By Barry Lawrence


When launching a social media engagement strategy, to pull consumers into brands, it’s important that companies begin to appreciate the many styles, tolerances and expectations that consumers bring to social networking. If your social media program is stuck in the mud, it may be that you are turning some customers away with a one-size-fits-all engagement strategy.


To help marketers account for different social media behaviors, Forrester Research created a Social Technographics®, classification system that places consumers into six overlapping levels of preferred participation (see Forrester’s Groundswell site and book for more details — highly recommended by BrandCottage). This week, Forrester announced a seventh rung, the Conversationalists, to account for “the very active communication style that has arisen recently within social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook,” said Forrester Analyst Emily Riley in her blog post, A New Rung on the Social Technographics Ladder.


To clarify, the bottom of the ladder represents the most passive level of social media participation; at the top of the ladder, we find the Creators, the most active social media participants. With each brand and social media program, marketers are wise to account for the predominate style or, more likely, styles of their target consumers.


Here’s how consumer social media styles break down, from top to bottom in terms of levels of engagement, according to data from the groundswell blog (note that Forrester has placed Conversationalists between Creators and Critics.:

• Creators, 24 percent of adults.
• Conversationalists, 33 percent.
• Critics, 37 percent.
• Collectors, 20 percent.
• Joiners, 59 percent.
• Spectators, 70 percent.
• Inactives, 17 percent.

In practice with our clients, rather than getting too hung up in the profile percentages of a company’s target consumers, BrandCottage thinks it’s best to account for all the styles in creating a well-rounded social media program. The goal of any social media program, when done correctly, should be to move consumers as far up the engagement ladder as possible, while still leaving room for spectators and joiners to get value from their social media interactions with your brand.


However, we most certainly need to account for the growing number of Conversationalists on sites such as Twitter and Facebook.


“Conversationalists intrigue me,” said Josh Bernoff in the groundswell blog. (Bernoff, along with Forrester’s Charlene Li, are the authors of Groundswell. ” They’re 56 percent female, more than any other group in the ladder. While they’re among the youngest of the groups, 70 percent are still 30 and up.”


“By following Conversationalists, you get free consumer insights,” noted Riley in her blog. “Conversationalists are your customers and they are talking about you. Listen to them.”


Indeed. Listen and begin to engage with your consumers. Participation on the high end of the ladder will continue to grow. If you haven’t already, now is the time to build a solid social media foundation.


Related BrandCottage posts: Why I’m a Power Tweeter on Twitter and The Essential 7 Ps of Social Media Relations. Also, see PR Squared’s blog post on Forrester’s Social Technographics Ladder.


Barry Lawrence is a BrandCottage partner in charge of public relations and social media relations.

By Barry Lawrence


BrandCottage is pleased to announce that one of its clients, Johnston & Murphy, is maintaining its long-standing tradition as shoemaker to the presidents. Johnston & Murphy recently presented President Barack Obama with a custom pair of dress shoes and boots.


We think this is a creative and remarkable service and marketing campaign, emphasizing Johnston & Murphy’s commitment to style and craftsmanship.


The Obama boots are especially interesting, inspired by a pair that Johnston & Murphy custom-made for President Lincoln in 1861. The company has handcrafted footwear for every American president since Millard Fillmore in 1850.


Johnston & Murphy created www.shoesofthepresidents.com to commemorate its 160-year tradition.


Barry Lawrence is a BrandCottage partner in charge of public relations and social media relations.

By Patricia Wilson


For online advertising providers, the honeymoon is finally over.


As a seasoned media planner, I was not surprised by a recent report designed to provide much needed damage control for the under-performing online advertising industry. The document, from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Bain & Company, highlights the many online advertising challenges being fac

ed by marketers. More importantly, the report, Building Brands Online: An Interactive Advertising Action Plan, attempts to provide a road map to improve the industry’s growing negative perceptions about the brand-building value of online advertising.

The IAB/Bain report is a much needed response to last year’s findings that online advertising inventory is highly undervalued by brand

marketers. At the heart of the problem, according to an Online Media Daily story:

. . . online sales organizations have lacked the sophistication necessary to turn the perceptions advertisers and agencies have about the value of online advertising . . .

