Entries Tagged 'Social Networks' ↓

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

I recently had a chance to sit down and spend sometime with Todd Friesen and hear his latest thoughts on Social Media. Naturally, the conversation turned to Twitter fairly quickly. Todd is very active on Twitter and offers us some perspective on micro-blogging and its impacts on brands, search and SEO. Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts Todd. It’s always great to catch up. Looking forward to seeing you at the next SMC Seattle event.

Cheers,

Blake Cahill
Visible Technologies

An amazing panel today by Kate Niederhoffer of Dachis Corp. and Marc Smith of Telligent about going beyond buzz measurement. To get beyond Buzz Measurement one needs to understand the social and psychographic dimensions, sentiment, influence, engagement and meanings of social conversations. However, many of these are superficial. It’s time to move beyond the buzz machine and “blackboxing”. It all needs more science.

First, understanding the social network theory is important - social structure emerges from the aggregate relationship (ties) among members”. Second, the Context of the Conversation involves relevance (signal), mindset (person), role (persona), and ecosystem (environment). Ways to measure “signal” are to look at term and network maps around topics, time and look for unique patterns but also look at the data from multiple lens. Glad Visible provides those type of maps for our customers to measure signal and relevance.

Second, measuring Mindset through linguistics like: demographics, emotion, cognitive style and personality also provide many clues and insight into a consumer passion on the social web. More pronouns and more verbs equally more passion especially in reviews. Pay attention to use of “we” and “I” in conversations.

Third, Marc from Telligent is now talking about the “meso” layer. What is the role of persona and ecosystem. Using ecosystems or “Egonets” to determine density of conversations to understand the core connections. There are people like Answer people and Reply magnets. Depending on what you are trying to attract then for your marketing initiative this can be a measure of success of failure if you do or don’t attract the right type of folks to your initiative. Some categories of “persona” are spammer, flame thrower, warrior. Use these to understand who is in your graph and do you have the right mix.

Fourth, looking for ties that bind or blind. Using ecosystems and analysis to best use your lens or variety of lens to determine ROI. “Social media spaces vary and roles are present”. Social media is about collective action. Measuring conversations is about measuring the context in which those conversations arise. Value is and intermediate step in calculating ROI. Moot to bypass it. Techniques from social science help capture “the immeasurable” in social media and the enterprise. The future of conversations - the enterprise being one - is about cultivating the conversations.

Excellent presentation and delivery!

Blake Cahill

Visible Technologies

In a new report from Forrester Research analyst, Jeremiah Owyang, entitled “Social Media Playtime is Over” new data supports what many social media providers and evangelists have discussing for sometime. The findings from a recent study show that 53% of marketers plan to increase spending in social media while 42% will remain the same this despite the current economic malaise.

To quote Jeremiah’s report “The recession has put more pressure on interactive marketers to deliver measurable results. While many marketing budgets are being cinched, more than 50% of interactive marketers say they will increase their spending on social marketing. Why? These inexpensive tools can quickly get marketing messages out through interactive discussion and rapid word of mouth and, properly managed, can deliver measurable results. But in this downturn, interactive marketers must move beyond experimentation by making social applications a permanent part of marketing, measuring and demonstrating their value, and integrating them into marketing efforts.”

The main highlights of the report include:

• Many marketers are already using social technologies for marketing, almost all of interactive marketers surveyed are currently using some form of social media and most plan increases despite the recession, starting with investments in social networks, blogs, and user-generated content.
• While social application spending remains small, Fifty-three percent of interactive marketers using social media expect that their budgets for social media marketing will increase as a response to the recession.
• Despite this shift toward social, these budgets remain minute compared with larger expenditures like advertising. Interactive marketers at large companies are still only spending a fraction of their resources on social marketing.
• Social applications aren’t a formalized line item in marketing budgets. Social marketing isn’t yet a formalized line item in the marketing budget, as most social application budgets aren’t predetermined.
• Forrester data suggests that marketers intend to invest more in social media but need to justify larger budgets.
• Marketers shouldn’t continue to invest in social media as an experiment but rather as a long term strategic program/plan.
• Marketers must demonstrate that social investments are effective and how it moves customers down the marketing funnel by measuring awareness, interactions, and intent to buy.
• Social media applications must prove effectiveness in order to pry budgets away from corporate marketing or advertising. Marketers should invest in a listening platform, then integrate social marketing metrics like share of voice and engagement that can reveal ROI through leads and purchase.

Nice report Jeremiah.

Blake Cahill
Visible Technologies