via Horia Varlan (Creative Commons 2.0)

We think that Q&A is a natural extension of social search and will become a permanent part of the social media landscape. We think Q&A is particularly relevant to social shopping. The process that now begins with a shopper’s review or recommendation can just as easily begin with another shopper’s request for information. Like writing reviews, answering questions is a way for shoppers to provide value, demonstrate expertise and gain influence. Of course, we at Zavee are continuing to develop and refine our own social search capabilities, so you can look forward to exciting new features over the next several months.

The Zavee takeaway:

• Social Q&A is suddenly hot, but that doesn’t make it a fad.
• Q&A is a natural extension of the social shopping feature set.
• Look for exciting new social search features coming soon from Zavee.

HootSuite logo

The key to making Twitter easier and more efficient is to use one of the free third party Twitter management tools instead of Twitter’s own site. HootSuite and TweetDeck let you do two things that can save a lot of time: manage multiple searches and cross-post into multiple Social Media streams.

In a previous post we blogged about four ways that local businesses can use Twitter. Some involve more time and attention than others. First, we suggested using Twitter as a listening post, gathering information from other users. The net you cast can be as wide or narrow as you want. Use your Twitter manager to set up searches for your industry, competitors, community, etc. If you can’t do all of these, establish some priorities and set up fewer searches. Checking them should only take a few minutes a day.

Second, we discussed using Twitter to build your brand. This is the most time-consuming aspect of making Twitter work, and while we think it’s worth the time not everyone will agree. This is where cross-posting can come in handy. You can use your Twitter manager to publish your Facebook posts as tweets – same content, two streams. You can do the same with blog posts (every Zavee Thinking post is automatically tweeted as soon as it’s published). Cross-posting isn’t a substitute for frequent tweeting, but it’s a reasonable compromise between committing to a major brand-building campaign on Twitter and ignoring your brand altogether.

Third, we pointed out how Twitter can generate leads. There is a passive and an active component to using Twitter this way. The passive part involves setting up searches for keywords that potential customers are likely to use when tweeting. The active part involves tweeting with those same keywords. Not enough time to do both? Just set up and monitor the searches and see how that works. You may need to adjust the search terms but that still should take less time than actively tweeting to gain leads. As you get better at finding potential customers on Twitter, however, don’t be surprised if you find yourself spending more time building those relationships online.

Finally, we recommended using Twitter as a customer service channel. At a minimum, you should use your Twitter manager to display mentions of your business on Twitter. Whether and how you respond to tweets that mention your business is up to you, but there is no reason not to see what people tweet about you.

We think that this minimalist approach to Twitter is a good way to start, especially if you don’t think you have a lot of time for Twitter. We also think it’s likely that you will ramp up your Twitter strategy as you gain experience with the medium. Take an hour or two on a weekend afternoon to get familiar with one of the Twitter management applications and play around with both searches and cross-posting. Let the technology do some of the work and you can get value out of Twitter without putting in more time than you want.

The Zavee takeaway:

• Use a third party Twitter manager for multiple searches and to publish Facebook posts on Twitter (and vice versa).
• An active tweeting strategy takes more time than reading relevant tweets, so if time is an issue focus on using Twitter passively – at least for now.
• Don’t be surprised if you find yourself spending more time on Twitter than you expected – not because it wastes your time but because it builds your business.

The consensus choice seems to be Facebook, and it’s easy to see why. This post will discuss some of Facebook’s advantages for business. Next week we will talk about how businesses that use Facebook can add Twitter to the mix without a major incremental time commitment.

Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner provides three big reasons for committing to Facebook: Facebook is communal in ways other Social Media are not; Facebook pulls people to its site often – Stelzner says it’s getting to be as frequent as checking email; and Facebook has tools that reveal “social proof”. Each of this points deserves some explanation.

