Social Networks Improve Business Performance

McKinsey says that social networks are “extending the organization;” that’s a key take-away from their fifth annual study of the use of technology in organizations.

They continue to identify the key benefits of effective use of technology as increasing speed to access both internal and external knowledge, reducing communication costs and both increasing customer satisfaction and decreasing marketing costs. In terms of technology usage, they identify 4 types of firms: developing, internally networked, externally networked and fully networked. It should come as no surprise that few enterprises identify themselves as fully-networked while the largest number identify themselves as externally networked.

In this chart they collapse the benefits into internal, customer and partner/supplier benefits. Fully networked organizations have seen the greatest increase in payback from social technology. McKinsey warns, though, that it can be difficult to scale the benefits in a large enterprise. It is clearly worth the effort. They found improvements in market share, operating margin and market leadership from the use of specific technologies. See that detail in Exhibit 5 of their report. See an interactive version, showing changes over the last 4 years, here.

The report also features a chart showing what kinds of technologies are being used for what purposes. Again, it’s no great surprise to see social networks, blogs and video at the top of the list in terms of most overall usage. Many of the firms are using wikis; more than you would see if the emphasis was solely on external audiences. This reinforces the point that you need to select technologies carefully, based on use and audience, before you invest time and effort in them.

The McKinsey report has some data on adoption of technology by industry. Dion Hinchcliffe has an excellent post that includes data from a similar study by IBM and examples of success in healthcare, manufacturing, finance and insurance. He makes the point that across industries have examples of increased worker productivity and efficiency through the use of social networks.

Why is that? Business Intelligence expert Ken Chow has a provocative answer. Writing in the Information Management newsletter he says:

the next evolutionary force that will impel the BI market will come by way of technologies that overcome these limitations [heavy architectures, long development cycles and high costs] and deliver high-value information to people in much more productive ways. Information delivery of the future will include the collaborative and social mechanisms that already dominate our personal interactions.

We are familiar with these social tools and we already know how to use them. Chow continues:

Tools built into social media sites allow users to convey opinions, emotions, share data and interact with greater abundance, speed, transparency and collaboration, making the pros of this approach in BI readily recognizable.

I remember in the “early days” giving the advice that businesses should test social tools internally, learning to use them before deploying them to interact with their customers. That advice has now been upended. Firms are making extensive use of social platforms to deal with their customers, and rightly so. Now they need to take a strategic look in how to use some of those same tools internally to create a more efficient and effective business.

Article first published as Social Networks Improve Business Performance on Technorati.

Do You Believe Zuckerberg's Law of Social Sharing?

It’s being equated to Moore’s Law of early Internet days; the now-validated prediction that computing power will double every two years as costs fall by half. I don’t know whether it meets that standard, but here’s what Zuckerberg originally said in 2008:

“I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before,” he said. “That means that people are using Facebook, and the applications and the ecosystem, more and more.”

My attention was drawn to this by a recent infographic on a Bloomberg Business Week site—more about that in a minute. The infographic is too large to reproduce easily, but it has some interesting factoids. Of course, the growth numbers are based on the Z. prediction; it’s not clear whether they used actual Facebook numbers to validate them. Whether the sharing figures are accurate (and who could tell with precision anyway??) the phenomenon is real. I found some other interesting things while looking around.

Aol & Nielsen content sharing study

View more presentations from Mitya Voskresensky

The consumer behavior behind sharing is important. There is a recent study by Nielsen for AOL that is worth paging through. Among other things, it finds that email is still the most-used sharing tool although social networks, especially Facebook, are gaining fast. Most Internet users share but they share different content on different networks. That’s interesting and important to the marketer who wants to have her content shared.

The difficulty of doing that was brought home to me by this chart. It is the multichannel options for the ShareThis multichannel bar. I use the simple icon on this site and it’s reliable and it produces interesting analytics. They’ve also added a real-time widget that other bloggers or website owners might enjoy. There are a lot of options here: how does the marketer select the best ones? Start with any analytics you can get. You might want to test different options of a multichannel sharing bar, although you don’t want to confuse your visitors. Finally, you might resort to marketing research among key users or the most avid sharers on your site. You have to understand the behavior of your own target audience.

Marketers also struggle every day with issues of keeping up with their discipline, given the torrent of content. I ran into two interesting services. The infographic I referred to was created by Summify, a personal service that creates a daily summary of news from the user’s social networks and sends it by email, to the desktop, or by mobile. The infographic was posted on a BBW beta site called Business Exchange. It describes itself as a social sharing site, with items “filtered by like-minded professionals.” Those professionals can view, comment, and suggest new topics. I don’t see a distribution tool, but if there’s not one, it will probably come.

These services represent two different and interesting approaches to taming the torrent of social sharing. They fall short, however, of actual content curation, adding expert judgement to the equation, as practiced by Huffington Post and others.

It’s a big world, full of content. The job of marketers is to make their content entertaining, relevant, and worthy of social sharing. A big job indeed!

Old Spice Guy Is Back--Quietly

I just linked my post-Super Bowl post to a detailed report on the effectiveness of the ads themselves and their impact on social media by agency ymarketing. The social media aspect wasn't particularly clear during the game, but it appears to have been considerable. I'd encourage you to read the report for yourself.

Likewise, the return of the Old Spice Guy on the day after the Super Bowl did not generate the buzz of the first outing last summer. Still, Ad Age reports a huge number of video views. That makes sense for at least 2 reasons. First,Isaiah Mustafa is just as hunky as ever--see the most recent ad below entitled Scent Vacation. Second, the campaign has a huge following. The ad below has gotten almost 2.5 million views. If you watch it you'll also get access to the I'm Back and Phone Call videos that were part of the effort to develop Super Bowl buzz. That part seemed to have gotten lost in the Super Bowl hoo-haa, but the campaign itself seems to be flourishing.



What does all this show? The report says that ad tie ins with social media do bring visitors. Old Spice seems to say that if you have a campaign that's working with the target market, stick with it!

