Archive for February 23, 2011

We recently revamped our share button arrangement (you should see it to the right) and made a conscious decision to include the FB Share button instead of the FB Like button which can still be found at the bottom of our articles.

Why? Well until today when a reader ‘liked’ (or ‘recommended’ in our case) a story, a single line of text would be posted into their Facebook profile for others to see. The Facebook Share button however, which although requires one extra step for the reader, includes a thumbnail by default along with a snippet of the story – something, I can assure you, matters.

Today see’s Facebook change things.

Pressing the ‘like’ button on an article now means a thumbnail is also added by default to that item on your Facebook profile (as below), just like the Facebook share button.

The significance of this for publishers is not to be sniffed at. For a publisher looking to drive traffic, a thumbnail image included with a shared story can mean a significant amount of increased traffic. In the simplest of terms, a shared story that includes an image is far more likely to catch a persons Facebook friends’ eyes than one that merely includes a single line of text, which in turn leads to more click throughs and more traffic.

Facebook is already in most publishers top three sources of traffic. This move may very well cement the social networking behemoth at number one and the FB share button to the grave.

(Thanks @patrozoo!)

Throwing dollars at social media is only doing half the job.

According to Alterian’s Annual Survey, while Singaporean marketers are allocating more of their budgets to digital campaign, throwing dollars at social media is only doing half the job and companies are still placing their brands at risk by not analysing the conversations and engaging with customers.

Alterian’s Singapore office released the results of the company’s 8th annual survey that polled nearly 1,500 marketers, agencies, marketing service providers and systems integrators from across the globe*.

This year’s topic, “How Engaged is Your Brand?” examined marketing expenditure, social media measurement and the level of personalization across digital channels. Findings showed less than one-third of marketers have a strong understanding of social media conversations happening around their brand. In fact, seven in 10 indicated they either have very little to no understanding (31 percent) or use a few ad-hoc tools to track and measure social media conversations (39 percent).

Nearly 80 percent admit they are concerned their brand is at risk from not being as engaged with customers, or failing to have a good grasp of how online conversations are impacting their brand. The majority say they recognize the problem areas and are taking actions to rectify them, such as dedicating a larger portion of the marketing budget toward the social/digital space to gain the necessary resources for increased message customization across web, email and social media.

About half of survey respondents project that overall marketing expenditure will increase slightly (5-25 percent) over the next year, and an additional 9 percent saying it will increase greatly (25 percent or more).

Similarly, three in four estimate their social/digital marketing expenditure will increase over the next year. Of those, one quarter project it will increase by 25 percent or more. The estimated growth for this sector of the marketing budget is indicative that digital will drive general marketing growth in the coming year.

But while budgets are increasing, this may only be part of the solution because a large portion of marketers appear to be limited in analytical competency, indicating they either have no analytical experience concerning digital media (6 percent), stop at the basic analytical level (29 percent) or struggle to tie analytics back to the campaign strategy (28 percent).

“The Alterian survey results show the majority of brands lack direction on what exactly to measure and analyze, how to go about it, and how to utilise that information to continually improve on their marketing efforts,” said Alterian Senior Vice President for Asia Pacific, Chris Tew.

“It’s crucial for marketers to seek guidance and the right tools to develop a strategic plan that allows them to fully engage with customers across channels. One of the first steps in this process is knowing how to create more personalized interactions via e-mail, social media and even with web visitors.”

According to the Alterian survey, the vast majority of marketers focus on creating a customized brand experience for at least one channel – website, direct mail, email, social media – with only 9 percent admitting to not personalizing any channel.

One-third use their company website as a corporate brochure, while more than half (55 percent) concentrate on offers and campaigns to specifically drive website interaction. Yet only a small number of marketers (11 percent) tailor each website visitor’s experience.

“These figures indicate that a mass marketing strategy is still considered the norm by many,” continued Tew. “There is still much room to improve both website and email engagement strategy through message customization, particularly based on individual preferences and needs rather than a particular segment. However, marketers seem slightly more advanced when it comes to email, understanding the importance of targeted interaction in this channel.”

Forty-three percent say they use some type of segmentation strategy to deliver specific email messages to each audience, although only a small portion (13 percent) deliver emails based on preferences at the individual customer level, monitored in real-time.

Marketers are hopeful that this will be the year that they finally link social media marketing to ROI, a new survey says.

