In January, we posted Media Logic’s 11 Predictions for Retail Marketing in 2011. We felt retailers would be among the first businesses to move decisively into the social world, to counter the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities. How’d we do? Let’s examine our 11 predictions one at a time.

1. “There’ll be no more social media strategies for you, missy!”
Let’s be honest, when social media first popped on retail’s radar, way back in 2010, few took it seriously. Writing status updates and tweets fell to those “crazy kids” in the marketing department. Social strategies, for what they were worth, were cute little things best kept separate and isolated from serious grown-up marketing.

Media Logic predicted this would change in 2011. We expected retailers would begin to see their social channels (and the easily spied upon social channels of their competitors) as more than alternates to their broadcast and direct channels. We believed they’d come to view social platforms as engagement channels and, perhaps even more importantly, feedback channels that could deliver enhanced customer experiences and inform the greater marketing effort.

How’d we do? Well, right at here at the year’s end, we are FINALLY hearing retailers discuss social communication as a central component of their general marketing strategies.  But to be honest, there is a lot of opportunity still left to explore.

Status: Pending.

2. “Anybody with a conversion fetish will be asked to leave.”
Even though Facebook itself tried to help brands measure ROI in terms of engagement instead of sales (with access to “talking about” data and insights on “total reach”), many retailers are still pounding the table demanding direct evidence of revenue driven by social media. This pressure has pushed many marketers toward so-called F-commerce – stores built right into Facebook. The results, for many, have been disappointing.

Still, the correlation between social engagement and business success remains strong.

The success of Media Logic’s Retail Social Juice Index suggests to us that retailers have moved beyond the simple metric of sales to the more appropriate metric of engagement to assess their social marketing efforts.

Status: Looking good.

3. “Big box retailers will make friends with phones.”
Sadly, the vast majority of big box retailers did not make friends with phones in 2011. They did not develop shopping apps that worked with UPC or QR codes. They did not turn shopping into an adventure game by enhancing the experience with mobile tricks and treats. And now?  It appears Amazon’s Price Check app may have beaten them to the punch. With the app, consumers can scan products in-store and find lower prices online. Of course, brick and mortar retailers aren’t happy about this, but here’s hoping they use their frustration to answer Amazon’s challenge. It’s unlikely to be the last one.

Big box retailers should look to other brands that are getting this right, such as the American Express tie-ins with retailers and Foursquare, the Apple Store app that lets retail customers buy in-store with iPhones and walk out with their purchases (even without interacting with store personnel) and Starbucks’ experimentation with augmented reality.

Status: What are they waiting for?

4. “Media will stop costing money and start making money.”
The idea here was that brands with large fan bases would begin to sell (or leverage through co-op) some of their owned media space. It’s a little hard to track. A few discounters have featured co-op Facebook tab promotions, but true complementary trades or more direct sales of brand-owned media space has not (yet) become common practice.

Status: Bad call.

5. “Interactive promotions will escape the Facebook tab.”
Many Facebook tool developers, including Buddy Media, WildFire and EngageSciences, now make it easy for users to create promotions not only on Facebook, but on websites, microsites, blogs and elsewhere.

Status: We have a winner!

6. “Goodbye, social media cowboy!”
As social marketing has evolved, it is no longer the purview of the lone enthusiast. Managing a complex web of social promotions, social commerce, experiential marketing and real-time conversational marketing – on brand and integrated with a retailer’s broader marketing efforts – takes coordination and professional support.

On this topic, remind us to review with you our social marketing management platform, Zeitgeist & Coffee, the next time we talk.

Status: Maybe sad (there was something charming about that guy!), but true.

7. “AdweekMedia’s 2011 list of Agencies of the Year will not include a single traditional advertising agency.”
Though the official list hasn’t been published as of this writing, we’re going to guess we were really wrong about this one. Traditional agencies have not disappeared. They’ve fought back by becoming, well, more social.

Status: Way wrong. (Sorry, Big Fuel.)

