New blog location

For two significant reasons, I have moved my blog from Google Blogger to Wordpress:

1. Wordpress's only business is blogging (and CMS, though they have a ways to go on that to catch up to the glorious Drupal). They invest in their blogging platform. It works, and it's good.

2. Transferring DNS from Network Solutions to Blogger is a joke. It ain't happening. So hopefully my blog now resides at http://www.lankester.com.  If not, you can find it at http://bigchiefalice.wordpress.com.

See you there! This one is closing down!

Forbes Magazine covers Friend2Friend's Outside Magazine engagement

Delighted to have secured a great article in Forbes Magazine, 'Creating Scalable, Engaging Editorial Content with MaaS -- 'Media as a Service.'

Forbes Magazine has published a review of how our Best Town Ever 2013 Social Voting Contest for Outside Magazine contributed editorial content for their September 2013 issue. The article outlines why Outside Magazine chose a Friend2Friend social engagement app and how the app worked.

Mastering content marketing on LinkedIn

Social strategies and content marketing strategies must be closely coupled in order to work. This is where LinkedIn has emerged as a huge business marketing opportunity. Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, talked recently of his plans for LinkedIn to become “the definitive professional publishing platform, where professionals come to consume relevant content and publishers come to share it.” One out of every three professionals on the planet is now on LinkedIn. As a place where businesses and professionals connect, LinkedIn is uniquely positioned to support professional communication, and it is building the hooks and systems to cultivate the sharing of content organically based on communities’ specific interests. Read more in this article written and placed in iMedia.

3 Critical investment opportunities for brands

Now that the dust has settled over Facebook's Q2 earnings results and the resulting share price changes, let's look at what the latest results mean for brand marketers. No, not whether brand owners should speculate in Facebook stock, but instead what user behavior trends and which successful Facebook products should brands be investing in over the next six months?

Read some thoughts in an article written and placed in ClickZ this month.

I'm glad Google Reader has gone...

I have been lazily using Google Reader for years ... probably since it first came out, though I'm not sure. But it wasn't until I was forced to abandon the tool that I realized what I'd been putting up with. The experience was just as unpleasant as the Google GMail experience (solved recently with Postbox -- excellent). I've now transitioned to Feedly and what a joy it is. So I'm going to ignore all the griping and whingeing and applaud Google for letting me go.

No more B2C Marketing Envy

I love being in the consumer marketing business. I spent 6 months at BEA Systems once back in the early 90s, helping with the worldwide launch of a middleware product. When I asked "can I get a demo?" the team looked at me blankly. "A demo? No. It's middleware." That was when I finally decided I'd never work on marketing something I couldn't use, play with, get the feel of and have fun with. And consumer tech marketing was where I could do all that. But it's changing. B2B marketing is getting more entertaining. B2B marketing is definitely getting the zing of B2C. And content marketing will be the way it happens. Instead of blasting out one-to-many messages to consumers, businesses are forced consider what they can offer to help those consumers do their job better. Content creation is a challenge, but a good one. It forces businesses to think about their consumers -- to focus on what's important to them, and what they can offer that helps. Read this recent article written for, and placed last week in ClickZ "No More B2C Marketing Envy." .

B2C marketing on social gets more complex every day — what social fragmentation means

Recent article written and promoted through the ClickZ network -- What Social Fragmentation Means for Marketers -- speaks to the increasingly fragmented story for brands for marketing on social. We have had considerable success encouraging our brand clients to bring multiple B2C social channel content efforts into a single space on Facebook, where content can be promoted and aggregated through the largest audience network.  Fanalog from SmartWool is a great example of work here.

The rising value of LinkedIn

Listening to the quarterly earnings report from LinkedIn this past week, I was really struck by the massive future value of LinkedIn as a hub for professionals worldwide.  This article was written and submitted to Adotas the same day. "Social media landscape: LinkedIn could rival Facebook's dominance."

Moving on from clicks to community

Working with large global consumer brands on Facebook I am reminded daily that success on social is all about community, not about clicks. This is particularly true when it comes to a successful advertising strategy on social.

Here's an excerpt:

Every single fan has the potential of helping a brand create authentic content, and Facebook’s engagement-driven advertising products are designed to amplify great content. It’s that powerful triumvirate of owned media (the page) encouraging the content to be created; to earned media (the fans responding, sharing, participating); to paid media (the brand amplifying those conversations and interactions to a wider audience). Without the first two, the third is just a one-to-many, reach-oriented broadcast message. And it will resonate less authentically on social platforms.

 Article written and placed for ClickZ: "Advertising on Facebook Is About Community, Not Clicks."

10 Ways to Boost Engagement on Facebook with Social Engagement Apps

This month, we released a White Paper that documented our best practices when it comes to social engagement apps on Facebook.  You can read the results in this article published on ClickZ -- "10 Ways to boost Engagement on Facebook with Social Engagement Apps," and download the Social Engagement Best Practices White Paper here.

ClickZ here we come!

Just be asked to write a blog post every month this year for ClickZ, the leading brand blog. Excited! First article due next week. Think I'll work with Roger Katz on continuing the mobile social thread ... it's important, and there's plenty left to say.

2013 is the Mobile Social Marketing

Mobile Social Marketing.  It's what I live and breathe. Here's an article written and placed in ADOTAS this week.  Everything I need to say is in here. No need to repeat!

"2013: The Year of Mobile Social Marketing."

It's time to mobilize your social fans

With Cyber Monday in the rear view mirror, here are some thoughts on the importance of capturing the mobile follower. Since joining Friend2Friend, we have ensured that every social branded experience is fully mobile-ready.  It's been great to put all that Loopt experience to work!

