Social Media Strategy

According to an article in  www.Gigaom.com :

• U.S. web users tripled the amount of time they spent on social networks in August from the same month last year, according to Nielsen.
• Estimated online advertising spending on social networks more than doubled over the same period.
• Around 17 percent of all time spent on the web in August in the U.S. was on social networks, up from 6 percent during the same period a year ago, suggesting that sites like Twitter and Facebook have not only grown their audience size, but augmented user engagement.
• Meanwhile, advertising on social networks rose to $108 million last month from $49 million in August of 2008, an increase of 119 percent.

This week the always interesting PSFK  released The Good Brands Report of 2009

They were seeking companies that were leaders in the following areas of innovation, environmental consciousness and social policy.

The winning brands were identified as:

• Google, Apple, Zipcar, Good Magazine
• Amazon, Facebook, Virgin, Twitter
• IKEA,  Skype

More interesting were the  common traits of these winning brands as listed in the report:

Utility – Aim to enhance your usefulness for the consumer. In doing so, look not only at your product or service, but the eco-system that surrounds it.

Experimentation – Constant innovation is the essential element of growth. Continual- ly push the boundaries of your offering and create ancillary products.

Design – Premium aesthetics coupled with consistent delivery wins every time. A premium experience can be applied to any product or service, no matter where it sits on the price spectrum. Make your audience feel valued, encouraging them to include you as part of their identity.

Community and listening – Create a sense of community for your customers. Actively engage them and listen to what they have to say. They are the best source of guidance for improved service.

Change the model – Look at your consumers’ eco-system of needs and change your business model to suit them.

Beyond the 30 second ad – Of the top 100 largest advertising spenders in 2008, none of them made it onto this list. Instead of spending money on advertising, leverage the existing community that’s involved with your brand to promote your products and services.

Environmental priorities - Brands in the lower half of the list lose points prizing innovation over environmental responsibility. Build in sustainable practices wherever you can in your brand’s eco-system.

Download the complete Good Brands Report of 2009

Yes the blog has been a bit quiet of late. I am currently in Shimoda, Japan taking a break.

It’s a great spot good food, surfing and views.  A relaxing place after time in Tokyo. Normal blogging resumes in the near future…

Ever walked past an empty restaurant and passed it by - wanting that last table in the more popular one? Well a new report out this week confirmed what many of us have always known popularity breeds popularity and this is evident on Twitter.

The study by co. Rapleaf examined the Twitter profiles on a word-of-mouth marketing list from a major consumer packaged goods firm. They then looked at the size in changes between March and June 2009 as an indication of how users follow, and get followed, on Twitter.

Findings

• Users in the top 0.1% of the group—those with the most followers to begin with—increased their average follower count by 275% from March to June.
• Those in the top 1% saw their average followers rise by 146% over the period,
• The top 10% of users grew followers by 126%.

The more followers users started with, the faster their gains. Read the full article in EMarketer http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007282

 The article said:

“An updated media brief issued to media owners in the last few weeks introduced a remuneration model based on defined measures of engagement. P&G, which owns brands such as Gillette, Pampers and Pantene, will now pay publisher sites running its campaigns more money for engaged users - for example, those who go beyond viewing ads and sign up to newsletters, play games or watch videos”.

The article discusses mixed reactions from publishers to the new CPE (cost per engagement) model.  It will be interesting to see if any advertisers in Australia follow suit.

P&G

Interested to read more about P&G the company? read  about their new ‘Values’ strategy written about recently in the Harvard Business Blog

Google has just announced its services to the public sector.  Google for the Public Sector is the outcome of a recent  Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington DC.

Google for the Public Sector lists a range of free tools that Governments can use to start communicating with their relevant publics.

The list is relevant not only for Government but also for private companies and non-profits.

Many of these tools have been around for a while but it is great to see them listed in one place a kind of check-list to see what apps might be relevant for your organisation.

Read more about Google for the Public Sector

This week the Body Shop came under fire for buying palm oil from an organisation that pushed for the eviction of peasant families to develop a new plantation. You can read the full article in The Guardian.

The item is of interest to me for an organisation trading on ethics this revelation could be devastating for the organisation.  It should be noted that the Body Shop has denied the accusation but coverage of the controversial palm oil issue in itself is negative. How will Body Shop advocates react?

You only need to check out Facebook and see how many Fan Pages exist for the brand- some with 141,000 fans!

How will the fans now react? will they utilise Facebook to start an anti Body Shop fan page? will they tweet out their views? how will social  media once utilised by the brand and its fans be used against it?

I will be watching with interest.

Yes it has been quiet on the blog this week I have been in Perth working on a clients project intently. Tonight I am also presenting at a Web 2.0 and Non Profits seminar - love the passion in this space.

Back on board next week! till then…

Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle update their thoughts on Web 2.0 with the following whitepaper:

This week I was interested to read an article in Content Marketing Today regarding the success a bank has had with blogging.

The following is an excerpt from that post (ok it’s the weekend time is short!):

The company under the spotlight was in a niche area - banks that were trying to get started, banks that were looking to acquire other banks or banks that were working on implementing growth strategies. According to company owner, Wendell Brock, his website,denovostrategy.com, received almost no traffic.

Wendell decided to launch a blog called, BankNotes that was integrated with his website and within a few months he went from zero traffic to 1000 new monthly visitors. About 10% of these are returning visitors and 2.5% have turned into new sales leads.

