Social Marketing Is Changing.

Are You Keeping Up?Just as marketers are starting to get comfortable

with social, the channel is evolving further.

Sponsored by

3: Introduction

4: Social Ad Spend Is on the Rise

5: 5 Big Changes in Social Media

6: 5 Social Media Marketing Myths Debunked

8: Shedding Light on Dark Social

9: 3 Tips for Future-Proofing Social Strategies

11: 5 Executives to Emulate on Social Media

12: B2B Companies Can Find Social Marketing Success

13: The Era of Free Social Media Is at an End

14: IFC Fine-Tunes Its Social Programming Strategy

16: Say Aloha to Social Marketing

18: Observations from the Twittersphere

19: Social Media Madness [Infographic]

Social media marketing is clearly here to stay, but the social platforms themselves remain somewhat transient. Shifting user demographics, ever-changing rules and policies for marketing on the platforms, and a growing din of marketing voices crowding the sites are among the challenges marketers are facing today when trying to reach custom-ers via social. But social marketing is popular because it works: 58% of marketers surveyed by Business 2 Community say that their social media efforts have generated leads.

The collection of articles in this eBook discuss how to tackle some of the biggest challenges and changes in social, and examine tactics that marketers can use to future-proof their social strategies. We’ll also debunk some of social media marketing’s most pervasive myths. Plus, we showcase the success strategies of several highly social brands, as well as cite executives who exemplify social media etiquette worth emulating. —Perry Simpson

Rising levels of mobile usage on the part of consumers and new target-ing options from Facebook radical-ly drove up demand and prices for social media in 2014, according to Social.com’s latest quarterly bench-mark report. Social.com is the so-cial campaign component of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Facebook last year rolled out the Facebook Audience Network, a new right-hand-side ad, multi-prod-uct ads, and reach and frequency campaigns. By the end of Q3 2014, 1.1 billion of Facebook’s 1.3 billion monthly users were accessing the site via mobile devices, as were 83% of daily users. Those two fac-

tors were the primary movers of CPMs that rose from 46 cents in the first quarter to $1.54 in Q3.

The CPM rise was justified by click-through rates that grew in kind from 0.18% in Q1 to 0.60% in Q3, plus a cost-per-click that held steady at 26 cents across the nine-month pe-riod, according to Social.com’s anal-ysis of ad data covering more than two trillion ad impressions from Jan-uary through September.

The rise in spending levels proved much more severe in select verticals. CPMs for clothing and fashion mar-keters went from 22 cents to $3.20 over that brief time span. Technolo-gy company spends increased from 50 cents to $2.66, and entertainment companies from $1.20 to $3.39.

Spending has also moved in tan-dem with Facebook’s growing mobile audience. Its daily active users grew from 374 million at the beginning of 2013 to 705 million in September 2014. Social.com users’ overall mobile ad spends, meanwhile, increased 239% year-over-year.

“The overall social advertising space was expected to grow by 27% in 2014, but our data suggests that for certain sectors like mobile, vid-eo, and the integration of first-party data, social advertising is growing at a rate far greater than that,” says Chris Jacob, director of product marketing for Social.com.

Social Ad Spend Tripled Last Year

Demand drove up prices markedly. Facebook’s CPM went from 46 cents in Q1 to $1.54 in Q3, says a Social.com study. By Al Urbanski

2015 will be a year of major change for marketers—especially those focused on social media. Much of what we knew about the space just five—or even two—years ago has pretty much been altered or is downright void today. So, in an effort to keep up with the pace of the social evolution, I’ve highlighted what I feel are the five biggest changes in social attitudes, behaviors, and plat-forms. Feel free to comment, and tell me some of the changes you’re seeing.

No. 1 Marketers are paying the price—literally.In social’s fledgling years, we learned that organic content is king; that is, un-til Facebook’s forever-changing algo-rithms made it more difficult to reach audiences organically. Today, brands must pay to play. And the price of those ads will likely continue to rise.

Adding insult to injury, Facebook an-nounced last year that it will curtail posts that seem too promotional. So, in the coming months companies will need to

increase their Facebook ads (and bud-gets) to help offset the shorter reach of their unpaid (organic) posts. That con-tent will need to be less self-serving and more consumer-focused.

No. 2 Yes, most everyone is still on Facebook, but more people are using multiple sites.Let me be clear: Facebook is not dead, as some bloggers continue to proclaim. In fact, Facebook remains the most popular social media platform, with 70% of its users on the site daily. The notable change, however, is that more people are using multiple social media sites. Instagram, for example, increased its users by about 9% from 2013 to 2014, and even surpassed the number of Twitter users in December, reaching more than 300 million. Compare that figure with Twitter’s 285 million users.

No. 3 Content on social media is more visual than ever.Sight, sound, and motion are the pillars

of engagement on social. Photo posts simply perform better than text-based posts. In fact, Web analytics company Kissmetrics reports that photos get 53% more likes, 104% more comments, and 84% more click-throughs on links than text-based Facebook posts. A collec-tion of photos is even better. According to marketing software company Wish-pond, photo albums get 180% more en-gagement than the average post.

No. 4 The Internet of Things is ap-pearing on social.Everything seems to be smarter these days; smartphones, smart watches, smart fitness bracelets, smart beds—you name it. Cheap sensors have led to an explosion of smart devices. Many of these devices are sending push notifications to Facebook, Twit-ter, and other social networks, a trend sure to continue in 2015.

No. 5 Shopping (finally) comes to social media.Last summer Facebook and Twitter began to test buy buttons. Strategists for both platforms hope that someday the feature will encourage impulse shoppers, on a massive scale, to pur-chase everything from sneakers to furniture. Also in the not-so-distant future, these social sites could keep a percentage of those retail sales. Could these sites be the next eBay?

5 Big Changes in Social Media

The social media landscape continues to change for marketers—at a rapid pace. With no signs of slowing down, here’s a brief breakdown

of some of the biggest shifts on the social scene. By Natasha Smith

It wasn’t so long ago that some pundits deemed social media little more than a millennial fad—one with only a modest potential for return, if any; thus, unworthy of any real marketing investment. Currently, however, there are 1.8 billion users of social networks, according to Statista; and at least 74% of online adults use social

networks, Pew Research finds. Data like this has many marketers reconsidering their positioning and priorities in terms of social. But despite its increasingly uni-versal adoption, social remains the most ambiguous of all market-ing channels, which is one reason so many myths on social media marketing abound.

Here, experts expound on five of the most common, egregious so-cial myths and present other, more effective steps to take.

Myth No. 1: People who love your brand on social are the best advocates.“I hate to break it to marketers, but this is not always the case,” says Marco Hansell, CEO of social mar-keting platform Speakr. “Advocates can quickly become white noise if people expect them to talk about your brand every single day.”

Marketers spend a fair share of their time and resources to identi-fy, empower, and leverage brand advocates on social media—and for good reason. Today’s consumer, however, is increasingly sensitive to advertising and marketing mes-sages. Shoppers want messages that are more genuine and less prepared. It’s important to note the difference between a brand advo-cate and an endorsed ambassa-dor; consumers sure do.

Myth No. 2: Posting and sharing content is enough.Part of the formula for social media success rests in, well, being social. Simply sharing brand content does not constitute interaction. Social

5 Social Media Marketing Myths

DebunkedNot all social media best practices are good choices for marketers;

here’s a breakdown of five common social myths. By Perry Simpson

networks are more than alterna-tive homepages.

“Engagement is the single most important use of social media. As a brand, you not only need to share content, but you also need to engage with your audience by responding to their comments, proposing questions, and estab-lishing a rapport with key influ-encers, so it’s visible to your lis-teners,” says John Donnelly, senior vice president of global sales and marketing at social intelligence company Crimson Hexagon. “Re-lating to your social audience can be the difference between a brand’s successful public percep-tion and a failed one.”

Myth No. 3: Respond to every-thing in social.Brands should make every effort to engage in a two-way conversation with their digital following, but that doesn’t mean brands should reply or respond to every comment. “One thing that I think brands mistake in social is that they need to hop on ev-ery real-time moment, trend, or cus-tomer complaint,” Speakr’s Hansell says. “While engaging with your au-dience is key, knowing when to en-gage and when to stay out is the art of thinking of your brand just like a normal person. We don’t respond to everything people email us, nor do we hop into every trending top-ic trying to force our own relevancy into it.”

Myth No. 4: Companies must have a presence on every social channel.

Each social platform has its own posting and sharing etiquette. Users even comport themselves differently depending on the plat-form. So, brands should be care-ful and strategic when expanding their social presence.