According to the report from Bazaarvoice, 74% of CMOs predict they will finally tie social efforts to hard ROI this year. The survey polled 175 CMOs from The CMO Club, including those from B2C and B2B companies in various industries.

In 2009, 84% of companies did not measure social media ROI — in 2011, that’s not an option. Business decisions are best made when they are based on hard numbers that measure success, and social media efforts are no longer an exception.

For the past few years, marketers have been content to measure “soft” metrics, such as the number of “Likes” or followers their brands have acquired. These numbers, though, are usually not indicators of an active community.

While those soft metrics still rank highly in importance, marketers are now turning to more traditional metrics that showcase true value. Site traffic tops the list as the most important factor for CMOs measuring social media ROI, as it did last year. In 2011, though, twice as many marketers plan on incorporating conversions — the total number of completed desired actions, such as “Likes” or clickthroughs, divided by the total number of impressions — as compared to 2010.

When asked which social activities resulted in the highest ROI, survey respondents identified Facebook as their platform of choice. Ratings and reviews sites ranked second on that list of high ROI performers. Notably, neither of these activities won hearty responses, as many respondents were more likely to say that they did not know which activities brought in the highest ROI. Another large chunk of respondents did not participate in the activities mentioned.

As ROI is increasingly used to assess the value of each social marketing activity, it seems inevitable that brands will begin to focus on the platforms that create the most added-value.

Which platforms pull in the most ROI for your business, and how do you measure social media ROI? Let us know in the comments.

by Erica Swallow

Happy Social Media Week! Yes, boys and girls, it’s that time of year when you drop what you’re doing and go to any of hundreds of amazing events around the world that explore the infinite facets of social media. Why, for people like me, it’s like Christmas and Diwali and National Fried Chicken Day rolled into one.

In honor of this sacred week, I’ll offer ten reasons why Social Media Week should be every week. This is a sneak preview of a talk I’ll be giving this week during Social Media Camp in New York; you can soon find the presentation itself via my blog or Twitter feed. You can also find a convenient one-page summary of this list on SlideShare.

On to the top ten:

1. It’s where we live.

I’m not rolling out the stat brigade this time, but social media properties have come to dominate metrics for time spent online and on mobile devices. More importantly, sharing, commenting, rating, and other social actions are seamlessly embedded into just about every other kind of digital activity, from browsing recipes to reading the news.

2. Some people care about what you ate for breakfast.

Social media is often mocked for being the playground of egomaniacs to share meaningless minutiae of their lives. Yet how many posts have you seen from your friends about some food they ate, a TV show they watched, or a complaint about the weather, with a slew of responses following suit? We should embrace such minutiae, as they collectively make up who we are, and our friends are precisely the ones who will care.

3. Crowd-sourcing empowers us to come together.

Communities keep coming together to achieve goals that individuals often can’t, or wouldn’t, or would do in some different way. From Wikipedia to the product design and retail site Quirky, we’re just starting to embrace the possibilities.

4. We trust total strangers.

I’ve written in this series how powerful it can be to get advice from total strangers via social properties. While I fear being accused of hyperbole here, there’s something magical about it when your life is positively influenced by someone you may never meet.

5. Meet your most important social network: your family.

Genealogy has become a hobby of mine, and it’s thanks in large part to social channels. On Facebook, for instance, I recently connected with a fourth cousin; our great-great grandparents were siblings. He even shares my name, and we’re named after the same ancestors. The value of social media can hardly get more personal than that.

6. It’s the ultimate defense against bullshit.

Kenneth Cole just entered the social media fiasco hall of fame, joining the Tropicana and, Gap rebranding, “United Breaks Guitars” and the Comcast technician asleep on a customer’s couch. Sure, word of mouth about such blunders spread before social media was around, but now there’s an added layer of protection for consumers.

7. It’s how we get support.

Customer service is one part of the picture. For instance, GetSatisfaction powers customer support forums for a number of different marketers and sites. Part of the benefit is making it easier for customers to help each other. Then there are moments where support is even more critical, such as for issues around health and parenting. I touched on this before when writing about CarePages (an aside: my cousin featured there has healed perfectly and has never felt better).

8. It brings us face to face.

Social media helps us get away from our gadgets. One of the reasons I’m most loyal to Facebook is for the events; if you’re not there, you won’t get invited. Then there are sites like Meetup, which is all about bringing people together, and Plancast, which helps you figure out what your friends are doing.

