Social media channels such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook are humming with commentary about companies, products, and services. How to respond to and tap into the “wisdom of crowds” is one of the most fluid and often-discussed issues in the retail and other industries today.
Kids Domain?
This is no longer the kids’ domain, as every generation is participating in the creation and consumption of content over the web. People in their 20s to 40s tend to produce more content, such as blogs and videos, while those in their 40s to 60s spend a proportionally larger amount of their time consuming content produced by others.56 Roughly 67% of global Internet users visit social networks, making them more popular than personal e-mail.57 Worldwide, Facebook membership alone has climbed above 400 million.58
How Much Activity?
All of this activity is producing massive amounts of data. More than 1.5 trillion text messages were reported on carriers’ networks during 009.59 Every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube.60 Every month, 25 billion pieces of content are uploaded to Facebook.61 And there’s no letup in sight.
The volume of data generated by social media represents a massive opportunity for consumer businesses—as long as they can figure out how to discern useful patterns in the noise and minethis sea of sentiment and ideas. Indeed, never before have businesses had instant visibility into consumer opinions and needs.It used to take weeks, if not months, to gather consumer data through formal channels, meaning the information was outdated long before decisions were made. Today, companies can take their customers’ virtual pulse in real time, one on one.
Any Risk Involved?
However, the risk associated with billions of mobilized and communicative consumers is as outsized as the opportunity. Intellectual property can leak around the globe in seconds, as can news of previously veiled corporate actions. Complaints—for instance, about a supplier allegedly using environmentally destructive practices or showing poor taste in an advertisement—can spawn thousands of commentaries within hours.
Clearly, companies need a well-honed strategy for participating in social media, and that strategy must include a way to measure ROI. Best Buy, Hershey, Sunny Delight, and others are actively working on such strategies while also engaging with their consumers in the here and now. They realize that sitting on the sidelines too long while developing plans could pose a far larger risk than the occasional messaging fumble.
Being Out There
After all, companies have to be “out there” to communicate their point of view. As Hershey CFO Bert Alfonso says, “Many consumers are now using digital media to get their information. You need a way to tell your story. And if you are going to tell your story in a world of blogs and streaming video, you better be able to communicate digitally.”
Furthermore, social media is evolving at breakneck speed. “It’s going to be radically different five years from now than it is today,
which is radically different from what it was five years ago,” says Steve Neil of Diamond Foods. Companies that learn how to reach consumers efficiently and cost-effectively are, at the same time, building entry barriers to competitors.
The experiences of leading consumer firms to date suggest several themes that are useful to executives trying to find the right approach, and the right level of investment, for their own companies.
Twitter is considering offering a product where users would pay to have their accounts promoted on the website, All Things Digital reported recently. How it would work and whether the users would pay per added follower or a base rate is unclear. Studies have been conducted by Sysomos. The firm recently looked at the authority rankings of five celebrities, five social media heavyweights and five media organizations – and focused on the kind of Twitter users who follow these people. It determined while celebrities have a large number of followers, most of them are low authority users. View More here >.
Mom and Motherhood Market
The motherhood market is both graying and greening, according to a new report from Experian Marketing Services, and the changes are fairly sweeping. Do you sell to this market? If so this story is worth a read.
Facebook claims (Facebook Market Research, Q4 2009) to reach 65 percent of all moms online in the U.S., and to have 17 million mom users who have kids at home. They tell us that 94 percent of moms use Facebook at least once a week, and 53 percent of Facebook moms have children under the age of 5. How does Facebook stack up in the Mom market?
Social Circles in Real Life
I saw this great slide presentation a 216-slides-with-footnotes presentation posted on SlideShare, Google UX researcher Paul Adams. He covered quite a few points from social circles, how we interact with people online and offline, ties of relationship. I enjoyed it and we talk mainly about that presentation. View the slides and check out the podcast here.
While there are any number of small business success stories on Facebook and Twitter, there is also a sizeable – if not silent – contingency of firms that find it has been overhyped. More here >
A majority of technology experts and members of the general public believe cloud computing will mostly replace desktop computing by 2020, according to [pdf] the recent “Future of the Internet” study from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center. Check out the overview here.
No one wants to think they’re being watched by Big Brother, and that is exactly how many consumers see behaviorally targeted advertising. According to a recent Zogy poll more than 80% of US consumers believe behaviorally targeting ads is ‘an unfair business practice’. Read the overview of this poll here.
FOR many marketers, advertising in stores is an increasingly important way to influence shoppers at the so-called moment of truth, as they finally make up their minds about which brands of soup, soap or cereal to buy — or not buy. Now, a company is hoping to bring commercials to the retail point of purchase on screens that will be attached to shelves and above aisles. View overview here.
