Appealing to Customer Preferences

Despite our tendency as marketers to treat prospects and customers as numbers, the contact behind the number is a human with needs and wants. Marketers should continue to appeal to emotions, no matter the communication vehicle, by capturing and tracking interests and behaviors to build out a “person-level” profile.

To truly connect, it is important to ask customers which channels and frequency of contact they prefer, and to honor those preferences, e.g., email, phone, direct mail, social media channels. Taking a non-strategic blanket or blast approach increases the risk of customers dismissing your communications, and your business.

Creating a Personal Relationship

Developing a one-to-one relationship with your customers is critical. For digital communications, each “record” in your database should be addressed by name, but make the effort to go beyond merely personalizing your greeting.

For example:

• Send a birthday message each year.
• Send an annual note of appreciation.
• Thank customers for their business a few times a year at random intervals.
• Offer exclusive benefits.

Be sure to nurture all of your prospects and customers and continually ask for feedback. Building a dialogue helps you understand what success looks like and what your customers expect from you. If customers have a channel to provide feedback and know they can shape your offering, then everyone wins.

Defining Customers’ Interests

To really determine your customers’ preferences, you need to go beyond demographic profiling and look at behavioral data. Just because a customer recently got married doesn’t mean he or she is ready to buy a house (and will welcome daily blasts of your latest mortgage rates). If a prospect consistently opens newsletter articles about getting the best rates, that is reliable data to act upon – and a targeted sales call will be better received.

As you develop individual profiles, make full use of dynamic content triggered by tracked interests and behaviors – the technology is available. Keep it simple initially, with just a few dynamic content options, but make delivering relevant content (articles, images, data, video) your end goal.

Combining Social Media With Other Marketing Channels

Social media is very effective in increasing interaction with your brand, building communities, and enabling avid customers to help participate in the selling process. Social can also be great for building email lists, driving awareness and even improving SEO. While social is hot and new measurement tools are released almost daily, organizations need ready access to hard data on what drives consumer response and helps businesses meet specific goals.

For marketers, email still remains the chosen solution that delivers data and metrics necessary for effective marketing. It’s easily measured, facilitates quick and easy split testing of messages, offers, pricing, etc., and enables one-to-one connections.

Email is ideal for private, targeted communications that help foster relationships over time, making it invaluable for preserving the personal touch. And when coupled with social and mobile delivery channels, email yields increased customer interactions where customers prefer to communicate.

Ultimately, knowing your customers’ needs and preferences will make communication more effective and allow you to build meaningful and long-lasting connections. Using a variety of marketing vehicles based on stated preferences and measured behavior is critical to successfully engaging customers in the digital communications age.

Mining motivations, in addition to data, as a way to understand consumers is an entirely new approach to social analysis, but it is one that is proving to be exceptionally powerful for companies in sectors ranging from automobiles to chewing gum.

Too often, marketers have relied only on the numbers surrounding social media to determine the success of their efforts—some aggregation of the number of Facebook fans and Twitter followers, the number of comments and retweets, the number of click-throughs and blog links. These can be shallow indicators, however; hundreds of comments will not persuade people to buy a product—more often than not, they’ll just generate more comments.

Detecting the motivations beneath the numbers allows marketers to discover the most expedient path to the consumer’s heart and mind. Marketers motivate consumers to make small decisions every day—choose a movie, pick a breakfast cereal, replace a battery.

These day-to-day choices, however, are made in the context of much more comprehensive, universal influences. Human motivations on a larger scale, in fact, are surprisingly similar all over the world. Our own research and studies by the academic community have identified the same 12 primal motivations that drive consumers in Columbus, buyers in Beirut and shoppers in Shanghai.

These desires have existed since humans began to interact with each other and their environment; and as man has evolved, his motivations have never changed. He has simply invented or discovered new ways to satisfy his needs to feel:

• Accomplished
• Adventurous
• Connected
• Creative
• Important
• Playful
• Rebellious
• Responsible
• Sensual
• Transformed
• Wise
• Youthful

These desires—to connect with others, to play and explore, to create and achieve—find an ideal outlet in social networks, where connections are the common currency, exploration is encouraged and creativity is applauded. The motivations that drive conversations in social networks are the real treasure to be mined by marketers,because the more we explore online conversations to reveal the motivations that are common to all of us, the more effectively we can position our brand and ourselves to be unique.

