Cerado

A Social Strategy That’s A-OK

OK Labs forgoes traditional marketing in favor of a community-based Web 2.0 approach.

By Marti Konstant, vice president of marketing for Open Kernel (OK) Labs, as told to Lauren McKay

• Tell us about your organization. Open Kernel—OK Labs—is a three-year-old start-up that was born in Australia and is now headquartered in Chicago. My role when coming on board was to build up the brand and, most importantly, create awareness among the technical developer community who work on developing mobile devices. Our area is mobile open virtual solutions. We are in the innards of mobile handsets. It’s not at the application level, but it’s embedded within the device.

I realized initially that the company wouldn’t exist if Google didn’t exist. The first commercial opportunities came through online inquiries. The obvious thing to do was to find out who these people are, what their needs are, and what kinds of places they go to find information. I tried to figure out the types of things these global engineers care about and tried to address their thirst for information that was accurate, technical, and in a peer-to-peer venue.

• At what point did you turn to service provider Cerado for strategic support? I found Cerado through networking and I said, “I’m building a community of developers and I know this community behaves differently from other communities. Can you help me build this?” I knew I couldn’t do it on my own. Cerado did the typical things of defining the behaviors of the community—and came up with something I loved. Cerado reinforced the notion of creating elements that can be shared easily—or “social objects”—and showed us lots of practical, real-world examples, ultimately taking us down a path toward building an online community. In addition to the community-development plan, Cerado introduced us to the overall concept of social media and, of course, Twitter—before its big ascent. What started out as a community-development plan evolved into a complete sharing plan—which included viral videos, webinars, and social networking—to grow organically and accomplish brand awareness along the way.

• What results have you seen from your online efforts? Our goal after developing the community was to have 1,000 members within a year. We’re at about 1,500 now. And, in our realm, when you consider the size of the developer community, that’s substantial.

We definitely have increased our online footprint and visibility. Now when OK Labs releases a press release, for example, we launch a webinar surrounding that news and we might ask a person with an impressive list of industry followers to twitter about our event or accompanying white paper. That leads to increased participation in our webinars. When we deployed new social sharing tactics during our last news launch on the topic of Google Android, we had the longest number of days in which people participated with a sustained increase in traffic.

OK Labs’ GeekTV videos are viewed via YouTube and Vimeo approximately 70 to 100 times per week. We know that we have not scratched the surface of what can be accomplished by actually promoting the videos with social media tactics. Most of our traffic for videos comes from links through our email nurturing program.

The majority—about 90 percent—of our leads come from Web searches and through email queries. Google search is the reason that the OKL4 technology was discovered by developers and led to our first design-in solution for a major chipset manufacturer for mobile phones.

It’s a challenge at this point to keep up with lead qualification. Twitter and LinkedIn will play a larger role in OK Labs’ social media strategy in the coming months.

Mobile tech vendor seeks to ease the strain on wallets…literally
From InternetRetailer (August 18, 2009)

Many consumers’ wallets and purses are bulging with loyalty cards, membership cards, credit cards and other pieces of plastic. It seems sometimes one could use a second wallet or handbag just for the ever-growing number of cards.

Mobile technology vendor Cerado Inc. believes there’s a market for a niche mobile solution to ease management and carrying of loyalty cards. It has introduced Scanaroo, an iPhone application that enables consumers to take close-up pictures of loyalty cards and store and organize the images. The goal is not to have to carry loyalty cards at all, using the iPhone, instead.

After a card has been photographed and stored in the Scanaroo library, a consumer can read the number of the card to a cashier or, in some cases, let the cashier scan the card’s bar code image directly on the smartphone. Some types of bar code readers can scan from a computer-based image; others cannot.

“Mobile phones and Scanaroo today do for loyalty and other cards what the iPod did years ago for CDs,” says Christopher Carfi, CEO of Cerado. “It used to be you’d grab a half-dozen CDs on your way out and hope you had enough and the best ones for the day. Then the iPod came along and you could have every CD you owned on one, small mobile device. The iPod was transformational technology. And so are mobile phones. In this case, it’s Scanaroo carrying all your cards on one, small mobile device.”

