Posts made in January, 2010
Two-thirds of marketers investing DM budget in social media
Companies are increasingly shifting their direct marketing budgets to social media, according to a study released January 21 by marketing services firm Alterian. The survey found that two-thirds (66%) of marketers who took the survey will invest in social media marketing in the next year. In addition, it found that of those investing in social media marketing, 40% will shift more than a fifth of their traditional direct marketing budget toward social channels.
The findings come from Alterian’s seventh annual survey, which interviewed 1,068 marketing professionals worldwide. It found that of the 66% investing in social, 67% felt that social media is either “increasingly important” or “critical to success.”
“This is showing an increasing professionalism in marketing,” said Bob Barker, VP of corporate marketing at Alterian. “We are getting to the phase of ‘yes, we can’ in social marketing. We can listen to customers on social media and engage with them in an interesting way on social media.”
The survey also found that more than a third of respondents (36%) are investing in social media monitoring and analysis tools. “The study shows that all of the digital technologies and the analytics tools are getting more investment,” added Barker. “Data is important and we are seeing marketers paying more attention to it.”
Alterian also found that more than half (51%) of marketers say they are placing a “fair” or “significant” effort on moving from a campaign-centric direct marketing model towards multichannel customer engagement. Only 7% of those marketers surveyed said that they are making no effort to do so at all.
“Social media energizes the whole of marketing because it is one of those key tools that is going to raise the amount information about marketing across the board,” said Barker. “It has an effect on search, on e-mail, and it is all measurable.”
Original article by Dianna Dilworth from DM News
Source: Alterian study
Consumers spend more time on social networks
Web users around the world are spending more time on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, meaning that a growing number of brands are also turning to these platforms.
New figures from The Nielsen Company, the research firm, showed that 142.1 million consumers in the US accessed properties like social networks and blogs in December last year.
This audience spent an average of more than six hours viewing material hosted on these services, a total that had increased by 143% year-on-year.
Some 46.6 million Japanese netizens also logged on to these portals in the closing month of 2009, typically devoting almost three hours to this kind of activity.
More than 31 million Brazilians used offerings such as Orkut in the same period, with a normal “dwell time” of over 4.5 hours, while 29.1 million Britons dedicated six hours to this pastime during the month.
Across the ten countries assessed – which also included Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Switzerland – the overall “time per person” recorded on social networks and blogs rose by 82% in all.
Out of a total sample of 307 million people, Facebook received 206.9 million visitors, with the amount of time that US members remained on its pages improving by 200% on an annual basis.
Twitter posted an uptick of 368% on this measure, and was the fastest-growing social network in the US, with 18.1 million people posting or reading “tweets” in the final month of last year, up from 2.7 million in December 2008.
Coca-Cola, the beverage giant, has recently announced its intention to place a greater emphasis on using social media to connect with consumers.
Sapient Interactive, the digital agency, has now built a variety of widgets – downloadable tools similar to mobile “apps” – to tie in with the Atlanta-based firm’s sponsorship of the forthcoming FIFA World Cup.
Rather than developing a specific campaign website, these widgets will be distributed in a variety of different ways, with Twitter being a key element in encouraging viral circulation.
One of the major benefits of using the microblogging service for this purpose is the ability to instantly track uptake levels among the target audience.
“The real-time aspect is the most interesting,” said Freddie Laker, director of digital strategy at Sapient.
In the UK, Kellogg, the cereal manufacturer, has also stated that it will place social media at the heart of its online communications for the launch of a new brand, called Krave.
It plans to use PR to drive traffic to bespoke pages on Facebook and YouTube, and thus encourage electronic word-of-mouth about the product.
However, Gareth Lucy, assistant communications manager at Kellogg, suggested a nuanced approach will be required in establishing whether this approach should be applied for its portfolio as a whole.
“While Cornflakes and Bran Flakes may not be the best brands to focus on for social media, others, such as Krave and Rice Krispies Squares, are,” he said.
Procter & Gamble, the consumer goods titan, employed a similar method when launching Pringles Extreme in the UK, with Facebook, in particular, playing a central role.
James Nunn, head of P&G’s social media strategy in the UK, said “each campaign needs to be individually assessed before deciding which medium to go on. It’s not a blanket approach but social media does work for some brands.”