Knowing how many people are talking about a brand and what they are saying is not nearly enough to support the creation of a brand that stands out from competitors. We must understand why people are talking about products or services and why they are supportive, upset, confused or just inquisitive. In short, we must examine the specific motivations that drive online conversations.

For example, if Nike believes that its target market is motivated by the need to feel accomplished (i.e. “just do it”), the company can align its brand with that driver to create online advocates. Mercedes-Benz on the other hand might find that its prospective customers often want to feel important, and everything about the Mercedes brand could revolve around a sense of power and importance. Obviously a subtle executional touch is needed here.

Archetypes and Recommendations

Often, consumers gravitate toward an archetype of a particular motivation to gain emotional satisfaction. In fairy tales, TV shows, movies and comic books, the archetype may be a hero who possesses the characteristics that the consumer seeks. Marketers have helped their brands succeed by embracing heroes from Tony the Tiger and Luke Skywalker to the Marlboro Man and Spider-Man. In social networks, the archetype often is an expert with particular knowledge about a product category.

We must realize, however, that the archetype is not the motivator—it is only the expression of the motivation and a clue to what is really driving a set of consumers. In our work with Fortune 500 brands, we have verified that not only do people buy because of underlying motivations, but also, by understanding the motivations, we can understand why they buy.

Furthermore, we have determined that the single best indicator of support for a brand is the willingness of a consumer to recommend the brand to someone else. If we can follow the recommendations, we can correlate them with an increase in sales. Conversely, if we deconstruct the reasons that people are making those recommendations, we can understand their motivations.

Implicit in this approach is the fact that as many as 90% of online conversations are not about brands at all they are about categories of products and the motivations that drive people within those categories. The BMW-owned brand Mini realized this principle in seeking to identify a way to distinguish its tiny, iconic car from an emerging flock of competing small-size, fuel for people who loved not fuel efficiency or economic prudence, but creative self-expression.

With this understanding of Mini fans’ motivations, the brand devoted its marketing efforts to leading a movement and creating programming for existing Mini owners in the form of road rallies, games and venues that all show off their customized cars. The brand celebrated drivers’ creativity and uniqueness, rather than the technology of the vehicle.

The result was growth in advocacy (or recommendations) for the brand and this directly correlated with sales:

Notes:

1. The R^2 is 54% and the p value of the coefficient is 3.7%, so we can be 96% certain that the positive relationship is not.

2. The bars are calculated by looking at the average magnitude of the monthly changes. The shortest bars are changes, the tallest bars represent the middle 80% of changes and the tallest bars (not visible in this date range are the to 10% of changes.

Shifting Our Thinking

In one business arena after another—packaged goods, many more—MotiveQuest’s approach to identifying motivations has helped clients transform their marketing efforts into highly successful campaigns. For each of these businesses, the behavior that has to change is the creation of advocates – brand and who recommend a product to others.

The daily motivations of these advocates are grounded in the larger motivations that move all human beings toward fulfilling their needs. As a result, these advocates invariably drive sales. This process is not just marketing theory consistently through its work for major global brands.

Marketers can gain a true competitive edge by shifting their relationship to social media in three ways:

1. Think outside of the conventional category. Online conversations may reveal that your product is competing in a much larger arena than you have initially considered. For example, in working with Wrigley, we discovered that its products were not so much competing with other gums than with other snacks, as a way to cope with stress. That revelation opened significant new opportunities to gain online advocates.

2. Listen closely not just to what people are saying in the broader category but also to why they are saying it. What are the needs they seek to fulfill, what is behind the buzz, what are the underlying motivations?

3. Take the time to tie motivations back to advocacy and sales. Shape your campaign or even your product development to capitalize on ways you can use motivations to drive advocacy for your brand.