Wendell noted another benefit to his new blogging strategy, “The blog has caused me to implement a new discipline to my marketing strategy by committing to writing a blog article at least once per week. This keeps me engaged in my website and inspires me to continuously strive to make it better.” Thus, even though he is a self-confessed ‘non-marketer’, his blog forces him to think regularly about continuous marketing improvement.

What happened here? By engaging with a relatively broad universe of professionals who cared about banking issues, BankNotes became a trusted source of information. As the subset of blog readers who qualified as prospects engaged with his content, they came to trust Wendel as the expert who could solve their problems about starting, buying or building a bank.  They would then take the next step to spend time on his buyer-focused website.

It’s worth noting that his blog is fully integrated with his website. Therefore, when blog readers are ready to consider becoming customers, his comprehensive website content is readily available to provide all the information they need to make a buying decision.

Summing up: Your website is necessary but not sufficient to draw in prospects before they are ready to do serious buying research. Your blog will engage a broader audience that will return again and again. An important subset of this audience will be ready to buy from you because you have effectively engaged them early on with relevant and compelling information.

**The case study regarding the bank was published in a new book entitled Marketing 2.0: Bridging the gap between Seller and Buyer through Social Media Marketing

Could your business benefit from a blogging strategy?

I have always loved the name of this report Gartner’s Hype Cycle Special Report for 2009. It examines the maturity of 1,650 technologies and trends in 79 technology, topic, and industry areas.

Some of the key takeouts include:

• Technologies at the Peak of Inflated Expectations during 09 include cloud computing, e-books and Internet TV
• Social Software and microblog sites such as Twitter have tipped over the peak and are expected to enter the Disillusionment phase among enterprise users
• Transformational technologies that will hit the mainstream in less than five years are expected to be web 2.0, cloud computing, Internet TV, virtual worlds and service oriented architecture

.

Read more about the Gartner Report

Looking for something to read regarding the YouTube phenomenon?

You might be interested in YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, by Jean Burgess and Joshua Green. The book analyses the most popular videos on YouTube.

As an online communicator with clients both in the corporate and non-profit sector I was interested in a post recently by Jennifer McClure of The New Communications Review discussing how the social web is a great place for philanthropic activity.

Jennifer’s blogpost highlighted new research “…funded by the Columbus Foundation, The San Francisco Foundation and The Saint Paul Foundation demonstrating that High dollar donors — especially 30-49 year-olds — use the social web, but have yet to be engaged by strong, trustworthy philanthropic organizations. This was among the key findings of the new research study, “Community Philanthropy 2.0,” conducted by Beth Kanter, Society for New Communications Research Fellow Geoff Livingston, and Qui Diaz of CRT/tanaka.”

The Community Philanthropy 2.0 research study examined the use of social media by non-profits and causes, as well as existing donors and Internet “savvy” users’ traditional and social media usage patterns. The research was designed to determine if and how social media can be used to engage and cultivate high dollar donors.

Key Findings

* The online world of charitable activity is highly social, but also fragmented. No dominant voice for charitable giving exists online, indicating the social web is still in an early phase of philanthropic activity.
* Online conversations rarely evolve into meaningful discussions about how nonprofits are achieving their missions and impacting society. Donors don’t advise other donors, and generally, philanthropic experts from foundations do not participate in these discussions.
* There is a need for a trusted source, and a lack of authoritative philanthropic conversations.
* The 30-49 age group represents the best fit to cultivate major donors using social media strategies,
* More than 50 percent of 30 – 49-year-old survey respondents are interested in the following topics:
• “Whether or not a nonprofit is successfully making an impact” (75%)
• “Learning about organizations that are actively working on issues and causes I care about” (62%)
• “Success stories and updates on the progress of nonprofits I support” (54%)
• “Information/updates on the issues and causes I care about” (54%)
• “Financial accountability and governance of nonprofits I support” (51%)
* 80 percent of the Internet-savvy respondents aged 30-49 reported that they would participate in social media with nonprofits if the information was highly credible and of strong quality, and 77 percent said they would participate if it came from a trusted source.
* Online community-oriented social media is a preferred tool over most other forms of online conversation.

Source/Credit: New Communications Review

An article in NMA today caught my eye.

The article reported that P&G recently launched product rating and review functions on its Head & Shoulders and Ariel (clothes washing detergent) brand websites as part of a strategy to engage consumers with its brands.

Users can now submit a review of a product with a star rating with P&G among the first of a major FMCG company to go down the ‘review’ path.

Interested to see how many people have the time or inclination!  to review washing detergent I was surprised to see over 6000 reviews on the site - and predominantly positive.

The site itself was well executed apart from the exceedingly long download time (but then again if you have time to review washing products maybe you have time to kill).

P&G have been innovators for quite some time in the marketing space. Back in 2001 they took their market research online and this year they have been utilising predictive analytics to get a greater understanding of their customer. Incorporating a review component to their product websites may seem like a logical step. But will it engage consumers?

Research over the past two years has shown that consumers are spending more and more time researching products online before purchase. This makes sense in a tight economy and particularly for items such as cars, house insurance, mortgages etc -  but does it hold true of smaller FMCG items? 

Will consumers spend time researching the less expensive items? or will only a Stepford Wife care enough to review her washing detergent?

Recent Findings from the Oneupweb study on eyetracking on social networks shows the dominance of sponsored ads:

• 65% of participants engaged with sponsored ads within social networks within the first 10 seconds of their search
• Scan paths do not follow the order of the search. Sponsored ads were looked at before the third or fourth organic results
• There is not a significant difference in fixation duration between Facebook and YouTube

Image below shows eye-track of Facebook indicating the dominance of top results and right hand sponsored ad.