8. “The headlines will read, ‘Facebook is Dead!’”
Despite link-trolling articles like – “Facebook is Dead For Gen Y; What’s Next?” (MediaPost, November 2011) – Facebook remains the central social platform for retailers. This is likely to continue into 2012 even as consumers begin to play more with Tumblr, Pinterest, FourSquare … and new social platforms that are yet to be invented.

Status: Right (the headlines were wrong).

9. “We’ll ask paid media to come out and play, too.”
Real-time participation has arrived! Today we use Twitter hashtags to interact with television. We use QR codes to turn magazines into websites. And we play with Times Square billboards from companies like Audi, CBS, Kodak and Disney, and even those developers co-opting billboards to promote their own messages.

But what makes this prediction spot on are the efforts by retailers and other companies to take it to another level. Major brands like Excedrin and Pop-chips have built integrated campaigns that include television and radio around social promotions, and X Factor went well beyond simple hashtag use, incorporating its X Factor app directly into the experience of watching and interacting with the show in real time.

Status: Right and getting righter by the second.

10. “I’m running away!”
Marketing and sales teams used to have control over marketing messages. Now, more than ever, consumers are challenging those canned pitches. Social media gives shoppers the ability to research brands and products with a click or a tap. And what are they looking for? Not just what brands tell them! They’re running away from that and finding out what their friends have to say. (They trust their friends more than they trust marketing – and haven’t they always?) The role of “big media” has shifted. The marketing message is but a starting point in what can be a lifetime of social engagement.

Status: Let’s all run together.

11. “Don’t worry, marketing will get fun again.”

Status: It certainly has for us!

There is no easy answer to this “chicken or egg” question. But there is no question social media is opening up (a quite public) window on the relationship between top retail brands and their customers. And though it is not necessary for retailers to prioritize openness – say, by defaulting likers to a “Top Posts” Facebook wall – not doing so (or being unable to do so), particularly when key competitors can, says something about a brand and offers clues as to how that brand operates in social space.

Media Logic has just completed a quick analysis of the relationship between brand sentiment/passion and the willingness of brands to prioritize customer posts on an open Facebook wall. We examined brands in three retail sectors – Department stores, Discount and Value stores and Hobby stores.

The accompanying charts generated by Netbase graph brand sentiment along the Y-axis and conversational intensity along the X-axis. The size of the circles is a relative measure of social chat volume. Short story: being in the upper right quadrant is good. Being a big circle in the upper right quadrant is even better. Being in the lower right quadrant is not so good. And being a big circle in the lower right quadrant is something a brand might want to work really hard to counter.

When we overlay wall openness with these circles, what we see is not terribly surprising. In fact, the results may even be a bit circular. “Passionately loved” brands generally default likers to an open wall of “Most Recent” or “Top Posts.” “Passionately hated” brands default likers to a wall of brand-generated posts. While none of the 20 brands measured here prevents users from posting to the wall, disliked and passionately disliked brands generally make visitors dig past the default brand wall to see complaints (or compliments) left by other likers.

This makes perfect sense. Brands that attract a lot of positive user posts no doubt find it easier – emotionally and bureaucratically – to promote those posts.

But maybe we should dig a little deeper. Because, as Media Logic has learned from a year of pretty intense study, the rules and opportunities of social marketing vary sector to sector and brand to brand. Let’s look at each sector and see if we can divine any general rules and uncover best practices.

Department stores

In the Department sector there are only two brands that prioritize fan posts, the medium-sized circle of Kohl’s and the tiny circle of Belk. A quick tour of their respective Facebook efforts shows Kohl’s exists in a special place, with a large enough and positively passionate enough fan base to make their wall all but self-policing. Negative comments are countered voluntarily by fans, with statements like, “If you don’t like Kohl’s, why are you a friend??” Belk has to take a more active role in managing its conversations. But the brand appears willing to make the investment, often answering customer service queries in a few minutes. And the general impression is that this active management is paying off – at least in Belk’s Facebook space – as the brand’s general page zeitgeist is positive, even joyful.