Location-Based Marketing 2--Check-In Programs

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have both come and gone. Black Friday filled the stores—from midnight on!*!—with shoppers who often used Black Friday websites to locate deals before they braved the stores. Cyber Monday online sales were over $1 billion—the most ever for a single shopping day!

I want to focus in on just the check-in programs as a new and powerful shopper stimulant. There are the “old-fashioned” apps that let you compare prices in the retail store. Apps like TGI Black Friday (DealCatcher the other 364 days of the year!) aggregate coupons and deals from all over. Shoppers find them valuable, but the real action is in check-in campaigns run by individual retailers. Analytics by Mashable show Target far in the lead in terms of number of check-ins. I got there too late to check out the Black Friday tab, but the Weekly Ad page shows the variety of channels for accessing weekly specials and the opportunities for check-in promotions that include contests, give-aways and special deals.

One of the big winners this holiday season has been Sports Authority, mentioned in my earlier post as having a $500 gift card give-away on Black Friday. As this quote suggests, the company considered it a great success—and it didn’t even make the Mashable list of the top 10!

"We saw a lift anywhere from 5X to 20X for the number of check-ins," said Clay Cowan, VP of e-commerce for the Denver-based retail chain. "Every metric of engagement that we tracked went through the roof. Whether it was Twitter posting, Foursquare check-ins, Facebook friend adds and comments...we saw increases."
On Foursquare, the brand had around 400 followers before the campaign and now has almost 4,500. . .”

Three important points. First, Sports Authority has been testing Foursquare promotions since early this year. They had a process in place. Second, they’re not resting on their laurels. They now have a 21 Days of Deals promotion in place. The box from their home page shows strong integration with Facebook. It’s easy to guess that they may have other Foursquare promotions that will be promoted on their Facebook page. That’s the third issue; marketers need to use something timely like Facebook or Twitter (or both) to publicize these short-term deals beyond their mobile app subscribers. This material is too transient for web site promotion unless you’re running a big campaign announced far in advance.

That’s one strategic was of looking at location-based promotions—the specific campaign. There is another—the integration with long-term loyalty programs. According to Fast Company Safeway is testing a partnership program with Pepsi in its California Vons stores. It’s built on the existing loyalty card, the important difference from most of the campaign-type programs we are seeing. When the shopper checks in with her Vons card, she can receive instant rewards (coupons at check-out) on PepsiCo products. It’s possible to set the program up so swiping the card checks the shopper in and rewards are “shouted out” on Foursquare. It’s a bit hard to find the Foursquare page on the Vons site, suggesting local promotion of this test program.

Does this predict that the future of the loyalty card is on our cell phones as suggested by the New York Times? It’s worth considering!

Before you get too excited, though, keep the recent Pew research in mind. A report published in early November says that only 4% of Americans use location-based services at this point. Ok, the target audience is relatively small at this point. The good news is that this market is in its early days and thoughtful marketers have time to test and refine strategies. This space is exploding, though; I’d recommend starting right away.

And as you do it consider an even more far-reaching possibility: The future of convergence may be the cell phone. That will stand conventional marketing on its head once again!

Add to Your Circle of Friends!

My friends at Overdrive Interactive have a new white paper that details ways of making connections in social media. They have 100 suggestions; I’ve picked out what I consider the Top Ten Ways to Make Friends—all free; all things even the smallest business can do. Here’s the list with some commentary and some combinations:


1.BE VAIN. Facebook now allows vanity URL’s. If you don’t have one yet, set one. It’s a lot easier to promote your page if you have a short, relevant URL that people can remember.
2.FACEBOOK TAB IT. Add an “Invite Friends” tab on your Facebook page that allows your friends to invite their own friends to become a friend of your Facebook page. Add the tab, then draw attention to it through status updates and tweets.
3.TXT 2 B FRIENDZ: Create a campaign that encourages people to join your Facebook page or Twitter profile by text messaging. If possible, respond back to messages with a coupon code or information about your company. Text “like overdriveinteractive” to 32665 to check it out. Give people an incentive to become your friend, then continue to reward them for loyalty.
4.USE CROSS-PROMOTIONS. Promote your Facebook profile on Twitter and promote your Twitter profile on your Facebook page. Tweet about your Facebook page and use status updates to talk about your Twitter page. Cross promote all your social networks, in fact! When you post something on YouTube or SlideShare, post a notice on your Facebook page and Tweet it. Be sure your company blog has chiclets or other call-outs to all your social channels!
5.SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. Optimize your Facebook and Twitter pages for SEO. Make a list of high value key words to use opportunistically in your content. Yes the engines are indexing sourced content. Yes, Facebook and Twitter get indexed. It’s hard to overestimate the contribution of high value key words in all your social channels! Study your referrals data, use keyword tools, and see what words are drawing traffic to the sites of your competitors on Compete.com.
6.REACH OUT TO BLOGGERS. The blogosphere is great place to promote your Facebook and Twitter communities. Find key bloggers that talk about your brand, company, or product category and then reach out to them to become your friend. Tell them the value of your content and tell them to send things to you to tweet and post.
7.WRAP IT. If you sell packaged goods, make sure your packaging promotes your social channels. If people like you enough to buy your product, give them the chance to connect with you in the places where they want to connect. Shopping bags provide great display space. And be sure your main channels—blog, Facebook and Twitter, probably—are on your business card and your email template!
8.MORE THAN JUST DISCOUNTS. If you send [mail] out coupons, include your Facebook and Twitter addresses on them. For more encouragement, include a statement about how social connections will receive more exclusive discounts on the social channels. Do the same in your email newsletters.
9.FOR FRIENDS ONLY. Have friends-only content on your Facebook page. If users want to access the content, they need to become your friend. Give them incentives by including coupons, discounts or sweepstakes entries. List your job openings there; why should anyone apply for a job who isn’t your friend?
10.Above All: SILENCE IS NOT GOLDEN. In social media, you never want to be quiet. Keep sharing information that your friends want to hear: tips, resources, contests, discounts, information, etc. The more you share content they care about, the more they will share your content and brand with their friends.