You can download the full report EyeTracking and Social Network report free of charge.

An article in ReadWriteWeb recently highlighted the changing demographics in one social media platform: Facebook.

Summary: “ College and high school users have declined in absolute number by 20% and 15% respectively in a mere six months, according to estimates Facebook provides to advertisers  that were archived for tracking by an outside firm. Facebook users aged 55 and over have skyrocketed from under 1 million to nearly six million in the same time period. There are more Facebook users over 55 years old today than there are high school students using the site”

The graphic below demonstrates the shift that has occurred.

Out take: For those that are marketing products aimed at the older demographic don’t dismiss social media platforms as only appealing to the young.  These platforms should be utilised to talk to that segment that:

(a) have time for social networking

(b) may have physical ailments and hence the platform has great appeal

(c) many of them probably started out on the platform to communicate with family members overseas but saw additional benefits along the way.

Are you dismissing the appeal of social media for this demographic? It might just be time to take another look.

Article of relevance:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/health/02face.html

I was recently interviewed by Stephen Byrne of Diffusion regarding brands and the impact of Social Media on them.

I started thinking about the famous quote from ad agency founder David Ogilvy’s definition of a brand:

“The intangible sum of a product’s attributes: its name, packaging, price, its history, its reputation and the way its advertised“ 

If we dissect each of these elements we can see the influence of Social Media within all these attributes.

Name - right this minute Vegimite is crowdsourcing for a new name for its new range

Packaging- last year Pepsi sent key influencers their newly launched can design

Price - music has been known to be sold online for the value that ‘consumers think its worth’

History -  consumers can mashup historical marketing collatoral - to help create the future for the brand

Reputation- every minute consumers are commenting on brands and services from simple product review sites to more complicated UCG including Dave the musician  with his song about United Airlines damaging  his guitar

Advertising -only an advertising man would isolate advertising as a brand attribute.  I dont  think it is an attribute.  It is a distribution vehicle to promote the other attributes of the product even so there are a myriad of examples of Social Media particularly UGC forms of advertising. Recently the US Govt held a competition for the public to create best Public Service Announcement regarding Swine Flu behaviour guidelines.

Recent blog post produced for Marketing Magazine discussing Knowledge Management, Enterprise 2.0 and Social Media interrelationship.

http://www.marketingmag.com.au/blogs/view/knowledge-management-and-social-transformation-1437

Interview with Diffusion’s Stephen Byrne regarding the impact of social media on brands:

http://diffusionblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/in-turning-bay-some-questions-on-future_24.html

Research from social media platform Wetpaint and digital consulting firm Altimeter Group this week found that ‘companies with the highest levels of social media activity on average increased revenues by 18% in the last 12 months, while the least active saw sales drop 6% over that period’.

Companies were scored based on the level of social media interaction across the key social media channels including blogs, Facebook, Twitter and wikis.

Starbucks came out on top with a score of 127, followed by Dell (123), eBay (115), Google (105), and Microsoft (103).

Companies that scored well generally had dedicated — if small — teams focused on social media initiatives. The most successful of these evangelized across the entire organization to gain broad-based support and cooperation. And instead of taking a traditional communications approach based on messaging and talking points, they embrace a conversational mode.

The report sorted companies according to four categories, 

 ”Mavens” - most aggressive brands in social media 

 ”Wallflowers” sitting on the sidelines.

“Butterflies” — companies that are spread too thin across social properties, and

“Selectives” — those that excel by focusing on just a few channels.

 -Media and technology companies tend to be “mavens”

-Financial, food and beverage, consumer products and apparel brands were reported to sit at the other end of the spectrum .

It should be noted that the revenue growth figure cited in the study is an aggregate of all the “mavens,” and not a reflection of just one company.

You can read the full article at Media Post

After a stellar first season Australia’s first MasterChef was announced - the homely and huggable Julie.

Perhaps The Daily Telegraph didn’t watch the final show at 8.57pm the following story appeared. Poh as the winner!?

In the age of instant syndication and RSS feeds the story naturally went much further than just the Telegraph website appearing in Wotnews within seconds:

Two friends of mine Tessie Ting and Jean Davis from Conversition in the US are making quite a splash with their new product TweetFeel which gives real-time sentiment results for Twitter.

Conversition are working with Twitter to set band widths as apparently they are getting so much traffic to the site.

I think its important to recognise that there is not one social media monitoring product that will be the panacea for the industry. We need to find a range of tools that does the best job on each platform that complement each other. Nice work Tessie and Jean!

The US Govt has embraced crowdsourcing and user generated content when it launched a competition last week to:

Create a 0:15, 0:30 or 0:60 second PSA that will inform and motivate people to take steps that will help prevent the spread of H1N1 flu. Make your video fun, smart, and entertaining.  PSA must close with visual mention of www.flu.gov.

The competition was launched on the Flu.Gov website  with a video about the competition by HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

While we are all very aware of FMCGs crowdsourcing for a new flavour for chips, or a new brand name for a favourite type of spread, crowdsourcing ideas for a Public Service Announcement (PSA) is relatively new.

It will be interesting to see what ad is chosen and if there are any interactive elements that are created to work with the PSA that help health officials continue to gain insights into public health behaviour and opinions.

