The Real Reasons Why Brands Like GM Still Don't Like Facebook Advertising
May 15, 2012 by Robert Hof
There’s a curious disconnect plaguing Facebook in the run-up to its initial public offering this week: Just about every marketer knows she or he has to be on Facebook to reach its nearly 1 billion users, which is why ad spending on the social network nearly doubled last year. But even as they write Facebook checks, those same marketers invariably confess that they’re unsure what they’re getting from all that spending–in particular whether Facebook ads ultimately push more products off store shelves.
The Quality of the Conversation on Facebook Matters
May 14, 2012 by John Bell
Last September Michael Scissons, president-CEO of Syncapse, used data to reveal that “Engagement on the Facebook walls of leading brands is down 22%.” He plotted engagement metrics on the top 300 brand pages. His hypothesis is that brands are not delivering long term value in favor of quick bumps from overuse of coupons and offers.
More recently the Facebook Timeline innovations seemed to improve overall engagement. According to Simply Measured, the change brought a 14% Increase in Fan Engagement. The format and the much industry-discussed launch called for lots more pictures and video content which saw a 65% increase in engagement (people interactive with multimedia content).
Are we good or are we in trouble? Are brands delivering the best quality interaction and value via their page content or is it all devolving? Are learning the hard lessons of the difference between a Facebook relationship and a broadcast channel?
Quality matters
My hypothesis is that many brands are not doing all they can to create a sustained and valuable relationship with their fans, followers, customers via these still new channels (facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc…). They too often fall into a habit of just broadcasting out content. Since the metrics say pictures and video do well, they try and create as much of that as possible. Sometimes they fly by the numbers alone without context. Rohit Bharagava has a new compelling book out now called Likenomics. It is not about Facebook. He makes a great point about marketers who steer completely by data without regard for context in the section, “Why Context Matters (And Your Sticky Website Actually Stinks.” He cites John Hayes from American Express with a thoughtful quote – “We tend to overvalue the things we can measure and undervalue the things we cannot.” I would add one word in there – “We tend to overvalue the things we can measure easily and undervalue the things we cannot.”Marketers are looking at readily available data on what drives the most interactions. They are not always weighing the benefits of a varied and enduring relationship with fans. I hope everyone knows that a small number of fans in any fanbase routinely do most of the interacting with content. That is a standard quality of many communities. Keeping that loyal core involved is valuable and just good business. And, yes, when asked, consumers cite coupons or offers as the number one reason they follow a brand. Again, let’s not over simplify and make every interaction a “10% off coupon.” That flies in the face of everything we know about building valuable brands.
The data should guide us. Not rule us.
Relevance too
AdAge recently needlessly took a jab at the social media specialists who champion a more conversational approach to wall content.
“Among the weirdness Facebook’s existence has loosed upon the world is the idea that it’s OK, and perhaps even good business, for brands to sidle up and give you verbal balm for your case of the Mondays, ask for predictions on the big game and offer random thoughts on things that have not a whit to do with their product or service.
The touchy-feely strategy is meant to be conversational — human, even. But new data from Facebook itself tell us that what looks good on the social-media guru’s presentation deck isn’t the best approach for making Facebook work for the brand.”
Their true point and the point of the Facebook study is that content that relates to the brand – the reason people liked the page in the first place – matters. Users engage more with content relevant to the page topic which just happens to be the brand.
Clearly, relevant content is key, yet a conversational tone true to the brand can help as well.
Create the right mix
Different wall content drives different fan action. Likes, Shares, Comments all have value but not equal value. Object Likes (liking a piece of content vs. a page, also called “fanning”) are often devalued by brands. I had a spirits client who dropped them from KPI metrics since he felt, rightly so, that it was too thoughtless a gesture and was not indicative of any serious engagement. ‘Shares’ show up in your wall and therefore take bigger advantage of the network effect available in Facebook.As Matt Creamer put it in the recent AdAge article, “Facebook to Brands: You’re Posting Stuff Wrong”,
“Another important finding was that asking people to like a post indeed yielded more likes, but it didn’t do much for the other forms of engagement, including the all-important share action that sends a brand’s post into a users’ timelines for all of their followers to see. Compared with likes, shares represent a bigger investment from the consumer and occur less frequently. Thus, shares are often going to be more meaningful from a marketing perspective. After all, they suggest the brand is tapping into that friend-of-fan network that’s central to Facebook’s viral proposition.”
We have found 7 simple types of content that each drive different types of user engagement. (See 7 Types of Facebook posts here.) Our Community Managers use them creatively and responsively with communities to drive long term and immediate actions. We listen and respond. If we drove simply by the data without context or a long term commitment then we would simply post remarkable picture after remarkable video – multimedia driving the most ‘shares’ in the Facebook study.
