Going Social Now

Super Bowl Digital Advertising Madness

2012-02-01T04:11:43Z

Super Bowl is upon us as is the advertising madness around. There are a few key themes that will hold true this year for sure and are already surfacing:

1. Releasing ads online early is becoming table-stakes. Nearly everyone seems to be doing this and with good reason. It's about building momentum into the Super Bowl typically done with a mixture of paid and organic promotions of the TV ads online.

2. The smarter advertisers are constructing narratives around teasers, the TV commercial and what should happen after the ad airs. Some are even focusing on second screen social TV experiences (we being one of those).

3. A much smaller subset of advertisers are recognizing that there's more to the Super Bowl than just the advertising or their own advertising. As a result, they have a more integrated, cohesive strategy build around the entirety of the Super Bowl experience. More will move in this direction next year.

4. Hashtag mania is taking hold. Lots of advertisers will be promoting hashtags. Many over their Facebook urls or website address. Time will tell whether these are valuable or if they get lost in the clutter of the moment. How many people will use those hashtags that are promoted?

5. Ad-meters galore for certain. Last year we got to experience lots of different ad meters. This year there are going to be even more with many varied measures of success. What's certain every advertiser will probably have at least one meter that they will be able to point to and say that they did well! In another year or two, the ad meters will reduce in number.

For more on the Super Digital mania, read this Reuters piece and this Ad Age story where our Pepsi plans are discussed (there's more detail in the Ad Age story)

Two steps forward, One step back

2012-01-11T11:36:58Z

Working with very large brands in large organizations means not knowing whether you're taking two steps forward, one step back or one step forward and two steps back in any given moment. We all like to say that there's light at the end of the tunnel but working within a marketing organization versus in an agency, the tunnel is much longer and sometimes the light can seem much further away. You're thinking about how decisions you'll make today will effect your brand three or four years hence.

Yes, we absolutely live in a real-time world and we have to be hyper-quick. But at the same time changing consumer perceptions of a brand sometimes can take years just as meaningful competitive marketshare moves take time. Influences affecting consumers are more varied, more random and less controllable than ever before too. They're also global and hyper local all at once.

It is indeed a fascinating time to be in marketing. And while some facets of marketing make it an extremely sexy discipline, others make it a more difficult discipline than ever. In this world, the adage, don't mistake motion for progress gets infinitely more complex to recognize.

TV Ads' New Digital Role, HBR Piece

2011-11-12T21:38:28Z

Television advertising has undergone significant changes in the last 30 years. However, it is arguably on the verge of its greatest changes ever. From where I sit as the Global Head of Digital at PepsiCo Beverages, charged with navigating our brand's foray into the digital world, I see three big changes:

The value we put on an advertisement will change as we seek to account for engagement metrics in the pricing.
The narrative arch will change as we think of the advertisement as a trailer versus the whole story.
Location-aware technologies will force a greater degree of engagement on a format that had historically been passive, impersonal and certainly without any extensions.

When you look at the statistics, the reasons are obvious. According to a recent study, 60% of television viewers also look at their mobile phones while watching TV shows. 33% have their laptops open in front of them and most interestingly, iPad owners spend the most time in front of the TV with their tablet than any other activity. It makes sense for TV advertisements to be thought of as an element in a broader narrative arch for the brand - a narrative arch that allows the brand to tell a more complete and a more interactive story. But what are the implications for marketers today? Read the complete post on the Harvard Business Review website and catch the earlier piece that I had written for them too.

Physio-Digital + Cause + Shopper Marketing

2011-10-28T03:29:20Z

Probably one of the most exciting parts of working at PepsiCo Beverages is in seeing the physical and digital worlds come together especially as the whole cause marketing space gets more directly integrated with brand marketing. This PepsiCo 7-Eleven program is a perfect example of that and one that I find to be awesome.

For every 20 oz. Pepsi product bought from 7-Eleven, we will donate five cents to the good cause. If the person also checks in using Facebook Places, we will double that donation. Feeding America provides emergency food assistance to those who are food insecure. Its network of food banks supply food to more than 37 million Americans each year, including 14 million children and 3 million seniors. The program is being promoted both in-store and online, with case cards on Pepsi end-caps, and advertising on Facebook and participating food bank websites.