 Related blogposts

Communicating Health Risk - Swine Flu

CDC embraces Social Media Tools - Swine Flu

By now you would have seen the music video by Dave the musician that had his guitar damaged by United Airlines.

More recently Dave finally got compensation from UA.  Listen to his statement and read more here

Also worth viewing is an article by SEOmoz regarding how UA can turn this negative pr incident around with well executed and creative crisis management.

Poor Dave Caroll his guitar gets smashed up on a flight with United Airlines and he has to foot the $1200 bill.

He talked to every UA mployee he could get his hands on through the phone and at the airport, each one just passed the blame onto someone else. In the end, he was told that he would not be receiving compensation for all of those repairs he paid for.

In the end Dave wrote a song about the experience - no doubt very negative pr for UA.

I came across a great article today in Harvard Business about some of the less sexy sides of Social Media - the continual maintenance that you need to do such as ’seeding’ and ‘weeding’ that are necessary if you want your social media engagement to flourish.

It is an important area and one that I talk to my clients about - who will be the designated social media champions internally? do they have time? what is the org. structure? who has what skillsets/interests and who is already dabbling in the space?

It reminds me of setting up and managing intranets years ago. Initially intranets were managed in either IT or Comms but over time to have fresh content and relevance you needed buy-in and resourcing from all areas - effectively a decentralised model - which today is the norm.

Social media strategies are starting to follow that shift. While they might be owned technically in marketing or by one division to have real relevance and cut through decentralising and building social media champions throughout the business is integral.  Not only will your maintenance activities be shared, you will get buy-in from the whole business and the benefits to the organisation will increase four-fold.

In Feb this year The Economist ran a fascinating article that discussed that even online the cognitive power of the brain limits the size of the social network. So while we may have a myriad of friends online we can only keep track of a certain number - mirroring real life.

Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist ago said that the size of the human brain allows stable networks of about 150 – what is referred to as the famous “Dunbar Number”. Over the years however this number has been revised and disputed by a range of anthropologists.

The Economist asked Cameron Marlow, the “in-house sociologist”Dr Marlow at Facebook, to crunch some numbers to see what the reality was online. These were the findings:

• The average number of “friends” in a Facebook network is 120, consistent —women tend to have somewhat more than men.
• The range is large, and some people have networks numbering more than 500, so the hypothesis cannot yet be regarded as proven.
• The number of people on an individual’s friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.
• An average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual’s photos, status messages or “wall”.
• An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten.
• When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six.
• Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26.
• Men communicate with ten, women with 16.

Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project:Put differently, people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,  Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.”

Looking at my own online connections I can see that I have about 10-15 people on Twitter and Facebook that I regularly dm and chat with - the others are semi regular contacts.

While the findings above are not new it reinforces that unless we are adding value to the online relationship and making an impact we are simply broadcasting messages - which may be as relevant and useful in the long run as a 30 sec TVC.

Do you think the Dunbar number still holds true? are we seeing any differences in this as Twitter develops and new applications make it easier for us to contact friends more efficiently?

Digital consumers have stronger relationships with brands than non-digital consumers. This was the finding from Millward Brown, who analysed WPP’s BrandZ database recently.

The report compared the brand relationships of digital consumers with those of non-digital consumers across all categories and countries. The findings: that digital consumers have  15% stronger relationship with a typical brand.

For some categories such as airlines they have a 93% stronger brand relationship while others such as soft drinks and fuel (items you don’t usually buy online) both recorded a 5% stronger brand relationship.

The chart below shows the categories and impact of digital on that category to consumers brand relationships.

So what is the BrandX definition of a digital consumer?  This is “someone who has either bought or researched that category online”

Digital consumers were reported to have have stronger relationships in all 24 countries examined.

Key Takeouts from the Report:

• Willward Brown discuss the ‘digital branding circle‘ where consumers are more interested in brands, research online increases brand knowledge, digital purchasing increases brand knowledge further.
• As more digital researching and purchasing takes place the brand relationship gap between digital and non-digital consumers widens
• Some consumers will be digital consumers in some categories and non-digital consumers in others
• Brand managers should examine if their category has a strong digital relationship, examine  their competitors digital relationships and integrate the research into a smarter digital marketing strategy.

(Report Background: The report was compiled using 2008 BrandZ data with a total of 100,000 consumer intervierws and over 8000 brand measurements. Interviews covered 24 countries and an average of 15 categories per country. The report pointed out that the digital relationship difference ” is not a measure of brand equity - it has no correlation with the absolute strength of the brand’s pyramid.)

How do you help build engaged digital consumers?

So how can you build a closer relationship with your consumer and make it easier for them to interact with your brand online?

(A) Search Marketing and Organic SEO can help you answer the ‘visibility’ question ie getting your brand found on the web. There has been much written about the fact that during recessionary times consumers are spending more time researching products and services online (lending more relevance to the ‘Digital Branding Circle’ theory discussed above.  

(B) Social Media Marketing. While search marketing might help you get found on the web social media marketing will help with the ‘engagement’ of those consumers. In fact a study released recently by The National Retail Federation’s Shop.org and Forrester Research found that:

• Amongst retailers that are reducing spending, 56 percent are cutting spending on search engine marketing, while only 24 percent will cut their social media marketing budget.
• Amongst retailers that are performing well (“beating expectations” according to the study), 12 of the 20 will increase spending in social media marketing.
• Further, amongst retailers that are increasing budgets, 80 percent will put more money into search, while 65 percent will put more into email marketing.