Among many other useful tips, the white paper points out that you should never waste friends. Don’t just close down a campaign-specific Facebook page. “Reskin” it. That one is likely to require professional programming assistance, but it’s worth it to recycle friends instead of having to reacquire them!

Notice that this is all about integrating your channels to get the maximum value out of your social media efforts. How are you doing on that score? There’s a new app, a Social Page Evaluator from Vitrue, discussed on Smart Blog and in more detail on Vitrue’s company blog that will put a value on your Facebook and Twitter pages.

So find out how well you’re doing in social media at the moment, think about where you need to go, and read the entire Overdrive white paper to get more valuable suggestions!

Keeping Up With Your Social Networks

It’s an issue that faces even those of us who are only active in a few social networks. I can’t really imagine how difficult it must be for people who seriously use multiple networks, especially if it’s for business purposes.

One of my students saw the post about Yoono on CNET. She, of course, posted the link in our class community--good going, Zoe! I haven’t found a good Twitter app for my Yahoo! page that displays exactly the way I want it, so I was interested.

I finally got around to checking it out. I downloaded the Firefox app and it happily showed up, on my Yahoo! opening page (image 1), my Gmail page (image 2), and wherever I go from them (image 3)--which is essentially everywhere! It has a good search bar; that’s how I found the Washington Post article. I’d be perfectly happy with just having it on my opening page but I can’t find any settings that let me control the placement. It does let me control which social networks I include, and I choose just Facebook and Twitter. I actually would like to include two Facebook and two Twitter accounts; don’t know whether I can do that.


One thing that I find amusing. It shoves my Gmail box over so far that the AdWords ads are lost. When I’m composing, I see links to the AdWords ads, but not the ads themselves. I have to guess that Google won’t put up with this if Yoono becomes widely used!

I agree with some of the issues in the Washington Post article; especially about the amount of real estate it occupies on a page. You can minimize it easily (that minimizes it everywhere, not just on the one page) or you can drag to make the space smaller. In that case, it only shows one or two posts, and I don’t like that. So it does take up space; otherwise it seems to work fine. I searched, made a Tweet, checked out my Facebook page—all worked fine. It’s very busy this morning. Many of the people I follow are at South by Southwest and they are socializing away!

The only other thing I’d point out is that Yoono comes from a firm that appears to be French, with a cosmopolitan management team. Occasionally you run into information you might like to read, but it’s in French (and my French is not up to it!). I see their blog in English, so I don’t have any complaints about the amount of support they provide. And, oh yes, it’s a free app.

This is a good example of the social media space maturing. I’ve tried other aggregation sites, and I like this better than others because I can get what I want on my existing home page. I don’t want to lose the news feeds that are there.

My personal suggestions would be choice of formats. I’d like to be able to open a page that shows a half-dozen or so social networks in essentially the same format that my news and blog feeds show up on the Yahoo! opening page. Maybe that’s just familiarity speaking. Yoonoo works, and I think it’s something I’m going to keep around.

Using Facebook to Drive Traffic

My firm assumption is that marketers are using Facebook to accomplish something, and hopefully they are clear about precisely what that is—good objectives! I’ve had several questions lately that have caused me to think about how marketers are using their Facebook Wall pages (assuming the wall is the most trafficked) and what they are using for landing pages.

So I did a small and totally unscientific survey of some of the sites I follow. Some of it is food for thought; all is interesting. In the interest of disclosure, all my entry points came from searching ‘name facebook.’ Am I the only one who can’t find anything on Facebook itself?

I’ve written about Coke’s social media strategy.
Wall Page. Their main link leads me to a big happy Coke logo; when I click through it invites me to be a fan. No thank you; closing that out leads me to the main Coke page. Easy to get from there to wall page. Took me several clicks but interesting, so I’m not annoyed. Wall is completely fan posts; see nothing from Coke at the moment. You might find it worth reading their House Rules.
Landing Page. None on wall at the moment because they are fan posts. Feeds page has lots of Twitter from the UK at the moment that take you to an offer page on the Diet Coke UK website. The Coke page seems to be the main page for corporate links; see for example their recycling page on the Living Positively site. There’s much going on here; all seems to be well thought out.

I’ve also written about the Pepsi Refresh program, which seems to be Pepsi’s sole communications focus at the moment.
Wall Page. The main link takes you to the Pepsi Refresh Project page. This is a marketing campaign, not a corporate site per se. On the Wall page(s) they have covered all the bases; Pepsi Only, Fans Only, Pepsi + Fans. I’m a bit slow to catch on; I’ve looked several times before understanding this option for corporate fan pages. Try it out and see what I mean. Interesting!
Landing Page. On the Pepsi Only Wall page, most of the current posts go to either to an update message on the Refresh Everything site or to a YouTube video. Some link back to the Pepsi Refresh Project page on Facebook—think about that!

Intuit has a lot of web savvy.
Wall Page. Actually, they have several Facebook pages. I choose the Small Business Spot because I like what they’re doing with it. They have a small business grants program—interesting. When I looked at that wall page it was a mix of Intuit posts, a warning from a user about incompatibility with Chrome, and some user questions. Interestingly enough, the same coffee-drinking user who warned about Chrome compatibility is answering other user question(s). Nice! Lots of questions about taxes; Intuit seems to be responding. One frustrated user says customer service on Facebook is better than in the telephone call center. All in all, a lot that Intuit can learn here and people seem to be getting their issues resolved.
Landing Page. Links from Intuit posts go to their blog, their community, their Kiva page and probably more, depending on the message. This was the first corporate page where I saw wall posts all post linking to the corporate Facebook page, in this case the Small Business Spot page on Facebook. Offers and links there take visitors to the Intuit small business website.