Related:

InternetRetailer

We had the chance to chat via email with Jordan Crook from Mobile Marketer earlier this week about Scanaroo, our loyalty card app for the iPhone.

Here’s a link to Crook’s side of the story, which we think was pretty-much spot on.

The key graf:

This is really the foundation of why we built the app, and it derives directly from Doc Searls’ drive with ProjectVRM, which has a stated goal of creating “tools of independence and engagement” for the customer side of the business relationship.

That said, Crook really grokked that what we’re trying to do with Scanaroo provides a benefit for both parties.

I saw this tweet today from @FitMenu which said “I’ve turned down loyalty programs to avoid that one more thing to carry,” and Crook noted that “often times, loyalty cards, gift cards and membership cards are not used on a daily basis,” which is exactly right, because it’s currently a hot pain to carry them all around. So, the retailers win, too, by always having the opportunity to have their card easily available.

Related:

Cerado Launches Loyalty Card Organization App (Mobile Marketer)
Scanaroo web site (http://www.scanaroo.com)

From RetailTouchpoints, July 23, 2009:

Providing the ability to reach some 250 million users, the Facebook platform has been established as a pot of gold for retailers, and some are taking full advantage of its offerings.

“Retailers that have a presence Facebook can leverage the social network for extending brand recognition, attracting new customers and staying top of mind with existing customers, and gaining more insight into their customers’ preferences,” says Nancy MacGregor Hill, Communications and Social Media Strategist, Real Time Communications. “Fan or group pages on Facebook are a great way for retail brands to make announcements about sales, offer special promotions for Facebook users, particularly for those who refer their friends, and see comments about customers’ experiences, their questions and other relevant discussions on their wall pages.” All of this, Hill says, is useful in strengthening a brand, supporting other advertising and marketing initiatives and helping serve customers better.

An example of Coach’s Facebook Fan Page Ad
“Whether you are a small local business, or even a well known product or service you will need to give some thought to your audience like, who they are, how do they want to be spoken to, what messages would you want them to receive, and what are the tactics for having them interact with your message,” says Paul Dunay, Global Managing Director of Services and Social Marketing at Avaya & Author of the forthcoming book “Facebook Marketing for Dummies.”

While experts agree that the common objectives for retailers should be branding, community building and intelligence acquisition, it is important to remember that the customer is still top of mind.

“The important thing to remember about social business is that all of the various parties (retailers, customers, prospective customers, etc.) all can—and should be—a part of the conversation,” says Chris Carfi, Co-Founder of Cerado, Inc. & Author of The Social Customer Manifesto Blog. “The dynamic is very different than the ‘customer-as-target’ mentality.”

Here are innovative ways retailers are addressing these kinds of objectives:

* Whole Foods: The organic grocer, with over 100,000 fans on its Facebook page, has done an outstanding job offering information that’s not only relevant to the store, but to the food industry as well. The company knows who’s shopping in the store—customers looking for the best in organic foods. A recent post on Whole Foods’ Facebook page offered an announcement about the USDA National Organics Program hiring enforcement investigators, which was “great news for organic integrity.” So while they do provide coupons and offers relevant to shopping at Whole Foods, they’re very focused on providing more information that gives a backbone to the name.
* Mandee: The small young apparel retailer, with nearly 22,000 fans uses the status feature on Facebook to ask their fans questions about merchandise and fashion preferences, like what colors and styles shoppers are interested in. Who makes the best pair of jeans? They also ask questions that provide richer information, not necessarily relevant to merchandise, but to learn more about their customers, like ‘What concerts you’re looking forward to this summer?’ (because Mandee wants to give out tickets), or whether or not you share clothes with your sisters. They have a strong presence on every major social network, from MySpace and Twitter to My Yearbook and Sodahead, which are geared to younger demographics.
* Sears: The cross-channel retailer, which recently launched “Christmas in July,” offers visitors a real incentive to become a fan: A free $10 Sears coupon. Sears currently has nearly 25,000 fans.
* Coach: The luxury retailer offers Facebook fans an exclusive free gift, but they have to fill out a form which asks for basic customer information, and bring it into a Coach store. This effort has potential to increase store traffic and help Coach to enhance their contact database. The Coach Facebook page has nearly 400,000 fans.
* Zappos: The e-tailer, recently acquired by Amazon, tapped Facebook for a video campaign where fans send in video clips of them opening the box of shoes they just received. The company also developed an application that enables people to show their recent purchases and brand preferences on their personal Facebook pages, creating an opportunity to make huge viral impact. Zappos has nearly 19,000 fans on Facebook.
* MiniUSA: The brand provides a venue where passionate customers have built a community. Nearly 170,000 fans of Mini are connected and rallying around what they are passionate about. They’re sharing pictures, stories and learnings about their cars with each other. “Facebook gives Mini a center-of-gravity around which the fans can congregate and, at the same time, gives them the opportunity to listen to those same customers and learn from them,” says Carfi.

Carfi adds that retailers need to assess the benefits of Facebook on an individual basis, like what business objectives they can measure. “Metrics can fall into a number of different buckets: Financial/ROI metrics, activity metrics, or others,” he says. “Instead of looking at the Facebook activities in isolation, look at how the whole business is doing (gaining market share and investing in expansion), like MiniUSA, which has seen significant increase overall.”

Dunay, who pens the Buzz Marketing for Technology Blog, says having a Facebook presence, like a Web site, is a fundamental tactic, which calls for posting updates and interesting content as frequently as possible. “Be sure to get your employees involved,” he says. “Encourage them to become fans and drive the conversations to create a thriving community. This is the key to growing your fan base ‘virally.’ Keep in mind Facebook pages are indexable so be sure to write your content with good SEO in mind.”

We’ve just made available a new Executive Briefing e-book that pragmatically introduces the idea of social networking for businesses and associations. Interested in introducing social networking to the exec staff at your organization? Included are answers to the common questions of:

• What is social networking?
• Why does this matter? Isn’t “social networking” just for high school kids?
• How can my organization get closer to customers or members using social networking?

Excerpt: Why should our organization care about social networking?

“Customers have lost trust in traditional sales, marketing and service (the three areas commonly referred to as “CRM,” or Customer Relationship Management). According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, “the most credible source of information about a company is now ‘a person like me,’ which has risen dramatically to surpass doctors and academic experts for the first time.” The survey relates that in the U.S., trust in “a person like me” increased from 20% in 2003 to 68% today.

The connections enabled by social networks are the glue that put the humanity back into business to solve the trust problem. In other words, the organizations that will win are the ones that most easily enable individuals to build relationships and communities with people they trust.”

“The Social Customer Manifesto,” a weblog written by Cerado co-founder Christopher Carfi, has been named “Best CRM Blog of 2005″ in voting by readers of SearchCRM.com. Throughout October and November 2005, readers were asked to judge over a dozen CRM-oriented blogs on a variety of traits including personality, usefulness, content and likelihood to encourage return visits. When the votes were tallied, The Social Customer Manifesto came out on top as the best CRM blog of 2005.

Started in July, 2004, The Social Customer Manifesto has consistently provided commentary and conversation on a variety of topics that have included not only customer relationship management, but also sales, marketing and general business as well. Most importantly, these conversations center around the increasing power of the customer in business relationships. Recent topics have addressed the issues of:

• Customer satisfaction
• CEO blogging
• Word-of-mouth marketing
• Customer collaboration using emerging technologies such as wikis
• Enterprise social networking
• Business book reviews
• The increasing role and importance of customer-driven communities in business

Interested in joining the conversation? Visit The Social Customer Manifesto blog and accompanying business podcast at http://www.socialcustomer.com.