Tight economic climate right for building ‘digital consumers’

The recessionary climate where consumers are increasingly researching your products is the opportune time to start engaging with them online.   

Many years ago I worked as an Information Manager at the NSW Cancer Council so with that background I was interested to see the use of innovative technology in this space with the introduction of the  Wellness Community.  While the community has been around for some years (Wash DC based) recently a swag of new functionality has been added to the site.

The Website provides free online support groups and education programs to people with cancer and their caregivers and families.

The community features new functionality including: chat support groups, Peer-to-peer social networking, Secure, thematic discussion forums,Personal blogs ,Video journals,Webcasts and podcasts and research tools to monitor symptoms and key quality of life indicators.

On a more local level the Cancer Council of NSW has its own version of the wellness community called Cancer Connections which is a very simple but well functioning site and looks relatively new.

Attending the Online Community Managers Roundtable last week was an eye-opener to the myriad of community types available but one area we didn’t discuss was Support Communities yet they have a very real and purposeful place today.

Yesterday I joined a swag of Australian online community managers at a roundtable organised by Editor and Com Mgr Essential Baby, Ms Alison Michalk. The group of over 15 of us from all around Australia met at Fairfax the home of Essential Baby to discuss online community management.

The group involved a great mix of online community startups such as Nick Gonio’s SportsPassion, through to the effervescent Ms Venessa Paech from the highly established and well regarded Lonely Planet, large media corporates were representated with Bob Dobson ( Entertainment Community Manager, NineMSN) and Ben Mott (Product Manager, Network Ten) as well as the ever-present and unmissable Scott Drummond - Sports Hydrant (not to mention many many others…)

Key discussion points from the day:

• The role of the Community Manager: leaders, the concierge, party hosts, traffic as well as other many descriptions. Community management is a highly complex role!
• The challenges included: head-count in recessionary times how to do the job well with limited resources; moderation is a continual challenge and technology can be your best friend or nightmare - with all agreeing technology platforms need to be nimble enough to adapt to the times.
• Sponsorship -  how to ensure the bottom line survives; the challenge of securing sponsors and ensuring sites remain objective is crucial.
• Benefits of online communities: a great way to gain insight from your key members, help you spread the word (WOM) regarding your product and brand and help you get a great understanding of your consumer.
• Metrics - lots of discussion on this topic with qual and quant discussed deeply. The usual page impressions etc were discussed and ever-present AVE (pr metric) but this time wearing the web 2.0 hat - is there validity in this metric? most agreed their was, metrics such as sharability and engagement were also discussed.
• Metric Relevance - of note was the point that you will need to look at member metrics vs metrics for sales and marketing these are naturally going to be different. We also discussed the old ‘conversion’ chestnut - that many clients asked. We agreed that as case studies come out we can put some figures to it but in reality conversion may in fact be a long bow to draw (ie sales) and if it happens - it wont ‘happen overnight’.
• Transparency: No surprises here authenticity/trust are the domain of a healthy and hence successful online community.
• Friction is healthy in an online community one com mgr said ‘it is in our real offline lives so it should be online as well’ - it keeps the community real, vibrant and engaged (too much though is a bad thing)
• Marketing your online community ideally should be a mix of social media strategies,offline activities, combined with some ppc (although some disagreed with ppc being of value). Obviously as a start-up without a brand name it is a lot harder to get that top-of-mind position than online branded communities (think Dell etc)
• Size - The interesting question of do you need to be a large site to be valuable arose. The answer was in fact both yes (particularly if monitisation is involved) and no if you are creating a niche(not a lot of breadth but depth re engagement) - the scalability of communities was also a good topic of conversation.
• Staffing of the community provided lots of variety with some online community managers existing with only paid staff and others relying heavily on volunteers - and every combination in between.
• Reporting Lines: So who do the community managers report to? a large range of responses from CEO through to general manager, marketing, global support/km to finance. We discussed the future of reports and how they typically report into marketing but wondered if it will always stay that way because online communities were providing tangible benefits to ALL areas of the business.
• Privacy is a continual issue for community managers and we agreed that some technology platforms simply don’t have the flexibility with functionality to allow for subtle privacy changes. One manager mentioned the importance of letting your members ‘grow’ with the site and that may in fact mean their privacy settings would need to change from teen/adult etc
• De la Soul -  the question was raised is there a magic number for getting traction within your community? the answer we all agreed was in the 50-80 range because at that point the community starts to run itself which is the ideal scenario (with the com mgr in the background)
• Technology was a source of frustration for many managers that had bought into systems that were not nimble enough to adapt to the times. Many believed that open-source systems were indeed the future.

My interest in community management was sparked when I was moderating online research communities for companies such as Kelloggs, Weight Watchers and Sara Lee. While the nature of my work has a research bent manyof the above issues regarding technology, resourcing, engagement and moderation still applied.

Today I am keen to stay in touch with the online community management field as Forrester’s Five Eras of the Social Web indicated communities are going to continue to have an impact on the social web and hence brands.

If you are an online community manager or company starting up an online community based in Australia feel free to join our Facebook group

P.S. Came across this memo to New York Times staff regarding the appointment of their social media editor (who has some com mgr responsibilities) it makes interesting reading.

As marketing students we all probably remember the four Ps: Product, Pricing, Placement and Promotion - the traditional model of marketing.

Today marketing has been reinvented and the Ps are being replaced with Cs - Collaboration, Creativity, Connection and Communication.  Brands now need to tap into those online community connections and hence the term Swarm Marketing was born.

