With Halloween now a faint memory, all of 6 days past, the retail holiday season is already in full swing. My inbox, like most people's, is absolutely full of red cheerful holiday sale messages. But, this year, much more front and center than in previous years, are the integrated social media contests/giveaways and general begging to be followed. More importantly, ever so slightly behind front and center is a new 2014 trend - explicit personal data gathering through social logins.
Today I received an email from Cost Plus World Market about a holiday giveaway. Here are some screenshots about the giveaway:
At first glance, this seems like a lovely holiday giving campaign - why not enter to win and have money given to a charity! How nice.
As I scroll down, I see that they are attempting to use this giveaway to drive additional social following. Look, you get more entries into the contest (perhaps a light version of a bribe?) if you follow them on Twitter and Instagram, and you get even more entries if you actually submit content to Instagram and hashtag it with their contest name. So a handful of people who are willing to do this in order to get a reward will be giving them some desperately needed following (at least they believe they need it) on Instagram and Twitter.
So, I click again to see what their user funnel is if I follow them on Twitter. After all, for 25 contest entries, following them doesn't seem like too much to ask ... Bang! I'm dropped into a funnel, run by a third party (Smartify) without any Cost Plus branding, that is requiring not only that I follow Cost Plus (which was the original requirement), but that I also give them access to read tweets from MY timeline. OK - if they follow me they can read my Tweets anyway, after all, the point of Tweets is to say stuff to the public.... But that's not all, they are just getting started in what they are asking me politely to give them. They want to see who I follow and follow new people on my behalf (say what!!!), update my profile (SAY WHAT!!! THEY can update MY profile on my behalf!), and POST TWEETS FOR ME! Seriously? So for 25 entries to a $500 giveaway, I am being asked to give basically FULL ACCESS to my Twitter account, including allowing them to tweet on my behalf, to a random 3rd party (not even the company that I have a relationship with).
Please, Cost Plus email users - DO NOT DO THIS! To all consumers - READ the permissions they are asking you to give and consider whether it is truly a fair trade for what you are trying to get.
Please, from one marketer to another, Cost Plus, review your contest user experience funnel, and don't let this 3rd party take advantage of you and your consumers.
My guess is that they probably don't even know that this screen exists. They probably signed up for this vendor because it was cheap and enabled them to do this contest on a short timeline with limited resources, and they didn't even check to see what their users would be asked to do (I've seen this happen way too many times, especially around the holiday season). At least, I hope that's what happened, because if they knew that they would be using their email list to feed this 3rd party's data mining at the expense of their valued customer relationships, they are probably in serious strategic trouble as a company, and I really like buying my moroccan harissa and dusseldorf mustard from them.
This whole experience has given me a reason to take a step back and think about the state of marketing and social data as we enter into this holiday season. This experience, while anecdotal, is not unusual. It is a representation of a new norm that itself is representative of our society's quickly changing tolerance for data access and gathering among companies. And that change has huge implications for marketers and consumers.
As the social media landscape has changed, users and companies have evolved in their activities. That is not a huge surprise, although it is always interesting at the beginning of a season to identify the iterations from the previous year. Instagram, while a dot on the horizon two years ago and a faint whisper for the most advanced last year is now front and center in many of these contests, despite the fact that they don't actually have a robust ad platform or an easy way to manage contests that follow the legal requirements to disclose rules clearly.
Now, do these Instagram/Pinterest/Facebook/Twitter contests work? What is the long term value of an instagram follower acquired through participation in this type of contest? Will their seasonal, contest-driven participation result in an on-going deeper relationship with the brand and deeper pockets when it comes to purchase time?
Probably it will for some, but the bigger question that brands need to ask is for how many of the primary target audience will a contest/giveaway strategy work, and could that level of engagement have been achieved with an alternative, more authentic long term engagement strategy. When limited time and money are on the line, as they always are during the holiday season, brands MUST not only focus on what a particular initiative can achieve (look we gained 50 Instagram followers!), but what other results their teams might achieve with a range of potential campaign strategies (perhaps a thoughtful Facebook story series with targeted ads would have gained 5,000 followers who would be more likely to share and buy for the same cost).
Analyses of social media contests/giveaway success in the past leave a lot to be desired both in good data and in clear impact on revenues. Many brands know this, yet they also know that they need to check the social media box when they are presenting their seasonal strategy to their skeptical board, and they know that there is something untapped yet incredibly valuable lying within the heaps of consumer social network data, which is why they have become more and more aggressive in using said contests/giveaways as an underhanded way to gain more data about consumers.
