I recently had a chance to sit down with ING Direct Canada CEO Peter Aceto and Mark Nicholson, Head of Online Experience to discuss ING Direct’s social media campaign that has brought the financial services company to the forefront of the social media buzz.  I recommend all readers to checkout Peter Aceto’s twitter feed, one of the liveliest CEO feeds on the web.

What draws you to use Social Media to connect with your clients?  What advantage does it have for ING?

Peter Aceto: As a direct business model where transparency and openness are two of our core philosophies, it just makes sense that we’d engage in conversation anywhere people gather to discuss important issues, including Facebook and Twitter. Social media allows us to engage in meaningful dialogue with our clients, most notably giving them another direct access point into the company to help answer their questions and discuss innovations they are looking for from us.

Do you find that social media changes the traditional rules of PR?

Peter Aceto: Social media has provided an avenue to have the types of conversations we want to have with Canadians. It’s exciting to be able to have an open dialogue on this platform and another medium in which to reach and connect with people. While I don’t believe that social media replaces traditional media, it certainly allows people to engage more fully in the news they read, and share their reactions and thoughts on the world around them. Although there is more transparency and time required to engage in this forum, it suits a brand like ING DIRECT with values based on openness, fairness and being direct.

Do you have any specific stories of how your experiences with social media have surprised you?

Peter Aceto: Social media has allowed me to have a very honest conversation with people. It has provided me with a means to reflect on our business and the decisions we make each day as a business. It forces us to remain authentic and true to who we are and what we stand for. I’m blown away by Canadians’ passion for our brand and in helping others to empower themselves using basic savings principles.

Today people are questioning the expensive financial or investment advice they have been getting. They are now turning to friends, family and peers for advice on these products. Social media help broaden this discussion to a wider group of people – extending its reach from the family get-together on Sunday to a network of thousands.

How has social media helped ING in the face of overwhelming media criticisms regarding financial institutions’ role in causing the financial meltdown and global recession?

Peter Aceto: Social media allows us to talk directly with Canadians in an open forum – through Facebook via our fan page “Save Your Money” and Twitter via @CEO_INGDIRECT.  It has allowed us to share the facts as we know them. I think Canadians appreciate having a forum where they can ask ING DIRECT questions about their money – including questions about the global recession and how it affects our business. Facebook and Twitter allow us to reassure Canadians that their money is safe with us, give them tips to help them with their savings challenges, and ideas for how to save during difficult times – for example options for guaranteed investments such as short-term RSPs or TFSAs. It’s always important to save, even during a recession, and our voice in this space is helping to inform people that they have options and can always find ways to save, even in small ways.

Although ING DIRECT is one of the Good Guys, the lack of trust of financial institutions is a reality. We’ve built a trust relationship with our clients over the last 13 years that is serving us very well now. This trust was greeted through our openness, honesty, and transparency that our clients are not surprised by fees, charges or other bad news. We’re direct and truthful.

Do you get overwhelmed by the number of personal responses required to keep a direct communication line open with all followers/customers?

Peter Aceto: Absolutely. This space is all about immediacy. The level of interaction from our clients has surprised and delighted us and it’s kept us actively engaged in the conversation as its coming fast.

How do you deal with negative publicity potentially generated through social media? Are you just going to tweet positives?  ie. Online communities scoff when corporations get into social media because they tend to only push positive stories relating only to their own company.

Peter Aceto: I’ve dealt with both positive and negative publicity in an open and transparent fashion. For example, I had a Tweeter who was unhappy with the wait times in the call centre attributed to the RRSP deadline. This Tweeter called us out on it and I reached out to let [him] know we were listening.  The platform allowed me to explain directly why it was happening. In the end, this person understood our position and appreciated the quick and direct way we interacted with him about it. ING DIRECT’s intent in being in this space isn’t about just pushing the positives – it’s about listening and making our business better for our clients.

What are the initial results of your campaign and are they encouraging?  How will your social media campaign grow/evolve?

Mark Nicholson: While we don’t look at this as a campaign per se, the results since launching the Facebook fan page have been quite promising.  We reached 1,400 fans in just under a month and the conversation is alive!  Clients are asking some really good questions and interacting with each other on a broad range of savings-related topics.

How are you measuring the success of your social media campaigns?  What metrics are you using?

Mark Nicholson: We are working with one of our partners, The Social Media Group, to develop what is called the Conversation Index for the Financial Services category.  We are leveraging this to measure our efforts in the social media space. It’s not all about measurement however. How do we know how often people mention ING DIRECT at the dinner table? We don’t – but the conversation needs to happen and we want to be at the table.