Recently Dell revealed Dell Swarm a new marketing scheme in Singapore. As discussed by the Ebiquity Blog it goes like this: If you agree to buy a laptop on Dell Swarm, the discounted price drops as others join your “swarm” and also buy.

Here’s how the Dell system is described:

-Start by picking the laptop you would like to purchase. Be the first buyer to join a Swarm and you’ll enjoy a price lower than Dell.com’s best discounted price (after cash rebates).

-Join a Swarm after, and you’ll enjoy a new, lower price - as will all previous buyers. 

- Once the swarms closes - which is when the limit of 15 buyers or 72 hours is reached, whichever is the earlier, the price is then finalised. This final, lowest price now becomes everyone’s purchase price – including yours!

-To get the maximum discount, grow the Swarm by Sharing with your friends. You can share via Twitter Or post a note on your Facebook® profile and tell all of your friends Point others towards your Swarm using Digg, del.icio.us and other tools. Or simply send your friends an email directly! Not ready to buy yet? You can also choose to Follow the Swarm. You’ll then receive updates via email. As well as through free SMS alerts.

What other examples do you have of swarm marketing? are there examples in Australia?

Could your business benefit from a Swarm marketing approach?

I came across a great  presentation this morning -on my rss feed for the wonderful AppGap -  it is certainly worth a read.  What I thoroughly support in this presentation is the idea of breaking down the internal business silos between customer research, pr and crm - a position I put forward in a recent blog post entitled Social Media Why Its Not All About You  

If your social media agency can’t talk across the business silos (ie not just pr or a quick viral campaign) maximisation of the dollars you spend on Social Media will be reduced.

In a recently released report by Research and Markets entitled Analyzing the Australian Media & Advertising Industry it found that:

• The Australian newspaper industry is outperforming its counterparts in the UK and US, with advertising revenues only falling marginally from 2008.
• In the advertising scenario, there is a global recession, and it is forecasted that Australia will have a soft 2009, after two strong years of performance.
• According to market researcher Aegis Media, the advertising industry in Australia will increase 1.7% in 2009. However, with a price inflation of 5.2%, spending will actually drop 3.5%.
• Only the online sector will mark a real growth of 9.7%, but the figure is cut to 5.7% if price inflation is considered.
•  The convergence of the Internet with television, the growth of wireless communication, and the increasing use of digital video recorders all offer new avenues and challenges for advertisers.
• Further consolidation across national borders is also expected as ad firms try to deliver global capabilities in an increasingly competitive market.

 About the Author: Jenni Beattie is the Director of Digital Democracy a Sydney based Social Media Consultancy .  Enjoy the article? please subscribe to the RSS Feed

It has been a week of ‘Influence’ locally with Ross Dawson launching the Influence Landscape Framework and Gavin Heaton summarising and commenting on some of the recent findings and blogposts.

Internationally ‘influence’ was also being discussed in a  paper by the Harvard School of Business and in the latest issue of Business Week where the cover page stated “What’s a friend worth”.

The Harvard Paper

The Harvard School of Business paper entitled  Do Friends Influence Purchases in a Social Network? (by Raghuram Iyengar, Sangman Han, and Sunil Gupta) undertook research to to look at the influence of friends on purchasing decisions.

The Study

Using data from Cyworld, (a very popular Korean social networking site) the study empirically assessed if friends indeed influence purchases. Using 10 weeks of purchase and non-purchase data from 208 users they built an individual level model of choice (buy-no buy) and quantity (how much money to spend).

Findings

The key takeouts of the paper were:

• There is a significant and positive impact of friends’ purchases on the purchase probability of a user.
• The study identifies three distinct group of users
• However, there are significant differences across users. Specifically, this social effect is zero for 48 percent of the users, negative for 12 percent of the users, and positive for 40 percent of the users.
• “Moderately connected” users exhibit “keeping up with the Joneses” behavior. On average, this social influence translates into a 5 percent increase in revenues.
• Highly connected users tend to reduce their purchases of items when they see their friends buying them. This negative social effect reduces the revenue for this group by more than 14 percent. This finding is consistent with the typical fashion cycle wherein opinion leaders or the elite in the fashion industry tend to abandon one type of fashion and adopt the next in order to differentiate themselves from the masses.

The researchers said: “…The members in high status group have an influence on those in the middle status group for the diffusion of a new product. However, a successful diffusion in the middle status segment may make high status members lose interest in the new product.”  

The findings naturally have implications for the way you engage differing users within the social networks.

You can download the full report  to read more.

Business Week

In addition to the Harvard paper above the cover story on the June 1 BusinessWeek edition,  asks “What’s a Friend Worth?” 

The article examines how  “Companies are working fast to figure out how to make money from the wealth of data they’re beginning to have about our online friendships“.

The article is of note as it not only examines networked relationships in the external world (around social networks and marketing) but also examines them within companies from a knowledge management - KM perspective (ie how can we more effectively transmit knowledge around the organisation). 

Many years ago when I was involved in developing Knowledge Management strategies understanding social network analysis theory and identifying the ‘connectors’ within an organisation was vital in understanding knowledge flow and who would ideally make the ideal ‘knowledge champion’ within each companyand division.

The same connector/influencer knowledge was then applied when I crafted Internal Communication plans - particularly around ‘Change Communications’ or introduced a new decentralised Intranet that need the ‘influencers’ involved.

Social Network Analysis (SNA) has been around for many years its not new but with the focus on online social networks researchers are now scrambling to crack the code.

