Entries Tagged 'Social Media' ↓

I have been part of the social media generation – professionally and personally – for a number of years, but last week was the first time I found myself social networking in the midst of a potential crisis situation – the Hawaiian Islands Tsunami Warning while vacationing in Maui.

Being jarred out of bed at 6 a.m. on a Saturday during vacation by the sound of emergency sirens blaring across the island is not something I will soon forget. The Tsunami Warning announcement slipped under our door from the Maui Westin Resort staff didn’t offer much comfort and advice either, especially given the hotel wasn’t even built the last time a major tsunami hit this island in 1960. To make matters even more concerning, our oceanfront room was roughly 1,000 feet from the pristine West Maui beach.

This was not the way I envisioned spending our last day of vacation.

The warning estimated the tsunami would strike Maui at 11:40 a.m., three hours before our scheduled flight back to Boston, a city where people would have trouble pronouncing the word tsunami let alone survive one. I wasn’t sure what to do at first, but I immediately flipped open my laptop and started searching for Hawaiian emergency sites before I even turned on the TV to see what local newscasters and CNN were reporting.

Working for a social media listening company over the years has taught me that the fastest way to find out the latest is from the wisdom and information-sharing of the online crowd. As Google loaded sites onto my laptop, I grabbed my Blackberry and headed for the hotel lobby to see what the in-person crowd had to say.

Maybe it was my previous background as a reporter for United Press International that kicked in, where you always put out snippets of breaking news as they occurred, but by the time the elevator reached the ground floor I posted my first update on Twitter.

The lobby was filling up fast with other information-seeking tourists and it was easy to see the hotel staff was ill-prepared for an event of this magnitude. Nervous-looking staff at the registration desk were telling people that the coastal highway leading inland and to the airport was closed by emergency officials at 7 a.m., something I found out later from people online was untrue. I thought it was pretty ironic that Maui was shutting down what they had designated to be one of the island’s main evacuation routes. Any thought about fleeing to higher ground or getting to the airport was now a moot point.

When the hotel broadcast an emergency announcement that all guests would be moved above the 4^th story of each tower in preparation for the first wave, I really got to thinking this could be the real deal. We’ve all seen the video of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.

So while some people started heading to a nearby convenience store to stock up on supplies, I returned to my hotel room with the idea of riding out whatever the storm might bring and getting as much information as possible from others on Maui and across the other Hawaiian Islands. The first waves were scheduled to hit the Big Island 20 minutes prior to Maui, so finding live Web cams of that area seemed like the place to start, particularly ones on the west side near Keauhou Bay that matched up to our west side location in Lahaina, Maui.

As I sped through finding new sites to track – the Hawaiian Civil Defense, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, and The NY Times Live Twitter feed – local TV newscasters were having trouble reporting anything of substance. In the meantime, Hawaii Governor Linda Lingle looked like she was auditioning for ‘Amateur Hour’, apparently with technical broadcast issues before finally opting for a blurry-image address via Skype.

Over the next two hours leading up to the estimated arrival time of the first wave, I shared everything that seemed relevant from what I heard on-site or from other people in the same situation as us, including updates on road closures, businesses shutting down, planned emergency power outages, and unusual water conditions in other areas of the island. Like any emergency situation, there is always a ton of bad information put out by people, but I found the good far outweighed the bad. I was also surprised that Starwood Hotels, owners of the Maui Weston, did not leverage their Twitter presence at all to broadcast emergency information to guests at their multiple Hawaiian resorts.

When the deadline finally passed, people started to finally lighten up, but it wasn’t until an NOAA official announced that “Hawaii had dodged a bullet” that everyone really started to relax, an announcement shared online roughly 20 minutes before it was carried by CNN.

Within minutes of my first online update, I began to receive dozens of reactions from friends, family and many strangers too, wishing us the best of luck, offering safety tips, and thanks for the updates from the island. It was really comforting to know so many people were listening and cared enough to send a message. I’m hoping that was the first and last time I’ll be part of such an event.

Sometimes instead of talking it pays to step back and listen to what’s going on in your business and industry, especially when you work in the consumer listening space. That’s what I did for awhile and I learned a lot over the past several months by paying close attention to what our clients and other companies are looking to accomplish in social media in the near future.