Read the recent article at Direct Marketing News:http://www.dmnews.com/its-time-to-mobilize-your-social-fans/article/273864/

Social mobile is exploding

Every key indicator worth watching shows that the mobile Internet is exploding. The market has now finally reached a point where smartphone and tablet usage, and accompanying Internet speed and application performance, are such that users actually find their phones — and tablets — legitimate and worthwhile alternatives to their desktop or laptop computer. This, combined with critical audience size, opens up an enormous untapped market for brands to engage social mobile fans.

See this post just posted to Friend2Friend's blog with some of the latest stats pointing to the explosion of social mobile. 

Are you failing your Facebook fans on mobile?

Last year, Forrester predicted that U.S. brands will spend $2.7B on their social media marketing efforts by the end of 2013, with that number growing to $5B by 2016. And with one in five of all Internet clicks in the U.S. happening on Facebook, brands are taking the cultivation and engagement of their fan base on Facebook seriously.

But unless brands wake up to their Facebook “mobile problem,” they will waste significant marketing dollars as well as audience clicks. The mobile problem I’m talking about is, surprisingly, unrelated to Facebook mobile advertising.

And it’s an issue that has yet to be widely discussed. Brands have been quietly struggling to engage with their Facebook fans who connect with them from a mobile device. We recently conducted a field review that illustrated that Facebook promotional apps on seven of the top ten most popular brand fan pages failed to successfully engage mobile fans.

See the article written for Friend2Friend and successfully placed at MediaPost on this critical subject.

How top brands are failing their fans on Facebook mobile

Not that it’s should come as any surprise, but this past Cyber Monday’s sales generated by mobile phone visitors jumped by 260% since 2010 — more than 6x the growth of sales overall. The same study by Deloitte tells us to expect that 68% of smartphone owners will be using their handheld devices for holiday shopping this year. In a separate study released in September 2012 we are told that those mobile consumers will not like visiting a poorly designed mobile experience on their smartphone.

Google tells us that mobile-friendly web experiences drive sales, and that while 75% of users prefer a mobile-friendly Website, 96% say they’ve encountered sites that were clearly not designed for mobile devices. So it’s clear then. You cannot ignore the mobile component of your marketing plan.

But what should you be thinking about, particularly with regard to the social component of your campaigns, when it comes to mobile? How do you approach mobile Facebook fans? Facebook users are accessing the site through their mobile devices in ever increasing numbers. In October of this year, Facebook announced they had 604 million monthly active users (MAUs) — an increase of 61% year over year. This compared to a 26% YoY for MAUs overall.

Where I work at Friend2Friend, an analysis of our clients’ branded Apps and Facebook Pages through 2012 has seen a significant increase in mobile activity. An average of 11% of all traffic to our branded mobile-enabled Facebook Apps now come from smartphones, a trend that has grown by 450% since January of 2012.

In addition, we have seen a tremendous growth in mobile likes for our clients on Facebook, with 350% more likes coming from mobile since January 2012.

Read this blog post for a study I performed of top brands and how they performed with mobile campaigns on Facebook.

Facebook Timeline for Brands - 6 month report card

Opinion article written and placed in iMedia Connection today, marking the 6 month anniversary for brands on Facebook. Sept. 1 marked six months since Facebook automatically switched brand pages from news-feed-style pages to the "Pages for Business," or Timeline view. Almost immediately, there was a flurry of panic about a reduction in engagement with brands due to the switch. Yet there's clearly plenty of debate: A brief search in Google reveals as many articles stating that engagement has increased as articles stating it has decreased since the introduction of Timeline -- with further confusion resulting from different ways of measuring engagement and competing points of view from reputable sources such as Reuters and the research firm Ipsos, as well as comScore. Read more at iMediaConnections.com

Who won the brand social Gold at the Olympics?

Article written and submitted to ADOTAS.COM, reviewing how brands did at the Olympics for their serious marketing sponsorship dollars. In the four years since the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Facebook has grown from 100 million users to close to a billion —what a difference four years makes. So, how have the Olympic sponsoring brands taken advantage of this immense new global audience? In 2008, there were two ‘levels’ of brand sponsors at the Olympics — the eleven TOP Partners (Acer, Atos, Coca-Cola, Dow, GE, McDonalds, Omega, Panasonic, P&G, Samsung and Visa) who are reported to have paid an average of $100 million each to buy the world-wide marketing rights over a four-year cycle, covering a Winter and a Summer games. And, about 40 other sponsors spending from around $15M to $60M each for more limited rights. (You can view a full list of those sponsors, and their contributions, here.) Read the whole article here.

Social media lessons for travel marketers

Article written and placed for Friend2Friend in iMediaConnection today, covering social media lessons for travel marketers. While websites catering to the “wisdom of the crowds” have shaped travel decisions online for well over a decade, social media sites such as Facebook represent much more powerful opportunities for marketers to reach and engage with new travelers. In fact, today it’s often trusted recommendations from our Facebook friends (via their Facebook news feed) that make us aware of a destination in the first place. And, when it comes to sharing stories about one’s favorite vacation spot, “like” often turns to “love” (i.e., purchasing airplane tickets and booking hotel rooms). Read the whole article on iMediaConnection here.

How do you create a social loyalty loop?

Opinion piece written and placed in MarketingProfs -- how do you create a social loyalty loop? The article covered:

• The definition of Social Loyalty Loop
• Four ways to fuel a social loyalty loop
• How to use social media to engage customers and keep them loyal

Read more at MarketingProfs.