About the Author: Jenni Beattie is the Director of Digital Democracy a Sydney based Social Media Consultancy .  Enjoy the article? please subscribe to the RSS Feed

Yelp

I recently read a fascinating  interview from econsultancy with Laura Nestler, Community Manager of Yelp. Yelp is an online review site that started in the US in 2004 and recently launched in the UK with new features. It is interesting to see how the site has been continually developing and adding new elements over the years.

The most interesting aspect of the new version of Yelp is the additional functionality that gives business owners the opportunity to respond to reviewers favourable or unfavourable reviews.  This is a key development and I believe much overdue. The ’two way dialogue’ model that forms the foundation of Social Media needs to occur to ensure continual dialogue and transparency.

So what else is new for Yelp? as with many online applications they have now launched our most recent iPhone application – Yelp for iPhone – and they expect to roll out further apps for other devices in future.

Review Sites in a Tight Economy

As the economy tightens consumers are spending more time on the internet researching product purchases before they buy.  Online product review sites are one of the leading types of user-generated content on the web today and their role will become increasingly important.

The following figures show the significance of review sites for consumers.

Does your website have a review element?  it might be a great way to start engaging with your customers today.

Review Statistics

Article of note: Tips on building your review site

About the Author: Jenni Beattie is the Director of Digital Democracy a Sydney based Social Media Consultancy .  Enjoy the article? please subscribe to the RSS Feed

Information Aesthetics one of my favourite blogs brought the following to my attention:

“Google recently introduced its so-called Wonder Wheel as an addition to its normal results page. .. this new feature shows how Google might be slowly stepping into the search visualization space. You should be able to see the graph for yourself, either by following the link above, or by choosing the “Show Options…” link immediately under the search box on a results page.”

As a digital marketer this is a tool I will be using to examine  relevant keywords  and find niches for my clients online.

How will you use the Wonder Wheel?

About the Author: Jenni Beattie is the Director of Digital Democracy a Sydney based Social Media Consultancy . Enjoy the article? please subscribe to the RSS Feed

Simon Waldman, Guardian Media Group digital strategy and development director, said of the initiative, “A huge amount of the commercial health of the internet is going to be driven by the decisions of chief executives at blue-chip companies, influenced by their marketing directors. The digital agenda has to hit all areas of firms’ marketing and business strategies.”

Digital Network chairman Scott Gallacher said, “A lot of the case for digital has been proven but there’s a challenge regarding delivery of results in a blue-chip corporate environment. This initiative is designed to let the digital industry recognise the needs of corporate organisations and help them understand the role digital can play.”

The initiative certainly looks well founded. Will the Australian Marketing Institute follow up with a similar initiative?

About the Author: Jenni Beattie is the Director of Digital Democracy a Sydney based Social Media Consultancy . Enjoy the article? please subscribe to the RSS Feed

How many times have you heard marketers or pr professionals say:

- “Social Media is so hard to get over the line’  and -’Its hard to demonstrate the ROI of Social Media’ or

-’The CEO is just not on board with the Social Media idea’

These comments typically come from individuals that do not have the full business picture in mind when they are talking with their client.

As marketers we often think of Social Media as part of our own personal toolkit - albiet a growing and quickly developing one. Via Social Media we have the capacity to reach consumers,  with some prs still aiming to get a few messages across  (yes very old school) and ideally raise the brand profile and ultimately sell the item that we are marketing.

So what is wrong with that notion? After working in traditional media, online pr, market research 2.0 and knowledge management it is clearly evident that we need to recognise that Social Media touches all the above disciplines within a business including R&D and CRM.  As individuals within those disciplines we need to step outside our own areas and look at how we deliver business value across many areas of the business  - a much more wholistic approach.

So how is this relevant to you as a marketer? First understand that the Twitter account that you are trying to sell in for pr purposes can also be used for CRM and that means working with those relevant internally to support customers if complaints arise.  That branded Online Community that you are thinking about will provide ROI for many elements of your business including innovation and R&D. It is not just about your big shiny idea or your pr/marketing silo, or for that matter (and this is positive) the marketing budget.

Finally social media strategies can be devised and initially implemented by agencies but collaborative maintenance must come from the company itself.   What is maintenance? after the initial burst of creative activity is the hard yakka of continuing the conversation with your consumers, listening to them and embracing what you learn. If your social media marketing agency is simply selling you a one-off campaign and not educating you along the way they are doing you a disservice. Sure campaigns such as World’s Best Job have a finite time period but most customer engagement strategies should be for the long-term.

Social Media has the power to transform a company,  break down internal silos, deliver excellent ROI, engage with consumers and deliver more relevant products to the marketplace but we need to first recognise its not all about us.

About the Author: Jenni Beattie is the Director of Digital Democracy a Sydney based Social Media Consultancy . Enjoy the article?please subscribe to the RSS Feed .

Update May 9 Mashable produced an excellent article using Twitter for customer service well worth a read!

The Global Online Media Landscape report by Nielsen has just been released and there are some interesting findings.