“While a social presence is im-portant, hitting every channel is not always necessary and often not strategic. Across the host of well-known social networks—e.g. Facebook, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube—there are marked audience and platform dif-ferences,” says Meg Bear, group VP, Oracle Social Cloud. “Not every or-ganization or brand translates well across every social network.”

Myth No. 5: Only professionals can create marketing content.“No one knows customers better than customers themselves; so, why do marketers think they’re the only ones who can create engaging content?” asks Marc Cowlin, senior director of content marketing at digital technology company Thismoment.

Cowlin underscores the ris-ing growth and popularity of us-er-generated content. One of the key takeaways from the Ice Buck-et Challenge craze, for example, is the method which the cam-paign managed to go viral: the users. “Instead of focusing entire-ly on generating new collateral,” he says, “marketers can leverage powerful user-generated content that’s already available, or engage customers to create new content for a campaign.”

“Not every organization or brand translates well across every social network.”

Tracking Web traffic through search engines or a social network, such as Facebook or Twitter, is fairly straight-forward. Through methods like cook-ies, marketers often can track the sources of their Web traffic.

“It’s important for marketers to know the source of traffic and referrals be-cause of two things,” says Niels Kvaavik, director of paid media services at Sprin-klr, a social management platform. “One, we need to be able to attribute which traffic source is leading to the best re-sults. Two, knowing the source of traffic referrals helps us figure which sources drive long-term customer value.”

There is, however, one major blind spot: under-the-radar social sharing, i.e. dark social.

Dark social, a term coined by The Atlantic in 2012, is traffic and informa-tion that’s hard to measure because it’s information that’s shared on chat, via messaging apps, and in email; it’s outside of that basic core of the social ecosystem, and 36% of the time it’s on mobile. The Atlantic reports that most social referrals are done via dark so-cial and, as a result, are downright dif-ficult to measure.

In fact, recent data shows that about 72% of all shares happen when users copy, paste, and then share a link through email, apps, and on chat. Compare that to 25% of sharing that’s happening on Facebook and Twitter—combined. Flat out, dark social is a major obstruction for

many companies trying to understand their entire audience.

“The largest impact that dark social is having on marketers is that it’s skewing their results,” says Mark Josephson, CEO of Bitly, a popular URL-shortening ser-vice. Josephson says that analytics tools too often report dark social as either unknown or direct traffic—erroneous re-ports that can cause marketers to dump resources into the wrong channels.

“It can cause marketers to put too

much emphasis on some channels that they mistakenly believe are working better than others,” Josephson contin-ues. “If you know where your traffic is coming from—and what channels work and which don’t—inevitably you will do more with the channels that work; you will test different creative; you will re-fine your spend; you can change your landing pages; you can tweak your messaging because you know one channel’s performing over another.”

However, is the goal of measuring an entire audience realistic?

“Absolutely,” Sprinklr’s Kvaavik

says, regarding whether marketers can activate dark social for their cam-paigns. “The good news is that tech-nology is getting better. It’s also about data accuracy in addition to attribu-tion. As data accuracy gets better and as marketers hone their techniques—in other words, figuring out what tools to use and how to attribute value to each of the channels—we’ll have much bet-ter data visibility and transparency.”

Kvaavik says that the value of Web analytics is diminishing and the value of app analytics continues to rise. He insists the reason for that is simple: “People spend more time inside apps than they do on the Web.”

Josephson says that to activate dark social, marketers must start with an aggressive plan to measure every-thing. Already, some marketers are getting around these in-app, private chats by adding trackable codes to short URLs that are copied and pasted into messages shared on dark social.

“Start by tracking what you do know. Then learn what portion is com-ing from places that you either don’t know or simply can’t explain,” Joseph-son concludes. “Then use third-party, independent tools to troubleshoot, fix bugs, and follow every link back to its source. If you’re not measuring per-formance then you can’t unlock any-thing; you can’t improve anything or grow. Start innovating, and that’s when you’ll be able to activate dark social.”

Shedding Light on Dark Social

A huge portion of valuable analytics remains untapped. Analysts reveal how marketers can unlock the potential of

dark social. By Natasha Smith

Strategists often discuss social media as yet another channel for marketing and customer engage-ment, and indeed it is. Digital cul-ture, however, is highly iterative, and social media is no exception. Marketers need to be nimble and adaptive with their social messag-ing and campaigns, and they must also recognize how social media has reshaped marketing commu-nication on a macro level.

