Hyperactivate The Blog

Posted August 27, 2014

To our best friends, fans and followers:  

We are up for an important panel at South By Southwest (SxSW to its friends) this coming year.  They are interested in the amount of support the panel idea can get, so they base a significant amount of their decision on how many votes the panel gets on their PanelPicker.  You would be doing me a great and personal favor by voting for our panel.   Here is the process:

1.      go to http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/42725 and click "sign in" 2.      unless you are already registered, click CREATE ACCOUNT and register 3.      give it a THUMBS UP

By Jerry Shereshewsky (@shereshewsky)

This is not about being sad. This is actually one of the happiest posts I’ve ever written. That’s because it’s about , as the old hymn says, “I was blind but now I see”.

 As marketers we are almost always slightly blind.  Magazine publishers have long touted their “pass along” readership, but the data behind the tout is incredibly imprecise.  And we all know the ‘water cooler value’ of Super Bowl commercials, but, to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever figured out how to measure that.  Internet marketers have had to make to with ‘likes’ and forwards/reposts/re-tweets.  But the ‘likes’ are generally meaningless and the reposts/re-tweets honestly just don’t go nearly far enough. 

"If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there." - Lewis Carroll

Posted June 27, 2014 by Marc Fischman (@marcf​)

At Hyperactivate, our work doesn't stop at identifying, validating, managing and measuring influencers, we are sometimes seen as influencers ourselves. And we know more than anyone that every fan and every follower is an influencer, Hyperactivate's job is to sort each one by their personal measure of influence. Brand marketers are learning that those that rise to the top of the social community should be treated extra special, and every brand marketer can take a lesson from Dell. 

We were overjoyed this morning with a giant box delivered to us by our mailroom. As we opened the box helium balloons floated out, and the "Party in a Box" had us playing like school children in our office. The gift wasn't all about Dell, it was filled with a box of cookies with our logos printed on each cookie. Even though the cookie was much tastier than the rice paper logo on top of it, it was a beautiful display of Dell caring about us. Our cleaning staff will wonder why we had confetti and silly string all over the floor, and our fans and followers will have fun with all of the rich media content that we shared about Dell in our own social channels.

Brands are now focussing on influencers and can take a lesson from Dell. Delight them by celebrating each other. The rich media sharing will follow.

Posted June 23, 2014 by Jerry Shereshewsky (@shereshewsky)

Marketers are a strange lot and all desire the engagement of customers and prospects – they want these individuals to consume their advertising, take part in their campaigns, and of course, make that cash register ring. However, it comes as a surprise that some brands are still often reluctant to engage back. This should not be the case and is increasingly becoming a thing of the past as more and more brands are learning to “lead by example.”

The big win for marketers happens when they learn to market with their consumers, rather than at their consumers and move from simple problem solving to more profound levels of two-way engagement with their very best and most important customers, their ambassadors or advocates. This is real participation; true 1:1 marketing.

The question now is how to identify who these advocates are, so that marketers can ground their focus on developing mutual relationships with these influential people. Running promotions is a great way for measuring advocacy and identifying influencers.

Promotions enable brands to activate fans and followers on social media, which leads to higher engagement frequencies and in some cases, virality. Partnered with the proper tools, social promotions can also facilitate the measurement of advocacy and identify true influencers. For example, in a promotion that Hyperactivate ran for Activision’s launch of Call of Duty, a mere 10 individuals expressing their excitement for the video game reached over 2.5 million friends, fans, and followers. The result: 50,000 page views to the Call of Duty website and over 2,000 additional posts and shares. Influencers are the omnipotent weapons that marketers need to pay close attention to and keep close 1:1 relationships with.

We’ve been reading and talking about 1:1 for several decades, but the costs of both the communications themselves (think USPS) and the difficulty of data management made this essentially an intellectual exercise. Until now.

Posted April 25, 2014 by Jerry Shereshewsky (@shereshewsky)

Two big questions:  Does mobile really matter and to whom does it matter.  The answers to these are not the same.