The report also identifies five key obstacles that have kept marketers from shifting more of their budgets online:

• Online ad formats and creative have not evolved to meet marketers’ needs.
• Media companies lack category expertise when they sell to brand marketers and engage with them too late in the media planning process.
• Marketers want integrated campaigns instead of platform-specific media programs.
• While marketers see high value in online advertising and believe that it could be effective at all stages of the purchase funnel, current industry practices inhibit greater investment of brand ad dollars.
• Marketers express needs for differentiated services for their brands and believe that media companies and agencies have to meet those differentiated needs for online advertising to grow.

Measurement Intoxication

What I find most interesting is that the once-mighty “click” measurement is now out of favor, having underperformed miserably and showing no signs of being resurrected.


“Ultimately, marketers are looking for media companies to offer a true triple-play service model from direct response to awareness to high impact brand engagement,” said John Frelinghuysen in a press release. Frelinghuysen is a partner in Bain & Company’s media practice and lead author of the study.


As a classically trained media planner, I place a high value on measurability. However, just as with traditional media, we must be careful not to chase what we can measure – what fits under the microscope and what shows some ROI – just so we can rattle back some good news to CMOs and CFOs. Click rates, foe example, may NOT really be a true indication of what’s driving the Brand long term. We must avoid becoming over-intoxicated on the wrong digital measurements.


Despite all the Technorati talk of measurement over the past few years, it appears online advertising has come full circle. It is now faced with the exact same question we’ve always asked about media, including the traditional television, print, radio and outdoor channels: How do we best measure online advertising’s full impact on our brand?


Patricia Wilson is the founder of BrandCottage, a media marketing company with offices in New York, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.

By Patricia Wilson


Friends, family and even business clients ask me all the time:


“What in the heck do you get out of all your tweeting and twittering?”


I’ll admit, I am addicted to my @BrandCottage Twitter account. And as the head honcho of BrandCottage, I believe it has been time well spent.


Many people GET IT. Others still don’t see what all the Twitter fuss is about. For the latter, I explain that you have to really use Twitter — and use it a lot — to understand its full value.


Here are the Twitter business benefits I see:

• I’m more informed. My fellow Twitterers provide me with updates, knowledge and thought leadership about my field. I am educated daily about emerging media technologies, shifting consumer trends, best brand practices, marketing challenges, new social media ideas and other trends.




• I’m more networked. For me, Twitter is by far the furthest reaching networking tool I have seen in my 20+ years as a professional. Next to personal relationships, it’s the single most important new tool for maintaining business relationships.




• I’m never out of the buzz loop. Twitter search  and its trending topics tools make it easy and fast to view the hot buzz of the day — both within my industry and through the World Wide Web. This helps our agency in the work we do for our clients, giving us the ability to take advantage of new branding or social relations opportunities.




• I’m building a voice and brand personality. The added benefit here is that BrandCottage can engage its clients and future customers by sharing valuable information with them. In addition, these conversations have become two-way and far reaching.




• I’m building trust with influencers. We’ve seen our partnerships and status in the media industry grow immeasurably with Twitter. It’s helping us find new opportunities and new ways to help each other — benefits that we return to our clients as added services and improved return on investment.

If you want to see what all the Twitter fuss is about, don’t just dip your toe in the water. Dive in, completely.


See you @BrandCottage.


Patricia Wilson is the founder of BrandCottage, a media marketing company with offices in New York, Atlanta and Washington, D.C.

By Barry Lawrence


What do you think about the future of social media spending in 2010? Please take our simple poll on this really cool Twitter-friendly application: twtpoll.


Click here to take the poll.


As a long-time public relations professional, I have always promoted the use of surveys and polls to create news that is reflective of a company’s brand. This is a great way to make news that reporters actually care about and to establish companies as thought leaders in their respective industries.


Now, with tools such as twtpoll, you can make news and engage your community. LinkedIn also has a nice social media application for polling. SurveyMonkey does a nice job with more in-depth online surveys. The trick is to have your survey questions designed by a professional so that questions and answer choices are unbiased, complete, easy to understand and not too long. Tougher than you think.


The important thing to remember is to be honest about the source of your data when sharing with reporters. Some media outlets, such as the Wall Street Journal, are persnickety about online polls. Others are OK with online poll data as long as they can be clear about how the results were derived.


Barry Lawrence is a BrandCottage partner in charge of public relations and social media relations.