By Piet Levy//Staff Writer

16  plevy@ama.org

Facebook, LinkedIn and Digitas:

al issue

The State of Social

Digi

Some of the hottest buzz in digital is still around social. According to The
Nielsen Co., Facebook and LinkedIn’s unique visitors were higher by 21.4% and
13.1%, respectively, in November 2010 compared with the year-ago period. With
more people flocking to social, more money is going there as well. Cambridge,
Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. estimates social media marketing spend
will be $1.2 billion in the U.S. this year, a 28% increase from 2010 projections.

To reflect on social media’s past, present and future, Marketing News hosted an
hour-long roundtable discussion featuring marketing leaders at the forefront.

Edited excerpts appear below. The full conversation is available as a two-part

Marketing Power podcast at MarketingPower.com.

Marketing News: How has social media
changed marketing?
Dave Marsey: We have the opportunity
to create communities in the social space
around consumers in a way that pulls out
the unique qualities of a product or a brand
and makes it more personable. … We need
to think more about being content creators,
producers [and] entertainers than classically
trained media professionals or marketers.
When you do this right it carries much more
weight and much more impact than a brand
or a product talking through traditional
advertising.
Steve Patrizi: Consumers have this ampli-
fied voice. Marketers still have an opportunity
to decide, ‘Here’s what I want my brand to
stand for.’ The difference today is that you re-
ally have to deliver on that. The second change
is that you can learn much more about your
customers than you’ve ever been able to learn.
You can start to see the kinds of things that
they talk about, the things that matter to them,
and learn far more about them today in real
time.
MN: What do you think social networks are
best for from a marketing perspective? …
Elaborate [with an] example.
David Fischer: People spend more time on
Facebook than any other site, more than twice
the number two site. On Facebook, you’re
not just sitting back and consuming, you’re
actually leaning forward [and] engaged. That
opportunity for marketers is tremendous in
terms of building not just a connection, but a
two-way dialogue, and getting feedback and
interacting. You are connected to the brands
that you care about, the people you care about,
the places that you care about. Those things
together create incredible capabilities for mar-
keters. I’m a skiing enthusiast, so I get really
relevant ads on Facebook targeted to the fact
that I’m a skier.
Starbucks is a really compelling example
of a brand and a company who has put
Facebook at the center of their marketing
strategy. They talk about new types of coffee,
farming or commitment to the environ-
ment. They promote things like ‘Free Pastry
Day’ which they ran last year and were able
through advertising on Facebook to drive a
94% increase in the number of people who
planned to go to a store that day based on
some Nielsen studies. Their team has basi-
cally gone on record saying they wouldn’t
think of doing a key marketing program
without [Facebook].
There are millions of people who drink
coffee every day, and even if they get those
people into a Starbucks store, when [consum-
ers] walk out of those stores they want to have
that connection, and Facebook enables that.
SP: The [LinkedIn] audience is an audience of
professionals that are maniacally focused on
being successful. When marketers start with
that understanding of, ‘What are they looking
for from this experience?’ it obviously helps
the marketer become much more relevant to
that individual. The profile data is one of the
biggest assets that come into play, so you can
make sure that small business professionals are
seeing the messages that are designed for small
businesses.
There is this notion of building commu-
nities. A marketer who really understands
this is HP. HP was very interested in build-
ing very strong ties with small businesses.
If you’re a small business, you’re probably
thinking, ‘How can a big corporation really
understand my needs?’ HP built a commu-
nity called the Small Biz Nation that is really
meant to be a place for these small busi-
nesses to come and share and collaborate and
learn from one another. What [HP] realized
is, ‘We don’t want to make this all about HP.
That’s not very meaningful to the intended
customer.’ Someone posted a question saying,
‘I’m a sole proprietor. And I’m curious, can I
expense my COBRA expenses? Is that some-
thing that’s legally possible?’ A representative
from HP joined the conversation and said,
‘SCORE provides consulting to small busi-
nesses and it’s free. Here are some links that
can help you get the answers you need.’ She
never said anything about HP products. She
just tried to provide value to the small busi-
ness. HP then runs promotional messaging
with us to help expose people to this group.
For every person who joins that group via
one of the promotional messages HP runs
on LinkedIn, one person joins virally. Group
members are 50% more likely to rate HP as
excellent in supporting small businesses than
non-group members.
DM: There [are] really three key outcomes.
First is creating demand for products in new
ways and through new time periods. Second
would be to reinvigorate venerable brands. The
last is to change perceptions.
Speaking specifically around a
Digitas client and how we worked to reinvig-
orate products would be Kraft and specifically
their Philadelphia cream cheese product.
The challenge we had was to increase sales

