News

Sharing on a Pinterest board is a hobby millions of people enjoy. Many marketers, especially national brand marketers, quickly followed the passionate pinners online and began doing what marketers do best.  They did everything possible to encourage people to pin information about their brands.  So far, so good except now the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says some of the activity can seem a little too much like an undisclosed endorsement.  That is a huge blow for organizations running social media contests.

In a March 20 letter to the attorneys for shoe manufacturer Cole Haan, the FTC’s Mary Engle wrote that a contest Cole Haan had sponsored created a situation where “…participants’ pins featuring Cole Haan products were endorsements of the Cole Haan products, and the fact that the pins were incentivized by the opportunity to win a $1000 shopping spree would not reasonably be expected by consumers who saw the pins.”

Engle, the FTCs Associate Director for Advertising, said the agency would not recommend enforcement action because they had not previously addressed whether a contest entry is a form of material connection.  They also had not yet commented on “whether a pin on Pinterest may constitute an endorsement”.  Cole Haan apparently worked with the FTC and adopted a social media policy that would similarly address any similar promotions in the future.

This is important. Read the words again.

The FTC has publicly said that “entry into a contest to receive a significant prize in exchange for endorsing a product through social media constitutes a material connection”.

You already know that people endorsing your brand for an incentive must disclose the relationship. Now the FTC is saying that requiring one of your products to be pinned on a Pinterest board for a contest entry requires that same disclosure. Guidance for other social media contests may be issued, and that is something you should watch for.

Your takeaway as a small business leader is to understand how even innocuous-seeming contest entries in social media channels can create the “material consideration” relationship the FTC warns everyone about.  You should talk with your attorney once and have that person help you create boilerplate you can repurpose later. Not doing so is to create a lot of risk for not much reward.

The link to the FTC’s letter to Cole Haan is in PDF at their site.

Case Studies

Moms Clean Air Force faced a daunting task. The organization wanted to harness the power of mothers throughout the United States to advocate for clean air to local, state and federal governments.

Why mothers?

The group knew that unclean air—whether in homes, schools, or outside—causes disproportionate health hazards to children.

Moms Clean Air Force logoHarnessing a crack editorial and social media team, the organization received funding from the Environmental Defense Fund and many celebrity endorsements.

Digital Director Shaun Dakin knew early on that the group would have to advertise in addition to reaching beyond traditional editorial channels. A skilled marketer in the public-private sector, Dakin also knew that stories were important to connect with audiences, but successful organization leaders rely on metrics, not just anecdotes.

“I asked Silver Beacon Marketing to help us solve advertising on search engines, on Twitter, Facebook and other social media,” said Dakin. “I worked with them in the past and knew that they don’t present fluff or fake numbers. Everything they do is strictly ROI driven.”

Silver Beacon’s passion for return on investment paid off handsomely for Moms Clean Air Force.

“We collaborated on powerful tracking reports immediately,” Dakin said. “Those reports helped the organization decide our priorities. Then Silver Beacon began advertising and found ways to match actions through multiple channels. Using analytics methods that most organizations can’t create for us, Silver Beacon showed us which channels worked for building community and the actual costs of adding a new community member and having that community member convert to our mailing list. The bottom line success metric is moving people from the web to our email list.”

Silver Beacon’s focus on return-on-investment (ROI) gave Moms Clean Air Force the confidence it needed to build a Facebook community that engaged with decision makers and also joined the group’s mailing lists for local and federal activity. The company continued weekly reporting to the leadership team on costs and ROI.

More responsibilities followed. A request to audit the organization’s website found more opportunity for improvement, and Silver Beacon Marketing built a new website for the organization while assuming responsibility for search engine optimization, website analytics and web development.

Successes of the Social Media Case Study, Advanced Search Optimization & Advertising

  • Cost-effective social media and search engine advertising opportunities
  • Search engine optimization of the organization’s website
  • Analytics reporting and analysis to organization leaders
  • Rebuilt and hosted the organization’s website

 

Case Studies

The owner of a content-driven website in a technical industry approached Silver Beacon Marketing with a unique situation.

Our traffic is great, but we know that we can get much, much more. We have people who read our site daily and others who use us to make huge buying decisions.  But there are many more people searching for data, and we don’t know how to reach them.  We have videos, active social media and a terrific reputation.  How do we move from the technical buyers to the tech-savvy buyers?

Analyzing How To Get New Visitors

We had previously worked on this website and knew their writers were among the best in the industry. The content they produced was so good that other websites throughout the world linked to them, the industry’s manufacturers monitored their work and a couple of million people visited each month through search engines.

Although clearly a champion of their industry, this website needed direction in finding a new audience who would appreciate their expertise.

Silver Beacon Marketing’s Solution:  Content Management & Marketing Constructs

Marketing construct example

To reach a tech-savvy audience who would appreciate the content on this site first meant understanding the audience.  That meant their ages, gender, education, likes and dislikes and enough factors to create a series of characters that represented them.  Marketers call these characters “constructs”. Silver Beacon often creates them when helping a client improve their existing audience engagement or to find new audiences.  Constructs are especially important when first creating a website because the text on the website should be written for people in the target audience. That allows a marketer to write about things that will interest the target audience.

As in every part of marketing, art and science blend together when creating constructs.  Some are so elaborate that the marketer creates a two or three page biography!

Writers construct new content that appeals to constructs like the portion of the  Debra construct shown here.  Even analogies and cultural references used when writing have a greater impact because they resonate with the audience.

If your organization had a large segment of Debras in its target audience, you would create products and services that appealed to them to ensure that your website addressed their likes and dislikes.  

With our constructs firmly in place for our client, we researched new content opportunities every week.  The information was gathered using software that analyzes stories appearing on sites like Google News and scores the subject matter and its growth potential.  With this data, we suggested the appropriate topics and keywords while also identifying competitors. We provided our client with this data each week before their editorial calendar was created.  Each article recommendation allowed the author to understand the reader in ways not possible before the technology we use was created.

Content Management Success

We could see new visitors come to the website and stay longer so we all knew the content management program was successful. Google validated our analysis with an email one Thursday evening.

 

Google email about traffic increase

 

 

This is not the first time we have seen emails like this, and if you have never seen one before, you should talk with us about content management and your website’s traffic.