San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives

The Carrot Way

Always Be Working Yourself Out Of A Job

This article is copyright © 2012 

Here’s what works about GE’s approach: the campaign…

1. legitimately brands crowd sourced content without alienating the audience
2. rewards participants cyclically for their participation, with multiple stages to the contest
3. engages the Facebook fan base to judge the content produced on Instagram, creating earned reach

This campaign optimally integrates TV, mobile, user generated content, and Facebook. I’m sure it will be a huge success.

Read The Next Web article here or see other brands that are using Instagram here.

This article is copyright © 2012 

Last week a contingent from Carrot Creative flew out to San Francisco and attended Facebook’s f8 conference. We laughed when Andy Samberg impersonated Zuck and we cheered when the app we built for The Daily was featured as the first media app released on the new Graph API.

We went into all the breakout sessions and meetings with Facebook as well as conversations with other developers on the platform with the typical questions and concerns. Nearly each person in attendance all had the same answer:

With this recent update, Facebook has given the entire web the ability to become social. Each object, piece of data and destination can be fully connected with the social graph. On the open web Facebook’s reach started with Connect, moved onto the Like button and Comments, and now with the new Open Graph API, they’re taking objects like songs, movies and articles, and creating social stories for your ticker feed by adding verbs such as listen, watch, and read. In doing this, Facebook has laid the foundation to enter their most substantial phase of growth in becoming a platform.

At each phase, they’ve increased their reach, improved the product they’re delivering users, and empowered the developer community. To take this final step however, they’ve got to turn many basic tenets of advertising on its head, moving an entire industry that’s built on buying nouns to hopefully buying verbs.

Newton’s Third law of motion is: (T)o every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

While this may appear nebulous on the surface of this argument, it’s one of the core principles that plays out everyday in advertising:

I show you an advertisement for X and you recall this ad and hopefully one day purchase X when you need something X was created to fulfill.

Social ads managed to take this a step beyond, helping to drive engagement and audience ownership. We’ve gotten lucky because social ads inherently have more variables and more points for engagement than typical ads, and moreover, they’re based on the subject of the ad, being inherently social.

E.g. Your friend X likes page X, you should like it too!

While we all know the root of actions are verbs, what advertising at large hasn’t embraced is the fact that verbs are fundamental to marketing because they create transactions. Outside of the ‘Cost Per Click’ product, modern agency based advertising–in large part–has abandoned the fundamental aspects of conversion or performance based advertising and in doing so abandoned verbs. Carrot Creative believes this is fundamentally wrong.

Why?

Because actions are generally associated with service based companies and modern advertising was born into an industrialized world, where widgets and not services were a highly sought after metric, easy to measure and objectively defined. Widgets are nouns, and within advertising, these nouns represent objects such as CPM’s or impressions and rating points and subscribers. These are the current industry standard and are all highly scalable in their respective industries. However, these scalable ad products can no longer accurately represent the greatest and most accurate value social platforms hold.

This is why we’re fundamentally abandoning traditional forms of media buying and from here forward building our Social Activation platform off of conversion based metrics exclusively.

This article is copyright © 2012 

Facebook announced a plethora of impressive updates during F8 last month. However, did you know that Facebook also silently rolled out a massive update to their Insights dashboard? This updated dashboard now allows brands to improve their measurement of not just their Facebook Page, but of the social plug-ins on their websites as well.

With the new update, a Page admin that has claimed Insights for a particular domain will be able to collect granular data for that domain’s subsequent sub-domains. Essentially, domain users will now be able to see Facebook demographic information that encapsulates gender, age, country, city, and language breakdowns.

Facebook is now putting a much greater emphasis on actions and objects than ever before. Page admins are able to see impressions in much greater depth — what types of stories triggered those impressions (Like, share, and comment stories) and where those impressions were seen (the Newsfeed, Timeline, or the Ticker).

What’s remarkable about the addition of web page metrics to Facebook Insights is that for the first time, Page admins will be able to gain insights into the life cycle of an object right from the Facebook Dashboard.

In the example above, filters are used to boil down application data into a specific set of actions and objects. Page admins are able to see metrics tied to their complete life cycle, from insights on the particular published action to the way to traffic referrals are caused by those actions.This updated Facebook Insights dashboard will give marketers specific understanding into exactly how their promotion initiatives on Facebook are performing.