One of the things that continues to surprise me is how much has changed in the last 12 months in this business and how much more I think it will change over the next 12 or so months. I’m not going to try to predict the future like so many people a lot smarter than me have done since the start of the year. That said, I don’t need to be The Amazing Kreskin to spot some emerging trends that are moving up the ladder in importance as the new year unfolds. Here are a few gaining some real traction in my opinion;

Organizational Design: Without a doubt, one of the most overlooked components of the entire social media business today is the development of a strategic organizational roadmap for brands to implement. One of the biggest corporate takeaways in 2009 was the natural migration of social media listening from one group to multiple groups. While not yet at a full-scale enterprise level, this evolution of more widespread listening will continue this year, and it is already spreading at a pace that strains the capabilities of many listening providers.

Any discussion about social media listening, measurement, and the now white-hot ‘customer engagement’ area without a full blown (global) organizational strategy is pretty much fruitless. This will continue to be a major issue in 2010 because, by and large, many companies haven’t yet recognized they have the need for it.

If I was running an agency or consultancy practice today, this is where I’d be aligning my thinking and resources for the immediate future. There’s been some work in this area by other firms besides ours, but nothing that I’ve seen that would make a Fortune 500 brand stand up and take notice.

Integrated Insights: Social media listening as a standalone data set has a life expectancy of less than 24 months, in my opinion. It may live longer in non-strategic or measurement adverse areas of a company, but it has no long-term lifespan with the real corporate decision-makers, internal brand strategists and research insights leaders.

I’m convinced more than ever that social media will grow in importance within the corporate environment, but just not the way it looks and feels today without a strategic facelift. This type of change will take place in the yet-to-be tapped world of social media data integration with other forms of traditional research and exploratory data mining. The recent Millward Brown, Dynamic Logic and Cymfony partnership is a step in this direction.

When this becomes more commonplace, listening and measurement will really begin to provide brands with a more robust level of actionable business insights and ROI measurement. Companies will demand that and those who don’t provide it will not be around for the long haul. Most people would be shocked how much more you can get from social media when you view it through the prism of other data sources. I expect companies to step up work in this area in 2010.

Brand Activation Analysis: Over the past couple of years it seems like everyone has been enamored with online customer outreach and pushing brands to get out there and address customer problems and issues on the Web. Call it the “Twitter Effect” if you like, but the focus has been more on the need to do something, especially if your competitor is already actively participating in social networks.

For brands already in the second and third generations of their social media strategy, the honeymoon period for brand activation is starting to wear off and fast. The novelty of “participating” is giving way to an increasing demand to understand the impact of this new generation of B-to-C (brand to consumer) communications. Like listening, brand activation is also starting to spread across companies with a real plan. The concept of the single Community Manager is starting to give way to integrated teams activated across different disciplines, such as customer service, marketing, crisis communications, sales, and other departments. It’s not widespread yet but the handwriting is already on the wall.

This new level of corporate engagement is also putting pressure on the development of new models of brand activation metrics and analysis. That may not sound so hard when you have one corporate responder on Twitter, but meaningful outcome analysis gets a lot more difficult when there is a global cross-functional team online. Measuring the impact on the brand gets a lot trickier. Dial-up your local social media listening provider and ask which button in their application will spit out that type of report. Good luck. Again, I have seen some work in this area, luckily some by our own company, but we all have a long way to go in this area.

The calendar has turned the page to another interesting and challenging decade, and as usual, I welcome your feedback, ideas and experiences in these areas.

Mike Spataro
Visible Technologies

Most brands and marketers invest lots of time and energy into customer segmentation programs in order to develop unique offers or programs based on demographics or buying behavior of their customers. I would propose that understanding where your customers and prospects are “hanging out” is an equally important data point if a brand or marketer wants to maximize exposure to existing or target segments. One such group that appears to be ripe with opportunity is boomers and seniors.  Recent data highlights the massive uptick in online time and social networking participation among them.

According to the NielsenWire Online, while people 65 and older still make up less than 10% of the active Internet universe, in the last five years their number has increased by more than 55 percent, from 11.3 million active users in November 2004 to 17.5 million in November 2009. Among people 65+, the increase of women online in the last five years has outpaced the growth of men by 6 percentage points.

Not only are more people 65 and older heading online, but they are also spending more time on the Web. Time spent on the Internet by seniors increased 11% in the last five years, from approximately 52 hours per month in November 2004 to just over 58 hours in 2009.

88.6% of seniors, check personal e-mail as the No. 1 online activity performed in the last 30 days. Viewing or printing online maps and checking the weather online were the second and third most popular online activities.

The No. 1 online destination for people over 65 in November 2009 was Google Search, with 10.3 million unique visitors. Windows Media Player and Facebook were No. 2 and No. 3. Interestingly, Facebook, which came in at No. 3, ranked No. 45 just a year ago among sites visited by senior citizens.

