In an earlier post (Will Facebook “Fans” be Missed?) I touched upon the fact that having Facebook Fans, aka people that like your brand, is not an ultimate measure of success. Rather a relationship of value (for both the fan and the brand) is created by activating your Facebook community through content, messages, offers, and other interactions and applying metrics to evaluate these efforts over time. Recently Augie Ray of Forrester Research posed the question of whether a Facebook fan even has value unless a brand does something to create value with the fan. His post What Is The Value Of A Facebook Fan? Zero! evoked such a lively discussion that he made a second post on the topic What Is The Value Of A Facebook Fan? Part 2. I recommend reading both posts as you assess the value of your fans and your relationships with them, as well as the impact of your go-forward marketing programs.

The folks over at Green Giant Fresh have been busy. After their initial promotional period, they’re rolling the program out across their entire distribution base. Coverage in Mashable and The New York Times has increased their profile, which is great for the promotion itself.

We helped put the pieces together and power the website and technology for the program. We see it as the first of many interesting intersections between real world companies and social experiences of all types. This one was a lot of fun for us, and we are excited about doing many more.

This summer several brand marketers and retailers are testing cross-promotions to tap into social gaming for motivating their target consumers to buy their products, redeem, play, and repeat. 7-Eleven, typically known for running promotions with movie and TV studios, branched out with a 6-week promotion involving product codes that are redeemable for virtual gifts across several of Zynga’s games on Facebook (FarmVille, Mafia Wars, YoVille). Green Giant Fresh tested and is expanding their cross-promotion with FarmVille to drive retail sales through on-package offer codes for gifts of Free Farm Cash. And just this week Cascadian Farm announced that they will also be partnering with FarmVille on an in-game promotion next week involving their organic blueberries plus a traditional coupon for in-store purchase (NYTimes.com article).

These marketers are all bold to explore new territory in a test and learn environment using social gaming tie-ins and unique offers as active motivators. And how will success be measured? The brands cite various metrics for effectiveness including incremental lift in product sales, site visits, customer acquisition rates, blog posts, brand and product category awareness. But the one commonality is that these brands are all taking an initial step to determine the value of social gaming offers and no doubt capturing their own consumer data and preferences along the way for re-marketing.

In the end, probably not. As of this week, Facebook has done away with the act of Becoming a Fan of a business, brand, band, or celebrity and swapped in a more universally-used Like button (such as on Green Giant Fresh’s brand page below).

The change might seem trivial, but brand marketers are commenting on and evaluating whether the shift in vernacular will substantially affect their efforts to interact with people engaged with their brand on Facebook.

Facebook’s intent is that more of its 400 million users will like businesses or brands as it implies a lower level of commitment than actually becoming a fan. And in theory this should result in an increased number of users that a brand can directly speak with through a user’s news feed.

Although the effort to build a sizeable audience on Facebook has merit, the number of users that like your brand now or became a fan prior to this week is not an ultimate measure of success. Instead, brand marketers should be focusing on ways to determine whether their content and messages are resonating and adding value to their relationship with their Facebook community. Such metrics can be redemptions of product offers that you post on Facebook, the number of users that further engage with your brand by joining your loyalty program, or by the number of users that are sharing your content with friends. The key is to be moving towards a more complete view of your brand advocates by understanding their interactions on Facebook (and other social networks) and mapping that to their purchasing behaviors for your brand over time.

BTW, we’ll be putting on encore performances in Chicago (May 13^th) and San Francisco (July 22^nd).  We’d love to have you.  Registration is open for both events.  Click here to learn more and sign up.

The NY allowed nearly 100 experienced marketing and technology executives to dive deeply into a number of the topics that we address daily with our clients.  Rather than another “Loyalty 101” expo for those just learning about the basics, our roster of presenters brought approaches, examples and real-life lessons that the group could bring back to the office begin implementing right away.

Here’s what I learned.

The day began with Loyalty Lab’s CEO Matt Howland and President Keith Rose outlining what we see are the newest trends in loyalty and how Loyalty Lab continues to invest in accelerating how marketers migrate good customers to loyal customers to fanatic advocates of their brands.

Auren Hoffman, CEO of Rapleaf posed an interesting proposition:  “What if you could target those customers that had the greatest social influence?”  Rapleaf partners with Loyalty Lab to supplement members’ profiles with their social influence levels.  By explicitly targeting members who speak loudly and widely, Rapleaf is helping companies change how they proactively respond to these customers’ needs.  On our side, we fundamentally believe that great programs know where and when to go high-touch, but automates this personal attention in order to keep the costs realistic.