(shows breakdown by channel)

Let’s take a sample scenario for example. Client A wants to allocate a budget towards a Facebook campaign; however, they are unsure if that budget should be allocated towards building out an application concept whose goal is to have users generate share stories, or put it towards building a robust and interactive application to be featured in a user’s Timeline. If referral traffic to their website from the Timeline happens to be lower in this case, budget spent on features for other users to interact with on the user’s Timeline probably produce the referral traffic Client A is looking for. This is a simple example of how Facebook’s updated insights will bring brands closer to determining a campaign’s ROI — eliminating the guessing game played by many marketers and brands utilizing applications for campaigns. Rather then saying “our app will drive traffic to your site”, Page owners will actually be able to see how this happens and whether it is from users liking, commenting, or sharing their content. This allows brands to initiate strategy-driven campaigns around a particular user action, an insight that is clear through understanding what type of execution will help them reach their goals.

Insights like this are also extremely valuable for community management. By seeing which type of action draws the largest amount of referral traffic, community managers can better tailor their updates in order to garner more Likes, shares, or comments. With Facebook’s newly added exporting feature, community managers will also be able to figure out what times and days are best to post.

This seems to be just the beginning of what will hopefully be many updates that will improve the robustness of Facebook Insights. Just this week we saw yet another new feature — the “People Talking About” metric — designed to give Page admins an idea of how compelling the content they are posting on their page is based on how much people are talking about it (see the article in Mashable.) With these updates it seems obvious that Facebook has vested a much greater interest in helping brands and companies who market through Facebook to prove the results of their campaigns while understanding the true impact and returns that social media marketing on Facebook can have.

This article is copyright © 2012 

Introducing: Platlas from Carrot Creative on Vimeo.

Here’s a quick look at the people and thinking behind Platlas, the first ever social media platform atlas. Meet the engineers, managers and research analysts that made Platlas for Facebook come to life. And see for yourself exactly what all the fuss about, and how you can use Platlas to better understand the countless interactions and connections that are possible on Facebook.

This article is copyright © 2012 

Exhibit A: Current landscape of fan-to-brand interaction on Facebook.

Someone has got to make the first move.  If brands and fans are ever going to get down to business, social networking venues need to call off the chaperones and get more booty dance friendly. So much of brand interaction on Facebook revolves around making initial eye contact (getting “Likes”). But then what? And why? Fans say “Yes” to “Do you want to dance?” They’re willing to hold each other at arm’s length and sway back and forth in front of ALL THEIR FRIENDS, but as soon as the song is over, brands let them shyly walk back to the punch bowl, never to take it any further. Well, I’m ready to take it further. I’m ready for this jelly.

What’s been happening the past couple years is once the song starts, brands seem to resort back to one of three dance moves: contests, content or charity. Even with all the talk around social channels connecting people through networks and communities and fan-to-brand interaction, I’ve yet to see brands loosen up and teach me, teach me how to Dougie.

A valid question is to wonder if consumers even WANT to Pop & Lock with brands? Which leads to more questions—do brands even know how to Pop & Lock? Who pops? Who locks?

One good perspective is to approach the Facebook Page like it’s the fans’ page, not the brand’s. Is there an opportunity to foster a community in the same way that forums have been doing for years? Is there an opportunity to let the fans have a small voice in what the brand is doing? Like voting on clothing designs or new menu items? Can you create content WITH them, instead of AT them? I think consumers are willing to justify their social interactions with foot traffic and purchases. Wouldn’t you want to stop in and see the item you helped get on the menu or the design you helped get voted #1?

As of now, Facebook user behavior doesn’t lend itself to going to a brand’s page, interacting with the left side navigation and exploring apps within that page.

Is that because people don’t want to? Or is it because too few brands have offered an experience or utility worth coming back for? Instead, brands seem to offer one short term promo/contest after another that eventually succeed in chasing away the very brand advocates they covet so much.

WHY?!

Facebook is a network that brilliantly connects 500 million people. Yet there’s no smart place for me to efficiently share or find information on a brand’s page. Right now there’s just a wall of linear, soon to disappear shout outs that have no hierarchy or filtering system that allow for me to quickly get the ‘best of’ a conversation or find topics that are helpful or interesting.