The impact of listening in social networks, rather than broadcasting, cannot be overstated. The biggest gap in the marketplace currently is the capacity for really deep listening—listening to what people care about most. Successful marketing pursues those factors about which people already are passionate—whether it’s Barack Obama’s focus on change or Apple’s development of creative user interfaces and devices, evolved from its “Think Different” mantra.

At the time Gmail started the same questions were raised: Was this an invasion of privacy and would users accept it? But let’s not forget, that was seven years ago. An enormous amount has changed in the intervening years and the Internet is an entirely different place now.

In March 2004, blogging had only just become mainstream, MySpace was a mere 2-months-old, Facebook was accessible at just five colleges and Twitter would not appear for another two years. In 2004 most Internet users did not have public profiles and were not sharing their personal information widely. The online advertising networks were barely collecting anonymous profiles for most users compared to the detailed, personal profiles they hold today.

What we’ve learned over the past seven years is that users will exchange privacy for convenience and that people’s attitudes to privacy can change rapidly. At this point in time I am quite surprised that anyone would do more than raise an eyebrow at the idea that Yahoo! would use the content of a page viewed to customize the advertising displayed to a user even if the content is a personal email.

Despite the progression in attitudes towards privacy I think there are still many ways to get this wrong. If the advertisements are too direct around emails that discuss personal matters, think a stream of condom advertisements after reading an email about a possible unexpected pregnancy; or if the advertisements cause brand conflicts, think streams of BMW advertisements after discussing one’s love of classic Ford Mustangs with a friend.

The reality though is that we’ve not seen a backlash about targeting advertising in the email interface based on the content and I do not expect to see one when that same data is used beyond the email.

In a nutshell, my take is that Yahoo! could get this wrong and face a backlash, but this isn’t 2004 and the line they just crossed was passed so long ago that most people have forgotten it even happened.

IVP is in good company, joining current investors New Enterprise Associates, Novak Biddle Venture Partners, former AOL vice chair and president Ted Leonsis, AOL cofounder Steve Case, Capital One cofounder Nigel Morris and Silicon Valley super-angel Ron Conway.

One of 20 web tools with a Google Pank Rank of 10, AddThis supports social sharing across 9 million domains and 300 social networks around the world. The platform processes 10 tetrabytes of data daily, which Clearspring notes on a weekly basis is on the scale of the entire digital U.S. Library of Congress stored online. AddThis’ reach has grown from 200 million uniques a month in 2008 to 1 billion a month currently.

“With this investment, we can now bring the power of that reach back to the individual publisher via our next generation tools and services, which will focus on providing publishers actionable data, not just from the social web, but the entire web,” said Clearspring cofounder and CEO Hooman Radfar. “Imagine the challenges we can help a publisher solve — it’s a staggering opportunity.”

Back in December, Clearspring introduced a social analytic offering for publishers — the Implicit Interest Graph determines interests by user behavior and categorizes them by levels of intensity.

Seriously, Twitter is great (and I have nothing but respect for the American servicemen and women responsible for Sunday’s tremendous operation). I actually wonder (out loud) if Keith Urbahn’s source leaked his info knowing that Keith’s Tweet would serve as a trial balloon.

As a 40-something publicist (and a paranoid one at that), I do sometimes speculate if one morning I’ll wake up and find myself replaced by a 20-something with more followers on Twitter and more friends on Facebook than me.

In January, Forbes blogger Aaron Perlut wrote a controversial post entitled “Why The News Release Is Worthless In Today’s Social Media Age.” I actually believe that the opposite is true, though there might be some difference between our definitions of what constitutes a news release.

The main reason why there is so much written about the death of the news release is because of the number or poorly written and unnecessary news releases written devoid of any news value. On this point, Aaron and I agree.

But is the quantity of bad news releases a reason for killing all news releases? There are also bad drivers who kill people, but no one is suggesting that we make driving illegal. And a bad news release never killed anyone.

