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#GrowthBeat 2014 highlights: Facebook, 7-Eleven, & Eventbrite on 21st century digital marketing

Facebook

Growth hacking your results

Facebook

Facebook may have one billion + users but if you're living in the U.S.A, you're not exactly top of mind. “India is the single, most important country for growth,” said Alex Schultz, VP of Growth, Facebook yesterday at VentureBeat's 2014 GrowthBeat conference.

Facebook hit a wall back in 2007. It was no longer growing its existing user base. Schultz said there were a number of reasons for why that happened, in particular, because the social networking platform was no longer able to ramp up new users, getting them each to find 10 new friends in 14 days, which is considered a significant benchmark for any social networking app.

Alex was part of the original growth team at Facebook. He worked on a number of tasks, including the company's SEO products and optimizing email campaigns. In 2007, Facebook was still only available as an English-only social networking platform. Competitors like MySpace had already made itself available in multiple foreign languages. Facebook immediately set out to concentrate its resources on attracting the non-English speaking audiences.

“There's a very fine line between removing friction and tricking users” – Alex Schultz, Facebook growth market #GrowthBeat

— Dylan Tweney (@dylan20) August 6, 2014

India became ground-zero as Facebook it set out to translate (and continues to translate) the nation's near 800 languages. Hindi is the world's 4th most widely spoken language in the world today. Facebook has worked hard at translating not only Hindi but more than 80 other languages spoken in India. This includes the top three languages spoken, including Hindi, British English, and Indian English. Schultz made it clear that Facebook is no longer focused on squeezing new users out of the United States but instead has tasked itself to make the world more open and connected, which is why the company still has a growth team.

7-Eleven

7-ElevenGood news, Slurpee and Taquito fans! The folks at 7-Eleven have heard you loud and clear…via mobile! Since the convenience food chain transitioned to its mobile app, it has received nearly 14,000 comments in less than a month, which is more than what it typically gets in a whole year with an 800 line, according to Michael Debnar, the leader of 7-Eleven's Innovation Team. “When a company says it's mobile-first and mobile-only, we are mobile first and mobile-only,” said Debnar at GrowthBeat. Debnar also announced that in six month's time, 7-Eleven would be introducing new delivery networks allowing customers to stay in their cars while getting their products.

Backstage at #growthbeat getting ready to chat with 7-11 and @Medallia. Man I need a Big Gulp.

— Ina Fried (@inafried) August 6, 2014

Digital is important, and according to Debnar, the chain has 65% smart phone penetration with 18 to 35 year old males being the targeted demographic. Debnar said 7-Eleven no longer considers itself a traditional company. He even compared 7-Eleven to Uber. “I'm a huge fan of two-sided marketplaces. You have on the one side a bunch of cars, and you have on the other side a bunch of people who need a car, and they are the glue,” said Debnar. 7-Eleven has nearly 8,500 stores in the United States and for Debnar, “the chain can be that glue for a lot of things.”

Technorati @ GrowthBeat 2014

7-Eleven is working on taking a page from various startups. It created an investment channel called 7-Ventures that launched back in 2013. It has invested in customer loyalty startup, Belly, and KeyMe, a digital locksmith startup. “7-Eleven has Amazon lockers in various stores, including KeyMe services. We can become this two-sided marketplace because we have a box that's everywhere and we can connect people who need stuff from these companies and services, “ said Debnar. 7-Eleven is exploring new categories for development and if it can align itself with complimentary disruptive services, it will do so. For Debnar that means investing in more experimental food and beverage startups.

Eventbrite

The Eventbrite team one day made a useful discovery. It realized that users of the app who attend events also organize events. The company is now working to get users who purchase tickets to understand that they too should throw events on Eventbrite, according to Evenbrite's senior director of marketing for user growth, Brian Rothenberg.

Rothenberg told marketers at this year's GrowthBeat 2014 that his company is unique in its approach to growth – combining product and marketing under one umbrella. More than 58 million people have purchased tickets via EventBrite.

Rothenberg said Eventbrite gets more than 20 million unique visitors a month. Working with both his product and user experience teams, he's trying to determine where in the product can the company message that people organizing events can also purchase tickets.