• Group discussions. Stelzner says that Twitter doesn’t lend itself to group discussions – it’s mostly a one-to-many medium. He’s right that Facebook has more sophisticated tools for leveraging groups, but Twitter users have figured out how to manage group discussions. These discussions happen in real time, so they can be very fast, lively and loose. I have participated in a weekly discussion relating to bargains and discounts called “#dealchat” that has been a useful branding opportunity for Zavee and a lot of fun for me. Facebook is communal in a different way: communities are stickier, while they tend to be more ad hoc on Twitter.
• Frequency. Facebook keeps coming up with new features that keep users coming back. And with both instant message (chat) and direct message (mail) features, users don’t even need email to connect with other Facebook users. However, some Twitter users post very frequently, and if your followers include these very active users Facebook’s frequency advantage isn’t quite as overwhelming.
• Social proof. Social proof is a term coined by the psychologist Robert Cialdini to describe the tendency of people to conform their behavior to the behavior of others. Facebook’s concept of “liking” leverages this principle to enable businesses to influence current and prospective customers. If you “like” Zavee (and I hope you do) your Facebook friends will see that and will tend to follow your lead. When we decided to push for more fans on Facebook this principle helped us grow from fewer than 100 fans to more than 600 in about a month. On Twitter social proof is structured very differently. Influence is determined in part by the number of followers a user has and by the number of tweets. Facebook is more egalitarian.

There is no question that Facebook requires time, both initially and ongoing. Consultants can help you establish your Facebook presence and can guide you in maintaining and growing it – this is a good one based in Delray Beach – but Social Media is never “fire and forget”.  If you want to use Facebook as a sales channel it’s vital to grow your fan base. This means updating frequently with new content and responding to fan posts promptly. There are also some more technical aspects of Facebook that are worth learning about – reading the All Facebook blog is a good way to do that. Poke around Facebook to see what other companies are doing. But the first step, of course, is to make the commitment.

The Zavee takeaway:

• You don’t really have to choose – see next week’s post – but if you want to choose choose Facebook.
• Some of Facebook’s features, such as “liking”, are ideal for businesses. Twitter is very different but also is great for business.
• Social Media only works if you make the commitment and invest the time and effort.

Thomas Jefferson

The Court doesn’t handle patent cases very often, both because the legal issues rarely become Supreme-worthy and because the underlying facts are often very technical. Bilski is an exception on both counts, as the issue is extremely important and the facts aren’t very difficult.

Bilski filed for what is called a “business method” patent, in this case a procedure for instructing buyers and sellers how to hedge against the risk of price fluctuations in the energy sector. The patent application was originally denied because the Appeals Court held that a “process” was patent-eligible only if it either was tied to a particular machine or apparatus or physically transformed a particular article into a different state or thing (think of a process for cutting a diamond or desalinating seawater). This is called the “machine or transformation” test and it played a central role in the Bilsky decision.

No one can patent natural phenomena, laws of nature or (and this is critical) abstract ideas. In fact, the Supreme Court held that the Bilski patent was properly denied not because it failed the “machine or transformation” test – the Court rejected that as a litmus test for process patents – but because it was an abstract idea. The problem for business people is that the Court explicitly refused to define what kinds of business methods could both fail the “machine or transformation” test and pass the “abstract ideas” test – and thus be patent-eligible.

Why is this a big deal? The purpose of patent law (which was pioneered by Thomas Jefferson) is to encourage innovation by granting inventors who disclose their invention a monopoly over the subject of the patent. Some inventors don’t like that bargain: the formula for Coca-Cola has never been patented because its owners think disclosure is too risky – they worry that flavor chemists could reverse-engineer the formula and come up with something that tastes like almost like Coke but doesn’t violate the patent.

With business method patents the risk is the opposite: that despite disclosure businesses could inadvertently infringe on a patent just by conducting their business. Although the patent described in this famous Onion article would never be upheld, Congress was nervous enough about business method patents that in 1999 it enacted a specific defense against certain infringement claims relating to business methods. Even with this defense, however, businesses will have to choose between investing in resources to effectively monitor both new patents and their own business to prevent infringement or take the risk of possible litigation. Either choice is risky and potentially very expensive.

The fundamental question about business method patents is whether they help or hinder innovation. Another way to ask the question is whether the absence of patent protection would deter inventors from incurring the cost and risk of invention. In science and technology, the benefits of patents are clear: no one would invest in drug discovery if the results of their efforts immediately had to be shared – for free – with drug companies that hadn’t put any time or money into the research. On the other hand, methods of doing business have been competing in the marketplace for centuries without patent protection.