In my opinion, news releases have more value today. Here’s why:

1. Though I still write news releases for journalists, I target other influencers/purchase decision-makers. Many PR people already write their news releases for multiple influencer groups. Though I write my news release for journalists and bloggers, I do make sure that the content is relevant to prospective customers, investors, strategic partners and others in the industry. Whenever one works for a client, there will always be some news releases with less news value than others, but I do try and make every news release relevant and interesting to all relevant potential readers. And social media provides a powerful distribution media through which to disseminate news.

2. Add links that help with SEO. I do try and incorporate links into my news releases though I don’t always succeed. With news releases getting indexed by search engines and even getting some pick up in relevant social media, a link in a news release can be a great way for someone Googling your company or the subject matter of the news release to find out more about your company. I personally am less knowledgeable regarding search engine optimization, but have been told by people with knowledge that published links to help with SEO.

3. Even the leading wire services have distribution options for a few hundred dollars. I have tested multiple distribution paths from the leading wire services and found the more local distribution to be as effective. (This point addresses the common complaint that wire service distribution costs $1,000 or more.)

4. When you mention industry leading companies in your release, everyone who tracks them sees your release. Whether your quoting public information provided by a leading analyst firm or some benchmark data from an industry leading company, everyone with a Google Alert or other tracking service monitoring the company in question will see your news release. Though many of those people might be your competitors, there is still value in gaining mass industry exposure.

5. Truth be told, every couple of years I get news coverage from the wire. Every once in a while, a news release I write and distribute over the wire gets seen by a mainstream media journalist who then writes an actual story based on the release. It doesn’t happen as often as I would like, but it definitely happens.

PR Newswire recently reported a 9% increase in revenue in Q1 2011 (I didn’t find revenue numbers for BusinessWire). Though PR Newswire does offer additional, more social distribution services in addition to wire service distribution, their revenue growth is a good indication that news release is going to be with us for a long, long time.

If there’s a lesson to be learned from 2010, it’s doubt the virility of FourSquare at your own peril. But 2011 is around the corner, and while the company is still blooming in the short term, the big picture is looking pretty hazy.

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley is making the conference rounds again this week, most recently showing up at Le Web 10 to boast that the mobile social network is up to 5 million users with 25,000 new recruits every day. Foursquare is averaging 2 million check-ins daily, as the average user checks in three to four times daily.

The company itself has also witnessed impressive growth in personnel: while last year Foursquare had four employees, now 40 staff members roam the office, including a new engineer who is entirely focused on statistics.

Crowley also implied (but didn’t confirm) that Foursquare turned down an acquisition offer of $140 million – tech gossipers believe the potential purchaser was either Facebook or Yahoo.

The offer came when Foursquare had only had raised $1.35 million in seed funding and before a $20 million round in October, with venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz joining existing investors O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures. At the time the company was valued at $95 million, had more than 2 million users and was averaging 10,000 signups daily.

But what’s next? Eventually the growth incline is going to level out — just like it did for Twitter — so how is Foursquare going to keep this user base happy. Where is the Foursquare bus is headed?

“I don’t know,” Crowley told All Things D’s Kara Swisher on Tuesday at the D: Dive into Mobile conference. “As the product matures, the paths will become clearer.”

That certainly won’t inspire investor confidence. Previously Crowley suggested
Foursquare would allow local store owners to offer incentives to users that check-in every time they visit, but that still seems like short-term thinking.

What’s the long-term plan here? Or is there one at all — especially if checking in is a fad that will fade in 2011.

We’ve all got genitalia, people — in fact, I almost feel worse for the TSA employees who have to stare at those scans all day. But I normally feel for them because working for the TSA has to be one of the most thankless jobs in the world.

While suggesting the public furor seems more likely a call for profiling, one of my favorite columnists is hoping against hope that the TSA outrage is another wake-up call to Americans about their diminishing control over privacy. Alas, these wake-up calls would seem to be abundant lately — the American public is made up of deep sleepers.

Before all the TSA-hatin’ there was The Wall Street Journal privacy escapades involving Facebook and data merchant Rapleaf. While I considered WSJ mainly spreading paranoia (I acknowledge that it was another incident in which Facebook showed a lack of concern for its privacy policy when building out services), the defense of the near-hysterical coverage seemed to be that, even if it’s just crying wolf, the browsing public needs a wake-up call about how their public online data is being used.