Overall, the number of unique visitors who are 65 or older on social networking and blog sites has increased 53% in the last two years alone. 8.2% of all social network and blog visitors are over 65, just 0.1 percentage points less than the number of teenagers who frequent these sites.

Marketers would be wise to do more than test online marketing programs with seniors as we head in ‘10.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

Forrester Research recently noted in one of their latest reports that four in five US adults online are participating in social media once a month. With this continued consumer adoption and year over year acceleration — many marketers, PR, and customer services groups at brands are attempting to transform their customer interaction tactics with customers and prospects. But what does this rush to be social really mean for brands? And are they pushing forward without having a clear line of sight about what levels of effort are required or what success metrics should be put in place? A recently published study reveals some interesting insights why social media is being adopted and the gaps between adoption and measurement.

The August 2009 survey by Mzinga and Babson Executive Education found that 86% of respondents from a variety of industries had adopted social technologies. Most said they were using the tools for marketing (57%), followed by internal collaboration (39%). Almost three in 10 respondents reported using social technologies for customer service and support.

Some addition data was reveal about headcount, support and funding - such as that it was more common that employees, either full- or part-time, were being devoted to working on social media initiatives (57% of respondents) than it was to commit budget dollars for social media (40%). Not sure if that second percentage mention was about tools or programs, but must social applications are being integrated within Websites or another site. While standalone community sites and third-party widgets were popular among 40% and 39% of professionals, respectively.

And despite widespread adoption and investment in social media, measurement of this investment and activity still lags. A scant 16% of those polled said they currently measured ROI for their social media programs. Now that is astounding in my opinion!! Additionally, more than four in 10 respondents did not even know whether the social tools they were using had ROI measurement capabilities.

Measuring the success of social media marketing can be a challenge, but using a variety of hard and soft ROI metrics can absolutely be accomplished. I would offer that volumes of conversation over competitors, sentiment (the good, the bad, the neutral), the level of reach and influence of those who are interacting with your brand, the amount of community involvement (answers or “love” your brand ambassadors give), call deflection, downloads, registrations, donations, etc are but some of the measures that can be used to construct a dashboard of success.

Before launching social programs beyond an experimentation phases it’s necessary to actually work backwards from what the end outcomes could or should be to ensure programs and consumer engagement tactics are aligned with tangible measures. Also, it is critical to ensure that brands put in place the time, resources and potential technology investments to scale the programs. Jumping in is not a easy as sustaining and scaling which must be done based on success and results which require measurement.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

Came across some interesting new data from the e-tailing group in their first annual Community and Social Media Study. The report highlights that five out of ten social media tools have been adopted by more than 50% percent of brands and retailers, with Facebook Fan Pages leading the way at 86%.

Additionally, the study found three-fourths of the survey respondents feel brands have accelerated their use of, and commitment to, community and social media in the past six months.

The study found that the penetration of social media tools within brand and retailer organizations is extremely high, given the length of time these tools have been around:

The top three concerns of marketers and merchandisers related to social media:

• Brand degradation fear - “people can trash my products in front of large audiences”?
• Competence fear - “I am using outdated marketing/merchandising techniques”?
• Competitive fear - “customer’s inclination to leave their site to find a more socially-engaging site”

These motivators, which drove the last wave of social media adoption, will also be driving the next wave in the coming year, says the study. Over the next 12 months, study respondents say they plan to adopt:

• Facebook Connect (31%)
• Social Listening Tools (31%)
• Customer Reviews (26%)
• Product Suggestions (26%)

The study also found the primary goal for adopting social media was:

• Customer engagement (39%)
• Mobilizing advocates to drive “word of mouth” (30%)
• Increasing brand loyalty (21%)

Lauren Freedman, President of the e-Tailing group, says “The integration of community and social networking within e-commerce has reached critical mass… failing to engage consumers via community and social media will have brand and bottom-line implications… “

Regarding advocacy and word of mouth (the #2 goal of using social media tools), the study found that Facebook is considered by brands and merchants to be the “single most effective tactic in mobilizing brand advocates and influencers to spread the word about products/services.”

However, when it comes to driving sales and customer engagement, customer reviews came out on top by a wide margin, with 78% of those polled listing customer reviews as the #1 social media tool for generating sales and 61% listing customer reviews #1 in driving customer engagement.

Some very interesting data and much of it is inline with what we are seeing with our clients and prospects as well.

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies