Social Media

Yury Lifshits and Yahoo Labs have recently released their Facebook Like Log Study and it is well worth a look into what news stories consumers engage with.

The study is an analysis of how Facebook users interacted with 100,000+ articles across some of the leading online media outposts.

Understanding content popularity; more specifically what content motivates your consumers to engage with, is an essential part of content strategy.  This study helps to illustrate the importance of demand analytics, as well as social media optimization.

Key take outs from the study are: placing more marketing effort behind the most popular stories.  Analysing and using specific words/phrases for your content e.g. news/blog posts.

There is nothing revolutionary in the study in terms of recommendations, but it is very interesting to see what methodology has been applied to the data to produce this study.

My favourite take out is “for every 1000 visits to a news story, there are 5 to 20 likes and tweets.  Next time you want to guess pageviews of your competitors, multiply their like counts by 100.”

Tagged as: demand analytics, social engagement, social media optimization, yahoo labs

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It is very apt, that whilst I’m typing this blog post, I am sat here with laptop humming, iPhone buzzing and television playing all at the same time.  Although my girlfriend may not think I can multitask, I’m doing a damn fine job at it!  I digress…

Harvard Business Review have recently featured a slide deck on media consumption, with the focus on Internet audiences and multitasking with multiple screens. ‘How Internet Junkies Will Save Television‘ is an easy read with some interesting stats on the behaviour of television viewers, and definitely worth giving some thought on how best media touchpoints link together (convergence culture) using social media as the glue..?

Tagged as: harvard business review, internet, multitasking, smartphone, television

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I would like to throw a little mobile marketing into the social media mix this month. After all, simple Darwinism applied to business thinking has proven how important it is to strive to keep ahead of the curve.

We should not ignore the impact that smartphones and social media are having on our lives. I for one probably use my smartphone more for web browsing, social networking, blogging and email beyond the workplace than I use my laptop.

Yes, this could well be early-adopter territory I’m speaking about but realistically I’m just one of 650 million people globally – according to eMarketer in March 2010 – who are now using their smartphones more and more for tasks such as email and social networking. This number is set to rocket due to the penetration of affordable smartphones within the market. Research from Comscore in December 2009 supports this theory – it found that 70 per cent of smartphone users have accessed email and 43 per cent have accessed social networks via their devices.

What is interesting is that email usage is up due to the social network usage on these devices. Research from ExactTarget has also discovered that social media and social networking have helped increase the use of email. The reason for this increase is that users of smartphones still want to keep in touch with their social network when ‘untethered’ and social networking sites use email and messaging as a way to encourage users to return.

Why convergence is key
It is not only important that we understand how new technologies affect our customers. At the same time we need to understand how they can be used to open up communication channels with them. This helps us to build stronger relationships, to attract new customers and to retain exisiting ones too.

Furthermore these technologies can complement one another, as the value of social media, mobile and indeed email combined can amount to a more successful campaign than when they are all executed individually, in silos. Here are a few key steps to take in order to optimise the success of integrated digital campaigns which include both mobile and social elements:

1. Make content mobile-accessible
First of all we should ensure that any digital content produced is accessible by all mainstream mobile devices. Many business decisions are made away from the office and as a result business persons use smartphone devices such as BlackBerrys, iPhones and Android phones to access information.

2. Optimise your e-newsletters
It is also advisable to add in the functionality to share content through LinkedIn groups, Twitter and your community sites, wherever possible. If customers receive emails via smartphone devices they can immediately carry out an action to share your content with their own social network, thereby helping to increase word-of-mouth marketing. They can also be taken directly to your forum or group where they can comment instantly on a particular topic or seek peer reviews and support.

3. Encourage interactivity at events
At events, look to offer SMS short codes inviting prospects to text for more information on a product or service, or even quick response (QR) codes. An example would be to offer a prospect the option to text to receive the latest video of a product demonstration. When the prospect texts it then automatically prompts them to enter an email address to receive digital content, thus building data within your CRM. This digital content again should be optimised to be shared immediately amongst social networks.