A Love Letter from Brand Marketers to Silicon Valley (republished from Ad Age)

2011-10-27T01:40:48Z

For too long, the digital industry has looked at brands like Pepsi simply as a monetization strategy. What's worse is that sometimes our digital friends view us as being uninformed members of the digital ecosystem - something akin to prey. Not only is that perception misinformed, its going to start impacting the bottom-line of many companies in the digital ecosystem.

On the brand side, marketers cannot afford to play that role anymore. We need to show a much stronger return on all our marketing investments just as we recognize that traditional forms of marketing (ie banner ads) aren't as effective as they once were. We also understand technology better than we're often given credit for. If you treat us as your monetization strategy, you probably won't get much attention from us.

So how do we think about our roles in the digital ecosystem? I like to think of it as four key points:

The role of brands extends beyond simple advertising and is evolving towards meaningful sponsorships, content curation and creation. The way Pepsi is partnering with the X-Factor across retail, in show and online (check outPepsi Sound Off and Pepsi Pulse) is an example of this. The same applies with our Call of Duty Mountain Dew partnership. Specially marked Mountain Dew packaging will feature codes that give double XP time to players in the multi-mode of Modern Warfare 3 when the game launches in November. This isn't traditional marketing.

This piece by me was first published in Ad Age.

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The future of marketing for brands means not just playing the traditional role of sponsoring experiences created by someone else. Instead marketers need to act like startups, media companies, technology companies and of course still as brands all at once. Whether it be through our PepsiCo Beverages Digital Labs initiatives or in how we partnered with Fashion Week around the Diet Pepsi Skinny can launch acting as a mini media organization, we are already playing these roles.

Having physical products with huge distribution (we're practically in every neighborhood of America) gives us digital scale for consumer engagement. Frankly, this is scale we've had all along but that we've never really had the tools to leverage before. Suddenly, everyday, physical products have become highly leveragable assets in the digital ecosystem. Whether it's our cups in food-service partner outlets with QR codes or the ability to photograph our logos and get access to exclusive content, we can now use our unique scale in the real world for digital.

The data that we are gathering now when linked to offline data gives us a view into consumers that we never had before. Last summer we ran the largest Foursquare check-in program with people around the country being able to check in at fun summer locations to get a Pepsi Summer badge. Think about the location data we've been able to capture there and how valuable it is when we co-relate it to sales data per location.

It is time for the technology industry to think more about how to work with us to build things, rather than attempt to sell us a finished product we don't need and never asked for. Indeed, perhaps its time for tech to learn a thing or two from marketers. As brands, we need to engage our consumers more deeply and more meaningfully in ways that enrich their lives and drive fierce loyalty to our brands. Traditional advertising is no longer enough to do that.

As a result, we need new kinds of partnerships where brands and technology companies co-create experiences for consumers that benefit everyone. If we are brought into the picture right at the end in a simplistic fashion, we will struggle to extract decent business value from those relationships. How will you partner with us in the future?

Note: This piece was first published in Ad Age.

Marketing in Steve Jobs own words. From 1997

2011-10-08T03:49:44Z

Enough said. Via Ad Age.

Google+ The Real-Time Marketing Promise

2011-08-01T02:04:10Z

Having played around with Google+ for a few weeks now, here are my raw thoughts on the social platform and its role in the Real-Time Marketing world. Some of these thoughts made it into this Ad Age story for which I was interviewed last week.

Finally a Google social networking bet that has a chance of surviving. There's no question, this is Google's best bet ever in the social networking space. There have been so many false starts and half hearted efforts that I had begun to wonder whether Google could every crack this space. The reason why things are different this time - rather than incubating the product in isolation in Google Labs, from the get-go Google+ is integrated into the rest of the Google ecosystem through single sign on, the navigation bar and the ability to add in contacts and friends. There's a lot more integration to do but it works effectively as a real-time stream of content being shared to you and from you based on social context.
Google's challenge is that we simply do not know how Google+ fits into our lives. Maybe Google+ been intentionally silent on that for a good reason. Facebook has become part of our digital habit -- I sit down for a cup of coffee in the morning and I go on Facebook to scan my newsfeed. I find some really compelling content while surfing the web and I tweet about it to the world. It's not clear if Google wants Google+ to be an add-on to my digital habits or a replacement. A lot of people -- the 20 million people who are playing around on Google+ are asking themselves that question. The funny thing is that Google+ has the best of Facebook and the best of Twitter -- you have the ability to broadcast and select closed groups who should receive that broadcast. So is it meant to be a bridge between the two but do we really need that? Targeting for brands in a real-time fashion this way is extremely powerful.
Google + misses a true radical innovation opportunity but all is not lost. Google's historic strength has been its search engine algorithms and its blistering fast, technology backbone. Simply speaking, it has the best scientists and its algorithms are unmatched. That's why its the undisputed leader in search. But in Google+ I have to manually find my friends and add them to circles manually. It is time consuming and can quickly get overwhelming managing all of these friends and circles.