Reflecting on a once powerful brand, AOL’s EVP Ned Brody ask the group what would they do if they were in his shoes.  Ned’s part of a turnaround team at AOL tasked with stemming attrition and rebuilding loyalty after years of precipitous fall off of subscribers and subscription revenue.  Not surprisingly, most of group didn’t even realize the breadth of the AOL footprint, nor that fact that nearly everyone had engaged with at least one property in the past couple of months.  So what to do with what’s left of the 90% gross margin revenue stream?  Invest it in content and continue to provide compelling venues for not just the old-timers but new users as well.

Addressing one of our most frequent topics, Jim Manzi, the founder and Chairman of Applied Predictive Technologies reinforced one of our core beliefs – that rigorous test design methodology allows marketers to radically expand their creativity.  Essentially when the world is zigging and the followers are following; test and learn allows marketers to take chances that zag in the opposite direction and provides a level of analytic confidence to invest and implement.  With respect to loyalty programs test and learn is the core technique for determining overall program lift in an unbiased environment, but also allows marketers to experiment with specific offers, enrollment tactics and reward and redemption schemes.

Another area that we’re frequently addressing is the role of formal market research in loyalty program design.  Jeff Rosenblum, Co-President of Questus has been working with us for several years to develop techniques for testing program designs and user experience with actual consumers.  Jeff recognizes that loyalty research is tough – too many marketers ask the wrong questions and get answers that satisfy their preconceived notions (either positively or negatively).  Jeff was frank with the audience.  If you’re not willing to do it right, if you’re not willing to listen, then don’t invest in market research.  But if you’re willing to jump in, a few key insights may have incredible impact on funding rates, how benefits are structured and the overall member experience.

We were also treated to an A+ panel of marketers from a number of different categories.  Rich Beatty of CMG Partners assembled Cynthia Ricciardi (CMO of SiriusXM), Robert Birge (CMO at Kayak), Jeff Bedard (brand manager at Campbell’s Kitchen) and Margaret Hynes (Platinum Card product director at AMEX) to compare and contrast their definitions of loyalty in each of their vertical markets.  While each face different issues to solve:  initial activity, advocacy, retention – or in some cases merely data gathering; the one thing all the panelists agreed upon was engagement led to customer value and more engagement led to even greater value.  Whether that meant lower attrition rates, higher usage rates, more referrals – the key was get them and get them hooked and get them talking.

Finally, Mark Silva, Founder and Managing Director of Real Branding closed the day by presenting a couple of case studies on the social marketing mapping.  Mark has been on the forefront of helping brands rethink how they get their message out to large audiences.  Traditionally, brands like Unilever could buy their way to high consumer awareness through television advertising and newspaper coupons.  But today, Mark is helping brands launch multi-channel social campaigns that allow brand messaging to be captured and amplified through loyal consumers.

Want to learn more?  Our speakers have made their presentations available (send me an email for access david@loyaltylab.com) or come to Chicago in May.  We’d love to see you.

The always flamboyant Lady Gaga.

Great observations in this blog post about how the flamboyant Lady Gaga has embraced key loyalty concepts to seize her brand and outlast the traditional “flash in the pan” that performers wrestle with. There are definitely correlations that many marketers can learn from:

• Give Fans a Name: these are not just “enrolled customers in the loyalty program;” these are ambassadors. The simple act of naming them as part of a movement has much more power than just a flat loyalty card number.
• Make it about something bigger than you: so many companies confuse “loyalty” with “points.” Lady Gaga embraces her fans, and they respond much more emotionally. Companies can tailor the program to be a personal experience for the customer, and see that same emotion.
• Develop shared symbols: if you have special pricing or incentives on products for Loyalty program members, tout it! Make them feel special, as well as making other customers want to join.
• Make your customers feel like rock stars: use your program to not just tout specials, but recognize individual members of your program. Develop a community, ask for their input!
• Leverage social media: this is a low cost, high ROI medium to truly cultivate a loyal customer base. It simply has to be part of your strategy to recognize, reward, and develop your best customers.

In February 2007, a series of very, very long tarmac delays (most notably on Jet Blue flights departing JFK) ushered in a new awareness of passengers’ rights for food, functioning lavatories and generally a way off the plane in case of claustrophobic anxiety attack.  Laws were passed, fines were established and now we can count on every substantial delay due to weather, mechanical or other acts of congress being reported in real-time by well-connected bloggers.

Well a few weeks ago, it happened again.  A perfect storm of a blogger with a web cam and, well, a storm.

Virgin America flight 404 from Los Angeles to New York Kennedy (or as we airline geeks would say VX404 from LAX to JFK) departed L.A. on time on Saturday, March 13.  Due to poor weather, the flight was diverted to Stewart International — about 90 minutes north of NY to wait out the storm and get clearance for landing.