Meanwhile, Walmart carries the dubious distinction of being the most passionately hated brand among the 20 reviewed here. A quick trip to its Facebook page, not surprisingly, shows that Walmart defaults likers to brand posts. If one digs into its “Most Recent” or “Top Posts,” it’s easy to see why. Walmart, the 800-lb gorilla of retail, draws lots of negative posts. But as Media Logic has noted previously, the brand is hardly a passive social player. Over the last year, Walmart has invested heavily, not only in managing its Facebook wall and answering nearly every customer complaint, but also managing a solid, green-focused, Twitter stream. Walmart also seems to actively listen to the organic (and apparently largely negative) social conversation and respond to it through its community outreach programs.

As Walmart has been the fastest growing brand on Facebook for at least the last six months, it will be interesting to see if its active management of that channel can nudge its Netbase sentiment score northward.

Discount and Value stores

Among Discount and Value stores, four brands default likers to open walls, while three default to brand posts. Costco, Dollar Tree and BJ’s, default to the most open of open walls, “Most Recent” posts. Family Dollar defaults to “Top Posts.” Rite Aid, Walgreens and CVS all default to brand posts.

Sadly, the general theme for this sector is “missed opportunity.” There is only one winner here, and it’s a surprise. Perhaps because of its unfortunate poor sentiment and passion index, CVS has, over the last year, taken the most active position relative to its competitors. The Discount and Value brand manages its wall very actively. It also runs regular, well-designed promotions to boost its liker base.

Meanwhile, Dollar Tree, Costco and Rite Aid are squandering enviable positive sentiment and customer passion by letting their walls fill with scams and spam. These brands, along with Family Dollar and Walgreens, should look to CVS (despite that brand’s low Netbase score) as an example. In just over a year, CVS has attracted nearly a half-million likers with its actively managed Social Promotions and Social Stream Marketing effort.

Hobby stores

The Recreation sector, particularly Hobby stores, contains brands that have most benefited from maintaining open Facebook walls. In our group of six, only Party City defaults users to brand posts. It’s low sentiment score may account for the brand’s position here. But a quick review of its “Top Posts” suggests the brand could benefit from opening things up. For almost all Recreation brands, and certainly all Hobby brands, the Facebook wall has become a community forum, a place for likers to show off and share their handiwork. The only thing Hobby brands need to do, it seems, is run regular promotions to attract new likers, engage current fans and conduct a modest amount of policing to keep the spammers at bay.

As Media Logic has written before, a few Specialty Hardlines brands (specifically Bed Bath & Beyond) have seen great social marketing success by picking up cues from the Recreation sector and promoting actively managed open Facebook walls.

Conclusion

While there is yet no clear answer to the “chicken or egg” question that opened this article, top brands, including Kohl’s, CVS and Hobby Lobby, do point to general rules and best practices. And they also point to the value of active social media management.

Whether your brand can run a lightly-policed open wall or needs to default to a brand wall and actively engage negative social sentiment, there really is no longer any excuse for not investing in professional management.

Media Logic is a pioneer in marketing for a social world. We have created a new generation of professional marketing services, driven by active Conversation Management and powered by our social collaboration platform, Zeitgeist & Coffee, designed to help both B2B and consumer brands realize the full potential of social media.

Call us for a chat sometime. We guarantee that it will be worth your while and that we won’t try to hook you … at least not right away.

Want to know what Conversation Managers really do? Take a look at this video Scott Rodgers recently put together:

We work hard at Media Logic to remain neutral in our reporting on the state of marketing for a social world. There is a lot of good news and a lot of great ideas to spread around. We don’t need to be hogs. And honestly, we think “rising Likers lifts all boats.”

But we have to admit that it does feel pretty good to tell you that at 21 percent, the fastest-growing major brand on Facebook for the week ending June 5 was none other than our founding retail account FYE. It also feels pretty good to report that the third fastest-growing brand, Cabela’s, is a Media Logic client, too.

Against some pretty mighty odds, FYE has been growing its FYEGUY social persona at a prodigious rate as of late. In our recent webinar, FYE Naked, we boldly predicted that growth wouldn’t stop – that it would spike. That prediction came true when back-to-back Facebook-based social promotions, Angry Birds and Tech N9ne, drove the big percent increase in Likers and our Zeitgeist & Coffee^sm-managed social effort earned FYE the highest Facebook engagement score among 100 tracked brands.