If I could log in and have Google+ make recommendations based on how I have interacted with people in the past that would be valuable. The home run would be if they could add a "Suggested Circles" functionality that helps me manage my networks. They do something similar in gmail today with "Important first" and the "Priority Inbox" functionality, so this wouldn't be a big step for them. After all, who wants to go about adding friends and categorizing them yet again. To take that thought a step further, Google+ could also suggest brands and products in a similar fashion.
Google+ can really work for brand marketers if we're given the right tools. From a brand perspective two things matter most - knowing where, when and how we can engage meaningfully with our consumers and in turn being mindful of how they'd like us to engage with them. As marketers, we absolutely want to find ways to engage with our consumers on Google+ that are organic to the Google+ philosophy and in ways that consumers are using the platform. But to be effective we need very strong analytics. We have to be smart in how we engage -- we can't be everywhere or do everything, so we need analytics that help us make decisions on how and where to best reach our consumers at moments in time when we matter. Google has said that when they do launch brand pages they will have strong analytics. Google understands brands because they have worked closely with us on search and they know what analytics we need, so I am happy to wait for that.

Keeping in mind the importance of people's privacy, we'd also want to know psychographic information about who are engaging. This is not an anonymous platform, so we always have to respect that. If Pepsi could reach out on Google+ and engage a Pepsi fan and then also be able to engage with their friend circle or their work circle that would be a win. In the end we want to participate in a way that makes sense for the platform, consumers and the brand.
Google+ functions effectively as a real-time sharing engine. There's no question in my mind that Google+ is strongest as a real-time content sharing engine for me to push out specific pieces of content to specific people circles. Google+ integrates more seamlessly with YouTube, Google Photos and Google Music as Ian Schafer emphasized in an Ad Age piece. That is its greatest strength. Its something that I cannot do with Twitter (lists are for viewing tweets from select people not for sharing out tweets to groups) and while I could do it with Facebook, the people management feature has gotten cumbersome. It is also symmetrical limiting me from controlling distribution the way I may want to.
Google + streams are very different to the Facebook newsfeed. That's an advantage. If someone gave me one wish in the world, I'd probably use it to understand how Facebook's edge rank system actually worked. Like the Google search algorithm its a black box and I'm not exactly sure how many users (and which users) may see a specific post of from one of my brands. From a marketing standpoint, that's a bit of a problem.

However, in the case of Google+ everything published appears in the stream in chronological fashion. I have a much better sense of what a user will see. Now, this can certainly get overwhelming but there's absolute clarity in terms of what will make it into a user's feed. You could argue that the Google model is simplistic and not scalable but what's certain is that it forces you to take those circles seriously. And for Google that's a good thing and for marketer's it makes Google + more valuable.

It's going to be fascinating watching the evolution of Google+ To get 20 million people to play with it in a manner of weeks is no joke. The social network is definitely off to a good start but there's obviously a lot more to do to create true stickiness of the Facebook variety. One thing is for sure, if Google were to integrate the Google+ stream and comments into its search engine algorithm, that alone may provide enough incentive for a lot more people to take it even more seriously. Only time will tell whether Google decides to go in that direction or not.

When a trillion impressions aren't enough

2011-07-24T04:32:27Z

There's a much ignored side effect of the social media phenomena. A side effect that has immense ramifications for the marketing world but gets no attention whatsoever. An effect that we as an industry must pay much more attention to. Otherwise, we're at risk of trivializing what we do, hurting each other's interests whether that be advertiser, agency, publisher or consumer related and wasting millions in marketing dollars.

I call it the trillion impressions problem. Largely thanks to the social media phenomena, we now live in a world which has many billions more (if not trillions) brand related media impressions that can be monetized in some form or the other. Most of these additional impressions are driven by the fact that consumers now are the ultimate marketers endorsing brands, advocating for them and talking about them across the social networks. It's a because customers are creating customers.

