Archive for July 26, 2010

Facebook and Amazon.com partnered Tuesday in what could be one of the social network’s most important integrations yet. Amazon.com now offers a personalized page, where consumers can see product recommendations influenced by friends and their own tastes. They get notifications on when friend’s birthdays are coming up and suggestions on what to buy for them.

It’s a big deal for a number of reasons.

A deep Amazon.com-Facebook partnership could help corner Google in the e-commerce market. One of Google’s most lucrative use cases is when consumers search to decide which products to buy. Costs-per-click on product keywords like refrigerators, TVs and books are often easily more than $1. But if consumers start looking toward their friends to find out what to buy, they could be able to bypass Google altogether. (This is the bet of a recent batch of startups like Blippy and Swipely that share consumer purchases.)

Such a partnership could also lay the groundwork for Facebook to get key pieces of data, so it can start to quantitatively value how social recommendations translate into sales. (The company says it’s not getting purchase history on specific individuals.)

The longstanding problem with brand advertising is that it is notoriously hard to measure effectiveness. A brand can run a TV campaign, a viral video, or make those innovative Old Spice ads on the fly, but how does a company really know whether these efforts actually boost sales? This is why, as angel investor Chris Dixon argues, ads that generate intent are undervalued relative to ads that harvest intent. Online advertising, as it exists today, rewards the last ad that a consumer clicks on before they buy a product (like Google’s search ads or Amazon’s affiliate links). But it doesn’t reward all the display or engagement ads that might influence a consumer for weeks or months beforehand on content sites or social networks.

Now if Facebook can build out a partnership with Amazon, where it can get key pieces of aggregated data back to study how product sales change in relation to social recommendations or ad campaigns, it can build models to show how financially valuable it is on average when a user “likes” a product or brand.

Facebook has been trying to quantitatively prove for several years that even though users come to the site to socialize and not to look at marketing, its ads pay off. Its partnership and study with the ratings firm Nielsen last fall was part of this. It needed hard data to prove that its social ads improved brand awareness.

An e-commerce partnership could go much farther than that. Facebook might be able to prove that not only do its ads and Pages raise brand awareness, they also lead to better sales too.

Of course, Amazon would get a lot of value out of such a data-sharing arrangement too. It already has a very powerful recommendation engine. And it will only get better if augmented by a consumer’s professed interests on their profile page and the habits of their friends too.

via [SocialBeat]

Despite its vast potential as a new marketing tool to create a deep bond with consumers, Twitter is no slam dunk for marketers. They say Twitter has yet to tap that potential, according to a six-month study by digital-marketing agency 360i.

The study, which analyzed 1,800 tweets, shows a disparity between what consumers — who account for 90% of all tweets — say, and how marketers use the social-media service.

“Marketers use Twitter to broadcast, while consumers use it to converse,” says Sarah Hofstetter, senior vice president of emerging media and brand strategy at 360i.

What the study found:

– A major disparity exists between consumers’ and marketers’ use of Twitter. Some 43% of original consumer tweets are conversations between users, but only 16% of marketer tweets are dialogue with consumers. In fact, only 1% of all original consumer tweets are conversations with brands.

– Conversations about brands on Twitter are still limited. Only 12% of consumer tweets mention a brand by name. When they do, about 20% of tweets demonstrate an outward opinion of the brand, with only 7% demonstrating negative sentiment. The top brands mentioned on Twitter are Twitter, Apple and Google.

– Twitter presents a huge untapped opportunity for brands to learn about their customers. A whopping 94% of tweets are personal in nature, yet only 8% of Twitter users make their tweets private, creating a ripe platform for online listening.

Twitter had no comment on the study.

via [USA Today]

We’re all embedded in vast social networks of friends, family, co-workers and more. Nicholas Christakis tracks how a wide variety of traits — from happiness to obesity — can spread from person to person, showing how your location in the network might impact your life in ways you don’t even know.

Hat tip to Eric to pointing this out. I watched it and was re-inspired to do what we at Vocanic do.

Ian McKee
CEO of Vocanic

With everyone struggling to figure out how to use social media for marketing and advertising, it’s obviously helpful to look at examples where a big company gets its right, demonstrating what can be done with an appropriate investment of time and money (and planning). Today, Ford hit the nail on the head with its “2011 Ford Explorer Reveal” on the Ford Explorer Facebook page. Let’s take a quick tour of the multifaceted project.