9. It’s changing the world.

It will be a while before we really know how much social media has had an impact on Tunisia and Egypt, or if large-scale protests will resurface in Iran. Even if Frank Rich and others are skeptical about whether the brave demonstrations against despotism were fueled by social media, social tools have given us direct access to some of the participants. During Operation Desert Storm, I remember the access CNN provided, night-vision smart bombs and all. That’s nothing compared to hearing from Tunisian blogger Slim Amamou, who is now a minister in his nation’s new government.

10. We love it because it’s fun.

I have two words for you: Cat Paint. Or take three words: Barbie Video Girl. Try one word: Kinect. And then there are the more day-to-day examples of fun, like the thrill of bringing people together to connect around shared interests. Whatever your definition of fun is, social media can play a role in it, so let’s enjoy every minute of it.

by David Berkowitz

Facebook’s Deals service landed in Europe on Monday, three months after its US launch.

It has lined up various promotions in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, from brands such as Starbucks, Yo! Sushi and Debenhams, offering freebies and loyalty discounts when people “check in” to their “Place” via Facebook’s mobile app.

But the most eye-catching deal was from Mazda, which is offering 20 per cent off its sporty MX-5 at five dealers across the UK. That’s worth around £4,000 off the list price, just for sending a message to the average Facebook user’s 130 friends’ news feeds.

Facebook says it’s had more than half of the brands using Deals in the US come back for a second promotion, and the inbound interest was sufficiently large for the European launch that it’s been able to pick and choose the best offers to showcase the service.

But is a check-in on a mobile application really worth thousands of pounds?
Local advertising has long been seen as one of the great untapped revenue sources on the web.

Google has already done a fantastic job at allowing small businesses to target local shoppers via search and its maps service. With the Android mobile operating system and its recent creation of Places pages, Google is well placed to tap local businesses further. But it hasn’t quite closed the circle between online advertising and offline shopping – no doubt a consideration when it tried to buy Groupon, the daily deals service, for billions of dollars last year.

Facebook fielded plenty of questions about what impact Places Deals might have on Groupon. “I don’t think this will kill Groupon,” said Emily White, director of local at Facebook. “We don’t want to kill Groupon, they have been an amazing partner on a number of fronts.”

But it was clear from a couple of comments that Facebook really has Google in their sights here.

“We used to go to the internet to search for information,” said Joanna Shields, Facebook’s head of Europe, Middle East and Africa. “Today we mostly go to find out what is happening with our friends.”

Facebook is hiring plenty of Googlers at the moment, Ms White among them. She wouldn’t comment on how well she felt that her former employer had tackled the local market, except to say that the two companies approach it “from very different angles… search and people”.

To me, the difference goes further. Facebook is trying – and to some extent succeeding – to attract marketers to the web that have not previously been big online advertisers. Through Places check-ins and Deals, Facebook is able to connect online and offline marketing activity in way that similar independent services such as Foursquare lack the scale to achieve.

For instance, Gabriele Lunati, digital director at Benetton – not a name you see using Google Adwords a lot – told me that the clothing retailer has now realised it has “always been a social brand”.

“I think there is a parallelism between ‘the United Colors of Benetton’ and a social network,” he said. “We are going to increase the use of Facebook and other social media platforms. It belongs to a more complex digital strategy for Benetton that we will create this year and next year.”

Benetton sees 50,000 check-ins as a successful result for its Deals campaign, which donates €2 to charity for each.

“Retailers don’t actually care about eyeballs, they care about the faces in the store. [Deals] really helps connect that,” said Ms White. “Doing deals does drive ‘liking’ of pages. Over time that relationship will become more explicit.”

The camera-filled press conference and half-dozen stalls of supporting brands made today the biggest launch of a new Facebook product I’ve seen in Europe to date.

“This is a main focus for all of the company, both on the web and mobile,” said Ms White. “We have a saying at Facebook: ‘We are 1 per cent done.’ With this product and everything we are doing, if you let your mind run wild there are amazing things we can do. It will be informed and evolved based on how businesses use it.”

One of the aspects yet to be evolved is how Facebook takes its cut. Deals are currently being offered for free to brands, with a self-service system already up and running in the US.

“We start by optimising the user experience,” Ms White said. “We don’t want to shut the door on anything. We want to create phenomenal user and brand experience.”

Places isn’t worth anything to Facebook yet, but if some brands are prepared to give £4,000 discounts for a single check-in, it could soon be a big deal for the social network too.

by Tim Bradshaw