At the January Toronto Product Manager Association meeting I had an opportunity to listen to Alfred Tan, a Senior Director in Sales at Facebook, lead a discussion on Marketing in Social Media. I was a great presentation; Delivered on a Mac using a Rogers Rocket Stick, it had lots of really interesting slides and a wealth of stimulating media and data supporting successful product marketing initiatives within Facebook.
Personally, there were two thoughts that rang bells in my mind listening to Alfred’s presentation; The potency and viral nature that opinion brings to a brand exposed in social media and the potential for new product-related business intelligence and personalization of the product message based on data relationships originating in social networks.
I found strong validation for the idea that there can be risk to any large active brand that is trying to ignore engaging resources in social media. If you choose to ignore Facebook as a CPG marketing manager or retail marketing manager, and then discover that a social community is impacting your brand message (due to opinion or legit product/customer issues), it may be too late to do anything but try to hire some of the trusted messengers right out of the influencing community. At this stage of the economic cycle I would expect this is something that more and more skilled and unemployed marketers may be beginning to realise in order to leverage themselves back into the industry with their new ideas. Put another way, there appears to be incentive to create impact to a corporate brand in order to bring awareness to the personal brand. I expect (and know) most CPG brand managers have Twintern(s) keeping an eye on things in this domain.
The other thought, most strongly stimulated by this presentation, was validation that the federation of identities between established Identity stores like Facebook, Google, etc. provides a powerful mechanism through which businesses can flush out new successful products and guide potential new customers, among other things. The keynote here for me is that the identity allows for both powerful business intelligence (useful to both the provider and consumer of the identity) and personalization of product messages based on knowledge gained from knowing the identity of a user (browsing, chating, sharing, using). Sounds like nothing new, except that the community has a way of proofing the identity through the relationships established with other users. There is a lot of self-policing and opinion that helps ensure presented data about a user is somewhat accurate. This makes any identity associated with a user and one or more communities much more valuable as a driver for BI or Personalization type activities.
Internally, Facebook is already delivering this BI and Personalization to its business customers; Some great eye opening examples for both products and services were in Alfred’s presentation. Starbucks, Coca-Cola/Energy Brands, BMW to name a few. Facebook does probably the best job today IMHO of softening identity relationships for public consumption using terms like “Friends” and “Fans”.
Two years ago experts knew that 75% of people look to social networks when considering product purchases as shown below. The impact of the identity will no doubt create an even wider gap between the average measures of “Cost Quality” (a McKinsey term from below) as it relates to the effectiveness of retailers with and without identities covered by their go-to-market strategy.
Externally, once other organizations finish getting a handle on their employee identities (something I am actively engaged with on a day-to-day basis with our products) they will begin to look outward and leverage the power of B2C and C2B identity relationships… with C representing the Social Community where their customers reside. There are certainly not many technology constraints here, although it may not be perceived that way by everybody.
The benefits, for example at a retail web site, include having individual consumer expectations more closely met with each interaction as long as that individual has a compatible identity. Logging in and collection of preference data are no longer part of the consumer experience. The Identity brings with it relationships between customers (in other social communities), relationships to feedback (direct and in other communities), knowledge about the customer (location, age, preferences) and drives each interaction, personalizing it and improving the experience for each subsequent potential customer or the return of an existing customer. For instance, imagine driving the customer directly to the two brands or models he or she is interested in without having them guide themselves through a retail site on their own.
Businesses that have established customer identity stores will be the first to lead this next wave IMHO. Where will they learn about you?.. Just think of where you log in today; where you are part of loyalty programs today; where you participate in an online community today.
There is no need for consumers to worry about which Identity store will be the end-all (i.e. rush to OpenID, Google, Yahoo or Facebook now) and no need for retailers to fear being at the mercy of an identity provider for an information service fee. To help understand this point, think about the evolution of plastic in the wallet. Generally people prefer to minimize the number of change cards in their wallet. That does not stop them from shopping anywhere, and carrying either Interac, Visa or Mastercard. This same motivation will drive people to a single, portable, preferred identity (but not necessarily all from the same source). It will also push Internet sites to share their identities and any public meta data they have (anything you would know about your “friends” on Facebook), and allow them to be used anywhere. The providers that put up the first road-blocks on information sharing will likely find the end of the road, whereby they are bought “on the block”, re-thought and re-exposed in a more compatible, profitable manner.