Using a similar analysis, four of the nine Justices concluded that business methods should not be patent-eligible, but they were outvoted (all nine agreed that the Bilski patent was too abstract to be eligible). The Court’s opinion has received critical reviews, since it was so narrowly decided that it leaves the important questions unanswered. Yet it seems inevitable that the Court will have to grapple with the issue of business method patents before too long. The lines are blurring between technology that is clearly patent-eligible and abstractions that clearly are not – a factor, perhaps, in the Court’s non-decision – and the risk to both businesses and inventors is great.

The Zavee takeaway:

• Whether methods of doing business are patentable is an important question, one the Supreme Court should have answered yesterday.
• If you are developing a novel way to do business, think twice before investing in a patent. Bilski didn’t kill the business method patent but it didn’t offer a strong endorsement, either.
• It’s not impossible that someday you will be on the receiving end of an infringement claim. If it happens, find the best patent lawyer you can and don’t give up hope – you may be able to beat the claim or even the patent itself.

via Rusty Boxcars

Adding an element of game play is one of the latest trends in marketing. At first blush, game play might not seem likely to resonate with adult consumers, but we all engage in competition in one form or another from a very early age. The viability of game play can be seen in the popularity of virtual games such as Farmville, which has almost 65 million monthly active users on Facebook. The location-based social network Foursquare also has a significant gaming element, with users earning points and “points” for specific activity.

Why should game play increase marketing effectiveness? The rationale is that encouraging the audience to participate and be rewarded helps a message earn attention in an increasingly noise-filled environment. Game play also is consistent with consumers’ increased expectation of control over the marketing messages they encounter. One result of meeting these expectations is that consumers not only pay more attention to messages presented as games, they have better recall of messages presented in games.

For small businesses, introducing game play into marketing programs can help level the playing field with competitors that have larger budgets. And it doesn’t require a lot of cost or complexity. The key is to figure out how to get the consumer involved in the message. We took a simple contest model and tweaked it by rewarding referrals. Social media platforms make game play even easier to implement. We plan to run a video contest on YouTube later this year, and the cost to us, apart from prizes, should be minimal.

The Zavee takeaway:

• Marketing messages that have an element of game play increase awareness, attention and effectiveness.
• The key to game play is user involvement, not expensive technology.
• Small businesses can and should add game play to their marketing.

There's a Map for That

The standard agency creative development process involves identifying a significant consumer insight, turning that insight into a relevant, credible claim and bringing the claim to life in a compelling and memorable way. Verizon’s insight was that a smartphone is only as capable as the network it runs on, and its claim was that its network has more coverage than AT&T’s. DirecTV’s insight was that consumers in this category are value-driven, and its claim was that it provides more channels for less money.

Both campaigns are from major agencies: McCann Worldgroup for Verizon and Deutsch for DirecTV. But while Verizon’s commercials make their point in a clever and engaging way, DirecTV’s spots are uninvolving and numbingly literal. One creative team was able to make the jump from Apple’s “There’s an app for that” to Verizon’s network coverage map to “There’s a map for that” while the other creative team got only as far as an old game show. In fact, one wonders whether DirecTV even bothered trying to be creative, or whether they thought that being literal was the best way to reach their audience.

Creativity is a particular challenge in online marketing. In Zavee’s Google advertising we have a very limited space in which to induce users to click, and every word is analyzed and evaluated. If we weren’t highly literal our ads might not even appear where we want them. Within the Zavee site and this blog, we try to use keywords that will improve our rankings in searches. Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization are absolutely vital to Zavee’s marketing plan, but they don’t result in much creativity. In fact, it sometimes feels like we are writing for Google, not for our audience.

One online medium where creativity doesn’t have to be sacrificed for effectiveness is YouTube. Many marketers have figured out how to create videos that pull the audience in, expose them to the marketer’s brand and get them talking about it with others. And some of the best YouTube videos are produced by consumers, not the marketer. Look for Zavee to make greater use of this medium in the near future.

The Zavee takeaway:

• Competition should make marketers more creative, not less.
• SEO and SEM present challenges to creativity, but they aren’t the only online media.
• YouTube is one online medium that rewards creativity.