Brands that would have the easiest time taking advantage of this would be phone companies, clothing lines, sports teams, or any brand that’s innovating products and could find use in collaborating with or crowdsourcing ideas and content from the people.

Interestingly, one of the best examples of this to date, Skittles’ Mob the Rainbow campaign, doesn’t even have a utilitarian need for it. They just made up a reason to have a community (i.e. send someone to bowling college), and it worked.

What I’m trying to say is, I’m done catching candy at the parade. My dance game is tight. Now it’s time to grab some brands and hit the club.

This article is copyright © 2012 

I had the privilege of representing Carrot Creative at Comic Con 2010 at the launch of Her Universe (you can read more about Her Universe in this previous writeup). This year’s convention was the largest ever. Floor space was at a premium and I had my credentials checked more frequently than at Terminal A in LaGuardia. Several themes were overwhelmed the convention center (much to the chagrin, no doubt, of Comic Con purists): Big Name Studios, Gaming and more Big Name Studios. Here are a few of my observations and a shameless plug for our ultra-cool client.

Her Universe

A pre-requisite for employment at Carrot is that you must be a Star Wars fanboy/girl to some degree. So, the first thing I did upon entering the convention was head straight to the Star wars “wing”.  There’s really no way to describe just how much space Star Wars took up this year – they owned CC2010! A stroke of good fortune had the Her Universe booth right in the middle of it all, the most heavily trafficked area of the entire show. Awesome. Fangirls of all shapes, sizes and ages were lined up grabbing as much girly schwag as they could get their hands on. This will be a spark, for sure, of all sorts of fangirl-inspired, female-focused clothing lines. I caught up with Her Universe creator (and voice of Ahsoka Tano in Star Wars: The Clones Wars) Ashley Eckstein:

A testament to the power of the fangirl phenom can be seen in this young lady’s devotion to Ahsoka/Ashley:

Attack of the Monster Studios

While Star Wars was everywhere, new title launches by major studios really dominated buzz generation. Leading the way was TRON: Legacy, the sequel to the awesome original. The line just to get a picture of the epic life-size Light Cycle was absurd. Granted, it was uber-cool. Yes, it was all very sexy and exciting but, to be fair, the major studios so overwhelmed the convention it seemed to detract from the underground feel of the show’s roots. Comic books were literally and figuratively relegated to the corner unless, of course, they were Marvel or DC titles.

Just a Game?

Video games were a constant draw all around the center. They often had the biggest mega-booths (see Red Faction: Armageddon pic) The difference with the game pavilions was an obvious and concerted effort to get fans to explore and (hopefully) endorse the new title. It was almost like a gaming convention with massive console set-ups and contests. It was all very player focused (in contrast to the movie studios which took a more drool-at-us-from-a-distance approach).

Takeaways

The fan’s social graph made an entrance in this year’s Comic Con. I don’t feel it had a big impact yet, as the really clever strategies have yet to be devised. Warner Bros., for example, gave away exclusive schwag bags just to Foursquare check-ins but they ran out fast and it was a short lived phenomenon. Social Media was, therefore, just a tool to get the word out. The next wave of social graph interactive engagement has yet to hit. When it does, you’d better believe Carrot will be ready for it.

This article is copyright © 2012 

My prediction is that there is much more to come for this type of “ionospheric” implementation of the Twitter platform. Ideally Twitter will become the de-facto standard for sending a “personal” note to anyone, anywhere. Users can easily and actively vet incoming communications in a separate space from their traditional, and practically sacred, inboxes.

@anywhere will push relevant users to the forefront and allow Twitter accounts to become a more mainstream tool for interpersonal communication. Judging by the early screenshots, I’d say the Twitter team is still catering to power-users and not doing enough to make the service accessible to the masses. Case-in-point—to re-tweet, reply, or view a users profile page they seem to only use icons. While this is accepted iconography within the Twitter community, it will not open up the platform to casual observers—an absolute must if they continue to organically grow their user-base.

