Dell Uses Social Media to Promote Brand

By Dave Fidlin

Once upon a time, not all that long ago, companies had one primary method of connecting with consumers, and that was through advertisements within the traditional forms of media: print publications (newspapers and magazines) and broadcast outlets (television and radio). The Internet, of course, has altered the playing field, and social media has become a prevalent method many companies have been using to reach out to new and existing customers.

Computer manufacturer Dell is among the companies that have been embracing social media to market new products. In fact, the company employs a chief blogger, Lionel Menchaca, who is responsible for a swath of sites under the banner name Direct2Dell.

DMB’s Dave Fidlin recently spoke with Menchaca, a 17-year Dell veteran, about social media, and how the method will continue to shape the company’s marketing and outreach efforts in the future.

Can you explain your role as chief blogger for Dell?
My role is to keep things moving with our external network of blogs. Direct2Dell now exists in five languages. Direct2Dell is our main corporate blog. Beyond it, we have 7 additional blogs. Our latest is Direct2Dell India, which focuses content on one of our fastest-growing countries in Dell’s business.

How is Dell marketing beyond established, traditional methods? Is the company getting the word out about its products through such avenues as Facebook and Twitter?
Yes, very much so. We have two main pages in Facebook — Facebook for Home, which focuses on product and service information for consumers and Facebook for Business, which focuses on reaching business customers there. We’ve been very active on Twitter as a company since 2007. We use Twitter in 4 main ways: 1) to keep our customers informed 2) to engage our customers from different areas of our business 3) to sell to our customers who opt in to sites like @DellOutlet and 4) to support our customers. We now offer 24/7 support to customers on Twitter via @DellCares. See Dell.com/twitter for more details

Aside from the two big companies — Facebook and Twitter — how else is Dell using social media?
Our core strategy in social media is to go where our customers are. That means we maintain a Dell presence in many other social sites like LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, SlideShare, Scribd and outside the US in Sina’s microblogging service. Beyond our own blogs, our forum site and all of our presence on outside social networks, we’re also focused on responding to comments on other places on the Web, like third-party user forums or blog sites.

Can you quantify, percentage-wise, how much of Dell’s marketing and outreach efforts go toward social media (versus traditional marketing) in 2010?
Our social media marketing budget is very small compared to our traditional marcom spend. Outside of some ad credits to drive awareness to the Dell Facebook for Home pages and drawing attention to some of our social media efforts via Dell.com, we spend very little to promote our social media activities.

Do you have an idea of what the ROI (rate of return) is for Dell’s social media efforts?
Yes, we do, and that’s an area where we are still working on. In the early days, we measured social media’s impact on customers’ perceptions and found a pretty strong correlation—at the low point in 2006, about 48 percent of what was said about Dell was negative. We were able to get that into the low 20+ percent range. Today, we’re able to track all the basic traffic numbers you would expect, but beyond traffic, we’re looking at things like reach, engagement, brand reputation and more. We’re also starting to use more of the same tools on the social media side that we’ve been using to measure Dell.com like Omniture. There’s still more work to be done, but we’re making progress.

Where, in your opinion, is social media heading into the future, and how is Dell going to stay on the pulse of this still-growing method of communication?
I really think over the next several years, social media will become an integral part of how companies in many industries will do business. To me it’s a natural progression to add from things like telephones, e-mail, the Internet, chat and beyond. Just like many other aspects of business, it all comes down to execution. In my view, companies who learn to use social media to really connect with their customers will have a huge fundamental advantage over companies who don’t.

Do you envision a day when social media might completely replace traditional marketing methods, or is that an extreme statement?
No way do I think that social media will ever replace traditional marketing methods. I do think that social media can and will continue to augment traditional marketing methods. I think social media will make companies smarter in how they market to and engage with customers, and I think that’s a good thing. Like many others in social media today, I’m glad to see the era of one-way push marketing giving way to something different – a place where customer feedback shapes the direction of the company.