Social Networks/Blogs Now Account for One in Every Four and a Half Minutes Online. The popularity of social media is undeniable – three of the world’s most popular brands online are social-media related (Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia) and the world now spends over 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites. view roundup of study from NielsenWire.
A study by lead generation solutions provider LeadForce1 examined the behavior of visitors to B2B Websites who had been directed to the sites from social media, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Wikipedia. Visitors from the top social sites were generally uninterested in product or contact pages, suggesting they were not in the market for the company’s products or services. View the outline of where b2b traffic goes.
Did you notice the competition going on between Bing and Google? The game is still on and after Google announced its new Caffeine search index, it is Bing’s turn to tout the future release of its enhanced ‘Bing Webmaster Tools’ this summer. Check out the full story here >
Where do Americans begin their online day? According to a study released today by ExactTarget, 58 percent check their e-mail, while 20 percent go first to a search engine or portal site and 11 percent start with Facebook. A conscientious (or worried) 3 percent make their company’s site or intranet their first online destination of the day. Five percent go first to a news site and 3 percent go to some other destination. View the overview from Adweek here or view another overview here.
Apple dropped the equivalent of a nuclear bomb on Google this week with its revision of its developer policies. Now, only “independent” ad-serving companies will be able to serve ads for the iPhone. That rules out AdMob, now owned by Google. The changes also appear to target third-party app usage analytics firms. Flurry, in particular, has been singled out for criticism by Jobs. Such applications are also banned from the iPhone. Read more here >
You’ve heard of Smart Cars. Believe us, they get smarter. No, we’re not talking about Kit, the wryly soft-spoken roadster from the ’80s TV show Knight Rider. Fully sentient robots like Kit are still a ways off, but computer programmers are starting to make serious progress in the horrendously complex art of artificial intelligence. View the story on Forbes.com
On Monday (June 28) the news site will roll out a sweeping redesign that encapsulates what publisher and general manager Charlie Tillinghast called “a major rethinking of what a news site is.” At the heart of that redesign is a philosophy that Web pages needn’t be text centric, and that Web ads should be large and not relegated to the periphery. “We don’t start with the premise that this is a newspaper online,” said Tillinghast. “In the past we’ve bolted on video and photos and commentary to text pages. Now all of those elements are equal.”View story.
Several studies, including ones from MarketingSherpa and Razorfish, have indicated that finding deals is the main reason consumers follow brands on microblogging sites. But US moms—normally considered big fans of coupons and money-saving tips—told lucid marketing that content was No. 1. View story and study.
Fully 100% of college students in the US have a mobile phone, and they use them constantly to communicate and connect. As such, mobile marketing becomes more difficult among this group because they see the devices as so personal. View mobile marketing overview.
We also put together the top 10 Facebook Questions:
What is the best way to drive interactions on your Facebook page?
Facebook etiquette: how often should we be replying to fans?
Does using images prove to be more effective than just words on Facebook pages?
How often should you post your website content on your Facebook page?
Is there any value to creating and using Facebook groups?
What examples of company Facebook pages do you consider to be effective?
Are B2B companies more difficult to promote?
How can Facebook ads be used in a campaign? What makes them effective?
What do you think about sending people to Facebook instead of sending them to your site?
Should a brand’s Facebook presence be a communal thing or an individual effort?
We’ve released quite a few articles here over the last couple of weeks. Instead of doing just the basic fair of how to set up a network, how to set up your account, or general tips we go into detail. We also provide some advance strategies for Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. Here is the round up:
This article is about advanced Twitter Marketing strategies. We’ve found that there is tons and tons of information on how to set up Twitter, search Twitter, Twitter tools and API’s, and generalized Twitter knowledge. Instead of just creating another one of those we want to give you an deep insight into how marketers can truly see results using this channel.
If there is one thing I could make sure that you take away from this article it is this… people login or visit Facebook to connect with friends and family. They go there to have fun. They do not go there with the intent to purchase something. Typically if someone buys a product, downloads a special offer or coupon, or enters a sales funnel this is an afterthought of the session or experience.
To capture attention today you have to think more like a media company–producing content, valuable content that resonates with your target audience. In this article we give you some pointers on doing just that.
The web and the rise of social media have created an opportunity for companies and brands to connect with their target market in ever more imaginable ways. One highly effective method is to focus on the influencer. In this article we discuss elements of what makes and influencer and how you can create a strategy to identify, interact, and court these individuals or groups.