Have you allocated new/additional budget for your social media strategy?

Mark Nicholson: We have focused more of our traditional budget on the social media strategy and based on early results, will continue to shift the budget to support these initiatives.

How are you aggregating conversations and feedback from social media and incorporating it into your business plans?

Mark Nicholson: We are currently measuring the conversation and some of the raw feedback through our partners as well as through tools such as ScoutLabs. This information provides us an invaluable feedback loop whereby we can react, respond and adapt where necessary.

Do you see social media as a brand new form of advertising and marketing, or a complement to traditional methods?

Mark Nicholson: We aren’t approaching social media as a platform to advertise.  We are currently using social media as an open communications forum – to listen to and address Canadians’ expectations of us.  That being said, we will look at opportunities that use social media to augment our marketing efforts where it makes sense.

Do you consider the Canadian Superstar Saver Search a success?  What was your goal with that contest?

Mark Nicholson: Yes. The Canadian Superstar Saver Search was a screaming success.  The spirit of the contest wasn’t about selling product.  It was about people living the brand.  We had over 200 videos submitted in just more than six weeks and they ranged from big to small productions.  The top 10 videos had over 1,200 hours of viewing time.  The specific objectives were two-fold.  The first was to move the metrics surrounding brand awareness and innovation.  The secondary objective was about being first to market.  We wanted to be the first company to leverage the new YouTube platform for a contest in Canada. We achieved both successfully.

Tags: Advertising, Marketing, Social Network by Tim McKillican
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TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook is opening up their mini-feed to third party services. What does this mean?

Let’s say you’re a Del.ico.us user, and you just added a new bookmark. If you choose to, that news will now show up in your news feed and your friends will be able to see it. The web just got a whole lot smaller.

This also marks Facebook’s first move outside of Facebook, and it could even have been urged forward by new COO Sheryl Sandberg (read Fortune’s report on her moves to make Facebook profitable here).

More on the move soon.

Tags: Advertising, Facebook, Marketing, Social Network, Usability by Neil
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The article is a year old, but senior editor David Kirkpatrick hits all the right notes in trying to understand the significance of Facebook as a communication and business tool.

“It’s not all rosy for business, though. You think we’ve had transparency on the Internet so far? The ramifications for marketers could be frightening if someone builds tools that enable Facebook users to get more efficient at communicating among themselves about products and services they use. It could become just as easy to learn if someone you know was overcharged by a credit card as to find out what concerts they are attending. Up until now most online sources of product information have been unreliable. But if it’s your friend telling you not to buy that shampoo, you’re likely to listen.”

Full article here: Facebook’s plan to hook up the world – May. 24, 2007

Tags: Advertising, Applications, Facebook, Marketing, Social Network, Usability by Neil
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If you’re a Facebook developer, user, or even an avid reader of this site, you probably know that Facebook is gearing up to revamp the visual and functional design of the basic Facebook profile. I evangelize about it daily, but this post isn’t about how widespread of an effect it’s going to have (it will be watercooler talk for days). Rather, it’s about how Facebook’s approach to this change demonstrates the pioneering of the next generation of large web companies.

Just take a look at their latest post: An Update on the State of the Profile Redesign. In short, it’s saying one thing: We’re listening to you. How? They held a few ’roundtables’, where developers and users of all types were able to get together and talk about what they like/don’t like about the upcoming changes. Then, they’ve been posting weekly updates on their design process, and keenly scouring the comments left by the 39,011 fans that have joined the Profile Redesign Fan Page. Finally, they also mention that there will be ample time for application developers to modify their applications before they release the profile to the public.

Say what you will about some of their Beacon moves and default privacy policies, but from the perspective of a user of the Facebook tool, I trust Facebook to make the right decision to enable me to communicate with my friends easiest. From the perspective of a developer, they have been smart and quick to upgrade as long as they’ve had the Platform available.

IMHO, it’s the use of a company’s ears that will enable a company to succeed in Web 2.0, 3.0 and beyond, and Facebook is definitely on the right path. While people are constantly extolling the virtues of a social web, in truth there are only a handful of companies (Digg is another great example) that truly leverage their social feedback. Even the prolific Google doesn’t make it this simple to let them know how you feel about their interfaces. And we won’t start into MySpace.

This goes farther than web businesses. It’s rare for even an individual to listen, but if you look carefully, the ability to consume and utilize feedback is the hallmark of any true success story. And when a service-provider of any type and size can hear and understand the thousands of users that truly love their offerings, they have the key to keep people smiling.

