Fun Facts To Know And Tell About Social Media In 2011

By Kip Knight & Dave Evans

• Social media and mobile devices are rapidly becoming a common way people engage with each other and brands; brand marketers need to be proactive about leveraging this accelerating trend

o   There are now over 500M Facebook users (with more than 200 million active users currently accessing Facebook through their mobile devices)

o   There are over 90 million tweets per day on Twitter with millions of comments, complaints and recommendation about brands

o   Every weekday, there are about 7.5 million people tuning into Oprah vs. 43 million people play a Zynga game

o   P&G recently shifted the bulk of its daytime advertising from soaps to social media marketing campaigns

o   Online advertising is predicted to set a new record in 2011, growing 14 percent to  51.9 billion, up from  45.6 billion in 2010

• Social media is now much more than just marketing…it’s about the whole business (i.e. customer support, product development, etc)

o   Leading companies who have bet big on social media (such as Dell, Ford and Starbucks) are now integrating social media into all facets of business  (including crisis management)

o   A recent global survey indicated only 29 percent of companies even have a social media policy – this is a very dangerous position for a company to be in given the damage one untrained employee can now do to a company (even with the best of intentions)

• Social media is turning into a major “listening platform” for brands

o   Technology is enabling us to convert millions of online comments into an on-going tool to measure consumer sentiment (and dig into the “why” and source of this sentiment) in close to real time

o   This will NOT replace the importance of in-depth consumer understanding (such as in-home visits) but helps enhance understanding of what’s happening in the marketplace

• Companies should have a global game plan and strategy to stay ahead of the curve in the rapidly evolving social media space

o   A company needs to be integrated into overall business strategy (not just marketing); they also need to utilize social media as a primary way of listening and responding to their target consumers(as well as monitoring what’s happening with competition and category) as a core competency

o   Companies need to make a  time and budget commitment to developing a strategic framework,  in-depth training and robust online tools to ensure their teams are prepared for managing their brands (both offensive and defensive) using various social media platforms

Social Fatigue?

July 24th, 2011 • social media • 6 Comments

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With the recent launch of Google+, marketers are excited to have a shiny new social network. Even though brands aren’t technically allowed on Google+ yet, some (likeFord Motor) are setting up personal profiles to get started and the marketing world is buzzing with possibilities.

When thinking about opportunities, it’s important for brands to remember that the message is more important than the media. The quality of the conversation is more important than the quality of the platform.

A couple months ago, I shared Andrew Blakeley’s “Social Consumer” experiment where he “Liked” every brand that asked him.  His conclusion: “My week as a social consumer left me tired and confused. It left my Facebook newsfeed crammed with nonsense, to the point that I could scroll entire pages without seeing my friends.”

Even as marketers excitedly brainstorm how to reach consumers on a brand new social network, many consumers are tiring with how brands are reaching them on the current ones. An antisocial brand that uses social media is still an antisocial brand. A content strategy must come before a social network strategy.

The arrival of Google+ is a good time to revisit and reevaluate how our brands interact with consumers. It’s not enough for communication to be good for the brand. It has to be good for the consumer.

Tom Fishburne

What Dell can teach your company about social media ROI

By Jesse Stanchak on July 18, 2011 | Comments (3)

How is your company determining the return on investment for its social media programs?

At the recent Corporate Social Media Summitin New York City, Richard Binhammer, Dell’s head of social media and corporate-reputation management, said the equation is a little more complicated than simply calculating money in and out. As social media programs evolve, they require a more sophisticated understanding of their benefits, he said.

A few lessons from his talk:

ROI is about more than sales. From many other companies, that would sound like a dodge, but Dell is one of the few companies that’s able to say it uses Twitter as a direct-sales tool. The company hasn’t announced an update to that sales figure in many months because it is thinking about ROI differently, Binhammer said. It’s not only one number because it isn’t only about sales; it’s also about increasing business value, he said.

Remember that social media are only another tool. The problem of social media scalability becomes apparent once you realize that businesses can’t win over a fan one time and then move on, thinking that they’ve made a fan for life. Social media aren’t a channel for pushing communications; they’re a tool for managing relationships. “Control is not as successful as influence,” Binhammer said.

Social media can transform your business. If you aren’t taking into account a network’s ability to affect your brand’s communication strategy, product development and customer service, as well as its sales and marketing potential, you’re not seeing the full ROI of social media. Done properly, social media can increase the value of every part of your organization that affects customers. Organizations shouldn’t be asking how social media are making them money; they should be asking how social media make an organization better. That means social media shouldn’t be run by any one division; they need to be part of every aspect of an organization, Binhammer said.

How are you using social media to increase your organization’s value?

Image credit: jpa1999, via iStockphoto

Things That Happen On The Internet Every Sixty Seconds!

