You’ve seen their Cavemen. You’ve seen their Gecko. But have you seen the Geico GloveBox?

Currently available for the iPhone, the Geico GloveBox allows customers to access a multi-functional, extremely useful application. Equipped with a handful of tools, this product is single-handedly transforming smartphone apps for the entire insurance industry. Before going any further, allow me to share just why this application is built to succeed.

Once it’s loaded, individuals have access to a wealth of useful and handy tools. First, is an accident helper that allows someone to quickly contact emergency services. It also gives you a place to organize photos from an accident, to help you prove that it was the other guy’s fault.

Next, it has a “Roadside Service” tool that allows you to find gas stations and tow services if you are ever misfortunate enough to need either one. There’s also a taxi/rental car function that utilizes the phone’s GPS, to help you find other ways to get home. Lastly, the application is equipped with do-it-yourself and how-to videos, covering everything from jump starting a car, to changing a flat tire.

Aside from these excellent services, what makes this app so groundbreaking is just how much stock Geico has invested in a product that doesn’t actively recruit new customers. While there are portions of this app that are dedicated to Geico customers – such as retrieving your insurance ID – no elements of this app are superfluous. Each service has a dedicated need, with a few videos along the way of the Geico Gecko to provide comic relief.

Furthermore, the GloveBox proves that Geico has resisted the current fad to bring something – regardless of usability – to the smartphone market.  You can also tell that this app wasn’t thought up in a back room by devious marketing executives attempting to use all of their allotted spend. Instead, this is a well planned, well thought out application, with the sole purpose of creating a positive brand experience.

It may be tough for Geico to measure the influence of this app on gross sales, but thus is the Catch-22 of social media.  However, if you look at this app through a different lens, it transforms traditional marketing. While you may not remember a whole lot about the next fender bender you’re in, you will remember using the GloveBox app, and the fact that Geico was there to help.

Social media has been one of the leading topics in the marketing industry for a few years now, but people seem to have difficulty defining it and determining how it can be best leveraged for marketing purposes, i.e. doing “social media marketing”. (Note: There is a difference between the phrases “social media marketing” and “social marketing.” Please refer to our previous post “Social Marketing vs. Social Media Marketing” for more information). This is our unique perspective on the social media basics, as a company that has executed hundreds of successful social media campaigns for the past 3 years in nearly every vertical, intended for both the new practitioner and old hats looking to adapt and refine their thinking.

The Basics

Social media is the result of taking what we naturally do as humans – mainly communicating and developing relationships – and combining it with technology and user-generated content. Unlike traditional media, which is one-way, social media allows for a two-way conversation between friends, family, and even companies. This provides companies with the opportunity to really listen to their customers (both existing and potential), gain insights and feedback, and hopefully put the acquired information to good use.

When social media is used correctly and in the right context, it can create community, develop enthusiasts and awareness in a way much faster and more organic than traditional media. It is a valuable addition to a company’s overall marketing mix and strategy. Marketing is changing rapidly and with the influence of social media there is discussion of defining a new version of the 4Ps. How is your company involved in the conversation? How does this new context challenge your current company dogma?

(Some of the) Goals of Social Media

-Create community through two-way communication.

On their own, users can create their own communities based on a particular interest or tribe. Some of these are corporate-free and others are open to companies participating. No matter what, a conversation will occur, with or without you. Your previous views held that all messaging about your brand needed to be controlled rigidly and in line with corporate mandates. Now, the majority of the public’s experience of your brand is out of your direct control. They are talking about you, to each other, publically, and with tools that allow their voice to extend globally and through time. Understanding the magnitude and implications of this new situation is the entire basis for mastering social media marketing. By reaching out to your customers you create a dialogue that can gain trust and can create brand advocates, as well as start the brand messaging in the correct direction.

As mentioned earlier, social media is a form of two-way communication, where users can have a dialogue with other users as well as with companies. Companies need to actually listen and participate, and not just broadcast! This is always given lip service, but rarely put into play correctly. Here’s a test for companies that think they “get it”. Ask yourself “what have I done to make listening and understanding my fans/friends/followers a priority?”. If the answer is “nothing” or something weak, you do not “get it” and need to evolve.

If you’ve already applied a listening strategy, your campaign has the potential to create essentially a global focus group for your company. It is possible to gain instant feedback on products, ideas, ads, and campaigns from the general public or from your most targeted, niche demographic. Use this feedback. Understand where the data is coming from and how much information can be gleaned. After receiving a State of the Brand Report, our clients are frequently dumbfounded that the “facts” they previously “knew” about their company are actually falsehoods and that the current reality requires a different approach.

-Create and provide the opportunity for content that can be shared, responded to and evaluated.

Content posted online can be passed along to friends, commented on and rated on review sites, reworked, mashed-up, or even crowd-sourced. If there is buzz about a topic, it can spread very quickly through viral methods. If content is interesting, unique or even weird, users will want to pass it on.

-Be personalized/customized.

Gen Y (aka Millennials) is the generation who brought customization to the foreground of marketing. Facebook, Twitter and even LinkedIn have ways to personalize accounts, through avatars, applications, images, and content. Unlike traditional forms that are one size fits all, social media allows and embraces variety.

Considerations Companies Must Address

• Is your original content adding value? Is it something users find relevant? In a two-way world, consumers have more control over when and where they see something. Are they going to take time out of their day to see your content? Do they care?

• Are you genuine, authentic and transparent? Social media is much more than press releases posted on a blog, Facebook or Twitter. It involves real people, with real thoughts and interactions. It goes beyond the speaking the company line. Content can still be true to the brand – just don’t be robotic about it. How is this conversation unique to the form of media you are using? As for being authentic, users can see through facades. Your company is evaluated based on if you are true to what you say and do. Be aware that criticism will happen since social media is democratic in nature. Don’t censor it – address it. By participating in social media, a company can’t go off in a corner, stick their fingers in their ears and go “Lalalalala I’m not listening” when someone else says something negative.

• Are you, and will you, continue to be engaging? Possibly one of the biggest challenges is to keep the conversation going. After connecting with a vibrant, excited audience, you can’t just forget about them. It’s like a guy really interested in you for a few dates, then never calls you back. Social media is one way to maintain a relationship with customers and address any problems that may arise in a more timely fashion. So if you are going to start a relationship, you better commit.

Social media is new territory that cannot be approached in the same manner in which companies are used to with traditional media (No, you can’t have 100% control of your messaging. No, you shouldn’t remove comments from detractors. Yes, you should respect and actively engage with both fans and detractors alike to give your message the best chance of succeeding). It is far more interactive and provides less control over the conversation, but one of the greatest benefits is creating and reaching out to brand enthusiasts who will voluntarily become word-of-mouth ambassadors for your company. So what are you waiting for? – join the conversation.

In this photo: an astrobeast

It seems like every month or two a high-profile brand or agency gets caught using some questionable black-hat tactics. Over the summer, Reverb was nailed trying to manipulate the App Store by posting positive reviews with fake accounts. The agency admitted no wrongdoing and went to great lengths to justify their practice as completely innocent. More recently, Sports Illustrated was discovered openly soliciting Digg users in an attempt to force mediocre content to the front page. When word got out, the press—particularly the social media press—were sure to make a moral example of these two naughty companies.

Let’s not be naïve here: Black hat marketing goes on all the time, in every channel that will permit it (think back to what e-mail was like prior to all of the CAN-SPAM regulations before you start thinking that this only affects SEO and social media). The people who get caught are a small fraction of the people who actively do it. And while it would be easy for me to take the cuddly-indignant social media line on black-hat practices and denounce them as crimes against our common humanity, the reality is that you can boil the issue down to 2 points:

• You shouldn’t use black hat techniques because people love exposing it like they love celebrity gossip.
• There’s no reason to do it when you can achieve the same goals just as easily (and sometimes more easily) with honest, transparent techniques anyway.

Let’s look at the Sports Illustrated case: Their social media guy contacts a Digg user who has posted sports content before and asks him to submit SI content in exchange for SI merchandise. Aside from the amusingly corporate tone and the offer of merchandise (which is a pretty weak exchange for what’s essentially access to a Digg power user’s influence and network), what you’ve got here is a simple request for help—the same sort of request that thousands of marketers and PR people send to thousands of industry experts and influencers every day. Take out the memorabilia bribe, and it’s one pitch among a million.

At Pandemic Labs, we’ve known influential members of the Digg community for quite a while now. We certainly understand the marketing value of a front-page story on Digg, of course, and, when they’ve had something worthwhile, we’ve helped some of our clients get some attention on various social news sites by connecting these users with our clients. Our contacts won’t push bad content; they’re rightfully concerned with maintaining their reputations, as was the user Sports Illustrated contacted. Even if they will, we stand to gain nothing from trying to force-feed an online community bad content. It hurts reputations, lowers the quality of information, and drives away users (who are by and large clever enough to identify content that’s been forced through).

To “game” Digg, as Mashable so pejoratively put it, but to do it honestly and transparently, is very simple:

1. Create quality content
2. Connect with a Digg users who likes the kind of content you create
3. Make (actual) friends, as a responsible social media marketer should do
4. Most importantly, don’t do steps 2-3 if you haven’t done step 1

We’ve turned down more requests from clients to help them promote their content on social news sites than we can count, and it’s because we know that when you do what Sports Illustrated did, everyone loses.

Watch your step

Where Sports Illustrated’s failure was simply to misunderstand how social news sites work, Reverb’s astroturfing represents a much more dishonest and calculated game. If we put the ethics aside for a moment, the problem with astroturfing is that to have the influence you want, you need to maintain a huge number of users, complete with believable histories, philosophies, political views, and opinions about a wide variety of subjects. I know it sounds obvious, but go try it and see how quickly you fail and end up falling into the patterns that make your users stand out as fakes: Copy-pasted posts, incomplete profiles, and boring user names.

One of our client’s competitors (no, we won’t be naming any names) has been astroturfing on forums for months. They’re nice enough not refrain from disparaging our client directly, always preferring to say that while our client was great, our client’s competitor was just a little bit better, or more friendly, or a better value.

We discovered the ploy during one of the regular brand audits that we conduct for this client. These audits compile data on online conversation about our client and our client’s competitors. We quickly noticed that there were a significant number of similar forum posts about our client’s competitor, and after 5 minutes of reading we realized that the competitor had simply written a few stock forum posts and then tasked some unfortunate intern with the job of making user accounts and posting the stock language everywhere he or she could.

There’s nothing inherently dishonest with getting on the forum circuit (whether it’s really the most efficient way to spend your marketing dollars is another matter entirely). But as with Digg, you need to have the content. A forum user won’t care who you are if you’ve got something they like.

It’s unfortunate that the astroturfers out there who try to make up for bad content with grunt work have made it much harder for conscientious, content-driven marketers to try to give people what they want. Any misjudgment on a social news site or a forum can severely compromise the reputation of a company or its agency, and every time one of us gets caught it makes us more like the annoying traditional marketers we claim to be different from. But we’ve got not right to complain: as an industry, we brought it on ourselves.