StarHub sponsored the Gala Premier of Iron Man 2 – we wanted to generate the maximum visibility for  Iron Man 2 and StarHub’s sponsorship.

We reached out to Ripplevox members and put up a custom Facebook application on StarHub’s Fanpage  that allowed us to data capture critical information for the people applying for tickets.

This triggered significant online conversation as people vied for tickets and remarked positively about being able to see the film prior to its official launch date.

A recent joint study from Nielsen and Facebook, titled “Advertising Effectiveness: Understanding the Value of a Social Media Impression,” analyzed survey data from more than 800,000 Facebook users with regard to more than 125 Facebook ad campaigns from 70 brand advertisers. The report provides quantifiable data that can be mapped to trusted advertising benchmarks: Ad Recall, Brand Awareness, and Purchase Intent.

Studies have shown that consumers trust their friends and peers more than anyone else in making a purchase decision. The authors acknowledge that it’s critical to understand advertising not just in terms of “paid” media, but also in terms of how “earned” media (passed along or shared among friends) and social advocacy contribute to campaigns.

The study took a close look at 14 Facebook ad campaigns that incorporated the “Become A Fan” engagement unit and sliced the effectiveness results three different ways, by each of the types of ads available on Facebook:

• Lift from a standard “Homepage (Engagement) Ad”
• Lift from an ad that featured social context or “Homepage ads with Social Context”
• Lift from “Organic Ads,” news-feed stories that are sent to friends of users who engage with advertising on a brand

For those Homepage engagement ads at the top of the marketing funnel, awareness increased on average by 4% between exposed and control audiences. Purchase intent also increased on average by 2% following ad exposure on Facebook.

Comparing the responses of those users who had seen ads with social context against users who saw ads with no social context from the same campaign, there is a measurable lift in lift.

While exposure to the homepage ad itself increased ad recall, those users exposed to both the “paid ad” and the organic impression remembered the ad at three times the rate of those just exposed to the paid homepage ad.

We saw a similar effect for the other two metrics evaluated. Homepage ads increased awareness of the product or brand by 4% on average, but exposure to both homepage ads and organic ads increased awareness by a delta of 13% versus the control group. Exposure to organic impressions also impacted purchase intent as well, increasing the impact of the ad from 2% to 8%.

To access additional visuals in the TopLine report, please visit Nielsen here, or for the complete PDF file on earned media, social advertising and the methodology behind the study, please visit here.

via [MediaPost]

Many B2C and B2B companies are successfully using social media networks to acquire customers, according to [pdf] the “State of Inbound Marketing Report” from internet marketing firm Hubspot.

Major Social Media Channels Provide Leads to 4 in 10 Companies
More than four in 10 companies overall have acquired a customer from four major social media channels. Forty-one percent of companies have acquired a customer from both Twitter and LinkedIn. That figure rises to 44% for Facebook and 46% for a company blog.

Social Media Especially Helps B2C
When social media customer acquisition figures are broken out by B2B and B2C companies, it becomes clear that B2C companies generally obtain much more value from their social media marketing efforts. Fifty-one percent of B2C companies have acquired a customer from Twitter, compared to 38% of B2B companies. The difference is most stark in customer acquisition figures for Facebook, which 68% of B2C companies have obtained a customer from but only 33% of B2B companies.

When it comes to professional social media network LinkedIn, however, the usefulness trends reverse. Forty-five percent of B2B companies have obtained a customer from LinkedIn, compared to only 26% of B2C companies. Figures for company blog customer acquisition are closest in range, with 57% of B2C companies and 43% of B2B companies obtaining a customer through this channel.

Blog Post Frequency Makes a Difference
Examining company blogs closer, the unsurprising finding is that the more posts a company makes, the more success it will have driving new business. One hundred percent of companies posting multiple times a day on their blogs acquired a customer, and 90% posting daily acquired a customer. This figures declines to 69% for companies posting two to three times a week, and all the way down to 13% for companies posting less than monthly.

Most Business Blogs Post Weekly
The majority of business blogs in 2010 post weekly (38%). Another 29% post two to three times a week, and 17% post monthly. Only 3% post multiple times a day. Only 58% of companies making weekly blog posts acquire a customer, meaning most companies are leaving a significant tool for customer acquisition on the table.

Bigger Business Blogs Better Lead Bringers
Business blogs begin generating significantly more leads when they have a median of 24 or more articles posted, according to other research by Hubspot.