But there's a problem with these trillions of media impressions about brands. We don't know what they're worth and we're not putting enough thinking into understanding their value especially as triggers for deeper engagement. We're not putting enough effort into figuring this out. Instead we have every media company and startup trying to selling brands a new kind of impression without anyone helping companies understand their worth.

For example, I cannot accurately quantify the value of a Pepsi display banner advertising impression versus a paid search impression, a mainstream news story about Pepsi impression, a FourSquare check-in impression at a Pepsi location, a Get Glue impression of a Pepsi branded sticker, or a Facebook edge ranked surfaced newsfeed impression of something the brand is doing. I'm not even sure if the Pepsi target consumer is seeing these impressions. I also don't know exactly which is more important, how do they influence brand affinity and which drive purchases the most. And this is just the beginning of it. What I do know however, is that every publisher, technology company and many an agency wants to sell me a lot of these new brand media impressions that are now in our ecosystem without anyone knowing or assigning an accurate relative value to them.

And that's the problem. Marketing budgets haven't grown at the same pace, and we have no way of qualifying the relative value of one type of brand impression in the media ecosystem to another. We also do not have the tools in place to tell us which type of impressions lead to the greatest consumer engagement and do the most to drive brand equity, brand health and sales of products.

Just because there's a lot more to buy, it doesn't mean we can or more importantly, we should. Let's not forget the basics. A trillion impressions are worthless if they don't move a business forward.

Do $185,000 Domain Names make sense?

2011-06-26T11:41:40Z

Last week I was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal for a piece about the new branded domain names that ICANN announced. Starting in 2012, companies or individuals will be able to apply for custom domain names that instead of ending with ".com" or ".uk" would end with ".brand" like dot pepsi or dot mountaindew. It'll cost $185,000. Here's my more unfiltered take:

I'm not convinced this is a good decision. Yes, it is a more branded domain name but it causes confusion among consumers. For every brand that forks out the money for a branded domain, there will be two that don't.
The pricing seems atrocious. I'm not sure where ICANN got the $185,000 figure from but it appears that the business community wasn't consulted. $185,000 is a lot of money and ICAAN appears to be trading on the insecurities that digital marketers may have about their brands.
It also seems that ICANN wishes they had benefited more directly from the domain name squatting gold rush of the 1990s and are now trying to make up for it. From a industry standpoint, I don't think it makes sense. And nor does Esther Dyson, former ICANN chairwoman.
Other domain name formats have come and gone in the past but they've failed. Remember dot biz and all those domain names that were actually meant for tiny countries? With dot com and the country domain names we have a standard. It's a vocabulary people are used to.
ICANN is supposed to be in the business of reducing digital confusion and making findability of websites easier. They say this will unleash global imagination.This does the exact opposite. Even Google thinks so.
ICANN seems to have confused the opportunities to have more top level domain names with the specific needs of marketers. I can maybe understand the value in having more top level domain names for generic topics like shoes but pushing brands into that space is a mistake. Read this insightful interview with a former ICAAN Chairman for more.
I can only imagine the copyright and trademark infringement issues that will arise in January. Without clear rules around this, we could have a lot of chaos.

I think this is a mistake and most importantly, it is guaranteed to cause user confusion. It'll also cause angst among marketers like myself who feel pressure to fork out the money to purchase a domain name. Similar to the whole net neutrality debate, we as an Internet community, are running the risk of enacting laws, policies and guidelines that hurt the Internet rather than help it over the long term.

Update: @38enso said it best in a tweet reply to my post. - Content drives traffic not URL name. That matters the most.

Conversational Marketing Summit Presentation

2011-06-21T03:13:54Z

Here's the video of my Real-Time Marketing presentation from the Conversational Marketing Summit. Enjoy.

View more videos from CM Summit: Marketing in Real Time

Your 30 Billion Competitors

2011-06-10T11:20:22Z

I work in one of the most hyper-competitive industries that keeps getting more competitive. 30 billion times more. That's roughly the number of status updates published each month on Facebook. Arguably, by the end of the year that number may have doubled or quadrupled.

