Growing Demand Blog

This post is part of our "Guest Stars" series here on the Growing Demand blog. In this installment we chat with Shiv Singh, VP & Global Social Media Lead for Razorfish. In addition to leading social strategy for one of the world’s top interactive agencies, Shiv is a recognized thought leader and in-demand presenter on all things social media, and he recently wrote Social Media Marketing for Dummies, published last fall.

Here, Shiv shares with us his unique perspectives on engagement, social marketing measurement and where content and social influence intersect. You can follow Shiv on Twitter at @shivsingh, and his must-read blog is www.goingsocialnow.com.

AW: When talking about social media and its value, one term comes up over and over. Engagement. What does digital engagement mean to you? How do you define it?

SS: Engagement for me refers to meaningful, relationship enhancing, authentic and balanced interactions between consumers and the brand or among consumers themselves with the brand playing a supporting role maybe even just as the “stage” for those interactions. What’s critical about engagement is that it needs to create a sense of memory, association, affinity, value and meaning for it to be successful. I’d like to also suggest that digital engagement is no different than physical world engagement. Something that brands need to always consider is whether the engagement is in alignment with their business objectives too.

AW: You’ve been a champion for social marketing and call the practice within Razorfish Social Influence Marketing. Razorfish has been highly successful in building and implementing SIM strategies/programs for its clients, and Demand Media has been fortunate to be a close collaborator on several of these initiatives and client accounts. In your SIM practice, if you were forced to pick one success metric to live by, what would that metric be?

SS: If asked to pick one metric, I’d pick the SIM Score. This is a metric that we developed for the industry. It is a comparative measure of brand health for a brand versus its competitors. The SIM Score is most valuable when you track it on an ongoing basis and see how your brand performs versus competitors as new campaigns are launched, products released into the market and as conversations erupt and subside. When we launched the metric, we saw it as a measure of brand health in the social web. Arguably, given the pervasive nature of social media, this metric can be considered as a broader brand health metric. Something that marketers should be keeping an eye on as they track the health of their brand. Annual tracking studies or surveys won’t be enough – real time conversations among consumers are driving the brand’s health more and that’s why the SIM Score matters so much today.

AW: From a 30,000 ft view and aside from any one specific metric, how do you know when a SIM program is working?

SS: I think you know a SIM program is working if you are meeting the program objectives. It is as simple as that. There are a lot of things that are very different in social influence marketing but I’d argue that the core fundamentals of business haven’t changed. You launch something, you need to see how it is performing against your objectives and internal metrics. Now the objectives and metrics maybe different for social influence marketing but that doesn’t mean you don’t measure against something.

The other way I know something is working is if customers start talking about the program or participating in it. People show their interest through the conversations they join and the initiatives they “like” and what they tweet. It is getting easier to know if something is working today.

AW: As you know Demand Media is a major content publisher, and much of our focus is on creating relevant, high quality content that fulfills real consumer needs. What do you see as content’s role in the art and science of SIM?

SS: I think content’s role is extremely important. It is easy to forget that social media is a form of content just not editorially produced content.

I believe that conversations and content are blurring. It is getting increasingly hard to separate the two. Content jump starts conversations and even more importantly, content serves as the canvass for social influencing to take place. On the flip side social influencers serve as the frame for people to find content too (you increasingly read what your friends tell you to read). So it is extremely important. It is also worth pointing out that people always have and always will gravitate to good content. When they do, it becomes an imperative for marketers to support the content with SIM programs that help them achieve their marketing objectives without becoming too intrusive.

AW: Razorfish does hundreds of millions in media billings for its clients, much of that placed with traditional and online publishers who are grappling with a range of problems. In your opinion, what one challenge in the publishing industry, if solved, would help Razorfish and its clients the most?

SS: I think it’s important to always consider that the problem that the publishing industry faces is primarily one of monetization. People are not reading less. The reading is just happening elsewhere. In fact, for many titles, magazine subscriptions aren’t falling off a cliff at all but are quite stable. What this means is that publishers are still able to deliver important audiences to marketers and that’s something we like. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we’ve increasingly discovered over the last few years that every impression or every click is not created equal.

You want to find out which consumers are influencing the most others to purchase as well. And then spend more time marketing to them. I think online publishers can help marketers (and agencies like Razorfish who represent them) do a better job of identifying which of the millions of visitors to a digital property are key and social influencers. They are more valuable than the others and as a result, marketers will be willing to pay more for access to them. That’s something that’ll help our clients.

AW: Let’s fast forward to 2015. What are some ways you think we’ll be using social media and SIM, that aren’t common or even possible today?

SS: Good question. I recently presented on this very topic at a conference. I believe we’re moving to a post digital age where separating digital from the offline world will get increasingly harder. Social programs will reflect more real world field marketing and guerrilla marketing programs as what people do online will be a reflection of what they’re doing in their physical worlds. In a sense, the digital space won’t be something separate that people go to and participate there.

Rather, it will be a direct reflection of what’s going on in the physical world in the moment and in the location that the person is and with whatever community he is participating in. I think augmented reality is going to be big but largely because it connects us to the physical world and provides meaningful context. SIM will be filtered through location aware applications that sit in the context of augmented reality. We will also be using technology less and it will be more invisible. But we will definitely be depending on our peers and social influencers for advice more than ever. Just the locations of influence will change. So I don’t think SIM will go away.

AW: In keeping with our enduring tradition of interactivity, this question was posed by our previous Guest Star, Twitter’s Josh Elman: If we had to start the Internet over and could only save 3 websites, what would you keep?

SS: I think I’d keep:

http://www.psfk.com/
http://www.nytimes.com
http://www.drvino.com/

AW: I’m not going to tell you who the next Q&A guest will be. However, I can tell you that he/she is, like you, a respected authority on the Internet and the online media business. What question should I ask this person?

SS: How do we better connect the innovations coming out of Silicon Valley with the purse strings of large corporations? It takes too long for something innovative that helps marketers, entrepreneurs and consumers together to come to market.

Adam Weinroth is VP of Strategic Marketing for Demand Media. Follow Adam at@aweinroth.