This clearly should have happened long ago, as a capitalist system would dictate. If a company isn’t listening to their consumers, then a company who does have the ears will open up, and produce a better product. However, the resources necessary to support these vast lines of communication feedback are a recent phenomenon, and we’ll feel the effects of this business style more over the next half-decade. While older corporations will stumble to understand the importance of having their ears to the web, young dynamic startups will spark a trend of iterative, evolving creations based on user feedback. Just like any modern day Engineering design must incorporate feedback, any web business expecting to succeed in the future is going to need to structure a social feedback system for their web presence.

Rant over.

Tags: Advertising, Applications, Facebook, Marketing, Social Network, Usability by Neil
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I just ran across one of the most interesting blog posts I’ve read lately speculating on Web 3.0 over at Master of 500 Hats.

Not to steal Dave’s thunder, but there are a couple points I want to highlight.  The Microsoft bid to buy Yahoo is primarily to shore up it’s dominance in the Email/Instant Messaging online sectors.  Sure there are side benefits like buying up Yahoo’s advertising, search and traffic, but the winner of the Internet will be he who controls the user.

But with the battle to own the user comes the battle to own the user’s social graph, currently controlled by Facebook/MySpace/Bebo/hi5/could continue to list ad nauseum.  I keep referring to it, but all future web advertising will be contextually driven by your social graph, where brands are providing social relevance to users.  Ie. “Your friend Katie just saw (insert cookie-cutter Will Ferrell movie) and rated it 5 stars!” (ok I kid, it will be impossible for a Will Ferrell movie to be rated as excellent again… the days of Old School and Anchorman are over).

I think it’s also highly important to note the fact that we as users on the Internet now have hundreds of logins/passwords for every individual site on the net.  This is a problem that needs to be solved, and while attempts have been made (Microsoft Passport or the community driven OpenID), nothing will happen until one company owns enough of the user’s Internet life to make it beneficial for the user (really, what’s the difference in consolidating your logins from 60 to 50?).  Alternatively, if the smaller communities can build enough momentum around the OpenID concept, it could be viable, but whether that is a possibility remains to be seen.

The final piece of the puzzle are the e-commerce/payment conglomerates.  Look for the Microsoft/Google duopoly to put pressure on eBay (and their very valuable PayPal) and Amazon for merger/acquisitions in the next few years.

Where do the small players stand in this heated battle?  Well, I sort of compare it to the open source community who has not only weathered giants like Microsoft’s attempts to push them out, but actually blossomed in the modern Internet era.  If the small guys can provide real value to users, by churning out innovations while being completely flexible to quickly capitalize on new ideas, they will have a direct line to sink their (small) teeth into the necks of Google and Microsoft.  And instead of a one-sided parasitic relationship, Microsoft and Google will leverage these small-time players to come up with new innovations and either partner or swallow them up for big money when it makes sense.  And sometimes these guys will have such momentum that they will swim past these sharks to potentially become a shark themselves (could Facebook be this shark?  That question requires an entirely new post) (and one more side point – I’m not sure whether I should perhaps be calling Microsoft and Google ‘whales’ instead).

The Internet and Web 2.0 is a playground for innovation due to the extremely low barriers to entry and it’s massive channel to instantly reach all users around the globe.  It’s an exciting time to see all the fish in the sea battle (and work symbiotically) to control the Internet.

Tags: Advertising, Facebook, Google, Marketing, MySpace, Social Network by Tim McKillican
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According to the Newspaper Association of America and referenced over at Editor&Publisher and TechCrunch,  Newspaper revenues fell 9.4% to $42 billion in the past year compared to 2006 in the US.  For reference, online ad revenues grew 19% to $3.2 billion over 2006.  What does this signal?  Well, for starters, the looming US recession has and will continue to have a definite impact on advertising revenues, as one of the first things to be cut during tight times are marketing budgets.  But is there more to it?

It’s no secret that traditional print media like newspapers are falling on hard times.  Marketing executives are being given more options with where to spend their marketing dollars, and while I don’t believe that Internet ad revenues have totally lived up to their potential, innovations in the online space are arriving that will present credible options for said Marketing execs when they determine how to optimally allocate their ad budgets.

First of all, the static ad banner on the side of every web page is starting to be replaced with interactive and engaging multimedia.  Online video ads and flash-based multimedia are becoming more and more common, attracting the user’s attention and creating a much more solid impression over and above the typical static classmates.com banner you traditionally see.

But more importantly, online ads are beginning to take advantage of demographics and eventually will leverage individual user preferences, as I alluded to earlier this month, to provide much more relevant and contextual ads that are targeted to every individual.