One of the recent changes to Facebook has been a great expansion of the “Like” concept which, among other things, replaces the “Fan” concept.  Yelp and other social networks have followed suit.  At least for now, Zavee is still inviting shoppers to become “Fans” of merchants they haven’t yet shopped at and not just “Like” them.  Why?  Because we think that, on some perhaps subtle level, being a “Fan” implies a higher degree of emotional engagement than merely “Liking” someone or something.  How substantial is that difference? It’s hard to tell.  If you follow sports you might agree that there is a difference between liking a team and being a fan.  If you follow the New York Mets or the Miami Dolphins you almost certainly do.  At Zavee we are considering changing the “Fan” concept to something completely different – something that retains a high level of engagement but provides greater flexibility.  More news to follow on that new feature.

One thing we didn’t think about when we were debating “Fan” versus “Like” was whether a lower level of engagement might make it easier for users to be less than candid about what they say they “Like”.  Would people really do this?  And why?

Starbucks Barista Badge from Foursquare (via pbende)

Like much about social media, behavioral targeting presents legitimate privacy issues, and they need to be worked out. However, if advertisers lose faith in the accuracy of consumers’ self-descriptions the effectiveness of social media for marketers is likely to decrease. For small marketers who are drawn to social media marketing by, among other things, its low cost and high effectiveness, this could be a very unfortunate result.

It’s probably true, as Scoble says, that advertisers have ways to verify, at least in part, the accuracy of the things we claim we like.  But the deeper point is that the value of social media as a communications tool for users in the network depends in large part on the credibility of other users.  A user who creates a false or misleading social persona may only lose personal credibility within the network, but if enough users do the same thing the credibility of the network as a whole may suffer. A recent paper about dating sites reports that deception in profiles is rampant. The paper suggests that one reason is that users understand what makes them desirable to potential mates, and create profiles to reflect those expectations. Dating sites like to advertise their successes, but they may have become just one more system to game.

Whether Zavee stays with “Fan”, changes to “Like” or goes in a different direction altogether, the principal means by which Zavee shoppers communicate the quality of their shopping experience is by writing reviews. It takes more effort (and commitment) to write a review than to click on a button, but that very fact gives proportionately more weight to the reviews and less to a simple “Fan” designation. One safeguard we put in place expressly to improve the accuracy, timeliness and fairness of reviews is for the system to accept a review of a merchant only if the reviewer has made a Zavee purchase at that merchant within 30 days.

We hope that social networks and their users develop means to limit the influence of false social personsas, not to protect advertisers but to protect the networks themselves and to permit them to continue to deliver valuable, relevant experiences to their users.

The Zavee takeaway:

• Once it becomes trivially easy to create a social persona, that persona may itself become trivial. The problem is that those personas are taken seriously, both by advertisers and by other users.
• It’s natural to present ourselves as we’d like to be seen, but invented personas can make the the network as a whole less valuable to users who rely on other users for timely and accurate information and opinions.
• Local businesses will suffer disproportionately if social media marketing loses credibility, because it’s a particularly attractive tool for them in an environment where conventional alternatives aren’t nearly as cost-effective.

Rebates aren’t something most small business have to concern themselves with, and they certainly aren’t part of Zavee‘s model. Nevertheless, they are an interesting touch point between marketer and customer. How large companies handle the complex questions about rebate redemptions may have implications for how smaller businesses deal with analogous situations in which the cost of making a customer happy may be to lose her altogether.

Consider what happens with a rebate: On the one hand, the marketer is willing to pass along an amount of money that may be significant both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the purchase price. This should create a positive interaction, especially for rebates that result in, say, a mobile phone costing the customer zero out of pocket. On the other hand, a redemption process that the consumer views as overly complicated or simply unfair can leave an unpleasant aftertaste and potentially threaten a relationship that may just be beginning.