Quality of the relationship matters. Quality of the content, too. Brands can embrace a more fine-tuned and, yes, conversational but not irrelevant, cadence to their communications. Just using the Facebook wall as a broadcast channel will never justify the huge valuation in the Facebook IPO nor the substantial bets that brands have made in their multi-million dollar ‘partnerships’ with Facebook.
5 Steps CMOs Can Take To Make Social Media Work
May 9, 2012 by Kimberly Whitler
Social media is important. CMOs get it. There are plenty of articles that detail how important social media is and many others talking about how unprepared CMOs are to handle it. However, few articles focus on the gap ? the space between knowing social media is important and being able to successfully leverage it.
A New Category Defined: Social Performance Software
May 4, 2012 by jeremiah_owyang
A new software category has emerged to bring performance marketing to social channels.
After interviewing over 10 software companies and 10 agencies, a new trend has emerged that will change the social business landscape. What is this trend? The marketing performance techniques to refine TV, Radio, SEO and other marketing mediums are now moving to the social space. Read my definitive post on Mashable to learn how this impacts not only brands, but also Facebook and my long term predictions on how this will play out.
Market Needs
Companies are struggling to scale to keep up with all the conversations in this space, secondly, the noise is becoming deafening with everyone from consumers to brands all shouting in social that targeting is needed to cut through the noise. Those that deploy volume quickly find they’re part of the noise, and get cast by the wayside. As a result, we’re seeing a new category emerge, called Social Performance Software.Social Performance Software Defined
Software tools and methods that analyze, plan, deliver, and measure media such as ads, content, and conversations published in social channels. For example, they will analyze the conversations of your followers, then suggest which content and media to publish, then determine when to publish, on which channel, and to whom. As a result, content will reach the intended audiences and result in higher resonation, or higher call to action ratesList of Vendors focused on Social Performance
Here’s a list of the vendors, if you know of others, leave a comment below. Please note that this category stretches across a number of product lines, as this will be a horizontal feature set spanning nearly every social software company.
- Adobe Social, which includes multiple acquisitions including Omniture and Context Optional.
- BuddyMedia, offers both campaign platform marketing tools along with social ads with their Brighter Option acquisition.
- Bazaarvoice, now has turned their earned content from ratings and reviews into a new social ad unit –even outside of FB.
- Crowdbooster, analyzes, measures and then optimizes when content should publish.
- Prosodic, which analyzes the who, what, where, and aids publishers.
- Shoutlet, focused on larger scale companies can help with complicated publishing needs, at scale.
- SocialFlow, analyzes your current socialgraph activity, guides users on content creation, then publishes at highest resonation.
- Tigerlily, focuses on publishing content by theme, audience and location, increasing relevance.
- UberVU, who first mines and analyzes data, then optimizes when content will publish.
- Webtrends Social, tracks content and ads, and measures performance across these multiple locations.
- Wildfire, a campaign platform marketing company has recently partnered with Adaptly to provide social ads and more
I’ve written other posts discussed why this trend will be important, one major industry force is that with Facebook and Twitter now offering ads (and new ad networks will emerge off FB and Twitter) we’ll continue to see social media agencies turn to advertising. I’ll be writing more about this space in the coming quarters, such as benefits and downsides of automation, and where this future will head.
Update: This is on the official Altimeter blog, and CMS Wire.
Article: Is Your Social Media Strategy Global?
May 4, 2012 by (author unknown)
North America is no longer the center of the social universe
Dump Your Social Media Strategy. It's Not Customer Service
May 3, 2012 by Christine Crandell
Companies of all types have jumped on the social bandwagon. The allure of having a deep, meaningful customer relationship is enticing and social media is so easy. Companies have multiple social media accounts across a wide range of channels including Twitter , Facebook, Tumblr, FourSquare, LinkedIn, Google+, and the list goes on. Anyone with a thousand or more employees will likely have over 170, mostly unmanaged, social media accounts. With each new tool introduced, like Pinterest, companies rush to get onboard without thinking about how it fits into their business strategy or customer expectations. Too bad all that time has been wasted.
Men Are From Google+, Women Are From Pinterest
April 13, 2012 by Steve Olenski
With all due respect to John Gray, men are not from Mars and women are not from Venus.
Smart Argentina's 140-Character Twitter Commercial
April 10, 2012 by (author unknown)
To launch Smart Argentina’s Twitter account, @smartArg, BBDO Argentina created what it bills as the first “Twitter commercial.”
Who Are Your Facebook Fans? Your Best Customers.