I’ve written about Legal Zoom also.
Wall Page. Can a bunch of lawyers carry on a good conversation? This site says they can! The main link takes me to their Notes page. I find that uninspiring, but they have a reason; pushing Start-A-Business month. Their wall page is a nice mix of LegalZoom and fan posts. Many fan posts are quite complimentary—amazing! Also some cute lawyer-related stuff like a link to a Hollywood Reporter article about the lawyer stationed backstage at the Oscars. Great content strategy!
Landing Page. As you might guess, their content strategy results in links to many sites. Some, like Inc magazine, appear to be partners in support of small business. Let’s hear is for these lawyers—they are being positive, supportive and interesting!

The San Diego Zoo is one of my all-time favorites in many ways. Its website ranks up there with the best of corporate sites.
Wall Page. The main link takes you to their wall pages. They use the same Zoo Only, Zoo + Fans and Fans Only set of pages.They have a lot of happy visitors and lots of adorable baby animals to talk about. What's not to like? The Zoo uses a polar bear as their icon for administrator posts. Wonder if they are thinking about that after SeaWorld?
Landing Pages. Their links go everywhere—pages, blogs, live webcams; they have great content. How can fans not like a baby panda or a little tapir? Their website is engaging and using Facebook the way they do creates more engagement as well as driving a great deal of traffic to the website. The zoo has had a family of blogs for quite awhile. They are, of course, on Twitter, Tweeting away with happy visitors and about zoo animals. There is a link on the Twitter page to the Live Panda Cam. They have a platform and are making excellent use of it. Look at how they cross post on blogs.

I started this with a misperception, and I just left it there. It’s not necessarily a wall page; it can be a series of wall pages. It is not a landing page. A vibrant content strategy leads to many links to many kinds of content both on the corporate site and to related content on other sites. All keep the fan base growing and engaged.

The major take away is that there is no one right way of using a Facebook fan page. It depends on your strategy and the way you want to interact with fans and visitors. Whether it’s baby animals or lawyers being amiable, it’s all about 2-way communication and dealing with customer questions and issues. The five above have all gotten the message!

Do Facebook Ads Work?

I’ve always understood the conventional wisdom to be that ads on social networking sites like Facebook don’t work well. The reason given is that people go to social networks to network—communicate—and don’t pay attention to ads. Harry Gold of Overdrive Interactive mentioned in my class recently that they had purchased an ad on Facebook’s home page for Harley-Davidson, which has had great success on Facebook. That started me thinking. This chart makes the point that Facebook is now the third-largest site for display ads, so something is going on!

Facebook ads (except for major placements like the home page) work like Google’s AdWords. The advertiser creates ad content; selects targeting options; and sets budget, scheduling and payment parameters. The mechanics are the same; the targeting is completely different. The AdWords targeting that most of us are familiar with is by keyword (content). The basic targeting options on Facebook are demographic; everything from gender to birthday. There is a keyword filter that is based on items from the profiles of Facebook users. That’s different from the search-based keywords of Google but it’s an interesting possibility if you’re looking for, say, fans of a particular rock band. It’s self-service, so there’s a strong help page associated with the main advertising page.

Ok, it’s easy to set up a Facebook ad. Question is, do they work? The answer, of course, is partly dependent on your objectives.

It’s not arguable that a lot of people would have an opportunity to see an ad on Facebook. According to Inside Facebook’s analysis of site data for January 2010, “More than 108 million people are now using the site every month, up from nearly 103 million people before.” The absolute numbers can be disputed, but the trend has been relentlessly upward for a long time. The post has more information about the composition of the Facebook audience and growth segments. The stats are fascinating, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that Facebook is a broadcast network. The real possibility is microtargeting of ads.

Data from comScore, accessed on the Inspire Media blog, give some insights into the effectiveness question. All users were asked where they would be likely to notice advertising and User Generated Content sites ranked below both news and content sites and corporate sites. Another question, presented for the 18-34 age group, is very revealing. The type of sites that score highest by a large margin is music/ movies/ entertainment. Makes sense, doesn’t it? These Millennials want the opinions of their peers when it comes to use of their leisure time, something they find on the social networking sites, including Facebook. That should make them more receptive to advertising there for leisure activities. Note that consumer electronics, travel, and apparel also score relatively high on the “likely to notice” metric; I hypothesize that the reason is the same.

Noticing is nice—do they take action? Click Through Rates (CTR) are not high anywhere. One well-known marketer gives the average for Facebook as 0.01 – 0.05%. Search ‘Facebook CTR’ for a lot of anecdotal evidence that CTRs are low but can be impacted by strategy.

You also see the occasional story about finding motivated buyers on Facebook. Those are super-anecdotal, but you might find this case history on the Facebook advertising page instructive. Think about the product category and the ability to target, both by age and relationship. Again, it makes sense, but it’s also clear the Facebook ad was supported by an active lead management program.

So I’m back to my point about microtargeting. In a lead generation campaign (and that’s one of the obvious marketing objectives), the quality of the leads is more important than the quantity.

Reaching the right people with the right message is always important. Does Facebook advertising make sense for your product/service? Here are some links that may help you think about that question for businesses (1, 2), for small businesses, or for non-profits.

More recent posts on Facebook ad effectiveness:
Targeting Your Facebook Ads
Stronger Evidence that Facebook Ads Work

Does Your Brand Need a Platform?

Writing about the SuperBowl, I mentioned the term ‘platform.’ I recognized it as the multiple communications channels I’ve been talking about for a long time. It seems crystal clear to me that various segments of customers rely on various (also multiple) communications chanels. It’s also obvious that we miss a lot of the communications that marketers target toward us; doesn’t matter whether the channel is direct mail or Twitter!

What I realized is that a platform is more than just multiple channels. Harry Gold’s slide captures it perfectly; it’s the complete set of channels that reach your target audience, yes. But the channels are connected, with a lot of the connections (integration?) being automated.

It would really be nice to know for specific target audiences, which and how many social networks they belong too. Most of us would say we belong to several; how many is that and which specific ones? That’s hard to answer even for generic segments. I did find a 2008 study of wealthy consumers who said they belonged to 2.8 networks each. Given that they are probably older than the population average, that may be a surprise to some. It shouldn’t be. According to a study of Google AdPlanner data by Pingdom, “A full 25% of the users on these sites (19 by my count) are aged 35 to 44, which in other words is the age group that dominates the social media sphere.” Interesting, but doesn’t answer my basic question.