A Good Chew: Orbitz’ Dirty Shorts Go Viral

By Ken Liebeskind

Product integration is the technique used to incorporate a sponsor’s product into branded videos, but the Wm Wrigley Jr. Company has gone over the top with the product inserts in the Orbit Gum Dirty Shorts, which debuted June 10. The Prom Date, a five minute video starring Will Arnett and Jason Bateman, incorporates the gum into the humorous video as it’s passed from the characters on numerous occasions, sparkling at one point to indicate an attitudinal change that prompts the parents to accept their daughter’s vile teacher as her prom date.

Actually the product integration in the dirty video is emblematic of the brand, which has been “cheeky and over the top on purpose,” according to Jeff Adkins, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Energy BBDO, the agency that has incorporated the dirty videos into its campaign for Orbit. “It breaks the fourth wall and allows you to have fun in the story, making the transition from a dirty situation to a clean one. It’s goofy fun.”

Prom Date is the first of three dirty videos for Orbit that will star Arnett, Bateman and other comedy stars. They are produced by Electus, Ben Silverman’s new media company that is partnering with celebrities to create branded content. Arnett and Bateman formed DumbDumb, the production company that created the Orbit videos.

The videos are playing at Youtube and Collegehumor.com, with 196,099 views recorded so far.

The dirty shorts are the first branded videos from DumbDumb and represent a driving force in contemporary marketing. “Major brands recognize that the media landscape is changing quickly and their success relies on their ability to expand well beyond traditional advertising,” said Drew Buckley, COO of Electus.

Adkins said Orbit gum is a favored brand among teens and young adults, so branded videos should be popular. “We’d been hoping to do something entertaining with Orbit for online content. We’ve done 25 TV commercials over the past nine years. This was the way to extend what we do in long form stories.”

SageRock

• Location: Akron, Ohio
• Number of Employees: 15
• Notable Clients: Cleveland Cavaliers, Carter Lumber, SKF
• URL: www.sagerock.com

Founded in 1999, SageRock is a digital marketing agency dedicated to helping brands engage their audiences online.  This is made possible with a suite of solutions that cover SEO, social media, behavioral targeting, usability and analytics.  Aside from being a digital marketing specialist, the company also provides planning, consultation, and training through SageRock Institute, which includes both paid and free courses.

Contel Bradford of DMB recently spoke with Sage Lewis, SageRock founder and president, to learn more about the company and get his thoughts on the ever-evolving digital space.

I noticed that you are very engaged in the digital marketing world? What fuels your passion for the business?
I believe that the digital revolution we all are participating in is the greatest transformation of media in the history of humanity. Because of tools like Twitter and blogs and YouTube, all riding on the back of the Internet, voices and perspectives never heard before are being heard worldwide.

This newfound power of the masses has required completely new levels of accountability and transparency in our governments and our corporations.  Simply put, communication is a good thing for everyone even though sometimes it looks messy.

What inspired SageRock Institute and what type of courses do you offer?
I love to teach. I am able to share my passion for my industry with many others through the medium of education. Also, I believe that there are many people who want to know how to successfully engage in the Internet marketing realm.

An important key to success in business is listening carefully to your customers and providing them with the services and products they want. SageRock Institute is trying to offer that solution.

With Twitter’s fast rise and the continuous dominance of Facebook, do you think brands should view social media as a must-have marketing tool?
No. Nothing is right for everyone. Doing social media correctly requires openness, transparency and a knack for engaging people on a personal level digitally. There are a lot of moving parts in social media. Doing it well is a rarity. Doing it poorly is common.

If your leadership and culture views social media skeptically and with suspicion you aren’t ready for it. Do something else.

What are your thoughts on Facebook’s Open Graph concept?  Do you think it will change the digital marketing landscape?
Information is meant to be free. Information evolves to openness. This is a law of human nature. There are many people that feel uncomfortable with Facebook’s sharing of information. Honestly, I’m uncomfortable with it. But ultimately this is where all information is heading.

