Distributed Commerce | Moontoast | The Leader in Social Marketing, Social Analytics and Social ROI

When you run a social channel as a brand, band, or business, you’re really the ringleader, rockstar, and emcee to a world-size pool of people. The show you bring to stage is going to determine how much and what segment of that pool will pay attention and fall in love with you. How do you start to deliver amazing experiences to an online audience? Be a gracious and entertaining host.

What does that even mean? All of the content you create and share should not be created from the perspective that you’re doing this for the benefit of the brand. You’re creating and sharing for them. The long tail result of great content is a growing fan base and increased brand awareness. Give people a great experience and not only will they build deeper relationships with your brand, but they begin to tell their friends.

Here are some ideas to help get you started:

Create a content calendar.
Follow the calendar.
Do two big things each month. This could be a sweepstakes, special sale, or free download of new music.
Do one meaningful thing each week. It’s easy to run mini-contests in which you simply give away product to a handful of fans.
Dish. Give behind-the-scenes content, useful tips, etc.
Be awesome regularly.

Big things get people’s attention. Little things keep them around.

Delivering happiness through social channels is all about creating interesting content and special offers that surprise and delight. By giving people access to special events online, you can easily capture new email addresses, acquire new customers, and generate word-of-mouth and brand awareness.

Moontoast’s Social Activation Engine is a platform that lets social media marketers create sweepstakes, contests, giveaways, and commerce offers quickly and easily to manage effective social campaigns. Our apps also tie back to our Social Analytics Suite to enable you to measure the performance of each and use that data to understand not only what fans react to, but also how you can better distribute the offers. We measure using DITE methodology (discovery, interaction, transaction, endorsement) to understand strengths and weaknesses of an offer. For example, a strong transaction rate but low discovery means you can increase revenue or leads by posting more often. High discoveries but a low conversion rate can mean you need to take a look at how compelling the offer is. Looking at these and other data in the Social Analytics Suite helps to drive better campaign performance.

For day-to-day content, here are some tips we’ve seen to be highly engaging:

Post big images. Bands can post images with song lyrics. Brands can post lifestyle or ‘results’ images from projects. Photos and videos also have a greater EdgeRank weight.
Go on-camera. Let people behind the curtain and see the face of the brand with behind-the-scenes content or even show the social team answering questions.
Pay attention to analytics. Some posts will get broadcast to more people than others. If a post is getting low impressions, share the post again at different times of the day to try to get more eyeballs on it.
Remember the feed. Social content appears in people’s feeds and then fall down and off the page as other content replaces it. People do not, by and large, visit a brand’s main page once they have Liked or Followed your brand; they don’t need to return as they then receive updates in the feed. The lesson here is to post content to reach a broad audience and don’t worry about posting too often. The half-life of a post is around 80 minutes.
Use the voice of a human, not a robot. Don’t be afraid to showcase a little (or a lot of) brand personality, not just in graphics or videos, but as the voice of the brand.

So there you go. Get into the habit of doing little surprises weekly and a couple bigger campaigns monthly. Take the stage and make it a great show!

Photo by Incase

It might be tempting to buy into the field of dreams mentality that says “build it and they will come.” This simple statement really defines the attitudes and mindsets of a lot of business owners, marketers and brand managers today. There appears to be an assumption that once you open your store, launch your website or finish your Facebook brand page that consumers and fans will magically flock there.

Crazy, isn’t it?

We live in fast paced times where attention spans are growing shorter and shorter by the minute. We also live in the age of convenience. People stay in their cars and drive up to windows to get their food. If the line is moving too slow they speed off somewhere else, sometimes right across the street. There’s a Starbucks across from the Starbucks!

In the online world we call the internet, anything that is fast in the real world is only multiplied. For example, in 2011 150,000 new URL’s were launched every day! That was a 21% increase from only two years prior. Facebook is estimated to hit 1 billion users this August. That’s a lot of eyeballs!

With that kind of growth, it’s not hard to see that simply building and launching a website or webstore and expecting people to discover and engage with it is nothing short of a pipe dream.

At Moontoast we’ve come up with a pretty great solution to this problem. We took a different approach and said “why not distribute your marketing and commerce efforts into the channels where people are spending time online.” It’s not limited to only commerce, either. This is increasingly how consumers are expecting to receive offers and loyalty rewards.

Who are we talking about?

Everybody. Everywhere. All the time. Online.

It started with e-mail lists and official websites in the 1990’s, it continued with CPC advertising in the early 2,000’s and now we are full speed into the era of The Social Revolution. Feeds are king. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, YouTube and other social arenas are where everybody is spending the bulk of their time online.

The next generation consumer will expect to be able to sign up for contests, make purchases, vote on new products and any other imaginable transaction anywhere he or she wants. In fact, they probably won’t even be on a computer. They will want to buy those cool new shoes from their iPhone while they are commuting into work on the train. They will order concert tickets from their iPad while they are in bed at the end of a long work day. In the same way they post photos of the concert they are at on Instagram or food they are eating on Foodspotting today, they will interact with your brand in the future in any channel available. The question is, will you be there when they come?

The age of social is here. Your brand lives everywhere online. It’s time to transact like it. This is your opportunity and we’re here to help.

What if I told you a Facebook Like is worth $2.50 to your brand. Would you be ecstatic? Or would you be sorely disappointed?

What if that number was, say, $250? Would that change your perception?

It’s all relative, of course, to what others in your industry are achieving with their social efforts, but when you think about it…why are we trying so hard to find out exactly what the value of a Like, fan, or follower is in the first place?

What Value is Considered “Good” Anyway?

So you’re researching all you can about how much a Facebook Like is worth so you can make sure your brand is up to par with its own campaigns. The problem is measuring the relationship you are developing with your fans. How do you put a dollar value on that?

You don’t.

Your job is to make that Like worth whatever you can make it worth to the fan. This isn’t something to be quantified by crunching numbers. This is a long-term relationship you are creating by offering great experiences to your community, and learning from the feedback and reactions you receive.

Turn the statement around and you’ll see it’s not really about the value of the Like – How much value do you add to the fan’s experience?

And how do you know if you’re creating value? What can you measure? At Moontoast, we use the DITE Methodology to track the reach and relevancy of social campaigns. DITE (discovery, interaction, transaction, endorsement) is a reflection of the love your content gets from fans. How many people are finding it? Is there a boost in discovery that tells you an influencer shared your post? How are people interacting with your post? Are they playing a video, listening to music, or clicking any other clickable plaything within your post? Are they entering your sweepstakes? Are they Liking what you’re saying? That’s value.

It’s liberating, really, to know that you can add an infinite amount of value, enhance the relationship, and help mold the perception of your brand. That’s how you create ambassadors who will tell their friends, family, and co-workers about their experiences.