There are two issues, though, that I think can be generally accepted:

• There are multiple networks that appeal to a specific target audience; Twitter and LinkedIn for business people, for example.
• A lot of users don’t see all the communications that pass through any given network. If you use Twitter, think about it; in a given 24-hour period, how many of the Tweets that are sent to your account do you actually see?

Point is, we have to get our message out through multiple channels multiple times to have a fighting chance to have it seen, much less acted on.

So as you look at Harry’s chart, ask yourself:

• Which channels are important to our target audience?
• What kind of content is most relevant to each? Videos for YouTube, content-heavy posts for blogs, and 140 character Tweets are some of the obvious.
• How should we connect the relevant channels? Even better, how can we automate the connections between them (this post goes automatically to Twitter, for example) to save the mindless and error-prone activity of reposting?

Connect them and you have a platform!

Two things I’ve learned:

• It’s not always as easy as it sounds; some of the feeds that make the connections automatic are easy. Others will require help from IT.
• Connecting the various networks doesn’t eliminate the necessity of an acquisition strategy—for fans, followers, whatever you think is the best entry point.

Marketers are still going to have to work at it, but a platform makes both strategic and practical sense!

The Importance of Social Media Policies

One of the annoyances of writing a blog is how often you see content the very next day that adds to what you just posted. Usually I just hope people will see it. But this one is so timely and so important it deserves its own post.

This Marketing Charts post from yesterday was in my inbox today. It headlines two important issues:

1. Formal social network policies are important for employers
2. 75% of the employers recently surveyed by Manpower do not have a social network policy

The Manpower report quotes statistics that attribute lost productivity to employee use of social networks at work. True, some of it is undoubtedly totally frivolous. But employee participation in social nets can also be a brand building activity—think Zappos as only one example of many. I gave links to guidelines from ESPN and Cisco yesterday.

The Manpower report acknowledges that workplace use of social nets can add value in the following areas:
• Productivity
• Collaboration
• Knowledge Management
• Innovation
• Employee Alignment and Engagement
• Recruitment
• Reputation Management.

This seems to be especially true if the firm has a substantial number of relatively young employees who are comfortable with social nets (or wants to be attractive to younger workers). I would argue that all companies need, as suggested yesterday, a crisis management plan that includes social nets. Toyota is the cause célèbre at the moment. I heard strategy guru Jeffry Sonnenfeld critize Toyota’s total lack of engagement with the auto blogosphere on CNBC this morning. Newsweek agrees and has recommendations.

This isn’t really a new thought, is it? If companies have thoughtful strategies and policies to implement them, they often navigate choppy waters reasonably well. If they don’t, something always jumps up to bite them. It may be customer complaints, it may be a product quality problem, it may be an environmental crisis, and many more. But stuff happens, and being prepared with employees who have social media skills and policies to guide them is one step in the right direction.

Does Search or Social Media Have More Impact?

Of course there’s a secondary question—impact on what? For several days I’ve been thinking about two specific questions:

1. Does search marketing or social media drive more traffic to websites? I’m going to limit it to PPC and not include SE0.
2. Does PPC or social media have more impact on sales?

Both sound pretty simple and straightforward, right? If we believe that, we’ve forgotten all we know about the interconnectedness of media. Nevertheless, starting out with two specific questions led me to some interesting data.

Going backwards, we also know that question two is not as simple as phrased; there is immediate impact on sales and delayed impact. From early studies we know that web exposure, which was mostly display advertising at that time, had some immediate conversion impact but also had longer-term impact. In other words, it often took more than one visit for a consumer to decide to make a purchase. Think about your own behavior—does that make sense? We also learned that conversions occurred offline in retail stores after consumers had visited websites. That was a pretty common phenomenon in the early days, “research on line buy offline.” Again, we’ve all probably done that. Are we more likely to just go ahead and buy online today; probably depends on a number of things.

The same is true of the online vs. offline conversion issue. These 2005 data seem pretty straightforward. More people convert offline. comScore went on to say that they “analyzed the time lag between consumers’ initial searches and subsequent purchases made in the same categories during November and December of 2005. . .more than half (56%) of consumers’ online holiday buying actually happened in subsequent internet sessions, clearly demonstrating the strong latent impact of search.”

I’ve been looking for a replication of this study ever since. I’ve never found one. Does that mean that the latent impact of search has become part of Internet marketing conventional wisdom and no one sees the need? I did find a marketer’s analysis of a single campaign in 2009. He found that initial Google results were faster to come in than Yahoo’s, but that 31% of all results came in after his (approximately 1 month) campaign was over. I’ll take that as confirmation until someone shows me otherwise.

Ok, so here’s what I found in terms of traffic. The answer to question 1 looks pretty simple, right? Search is the winner by a huge margin. But look at what else eMarketer said (newsletter, October 22, 2009):

According to research by ad network Chitika, social sites Facebook and Digg are more likely to send returning traffic your way than search engines such as Yahoo!, Google and Bing. More than one-fifth of users referred to a site by Facebook visited at least four times in the course of a week. Less than 12% of Google-referred visitors were as loyal.

It doesn’t say that the loyal users were more likely to buy, but would you agree that the likelihood of a purchase goes up with repeat visits? It does seem likely; how much is unanswered, at least in any recent research I could find.
The most interesting data I found is this 2007 study of the influence of newspaper advertising on web traffic. 44% of people who saw an ad did additional research; 67% of them did their research online; and 31% went to a search engine first.

But strong brands matter; in 2009 Nielsen found that 61% of the holiday traffic of retail web sites came from direct visits, not search. A Nielsen spokesman said:

the fact that such a high percentage of people go directly to retail sites and even those that search generally have a pretty clear intent as to which website they'd like to go to -- it makes a compelling argument that brand and past experiences [with a marketer] matter an awful lot and will be far more significant determinants of success than any customer acquisition strategy that they're going to engage in."