Suddenly these contests are not driven so much by branding or sales goals, they are driven by data acquisition goals, and THAT is what makes 2014 so truly different than previous years. "Want to enter our contest? Great! Now just give us access to your social media accounts in order to enter. No purchase necessary... but you must pay us in data... and we're not even going to pretend that that's not what's going on."
Now, depending on which side of the line you live on, either as a marketer or a consumer, this environment can be either really good or really bad. Many marketers are excited about how increasing consumer participation and comfort with sharing social media access has enabled them to build their prospective customer base and engage with their existing base at a deeper, more personalized level. All brands who do this will argue that this is a clear benefit and improvement for the consumer.
Despite groaning in the WSJ and other media, I would argue that many, perhaps even most consumers at this point would agree with the marketers' assertion in practice - they like getting a special coupon for a product they were going to buy anyway - but they would still disagree in principle. We are still uncomfortable with the black box of who is doing what with our data, and we're pretty sure Facebook and Google are up to no good, we're just not totally sure how. Scenes from "Minority Report" stream through our minds as we open Facebook only to be re-targeted with the exact products that we looked at an hour ago on the Sak's Fifth Avenue website. "How did they find me!" many consumers wonder, as orwellian visions dance through their heads. We can delete or mark as spam emails from these brands as they hit our inbox, but as they follow us around our social networks, busting their way into our newsfeed as we look at pictures of our adorable puppies and babies, they are inserting themselves into a different part of our online lives, in a more insidious way... and in a way that brands find exceptionally valuable.
Let's talk a little bit about the value to brands. First, there is the obvious example that when they re-target me on Facebook, showing me a product I was interested in, in some % of cases I will buy that product, and I may be more likely to buy it than had I not been followed around the internet. When I follow a brand on a social network, it is like a personal endorsement of that brand to my friends, and I am more likely to receive and share their organic content, which is a good deal for them. However, what are they actually getting from me when I login to their website or enter a contest through a social media login, that they wouldn't have otherwise had? How can they use that data to their advantage?
When I, as a member of their email list, engage with a brand contest and login through Facebook or Twitter to enter (despite the fact that I already have an account directly with the retailer), they are able to learn infinitely more about me than they ever would have been able to get purely from my interactions with them. Up to this point, they know what I have given them - potentially my name, address, email address - other info that I was required to give them in order to complete a purchase. Now, they can already pay third party companies that will match this data with online profile data anonymously, but with a simple social media login that has certain permissions bullet points, they will be able to add to their picture of me in a very specific way: who I follow (people and brands), what I like, who I'm related to, and all sorts of other juicy details that can paint a very clear picture of who I am. If I'm a big sharer, they might even know what I ate for dinner last night. Oh, and if I'm not paying attention, they can post on my behalf...
Now to a certain degree, how much data marketers can get from me as a consumer depends on two major factors: 1) whether I am willing to check the terms & conditions box when I sign up for their contest, since it is legally required that they specify what access they are getting to my account and 2) how much information about myself I keep on social networks. Both of these require effort on the part of the consumer.
Managing the first means that if I see a brand or company asking for permissions that I don't want to give, I can't enter their contest or engage with them. In many ways, that is a loss for both of us. If they didn't ask to have full access to my profile, they would have had a longer term relationship with me - but with their obvious data fishing, I was turned off to both their contest and their brand as a whole. While I am one example and there are millions of people who sign up for everything without reading the Ts & Cs, there are also millions of otherwise qualified consumers who would be willing and interested in starting a relationship with a brand that doesn't require such a commitment of personal data.
Managing the second also requires sacrifice and effort on the part of the user. Like many consumers, I was a die-hard Facebook user when I first got my account (way back in 2003 when I was a student at Stanford, one of the first schools to gain access to the social network that was named after our freshman "facebook" - a printed paper booklet with pictures of our fellow students that we could use to learn the names and faces of our classmates and/or decide who we wanted to invite to parties based on superficial characteristics). By about 2007 with the increase in spam and unclear privacy policies I'd pulled it back, and now I use my personal account primarily to communicate with those who insist on using Facebook instead of email and to voyeur old connections who I don't know well enough to send a friendly email to or meet for coffee in person. Yet, this costs me something - it means that every time I post on Facebook I have to think about whether I want random strangers and brands to have access to my info. I would certainly be more active if I wasn't optimizing for my own privacy, and I would like to be able to offer better updates to my global friends who I can't communicate with en masse through any other medium (at least until another one comes along). I didn't even post my wedding pictures until others at my wedding did it for me. It would have been nice to be carefree in posting, but I didn't want to give them the satisfaction of another nugget of my personal data. That was my choice, but one that I would prefer not to have to make.