Stewart is a small airport, with limited gates, so VX404 was not given a gate, but passengers were allowed to leave if they chose and cases of water were delivered by the ground operations crew.  After several hours, a gate became available and the aircraft docked and deplaned.  When it became clear that JFK would not reopen in the near future, a bus was chartered to bring passengers to New York.

But that’s not the interesting story.  Sitting in first class, utilizing Virgin America’s wifi and “sharing” with his webcam was David Martin, CEO of a social media site that encourages its followers to upload videos or images of what they’re doing “right now.”  A perfect opportunity to promote his site as he experienced another episode of “Torture on the Tarmac.”  (probably of more interest was his cabinmate Carrie Ann Inaba — of ABC’s Dancing with the Stars 

The SF Chron documents the day nicely.

While VX did everything by the book with regard to the ground delay, what they did really well was addressing the blogosphere head on.  Here’s what impresses me:

Virgin actively encourages social media contribution — all of which they monitor and react to.  This allowed them to rapidly see what was happening and respond directly to the blogger.  Virgin America’s CEO, David Cush, personally reached out to Martin.

Next, Virgin leveraged its strong group of loyal travel bloggers to launch a counter attack.  In fact I heard of the events not from the news media, but from Cranky Flier’s Brett Snyder who wrote a blunt rebuttal to any criticism that may have been suggested about the incident.

In the end, Virgin did an outstanding job balancing the open, real-time nature of social media by quickly responding to blogger.  Unlike other airlines that allowed incidents to become Top 40 YouTube hits, Virgin America rapidly, appropriately and professionally dealt with a tough day and an even tougher situation.

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Best Buy’s long-term investment in their mobile strategy can be seen in the multitude of ways consumers are now able to use their mobile phone to interact and transact with the brand. Consumers can access the mobile version of Best Buy’s Web site to locate their closest store, check their rewards program points, research information about a product while in-store, and easily make a purchase. They have also released several updates to their iPhone app that launched last year, as well as publishing an app for the Android platform this year.

Best Buy is working to connect the virtual and physical experiences with their brand so that consumers can shop, learn, and buy with their mobile phone. This video highlights their commitment to mobile and serves as an excellent benchmark for other retailers and brands:

Many marketers continue to ask themselves what role mobile marketing and commerce should play in their brand’s strategy. For Target, a new mobile coupon program that connects a customer’s mobile and in-store experience is one answer. Target customers can opt-in to the program on their phone at m.target.com, by texting COUPONS to 827438 (TARGET), or from their computer online at www.Target.com/mobile. After opt-in, customers receive a text message with a link to a mobile Web page that contains multiple offers, all accessible through a single barcode. Customers can then redeem the single-use offers by having their phone (with the coupon barcode) scanned at checkout.

In addition to using the new mobile coupons, Target customers can view online assortments, check product availability and store locations, access Mobile GiftCards, manage their gift registry, and be notified of deals on their mobile phones.

As smartphone adoption continues to grow at a steady clip, brands should be defining, testing, and rolling out mobile programs that work to add value to the overall customer experience. This program by Target is a great example of using mobile to provide deals and convenience in an easy to grasp way.

I’ve been following two trends that make me very excited to be a Loyalty marketer. Developing high-value, enduring relationships with loyal customers/guests/shoppers/members isn’t new. But what were starting to see on forefront of smart marketing is simply awesome.

Trend One – Farm Cash for Fans.

I used to work at a company called MyPoints. It’s an amazing marketing engine that could change the behavior of hundreds of thousands of members by offering points in exchange for purchases, registrations, surveys, etc. Problem was, points are expensive. Basically it costs about ten dollars to reward a member with a ten dollar Starbucks card. And we mailed a lot of Starbucks (and Target, and Red Lobster and Macy’s and Amazon, etc. ) cards.

Last week players of Zynga’s amazingly popular game Farmville were offered Farm Cash for fanning Bing. Twenty Four hours later, 400,000 virtual farmers had taken the bait and signed on. In a flash, Bing surpassed Google in the hyper-followed ranking of “how many fans do you have on Facebook” stat.

And guess how much Farm Cash costs Zynga? A lot less than a $10 Starbucks card I’d guess.

Trend Two – Check In and Earn Points.

I’ve been watching for this one for some time. The very cool fro-yo shop Tasti D-Lite is now offering loyalty points when its members check in on Foursquare. Cool on so many levels: drives engagement, posts to Facebook – and more interestingly begins the process of geo-based permissioning for offers.

I strongly believe that location is the next frontier for right offer at the right time to the right person. However, geo-based targeting really does bump up against the marketing creepy factor. Loyalty programs bridge that gap by establishing a fundamental permission level for members and rewarding that additional permission with some type of gift or reward.

More to come on this one and we’ll make sure that we’re driving what happens next.