Let’s start with the basics:  does mobile matter?  I spend a lot of time watching normal people.  I commute by train and subway.  I work in NYC which means I’m on the street a lot.  So I see people.  And they’re almost all always doing something with their phone.  It’s amazing.  Stand on the street and count them as they walk buy.  Look at the people on the subway car.  How many of them are engrossed with their phone?  So, at the very least, mobile matters to them.

It’s a tool that connects them to their networks.  48% of daily users of Facebook are now mobile-only!  And now about the same percentage of Facebook’s advertising revenue comes from mobile ads! 

It’s their camera.  And, unlike what we understand as cameras, these are connected to those same networks by Facebook and lots of other tools. 

It’s their radio; whether iTunes, Pandora, Spotify or whatever, it’s how lots of people connect to their music of choice.

It’s their 1:1 communications device.  Whether phone, email or SMS, it is how we are are ‘talking’ to our friends individually. 

Frankly my only reason for a desktop computer at all is that the screen is bigger (and I have two of them) and the mouse makes things like spreadsheets easier to use.  And my laptop is history.  It’s now an iPad.

So, yes, mobile matters because it has become, very quickly after the introduction of the iPhone, an indispensable part of our lives.

But aside from the users themselves, why should we, as marketers, pay special attention to mobility?

First there’s the arbitrage.  Way more time (and media consumption) is happening on mobile devices than the percentage of marketing and ad dollars allocated to these media.  This means the environment is significantly less cluttered and your ad is more likely to be seen and noticed (and acted upon). 

That’s good news, but mobile matters for some other less felicitous reasons.  We, as an industry, really don’t know how to take advantage of this medium.  Back in the mid 1990’s, as the internet was just becoming ‘real’ we had absolutely no idea how to exploit the medium.  There were bandwidth constraints.  There was need for additional utilities (Java, as an example).  And, because the internet was a personal, lean forward, medium we didn’t know how to make ads that didn’t turn off our audience.  The same is absolutely true about mobile today.

Posted February 20, 2014 by Jerry Shereshewsky (@shereshewsky)

We all understand that word of mouth is the single most powerful form of commercial persuasion.  But not all mouths are created equal.  Some people like to spread the word.  But not all words spread equally.  The person that every brand most covets has a real network of friends who actually pay attention to their posts and tweets, a knowledge and reputation surrounding the product or service category about which they are posting or tweeting, and the credibility and respect of those friends and fans in the particular arena about which they are posting/tweeting.

That person (or, rather, those people, who fit this description are, to any given brand, product or service simply the most important people in the world.

We marketers have been desperately chasing and looking for these folks seemingly forever.  Their elusiveness comes from a simple truth:  these influencers are not universally influential.  They are not expert about everything.  Their field of competency is narrow and their friends know it.  But therein lies their power.  When they say something about an area about which they have real creds among their circle…people listen. 

And then comes the exciting part:  when they talk, and their friends listen, some of those friends pass this wisdom/opinion on to their friends and fans.  Many of these friends of friends have circles who may be completely invisible to the original opinionator.  And it is this ever expanding circle of influence that makes success in social media so valuable.  It is also what makes it hard to channel.  But, when one can harness this power magic happens.  That’s what ‘going viral’ means.  It is a chain reaction of thoughts bouncing like atoms in a reactor, all happening beyond the control of the marketers.

Posted January 23, 2014 by Marc Fischman (@marcf)

If you ask the average teen what social media channels they use to communicate with their friends, the answer will most likely be Snapchat, Instagram, and Vine. (If you thought 140 characters was brief – try a 6 second disappearing message or 16 second video!)

The fact is: social media is evolving at an alarming rate with attention shifting to new platforms all the time.

So what does that mean for the 800 pound gorilla in the room?

Many argue that Facebook is losing its relevancy. I say, hold on, not so fast. Yes, users are spending less time on Facebook’s web properties than they were a year ago – but with Facebook’s 1Billion+ users, the platform is not going away. Instagram and Facebook’s mobile properties are proving to be more and more lucrative.  In fact, they account for 50% of daily photos shared, with Snapchat accounting for the other 50%.  