Here are three ways to future-proof your social media strategies.

Explore collaborative commerceAccording to a 2013 Nielsen study, 84% of consumers trust word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family, making word-of-mouth one of the most power-ful marketing tactics this side of Twitter. With consumers wield-ing such considerable marketing

power, it stands to reason that in-tegrating shoppers into the day-to-day business operations could prove invaluable. It certainly did for AirBnB and Uber.

“When you look at the Ubers of the world you have to look beyond them simply being a new technol-ogy. [These companies] have insti-tuted a whole new business model that’s built on collaboration with consumers,” says Brian Kristofek, president and CEO at marketing agency Upshot. “If you think of [Uber] as a business model, it pro-vides a framework for innovation,” Upshot’s VP of marketing intelli-gence Liz Aviles adds.

In addition to more contempo-rary examples such as AirBnB or Uber, Amazon, AutoTrader, and eBay represent longstanding proof of the success businesses can achieve when they open up to con-sumers. Companies founded on principles of open source technol-ogy, such as Android or Wikipedia, are poignant examples of a para-digm shift sweeping through mod-ern business; one where brands acknowledge that consumers trust each other, and innovative market-ers make it a priority to encourage consumer-to-consumer behavior.

3 Tips for Future-Proofing Social Strategies

Few rules apply to social media marketing for very long, but these tactics aren’t likely to fade out anytime soon. By Perry Simpson

“[This] is all enabled by this new social economy, and brought together by technology,” Kris-tofek says.

Target omnicultural demographicsMillennials have shown themselves to be politically and socially inclu-sive. Marketers who wish to connect with this increasingly influential group also should consider inclu-sive practices. “Our population has grown more diverse. As marketers and brands, we need to talk about shared cultural trends, not specific demographics,” Kristofek says. Kris-tofek advises marketers to extend this idea beyond mere messages and execute omnicultural market-

ing through online and TV ads. “You have to show the diversity of the population,” he says.

Embrace authenticity and transparencyBrands must consider that the consumers who are driving this digital age grew up during the heydays of TV ads and mass marketing, resulting in a discon-nect with marketing. “Over time, brands have gotten almost too shiny for consumers,” Kristofek says. “When brands are stripped down and true to themselves, that [authenticity and simplicity] res-onates with people better than when [brands] overpromise.”

Transparency is among social

media’s most appealing aspects. People love to watch their friends’ lives unfold through Facebook or catch pithy puffs of personal-ity on Twitter. Though the rules of engagement slightly differ on each platform, consumers look for transparency throughout the so-cial Web.

“[Marketers] have talked about the next evolution of transpar-ency for the last few years,” Up-shot’s Aviles says. “What we’re seeing on social media shows how important it is for brands to be more personal and human in their messaging on social chan-nels. Regardless of what category your business is in, this is what consumers are looking for.”

“If you think of [Uber] as a business model, it provides a framework for innovation,” says Up-shot’s VP of marketing intelligence, Liz Aviles.

Brand social media accounts will likely continue to rank among the most important tools for success-ful businesses as we move further into the 21st century. I assume most marketers would agree, giv-en the pervasive presence of Twit-

ter’s “Follow” plug-in on myriad company websites. However, mar-keters—especially those C-level or higher—can sometimes underesti-mate the power of their personal social media accounts. CEO.com reports that 68% of Fortune 500

CEOs have absolutely zero pres-ence on social networks; nearly the exact same figure from the same study last year.

These figures, to me, are down-right jarring. Imagine such num-bers in 2020, which will certainly be well into the next phase of digi-tal maturation. It behooves modern marketers to begin to carve out their social niche now. Should they refuse to change, marketers run the risk of alienating themselves—and their brands—from reaching a rapidly expanding demographic that’s grown up with and continues to interact in a digital environment; one where brands, celebrities, fam-ily, and friends are equally a simple Twitter handle or hashtag away.

Here are five examples of active and engaged executives using so-cial media.

