#hyperactivate

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. 

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.

In this special episode of Marketing Made Simple TV, Marc Fischman of Hyperactivatediscusses how to best engage your brand’s followers in this fun and engaging video. And please check out the link at the top of the show to learn more about Activating Fans…