4. Consider an app
Banks now offer smartphone applications to manage business account information. Why not look into developing a mobile application for your customers so that they can manage their own accounts and orders? Furthermore you can look to run offers, promotional or discount codes for products and services through this application to your loyal customers.

Staying up-to-date
Beyond the above-outlined campaign activities I have stumbled across a tool called Gist: (www.gist.com). This is an application which helps manage your inbox and social network accounts to give you the latest information about business contacts and their social interactions. This is available as a mobile application, so it is useful from a B2B sales perspective as before a meeting you can be instantly alerted to a prospect’s lifestream, which can help you to stay up-to-date, keep your interactions relevant, and build deeper relationships.

In the various ways outlined above, marketers can develop their knowledge of the use of smartphones, social networks and emails. By combining this with a greater understanding of how we can apply these tools and technologies to our businesses, hopefully we can all aim to develop more successful, integrated and profitable business processes and digital campaigns.

Tagged as: emarketer, gist, mobile marketing, smart phones, Social Media

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Jeremiah Owyang, a leading voice within social media and digital marketing, predicted that 2010 would be the year that social media needs to prove itself. Well, here we are in 2010 and now is the time we start to look at whether or not our investment into social media activities has actually proved fruitful.

Some marketers may claim that measuring the effectiveness of social media marketing is difficult, and in all honesty it is, but it is possible and should be done. Marketers who claim it is impossible are more than likely those who do not look at effectively measuring the impact of any or all marketing activity. Typically those businesses who are already measuring the success of social media are those focused on putting in place metrics for activities such as enewsletters, CRM, collateral, sponsorship, advertising and have a strong understanding of return on investment.

ROI of social media
We can easily measure website visitors driven directly from social media channels such as blogs and YouTube videos by using metrics software such as Google Analytics. The growth over time for number of Twitter followers can be measured by tools such as Twitter Counter and Twitter Anaylser. Facebook Insights and Nielson’s BrandLift provides us with similar data. If the previous tools mentioned are already being employed to measure social media activity, then this is great. If not, you should look to introduce social media measurement to your team’s weekly or monthly processes.
But, the aforementioned are all non-financial impacts on a business. This is why C-level executives find it difficult to truly understand the value of PR, advertising and social media activity.

Oliver Blanchard, a business strategist, has looked in depth at the ROI of social media, supporting the theory that social media needs to be measured in direct relation to the resource allocation. For all the investment into blogs, communities, Facebook and Twitter it makes sound business sense that a company should see the direct impact these activities are having on the P&L. After all, being able to quantify the success of a campaign or activity in relation to beefing up the bottom line ensures that you are re-allocated budgets to carry out the activity in order to sustain and grow market share.

So, how can we show that our social media marketing activity is actually delivering direct value to the bottom line? Well, we start with the above process of measuring the activity using tools and processes but we also compare this activity to other business data.

What we should be looking to do is plot social media activity against sales revenue, transactions, new customers, loyalty data and market research. By comparing and contrasting both sets of data, we will be able to see a correlation between whether or not marketing activity that includes social media has actually helped increased sales before and after social media activity was introduced. If the correlation is positive, and sales activity has increased during the time that social media activity was introduced, then we can ascertain that certain social media activity has had a positive effect.

Tools such as BrandWatch and Radian6 can also be used to visualise the volume of conversation around your product and service and then you can overlay sales data over the same timeline to see whether or not social media conversation for example correlates with an increase in sales.

Deep data diving - This type of activity is incredibly effective as we are able to ‘deep dive’ into the data to understand particular conversations and the sentiment around your business and service at a particular time such as positive and negative sales spikes.

For marketers it is a case of applying a little more depth to your measurement. For example, measuring the conversations you have had on LinkedIn that culminated in forming a relationship with a prospective customer to that prospect actually becoming a customer and what additional value that has added to your bottom line.

Measuring the Twitter conversations that you have entered into that may have resulted in a new client relationship and sale. Measure the investment of time on Twitter to win that client in comparison to time spent at a networking event. Yes the measurement is more complex but it is quantifiable none the less.

Tagged as: brandwatch, jeremiah owyang, Nielsen, oliver blanchard, Radian6

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