Disqus - Latest Comments for socialmallard

Re: SOPA Is Not A Black Or White Issue

Kevin Briody — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:09:03 -0000

Jason - I'm not seeing much in the way of critics of SOPA truly advocating for a "100 open market" - that's a bit of a straw man. Sure there are some extreme free content folks out there, but they are not representative of the bulk of reasonable critics to PROTECT IP/SOPA from what I've seen and read. Aside from the potentially dramatic effects SOPA would have on the 'Nets technical infrastructure, the chilling of free speech, the potential for rampant abuse, the total lack of due process, and the betrayal of US moral standing on the topic, one of my biggest beefs is that there IS a law on the books for this: the DMCA.

Copyright holders generally complain that it takes too much work to use it, therefore they want easier (for them) tools and the onus to be placed on the network via some mystical magic dust - and damn the consequences. The result is an abomination like SOPA, written by and for the entertainment lobby.

I understand your concerns about others profiting off your hard work, but 1) use the DMCA to issue takedowns and 2) recognize that there has to be a balance, and when push comes to shove we as a society MUST err on the side of protecting speech and innovation on the Web, even if content creators lose some revenue in the process. To create a draconian copyright enforcement regime that cripples the innovation, experimentation, and creativity (yes, some of it realized via copyright violations) is to blow off our head in order to save our body.

I'm no free Web fantasist, but things like SOPA represent the fastest way to a stagnant society and economy I can imagine. There has to be a balance, and SOPA destroys any semblance of it, which is why you see the huge outcry.

Re: Twitter Brand Pages Are All About Acquisition, Not Engagement

Kevin Briody — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 09:21:24 -0000

Hi Gabriele,
Agreed, this has long been Twitter's next step towards becoming a more effective platform for brands. They are more unapologetic purists than Facebook - more about fostering communication than enabling big companies to do marketing - so it's not all that shocking they took this long to do it. Should be interesting to see how companies adopt brand pages once they move out from the current private pilot.

Thanks for reading!

Re: The Content Convergence Dilemma: Where’s the Content Department?

Kevin Briody — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 20:50:29 -0000

Great post Adam, and incredibly timely for me given I just jumped over to a content marketing agency. Definitely a set of challenges I'm learning about quickly from the agency side. If you hear of any great examples or answers to your questions, please do share!

Re: Making A Change: Leaving Ignite, Joining Pace

Kevin Briody — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 20:40:02 -0000

@david horne thanks man! we'll have to grab that coffee once I come up for air in my new job!

@twitter-8064862 Thanks as well Jim. I miss you guys as well. Somehow I need to figure out how to introduce sarcastic humor over Yammer to my new team, but I doubt it would ever be quite the same.

@twitter-25601590 Rob, congrats on your new role as well. And yeah, the short commute is shaping up to be a wonderful thing.

@BrianChappell Hopefully we'll get the Ducks out here - we can get some tailgating plans in motion. And trust me, I'll still be looking to your blog posts and tweets to keep me up to speed on all things SEO! (as should anyone else reading this...)

Re: Facebook f8 2011: Implications for Brand and Social Media Marketers

Kevin Briody — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 13:45:09 -0000

Hi Raj, thanks for the comment. For app examples, the two that Facebook featured prominently in the keynote were Spotify - which shares every song you are listening to - and the Washington Post's Social Reader - which shares every article you take a look at. The controversial thing about both is you are no longer taking a conscious sharing action, selecting what you think is worth the time of those who follow or friend you, but instead the apps are just firehosing out every piece of content you touch.

Re: Mad Libs and Social Media Mission Statements

Kevin Briody — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 13:14:38 -0000

I think any corporate mission statement is typically written to make top comms staff and CEO's feel like they are accomplishing something. No one else bothers to read them, and to your point, they seldom say anything worth reading (or capable of being deciphered) in the first place. I hadn't run across social media-specific mission statements before. The whole concept is beyond pointless.

Re: 100 Women Bloggers You Should Be Reading

Kevin Briody — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 10:08:42 -0000

This is a ridiculously useful post Olivia. Picking out some good ones to add to Reader now...

Re: SXSW 2012 - The Facebook Customer Service Challenge for Brands

Kevin Briody — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 16:25:23 -0000

Sounds like a great panel Bryan!

Re: SXSW 2012 - Fragmented: Marketing in a Post-Facebook World

Kevin Briody — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 14:59:30 -0000

To clarify, the proposed speakers for this session are both Bob and I (Kevin).