Infographic by- Shanghai Web Designers


Did You Know That - In 60 SECONDS

Search engine Google serves more that 694,445 queries

6,600+ pictures are uploaded on Flickr

600 videos are uploaded on YouTube videos, amounting to 25+ hours of content

695,000 status updates, 79,364 wall posts and 510,040 comments are published on Social Networking site Facebook

70 New domains are registered

168,000,000+ emails are sent

320 new accounts and 98,000 tweets are generated on Social Networking site Twitter

iPhone applications are downloaded more than13,000 times

20,000 new posts are published on Micro-blogging platform tumbler

Popular web browser FireFox is downloaded more than 1700 times

Popular blogging platform Wordpress is downloaded more than 50 times

WordPress Plugins aredownloaded more than 125 times

100 accounts are created on professional networking site LinkedIn

40 new Questions are asked on YahooAnswers.com

100+ questions are asked on Answers.com

1 new article is published on Associated Content, the world’s largest source of community-created content

1 new definition is added on UrbanDictionary.com

1,200+ new ads are created on Craigslist

370,000+ minutes of voice calls done by Skype users

13,000+ hours of music streaming is done by personalized Internet radio provider Pandora

1,600+ reads are made on Scribd, the largest social reading publishing company

Zuckerberg Kills Emailing With Instant Messaging

 

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Instant messaging available from platforms such as Facebook looks set to replace cell phone text messaging. As the new generation of teenagers buy into smartphones such as iPhones, and BlackBerries because they provide a free BBM instant messenger platforms and there is no limit to the length or number of characters in a message.

Not so long ago teenagers revelled in the ability to ‘text speak’, a garbled mix of phonetic spelling, numbers and invented shorthand which, much to their amusement, was almost completely undecipherable to their parents. Suddenly this trend has turned on its head as more expensive smartphones with predictive text requiring less thought and are just as quick to write, are faster cheaper instant internet based real time text-based conversations. Now to use ‘text speak’ is to admit to not owning a smartphone!

Instant messaging is also predicted to make emails redundant, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was quoted as saying that ‘email is dead’ due to the launch last November 2010 of Facebook’s instant messaging service.

The Antisocial Network

Brands are flocking to Facebook in greater herds than ever before. Facebook has become an integral tick box on just about every marketing plan.

Yet setting up a Facebook page alone won’t suddenly make a brand more social. The question for a brand to ask is not whether to use social media. The question to ask is how to make your brand more engaging. An antisocial brand using social media is still an antisocial brand.

After drawing “how brands talk” a few weeks ago about the self-promotional way that many brands talk with consumers, I’ve been thinking about where these brands talk to consumers. Many brands use social media to talk at consumers the same way they talk at consumers everywhere. They blab about their benefits, products, and services.

Yet there is no captive audience in media nowadays, particularly online. Brands should think less about transactions and more about relationships.

Think about the Nike Livestrong/Chalkbot campaign, which deservedly won the digital grand prix at Cannes a few months ago. Nike sponsored a computerized road painting machine that “chalked” inspirational messages along the Tour de France. People submitted 36,000 messages through social media. Each message was printed on the section of the course, photographed, tagged with GPS coordinates and emailed to the person who submitted it.

What made this campaign social was not that it used social media tools. It was about the cause, not the shoes. It’s not where brands communicate. It’s how brands communicate.

Misconceptions of Social Media !!

Many brands bring an advertising campaign mindset to social media. A campaign has a start date and an end date. One campaign ends to make way for another.

Yet success at social media requires sustained involvement. Social media doesn’t start and end with a “Like”. It grows over time. There can be individual campaigns as part of a social media platform, yet the baseline must be strong and continuous.

Treating social media as a campaign is as ridiculous as treating a call center as a campaign. When done well, social media is an indelibly linked part of the brand experience. Instead of “campaign”, try substituting the word “commitment”. Instead of planning a social media campaign, make a social media commitment.

In my marketing experience, I’ve rarely seen one campaign endure longer than a year or 18 months. Often, a new campaign is introduced with the arrival of a new brand team, a new agency, or a new planning year. Yet, it’s the same consumer and the same brand. In social media, invest in the long haul.

One of the things I’ve liked about my various Marketoonist projects is the long-term continuity. With one client, we’ve published a cartoon a week, every week, for the last 2.5 years. The strength of the connection grows over time.

Aside from a campaign mindset, many brands fail to consider the actual role of brand communication in their consumers’ lives. Andrew Blakeley conducted an interesting “Find us on Facebook” experiment recently after hearing his boss say: “This morning my yoghurt told me to find it on Facebook. It didn’t tell me why, it just told me to find it. Why on Earth would I want to find a yoghurt on Facebook? It’s a yoghurt!”

Andrew vowed to become a “Social Consumer” for one week and to “Like” every brand that asked him.

“My week as a social consumer left me tired and confused. It left my Facebook newsfeed crammed with nonsense, to the point that I could scroll entire pages without seeing my friends. It left me feeling a bit sad for the digital marketers and agencies who were building great content that wasn’t getting the attention it deserved. If you’re reading this and you work in advertising, or you’re a marketer working for a brand – next time you think about telling your consumers to find you on Facebook, consider telling them why.”

Before crafting a social media plan, first become a “social consumer” yourself. What would you personally welcome in your newsfeed? The experiment will shape what you create.

(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away two signed prints of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment from my blog and one comment from Facebook at 5:00 PST on Monday. Thanks!)