That’s really interesting. Two things strike me. First, that’s holiday shopping data for retailers and it may be different for purchases during the rest of the year. Second, all marketers have to do customer acquisition, so the question as to whether social media or search is best for acquisition still matters. Each and every marketer has to answer that by looking at quality vs. quality of initial referrals and the persistence of customers who were acquired in various channels—in other words by Customer Lifetime Value. At the same time, it’s unlikely that one acquisition channel will ever be enough; the question is allocation of resources.

Question 2 one more time--does search or social media have more impact on sales? Here’s data from the current Razorfish Fluent Report. Offline friends are most trusted when making a purchase—WOM again and always. TV was also trusted by these respondents, then “online” activities of several types appear. Search is down at the bottom as far as trust when making a purchase is concerned.

The issue is not straightforward in the sense that either search or social media is “best.” However, there seems to be a pretty clear picture in these data. Search brings more people to your site; social media gives them more trusted information on which to base their purchases. It’s not either/or.

Several times while I was looking for data I came across a good piece of advice. Marketers must measure the impact of various media at each stage in the conversion funnel. It changes from “just looking for information” to “deciding to buy something” and in between. That’s the real message; marketers must use all the tools in their arsenal—wisely!

The White House Joins the App Craze

It’s been a political week, so I might as well end the week on a political note. The White House must have been reading eMarketer also; it announced its own app on Tuesday.

The eMarketer newsletter (January 21, 2010) quoted a study by DM@PRO and Quattro Wireless that has a lot more good data on building and promoting apps. If you’re the White House, promotion isn’t that much of a problem, but the reasons for the app certainly apply. Think about it; they pretty much boil down to ‘it’s where our customers are’ and ‘it’s gotten a lot easier.’

I downloaded The White House app and it works as promised. Plenty of photos and videos; access to the White House blog, which is pretty informative. Apparently I can watch the State of the Union speech streamed live next week. After just a few days the reviews on the App Store are pretty good. It’s clean and quick and those who have used the streaming say the speed is good. Only real complaint I saw is that it’s not compatible with the first generation iPod, but to be fair, it says that on the store page. I’m a huge fan of the first dog, so I choose a screen capture that included him. The White House furnished several screen captures—they know quite a bit about promotion—and you can see more on Huffington Post.

The study says that Facebook is still the most popular venue for apps with 45% of the marketers surveyed having developed Facebook apps. iPhone comes in second with 42%. Our own site or community comes in third at only 36%. How do you choose? According to eMarketer:

Engagement was the top reason to choose either mobile or social as an app platform, but social sites were perceived as better for many top goals, including engagement, audience targeting, sharing and branding potential, and reach. Mobile scored higher on creative control and persistence.

Interesting! I recently ran across a Facebook app that lets you send a newsletter from your page—sort of. According to Nutshell Mail, you can “Automatically send the latest feeds from your page to your fans' email inboxes.” Not for me, thank you. It’s worth looking at, though, just to see what’s possible.

There are at least two take-aways here:

1. Apps are still in their early days and marketers are finding more creative, and even useful, ways to use them. Think branding, think pushing your message out to people who have indicated willingness to receive it.
2. Mobile is finally here, although it still has a lot of room for development and growth. Think about the moms described yesterday who are using smart phones to manage their lives, shopping included. Retailers were urged to take heed. Brand markets are also.

What’s next for The White House? mobile.WhiteHouse.gov, according to the blog.

What’s next for this app user? While I was looking for this one, I found a camcorder app that is getting pretty good reviews for 3G users who don’t want to spend the money for a 3GS. At $.99, the app is a much better buy. What else does that say about today’s mobilized world?

Digital Moms on the Move

Every so often I get energized to write a post on moms on the web. I’ve done Mommy bloggers—who they are, how to reach them, and the importance of transparency. The latter was before the FTC proposed regulations and guidelines.

Moms have always been purchasing agents for their households; now they have digital tools to do it. The chart from the Razorfish/Café Mom study shows the digital channels moms use, categorized by mainstream channels used by over 50% of moms, mainstream used by about 1/3 of them, and emerging used by less than 25%. eMarketer adds to this picture by pointing out that moms are using their smartphones to do things like searching for recipes online. Think of the opportunities for reaching them in the course of such activities, but also note that the best way is not advertising in many channels, especially mobile. The second chart suggests that ads on social nets get a rather small amount of attention and even less action. Awareness? Maybe.


What made the subject top of mind was a headline in Marketing Charts a couple of days ago: “Retailers Can Lure Moms with Social Media, Free Stuff.” That’s not exactly a surprise, but the chart on what promotions moms find most influential is interesting. It’s also interesting that moms are more influenced by everything than are adults in general—the purchasing agent effect in operation. What interests me even more when I look at this chart is the ways in which marketers can reach moms with the promos they care about. Just a few examples:

• Notify moms of Product Samples In-store on their social networks (message your fans, advertise to others) and by reaching out to the ecosphere of mommy bloggers
Actually, that advice hold true for most of the items on this list.
• Use the database from Store Loyalty Cards to reach moms with permission email and mobile coupons based on behavioral data.
• In-Store Events and Parking Lot Events can be Tweeted to build excitement and momentum.

Think about it: what promotional techniques should you be using? How can you notify moms that they are available?

Ponder this quote from the RAMA study that produced the promotion data:

“Retailers who aren’t engaging customers through social media could be missing the boat,” said Mike Gatti, Executive Director for RAMA. “Twitter, Facebook and blogs are becoming increasingly popular with moms as they search for coupons or deals and keep in touch with loved ones. The web provides efficient, convenient ways for brands to stay in front of their most loyal shoppers and attract new ones.”

He’s being tactful! Unless your women customers are all over 80, you need to be actively pursuing social media strategies—listening and engaging, not advertising. Otherwise, the boat goes without you!

Social Shopping--Another Trend for 2010?