Marketers have a legitimate reason for making the redemption process at least somewhat complex: preventing fraud. Fake bar codes and forged receipts are only two of the ways companies could be preyed upon if redemption were too easy. Moreover, some non-redemptions, or “breakage”, is attributable to consumers’ own inability to follow directions, such as mailing in the rebate by the deadline. Unfortunately, it is difficult for the consumer to differentiate between redemption strategies that are designed to protect the company (and, ultimately, consumers), from strategies that are expressly intended to increase breakage. And consumers do not seem inclined to give rebate marketers the benefit of the doubt.

We haven’t seen a great deal of discussion about the potential impact on customer loyalty of rebate redemption strategies, and we think there a great many unanswered questions. Here are a few that we hope loyalty professionals will consider and talk about:

• If a consumer comes away from the rebate redemption process convinced that the marketer was attempting to (or did in fact) prevent her from redeeming her rebate, how long does that ill feeling remain? What are the variables that determine whether the consumer chalks it up to lessons learned or is lost to the marketer forever? Assuming that a given rebate redemption strategy will result in some loss of customer business, how do marketers calculate those losses in determining the ROI of a rebate program? Does the breakage always pay for the lost customers?
• Do marketers take into account the propensity for frustrated consumers to share their experiences with their social graph, e.g., on Facebook and Twitter? What steps are marketers taking to participate in the conversation with consumers, e.g., to explain how the marketer’s redemption strategy reduces fraud and keeps rebate programs alive?
• What are the fulfillment industry’s goals in structuring rebate redemptions? More specifically, is maximizing breakage an overt goal or merely an inevitable byproduct of loss prevention strategies? Is it reasonable for consumers to expect that marketers are capable of balancing their desire to prevent fraud with the customer’s desire to receive the rebate without undue difficulty or delay? Some companies have taken steps to make the redemption process easier, without changing the underlying eligibility rules, by walking consumers through the process on their Web sites. Is this the wave of the future, or do these marketers have unique reasons for making redemption easier?

At Zavee we don’t have answers to any of these questions but we hope the loyalty industry recognizes their importance and gives them the consideration they deserve.

Taglines act as a shorthand for communication about a business and its products (or a product). There is only so much a tagline can do without smart strategic thinking and powerful creative execution around it. And, of course, it has to be true to the product and the brand. BMW‘s “Ultimate driving machine” tagline has retained its power for 35 years not just because it promises exactly the experience that its buyers want, but because the company and its products deliver.

35 years and counting

I think of taglines as existing on a spectrum between purely product-oriented messages and purely brand-oriented messages. Messages about your product involve what it does and the benefits it provides. Think of Miller Lite‘s “Tastes great, less filling.” Messages about your brand involve what your company is and what it stands for. IBM’s “Building a smarter planet” is mostly if not entirely about the brand; if you weren’t familiar with the company you couldn’t tell what IBM actually does. Snapple‘s tagline, “Made from the best stuff on Earth”, combines a message about the product with a message about Snapple’s corporate values. Creating a tagline that is right for your company should involve a careful and candid analysis of how both kinds of messages fit into your overall consumer value proposition.

Two things to bear in mind when thinking about taglines are positioning within your space and differentiation vs. similarly positioned competitors. Positioning is about the different high-level choices that you make about how you want consumers see your business. The matrix of choices is different in every category and every business in the category occupies a unique point on this matrix – even when there are only limited functional differences among different companies’ products. In fact, the fewer the differences between competing products, the more important positioning can become. Car insurance is a prime example. At one end of the spectrum there are value-positioned companies like Geico with product-focused taglines (“15 minutes can save you 15% or more …”) and at the other there are premium-positioned companies like Allstate whose messages evoke more of a brand than a product promise (“Are you in good hands?”).

However, multiple businesses within a category may position themselves similarly. When this happens, businesses may try to differentiate themselves on the strength of their creative, and the tagline can be part of that. Charles Schwab‘s “Talk to Chuck” campaign is a novel approach to communicating a client-focused positioning. A more strategic approach, however, is to try to find something differentiating in either the brand or the product that had not previously been taken advantage of. A well-known example in the very crowded breakfast cereal category is Wheaties, which used its heritage with athletes to differentiate itself as “The breakfast of champions.”

