1.
Social Media Marketing:
principles, economics, technologies
Ethan Bauley, M80
www.M80im.com
ethan@m80im.com
@ethanbauley
ethanbauley.com

2.
M80
• Online PR
• Social Media Marketing: blogs, Twitter, social
nets, Flickr, forums, etc
• Founded in 1998 by Dave Neupert
• Acquired by WPP/GroupM in 2006

3.
Semantic problems with
the word “media”
• Tools of production?
• Artifact? (i.e. “piece of content”)

4.
What isn’t social media?

5.
Is...
• Email?
• Public access TV?
• circa 1994 BBS?
• Amateur radio?
• Direct message on Twitter?
• Air?
• IM?
• 700MHZ?

6.
Industrial Media
• Expensive: requires financial capital
• Owned by just a few people/firms
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Social_media#Distinction_from_industrial_
media (I wrote that; isn't social media fun?)

7.
Social Media
• Relatively cheap (computer/phone +
connection)
• Ownership distributed in the population
• Equivalent scale to industrial media
The means of production are distributed across
the majority of the population

8.
The Wealth of Networks
• Yochai Benkler
• Introduction = must read

9.
More from Benkler
Non-market collaboration and production
systems are
a) creating an increasing proportion of
economic value
b) sometimes better at motivating effort than
traditional market mechanisms
[Wikipedia, F/OSS, etc]

10.
Everything is cheap
• Production and distribution used to be
bottlenecks/expensive, now they're
commodities/cheap
• It's very cheap to build software, too
The implication is: no one needs commercial
aspirations to communicate.
Change in expectation, social norms, etc.

11.
Information/Network
Economics
• High “first copy” costs, low reproduction
costs
• Explosion in quantity creates scarcity of
“attention”/time (used to be relatively
abundant)
• Network effect: value of network increases
exponentially as users grow linearly (Reed/
Metcalfe)

12.
Information Rules
• www.inforules.com
• Hal Varien & Carl Shapiro
• Varien = GOOG chief economist
• Auction (AdWords) expert

13.
Game Theory: The
Science of Strategy
• John Von Neumann, John Nash (Beautiful Mind)
• quot;Game theory makes it possible to move beyond overly
simple ideas of competition and cooperation to reach a
vision of co-opetition more suited to the opportunities of
our time.quot;
• quot;You have to put yourself in the other players' shoes. You
have to be allocentric. This doesn't mean you can ignore
your own position. The skill lies in putting the two vantage
points together: in understanding both the egocentric and
the allocentric perspectivesquot; (Co-opetition, Brandeberger/
Nalebuff)

14.
Let’s talk about GOOG
• What is PageRank?
• How does it work?
• How were competitors (YHOO) indexing
previously?

15.
Networked people beat
firms
• This is why social media is so
powerful
• Wikpedia vs. Britannica, SETI@home vs.
IBM, etc
Ask: how can I design a network/market/
community that will grow and manage itself?

16.
Theory of the Firm
• Firms exist to minimize transaction
(“coordination”) costs
• Social media sharply reduce coordination
costs
• Ergo, dis-integration and reconfiguration of
firms.
• Past: Big firms for incremental things
• Future: Tiny firms for enormous things

17.
What is the pain point
in the mediascape?
• TMI
• Hyperfragmentation
Context is king
(help me decide: does this suck or not?)

18.
Umair Haque
• Your new media/marketing guru:
discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque
• “The bulk of what connected consumers
create isn’t content, it’s context; information
about the value of goods and services”
• Context and content are complements
• Context is created by markets (auctions),
networks (AdSense/MySpace),
communities (craigslist, Wikipedia)

19.
Typical Umair-ism:
quot;I think there's a simpler way to put it. Most ad-
supported startups will fail simply because 1) ads
suck, and destroy value, and 2) they're not creating
new value by making said ads any better.
quot;In fact, the less they all focus on making ads better,
the worse each of these players is, because the
mediascape just gets more polluted.
quot;It's a classic example of a negative equilibrium.quot;
(game theory reference!)