If I had added one more trend to Monday’s list, it would have been social shopping, so I decided to end the week with a summary. I’ve written a lot during the holiday shopping season about good uses of social media by retailers and results from the season confirm the importance of social media to ecommerce. According to Internet Retailer:

Another trend that emerged from the holiday season is the growing importance of online social networks, blogs and forums. Among consumers researching and buying holiday gifts online, 28% said social media influenced a purchase decision, compared with 11% who said they were guided by a customer-generated product review, 7% by an expert review and 6% by a Facebook message, comScore says. Observed comScore’s (chairman Gian) Fulgoni, “We are getting our first real glimpse at the impact social media will play on commerce as we enter the next decade.”


Earlier in the fall the site SheSpeaks asked about brand-related activities and found a lot of it on both social networks and Twitter. Other 2009 data from SheSpeaks found 55% of women they interviewed logging into social networks multiple times each day; 72% log in at least once a day. That’s huge!

The strategic use of social media by retailers is important, but the precise definition (if there is one!) of social shopping (or social commerce) is more narrow. It is an attempt to allow shoppers to bring onto the web some of the “social event” feeling of shopping in the mall with a friend. That may be an important part of the physical retail shopping experience that Internet retailers can provide on the web going forward.

As I’ve looked at the space, there are two basic ways to do that:

• Join one of the shopping sites that supports social experience. There are a lot of them and more being added. ThisNext is a good example of a site where a merchant can get a free tool that allows visitors to post a product to the site, where it joins the pool for online discussion. They have an application called Shopcast that encourages consumers to add ThisNext content widgets to their own personal pages. The common thread in this type of site is that retailers must encourage shoppers to list products on the site. Another set of sites appear to feature the products of partners; Couture Society is one of those.

Actually, it’s rather hard to find out precisely how retailers get products included; maybe that’s intentional, maybe it’s because the space is still new.

• Add social shopping functionality to your site. Clearly, this would be the more expensive option, but it gives retailers control. I wrote about Decision Step earlier in the year. BazaarVoice is another firm that offers a robust set of social applications. These, obviously, work on your own site and the merchant doesn’t have to rely on a third party site.

Be it social media in general, or social shopping in particular, interaction between shoppers seems to be the direction in which ecommerce is moving. Does it create a new type of business model, or is it just value-added to the existing ecommerce model? For now, I think it’s the latter, but that could change. It certainly is a part of Web 3.0 – the open ecosystem that is gradually replacing the walled-garden sites of the early Internet.

Internet marketers should keep an eye on what is going on in this space. It seems to offer merchants a way to reach out—often to the friends of friends (“birds of a feather”) who might also find the offering attractive. That’s cost-effective customer acquisition!

Tracking Coke on Social Media

While doing research for the best practices article yesterday, I noticed that Starbucks had pushed Coke out of first place in one of the listings—engagement, I think. I don’t pay much attention to the “who’s on first” kind of lists; I’m interested in looking for strategy. Coke, though, seems even less amenable to online social media than Starbucks, although I did write about an experiment they did in Second Life quite awhile ago. In any event, I checked it out.

The first thing I found was that there are over 1,000 Coke pages on Facebook. Lovely for them, but I was looking for their official fan page. I found it, and it’s impressive in design and content; clearly not a DIY effort! They have 4,107,432 fans, which sounds like a pretty good second place! More interesting is the integration of customer effort into their Facebook presence. Coke marketing people were paying attention to what customers were saying—and the rest is history. Check out this video for what they did and how they did it!

Again, lovely for them for co-opting their customers into their own marketing, but I looked a little further. It didn’t take much effort to find that they have a year-long promotion, launched in Madrid on New Year’s day. The three winning adventurers are already off on Expedition 206. The header pretty much says it all; the mission is to seek and share stories of happiness.


It’s worth spending some time on this site. The three young people are delightful and seem to be having a wonderful time 3 days into their excellent adventure. I was especially interested in the ways to follow it. The last similar thing I followed was a National Geographic deep sea project; those reports came to me by email, which suits my lifestyle. No email here that I can see. You can download the widget, which looks like fun. You can get posts on 4 of the major social networks; MySpace and Twitter are obvious; don’t know where Yahoo! puts it, although the link took me to my account sign-in. If you’re not a fan of Facebook Connect, you should click on the Facebook link and see what it tells you. See how fan pages can get a lot of fans quickly?

There should be a word on Facebook privacy (or lack thereof), which has once again been in the news recently. Facebook Connect brings in all your friends. When I went directly to Coke’s Facebook fan page, I got an interesting privacy notice from it. By clicking through to the page I gave Coke permission to access my Facebook information. Ok, but I do appreciate being made aware.

You have no privacy on Facebook; “get over it.” As individuals, be aware of what information you are putting out there for the world to see. As marketers be aware of what you are asking your customers to do—and be transparent about it! As long as you don’t put data or content out there that you wouldn’t be happy for your mother—or your best customer—to see, this is good fun!

Ok, so most of us aren’t Coke, and we can’t do a 206-day global promotion (actually, most of us probably don’t need to!). Is your business doing something that you’d like for people to know about and to follow—a green project is a good candidate these days. So is an event you sponsor. As is a cause you partner with.

On a smaller scale, I’m willing to bet that most of us have things we should be sharing with our customers—good things, innovative things—things that build our brand, whether it’s global or local!

A world map of social networks

If you wonder what is the most popular social network in your country or in what countries is FACEBOOK the most popular network you should have a look to the World Map of Social Networks in the Vincos Blog

Communicating the U Wisconsin Snowball Fight

I don't usually do current event announcements, but this one is too good to pass up. Actually, I don't usually have The Weather Channel on for a long period of time but we're having an awful storm on Cape Cod--the kind where my yard furniture blows around and I listen to TWC to find out how far it might go and when it's safe to set it upright again.
























The point is, however, that TWC knew that UWisconson Madison is closed today--a feed or manual monitoring, I don't know. However the local papers and broadcast outlets have picked it up also. Probably the first to know were students who quickly found out that their classes were canceled today!

A Facebook event page was quickly set up to announce a campus snowball fight at 2 p.m. I don't know what time the page was created but as of this writing about 1 p.m. EST, there are

• 5,482 confirmed guests
• 3,437 "maybe attending"
• 221 wall posts.