Lifestyle brands compete with those 30 billion status updates for attention, relevance, interest and mindshare everyday. It's the new battleground. If the brands I work with were mentioned meaningfully in just 5.0% of those status updates, it would change my business dramatically. Brands succeed when they have cultural resonance and whether it is Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Sierra Mist, AMP Energy, SoBe or Propel, those 30 billion status updates are the competition, more competition than another beverage company.

We live in a world where everyone and everything has become media. Brands, people, objects and technology are all media in some form competing with each other for attention and for the attention of each other. That's the world we live in. Knowing how to compete in this new world order on a global scale and in ways that benefit your brands is worth having many sleepless nights about.

Staking everything in Real-Time Marketing

2011-06-10T10:57:28Z

This week I declared at the Conversational Marketing Summit that I was staking my whole career on Real-Time Marketing. I believe this will be at least 50% of all marketing activities in a few years. In the coming months, watch as I use this blog to go deep into describing what real-time marketing is, explain the framework that drives it (see a summary below) and track activities in the marketplace around it as well as from within the four walls of PepsiCo. One important caveat, people often associate real-time marketing with social media marketing. That's not true. Social Media Marketing fits into the world of Real-Time Marketing which also includes real-time audience buying, media distribution and addressable television. Here's some coverage of my talk. Watch for slides soon and take a look at what Facebook is doing and how other companies like Taykey who I've tested solutions with are doing. Agencies like iCrossing with its live media studio are also aggressively entering this space.

The X-Factor, YouTube & a New TV Mindset

2011-06-03T03:17:39Z

This is an exciting year for us at PepsiCo Beverages. Along with The Pepsi Refresh Project, we're the launch partner for The X-Factor. We're going to support this massive entertainment platform by pushing the boundaries of digital engagement and connecting fans to meaningful Pepsi X-Factor digital experiences. Along with our partners, today we made what might seem to be a small but is actually an important step in that direction - we jointly announced that for the first time ever, consumers will be able audition for a Reality TV show via YouTube.

For some of us in the Internet space this might not seem special. But no reality show has done this before and certainly not on such a scale. No show truly gave every American the opportunity to audition for their show. Americans weren't given equal chances to fulfill their dreams. The show producers could only visit so many cities in a given time period to conduct auditions. It was all about the logistics and the cost. Both barriers have been broken down with the X-Factor YouTube initiative. Arguably, few television shows even beyond the realm of Reality TV have leveraged the Internet has meaningfully as The X-Factor will.

In the coming months and years, the television industrial complex is going to rethink its business structure to incorporate "Internet thinking" into its core. Some networks may have missed an opportunity with the TV up-fronts which treated digital as nothing more than a step-child both from a content and an advertising standpoint. I'm hoping that the TV world won't make that mistake twice. Our YouTube announcement with The X-Factor is one small example of how much the world has changed and what kind of possibilities open up by tapping into "Internet thinking" to enhance, democratize and even redefine traditional, television entertainment and everything surrounding it from script creation to consumer participation and real-time feedback. It also shows the new roles that brands can play in this world.

Social Vending, TV Ad Tagging & Marketing Convergence

2011-04-30T05:42:05Z

Earlier this week PepsiCo announced the Pepsi Social Vending machine which allows consumers to interact with a vending machine in unique, digitally enabled way. You can gift a drink to a friend in your social network who'd get redemption code by text and use it to pick up their soda at any other social vending machine. And you can also gift a soda to an stranger in another city as a gift. The vending machine also displays Pepsi Refresh Project ideas.

The week before we launched the first of its kind IntoNow Pepsi Max tagging experiment letting consumers tag our MLB advertisements and receive a coupon reward in return that can be redeemable in retail. These two very different announcements may have nothing in common on the surface, but that couldn't be further from the truth.

The promise of convergence is quickly becoming a reality. Our consumers do not live in digital worlds that are separate from their physical realities (interestingly, this was my key message at the Ad Age Media Maven awards two years ago). Nor do they treat televisions as a technology independent and separate from computers or mobile phones. Those worlds are blurring and brands must respond to that. With that in mind, here are some thoughts that I believe will influence marketing over the next decade.