Mark Benioff CEO of Salesforce

Phil Spencer Head of Xbox

Shuhei Yoshida President of Worldwide Studios at Sony

Marissa Mayer CEO and President of Yahoo

Russell Simmons Cofounder of Def Jam

5 Executives toEmulate on

Social MediaManaging a personal social account will only get more important

as the digital world matures. These digitally savvy execs are setting a fine example. By Perry Simpson

Sure, plenty of B2B companies use social channels to engage with customers. But why aren’t more of those companies talking about social revenue goals? That’s the question Edmund Optics’ Kirsten Bjork-Jones, director of global mar-keting communications, and Geof-frey Forman, marketing analyst, posed during their session at the 2014 MeritDirect Co-op.

The reason for their rhetorical query: At Edmund Optics, revenue is an essential component of its social strategy. The maker of optics, imaging, and photonics technology defines B2B social marketing success in several other ways, as well, including driving site traffic and identifying brand cham-pions. Attaining this success starts with providing customer service, thought leadership, and other content. Edmund Optics’ customers are hungry for con-tent, Forman said, so that’s where the company puts most of its social focus. Being responsive to queries is another success strategy. “If we don’t respond quickly to customers [on social], why would they think we could get them their product quickly,” he said.

Social success for the company also encompasses monitoring com-petitors and its industry, recruiting and corporate culture, and creating

a brand personality. “Social isn’t just about engaging customers,” Bjork-Jones said, adding that by monitoring the competition and the industry the marketing team can see the health of industry, as well as opportunities; for example, customers complaining they can’t get something they wish they could get. In terms of creating

a brand personality, Edmund Op-tics has launched initiatives such as its #geekyfriday and #biothursday on Facebook and an annual wacky holiday video that customers enjoy enough to share.

The company’s zombie-themed holiday video from two years ago gar-nered 5,000 views and got picked up by industry publications, one of which forwarded the email to its subscribers.

So how does this translate into rev-enue? Edmund Optics gets 10% of its referral traffic from social, versus 3%

from the top three industry sites. Its Facebook page provides 30% of that social referral traffic, and LinkedIn provides 41%—based in large part on Edmund Optics’ use of targeted spon-sored posts.

Bjork-Jones and Forman shared seven tips for ensuring B2B social marketing success:

Don’t be a quitter. Be all-in with social. If you don’t post regularly it re-flects poorly on your brand.

Dedicate resources. You need to interact daily on social, especially if customers are coming to you with ser-vice-related queries.

Create measurable goals. Not all objectives have to be revenue-driv-en; goals such as shares and content downloads also can be meaningful.

Be unique. Develop a personality that’s true to your brand image and carries across channels.

Play well with others. Silos are old school. Integrate social marketing into your marcom mix.

Know your customers. Under-standing your audience will allow you to select the channels that make the most sense for your business.

Rule, with flexibility. Develop a social policy, and set of guidelines that employees can follow to ensure they’re on brand and on message.

Can B2B Companies Find Social Marketing

Success? Uh, Yeah.Edmund Optics took its quirky corporate persona to social channels,

and customers gave the company a second look. By Ginger Conlon

Eric Weaver, chief social officer for Interpublic Group Mediabrands, de-scribes himself as a cheerleader for social media and the great value it can bring to brands. But this past year the cheering went out of the marketing crowd concerning social media’s im-pact on their bottom lines.

“There is a massive crisis of faith in the practice of social media market-ing. We’re seeing fear, uncertainty, and doubt everywhere. My clients are call-ing up angry, wanting to know what we’re going to do about it. Organic reach dropped to zero for some of our clients,” Weaver told a group of bev-erage industry marketers at the 2014 eBev Conference in Atlanta.

Social media triumphs by Walmart and Dove, and events such as Oprah going on Twitter, fueled the excitement about the channel in the marketing community, Weaver said—until this year.

“That’s when the shiny vehicle called social media stalled and all the money put into this vehicle materially came to a halt,” he said. “This whole idea of so-cial media being free…well, it’s not. And it’s come to an end, in my opinion.”

CFOs and CMOs, Weaver said, are asking how they can justify the costs of social teams and listening platforms against what they spend in more tra-ditional channels like TV and radio. The stuff hit the fan in 2012, when all brands got on the social train and ig-nited an explosion of posting. Reach of beverage industry messages plum-meted to 5% on average, meaning 95% of them were not being read by brand fans, let alone the universe. “You only catch them when they come online or when they refresh and your post rises to the top,” Weaver said.