I disagree — a better alarm is to show them the money. And a great porthole to the money in the online data industry is people search engines, an area that will be brining in $10.8 billion yearly according to recent research by Forrester.

A few weeks ago, PeekYou founder and CEO Michael Hussey gave Adotas insight into the company’s goal of creating social data profiles for all Internet users, and how PeekYou makes money off of data transactions.

And now people search engine MyLife, formed out of the merger of Reunion.com and Wink almost two years ago, announced it will earn $60 million in revenue this year and is expecting 40% growth in 2011. The company boasts 1.2 billion global records, including 205 million from the U.S.

In other words, MyLife is going to earn $60 million this year, partially by selling third-party marketing partners the aggregated public social data of you, your friends and your family.

I’m perfectly fine with that — kudos to MyLife. Third-party marketers, do your best to appeal to me. If you users want to throw a hissy fit about it and claim your privacy is under siege, perhaps you should look into social network suicide first?

However, I’m wondering if the relationship between the networks will be a little less cozy now that Loopt, inventor of the is further nudging onto Foursquare’s turf with its new Loopt Star mobile app.

Loopt has awoken the inner gaming aspect in its social mapping network — which also includes mobile apps Loopt, Loopt Mix and Loopt Pulse for iPad — by offering real-world rewards to users. Participating retailers are charged on a cost-for-visit basis, giving retailers the ability to control qualifying locations and times, as well as amount of check-ins and number of friends checked in with.

For example, two check-ins at the Gap earns you a 25% discount (cheap khakis for everyone!) while three check-ins at a Burger King NYC area will get you a free coffee, soda or a bear hug from the King — as long as you order a sandwich. The person who checks in the most at a specific Starbucks becomes mayor honorary barista, which either means you get to make your own espresso drinks (can you say quattro grande caramel white chocolate mocha with extra whip cream and sprinkles?) or you have to show up at 5:30 AM to work the morning shift in SoHo. I have to say the latter is not intriguing me…

Still, it’s more fun adventures in “Consumerism: The Game!” I’ll be right back to report more after I get me a double Whopper with cheese (no pickles) and a good ol’ squeezin’ from the King. Hopefully the staff won’t call the cops this time.

That was one of the reasons I never finished creating a MySpace account. Now I have another reason. According to the WSJ, state tax agents have been nabbing deadbeats, using information posted on social-networking Web sites, from relocation announcements to professional profiles to financial boasts.

In Minnesota, a long-sought tax evader was caught after he announced on MySpace that he would be returning to his home town to work as a real-estate broker and gave his employer’s name. And the feds are getting involved to. One agent collected $30,000 of unpaid tax from a resident after a Google search found him listed as a high-ranking local marketing rep for a national firm.

“These new supplements are often far more efficient than the older ones, such as reading the local newspaper or making inquiries at barbershops and church meetings,” Jim Eads, director of the Federation of Tax Administrators, told the WSJ.

Alas, the some states only allow agents to use publicly available information. You can’t fake a friend request on Facebook, for instance. Some states are looking for ways to use the information to enhance not only collections but also audits and negotiations.

I’m not a government intrusion kind of guy when it comes to some things. But if you’re knowingly breaking the law, you shouldn’t be surprised if agents use trickery – like fake friending – to catch you. Guess I should check my list again.

“The beauty of social networks is that they are a place where nearly any marketing goal can be achieved, with nearly any marketing tactic,” according to Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report, “Marketing on Social Networks: Branding, Buying and Beyond.”

In a MarketingSherpa survey, 92% of social media marketing respondents said social media marketing was effective at influencing brand reputation and 91% said it worked for increasing brand awareness. These executives found it far less effective for generating sales leads or increasing online sales.

According to eMarketer though, marketers are demonstrating the effectiveness of using social networks for direct marketing and lead generation with brand pages and applications being used to deliver coupons and offers to consumers to drive trials, store traffic and response.