People are uncomfortable with this because they see it happening. They should be more frightened of where their information is going without their knowledge. We used to live in a world where we hid our political and religious views. Today we live in a world where our personal lives are becoming available to everyone. The people giving the information need to be at peace with that. The people getting the information need to realize we are all human.

Some view social media as a threat to online search? As an SEO specialist, do you see it having an impact on how businesses approach optimization?
It isn’t a threat to online search. It is the evolution of online search. YouTube is now the second most important search engine. Social content is now becoming integrated within the search engines. The search marketing space is significantly more complicated than anything I dealt with in 1999.

As a search optimizer we have no choice but to force ourselves to learn and grow with this space. If we do, it offers incredible opportunity to be leaders and guides for the rest of the business community. To work in this space correctly you have no choice but to be a specialist.

Jenesys Group

• Location: Novi, Mich.
• Number of Employees: 20
• URL: www.jenesysgroup.com

Jenesys Group is a full service digital marketing agency located in Novi, Michigan, just outside of Detroit. An expert in Internet technology, the company offers services that range from web development and hosting to social media marketing and reputation management.  Jenesys Group lends it expertise to companies big and small, fit with solutions that enable brands to generate buzz and visibility online.

DMB’s Contel Bradford recently spoke with Nippa Shah, President of Jenesys Group, for some insight on digital marketing in the era of the social web.

Your portfolio of services is quite impressive. What integrated solution are your clients finding to be the most effective?
Social Media Marketing PLUS Search Engine Optimization. That’s because the combination is very powerful and the business owners “who get it”, want both.

Could you please tell our readers about your multi-cultural campaigns and the benefits of engaging ethnic audiences?
We have just begun offering these multi-cultural campaigns because data shows that multicultural audiences engage differently with brands. They also visit media that is more culturally relevant to them. There is no better ROI than when a targeted audience is attracted by messaging that is culturally relevant and appealing. We want to use the social networks to create that awareness and outreach for our customers and their brands.

How can aspiring businesses benefit from your licensee program?
Well, there are many who want to get started on an entrepreneurial journey but invariably besides the investment, it’s the “fear of the unknown” that stops them from venturing ahead. With our licensing program, we offer a lower-cost opportunity with lots of flexibility and hand-holding to prospects who wish to create a business. WE teach them tips and techniques so that they learn not only the subject matter but also the in’s and out’s of becoming a business owner. Too many people end up “buying a job” when they buy a franchise or a business. We teach our licensees how NOT to buy a job but to build a recurring revenue that is scalable with every year in a field that is exploding.

Do you see innovations such as Google Buzz and Promoted Tweets having a big impact on social media marketing?
Well, Google Buzz is yet another social networking platform for people to engage and brands to leverage. Promoted tweets will certainly be an interesting development and most of us in the field are waiting to see how they will impact the growth or decline of Twitter users.

Please explain why reputation management is more important than ever in the era of the social web?
Reputation management is huge because social networking allows anyone and everyone to post negative information online. All this is “user-generated” content that is not necessarily policed in most cases. To that end, anyone is an expert and anyone can create content that can potentially be damaging to a personal or professional reputation. Social networks provide “biased” content which cannot be controlled nor can it be policed in a very clear-cut manner. That’s why reputation management is a very important need in this age of social networking and popular sites like Facebook and Twitter.

AOL, Google: Searching for the Benjamins in Display Advertising

By Sheila Shayon

The first online advert ran on Oct. 24, 1994, on HotWired, the forerunner of Wired Magazine. It was 468 x 60 pixels and asked:

“Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.”

And we did. The click-through rate was 42 percent. (For the record, Global Network Navigator ran the banner two or three weeks earlier, but HotWired garnered the coverage.)

Today’s display ads are virtual micro-sites, replete with interactive, social elements, animation and video. An example of an award-winning rich media ad:

In three days, this campaign earned 170 million impressions, 50,000 clicks and 17,000 hours of brand engagement, according to Google.