Every device and product can be a connected device. Connect your devices. This may seem like a cliché but the truth is so far very few devices are truly connected ones. That's all about to change. For us at Pepsi, we recognize that our fountains, vending machines, cans, bottles and even trucks are fundamentally media. In more and more scenarios they can also be interactive media that can be linked to the digital world. That's where the Pepsi Social Vending machine enters the picture. A hyper-local physical product is your connection to your global, social graph.
Television advertising is dead as television advertising. There's no shortage of column inches dedicated to the death of television advertising. But that misses the point. The fundamentals of television advertising are changing dramatically. No more can you think about it in isolation. Rather your television advertisement is the trailer for deeper online engagement or as in the case with the Into Networks experiment, the access point to specific experiences that could be coupon, game or content centric. Creatives need to think about TV through a different lens - through the lens of it being one touchpoint in a broader consumer engagement strategy. Never start with a TV campaign.
People must be at the center of every business. Make it happen. This is another one that may sound like a cliché but demands mention. In business we often put the wrong words at the heart of our thinking (for my business it maybe consumption, for an airline its seats and for a publisher its audiences), where as at the heart of every business need to be the people who don't just consume the product but also badge it, talk about it, frame experiences around it and choose to bring it into their lives either themselves or through their networks. The Social Vending machine takes us in that direction with the gifting opportunities. It is fundamentally about focusing on fun things people would want to do versus just on ways to sell more of a product efficiently.
Digital Innovation is table stakes for any brand that desires relevance. Since my joining PepsiCo Beverages, we've conducted more tests and launched more proof of concepts than we can barely support. We do this because we recognize that technology is having dramatic effects on how our consumers associate with brands, make purchase decisions collaboratively and consume our products. Everyday we're researching and testing. The benefit - we get to learn quickly what works and what our consumers care about. That maks a big difference. However, betting on the right horses is hard. Success isn't just about experimenting a lot, it is also about placing strategic bets otherwise you dilute your brand's equity. Betting on the right horses will get harder. If tagging TV commercials doesn't take off, we may look stupid a year or two from now. On a side note, IntoNetworks was bought by Yahoo a day after we launched our experiment. That's an endorsement of the technology.
Metrics need to be much more sophisticated. We like to believe that we're entering an age where everything can be measured. That couldn't be further from the truth. The technological and cultural changes we are experiences far outpaces evolutions in marketing measurement. We need to learn so much more about what drives behavior, how the dynamics of influence work and what marketing activities (technological or otherwise) truly influence sales. Currently, those metrics are relatively simplistic and the organizations that invest in measurement in proprietary ways will get ahead. With both the social vending and the tag an advertisement efforts, the metrics will need to be very different. We have no benchmarks or models to work off.
Engagement must be the mantra through real-time marketing. There's no doubt in my mind that thinking of marketing as the search for the next big idea is going to seem trite and superficial a few years from now. Momentum for a big brand won't come from creating splash in Times Square alone and then getting media to surround it. Nurturing continuos, culturally relevant relationships that connect the brand's meaning with consumer intent in the context of their cultural groups will be what matters. The operative word is continuous.

Look at your marketing calendar and ask yourself, are you truly creating continuous relationships with your consumers? Everyday, that social vending machine should have different, experiences that are synchronized with how we're communicating to our consumers digitally, in retail and through trade promotions. Will it get there? Yes. The same applies for tagging an advertisement, the engagement should change by the day based on what's going on in the real world and what the brand is trying to accomplish.

This couldn't be a more exciting time to be in marketing and the thoughts above reflect just some of the transformations that companies are going through. There's a lot more to come but I thought I'd share some of the factors that influence what we do in the marketplace and why.

Will you tie bonuses to Facebook fan counts?

2011-04-22T03:32:42Z

In the last year people have begun to associate the number of likes/fans that a brand has on Facebook with its social media savviness. Some even consider it to be a broader measure of brand health. At the rate we're going, soon corporate bonuses maybe tied to Facebook fan counts! Is that a good thing? I don't think so and here's five reasons why.

Fan count is not a measure of engagement. A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a surprising fact concerning one of the brands that I have to worry about in my day job. While brand Pepsi has fewer Facebook fans than some other brands like Starbucks, it has as much forms of engagement online but outside of Facebook.

How could this be? Here's how. The Pepsi Refresh Project which has been a really successful digital program for Pepsi has an average of 20,000 comments published on the site everyday when it is in session. This is as much engagement than practically any brand on Facebook has on its Facebook page irrespective of the size of its fan base. So what's more important - the Facebook fan count or the deeper engagement around conversations? Arguably, conversations alone don't equal engagement but it does show that the number of fans isn't the right metric alone either. These metrics need to be considered as signals only.
Liking a page is a onetime activity that's then forgotten by many. Shut your laptop and ask yourself this question. How many brands have you "liked" on Facebook in the last year? Do you remember all of them, any of them? The truth is that we don't. And what's even more interesting is that when a brand publishes a status update barely 10% of its fans sees that update.