Cabela’s (our newest retail account) landed at #3 with 65K new Likers and a solid one-week increase of 6.1 percent. Competitors Gander Mountain and Bass Pro Shops took the #2 and #4 spots, with 6.4 percent and 4.1 percent gains, respectively.

PacSun and Walmart repeated their top 10 performances, landing in the #5 and #6 slots. Sears, after falling off the list the previous week, climbed to #7 on the strength of a Facebook Father’s Day sweepstakes. Gymboree, Tommy Hilfiger and Fashion Bug rounded out the list at #8, #9 and #10.

Curiously, Kirkland’s, which set the standard for Liker growth with its recent “Cha-Ching!” sweepstakes, fell this week all the way to the bottom of the Media Logic Facebook Retailers list.

If you fall into this rarified category, you’re in luck! There are about 250 social media management tools on the market designed to help you do your thing – listen in, engage and counterpunch with a comment or a tweet. If you’re aggressive and swift, you may even shift sentiment a degree or two.

However, since so few organizations generate enough organic chatter to even bother monitoring, and since monitoring has so little value as anything but a starting point for a reactive marketing strategy, we have to ask why tools that do it seem to be the only ones that exist. Why is monitoring and reflexively reacting the priority?

As blogger Joshua Barnes prepares to map social media management platforms, he is nearing an important question. Joshua writes, “The very nature of listening is reactive and defensive, it’s simply not able to ascertain insight. Something above listening, in the hierarchy of data organization, must provide that top-down value. Listening is just a data point.”

So, the question that naturally follows is, “what is above listening in that hierarchy?” Media Logic believes the answer is collaboration – constant collaboration – between client, agency, influencers, customers and prospects on the creation, monitoring and analysis of proactive social media efforts.

Intelligence happens when you collaborate. And no technology can substitute for it.

The tools sure are shiny! But experience tells us there is simply no listening tool so intelligent and no posting tool so swift that they can’t be outpaced (and rather easily) by a small team plugged into the brand and empowered by a good social workflow and reasonable approval process.

What is above listening in the hierarchy of data organization? The answer is shared knowledge and value creation. And it’s made possible by real-time social collaboration managed by professionals through tools like Media Logic’s Zeitgeist and Coffee.

When an individual representing Chrysler tweeted a derogatory remark about Detroit, a city Chrysler is invested in promoting, there was someone to fire, and there was an agency to let go.

Still, at the end of the day, the public holds the brand itself responsible for its social media streams. Chrysler will take the brunt of the impact.

As a result of the controversy, social media marketing takes a bit of a beating, as well.

Many CEO’s remain unconvinced about the power of social media. When their fears are played out by another brand, they feel justified in remaining on the sidelines. They may permit a defensive posture in their efforts – fielding customer complaints, responding to product criticisms – but they also may believe they have good reason not to engage fully.

Unfortunately, if brands fail to claim their spaces now in social media networks, they will regret it. Their competitors will become skilled with owned media while they remain inept. Instead of allowing fear to limit opportunities in social media, we believe the right processes and tools can help companies not only survive current trends but flourish in them.

At Media Logic, we use Zeitgeist & Coffee, a real-time marketing collaboration and management platform to develop ideas, assign, approve and publish content and engage in sincere two-way conversations with audiences in social media networks. It positions companies to deliver marketing for a social world.

Much of the talk surrounding the Chrysler gaffe focuses on policy. While guidelines are very important, they mean little without the processes and tools to support them. Zeitgeist & Coffee folds our input as an agency into the workflow of the company, while integrating the company’s own marketing protocol.

Yesterday’s AdvertisingAge article, “What Lurks Behind Chrysler’s F-bomb? Social-Media Turf War,” describes battles behind the scenes at many companies: Which department is responsible for social media? A collaborative process gives everyone ownership.

No longer.

Technological changes, specifically in mobile devices and social media, have driven a rapid evolution of our marketing culture. Today, in addition to up-to-the-second information, consumers expect sincere two-way communication between themselves and the businesses and organizations with which they would like to have relationships. Owned media – websites, social sites, stores, etc. – must now take the strategic point, ahead of traditional advertising and public relations, in branding and promotions.

It’s all very exciting. But the time and resource demands of real-time engagement through owned media is stressing – and often breaking – established marketing budgets, protocols … and relationships.

To meet the challenges and take advantage of the incredible communication opportunities now available, Media Logic created Zeitgeist & Coffee, a real-time marketing collaboration and management platform.

Zeitgeist & Coffee is a complete social ecosystem – idea exchange, content development environment, assignment and approval dashboard, posting hub, and monitoring and an analysis tool – designed to deliver marketing for a social world.

But Zeitgeist & Coffee is much more than a technology.

Zeitgeist & Coffee manages the new marketing protocol, the new way clients, agencies and customers must work together. It is the tool our Conversation Managers use to connect and collaborate with our clients in real-time and is the tool that allows Media Logic to deliver our innovative social marketing services: Influencer Marketing, Managed Community Marketing and Social Promotions and Social Stream Marketing.

Zeitgeist & Coffee comes bundled with every Media Logic relationship and undergoes routine enhancements to meet the evolving demands of marketing for a social world.

For more information and to request a custom demo, contact us.

Pepsi has reported that every entry in its Refresh Project generates, on average, 5,000 votes. That means the 5,000 projects Pepsi had approved and posted to its Refresh site by June 2010 generated 25 million direct engagements. And those 25 million represent only the tip of the iceberg relative to the total media reach generated by the 5,000 posters who promoted their causes through their own social networks.

Social promotions, defined here as any intentional social engagement – queries, polls, contests and other structured invitations to interact with a brand – seed the social landscape, trigger interaction and inspire sharing. Their success is changing how brands look at social media – reducing fears and opening minds.

Many organizations have been slow to the social media party, citing the inability to control messaging as the main reason for their hesitance. And certainly the waves of negative comments generated by the political missteps and bad design decisions of brands like Whole Foods, Target, Best Buy and Gap only make nervous brands even more so. But brands still standing on the sidelines should stop looking at the mistakes their competitors have made and instead focus on the successes they are having.

Facebook is helping brands mitigate negativity. It now allows brands to implement segregated Facebook walls where the posts of “others” are not immediately visible and also collapses comments so they too are not immediately visible. But even before Facebook implemented these options, brands had already demoted the wall by landing visitors on a promotions tab by default. Probably to their general relief and great surprise, companies from Pepsi to American Eagle Outfitters discovered their social fans and followers didn’t mind. In fact, they seem to prefer the control offered by promotions to the wild west of freeform conversation.

Promotions, it appears, provide a necessary context for consumers. Rather than shutting down two-way conversation, promotions open up the engagement faucet.

All by itself, this is cool. Promotions work, and their ROI, at least relative to reach, can be directly measured.

But promotions can do more than reach. Promotions can also teach.

Thanks to tools like Alterian’s SM2, promotions can become research instruments that in sum are potentially more valuable (and certainly more timely) than traditional data gathering techniques. Promotions by their nature constrain the question set social media monitoring tools are asked to explore. Consequently, the information returned is of exponentially greater interest and greater value.

I must offer a few caveats. First, social promotions are only valuable as research instruments if the organization issuing them is social itself. Merely having a Facebook page or Twitter stream does not qualify. Organizations must be able to share information and ideas across departments. Second, promotions need an audience. If a brand does not enjoy a large fan/follower/email base, its social promotions will need additional media support in order to gain traction.

Media Logic, with its Zeitgeist & Coffee^sm dynamic content management environment, is among a new generation of marketing agencies pioneering the development of behind-the-scenes networks designed to take social media integration to the next level. These networks connect critical departments within organizations – like product development, community relations, sales and marketing – and through marketing, connect the brand to the entire social world. Combining a behind-the-scenes social network with a public social network into a single manageable whole allows brands to maximize the power of social media to reach and teach.

While we cheer this growing acknowledgement of social media as a marketing tool, we wonder about the effectiveness of most hospitals’ efforts as they “dip their toes into the water.” Are they building engagement? Are they forming communities? Are they advancing their brand and differentiating?

Social media without a social media marketing strategy may help us develop Facebook “likers” or Twitter followers, but we’ll never get the kind of engagement that will build an engaged audience and meet our objectives.

So what do we do? Let’s look at what Media Logic is doing for one of its medical clients, a large multi-site radiology practice in New Jersey, Altantic Medical Imaging or AMI. Radiology is a highly competitive field with private specialty practices jousting for patients with large medical institutions and multi-specialty physician groups.

To position AMI as a technological forerunner and thought leader, Media Logic focused their social media efforts on building awareness of one of the hottest issues in radiology — potentially excessive exposure to radiation. Dr. David Dow, an AMI radiologist and an ardent spokesperson for low dose radiologic techniques, became a spokesperson for the practice through topical blog posts, supported by Twitter and Facebook submissions.  Through a carefully planned content marketing strategy, link-building and traffic generation, AMI now appears at the top of the list for local Google searches and has developed a growing community of loyal and engaged followers.

So what does this mean for larger, more diverse institutions? Most importantly, this is your opportunity to shine – but you’ll likely never find the spotlight with an all encompassing hospital effort. It will be too broad and, frankly, too “institutional.” Focus on one of your “centers of excellence” as a beginning. Then, while it may be politically difficult, you’re going to need to have a “voice” or “voices” — real, live people to spearhead the conversation and create engagement. Finally, you’re going to need to develop an ongoing source of fresh and relevant content. For AMI, Media Logic’s Zeitgeist & Coffee^SM process has helped scour the landscape for up-to-the minute topics, trends and commentary. On the backend, precise tracking and analysis will help you determine which topics and discussion items are doing the “heavy lifting.”

It’s taken medical marketers 10 years to realize the promise of the Web. The smart ones won’t wait so long this time around.

Even though the effort has just recently launched, we have used “best practice” social marketing techniques we have learned through our work with highly regulated industries such as banking and insurance to build-in security while optimizing engagement. Here are three key elements we believe are important in using social media as a marketing tool for medical practices.

Dealing with Risk

Medical providers are (rightfully) concerned about the risk of HIPAA violations on social media sites. Medical providers are also concerned about expectations that they will furnish diagnoses and treatment advice in response to fan queries. The safest way round these issues is to have a clearly stated policy (published as part of a bio or “about” section on all social media platforms) that outlines what may and may not be discussed in a public forum. For AMI, we also crafted a library of physician-approved responses to some expected (and potentially problematic) questions that would, for example, refer the fan back to his/her personal physician.

We also knew that we should be prepared to the “airing” of patient-service issues (for example, long waiting times, billing concerns, etc.). These types of issues need to be addressed quickly in the public space to show the practice’s concern and then moved offline for resolution.

Perhaps most importantly, Media Logic (via its Zeitgeist & Coffee social media management service) established a rigid approval protocol for all social media postings, including responses to fan queries and blog comments.

Establishing a Voice

One of the most critical aspects of establishing an effective social media presence is to differentiate your practice from the sea of medical information available online and in the social space. For AMI, we looked to do two things. First, we needed a persona (or a “voice”) that would speak for the practice. No one wants to have a conversation with an institution or a faceless practice. At AMI, this voice was the voice of Dr. David Dowe, an eminent radiologist and a rather forthright persona in his own right. Dr. Dowe’s voice personalizes AMI and makes it distinctive in the social space.

Second, we needed a point-of-view. Why should anyone care to read AMI’s blog or to follow the practice on Facebook or twitter? We found the answer in AMI’s adoption of an important new approach to CT-scans using low doses of radiation. It allowed us to position AMI as a thought leader and champion of an important cause – beyond being “just another imaging center.”

Being Committed

Finally, participating in social media requires a commitment. “In & out” attempts fail to build followers and can, in fact, produce a negative response. AMI, working with Media Logic, established firm expectations for participation (for example, number of Facebook posts per weeks, number of blog posts per month, etc.) to make sure that we were actively conversing with our target audiences. Using Media Logic’s Zeitgeist & Coffee dashboard as control central, a Media Logic conversation manager tracks the schedule, promotes topics of conversation, encourages client participation and handles the details of posting and follow up. Most social media efforts fail because they are just not anybody’s “real” job.