April 10, 2012 by (author unknown)
Your Facebook fans are more likely to buy from you, consider you, and of course, recommend you.
Article: Companies Incorporate Social Media Monitoring into Bottom Line
April 5, 2012 by (author unknown)
Marketers making greater effort to track metrics such as customer satisfaction and overall buzz
Coping With Twitter’s Unfollow Bug
March 28, 2012 by jeremiah_owyang
I originally posted this on Techcrunch, and cross-posted here on the Web Strategy blog.
If you’re like me, you may have noticed that Twitter may be arbitrarily, randomly, and haphazardly, unfollowing people you fully intended to follow. Similarly, if you’ve ever noticed your friends and contacts unfollowed you, it may have caused a sense of confusion, dread, or self-insecurity. Before one spirals into a series of apologies or deep-depression, it’s likely not your fault, (whew!).
What’s causing this? I’m not sure, so I asked my proper contacts at Twitter who responded “This is a bug, and our team is working to fix it.” They also sent me a link to their support FAQ, which indicates the known issue. I’ll leave it to the team at Twitter to get this resolved, but in the meantime, let’s discuss how we can cope with this industry phenomenon.
Imagine this bug in the physical world: Your dear Aunt Margaret wasn’t invited to your wedding due to mail parcels gone missing, or your executive wasn’t invited to your big presentation meeting because your address book deleted him, or you couldn’t call your best friend to let them know about your funding announcement because his contact info went missing.
The act of following someone in Twitter is an important social indicator for at least three reasons: 1) A follow suggests the individuals content is worthy of listening to and you want to hear their thoughts –even the most mundane ones 2) It’s an important indicator that you’re willing to engage in deeper conversations by receiving direct messages and 3) At a broader social perspective, this is a gesture this person is in your broader social clan, your kin, your affinity.
Importantly, in my line of work (and probably in yours too), direct messages have become a mainstay of communications with clients; in fact, some overloaded executives ask me to DM them, rather than email them. In more than one case has a qualified business request come by direct messages requesting my research and advisory services. Unlike the overloaded email channel, direct messages are an important opt-in business communication channel of higher quality signal.
Despite the business communication opportunity losses, there are broader social impacts that may relationships around you. Just a few days ago, one of my dear colleagues Susan (@Setlinger) pointed out that she wanted to send me some information, but noticed I had unfollowed her and half-jokingly wondered if she’d offended me. This wasn’t any passive-aggressive maneuver by me, I had full intentions to follow her, and quickly apologized and refollowed her.
Yet, I wonder how many business, personal, and casual relationships are strained by the bug haphazardly unfollowing. It causes us to give pause and question the stability of the Twitter infrastructure, usage of my personal data and social network, and what important messages I may have missed from my trusted Twitter network.
So what can you do? If you find that you’ve arbitrarily unfollowed someone in Twitter (or maybe you need an excuse to escape the ex), and you’re in a potential embarrassing situation, I recommend bookmarking this blog post, and sending it your apparent victim, explaining the situation was out of your hands. Hopefully no relationships were damaged, and we can continue happily twitter-ing with relationships salvaged.
I’d love to hear from you, have you been a victim of the bug? How are you coping?
Related Links: My findings spread to Telgraph, Huffington Post, Mashable, Verge, cnet and many others.
Article: Will Brands See User Engagement on Google+?
March 28, 2012 by (author unknown)
Brand posts and engagement peak midweek and in the morning on Google+
Article: CEOs Who Tweet Held in High Regard
March 27, 2012 by (author unknown)
Top execs slower than employees, customers to view social media as communications channel
Social Media in the C-Suite
March 22, 2012 by McKinsey & Company
Executives who want to understand what social media really means need to jump in.
Facebook Brand Timelines: 6 Big Changes Every Marketer Needs to Understand
March 3, 2012 by (author unknown)
Facebook announced to brand marketers the world over that, within the month, everything they knew about fan Pages on Facebook would be overturned. While you get your brand ready for the new Timeline format, here are six important changes to keep top-of-mind. 1. Updated Look and Feel 2. Reduced Tab Visibility 3. No Default Landing Page 4. New Way to Feature Content 5. Current Tab Content and Applications Become Outdated 6. Private Messages Between Brands and Users
Facebook's gaming boom is over, analyst firm says
February 24, 2012 by (author unknown)
While the number of Facebook gamers grew dramatically in 2009 and 2010, but the number grew little in 2011. In 2010, about 50 percent of Facebook’s users were gamers, but that percentage fell to 25 percent in 2011. The assessment is a contrast to one offered by analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities yesterday. Monthly active users for Facebook game giant Zynga fell in the fourth quarter to 225 million, from 266 million at the end of the third quarter.