That's one reason why Facebook launched its Sponsored Stories ad product to promote brand status updates within Facebook so that more people see them. They fully acknowledge that not everyone will see a particular message in the newsfeed. Facebook fans represent the affinity that a person has to a brand in a particular moment of time and not in an aggregated, continuous fashion. It is very different to monthly engagement, traffic or time spent. If we were asked to re-like pages every week or every month, it would be another story but that's not the case.
Facebook Fans can be bought. Some brands buy fans every month. You want to know the truth? The going rate for fan acquisition is roughly $0.60 to $1.00 per fan. If I wanted to create the largest brand page on Facebook, I could do that quickly by just spending. I could use a large percentage of a digital media budget to buy those fans. It'll take probably two weeks but I would have the largest Facebook brand page in no time. Does it mean that I have the most popular brand online or that I'm the most social media savvy marketer out there? Of course not. It just means that I have a very large budget.

This shows that anyone who tries to equate Facebook fan counts with social media success is ignoring the fact that fan counts aren't a pure organic endorsement of a brand. By putting the brand in front of more people on Facebook via its advertising solutions (or third party ones built on the Facebook marketplace that are designed to drive fan increases) you can quickly scale up your fan count. That's why we see spikes in the number of fans a brand has from time to time, it is because they're doing special advertising to acquire them. There's nothing wrong in that, what's wrong is when we equate Facebook fan count with overall health of the brand and assume that it is all organically grown.
Facebook fan counts don't represent true consumer opinion. We don't pay enough attention to semantics as we should sometimes. The acting of "fan-ing" or "liking" a page doesn't necessarily mean that the user is choosing that brand over all others out of pure fondess. He may in fact be liking the page because it'll give him the opportunity to participate in a sweepstakes or get access to special content. In fact, with the ability to "gate" pages (meaning you don't see what the brand has to offer unless you like the page) the user could have a completely different motivation that's driving him to like the page than affinity for the brand itself. For example, in the case of The New Yorker, he may like the page so that he gets access to a specific article that's being shared on the page. Jet Blue ran a special promotion encourage people to like their page to enter sweepstakes that gave away free tickets. Not surprisingly, their fan count grew dramatically during that period.

Instead metrics like the SIM Score (which I introduced in Fluent and my book a few years ago) are a more accurate representation of digital brand health. Metrics like the SIM Score measure opinion online around a brand but also account for reach and puts it in the relative context of its competitors. They're not perfect themselves but they're a step in the right direction.
History plays a significant role in Facebook fan counts. What's sometimes forgotten in the digital space is that first move advantage is truly a massive advantage. Brands that developed Facebook Pages early on or better still those that had existing Groups (before the pages were setup) that were then migrated to pages are at a significant advantage. Also, in the early days of Facebook Pages, users truly liked brands as a show of support. There was no "gating", strategic incentives and very little advertising designed to increase the number of fans. Those brands who were smart enough to be on Facebook and in strategic ways early on are some of the ones that are reaping the benefits. Furthermore, brands that went the route of taking over user groups, started off with an in built base that helped them significantly.

Again, there's nothing wrong with this but it does go to show that simply equating fan counts with brand health or social media savviness is simplistic. There are many more factors at play.

So where does this leave us? In my opinion, Facebook fans is not a measure of online brand health or social media savviness. It is also a factor of budgets, consumer incentives, history, what else the brand is doing online and where it is choosing to focus its efforts. If you're thinking of tying bonuses to Facebook fan counts, I'd suggest you think twice. While the thought may seem preposterous to many of us, it is something that a few people have wondered about.

It is far more important to think strategically and holistically about the health of your brand online and how you are engaging consumers. Yes, Facebook is very important especially in the opportunity it provides to engage with your consumers on a daily basis in light, continuos ways. But depending upon your objectives it may make sense to be the core focus (and that too with fan counts versus page engagement) or it may not. Only you can make the judgement call of what matters to your digital strategy and broader business objectives. Just as you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, you probably shouldn't judge a brand by its Facebook fan count.