Buying Fans vs. Earning Them: What’s better for Your Brand?
The answer to that question seems simple. Earning fans by creating compelling content – be it an ad, a Facebook contest, or even sponsored editorial – is obviously far better for a brand than buying them in bulk. Right?
Startups like Bulkfans.com and the brands currently working with them might argue the contrary. Why else would companies that offer deals like “Get 1000 Likes for $79” be thriving right now?
Thousands of nameless fans
Quantity is important. Our industry uses stats like the number of comments, Likes, and retweets to help determine the ROI of social campaigns. And in many cases, knowing the number of users that commented or voted can also help determine a campaign’s influence on things like purchase intent, in the absence of metrics that connect social directly to sales.
But focusing solely on quantity leaves a huge component out of the mix: Quality. Sure, a brand can buy a few thousand Likes for its Facebook Page, but are those new Likes going to be true brand ambassadors? Will they influence their friends? Will they ultimately make a purchase? Are those Likes authentic?
Reducing influence to a cheap commodity
I’m not saying that companies selling fans in bulk don’t have a right to exist. Clearly, some brands think they’re useful. But I do think we’re creating a big problem for ourselves – digital media companies, brands and everything in between – if these services become commonplace. We’re commoditizing Likes and influence, before anyone really has the time to determine how valuable they are.
We keep making this mistake as an industry. We did it with clicks and impressions, and we’re doing it with Likes and fans now. Trying to establish the value of something by showing how cheaply someone can get or give it isn’t a good long-term strategy.
Instead of buying fans for the lowest price possible, brands need to earn them. That’s where companies like Halogen, Buddy Media and others come in. We help brands earn fans that ultimately have more value. How do we know they’re more valuable? At Halogen, we use three criteria:
1 – Are they purchasing? Economic value, plain and simple. Are they first-time buyers? Repeat buyers?
2 – What’s the level of engagement? Do these fans contribute to the community and enhance the brand’s social presence? Have they subscribed to a mailing list as a result? Are they posting recipes they made with a specific product, or pictures of themselves wearing the item?
3 – Are they real brand advocates? It’s easy to “Like” a brand on Facebook. Being an advocate – sharing the positive experience of a brand with someone else – is harder. Are your Likes or fans pulling others into the conversation? Are they showing their loyalty in other ways?
Of course, measuring influence and fan value is an ongoing process. We haven’t completely figured it out for our clients yet, but we’re constantly trying. What about you? How is your brand measuring fans?
Photo Credit: National Library NZ on The Commons
Mastering Content
The more value placed on quality content, the more “shareable” the material becomes, thus the more it sparks and becomes part of the conversation. This article takes an in depth look at a couple of brands, such as Kodak, that have done content marketing right: Brands That Have Mastered Content Marketing.
Tom Hoehn, Kodak’s director of interactive marketing and convergence media, emphasizes the importance of content in the company’s marketing efforts: “Content is at the core of everything that we do with interactive marketing. We use it in our blogs that have embedded videos, from YouTube, that are linked from tweets, Facebook wall posts, and featured in outbound email messages.”
Content should remain at the core of everything marketers do – the key is understanding how to produce consistent, quality content that eliminates the crash and burn.
Voices of Influence
We’re taking to the blog to extend our congratulations to Amanda Hesser, founder of Halogen’s authentic media publisher Food52, and Jamie Derringer of Design Milk for being named two of SAY Media’s 100, a list that identifies 100 voices that shape opinions in a number of different categories such as business, design and travel.
Its great to see two of our top publishers named as premier influencers in the SAY Media 100. We support all efforts to focus attention on the authentic web and to recognize the growing influence of these passionate and personal voices.
Congratulations, Jamie and Amanda!
Team Halogen Grows
We’ve made some exciting additions to the Halogen team that have officially been announced and wanted to share some of the press coverage with you.
First, read about Executive Chairman Peter Horan, VP of Strategy Brian Eakin and Creative Director Ed Ortega in Paid Content here. Be sure to check out AdWeek’s coverage of the news here.
We’re excited to have these talented industry leaders join the Halogen team and look forward to big things from them and from Halogen as a whole.
Why Aren’t Prestige Brands Spending More on Digital?
Digital is where the most influential brand experiences live, but most brands are still spending just a fraction of their budgets on digital campaigns. What’s holding them back?
Platform complexity?
Too many new formats?
Too much data, and not enough research?