AMA_031511_composite.indd 16 2/14/11 12:39 PM


DAVE MARSEY, senior vice
president and group media director at
digital agency Digitas Chicago
DAVID FISCHER, vice president
of advertising and global operations at
Facebook Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif.
and to get home cooks to fall back in love with
the brand and to use more cream cheese in
their cooking. What we created was a move-
ment called The Real Women of Philadelphia.
We recruited Paula Deen to kick this off and
to engage with cooks where they are spend-
ing significant time online. It was a call to
action for moms and women to submit reci-
pes and videotape [themselves] cooking with
Philadelphia. Paula had a section within the
YouTube content on her website [showing] tips
and tricks for the women to follow when film-
ing [themselves]: how to do their make up, how
to arrange the utensils in their kitchen. It’s one
thing to go out with Paula Deen and say, ‘Hey,
submit your recipes and we’ll pick a winner,’ it’s
another to help guide those consumers to do
that right. The quality of the videos that [were]
submitted was something that you could hold
up to a professionally done shoot.
The Real Women of Philadelphia contrib-
uted to the brand’s first volume lift in over five
years and generated over 7,000 recipes. When
you create a community and you give them a
purpose and you cultivate that purpose, you will
see bottom line results.
MN: Any definitive best practices to share?
SP: Just remember it’s all about your custom-
ers. This is their space, and the more you can
approach this as, ‘This is about them,’ the more
likely they’ll be to be receptive to the messaging
that you want to deliver to them.
It’s really smart to think about, ‘How do we
start building a dialogue with these customers?’
I would just caution that there could be a sense
of going too far in that direction where not
only are we now asking people for their money
but we’re asking them for their next scarcest
AMA_031511_composite.indd 17
17
STEVE PATRIZI,
vice president at
LinkedIn Marketing
Solutions, a division of
LinkedIn Corp. based in
Mountain View, Calif.
resource which is time. Let’s just make sure that
we find that right balance.
As far as expectations, just acknowledge
that every network is unique. In some cases
they may be used by the same people but
they’re used for very different purposes and
very different contexts. I would challenge your
creative teams to think about the best way
to message on each platform. You may lose
some of the cost benefits of a spray and play
approach where you’re able to take one piece of
creative and run that across different platforms.
But you’ll gain in the relevance that you’ll
deliver to your customer. The message will feel
like it’s a native part of the platform that this
person is engaging in.
DF: Move quickly and really try to avoid over-
complicating things. Facebook is informal. It’s not
about getting the message exactly perfect, it’s about
being in the conversation and taking advantage of
the connections that are out there. That goes for
both listening and engaging and responding.
Recognize that building up your connections
and building up your fan base is important, but
it’s really a means to an end. You sometimes hear
people coming in saying, ‘Well we’ve got this
new campaign we’re doing, we’re thinking about
Facebook and our goal is to get X million fans.’
The number isn’t so important. Realize it’s what
you do with those connections and how you
take advantage of the brand loyalists out there,
that you can connect with and interact with in a
marketingpower.com
two-way dialogue. [Editor’s note: see page 20 for
more on how to leverage brand influencers.]
DM: Create a page and get really good at pro-
ducing content and engaging and stimulating
that fan base. You can’t just take a promotion
that you’re doing in the offline world and throw
2/14/11 12:40 PM
 18 that into a Facebook wall post or a Tweet. You
need to make that more into a conversation
about what unique attributes make up that prod-
uct and how can we engage a consumer around
al issue
dollars on the research side of the house connect-
ing the dots back to sales.
MN: What [do] you see as the biggest obstacle

that product and the benefits rather than, ‘Hey,
you’re going to save 50% if you buy now.’ Step
two is employing what we call a community
manager to follow that conversational calen-
dar and to engage with the community. If your
brand was a person, it would be this community
Digi
or obstacles keeping marketers from more fully
embracing social networks right now?
DF: One of the things we really tried to do
with marketers is understand their objectives
upfront so we’re set up to measure. Bringing

manager. This cannot be an intern. It’s a unique
position in and of itself.
MN: Emily Riley, a Forrester analyst covering
digital, told Marketing News last year that social
was still in such a state of development that time
and research were arguably more important
than just putting money into the space. Is that
still the case?
DM: I think it’s a fair assessment. However, I
disagree to a certain extent in that I feel like you
can do both. For clients we have been able to de-
termine a return on that investment. If you wait
and you focus more on doing the research, your
competitor is going to leave you behind and the
consumer perception is going to shift.
Putting more money into the space really is
going to come from when we have that content
and those conversations that are worthy of ampli-
fying and worthy of connecting. Research is
important because we want to understand what’s
motivating consumers and how they’re reacting
and how they’re responding. I would spend the
more light to those brand metrics is critical.
We’ve worked with some major brands who
have been trying to drive brand awareness but
then have actually tracked back through things
like home scan studies to in-store results, and
[are] seeing a very nice and healthy return, and
those are the things we want to prove with each
and every client.
SP: Every senior level marketer that we talk
to, they tell us, ‘How do we get all our different
lines of business, our marketing heads of various
products, bought into this?’ The ROI conversa-
tion a lot of publishers shy away from, maybe just
because they don’t feel very comfortable being
able to really showcase those results. We have a
self-serve platform much like Google that allows
marketers to go in and select the audience that
they’re very interested in reaching. You can bid
on the inventory on either a CPM basis or a CPC
basis. We see a lot of repeat advertisers going back
in that system and renewing their campaigns. The
ROI conversation is one the social platforms are
very well equipped to embrace. m

Editor's Picks @ MarketingPower.com

For More on Social Media:

Podcasts
Marketing News Presents: Facebook, LinkedIn and Digitas Discuss Social
Media, Part One
In part one of a two-part discussion, Fischer, Patrizi and Marsey discuss how
social media has changed marketing, analyze some strong case studies and
provide best practice guidelines. Available beginning March 14.

Marketing News Presents: Facebook, LinkedIn and Digitas Discuss Social

Media, Part Two
Part two examines the state of social media proliferation, steps market-
ers need to take to get started in digital now and more. Available beginning
March 28.

Articles
Facebook’s David Fischer, LinkedIn’s Steve Patrizi Answer Your Marketing
Questions
Marketing News turned to the AMA’s Facebook community to see what ques-
tions members had for the marketing leaders at Facebook and LinkedIn. Look
for answers in this Marketing News Exclusives article appearing in the e-news-
letter’s March 17th edition.

Starbucks’ Own Good Idea

Learn how Starbucks became one of the largest brands in the social space.

10 Minutes With Paul Dunay

The global managing director of services and social marketing at Avaya Inc.,
and co-author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies, offers tips for marketing
through Facebook and assesses B-to-B marketers' use of social.

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