Re: Tin Cup, The Masters, and the Marketability of the Epic Fail

Kevin Briody — Sun, 26 Jun 2011 14:33:28 -0000

Hi "lakawak" - Thanks for reading, first of all. As for your comment, I'd have to say dropping by someone's blog anonymously and immediately calling them a fool isn't exactly the best way to join the conversation.

That said, as to your points. Particularly in the pre-Tiger era when pro golf was desperate for TV ratings, I highly doubt that our fictional Roy wouldn't have received invitations to some follow on televised tourneys. He went out in such a blaze of glory, and with such an interesting story, that people would have tuned in if only to hope to see his daring/ego turn into yet another amazing train wreck. My point - poorly written though it was, I admit - was simply that his story was compelling enough that the interest wouldn't flame out the moment he walked off that 18th green. Marketers and the Tour itself would have tried to milk his sudden micro-fame as long as they could.

As to your comparison to Van de Velde at the Open in '99, yes he had a spectacular flame out on the 18th to lose. But that's where the comparison stops. Van de Velde was a pro golfer at the time, working the tour. He hadn't just come from nowhere - a crap-ass driving range in rural France, to keep the comparison valid. He also didn't implode because he had a bull-headed insistence on always going big ala "Roy" - he just had some poor club and shot selection and some really bad swings. If Roy had been real, it would have been an epic finish. Jean's was just epically cringworthy.

Thanks again for stopping by.

Re: Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and NCL: A Social Media Comparison

Kevin Briody — Fri, 06 May 2011 08:45:53 -0000

Hi Jenn, Thanks for reading and the nice comment. Carnival has been doing some interesting things on Facebook, and for several cruise lines the launch of ships seems to be a favorite excuse to experiment with new campaigns and social tactics. And I agree, nice to see Windstar chime in - always loved their idea of cruising. :)

Re: Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and NCL: A Social Media Comparison

Kevin Briody — Fri, 06 May 2011 08:43:37 -0000

Hi Hope - thanks for the comment and sorry for my (very) delayed reply. That is a great question, and ultimately the one that matters most: how much does all this conversation and engagement actually impact sales (if at all)? I haven't seen a case study on this specific to the cruise industry, though I would love to see any data if it exists and include it in my Social Media ROI Revisited blog post series (first post went up a couple weeks back). If you find any, please share in the comments.

Re: Social Media ROI Revisited: 4 Ways to Measure

Kevin Briody — Fri, 06 May 2011 08:41:02 -0000

Hi Jason,

Good suggestion, I hadn't actually been looking at that. The two obvious examples from Dell and Starbucks come to mind, and I know Microsoft has done some pretty interesting experiments with this on their dev tools a while back. Worth checking out. However I'd be surprised if they have a direct ROI number - likely more of a quasi-proxy ROI (to confuse things more). For example with Starbucks, I believe the spill stoppers came from their customer community - and while very handy, I think it would be hard to quantify exactly how much money that earned or saved (if any).

Again though, great point and it's something I'll go explore for a future post. Thanks for stopping by and for the comment!

Re: Social Media ROI Revisited: 4 Ways to Measure

Kevin Briody — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 11:22:10 -0000

Thanks Nolan!

Re: Social Media ROI Revisited: 4 Ways to Measure

Kevin Briody — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:29:09 -0000

Hi Barrett - Thanks for the comment and compliment. My goal with this post, and the rest in the series which should go up about once/week for a while, isn't to push one way to measure as better than others (too much of that floating around, I think) but rather share a broad overview of the topic with as much context as possible. I'm glad you found it helpful!

Re: 2011 Trending Topic: Social Media ROI

Kevin Briody — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:18:37 -0000

All good points. Sentiment (like share of voice, etc.) isn't a measure of real ROI by any stretch - raise revenues or lower costs, the only things that truly matter in term of generating positive ROI - as you note, however it's something many marketing organizations employ for their social media efforts where the marketing spend is significantly abstracted from trackable impact on revenue or costs. We're seeing a lot of it with clients - they know it's not "real" ROI, but look at it as "proxy" ROI that they know through other qual/quantitative research has a real impact on revenues or costs down the road.

For example, when I was at Microsoft one team I worked on (pre-social media :)) used customer satisfaction (actually Net SAT - top box minus bottom two, add 100 to make it more usable) as a proxy for ROI for all our community efforts - user groups, forums, events, etc. We knew from research that shifts up or down among certain levels of satisfaction had a measurable impact on revenue or costs (e.g. fewer support calls). Could we draw a straight line between a dollar invested in community marketing and a dollar realized in an ROI equation? No, but we could reasonably argue that our efforts were having an impact on Net SAT, which indirectly impacted the ROI equation.