A lot of the wall posts are chatting about whether this could set a Guinness World Record and whether it's worth submitting. What I find even more fascinating is that a lot of the recent posts on the wall are from high school students. Are they already following the UW network and therefore picked up on the Facebook page at once? That probably beats all the paid advertising on the planet!

I made 2 screen captures, the first one something like an hour ago (I've been outdoors chasing yard furniture!). In that period of time the notice at the top of the posted image, **ESPN seeking videos" appeared. Ponder that!

I was already going to point out that this will be on the nightly news, and I wouldn't be surprised if CNN has it on live or at least has an Internet report before the event is over.

Note: While I was editing this someone from Madison located it! Wow!

Such is the power of instant, social-network-based communications!

A Community Manager Dishes

I’ve written about community monitoring several times because it’s key to successful online community. I was interested a couple of weeks ago in a Matt Rhodes Tweet about interviews Fresh Networks had conducted with Shirley Bradley, the community manager at Business Week. The first part of the interview has a lot to say about community management in general; the second is about community management in a publisher setting.

She describes her role as “efforts to include readers and incorporate user-generated content (comments, suggestions, longer form opinion pieces) in BW’s journalism, elevating our readers’ participation on the same level as our journalism.” Some of her specific duties are:
• Managing customer engagement; see the links in part 1 for the many activities involved. One important activity is to solicit reader involvement. In part 2 she talks more about the “crowdsourcing” techniques they use.
• Included in customer engagement is the monitoring of reader comments. Each editor also monitors his/her own blog. Monitoring is one way of gauging reader sentiment. It also includes removing comments that do not meet community guidelines.

Crowdsourcing is not my favorite term; it seems to smack of an unruly mob running amok. In spite of that, I wanted to see what they were doing, so I went to the CrowdSourcing page. You may have to go there yourself to read the explanation at the top of the page; the relevant phrase is “using large, distributed and minimally directed groups to accomplish tasks.” Ok. While you are there, note that there’s a Featured User—nice pr—and a block of Tweets on this topic (the main filter appears to be the term “crowdsourcing”). Well done!
















When you look further you find that Crowdsourcing is a page on their Business Exchange site (a community site powered by Ning, as far as I can tell). According to the site, “Business Exchange is a Web site that allows users to create business topics, collaboratively aggregate content from the entire Web and connect with other business focused users around these topics.” It has a mind-blowing number of topics (I checked on “Social Marketing,” surprise, surprise!). I registered using my LinkedIn profile. I’m not sure what that adds; it would have been just as easy to fill out the form. However, I may find that I signed up for something else on LinkedIn! Registered users can save content, create a network, and suggest topics as well as simply adding content.

The main take-away is that there’s a lot going on in Business Week’s social space. It’s probably not a luxury, it’s a necessity for a media vehicle that wants to survive in the changing media world. (On that subject, check out the website for Gourmet magazine before it goes away. The home page clearly focuses on content from their writers and editors. There are discussion forums, but there seems to be no serious effort to bring readers into the editorial process.)

Social media is undoubtedly not the silver bullet for survival for magazines, or any other media, for that matter. The more interesting question is whether a given vehicle can survive without enthusiastic reader participation.

While you’re mulling that question, you can learn a lot about community management (note it’s more than monitoring; see a great post by Dion Hinchcliffe) by reading the interviews with Shirley Bradley. Then stay tuned for my next post. I’ve discovered an interesting new community where content creation and monitoring takes on a whole new meaning—and potentially a whole new series of challenges!

Women, Brand Marketing, and Social Media

Two recent headlines summarize the dilemma for marketers:
• SocNet Branding Fails to Sway Women
• Are Women Really Ignoring Social Network Marketing? (eMarketer, September 17, 2009)
Both articles are based on data from a Q Interactive study recently presented at AdTech Chicago. (See the full presentation here; it has a lot of data and includes two successful brand studies.)

First, let’s admit that the research is all over the place and that headlines often fail to capture nuances. We know that women are on social networks like Facebook in large numbers. However the study as reported in eMarketer makes it clear that some brand marketing activities do have impact. In this economy, not surprisingly, coupons and discounts have the most impact—not exactly what brand marketers want to hear. Online ads have much less impact; purchasing advice from blogs, online communities and website have even less. A study by the Marketing to Moms Coalition and reported in Marketing Charts asks the question more broadly and finds 49% of online moms doing product/price research and 45% shopping for their children.


So moms are online; they are researching and making purchases. Why do they report so little influence from online brand development efforts like marketer blogging and use of social networks. Maybe it’s just the word “marketer.” We also know that WOM is still the most trusted source of information. In the study I talked about earlier this month “Consumer opinions posted online” came in a distant, but still strong, second. Surprise, surprise! Consumers have never been highly trusting of advertising. I don’t think it matters a bit whether that advertising is online or in traditional media.

The difference, obviously, is that consumers now have the ability to make their experiences and opinions available online. That puts them in strong competition with marketers who are trying to make their voices heard online. And since “people like me” are trusted to give good advice, their voices have impact. That says a lot about how brand marketers should be approaching social network marketing. In the Kraft and Fisher-Price brand studies in the Q Interactive presentation, you’ll see lots of coupons, which the data says women are looking for, and contests, which are engaging. But you’ll also see growing attempts to dialog with women and to listen to what they are saying.

But there may well be another issue that arises from the nature of the social platforms themselves. A study from BlogHer, iVillage and Compass Partners reminds us that women use different social platforms for different purposes. Social networks are primarily used for social purposes. Blogs score much higher for both getting information and sharing opinions. (See the full presentation here.)

Social media can work for brand development and marketing. It doesn’t come quickly or easily, as I’ve said many times. It’s important to start by recognizing that not all platforms are created equal, as far as marketers are concerned. The corollary to that statement is that it takes different types of marketing effort to be successful on different platforms. Starting from this rather simple premise should help brand marketers develop social media strategies that do have impact.