with Vendola’s persona himself – a leftist, ex Communist, anti-establishment politician in a Southern conservative region. After months engaged in a fight against his party, Vendola decides to disregard the official endorsement and seek instead the people consensus: if he cannot be the Democratic candidate, he will try to be the people one. To reach this goal the web, and Social Media in particular, is his faithful ally. With the help of the ad agency Proforma, Vendola opens a fan page on Facebook and a channel on YouTube that rapidly reach a wide consensus. In the top-down strategy’s phase, Vendola encourages people’s participation in content creation, building a grassroots movement spread all over Italy and Europe. This people meet on FB and gather in workshops (Le Fabbriche di Nichi) to discuss topics, raise problems and come up with possible solutions and proposals for Vendola’s electoral program. At the end of the campaign there are 463 Fabbriche di Nichi all around the world. Vendola understands also that FB is a fantastic “war machine” for the election day: in the bottom-up strategy’s phase, he sets a widespread and super-efficient organization to bring people to the ballots. The happy ending is guaranteed: Vendola rocks the primary election with 73% of the votes and 3 months later, in March 2010, he wins also the Regional Election with 48% of preferences. Moreover, FB casts him from a regional, local horizon to a national one and today Vendola is one of the front runners for the next National election.

In a country trapped for decades in a rigid TV-centric system, Vendola’s use of Social Media was more than just a political strategy. Vendola recognized in the web the new version of the Italian “piazza”, where today as at the time of the Roman Empire, Italians gather to talk (mostly) about politics. He intercepted the desire of participation among younger voters and understood that empowering them meant unleashing their contagious enthusiasm. And most of all, while other politicians were still focusing on the old way of making politics, he wasn’t afraid to explore a completely new path to reach for consensus. For these and other reasons Vendola earned the nickname “The Italian Obama” by Le Monde Diplomatique.

Social Media didn’t work out as well for Letizia Moratti, the mayor of Milan. It’s the Spring 2011 and, as Vendola, she seeks for the reelection. Less than a month before the election day the polls indicate Moratti well ahead her opponent Giuliano Pisapia, thanks to a massive budget she used mainly for a campaign on traditional media. To be sure to have the victory in the bag, her campaign strategists decide to add Social Media to the media plan and open profiles on Facebook, Twitters and the local community Mirispondi.it. But the lack of confidence and expertise with SM tools played a dirty trick which cost to Moratti her job. First, a Twitter user tricks Moratti’s Twitter account by asking about a quite obvious imaginary neighborhood’s (Sucate) Mosque construction. In response Moratti’s staff doesn’t recognize the provocation and tweets back a serious “We won’t allow it”, unleashing instantly every kind of jokes all over the web. The second misstep follows a TV debate, where Moratti accused Pisapia of an old crime which turned out being false. Once again, the sarcasm spreads all over the web and the catchphrase “That’s all Pisapia’s fault” inspires jokes (some very hilarious), FB pages and tweets. Lastly, Moratti’s FB fans unbelievably grow from 3K to 36K in 2 weeks raising the suspect – lately confirmed by a Wired Italy reportage – of a “black market” of fans.

It wouldn’t be appropriate to say that these three missteps by themselves cost to Moratti her reelection, but we can certainly claim that an unprofessional use of SM contributed to her final defeat and led Pisapia to the victory with more than 58% of preferences.

What can we learn from these two examples? At least 5 lessons:

1. Social Media can turn a weakness into a strength (i.e. Democratic Party opposition Vs Vendola as “people” candidate)

2. Social Media can turn a weakness into a huge failure (i.e. Sucate’s tweet)

3. Social Media challenges traditional media and can be more effective than TV especially for young target

4. Social Media is not “the rabbit out of the hat” (as Moratti’s staff thought). It needs to be cultivated

5. Finally, it’s clear that Social Media alone cannot determine an election, but it’s out of question that in the last years it became a powerful tool for driving political consensus. Henceforth traditional campaign with centralized power needs to coexist with the unstructured digital democracy raising from the web.

Alessandra Marseglia
alemarsi@gmail.com