But supercharging social media with paid media makes the matur-

ing marketing vehicle run like it did back in 2010. As an example, Weaver showed a table of posts an IPG agency made for a tire brand before and af-ter boosting with paid ads. One went from 2,000 opens to 40,000, another from about 5,000 to nearly 900,000.

“Facebook has clearly changed the game to where you have to spend money. The only way you’re going to get seen is by boosting your social with paid,” Weaver argued. “You have to do this, end of story. It’s now a requirement.”

The key to selling this to senior management is establishing an earned media value (EMV) for social. Weaver said that IPG has been honing a system over the past four years that assigns dollar values to social that allows com-parison of social media campaigns with more traditional media methods. “EMV has been used by agencies for years. When measured correctly, it’s a good linga franca to use in budget meetings,” Weaver said. “What would I have to pay for social versus TV and radio? Then I have a happy CFO who can compare apples to apples.”

Weaver noted that more and more outside vendors are developing more exacting valuation systems that assign attribution via coupon codes, bea-cons, and other marketplace technol-ogies. “We’re getting there,” he said.

The Era of Free Social Media Is at an End,

Says IPG Social ChiefBoosting earned media with paid media has become a requirement,

Eric Weaver tells a group of beverage industry marketers. By Al Urbanski

Isn’t it funny how blasts from the past have a way of working them-selves back into modern society (the jumpsuit, anyone)? The same happens in marketing. Take tele-vision, for instance. Although TV is a more traditional channel, marketers continue to apply its best practices, such as program-ming, to more modern mediums like social.

To illustrate this point, consider the following case from AMC Net-works’ cable brand IFC.

Colin Moore, VP of digital me-dia and alternative content for IFC, describes the channel as a provid-er of “smart” and “edgy” comedy. Home to Emmy-nominated shows like Portlandia, IFC introduced a new program, Garfunkel and Oates, to its television lineup on August 7.

In the show, comedians Riki Lindhome (Garfunkel) and Kate Micucci (Oates) sing silly songs about life’s ups and downs. Moore

knew that the duo already had a prominent following before the program’s debut. Still, he needed a way to notify other audienc-es about the show and convince them to tune in. So, he decided to pursue three audiences: Garfun-kel and Oates fans, IFC followers (who are predominantly 18- to 49-year-old males), and people who indicate that they enjoy sim-ilar comedic videos and websites on social media, such as through Facebook likes.

“If you have great content, you can make an impact beyond your social following,” Moore says. “You [need to] take that content and think about and strategize, ‘What do I need to do with this content? How do I need to treat it to turn people on these platforms?’”

Playing off of the brand’s “Al-ways On, Slightly off” tagline, IFC launched a campaign centered on social programming. The strategy required IFC to generate specific

content for particular platforms, similar to a TV network, that would enable social audiences to learn about the show and share the con-tent with others.

Aligning with Garfunkel and Oates’ comedic camaraderie, IFC scheduled the campaign around National Friendship Day, held on August 3. So from July 28 to August 11, IFC created eight “V-cards”, or video performance cards, for Gar-funkel and Oates’ most popular dit-ties for people to share with their friends. For instance, people could share the “Pregnant Women Are Smug” music video with friends who were expecting and the “29/31” clip with people who are nervous about entering their 30s.

Working with social buying platform Adaptly, IFC then promot-ed the videos on social media. The brand tweeted animated GIFs on Twitter, used promoted tweets to boost them, and created video ads for Facebook. Adaptly and IFC se-lected these content forms based on each platform’s auto-play ca-pabilities, Adaptly President Sean O’Neal explains.

“[With] IFC, [a] big media brand, everything is based around video,” O’Neal says. “So, the strategy that

IFC Channels Social Programming to

Promote a New ShowThe results from the comedic channel’s campaign are anything

but laughable. By Elyse Dupre

we developed had to incorporate sight, sound, and motion as much as possible.... Social advertising is now really, as a best practice, incorporating rich media with re-sounding success.”

IFC had been working with Adaptly for about a year prior to the campaign, Moore says, to fine-tune its social programming strat-egy. “You can’t just throw anything up and you can’t just buy an ad and place an image up there,” Moore says. “You really need to think about the audi-ence—who you’re going after [and] what it is that they like already. What they like is con-tent and content that was actually made for that platform.”

In addition to the GIF or video content, each V-card ad included the official Garfunkel and Oates hashtag, a link to the V-cards landing page, and calls-to-ac-tion inviting people to tune in to the show’s premiere. IFC continued to run the campaign after the August 7 debut to account for viewers who may watch the premiere on DVR or on-demand and adjusted its messaging accordingly.