There is a wide spectrum of what consumers are willing to do with social media, and having run many social media communities and campaigns as a marketer, I have seen the full range of consumer behavior: there are the many who don't ever click, there are those who click but don't take a further desirable action, there are those who share but don't participate themselves, and there are those who click, share, enter, comment, repeat. Depending on the behaviors, demographics, and interests of the target audience of the campaign, a brand's audience will distribute into these buckets differently. The clearer the reward and relevancy to them, the more the brand can nudge them into the action buckets, and yet, as relevant as the campaign and as enticing as the reward is, there is still a barrier in the user experience, that if done in a sloppy/creepy/obvious way, will also limit a brand's success.
In short, when a brand makes it clear that it is using social media to blatantly take advantage of the consumer's data, they are less likely to gain the warm and fuzzy benefits of social media, ie, the authentic brand advocacy that comes with a follower and advocate who believes in the brand and shares their love of it with their friends and networks. And that authenticity cannot be bought, not with dollars and not with data.
Marketers:
Today I received an email from Cost Plus World Market about a holiday giveaway. Here are some screenshots about the giveaway:
At first glance, this seems like a lovely holiday giving campaign - why not enter to win and have money given to a charity! How nice.
As I scroll down, I see that they are attempting to use this giveaway to drive additional social following. Look, you get more entries into the contest (perhaps a light version of a bribe?) if you follow them on Twitter and Instagram, and you get even more entries if you actually submit content to Instagram and hashtag it with their contest name. So a handful of people who are willing to do this in order to get a reward will be giving them some desperately needed following (at least they believe they need it) on Instagram and Twitter.
So, I click again to see what their user funnel is if I follow them on Twitter. After all, for 25 contest entries, following them doesn't seem like too much to ask ... Bang! I'm dropped into a funnel, run by a third party (Smartify) without any Cost Plus branding, that is requiring not only that I follow Cost Plus (which was the original requirement), but that I also give them access to read tweets from MY timeline. OK - if they follow me they can read my Tweets anyway, after all, the point of Tweets is to say stuff to the public.... But that's not all, they are just getting started in what they are asking me politely to give them. They want to see who I follow and follow new people on my behalf (say what!!!), update my profile (SAY WHAT!!! THEY can update MY profile on my behalf!), and POST TWEETS FOR ME! Seriously? So for 25 entries to a $500 giveaway, I am being asked to give basically FULL ACCESS to my Twitter account, including allowing them to tweet on my behalf, to a random 3rd party (not even the company that I have a relationship with).
Please, Cost Plus email users - DO NOT DO THIS! To all consumers - READ the permissions they are asking you to give and consider whether it is truly a fair trade for what you are trying to get.
Please, from one marketer to another, Cost Plus, review your contest user experience funnel, and don't let this 3rd party take advantage of you and your consumers.
My guess is that they probably don't even know that this screen exists. They probably signed up for this vendor because it was cheap and enabled them to do this contest on a short timeline with limited resources, and they didn't even check to see what their users would be asked to do (I've seen this happen way too many times, especially around the holiday season). At least, I hope that's what happened, because if they knew that they would be using their email list to feed this 3rd party's data mining at the expense of their valued customer relationships, they are probably in serious strategic trouble as a company, and I really like buying my moroccan harissa and dusseldorf mustard from them.
This whole experience has given me a reason to take a step back and think about the state of marketing and social data as we enter into this holiday season. This experience, while anecdotal, is not unusual. It is a representation of a new norm that itself is representative of our society's quickly changing tolerance for data access and gathering among companies. And that change has huge implications for marketers and consumers.
Social Media Marketing - Not Just for Brand and Sales Goals Anymore
As the social media landscape has changed, users and companies have evolved in their activities. That is not a huge surprise, although it is always interesting at the beginning of a season to identify the iterations from the previous year. Instagram, while a dot on the horizon two years ago and a faint whisper for the most advanced last year is now front and center in many of these contests, despite the fact that they don't actually have a robust ad platform or an easy way to manage contests that follow the legal requirements to disclose rules clearly.
Now, do these Instagram/Pinterest/Facebook/Twitter contests work? What is the long term value of an instagram follower acquired through participation in this type of contest? Will their seasonal, contest-driven participation result in an on-going deeper relationship with the brand and deeper pockets when it comes to purchase time?