The bigger-picture implications of @anywhere come in the simple fact that the future of communication will come not from impersonal phone numbers, but from personalized “usernames” that will make exchanging quick messages with friends seem like a world away from the numerical strings that made up the majority of email addresses until the launch of the mainstream version of AOL in the early ‘90s. Instead of limiting ourselves to simple text transactions, I can see the Twitter ecosystem opening up to include a wide-swath of communications options—voice and long-form messaging, along with the short bursts of text we’re currently using it for.

It could become a switchboard for the modern era, nicely sidestepping and/or complementing everything Google has rolled out over the past six months.

As soon as we get our hands on the platform we’ll be able to post a more robust commentary on whether the future value of this tool is in the sheer number of sites its placed within (a potential advertising platform), or whether it serves as a launchpad for future structural changes for the service (communications switchboard).

This article is copyright © 2012 

Speakers at the PR Advanced event included representatives from JetBlue, the Boston Red Sox, Dunkin’ Donuts, Wholefoods and myself, representing Carrot Creative and my personal brand, Just Creative Design.

Entitled “The Art of Online Self Promotion: Branding, Blogging & Social Media“, my talk gave insight on how to create a strong personal brand identity, how to set up a blog & run it as a self promotional tool and how to build relationships across social media platforms… and then some.

It all turned out a huge success, considering the fact that all of the Carrot Creative business cards & stickers had evaporated by the end of the talk. Student and teacher feedback was also another great indicator, as well as a few more offers to talk elsewhere, including an offer for regular weekly lectures.

A few attendees of the conference wrote about what they learned from me and the conference as a whole.  A select few are linked below:

• Branding Yourself ‘PR Advanced’ Wrap Up by Ginny Rose
• ‘PR Advanced’ Conference Wrap Up by Emily Forrest
• Branding Myself by Ellie Botelho
• Takeaways from PR Advanced 2010 by Emilie Toole

There are also a few pictures up of the PR Advanced event, with more to follow.

The #PRAdvanced hashtag turned into a trending topic on Twitter, which was made possible by the Q&A that was set up via Tweetdeck (such a great idea). There are a lot of great tips to pick up from that stream, so be sure to check it out.

Overall it was an extremely pleasurable experience, supported by awesome event coordination (great job Chelsea n co!), a plethora of talented speakers and most importantly, the extremely passionate students & teachers that gave up a Saturday up to attend. Carrot Creative and myself thank you all for the support.

Oh, and thanks once again for the shiny thank you certificate.

This article is copyright © 2012 

Recently I had the privilege of participating in a groundbreaking social media study underwritten by Cisco, spearheaded by one of my mentors, Dr. Neil Hair and sponsored by my Alma Mater,  Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and the University of Navarra. The comprehensive global study sought to better understand how consumer-based social media tools effect both interpersonal collaboration within a corporate setting and external communication with key stakeholders.

The direct impact of this study is not only a greater understanding of what sort of best practices have arisen in the advertising/PR industry but also how many firms actually have such policies. It’s fascinating to see how firms of different sizes and specialties leverage either embrace or choose to ignore the power of conversational messaging.

A quoted excerpt from the published report:

“At Carrot, we live and breathe social media. We work with our clients to build the best social media strategies that will help them meet their business goals and reach more customers. What we’re working to instill with our clients is the idea that information consumption is no longer a passive task. Instead, businesses need to take a proactive approach with their brand and demonstrate to customers that they are hearing and delivering on their needs, now and in the future.” – Maury Postal

Some additional highlights:

• Of the organizations interviewed, 75 percent identified social networks as the consumer-based social media tools they primarily use, while roughly 50 percent of the group also identified extensive use of microblogging.
• Only one in seven of the companies noted a formal process associated with adopting consumer-based social networking tools for business purposes, indicating that the potential risks associated with these tools in the enterprise are either overlooked or not well understood.
• Only one in five participants identified any policies in place concerning the use of consumer-based social networking technologies in the enterprise.

We at Carrot recognize the challenges that large organizations face when trying to implement an external facing social media campaign. Enacting a clear set of usage guidelines and content directives are key to any mass-scale digital communication initiative—something we’ve not only helped some of the largest organizations on the planet formulate and place into practice—but also take to heart internally. We pride ourselves on our interaction with every major mainstream social media tool as well as understanding the implications of having our people in the public eye—something any business, of any size needs to come to terms with in the modern age of always on, immersive media.

The full findings of the study are published here.

This article is copyright © 2012