According to Moore, IFC decid-ed to advertise the show on social networks because the brand had experienced success with pro-moting its programs via Facebook and Twitter before. And it looks like the second time proved to be

fruitful, as well.IFC accumulated 17,000 new

Twitter followers and experienced an increase in account growth of more than 23%. What’s more, the brand garnered close to 336,000 video views (with a completion rate of more than 95%) on Facebook, reaching a $0.07 cost-per-view rate, O’Neal says. The Facebook videos generated close to 32,000 likes, more than 57,400 shares, and a

7.52% click-through rate. O’Neal primarily attributes the

success of the campaign to the timing of it (linking it to National Friendship Day) and the mix of rich media. He also says that leveraging a combination of paid and organic marketing is “absolutely essential today” to reach beyond brands’ existing followers and stand out in the feed.

“Paid media within social, at this point, is very tightly coupled with organic,” he says.

Moore admits, however, that it’s difficult to measure whether the so-cial ads actually led people to tune into the show, aside from the peo-ple who were live-tweeting during the program. Still, the campaign’s success has inspired Moore to continue to enhance IFC’s social programming strategy, as well as include more social components.

In terms of learnings, Moore says that the campaign reinforced

the importance of de-signing content around the channel. “The les-son for us is don’t take your content and your video and just put it out there,” Moore says. “Really take that [con-tent] and reformat it for each platform. Think about what people want to pay attention to [and] what people are consuming, [then] reformat accordingly.”

But before brands can promote their con-tent, they have to create

content that audiences want to con-sume. And the way to do that, O’Ne-al says, is ensuring that both the brand and the consumer benefit.

“The secret to successful con-tent marketing and the key to earned media is value exchange,” O’Neal says. “[It’s] providing some-thing that actually goes beyond just promoting your product or your brand, but gives something to the consumer of value. When the consumer has value, you’ve creat-ed a remarkable experience.”

Sad stories—even succinct nar-ratives—sometimes have happy endings. Just ask the sales team responsible for booking luxury weddings at the Hyatt Regency Maui Resort and Spa. Even better, ask Josh and Todd.

Last October Josh and Todd got hitched in Hawaii on the breathtak-

ing grounds of the Hyatt Regency Maui as part of their reward for winning a Facebook photo contest the resort offered with the help of Offerpop, a digital marketing soft-ware-as-a-service platform.

From a strategic perspective, the contest was a success: Hyatt Re-gency Maui created the program to

generate wedding-sales leads (80 of them) and to raise brand awareness.

On a personal level, the story was heart-warming. “When I pro-posed to Todd…this past January, he was so thrilled—and immedi-ately sad,” Josh writes in the entry form. “Living in Arizona, marriage isn’t an option for us.” For sever-al years the couple “watched as state after state struck down bans against gay marriage.” Arizona was not among those states, but Hawaii was—thanks to the Aloha State’s Marriage Equality Act of 2013, which built on previous al-lowances of same-sex civil unions by granting the legal green light to same-sex marriage.

Challenge and choiceHyatt Regency Maui is well-known for its allure as a destination for family vacations, corporate re-treats, and romantic getaways. But Marketing Manager Jessica Kapoor and her team wanted to increase awareness of the resort as a destination for large and lux-urious weddings. Specifically, she wanted to generate more quali-fied leads to share with her sales colleagues responsible for book-ing weddings.

Hyatt Regency Maui Says ‘I Do’ to Social Marketing

The resort proposes its site as a wedding destination to prospective customers through a targeted social sweepstakes. By Eric Krell

Given Hyatt’s loyal Facebook fol-lowing (where people also enjoy posting pictures of their engage-ments and weddings) and her desire to reach a broad audience, Kapoor opted for a photo contest.

The campaign, which featured two stages, began March 10, 2014 and ran through April 14, 2014. The first facet consisted of submis-sions: engaged couples through-out the United States were asked to provide a photo and 100 words explaining why they wanted to get married in Maui. Seventy-five couples completed submissions. The second facet enabled Face-book users to vote for the winning couple (from April 2 through April 12). More than 1,200 people voted. People could vote once per day and share the contest on their own social media channels.