Enterprise Social Networking: Focus on Relationships (Altimeter Report)
February 22, 2012 by jeremiah_owyang
Altimeter’s latest report now on Enterprise (inside of companies) social networking is now out from Charlene Li, author of Groundswell, Open Leadership and my business partner. She conducted thorough analysis by surveying 185 users, surveyed 81 ESN decision makers and interviewed 12 technology vendors.
Key findings that attracted my eye include:
- Long term adoption often unsuccessful beyond one department. What’s interesting is there’s lots of initial enthusiasm but a slow decline after deployment. In many cases, primary adoption occurred in the marketing/product section, IT, followed by sales and corporate communication.
- Highest adoption of fremium tools. Interesting breakdown of vendors, with self-service Yammer in the lead, followed by Chatter and Tellingent and IBM connections. What’s interesting is these fremium tools enter the market, get their hooks in and grow adoption and switch to premium offerings.
- Companies are measuring in the wrong way. Lack of metrics (or measuring the wrong way) by focusing on measuring conversations or engagement –rather than measuring improvement in relationships
Who said social media will reduce emails?
What’s interesting is that enterprise social networks don’t actually reduce internal email. The report also includes an actionable plan to get started, while there’s lots of details in the bullet points (filled with real world examples from real research interviews), they include four ways ESNs drive business value, including: 1) Encourage Sharing, 2) Capture Knowledge, 3) Enable Action, and 4) Empower people.Open Research: Use it, Share it, and We’ll Publish More
We’re continuing to publish reports, and have a growing archive on our site, and will be doing a variety of webinars in support of these research findings. If you found them helpful, we look forward to you engaging with us in the conversation, and appreciate you using, sharing, and applying the findings.You’ll find the full report embedded below which you can download, print and share, also read Charlene’s post.
Pinterest: Essential or Beguiling?
February 20, 2012 by John Bell
Almost everything you need to know about Pinterest is conveniently wedged into this infographic from lemon.ly. It reaches women like no other social platform. It delivers more traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LInkedIN combined (kind of like saying a country is bigger than Iran, Turkey and Pakistan combined – sounds like a lot but less than Russia, Australia and Brazil combined). Pinterest is growing very fast.Many brands are jumping on board. This raises the obvious question as to whether Pinterest is worth the energy and effort now or whether brands should wait. Is it essential to your business? Or is it an innovative platform for you and therefore worth some resources? Or is it simply beguiling – waiting to charm or enchant you and divert you from more meaningful programs? This last risk is a big one.
In Altimeter’s latest report on Content: The New Marketing Equation, Rebecca Lieb cautions,
“Bright, shiny objects, i.e. a fixation on newer channels and technologies, can distract from foundational channels, e.g. search, written content, such as blogs, and educational content.”
Certainly many marketers are skeptical and even disgusted with the amount of attention Pinterest has earned. As a marketer, I don’t worry about that. None of us really know whether Pinterest will become a significant platform or become the next Empire Avenue (hey, even MySpace is making a comeback!)It’s more important to evaluate this platform and the others vying for attention and resources based upon how it can help your business today.
It’s Essential
If you are an ecommerce offering catering to women, you should jump on board now. Many retailers are doing just that. The number one ecommerce retailer in this space is Etsy. The haystack nature of that marketplace seems ideally suited for the visual curation that Pinterest delivers. The most remarkable Pinterest quality is really the women. While Instagram is also big with women, it doesn’t have the same referral traffic as Pinterest. If you have a product collection well-suited to this curation, have a storefront/product page to point people to and sell to women, then Pinterest is an easier choice. While you are figuring out the value of the “engagement” metrics (pin-ing and sharing, essentially), you can still look to count the referral traffic which is already a valuable KPI for online stores.
A Worthy Innovation
I certainly know plenty of big brands who are going all in on Facebook. Anything else – even Twitter – is a distraction. That may be a dangerous single-mindedness. We are all pushing our organization’s ability to adapt to new customer and stakeholder behaviors. We need to learn. We need to learn how to cope with the flood of choices available to people out there. Should you be on Google+? I think that one is a good bet. It may take another six months to understand its business impact but experimentation via limited investment is the only way to figure it out.
If you want to specifically engage women who are energized by fashion, food, home design, graphic design or hobby, then it may be worth some effort and investment. These categories do seem to dominate and you can see it in the most followed users.
If you have a collection of visual images to share that are of natural interest to people or if your brand intersects with a theme/meme already gaining traction, then that gives you one more good reason to engage. It doesn’t make sense to take this platform on if you don’t already have the picture content or the theme that lends itself to pinning (bookmarking) images.