Hey, marketers! Find that one, key growth driver. http://t.co/C7pu668BNI @eventbrite #GrowthBeat #marketing pic.twitter.com/XgWKD14RmG — Engagor (@engagor) August 6, 2014

In directing his analytics teams to review people's usage patterns, Rothenberg made the observation that once a person attends one event, they could very well attend another. “That piece of data helped us use better targeted trigger emails once a person has attended two or more events,” said Rothenberg.

When it comes to strategies that drive engagement, social remains a big player. Eventbrite's social email outreach has 40% open rates, and their click to purchase rate is 5%, which is also impressive for an ecommerce company. Rothenberg didn't abandon more old-fashioned ways of marketing to people. “We're even testing outbound phone calls. When behavior deviates from past behavior, we can still reach out to them.”

Eventbrite will be sure to continue tinkering with its marketing success as it now boasts a 1 billion evaluation. Be on the lookout for that IPO.

Technorati's Travis Wright leading a GrowthBeat panel.

Technorati's Travis Wright leading a GrowthBeat panel.


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By |August 7th, 2014|Advertising Technology|0 Comments
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ESRI UC 2014: Notes from the floor [#esriuc2014]

TouchShare_Attack Density vs. IED activity

This ESRI Conference was just amazing, it was very difficult to slow down and look at the vendors closely, so many of them were so interesting, but for you dear reader, no effort is too great, so I took the time to smell the roses and see what the scope of this conference was. I thought since it was a GIS conference, I would clock how much I walked the vendor show in a day. 3.1 miles!

If ESRI could make them cheaply enough, a pedometer would be a cool item to add to the conference bag, but I digress.

There's an unbelievable amount of things you can do with this GIS data. The thing to keep in mind going in, is that this isn't like a static Google Map (although a lot of companies will overlay data on to Google Earth). This is GPS location coordinate data that you can then use to render a map. The military applications were the most fun to check out, although they probably have the least amount of generic use.

One example I saw was from TouchShare, a leader in geospatial collaborative solutions. Their are multiple layers to their software stack.

The first thing you notice is that you can share a screen, so you have these giant touch tables that you can easily navigate and apply lenses to, or draw on, that will remind you of a show like 24. You could, in real time, have a command center going and people out in the field, on a map, where you are feeding data to it, like enemy deployments, and redraw the soldiers incursion map.

The “lenses” allow you to have a layer view that you can drag over an area, say for example a map of IED explosions, if you don't care about the whole map, but a particular area, the lens will just show those IED marks in the area it is active. You can overlay different lenses to intersect datasets in a geographic region, so in the IED example, you could have a Poppy Field lens overlay it (or even just activate both for the entire map), and then look for a high frequency of IED attacks that is geographically close to a Poppy Field under the assumption that terrorists are protecting an income source. It can then pull up biographic data of known terrorists that are known to be in that area.

In a similar vein was in the law enforcement community. I saw an example from Snaptrends that was almost scary. They provide real-time, location-based social intelligence.

Their SaaS software identifies relevant, open/public social media content within a specific geography to enable organizations to more effectively: Prevent, Identify, Respond to and Investigate crimes, threats and emergencies. you can see icons popping up on the map of people sending a Tweet or posting on Facebook (assuming geotagging is enabled), as well as cross reference in the police report data. So for example, suddenly you see a bunch of tweets popping up on a corner, you can click on them and see what they are, could be a bunch of people taking pictures of a fight or something.

That can tie in to the police report data to see what kind of incident is getting reported. You can start to know about events before they get reported, verging on Minority Report style crime divisions. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about that.stmapping

What I found most useful however, was the application within government infrastructure, especially in smaller to medium size cities that typically have smaller budgets and are more cost conscious (the larger ones should be, but don't seem to be). The ability to track and monitor assets and predict maintenance schedules was sweet. You can also interface with your citizenry to report information back to you. For example, if there's a dead animal in the road that needs to be picked up, or you are walking at night and see massive overwatering or a broken sprinkler.

Speaking of watering, with all the various water shortages, especially here in California, we are constantly talking about conservation, but if you look at the waste in landscape watering, you can see huge potential for savings, but no one bothers to do it. The three main players I saw in this space were Trimble, Cityworks and Cartegraph, the latter seeming to be the most recent entry in this market and the former two have a co-opertition relationship.