Offerpop Account Manager Ashley Astolfi typically recom-mends that companies run pro-motional photo contests for two to four weeks. Since Hyatt’s con-test featured separate submis-sion and voting periods, Astolfi suggested the longer end of that range “to allow for plenty of time for engagement.”

Hyatt Regency Maui promoted the contest with ads to supple-ment the organic social-media sharing. To do so, the marketing team targeted key demographics in its database (age, relationship status, etc.) and then used Offer-pop’s analytics to track the sourc-es and ad campaigns that drove the campaign participation across Hyatt.com, Twitter, and ads from

Facebook, The Wedding Channel, and The Knot, among other sourc-es. This integrated, multichannel approach to promotion “was es-sential to success,” Kapoor re-ports. “Facebook ads in particular were effective and inexpensive for us to run.”

For each contest entry, Hyatt also collected key information—such as wedding budgets and date options; and opt-in commu-nications for information about weddings, honeymoons, and vaca-tions—for the sales team to use. The marketing team offered a follow-up contest to everyone who voted: a shot at winning a three-night stay at the resort. Additionally, everyone who participated in the campaign (those who submitted entries as well as those who voted) received a 10% vacation discount offer. “This promotion extended the reach of our brand beyond weddings,” Ka-poor adds, “and gave us a way to further engage consumers already interacting with us.”

Astolfi credits Hyatt Regency Maui’s marketing team for hav-ing a “clear understanding of cross-promotion.” It helped that Kapoor and her team established a clear promotion schedule and developed a specific budget for the campaign. “This allowed them to reach a very wide audience with a combination of email, Face-book advertising, and on-site pro-motion,” Astolfi says.

Of course, it also helped to en-list the help of outside content-pro-ducers, including the storytelling skills of happily couples.

Sweepstakes winners Josh and Todd are among the Hyatt Facebook followers who engage with the brand via social.

Briana@_briana_D

Social media marketing is growing on me mainly for how interactive it can be.

Success can be measured easily and quickly based on responses.

Gulf To Bay Web@GulfToBayWebDetermining your goals and

market are the first steps in social marketing for your business.

Clive@ClufftyLeveraging Social Me-

dia Marketing is really plain brilliant if you’re a small com-pany on a constrained budget.

Lorenzo Dickerson@ZoDickersonIn social media, digital mar-

keting and business in general. #UseItToGive. Provide solutions for customers, and the sales will come.

Kelly O’Connell@kelly_virginiaUse your email marketing

content to drive subscribers to your other channels & content - web, so-cial, etc. #ListGrowth

Shake Social@shakesocial

For effective marketing, make sure you’re using the different communication

tools on each social media platform to their maximum potential.

Marketing Wages@MarketingWagesContent is fire, social media

is gasoline. #Marketing

Twonder Woman@TwonderWomanSocial Media puts the

“public” into PR and the “market” into marketing. Chris Brogan.

SOCIAL MEDIA MADNESS

31.2MARKETERS

WHO USE PAID SOCIAL ANALYTICS

TOOLS

MARKETERS AIM TO SCORE CUSTOMERS, BUT FAIL TO ASSIST.

M

PA

SOCIAL NETWORKSIN 2014

HIGH PRIORITY:81.2%: FACEBOOK43.7%: TWITTER29.7%: YOUTUBE

NOT A PRIORITY:60.9%: TUMBLR

34.8%: PINTEREST23.3%: INSTAGRAM

22.8%: GOOGLE+

VERY IMPORTANT SOCIAL MEDIA

GOALS FOR 2014

61.7%CUSTOMER

ACQUISITION

28.9%SOCIAL

CUSTOMER CARE

56.629.6

MARKETERS WHO

CONSIDER COMPETITIVE

SOCIAL ANALYSIS TO BE...

VERY IMPORTANT

SOMEWHAT OR FAIRLY IMPORTANT

CEO 39%

CMO 19%

SMB MARKETERS WHO GET ACTIVE SUPPORT ON THEIR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING FROM THE

ENTERPRISE MARKETERS WHOSE HEAD OF DIGITAL ACTIVELY SUPPORTS THEIR SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

MARKETERS WHO USE SOCIAL CONTENT PUBLISHING TOOLS

MARKETERS WHO EXCLUSIVELY PUBLISH DIRECTLY TO SOCIAL SITES

30%

59%

41%

SOURCE: SOCIALBAKERS

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