First of all, Ford isn’t treating the Facebook push as a mere adjunct to an official unveiling elsewhere — this is the big “reveal,” which usually takes place at the Detroit auto shows. Of course most people don’t attend the Detroit auto shows, and press reports about the unveilings always tend to be a bit humdrum, at least in my opinion. They also don’t do justice to individual models, lumping all the new vehicles together with scarcely a paragraph each.

While clearly unsatisfactory from the carmakers’ perspective, in the days of broadcast media that was about all they could hope for. But Ford is using social media to give users an interactive, multimedia tour with videos, text and images on the Explorer’s Facebook page, all anchored by live video of the “reveal” in New York City (taking place on an elaborate set recreating some wilderness getaway in the middle of the urban landscape — very weird). These include celebratory mini-events with live music, etc. At the top of the page is a timeline, showing all the different real and virtual events taking place over the course of the day as part of the unveiling. Users can click on any of the previous times to see events that already happened.

Below that are a series of videos, some filmed ahead of time, some filmed live at unveiling events. The live events are hosted by Mike Rowe, the host of Discovery’s “Dirty Jobs,” who pokes around the new 2011 Ford Explorer with Ford CEO Alan Mulally. Mulally also appears in a pre-filmed Q&A. That’s a gold star for Ford: recognizing that social media is supposed to feel “real,” there are no anonymous actors or B-list celebrities taking a prominent role in the launch, but rather the guy who is responsible for the new model (facilitated by Rowe as the rugged media personality).

Meanwhile the pre-filmed video also includes a tour of the new Explorer with Mark Fields, president of Ford Americas, and Julie Levine, the Ford Explorer product manager, and a Q&A about the Explorer’s “green” aspects with Sue Cischke, vice-president for sustainability environment and safety engineering (more gold stars for hitting hot-button issues, again with the actual executive in charge leading the discussion).

via [Media Post]

There may be a literal truth underlying the common-sense intuition that happiness and sadness are contagious.

A new study on the spread of emotions through social networks shows that these feelings circulate in patterns analogous to what’s seen from epidemiological models of disease.

Earlier studies raised the possibility, but had not mapped social networks against actual disease models.

“This is the first time this contagion has been measured in the way we think about traditional infectious disease,” said biophysicist Alison Hill of Harvard University.

Data in the research, in the July 7 Proceedings of the Royal Society, comes from the Framingham Heart Study, a one-of-a-kind project which since 1948 has regularly collected social and medical information from thousands of people in Framingham, Massachusetts.

Earlier analyses found that a variety of habits and feelings, including obesity, loneliness, smoking and happiness appear to be contagious.

In the current study, Hill’s team compared patterns of relationships and emotions measured in the study to those generated by a model designed to track SARS, foot-and-mouth disease and other traditional contagions. They discounted spontaneous or immediately shared emotion — friends or relatives undergoing a common experience — and focused on emotional changes that followed changes in others.

In the spread of happiness, the researchers found clusters of “infected” and “uninfected” people, a pattern considered a “hallmark of the infectious process,” said Hill. “For happiness, clustering is what you expect from contagion rates. Whereas for sadness, the clusters were much larger than we’d expect. Something else is going on.”

Happiness proved less social than sadness. Each happy friend increased an individual’s chances of personal happiness by 11 percent, while just one sad friend was needed to double an individual’s chance of becoming unhappy.

Patterns fit disease models in another way. “The more friends with flu that you have, the more likely you are to get it. But once you have the flu, how long it takes you to get better doesn’t depend on your contacts. The same thing is true of happiness and sadness,” said David Rand, an evolutionary dynamics researcher at Harvard. “It fits with the infectious disease framework.”

The findings still aren’t conclusive proof of contagion, but they provide parameters of transmission rates and network dynamics that will guide predictions tested against future Framingham results, said Hill and Rand. And whereas the Framingham study wasn’t originally designed with emotional information in mind, future studies tailored to test network contagion should provide more sophisticated information.

Both Hill and Rand warned that the findings illustrate broad, possible dynamics, and are not intended to guide personal decisions, such as withdrawing from friends who are having a hard time.

“The better solution is to make your sad friends happy,” said Rand.

via [Wired Science]