There is a lot going on in this space and it all starts with getting an inventory of your city's assets. This is streets, lights, sprinklers, parks, sidewalks, fire hydrants; what you have and where it is located. You need to inspect the condition of your assets, set their value, assess their performance, at what point do they fail, and at what point it makes more sense to repair or to replace the asset. Once you have everything in place, then you are able to really manage your work and do predictive analysis. If you've got an item that is failing now and it turns out the same item, like a fire hydrant, is due to be replaced around the corner in a month, you might as well consolidate the work and have it done at the same time. It is less expensive to make a single trip than multiple trips, so you start to reduce costs.

What I really like is tying this in with a service like SeeClickFix that allows citizens to report non-emergency items in a city, like broken sprinklers, a street light that is out, dangerous sidewalk cracks,dead animal in the street, that kind of thing. These should go in to the cities intake system where you could let some items get automatically routed to service tickets or maybe they are reviewed before they are routed.

It is a great way for a city to make things easier for their citizens, they don't need to know which entity manages which asset. Maybe there is an HOA for the landscape watering, or the county manages the traffic signals and the city does the street sweeping. If the city took it on themselves to do the routing, then the citizens can just make the reports.

The possibilities for automation, improving responsiveness and cutting costs are really very exciting, at least to me. ESRI has a huge array of developer options as well, pretty much any modern language and platform you care to name, even scripting languages like Python. The array of options is just massive. One thing that struck me is the responsiveness of all these vendors parsing through what has to be massive amounts of data.IMAG0777

I ran across one of the old product reviews I'd written about 25 years ago, and I was gushing at the amazing performance of *only* taking 15 minutes to churn through 20,000 lines of source code, just crazy. The “at a glance' guide for the conference was over 80 pages. There were so many breakout sessions and tutorials that I had to just focus on the vendor floor. ESRI even went so far as to make the tables in some of the areas whiteboards, so you could brainstorm while you were sitting and chatting, I saw a good number of tables with ideas on them, I just had no idea what they were talking about.

To wrap up all too soon, you gotta check out this Twitter page:

Geoawesomeness geoawesomeness on Twitter

I was ready to grab 20 pictures off of it for this story, but then I thought about it and the important take away is that just about all data that occurs is being stored, the challenge for these vendors is primarily finding interesting, useful and innovative ways to provide it to you. A little out of the box thinking and you'll be surprised at what you can accomplish.

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By |July 22nd, 2014|Advertising Technology|0 Comments
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Gearing up for Oracle’s Marketing Cloud Conference #Interact2014

Screenshot 2014-07-01 23.06.53

The Battle of the Marketing Clouds

San Francisco is hosting the annual Oracle Marketing Cloud Interact 2014, one of the biggest events for digital marketers of the year. This year, it's expanded for more B2B and B2C marketers to take part and benefit from the collaboration of expertise. The focus will be on best practices in an era when data-driven marketing is king while also detailing the importance of customized engagement in a cross-channel world. The event is taking place next week at the Moscone West from July 16-18.

Interact '14 is around the corner. A must-attend event for every marketer: http://t.co/ET5Pupq4GL #interact14 pic.twitter.com/Lqi2mVlzLI

— oracleopenworld (@oracleopenworld) June 27, 2014

Marketers, no matter what their field, may be asking themselves if the conference will really be beneficial to them. After all, traditionalists have been shying away from embracing cloud marketing and such a summit can seem overwhelming. However, the event coordinators say that a series of sessions will be immersive and suitable for every level of marketer. While the theme is best practices, there are options for overview sessions or more in-depth choices. If you're a user of Responsys or any component of the Oracle Marketing Cloud, then you should definitely attend.

Experts on Hand

Some of the top marketing executives in the world will be leading sessions, including the top dogs at Comcast, LinkedIn, JCPenney, Lenovo, Shutterfly and DocuSign. This is one of a small smattering of conferences directed to both B2B and B2C companies, with Oracle dishing up a little something for every industry. The best and more innovative marketing campaigns will be dissected with a look at how the cloud and related technologies can further optimize such efforts.

As for the keynote speakers, Buzzfeed's VP and GM Jonathan Perelman is leading the pack. An associate professor from MIT Media Labs, Hugh Herr, is also on deck. You'll also be able to attend keynote lectures from Laura Ramos and Shar VanBoskirk of Forrester Research, a digital change partner from PwC, and LeapFrog's Senior VP and GM of Digital Community, Sean O'Driscoll.