Small businesses are frequently advised to focus on product benefits when creating a tagline. Is this good advice or is it too limiting? I think all businesses should use the same process: analyze your product and your brand to determine what is credible, compelling and differentiating; understand your positioning choices; and be aware of what your competitors’ messaging is. Consider Avis. Back in the 1960s, Avis was an upstart compared to industry leader Hertz. It couldn’t compete on the basis of its rental fleet, prices, or number of rental locations. Instead, Avis embraced its positioning as a challenger in a way that also communicated a key brand attribute: commitment to customer service. The Avis tagline was an instant classic: “We try harder.”

What about our tagline? Once, when we were asking ourselves what we wanted Zavee to be, someone put three words on the whiteboard: Simple. Local. Social. Ease of use, focus on local communities, and social networking are key features of our platform and we wanted to make sure that everyone at Zavee kept them top of mind. Making those three words our tagline was almost automatic. Why didn’t we focus on brand messages? In one sense, we did: our commitment to helping local communities become stronger is our most important brand attribute. But in another sense, we don’t think open social networks like Zavee really can (or should try to) create a brand other than organically through its members. I don’t see much brand communication from either Facebook or Twitter and I think they have the right approach.

The Zavee takeaway:

• A tagline is only a tagline. It isn’t your entire marketing campaign.
• Understand what sets your product and your brand apart. Understand the same things about your competitors.
• Positioning involves making difficult choices but it’s the only way to truly differentiate yourself. Focus on the differentiators when you are looking for your tagline. It’s in there somewhere.

Foursquare @SXSW

Location-based social networks such as Foursquare and Gowalla make use of the GPS capabilities of smartphones to let users communicate in real time not just what they are doing, as with Twitter, but where they are. They are growing rapidly, and for businesses they are well worth checking out.

Both networks are about two years old but have entered the mainstream only recently. Users of Foursquare “check in” at different locations to tell their friends where they are and what they are doing. Foursquare also has an element of game play that lets users collect “badges” for certain activities, such as earning a “barista” badge for checking into five Starbucks. Foursquare has a large user base that skews young and lives in cities, and has attracted a certain amount of backlash (note: strong language at link), although it has its defenders. Gowalla doesn’t depend quite as much on its game mechanics, but supports media files, such as photos, and claims to be looking for a broader (and perhaps older) demographic.

Businesses seem to have less of a “wait and see” attitude toward location-based social networks than they did toward Facebook and Twitter. It may be that, having been through this before with other Social Media outlets they simply need less persuading when it comes to location-based networks. It may also be that the business case for location-based networks is more obvious than with, say, Twitter. Another possibility is that the networks themselves have become business-friendly faster. Foursquare already has the ability to serve merchant offers based on location, although it is still refining its analytics dashboard. In any event, marketers are not sitting on the sidelines. Recently, Pepsico announced a “geo-based loyalty program” in partnership with Foursquare that will reward consumers who check in via iPhone at businesses that serve Pepsi products. The History Channel also is using Foursquare to promote its show, “America, The Story of Us.”

Do networks like Foursquare and Gowalla have relevance for small businesses? We think they do. Even basic data on who has visited a business, how frequently, etc. adds to the merchant’s knowledge of the customer base. Serving offers and other content to those customers has obvious benefits, although it still isn’t clear how the merchant can get a full picture of the return on investment from that content (merchants will know how many people used (and, presumably, saw) the offer, but won’t necessarily know how many of those transactions were made by customers who would have purchased anyway). Checking in to a business from a location-based network also can provide extended word of mouth for the merchant. It’s going to take time to figure out how to use these services for business, but that was true with Facebook and Twitter. And, as with Facebook and Twitter, there is a lot of potential and no real downside for businesses that experiment.

At Zavee we are currently exploring the fit with location-based networks, but we fully anticipate using this technology to add value to the Zavee experience for both merchants and shoppers. With both cash back offers by merchants and reviews by shoppers, Zavee provides a great deal of content whose value can only be enhanced by becoming location-aware.

The Zavee takeaway:

• You heard it about Facebook, you heard it about Twitter. Well, location-based social networks aren’t fads either.
• Businesses have wised up and caught up, and are right on the heels of consumers in discovering how to make these services useful, relevant and rewarding.
• If you were sitting on the sidelines while Facebook and Twitter were becoming huge, don’t let it happen again!