Convoluted sure, but that's the fun marketing orgs deal with. :) Incidentally, I have a post up which mentions Proxy ROI (http://www.ignitesocialmedi.... A more detailed breakdown will come in a few weeks.

Thanks for raising some important points and keeping me thinking!

Re: 2011 Trending Topic: Social Media ROI

Kevin Briody — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 09:29:49 -0000

Hi Nichole, nice write up on the challenge of measuring social media ROI. Overall however I think your various points apply more to measuring the impact of an organization's *entire* social media effort, akin to how you'd measure overall branding efforts (re: your Coke '70s example). In that sense, yes, it's pretty complex stuff, a challenge to measure, and debatable how much positive ROI companies are probably seeing at this point.

However many companies I talk with are focused on measuring the ROI of specific social media activities- e.g. promotions and campaigns, customer service delivered through FB or Twitter, impact of specific social efforts on sentiment within a given channel, and so on. While still not overly simple to measure, for many of those efforts the measurement is just a reasonable extension of their existing marketing analytics efforts. And in lots of cases you'll find companies seeing measurably positive ROI for specific social media programs.

Looking at ROI all up across everything you are doing in social can be like trying to "boil the ocean" - you're just not going to get there and the thought of it might scare you off. Breaking it down into measurable chunks is a reasonable alternative.

Re: Has Engagement Been Rendered Meaningless as a Marketing Term?

Kevin Briody — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 13:59:16 -0000

HI Steve - Good to hear from you again as well, and thanks for the comment! Trying to get better about blogging consistently, if for no other reason than to keep the writing skills in tune.

Your bit.ly link by the way is broken - bit.ly apparently doesn't much like quotation marks in static URLs. I found the post though, and it's a good write up. I think "engagement" as an overused and abused term is just following the trend - pretty much every time we come up with a new term or concept, marketers and industry in general latch on to it, apply it indiscriminately, and render it meaningless. Think "Web 2.0" for example.

Engagement is a very useful term, but it just needs to be applied in the appropriate context and not just as an alternate name for "clicking the Like button."

Re: Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and NCL: A Social Media Comparison

Kevin Briody — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 10:23:22 -0000

Thanks for the kind comment!

Re: Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and NCL: A Social Media Comparison

Kevin Briody — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 10:22:39 -0000

Good observation Faraz, thanks for posting it. I agree that NCL deserves some credit here for cultivating an engaged fan base on Facebook - from the quick stats I pulled, they are seeing nice interaction rates on their own posts, and the fact that so many posts are from their fans is a definite positive. Thanks for reading and commenting!

Re: Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and NCL: A Social Media Comparison

Kevin Briody — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 10:20:32 -0000

Thanks for the heads up, I'll go take a look at them and maybe look at a broader group of cruise lines in a later post.

Re: Twitter brand pages? The value is in the stream

Kevin Briody — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 12:45:14 -0000

Exactly my thought - not likely all that useful, but if it's available for free (free being a key point), I imagine pretty much every eligible business will set one up.

Re: Social Media Tips for the New Marketing Grad

Kevin Briody — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 22:47:43 -0000

Hey David - glad you liked it! And yes, speaking of, let's definitely connect on email or Twitter and set something up.

Re: Engagement + Reasons to Share = Social Spread

Kevin Briody — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 11:00:21 -0000

Hi Gabriele - Thanks for stopping by and the comment. I'm not sure I agree with your first sentence, but I do agree on the rest of your comment. I think some of the most effective social media campaigns are ones that have a continuous interplay across marketing channels - a nice example is Wheat Thins current Twitter campaign in the US, mixing a surprise and delight element on Twitter with TV spots showing them doing nice things for Twitter followers. The TV spots pay off on the Twitter campaign, while also drawing attention and (presumably) traffic back to it.

There's also a great campaign by Tribal DDB out of LA I believe, for a low sodium rice, that does a great job mixing. My point though was definitely around your last sentence - a great social media campaign should be able to rely on organic spread to drive the bulk of traffic and participation over the long haul, and just use the traditional media as a supplement.

Re: Launch Your Cause Marketing Campaigns with Facebook Deals | Ignite Social Media

Kevin Briody — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 20:42:49 -0000

Hi Maria,
Thanks for stopping by and the great comment!