Oracle executives will also be on hand including President Mark Hurd, GM and Senior VW Kevin Akeroyd, and Group VP of products Steve Krause.

What to Expect at Interact 2014

Attendees will face two big challenges if they plan to make the trip to SFO: Dealing with “the harsh mid-70° degree San Francisco summer temperatures,” and choosing which of the 30+ breakout sessions to attend first. No matter which session is chosen, Oracle promises “actionable insights” so that marketers can help improve their capabilities via building a “digital dialogue” that translates best to customers.

As a grand finale, a special private show from the B-52's is also schedule. The “World's Greatest Party Band” will be on hand to really bring the party to life. Marketing is an industry that really makes the most of social aspects of conferences, and the biggest cloud marketing event in the country is no exception. I, for one, have always wanted to head out to the Love Shack.

Coming Armed with Questions

For those who aren't 100 percent comfortable and familiar with the marketing cloud, it's wise to come to the conference armed with questions in order to get expert advice. Finding out more about how traditional marketing tactics translate into cloud marketing, the difference between cloud business intelligence and cloud marketing, and the easiest path to transition to the cloud specifically for marketing departments can all be addressed.

I'll be looking at this conference through a different lens. As someone who went to Salesforce's Dreamforce conference, the Adobe Summit and Ensighten's Agility 2014, I'll be curious to see how open Oracle is with their version of their marketing cloud. I'll be sharing all of my findings during my Marketing Technology Conference keynote in Boston in August. Viva la marketing technologies!

Salesforce and Adobe are a closed marketing cloud, with API's and apps to utilize other marketing technologies, and they don't typically allow competing technologies into their cloud. Whereas Ensighten allows you to build your own marketing technology stack using components of Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, IBM or any of the other 1000+ marketing technologies. Let's hope that Oracle promotes openness, as that is clearly the best way to go.

The post Gearing up for Oracle's Marketing Cloud Conference #Interact2014 appeared first on Technorati.

By |July 7th, 2014|Advertising Technology|0 Comments
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What is a ‘burst campaign?’

Example of a burst campaign

A burst campaign occurs when a marketer concentrates ad spend over a short period of time in order to boost the visibility of the app and increase installs. The primary purpose of burst campaigns is to move the app up the top charts in the major app markets. To better understand how burst campaigns work, and why they can be an important component of enterprise marketing strategies, it's helpful to understand how top charts work.

Top charts

The App Store and Google Play both organize apps into a number of basic categories and subcategories, helping users navigate to apps that are relevant to their interests. Both Google Play and the App Store further assist app discovery by prominently featuring lists of top apps. For example, if you navigate to the Games category in the App Store, you can see Best New Games, Best New Updates, What We're Playing, and other lists. In Google Play, each category under Games has it's own Top Paid and Top Free lists.

There are a number of theories about the factors influence which apps are featured in the top charts, but undoubtedly, the popularity of the app (measured by the number of app installs) plays a major role. Considering that being featured in the top charts is the most common way for new users to discover apps, it makes sense that marketers go to great lengths to move their apps up these lists.

Enter burst campaigns. By concentrating ad spend in a short period of time, marketers hope to draw a large number of new users. The mass influx of new users moves the app up the top charts, increasing its visibility and creating more organic installs.

When to use a burst campaign

Burst campaigns are not appropriate in every situation, but the following examples outline opportunities where a burst campaign may be ideal:

  • Initial launch of an app: Remember, there are over one million apps on both Google Play and the App Store. Launching an app without a strong marketing campaign is a safe way to ensure your app disappears into the digital oblivion. Accompanying your app launch a strong burst campaign can help get your app moving up the charts.
  • A lull in app downloads: It's common for the number of app downloads to experience some fluctuation. But sometimes an app remains flat for an extended period of time, or experiences an unexpected lull. In cases like this, a good burst campaign can be the thing to get the app back up to speed. As seen in the example below, installs for this enterprise app remained fairly flat for an extended period of time – and you can clearly see when the burst kicked in.

  • Peak season: It's a well-known phenomenon that apps peak around holidays. Users often get new devices and are interested in experimenting with apps. Running a burst campaign around peak season can be a great way to pick up a fresh round of new users.