JPMorgan analyst, Imran Khan, predicts an $8.3 billion display advertising economy in 2010. The name of the game in the digital space has moved from search to advertising as the big brands step further into open access platforms with suites of tools and metrics to make it easier for advertisers and agencies to create and ’self-serve’ display ads and track and measure their effectiveness.

DMB spoke with Jeff Levick, executive vice president, AOL Advertising; and Rachel Nearnberg, Global Communications & Public Affairs, Google, about their advertising platforms.

AOL
AOL recently launched a beta version of Advertising.com Ad Desk. Levick was on the floor of Ad Tech San Francisco, where he said AOL’s presence in the middle of the exhibition was attracting traffic and attention. “It’s the most exciting experience at AOL you can imagine. We’re still testing Advertising.com Ad Desk, and learning as we go. It’s a huge leap forward, as it opens up all the inventory we have as well as gives access to a massive number of properties across the web through Ad.com.”

The AOL network has 78 of AdAge’s Top 100 advertisers and 70 of comScore’s Top 100 publishers. ‘Lead-back targeting’ is a distinguishing feature for AOL’s new platform, which allows advertisers to target their ads, and once it’s seen, re-target the same ad across the web. AOL’s suite of tools allows for retargeting consumers who have:

• Visited your website (Advertiser LeadBack)
• Seen or clicked on your ad creative (Creative LeadBack)
• Visited a webpage that you’re sponsoring (Sponsorship LeadBack)
• NOT visited your website - a great way to reach more unique visitors (Reverse LeadBack)
• Searched for a relevant word or phrase on AOL Search (SearchBack)

Formats include rich media, video and widgets, and AOL Advertising’s ad serving platform, ADTECH, manages campaigns across multiple platforms for web publishers, ad networks, agencies and advertisers.

“Transparency and control are the future of online advertising,” Levick says. “Providing clients with a greater level of personalized control over digital marketing campaigns is paramount as organizations continue to look for innovative ways to promote their brands and evaluate their ROI when planning campaigns.”

The build-out of Advertising.com Ad Desk over the last 10 months has deep-dived into technology to create the ‘lead-back targeting’ capabilities. Ads uploaded by the users are virus scanned and monitored as they run, as well as reviewed for ad spec compliance, quality and content.

Next up, Version 2 will deliver increased Reporting and Insights tools and metrics. “We’re connecting the advertising experience to the publishing side of the house. Church and state are talking,” Levick added.

Google
We all heard Eric Schmidt’s prediction that display advertising would be Google’s next billion-dollar business. According to Nearnberg, “In such a fragmented media landscape today, with users on social media sites, e-commerce, blogs or online games, the challenge is where best to reach people and how to tailor ads across thousands of sites and track performance.”

According to Google data, US users spend 12 hours online per week, about 32 percent of their media time. But online advertising comprises only 13.6 percent of US advertising spend. “Scale and reach are the key challenges, and serving display ads is a more sophisticated and complicated process than search,” Nearnberg says. “Our Content Network enables keyword, contextual targeting between ads and content.”

The Google Content Network serves hundreds of billions of ad impressions to more than 500 million Internet users worldwide every month. It includes several Google properties including Google Finance and YouTube, and reaches 100 countries, with ads in 20 languages. Major publishers include New York Times, LinkedIn, Univision, About.com, and Food Network. “94 of the top 100 Ad Age advertisers have run campaigns on Google Content Network - display not search,” added Nearnberg.

For smaller businesses, Google’s Display Ad Builder, offers designed templates that enable the creation and distribution of an ad in minutes. The goal is to make display advertising as simple as search, those functions being complementary. “20,000 advertisers using Display Ad Builder are first-time users. We are adding the science of search to display advertising,” commented Nearnberg.

According to Comscore, “average lift of search activity when display was added to a campaign was 155 percent.”  Douglas Anmuth, a Barclay’s Capital media analyst, predicts that display ads will account for $1 billion in revenue in 2010, or about 4 percent of Google’s total sales.