In my history of working in social media, we have seen trends come and go, but platforms are very difficult to kill. It’s true, we have seen AOL and Myspace become irrelevant, but that was because of lack of innovation while other platforms around them like Skype and Facebook were taking over their market share of their core products. AOL lost focus when they merged with Time Warner and News Corp’s acquisition of Myspace killed the innovation that made Myspace so attractive to teens of the 2000’s. 

When Facebook saw a company like Twitter attracting more attention than them in 2010, they redesigned their newsfeed to be more Twitter-like, and it worked. For a while I thought Facebook sealed Twitter’s fate, but now Twitter seems to be making a comeback. With that said, Facebook isn’t sitting still. They have added more Twitter functionality into their site with Graph Search and now they are adding trending topics.

Snapchat may have the teens, but Facebook has the money and is going after Snapchat with Instagram direct. And on that note, buying Instagram (where most claimed it was an overpriced mistake at the time), is looking like one of the best things Facebook ever did. Many teens don’t even realize that Instagram is owned by Facebook. The point here is that Facebook will innovate or replicate if needed in order to crush their competition. 

Facebook has money. They IPO’d and they have much more revenue than any of their other social competitors. Google is still a search company; as much as they would like to play in the social space, Google+ is not a threat to Facebook. Money is power and Facebook can buy all of their competitors if they really want to, with the exception of Twitter. If they can’t buy, then they will replicate the competitor until they are no longer relevant. We saw Facebook do that to Foursquare when advertisers were all about local advertising on Foursquare, Facebook launched Facebook places, and when Groupon was stealing the show, Facebook launched Facebook deals. If Snapchat is a fad, teens will get sick of it; but if not, Facebook with their Instagram Direct will begin to pose a serious threat to Snapchat. 

Facebook owns the communication channel between consumers and brands. Coca-Cola will not let their 70 million fans on their fan page go to waste. If anything, the brands that have amassed these astonishing and costly followings on Facebook will keep bringing their consumers back into Facebook. 

Facebook is an 800 lb. gorilla and like advertising legend Jerry Shereshewsky says … “If you’re a gorilla and you see a chimpanzee, YOU EAT IT.”

If advertisers know one thing, it’s that clicks are expensive. Wall Street even evaluates companies by their click-through rates. For platforms where success is contingent on how willing people are to upload content, it is especially important to make sure that the user’s experience is as seamless as possible. This picture shows, in order, the most seamless platforms for uploading a photo.

When a photo contest asks for the best selfie, it seems like a simple fun request and often times, those photo contests fall short of expectations. This chart shows that a simple fun request can be pretty complicated.

Most photos today are snapped by mobile phones, and most photo contests live in a tab on a Facebook fan page. Since fan page tabs can not be viewed in mobile, photo sharing becomes much more complicated when consumers need to get their selfie on to their laptop in order to submit it into a fan page.

A great talk by the CMO of Wendy’s at Advertising Week inspired us to take a look at the QSR industry’s impact online. We spent time looking at the Facebook presence of the big 6--McDonald’s, Burger King, Subway, Taco Bell, Arby’s and Wendy’s--and what we discovered was extraordinary. Very ironically, looking at fast food online ended up being a great exercise to better understanding social media.

Once we crunched some numbers, it became very apparent that the QSR industry reflects the trend that the number of likes a brand’s page has gathered has nothing to do with the amount of engagement on that brand’s page. Here is what that quantity/quality gap looks like:

On the left side, you see the number of Facebook likes in millions. Brands that are closer to the top have more likes on their page than brands closer to the bottom of the chart.

Going left to right is the engagement rate, measured by the total number of likes, comments and shares on the brand’s last ten posts as a percentage of their total likes. Basically, how many of the people who have “liked” are actually engaged in the brand’s content?