More broadly, Procter has outlined its objective of dramatically increasing the size of its customer base in the next five years, and digital media us expected to contribute this process.
Replying to a post on Venture Beat, Tressie Long, of P&G’s external relations team, said its “stated goal is to serve 5 billion people with our brands globally – up from the 4 billion we serve today.”
“We do see digital communication platforms as one of several ways to help achieve our goals.”
Data sourced from Nielsen/Brand Week/NMA/Venture Beat; additional content by Warc staff, 26 January 2010
Read MoreSocial Media and Brand Reputation Strategy
Direct engagement top short-term response.
An oft-cited fear of brands is that online consumers will post negative comments about them, especially on social media where opinions can be broadcast far and wide. In their “Social Media and Online PR Report,” Econsultancy and bigmouthmedia explored ways marketers can combat brand bashing.
Asked what their company had done to minimize negative comments in the past, nearly one-half reported having directly engaged with the consumer. The second-most-common strategy was longer-term in focus: trying to improve products and services.
A few respondents had tried to get offending content removed, but that tactic can backfire and cause further negative remarks against the brand. Econsultancy noted that only 12% of companies tried to create their own content to offset negative consumer opinions in search results, and that more could go this route.
Brand monitoring was an important aspect of Twitter usage as well, among the companies surveyed, though publicizing new content was the top activity. About one-quarter of companies were using the microblogging site for customer service or gathering customer feedback.
Nearly two-thirds (63%) of companies reported responding to tweets, and 34% responded “systematically.”
More than one-fifth of client-side companies told Econsultancy that fear of reputation issues was a factor preventing more effective social media engagement. Almost 30% of agencies said the same of their clients.
“To address this, there needs to be more education around how to deal with negative PR and social media crisis management, as well as best practice on how to engage in the first place,” according to the report. “There is clearly an opportunity here for agencies to better educate their clients.”
Read More100 Ways To Measure Social Media
The topic of Social Media Marketing ROI is hotter than ever. With most brands now mandated to develop a social strategy, marketers are searching for ways to validate, justify and measure their efforts. MediaPost’s David Berkowitz wrote a great list of 100 things they can start with! OK, so you don’t really need to worry about all 100 — but it just goes to show you that there’s a lot Social Marketing can give back in the form of data. All of which is measurable and quantifiable.
If there’s anyone out there left who says you can’t measure social media, here are a hundred answers.
At most of the events I’ve been to lately, measurement continues to be a hot topic. The first question that comes up is, “What can I measure?” That’s where this cheat sheet can come in handy: a list of 100 thought-starters.
Some entries here can be interpreted several ways. Depending on how you define them, some of these metrics may seem redundant, while others may seem so broad that they can be broken out further. Many of these can be combined with each other to create new metrics that can then be tracked over time. It’s a start, though, so dive in and consider which ones may apply to programs you’re working on.
1. Volume of consumer-created buzz for a brand based on number of posts
2. Amount of buzz based on number of impressions
3. Shift in buzz over time
4. Buzz by time of day / daypart
5. Seasonality of buzz
6. Competitive buzz
7. Buzz by category / topic
8. Buzz by social channel (forums, social networks, blogs, Twitter, etc)
9. Buzz by stage in purchase funnel (e.g., researching vs. completing transaction vs. post-purchase)
10. Asset popularity (e.g., if several videos are available to embed, which is used more)
11. Mainstream media mentions
12. Fans
13. Followers
14. Friends
15. Growth rate of fans, followers, and friends
16. Rate of virality / pass-along
17. Change in virality rates over time
18. Second-degree reach (connections to fans, followers, and friends exposed – by people or impressions)
19. Embeds / Installs
20. Downloads
21. Uploads
22. User-initiated views (e.g., for videos)
23. Ratio of embeds or favoriting to views
24. Likes / favorites
25. Comments
26. Ratings
27. Social bookmarks
28. Subscriptions (RSS, podcasts, video series)
29. Pageviews (for blogs, microsites, etc)
30. Effective CPM based on spend per impressions received
31. Change in search engine rankings for the site linked to through social media
32. Change in search engine share of voice for all social sites promoting the brand
33. Increase in searches due to social activity
34. Percentage of buzz containing links
35. Links ranked by influence of publishers
36. Percentage of buzz containing multimedia (images, video, audio)