If you’re in LA tomorrow, join our CEO Greg Shove at the DIGIDAY:ON MEDIA event. He’ll tackle the issue on a panel with execs like adap.tv’s Toby Gabriner and James Piper from Vibrant Media. Trust Greg to be candid during the discussion, and outline some steps that online publishers need to take if they really want to earn big brand dollars. He’ll also share insights that are specific to prestige brands.
Session starts @ 2:20pm. Get the full details on the panel, venue and conference below:
2:20pm: The Brand Perspective on Digital Advertising: Key brands are ready to spend more of their budgets on digital, but not as much as publishers would like to see. What’s holding them back? How does digital marketing accelerate the migration of big brands from apprehension about digital to dominance.
Moderator: Toby Gabriner, President, Adap.tv
Speakers: Jacob Cohen, Senior Digital Strategist, Wolff Olins
Greg Shove, CEO, Halogen Media
James Piper, SVP of Sales & GM, West Coast, Vibrant Media
Aaron Broder, Co-Founder & CEO, Evolve Media Corp.
The venue: Hyatt Regency Century Plaza (in Century City)
Photo Credit: purpleslog via Flickr
Our Authentic Team: Meet Olivia Jovais
Halogen’s goal is to help prestige brands tell their stories (and reach consumers) on the authentic web. (Isn’t that a nice, packaged sound bite?)
But authenticity isn’t just part of some PR pitch. We practice what we preach. So each month, we’ll introduce you to a new team member so that you get to know us – and understand why we’re authentic from the inside. This month, it’s our marketing analyst Olivia Jovais.
Olivia Jovais, marketing analyst at Halogen
What does “authentic” mean to you?
Authentic is a quality I look for in friends, coworkers, products and experiences because it implies reliability, truthfulness and plain and simple “real-ness.” Now it’s something I look for on the web.
What brand do you think is great at conveying a message of authenticity online?
Not simply because we share a name, but Alice + Olivia has a unique way of conveying authenticity online. I don’t know if it’s the font and design used on their site, their playful ability to connect with fans or their amazing “4AM Finds” collages that encourage organic sharing of content, but everything from dress to tweet to 4AM find conveys an authentic and quirky personality.
What’s your must-read blog and why?
Atlantic-Pacific for fashion. Jezebel for fun. Why? Because fashion needs no words and because Jezebel covers stories I can share with everyone from friends to professors. Read the rest of this entry »
Klout: Not perfect but getting better fast
There has been lots of buzz recently about Klout and others in the social influence measurement space – with understandable debate about their algorithms and methods, and therefore real value. Another story here – this time in the WSJ about how celebs and wanna-be’s will try to game these new measurement tools. I (and others at Halogen) have been spending time with Joe and the team at Klout (I was there this morning before heading to NYC) and we are convinced that their service is a very valuable data point in the analysis of where brands should deploy media dollars if they want to move the brand preference needle.
When we decide on what publishers we want as part of our media network, we look at a variety of factors, from look and feel of the site, quality and consistency of content, engagement of the readers (comments, shares etc), and now we look at their Klout scores. We also look at these factors over a period of time – so consistency and growth matter. Like any algorithm ( eg the imperfections of search algorithms and all gaming that did and still does go on), these new services will need to improve over time – especially in terms of their inputs for gauging social influence, such as activity on LinkedIn or Tumblr, comment volume as tracked by Disqus etc. Lots of data API’s out there for these services to source from.
So Klout and its competitors will get better – and they will no doubt find a way to build a business off this data platform (probably charging us at some point!). Meanwhile we will work with their data to help identify the best authentic and social publishers on the web – and then deploy campaigns that can leverage the influence of those publishers. Joe (Klout’s CEO) and I are planning an event in late March in NYC – more on that soon.
The Blue-Chip Web is Dying (Long Live the Authentic Web)
Hmm … perhaps Wired’s Chris Anderson was onto something when he declared “The Web is dead.” Now the CEO of Forrester Research says the same thing. George Colony told attendees at the DeSilva + Phillips Media Summit that the Web was “dead” and that tablets and e-readers represented the new “nexus of media.”
As Folio notes, the comments didn’t sit well with the event attendees, who were mostly a mix of “print-based media company executives and their financial sponsors.”
Wired’s techie audience may have been ready for straight talk about radical changes in content consumption and monetization, but not stodgy old media execs, right? Well, at Halogen, we’re inclined to agree with both Chris Anderson and George Colony – but with some of our own qualifications.