Experts agree that the gold rush towards display advertising is still early stage. Predictions for the advertising landscape in the near future include: data will be more valuable than awards; ROI will be the metric of success; engagement will trump creativity; and the technology deep dive will continue - with those who can afford to own their own - in the driver’s seat.

In April 2005, DoubleClick released a white paper, “The Decade in Online Advertising (1994-2004) - Online Advertising.” The summary included: “Advertisers still lag consumers in their adoption of digital media. As broadband reaches more American homes, as entertainment companies develop more digital content, and as televisions, mobile phones and other devices further blur the distinction between “online” and “offline,” all advertisers will be forced to adapt faster to the new media environment or struggle to stay relevant.”

Five years later, the struggle continues - but advertisers are adapting faster, listening more to their consumers, and making online engagement a more worthwhile endeavor.

Jenn-Air cooks up webisode series to promote new kitchens

By Ken Liebeskind

What’s cooking online these days? How about 11 new webisodes promoting Jenn-Air kitchens starring a celebrity chef and contestants in a cooking competition.

In the Kitchen webisodes debuted March 26, were created and produced by RedLever and star Tori Ritchie, the celebrity chef, who has hosted Ultimate Kitchens on the Food Network and cooking segments on the CBS Early Show. Ritchie introduces the contestants and oversees their preparation of gourmet meals that are served to their special guests. Viewers vote on their favorite contestant, who will win a Jenn-Air kitchen prize. One of the viewers will win another Jenn-Air prize.

The webisodes run five to seven minutes each and all 11 play on the site simultaneously.

Richard Shore, RedLever’s chief operating officer, says the webisodes were shot at a Los Angeles studio and follow a standard episodic format structure: “Act one introduces the candidates, the second act is a set piece in the Jenn-Air kitchen and the third is in a dining room where the contestants throw the occasion on an intimate table setting.”

RedLever pitched the idea for the webisode series to Digitas, Jenn-Air’s agency, which is using them as an online element of a campaign that includes magazine ads and live events.

The webisodes offer brand integration, with the meals prepared in a Jenn-Air kitchen with Jenn-Air product mentions from Ms. Ritchie. The scripts were written by RedLever with guidance from Digitas.

Digitas was drawn to the webisodes by a 25 million per episode audience delivery guarantee by the Adconion Media Network, RedLever’s parent company, which runs an ad network with more than 2,000 sites. The webisodes run at the home site and in banners at sites in the Adconion network. Digitas selected sites that behaviorally and demographically fit the Jenn-Air target, according to Justin Newby, vice president group director at Digitas. “We’re not just throwing it into the air and hoping it works, there’s a guaranteed performance in place,” he says. “We hope as many people as possible watch the whole series, so it plays out like TV programming.”

The 25 million isn’t a viewer number, but an impression number, he notes.

“We have a proprietary ad server and in-house technology that provides us with the targeting capability to identify the right audience. We use third-party data and Comscore overlays to look for the appropriate sites within our network,” adds Nick Higgins, Adconian’s director of global video.

The webisodes are the key element of an online campaign that also includes Flash and rich media units at HouseBeautiful.com, BonAppetit.com, Epicurious.com, PointClickHome.com, Kitchens.com, FoodandWine.com and Yahoo. Magazine ads have appeared in national and regional publications, including House Beautiful, Food & Wine and Texas Monthly. Live events including the Architectural Digest Home Design Show and the Pebble Beach Food & Wine event have also been used. “We’re looking for ways to create the brand experience and engage the target who loves to cook and entertain,” Newby says. “It’s a 360-degree program and the webisodes are the most important component.”

Adconion declined to discuss the specific sites or the number of sites that will guarantee the 25 million impressions. The number of webisode impressions that have been served during the first weeks of the campaign are unreported. “We do not disclose campaign results, but the results are positive,” Newby said.

The webisodes will continue to play through 2010 with a contest winner announced in July.

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