Probably it will for some, but the bigger question that brands need to ask is for how many of the primary target audience will a contest/giveaway strategy work, and could that level of engagement have been achieved with an alternative, more authentic long term engagement strategy. When limited time and money are on the line, as they always are during the holiday season, brands MUST not only focus on what a particular initiative can achieve (look we gained 50 Instagram followers!), but what other results their teams might achieve with a range of potential campaign strategies (perhaps a thoughtful Facebook story series with targeted ads would have gained 5,000 followers who would be more likely to share and buy for the same cost).
Analyses of social media contests/giveaway success in the past leave a lot to be desired both in good data and in clear impact on revenues. Many brands know this, yet they also know that they need to check the social media box when they are presenting their seasonal strategy to their skeptical board, and they know that there is something untapped yet incredibly valuable lying within the heaps of consumer social network data, which is why they have become more and more aggressive in using said contests/giveaways as an underhanded way to gain more data about consumers.
Suddenly these contests are not driven so much by branding or sales goals, they are driven by data acquisition goals, and THAT is what makes 2014 so truly different than previous years. "Want to enter our contest? Great! Now just give us access to your social media accounts in order to enter. No purchase necessary... but you must pay us in data... and we're not even going to pretend that that's not what's going on."
The New Online Currency that's not Bitcoin
Now, depending on which side of the line you live on, either as a marketer or a consumer, this environment can be either really good or really bad. Many marketers are excited about how increasing consumer participation and comfort with sharing social media access has enabled them to build their prospective customer base and engage with their existing base at a deeper, more personalized level. All brands who do this will argue that this is a clear benefit and improvement for the consumer.
Despite groaning in the WSJ and other media, I would argue that many, perhaps even most consumers at this point would agree with the marketers' assertion in practice - they like getting a special coupon for a product they were going to buy anyway - but they would still disagree in principle. We are still uncomfortable with the black box of who is doing what with our data, and we're pretty sure Facebook and Google are up to no good, we're just not totally sure how. Scenes from "Minority Report" stream through our minds as we open Facebook only to be re-targeted with the exact products that we looked at an hour ago on the Sak's Fifth Avenue website. "How did they find me!" many consumers wonder, as orwellian visions dance through their heads. We can delete or mark as spam emails from these brands as they hit our inbox, but as they follow us around our social networks, busting their way into our newsfeed as we look at pictures of our adorable puppies and babies, they are inserting themselves into a different part of our online lives, in a more insidious way... and in a way that brands find exceptionally valuable.
The Value of Social Data to Brands
Let's talk a little bit about the value to brands. First, there is the obvious example that when they re-target me on Facebook, showing me a product I was interested in, in some % of cases I will buy that product, and I may be more likely to buy it than had I not been followed around the internet. When I follow a brand on a social network, it is like a personal endorsement of that brand to my friends, and I am more likely to receive and share their organic content, which is a good deal for them. However, what are they actually getting from me when I login to their website or enter a contest through a social media login, that they wouldn't have otherwise had? How can they use that data to their advantage?
When I, as a member of their email list, engage with a brand contest and login through Facebook or Twitter to enter (despite the fact that I already have an account directly with the retailer), they are able to learn infinitely more about me than they ever would have been able to get purely from my interactions with them. Up to this point, they know what I have given them - potentially my name, address, email address - other info that I was required to give them in order to complete a purchase. Now, they can already pay third party companies that will match this data with online profile data anonymously, but with a simple social media login that has certain permissions bullet points, they will be able to add to their picture of me in a very specific way: who I follow (people and brands), what I like, who I'm related to, and all sorts of other juicy details that can paint a very clear picture of who I am. If I'm a big sharer, they might even know what I ate for dinner last night. Oh, and if I'm not paying attention, they can post on my behalf...
Managing Your Data
Now to a certain degree, how much data marketers can get from me as a consumer depends on two major factors: 1) whether I am willing to check the terms & conditions box when I sign up for their contest, since it is legally required that they specify what access they are getting to my account and 2) how much information about myself I keep on social networks. Both of these require effort on the part of the consumer.
Managing the first means that if I see a brand or company asking for permissions that I don't want to give, I can't enter their contest or engage with them. In many ways, that is a loss for both of us. If they didn't ask to have full access to my profile, they would have had a longer term relationship with me - but with their obvious data fishing, I was turned off to both their contest and their brand as a whole. While I am one example and there are millions of people who sign up for everything without reading the Ts & Cs, there are also millions of otherwise qualified consumers who would be willing and interested in starting a relationship with a brand that doesn't require such a commitment of personal data.