All the way on the upper-left corner are McDonald’s and Subway--two remarkable examples of the quantity/quality gap. Although these brand have the most likes out of any other QSR chain that we measured, those fans aren’t actually involved in the page. While McDonald’s and Subway have the highest number of likes, they also sport the lowest rates of engagement.

On the other end of the spectrum is Burger King, with just one-fifth of the amount of likes as McDonald’s, but over twenty times the engagement.

Why do McDonald’s and Subway have the largest followings and the least engagement?

McDonald’s and Subway think social media is TV...but TV is for self promotion. Social Media is for fan participation.

Take a look at some recent McDonald’s and Subway Facebook content: nice imagery to remind people that the food is good, the deals are nice and the brand exists. It’s a TV spot--entirely unfitting to the social media world, where people log in to be a part of something. This content can’t inspire discussion; it can’t inspire participation.

Why does Burger King have a small following and huge engagement?

They use their wall to ignite discussion.

  But not the same discussion. They switch it up.

(You can compare this to Arby’s, who will often try to recreate the same discussions)

  They reward their customers for participating by actively listening to them.

 Here’s a great example. Burger King recently polled their Facebook followers to find out what they wanted from Burger King on Facebook.

They found that a huge majority of their fans just wanted deals--so they provided them with deals. Look how the crowds responded! Standing ovation! A whopping fifty-four thousand likes!

In 1982, a brilliant computer scientist built an algorithm to draw seemingly random points on a screen. He called it Perlin Noise. In 2008, another computer scientist built a totally different way to put seemingly random points to a screen. He called it Twitter.

Through just a glance at my Twitter feed, I can get a glimpse of the happenings on the Senate floor, catch breaking news from the Middle East, be updated about a disaster abroad and about an equally important mosquito situation on my friend’s arms. Here, it is clear what constitutes the noise, but it is not always so much so.

A study done in collaboration across Carnegie Mellon, MIT, University of Southampton and Georgia Institute of Technology aims to discover what makes a tweet noise, and what makes it worth reading? They asked 1,433 tweeters to rate 43,000 tweets, sorted into categories like Questions to Followers, Information Sharing, Self-Promotion, Random Thought, Opinion/Complaint, Me Now, Conversation and Presence Maintenance. Here is what they found:

  Only 36% of the rated tweets were considered worth reading. The fact that the number is so low is funny, since people actively choose which accounts to follow.

Of the tweets deemed worth reading, 48% were informative and 24% were funny.

  Also, the study found a pretty universal dislike for location service tweets, like automated posts from Foursquare, the use of @ mentions in the body of a tweet, and the overuse of hashtags obscuring the tweet’s content.

The researchers left a list of best practices for Twitter:

“[Posters should] embed more context in tweets (and be less cryptic); add extra commentary, especially if retweeting a common news source; don’t overuse hashtags and use direct messages (DMs) rather than @mentions if more appropriate; happy sentiments are valued and ‘whining’ is disliked, and questions should use a unique hashtag so followers can keep track of the conversation.”

A lot of yogurt is consumed in New York. Want proof? Check Instagram. Especially now that summer is in its heat, New Yorkers—realizing that it is no longer possible to sit under a roof when the sky looks as #0000FF as it does—are bringing their work and their yogurts to benches and lawns, mindlessly staring at dogs they wished they owned, and instagramming pictures of themselves and their dairy consumption. Don’t believe me? Search on Twitter. It’s 10am, 63 degrees out, and #yogurt has been used several times already today.

Proving her inner New York, a friend of mine, sprawling on one of the tiny hills of Washington Square, instagrammed her half-munched Greek yogurt between the blades of summer grass. Then, the unthinkable happens—@Chobani likes it.

Brands on social media exude a sort of Wizard of Oz effect. Nobody knows who is behind the handle, which creates a surreal feeling of celebrity. When @Chobani likes your photo, it may as well be Ricky Martin pausing on the street to pat you on the back—it’s the same rush.

Her next reaction was guttural, primitive: she instagrammed the notification.

It practically received a virtual standing ovation.