20.
Welcome to Next-gen
Brands!
• Using social media, connected consumers
discuss excruciating minutia of products/
services in public view
• Scripted brands have no utility
• Advertising is only as valuable as a) any
information it communicates b)
entertainment [maybe]

21.
STOP TALKING
START LISTENING

22.
Listening Tools
• Twitter Search
• Google search feeds
• Yahoo BOSS
• Filtrbox
• BackType
• Delicious
Run ‘em through AideRSS

23.
Listening Tools:
Expensive Version
• Visible Technologies/TruCast
• Radian6
• Buzzlogic
• Collective Intelligence

24.
Why aren’t there ads on
Google.com?

25.
Anyone marketed on
Facebook?

26.
(Benevolent)
Sponsorship
• Create an interaction
• Nike+
• blue.popurls.com
• Olympics/Lenovo: http://iainmurray-
starsailor.blogspot.com/

27.
Using the Internetworks,
how would you market a
wedding movie?

28.
Reaching out to
Bloggers
• There’s a lot of them
• Like: A LOT
• Think about how you will SCALE your
blogger relations programs
• Blogs are cool

29.
Blogger tactics!
• WRITE A GOOD BLOG YOURSELF (then
link out to others)
• Leave insightful comments (most publishers
read them!)
• Always be 100% transparent
• Be concise when emailing (and be sure to
read the “about” page)
• Reverse look-up authors in other media

30.
Researching your
blogosphere
• Quantcast
• Linkrolls/Blogrolls
• Delicious
• Technorati
• Google Blog Search
• Blah blah

31.
Blogger engagement
strategies
• Product reviews (even more context!)
• Have them guest-write on your blog
(Samsung)
• Figure out a sponsorship model
• Contests: enter by leaving a comment
• Think about incentives

32.
Twittering for $$$
• Tweeting for $$$?
• Twitter is just a mini-blog: write good stuff
when you’re there
• Should it be a real person or the name of
the brand? (answer: both)

33.
Customer service is the
new marketing
• Once you start engaging, being authentic,
etc, you’ll find that people have problems with
your stuff
• These are easiest opps to make a sensational
story happen that will propagate through the
network
• First step in cross-functional teams

34.
Crossing internal
boundaries
• ~ 90% of the time we (M80) want contacts
in multiple business units (marcom, cust svc,
product experts, investor relations, etc)
• Why?
• This is improvised and based on listening.
Very heterogeneous value propositions/
motivations among connected consumers.

35.
Integrating SM in the
Plan
• Bootstrap as much SM as you can!
• quot;Air coverquot; from corporate PR, advertising is extremely
helpful
• Use PAID MEDIA to get distribution for your SM
initiatives: advertise an interaction/benefit, not just the
product
• Consult a social media strategist during early stages of
product development
• Many ways to integrate that are legit and useful
• Keep it simple: simple quot;askquot;, simple incentives, simple goals

36.
“ROI”
• Sometimes it’s direct purchases
• Organic SEO
• Business development
• Customer service
• Replacement cost (think: email list)
Most people are still trying to hack this. My
advice for now is: look for cost efficiencies,
too...not just sales growth

37.
Twitter & Cisco
• wrote posts linking to prominent DC
bloggers, relevant news (during the course of
my daily research/listening)
• lots of @ messages; let people know I’m not
a bot (evidence of humanity)
• Most of those bloggers now following
• 100% bootstrapped (quot;on specquot;)
• combined w/ blog outreach/YouTube
program

38.
Results: Cisco Blog/Twitter/
YouTube program
• Data center blogger hired at director-level position
5 mos after M80 @ message
• Placed Cisco executive on conference panel
• Data center executives now exploring book deal
w/ blogger
• Coverage on 20+ top tier data center blogs (it's a
small community ;-)
• Unique videos helped spark relationships
• Twitter extended relationships, helped generate
coverage

39.
What is the problem
with Facebook/MySpace?

40.
Twitter, Flickr, and
BizDev 2.0
bootstrap EVERYthing...

41.
Reverse Markets & VRM