Potential problems with burst campaigns

The biggest drawback of burst campaigns is that user quality is notoriously low. In particular, burst campaigns don't have a great track record of acquiring users with a high LTV. Users often uninstall apps from burst campaigns after only one or two uses. In theory, this might be acceptable – remember, one of the main purposes of burst campaigns is that an influx of new users will drive the app up the charts, making it more visible and resulting in more downloads.

For example, the enterprise app featured in the graph below had been experiencing low activity for several months. After launching a burst campaign in early March they were able to see a considerable spike in both paid and organic installs. At one point, organic installs were higher than paid installs, but most important, organic installs were able to remain at a level considerably higher than before the burst campaign (likely the result of being featured in top charts).

Best practices

Advertise on multiple ad networks: Ad networks have access to inventory on a variety of publisher websites. As an enterprise marketer launching a burst campaign, you'll need to be able to purchase big blocks of ads. Working with multiple ad networks will give your ads a much broader reach. Some of the most popular ad networks for enterprise marketers include:

  • Chartboost
  • InMobi
  • Fiksu
  • Millennial Media
  • AdColony

Rotate your creative: Because you are going to essentially be flooding the world with ads for your app, rotating your creative can help your ads stay fresh. Repeatedly displaying the same ad to users leads to message fatigue and can actually have a negative impact on potential users.

Summary

Burst campaigns occur when marketers concentrate ad spend over a short period of time. One of the major purposes of burst campaigns is to acquire a large number of installs and move the app up the top charts on Google Play and the App Store. The best times to run burst campaigns is at the initial launch of the app, during peak seasons, or if the app is experiencing an unexpected lull. The biggest downfall to burst campaigns is that user quality is low as users have a low lifetime value and have a tendency to uninstall the app after a short period. Burst campaigns can be optimized by working with multiple ad networks and and rotating your creative.

Main image credit: tedits.files.wordpress.com

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By |June 17th, 2014|Advertising Technology|0 Comments
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Why buy 10, get one 1 free is a proven loyalty fail

Mogl

Buy 10 get one 1 free, right? WRONG

For Jon Carder, Co-Founder & CEO of restaurant rewards program Mogl, providing utility is the winning formula that makes gamification successful. Carder, speaking at the recent Gamification Summit, made it clear that the old formula of providing points, badges and/or levels are all bad utilities that no longer work to boost levels of engagement. Companies like Foursquare and Scvngr have been unsuccessful at gamifying their products, mainly because they've been unable to provide lasting utility.

Loyalty means utility

Customers want utility that doesn't fade overtime. Frequent flyer dollars and VIP services make a customer feel valued but that's only the tip of the iceberg, according to Carder.

In trying to gamify the restaurant business, Carder and his team knew that their greatest success would come from tapping into the power of the credit card. Once a user has linked up their Mogl account, the program finds them participating restaurants. Using mobile, customers can see the best deals at the top of their screens and restaurants that are bidding in real-time for their business.

very true, affluent consumers aren't willing to pull out a coupon when dining @joncarder #gsummit

— Stephanie Garcia (@heystephanie) June 12, 2014

You walk into a restaurant, enjoy a great meal and using your credit card-enabled Mogl account, get cashback every time you eat at a participating restaurant. Using leaderboards Mogl users can track themselves with other users and get alerted to how much money they have earned.

On top of that, Mogl has implemented the Mogl Jackpot giving out cash prizes to the top three earning customers at every restaurant, every month. Tying Mogl to something intrinsically rewarding makes you feel good about winning and earning money, said Carder.

It's a win for the restaurant patron; it's a win for the hungry, and it's a win for the restaurant. With your cashback, you also can choose to donate it to food banks in your area. A principle mission of Mogl is to help end hunger.

Since their launch back in 2006, Mogl users have spent more than $40 million at more than 1,500 participating venues and donating approximately 750,000 meals to food banks. Mogl continues to expand into new markets (now in Phoenix, Los Angeles, Orange County, Ventura County and San Francisco) and has raised a total of $25 million to date from VCs.

Mogl's three tips to gamification success

Carder's three gamification tips?

  1. Pick a pain point – Hone in on customer pain points in order to provide your customer with a compelling reason to try your product
  2. Remove any friction – Eliminate the hoops preventing your users from fully participating
  3. Kill the “Buy 10 get 1 Free” – It's a dated gaming model, having outlived its usefulness and perpetuates a grinding gaming methodology with no sense of fun.


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By |June 16th, 2014|Advertising Technology|0 Comments
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