Creating a successful blog strategy will give you a direct line to your customers, prospects and target market. In this article we talk a little about why and how to create a blog strategy.
A recent study from Forester found that emotional and engagement is the key to gaining and keeping customers. Now has any well versed marketer will tell you this is marketing 101 but once you dive a little bit deeper into the report it reveals some interesting findings.
First it the report concluded that companies are investing 58% more in web design than last year, and 37% of these companies are investing in behavioral analytics. One shocking number is that 90% of companies fail when it comes to site experience.
The internet exists mainly because we are social animals. Social media is just the latest form of groups of people sitting around the campfire.
One such example of this comes from Groupon a group buying service who attributes much of its success and growth to the ability for users to easily share the daily deal with their social circle.
We see this happen often when we login into Facebook. Someone sharing the latest GroupOn or LivingSocial deal and enticing their friends to join them in purchasing. You could argue that GroupOn wouldn’t even have had a chance if it wasn’t for the popularity of social media.
There have been other attempts of similar services in the past but those have not grown as fast or as big. We’ve watched the rise of GroupOn and would argue the main reason for this is the usage of social networks.
When developing a social network what are the key elements you want in place?
People are getting sick of registering and declaring their friends on each and every site. Lost passwords, multiple logins, and entering the same information over and over is one of the reasons why new networks fail to grow to their full potential.
Facebook Connect is Facebook’s latest addition to its development platform. It enables developers to leverage the power of Facebook’s social context in existing, third-party Web sites. The platform features seamless, one-click authentication, Facebook friend account linking, distribution back into Facebook streams, and the full power of the Facebook REST-like API and FQL. Utilizing Facebook Connect for authentication has proven to dramatically increase site exposure and new user registrations.
OpenID
You may choose to associate information with your OpenID that can be shared with the websites you visit, such as a name or email address. With OpenID, you control how much of that information is shared with the websites you visit.
OpenID is rapidly gaining adoption on the web, with over one billion OpenID enabled user accounts and over 50,000 websites accepting OpenID for logins. Several large organizations either issue or accept OpenIDs, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Microsoft, AOL, MySpace, Sears, Universal Music Group, France Telecom, Novell, Sun, Telecom Italia, and many more.
ALLOW EASY OF SHARING CONTENT
One key element you want to design within a social network is the ability for content to be shared with other social platforms. A great example of this is a recent change by YouTube. You’ll notice that when you watch a video from YouTube you get these options:
That is just the beginning, to learn more about what elements your custom social network should include visit this page to download our special report on How To Build Social Media into Your Social Networking Website.
Integrating Social media in Ecommerce Report (PDF)
Social media undoubtedly has a presence in eCommerce. If you spent any amount of time in social media you will find that conversations around brands, companies, and services happen all the time.
New research indicates that more than 75% of consumers trust peer recommendations of products and services, while less than 15% trust paid advertising. The opportunity to tap into this trusted form of communication to market your e-commerce business is huge, so it’s important to think beyond your immediate network and find creative ways to encourage fans to spread the message about your business.
One important aspect of integrating social media into eCommerce is giving your customer or potential customer the ability to easily share your products. We recommend the below services for all eCommerce driven websites:
Integrate Facebook Like button into each product page and category
Provide easy way for someone to share via email
Integrate Twitter share
Integrate Facebook share button
If your target market is younger integrate MySpace
Integrate social bookmarking sites such as De.Lecious.us
While integrating social media with your e-commerce presence may be free, it may still come at a price: your valuable time. Maintaining multiple online presences, pages and feeds can be extremely time consuming. Fortunately, with the right e-commerce platform, you can easily integrate—and automate—these efforts to save time.
CUSTOMER SERVICE
Social media has made your average user sophisticated enough to know the difference between “customer care” and PR. Corporations that try to confuse the two could confuse customers, and potentially suffer even more in the long run.
Customer service isn’t a silo; it requires excellence across multiple channels and still excludes non-social media consumers. (Shayon, 2010)
Some American companies that have been early adopters in the space have witnessed measurable benefits. One such case is Frank Eliason’s turnaround at Comcast. Another example is at the end of FY 2009-2010, Dell’s ‘chief blogger’ Lionel Menchaca announced that Dell is not only servicing customers through social media but made revenues of the tune of $6.5 million, double the preceding year. (Nandi, 2010).
If you are considering building an eCommerce website one element of your plan should include how you will provide customer relations within social media.
Special Report
We’ve put together a special report on the social media and eCommerce. You can find the report and a quick video presentation here at eCommerce Social Media Web Design.