37. Share of voice on social sites when running earned and paid media in same environment
38. Influence of consumers reached
39. Influence of publishers reached (e.g., blogs)
40. Influence of brands participating in social channels
41. Demographics of target audience engaged with social channels
42. Demographics of audience reached through social media
43. Social media habits/interests of target audience
44. Geography of participating consumers
45. Sentiment by volume of posts
46. Sentiment by volume of impressions
47. Shift in sentiment before, during, and after social marketing programs
48. Languages spoken by participating consumers
49. Time spent with distributed content
50. Time spent on site through social media referrals
51. Method of content discovery (search, pass-along, discovery engines, etc)
52. Clicks
53. Percentage of traffic generated from earned media
54. View-throughs
55. Number of interactions
56. Interaction/engagement rate
57. Frequency of social interactions per consumer
58. Percentage of videos viewed
59. Polls taken / votes received
60. Brand association
61. Purchase consideration
62. Number of user-generated submissions received
63. Exposures of virtual gifts
64. Number of virtual gifts given
65. Relative popularity of content
66. Tags added
67. Attributes of tags (e.g., how well they match the brand’s perception of itself)
68. Registrations from third-party social logins (e.g., Facebook Connect, Twitter OAuth)
69. Registrations by channel (e.g., Web, desktop application, mobile application, SMS, etc)
70. Contest entries
71. Number of chat room participants
72. Wiki contributors
73. Impact of offline marketing/events on social marketing programs or buzz
74. User-generated content created that can be used by the marketer in other channels
75. Customers assisted
76. Savings per customer assisted through direct social media interactions compared to other channels (e.g., call centers, in-store)
77. Savings generated by enabling customers to connect with each other
78. Impact on first contact resolution (FCR) (hat tip to Forrester Research for that one)
79. Customer satisfaction
80. Volume of customer feedback generated
81. Research & development time saved based on feedback from social media
82. Suggestions implemented from social feedback
83. Costs saved from not spending on traditional research
84. Impact on online sales
85. Impact on offline sales
86. Discount redemption rate
87. Impact on other offline behavior (e.g., TV tune-in)
88. Leads generated
89. Products sampled
90. Visits to store locator pages
91. Conversion change due to user ratings, reviews
92. Rate of customer/visitor retention
93. Impact on customer lifetime value
94. Customer acquisition / retention costs through social media
95. Change in market share
96. Earned media’s impact on results from paid media
97. Responses to socially posted events
98. Attendance generated at in-person events
99. Employees reached (for internal programs)
100. Job applications received
Read MoreHarnessing Active Brand Advocates to spur offline word-of-mouth
With brands turning more to earned media—the additional free exposure that a brand gets when consumers talk about a brand—they depend on motivated consumers to act as advocates. A survey conducted by Synovate for word-of-mouth ad network PostRelease investigated just how likely Internet users are to do that.
The most common word-of-mouth activity reported by respondents was helping a friend or family member with a purchase decision, but more than two-fifths also said they had shared advice offline about information they learned on the Web. Significantly fewer Internet users posted their own ratings and reviews online, and only about one-half as many shared links to articles or reviews about products.
Participation in most of the social media and word-of-mouth activities was highest among younger adults, almost one-half of whom gave in-person advice based on online information. Respondents ages 18 to 24 were also more likely than older Web users to post ratings and reviews, share links, and have a blog.
PostRelease also broke down respondents according to whether or not they participate in online forums, which about one-fifth of those polled did. Forum participants were significantly more likely to take part in all the activities queried. Notably:
- 65% of forum contributors give advice offline based on information found online, compared with 35% of noncontributors.
- 66% of forum contributors post online ratings and reviews, compared with 16.8% of noncontributors.
- 43.6% of forum contributors share links to articles and reviews, versus 12% of noncontributors.
- 20.6% of forum contributors publish a blog, compared with 2.1% of noncontributors.
Users of forums, who are already actively engaged in online social activity, make for “enthusiastic consumers and influential brand advocates,” according to a statement by Justin Choi, president and founder of PostRelease.
Read MoreAbout Me
Proud father, devoted husband, Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Big Fuel, a full-service marketing and communications company based in New York that takes brands from Content To Commerce.
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