Finally, combine these new contextual online ads with a solid metrics and reporting system that can track every user’s interaction with the ad, and you can create an objective sales presentation to the aforementioned Marketing executive, giving him or her direct insight into how each penny spent online translates into brand impressions/interactions, and eventually, sales.  This gives the online ad realm a tremendous advantage over traditional media, because the feedback reporting mechanisms can objectively indicate the success rate of an online marketing campaign .  A complete return-on-investment can be calculated along with with every reportable stat you can imagine, so that the Marketing exec can easily gauge how to optimally allocate their online marketing spending.

Newspaper and traditional media are a one-way street.  You can get indirect feedback based on general sales lift, but nothing near what can be done through online metrics.  This gives online advertising the advantage, and with innovations still to come to provide even more creative as well as socially relevant ads to users, it appears as though online advertising is destined for continued growth.

On another note – Duncan Riley at TechCrunch wrote an interesting post last November about the need for consolidation in the Newspaper industry to improve their chances of survival in the face of increased competition for advertising dollars.

Tags: Advertising, Facebook, Marketing by Tim McKillican
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It seems that Microsoft is chasing after its own tail these days.  Only months after investing a healthy quarter billion into Facebook, their Spaces division is attempting to leverage its own friend network by introducing a friend-feed to display your Live Messenger friends’ latest actions (see screenshot).  Are they competing with Facebook?

With MySpace having jumped on the ‘friend-feed’ idea in their revamped profile and web applications such as FriendFeed and Twitter popping up, it’s quickly becoming apparent that the feed is the essential backbone of any good social network.  That must have been what Microsoft was thinking when they made this move, but the current incarnation is hardly providing me with enough relevant information to constitute a “social network” (see screenshot).  Most of my friends have never even set up their Live Spaces profile, even though it’s been around for years, and so I’m left with entries like

Judging by the latest Nielson ratings on Social Networks (see image), Live Spaces is about to lose its long hold on the fourth place.  I don’t see anything particularily wrong with the technology, but the botched release of Spaces and the consequent pillaging of the once simple-yet-effective MSN Messenger convince me that we won’t see users flocking to Spaces anytime soon.

Tags: Advertising, Applications, Facebook, Social Network by Neil
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Talking to users of Facebook of all demographics, I find that more and more young people use Facebook as their exclusive method of communication.  The archaic messaging system is at best awkward in comparison with GMail or even Hotmail, but the fact that it is embedded in the Social Graph proves its value to consumers.  Combined with the recent integration of Facebook mobile, the system provides an integrated way to ensure you have access to all your closest friends.

Well, Facebook is about to make another big move in a small way, by introducing Instant Messaging to Facebook.  As can be seen in the video, it will dock at the bottom of your browser as you use Facebook, and enable you to simply send instant messages to your online contacts.  It may be simplistic right now, but that’s always what has worked best for Facebook, and I can envision this becoming more and more popular, and eventually spreading out into an optional desktop application.  Video available courtesy of FaceReviews.com.

Tags: Advertising, Facebook, Marketing by Neil
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BusinessWeek posted an article that I think highlights the potential and uncertainty about this new social networking market. I regularly point clients and friends to it, and if you’re trying to explain this new market, I’d recommend you do too.

“Building a Brand with Widgets” by Rachael King

“It’s surpassing our expectations,” Peterzell says. A growing number of companies hope they’ll be wowed by widgets, too. Electronic Arts (ERTS), Viacom’s (VIA) Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures, Gap (GPS), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Hallmark, and Blockbuster (BBI) are among the businesses hoping to spread a marketing message or raise brand awareness through these modules of content used by millions of social network users to customize profiles or communicate with friends.

The article begins optimistically, but quickly points out that many campaigns have difficulty in standing out in an overcrowded widget market.  From my chats with Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook.com, a good strategy is to supplement any social media campaign with real advertising dollars.   Companies can take advantage of the many burgeoning banner networks, like RockYou or Slide, and implement a Cost-Per-Install advertising campaign for only a few thousand dollars.  The great aspect of a CPI campaign is that it only costs the advertiser money when banner-viewers click on the banner and subsequently install the application.  That way, the general branding that goes along with each banner view is in fact, free.

Tags: Advertising, Marketing, Social Network by Neil
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Phil Edwards of Lonely CEO Media analyzes the slow movement of large corporations into the social networking sphere. Specifically, why haven’t large brands moved to associate themselves with Applications generating millions of entertained views per day.

There are of course, as many theories for this as there are terrible applications, but I feel Phil’s analysis is optimistic while simultaneously realistic.

Tags: Advertising, Facebook, Marketing, Social Network by Neil
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