Give yourself a time constraint like 2-3 hours a week. Pick out the likely KPIs that might show progress from click-throughs to followers and likes. Benchmark yourself against other similar brands or against ones you aspire to being compared to. Every brand should have some tolerance for innovating on new platforms. With a logical decision tree and quarterly evaluations, it’s possible to keep the level of effort reasonable.
Just Plain Beguiling
The simplest filter is women. If you are trying to engage C-suite decision makers (let’s face it – predominantly men) you are pretty far off your target. If you have no picture assets (e.g. catalogs) or objects that capture people’s interest, then the level of effort to create them and hope they are of intrinsic interest to people just isn’t worth it. The reason we are intrigued by Pinterest is the natural growth of the platform. Our job must be to understand it and make use of it, not try and game it.
SEO Blogger is skeptical of Pinterest’s value today. He outlines a scenario to evaluate its potential based upon a crude ROI model. As a solo-practitioner, his criteria makes sense. For brands considering the platform, we are way off any ROI that matters. Simply know the platform, judge whether it is essential, innovative or merely beguiling and go from there.
Great Pinterest pages:
- Etsy – probabaly the top page, how else can you find these must-have rings
- West Elm – I love their collections. If I was currently shopping for furniture, thsi woudl definitely make it easier and more enjoyable
- Michael’s Stores – how else can you make sense of all the craft supplies these guys sell?
Social Business: We’re Just Getting Started
February 15, 2012 by jeremiah_owyang
Recently, folks suggested that social business space was getting washed out, especially with Social Media Week spreading across the globe and being hosted at many corporations. Yet despite the interesting and activity around this topic, many folks are confused around what maturity really looks like. Managing a Facebook page to promote the latest campaign isn’t really social business, it’s just social added to existing interactive marketing.
I was talking with industry peer Michael Brito (former Intel and now at Edelman) about the maturity of the space at Cisco’s social media week yesterday, and we both agree this space is just heating up. But don’t listen to us, instead, let’s review a sample from a recent Altimeter Report on Social Business of what actual corporate decision makers said in a recent survey:
Figure 1: Only the Most Advanced Companies are Conducting Social Business Holistically, Beyond Individual Silos
Figure 2: Advanced Companies are Formalizing Processes to Intake Customer Insights
Figure 3: Only the Most Advanced Companies Are Integrating Social Data into Customer Databases
Let’s take a look at this data, to understand why the social business space is still very immature:
The Industry Isn’t Mature, Few Have Reached Advanced
Altimeter’s research often segments buyers by their maturity, as it helps to forecast future behaviors and we wanted to share this today. First note this maturity breakout of these corporations (many of which are global national) that have over 1000 employees: novice are 44, intermediate 81, and advanced are 18. Percentage wise, we see that 56% of the 143 are lumped in the intermediate stages, followed by 30% of the market in novice, and followed by the remaining advanced a mere 12% of the set. What does this mean? While most companies are past the experimentation stage, they’ve yet to roll these out across the corporation or think bigger than campaigns or specific business units.Limited Integration Across Business Units, Products, and Customer Databases
Looking at Figure 1, we can see that many companies are not even integrating this across their enterprise. We know from data that rollout usually starts in Marketing (with a segment of that being corp comm), followed by customer support who has to respond to angry clients, followed by product teams, and then low adoption for partner ecosystem and supply chain. One sign of an advance company is the ability to integrate customer feedback into the product roadmap in Figure 2. We know this is a sign of maturity as it requires both vertical approval from executives and broad approval across product lines and beyond –it’s often against the culture of many engineering groups. Lastly, in Figure 3, companies barely even have a full view of their customers in the social space, as data is siloed among brand monitoring, locked in Facebook apps, and spread among the company.Understand What Advanced Corporations Look LIke
There’s a few criteria I look for when seeing if a company is advanced beyond the three figures presented above. Nearly all employees are using social in a safe and organized way (called Holistic). Another criteria is data is being aggregated from multiple locations and the company is able to predict and anticipate what customers are going to do. Thirdly, they stop using the terms ‘social business’ and just use the term ‘business’ as this integrates into their normal digital communications. While somewhat dated (2010) I created a list of what an advanced company looks like, although I feel it needs updating in 2012.I look forward to hearing from you, what are you seeing: Are companies starting to mature? What are your indicators?
LinkedIn Shares Jump as Ads, Subscriptions Boost Revenue
February 10, 2012 by (author unknown)
Shares of LinkedIn Corp., the biggest professional-networking website, rose the most since November after it reported quarterly sales that more than doubled and forecast higher 2012 revenue, buoyed by advertising and subscriptions.