Businesses with blog article numbers above this critical threshold are likely to have enough content to make a significant impact on search engines through additional indexed pages and new keywords with which to associate. In addition, other sites are more likely to link to a blog that offers a steady stream of content. Businesses with blogs of 24-plus articles are more likely to be committed to updating their blog frequently and, thus, are likely to generate more traffic from referring sites.

Business blogs that have 0-11 articles posted will generate a median of three leads. Once blogs reach the 12-23 posted article threshold, this median dramatically rises to 10. However, blogs with 24-51 posted articles generate a median of 13 leads, and will generate a median of 23 leads when the posted article threshold reaches 52. This represents 77% lead growth, more than twice the 30% lead growth that occurs when the number of posted blog articles reaches 24.

via [Marketing Charts]

In his brilliant new novel Makers, Cory Doctorow, a firebrand left-wing blogger, social critic and sci-fi novelist, paints a vivid and compelling portrait of a near future that feels an awful lot like the present. In the opening pages Landon Kettlewell, the visionary young CEO of “Kodacell,” perfectly describes 21st century capitalism. “Capitalism is eating itself,” he tells the assembled crowd. “The market works, and when it works, it commodifies or obsoletes everything.” The industrial giants of the last century are doomed because they’re too centralized and too focused on big, homogeneous markets that no longer exist. Now, Kettlewell argues, “the money on the table is like krill: a billion little entrepreneurial opportunities that can be discovered and exploited by smart, creative people.”

And so Kettlewell sets out to create the infrastructure that allows hackers to build their own projects and flourish, like an early-stage venture capitalist that spreads its bets across tens of thousands of little firms rather than dozens. Kettlewell’s central insight is that no one man and no one firm can monopolize smart, creative people, the world’s most valuable resource. But by giving smart, creative people the tools they need to succeed, you can do the next best thing. That was the vision of accidental empire-builders like Carlos Slim and Bill Gates, and it appears to be the vision of Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

As Facebook fast approaches 500 million members, the company has announced its intention to remake the Internet. As of June of last year, there were roughly 1.7 billion Internet users in the world. Given Facebook’s origins as a destination for college students, it’s safe to assume that its army of users represents an above-average slice of global Internet users in terms of income and influence, as Danah Boyd suggests in a comparative study of Facebook and MySpace in 2007.

The hermits who’ve successfully resisted assimilation by the FaceBorg in the developed world are presumably more resistant than the rest of us to corporate marketing, even of the subtle variety. Facebook has essentially corralled almost half a billion of the world’s most enthusiastic consumers. Many observers have puzzled over Facebook’s viability as it swelled in size, wondering how the firm could monetize its enormous, and expensive, audience. Those questions have long since faded. In a post declaring the next decade “The Age of Facebook,” Michael Arrington of TechCrunch estimates that Facebook now has a billion-dollar-plus revenue run rate, with more to come.

And now, as Google ( GOOG – news – people ) matures and as Microsoft ( MSFT – news – people ) struggles to reinvent itself for the age of cloud computing, Facebook has settled on a truly grand ambition: to serve as the infrastructure that knits together the world’s information.

At f8, Facebook’s annual developer conference, Zuckerberg outlined Read more »

In a session at Forrester’s Marketing Forum, Forrester analysts Josh Bernoff and Augie Ray presented research findings on peer influence and word of mouth marketing. Some of the statistics were surprising, and the presentation was rife with practical tips for marketers we thought worth sharing.

Influencers are Diverse
Ray said that when marketers think about targeting influencers, they tend to think of them “like a stew”: tasty, but undefined. He advises thinking about them instead as a “delicious 3-course meal” in which it’s important to savor the flavors of each. He outlined a Peer Influence Pyramid that breaks down influencers into three types: Social Broadcasters (at the top), Mass Influencers (middle), and Potential Influencers (bottom of the pyramid).

Social Broadcasters are few in number but great in scale — they are the top bloggers, most well-connected individuals, and have a lot of followers looking to them for news and advice on the latest and greatest. They have scale but lack trust, in the sense that their followers will click on the links and recommendations they share but still perform their own evaluation of the data — this makes Social Broadcasters better suited for awareness than preference.

At the bottom of the pyramid are the Potential Influencers — this is where the trust really is. These are the proverbial “average consumer” who have primarily networks of people they actually know in an offline context (friends, family, peers). These networks are rich with trust, and make up 84% of the total population of the pyramid.

In the middle are the Mass Influencers, who make up only 16% of the pyramid but account for 80% of the influence impressions about products and services. Ray says Read more »