Managing the second also requires sacrifice and effort on the part of the user. Like many consumers, I was a die-hard Facebook user when I first got my account (way back in 2003 when I was a student at Stanford, one of the first schools to gain access to the social network that was named after our freshman "facebook" - a printed paper booklet with pictures of our fellow students that we could use to learn the names and faces of our classmates and/or decide who we wanted to invite to parties based on superficial characteristics). By about 2007 with the increase in spam and unclear privacy policies I'd pulled it back, and now I use my personal account primarily to communicate with those who insist on using Facebook instead of email and to voyeur old connections who I don't know well enough to send a friendly email to or meet for coffee in person. Yet, this costs me something - it means that every time I post on Facebook I have to think about whether I want random strangers and brands to have access to my info. I would certainly be more active if I wasn't optimizing for my own privacy, and I would like to be able to offer better updates to my global friends who I can't communicate with en masse through any other medium (at least until another one comes along). I didn't even post my wedding pictures until others at my wedding did it for me. It would have been nice to be carefree in posting, but I didn't want to give them the satisfaction of another nugget of my personal data. That was my choice, but one that I would prefer not to have to make.
There is a wide spectrum of what consumers are willing to do with social media, and having run many social media communities and campaigns as a marketer, I have seen the full range of consumer behavior: there are the many who don't ever click, there are those who click but don't take a further desirable action, there are those who share but don't participate themselves, and there are those who click, share, enter, comment, repeat. Depending on the behaviors, demographics, and interests of the target audience of the campaign, a brand's audience will distribute into these buckets differently. The clearer the reward and relevancy to them, the more the brand can nudge them into the action buckets, and yet, as relevant as the campaign and as enticing as the reward is, there is still a barrier in the user experience, that if done in a sloppy/creepy/obvious way, will also limit a brand's success.
In short, when a brand makes it clear that it is using social media to blatantly take advantage of the consumer's data, they are less likely to gain the warm and fuzzy benefits of social media, ie, the authentic brand advocacy that comes with a follower and advocate who believes in the brand and shares their love of it with their friends and networks. And that authenticity cannot be bought, not with dollars and not with data.
Key Takeaways for Both Sides
Marketers:
1) Lay out numerous campaign options for the holiday season. Estimate impact on core metrics before deciding what to do, because the opportunity cost of choosing the wrong option is high, even if you can't measure it. Campaigns with an authentic human element that is expanded over the course of a multi-week timeline are most effective at driving engagement.
2) Don't choose campaigns/initiatives/platforms just because they will help you check a box on your road map. Just because everyone is asking you about Instagram, doesn't mean that it's the best platform to engage with your target audience, or that it is most effective at driving your holiday goals. Stand up for the initiatives/platforms/implementations that you truly believe will work the best with your target audience.
3) Don't alienate your existing audience by pushing too hard for them to give you the keys to their data. If you build an authentic, trusting relationship with them, they will willingly share what they want to with you. Don't buy it, and don't try to force it.
4) Vet 3rd parties. Review the entire privacy and data policy of any vendor you work with. Vet the user experience before you launch. Demand real examples of similar contests or other campaign experiences so that you can decide if you want your valued customers to have that experience under the auspices of your brand.
5) DO NOT ask consumers to give you full permissions to post and act on their behalf on social media. You won't even benefit from doing this, and you will risk ruining your relationship with them. Do not use 3rd parties who ask for these permissions.
Consumers:
1) READ all permissions that you are being asked to give to an app/contest/company. DO NOT give them access that you don't think they should have. If that means not moving forward, then don't move forward. You will find another contest/app/company to engage with that won't require such permissions. If you do move forward, it will become harder and harder in the future to find alternatives that don't require so much data - after all, you were willing to give it, why would they pull back on future initiatives?
2) Think about what data you are putting on social networks. Don't put data that you don't want to have used for ad targeting.
3) Reward brands who don't employ sketchy tactics. Engage directly with and advocate for brands you like that treat you right. It will encourage more of them to act that way and will reduce the temptation in the future for brands to employ more aggressive tactics to drive your engagement.
Stay tuned for more from the DigiMarketeer blog!
For custom marketing consulting services that will add solid foundations and integrated, consumer-oriented approaches to your 21st century marketing visit us at www.DigiMarketeer.com.