Some key takeouts include:

• Online display advertising’s share of revenue has plateued at 20% of total online ad spend in the US
• Online video has high engagement levels
• Search continues to be indispensible tool for online with search across social media networks the likely next opportunity
• Long term prospects for the global online medium continue to be bright.
• Shopping directories and guides style portals are declining in interest with social media sites such as Facebook graduating into ’some of the most significant short tail sites’
• Member communities surpassed email for the first time in Feb 09
• Twitter is the biggest media story of the year with conversations around Twitter surpased Facebook during March 09
• Market Research ‘ as we know it will be enriched and redirected’ due to the Social Media phenomenon
• Mums and in particular new mums are more likely to  visit social networking sites and publish their own blog than most other online users.
• Women 40-50 in the home are the fastest growing demographic on Facebook
• Social Media will change advertising ‘ marketers will ignore these [social media] communities at their own peril’. The report examines the Motrin advertising and discusses the impact it has. (you can read more here about Motrin from one of my previous guest blog posts).
• 2009 is the year of the mobile with proliferation of smart phones

In future posts I will be examining the trends and what they mean for the Australian marketplace.

About the Author: Jenni Beattie is the Director of Digital Democracy a Sydney based Social Media Consultancy . Enjoy the article?please subscribe to the RSS Feed

Has twitter reached maturity? This week it may seem that way with unborn babies now able to tweet.

A tech student from NYC who didn’t want to miss a single moment of his wife’s pregnancy, has invented a device that instantly posts his unborn baby’s kicks on Twitter…

 http://www.viralblog.com/widgets-apps/unborn-baby-kicks-its-first-tweet-on-twitter/

I love a good wiki. Perhaps it’s my background in knowledge management but I think they are extremely valuable so when I found the UK Online Community Research Wiki I was in heaven.

The find combines my two loves: Online Communities (OC) and Wikis.  

The site contains a list of UK Online Communities with the formats as varied as Ning Communities to Yahoo Groups. While the format of the wiki could do with some aesthetic improvements the site itself provides useful content for those interested in OCs.

I would be interested to see if an equivalent Australian wiki exists - if it does be sure to let me know.

**Hat tip to Andy Roberts for bringing it to my attention.

 The US CDC has further embraced social media to spread the word about Swine Flu.

Today they released a range of buttons that could be added to websites to disseminate the word on the potential pandemic.

Nice initiative!

In the first post (below) I discussed the recent Forrester study and how they described the Five Eras of the Social Web.

The five eras not only relate to social media marketing but also the discipline of market research.

Innovative market research companies have already tapped into the fact that market research methodologies need to change in a web 2.0 environment- become more online and more ’social’.

The following are  a list of agencies that are currently using innovative approaches:

• The Digital Edge - the only Australian company to have facebook-style community software that enables a highly interactive online and highly ‘sociable‘ research experience - referred to as MROCs or market research online communities. (Era 1 & 2)
• Peanut Labs, runs  surveys across widgets on social networks. (Era 2)
• FreshNetworks build online communities for innovation and consumer advocacy - with the ability for insight collection (Era 5)
•  Australian online communities provider Resonate Solutions builds communities for organisations with potential for market research/insight gathering (Era 5)

 The Social Web touches many disciplines from knowledge management, to pr and marketing and market research. The agencies that innovate to recognise the change  and use it to drive their future methodologies will survive while those that don’t will become increasingly irrelevant.

In Forrester’s latest report The Future of the Social Web they define:

The Five Eras of the Social Web:

1) Era of Social Relationships: People connect to others and share
2) Era of Social Functionality: Social networks become like operating system
3) Era of Social Colonization: Every experience can now be social
4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content
5) Era of Social Commerce: Communities define future products and services

Forrester explains that in 2009 we are currently in the Era of Social Functionality and Era of Social Colonization (not mature yet).

Forrester then reveals How Brands Should Prepare:

• Don’t Hesitate: Connect with your community before competitors do
• Prepare For Transparency: A hot topic at the recent Social Media Club event in Sydney.   Prepare for every webpage and product to be reviewed by your customers and seen by prospects –even if you choose not to participate.
• Connect with Advocates: Focus on customer advocates, they will sway over prospects, and could defend against detractors.
• Evolve your Enterprise Systems:  CMS systems will need to inherit social features –pressure your vendors to offer this, or find a community platform.
• Shatter your Corporate Website: In the most radical future, content will come to consumers –rather than them chasing it– prepare to fragment your corporate website and let it distribute to the social web. Let the most important information go and spread to communities where they exist; fish where the fish are.

In my next post I will examine how these five eras will impact the market research industry

Over a sunday breakfast that included a BLT I opened the papers to read about the outbreaks of Swine Flu. Over the course of the day it was clear that this flu was spreading and discussion online ramped up.

swine flu

Swine Flu received its own Hash Tag on Twitter evidence of growing interest and Mashable wrote an excellent post about the best way to stay on top of the issue.

There is no doubt that the introduction of innovative technologies used by authorities such as the CDC  (such as Mashups of health outbreaks,CDC HandWashing ECard , CDC Streaming video  on Youtube and CDC Twitter ) and WHO (WHO Twitter) are a great addition to our health communication toolkit.

On the negative side speculation was also raised in an article in Foreign Policy that technologies such as Twitter may also increase community panic.

Some years ago in a previous role I did some research on the subject of Bird Flu for an article regarding how countries were tackling the issue from a crisis communication perspective.

I will now be following how Swine Flu is communicated to the Australian public.  There is no doubt that getting the balance between informing/preparing and not alarming the public will be crucial.

It will be interesting to see what online communication tools are employed locally.

Following the CDC information is important but having our own local (NSW Health Twitter) updates will be critical if the flu progresses.

Update

CDC has  fully embraced social media tools to disseminate their message.

Uncovered this document from Peter Sandman and Jody Lanard (risk communicators) that discuss pandemic communication. It is quite insightful and explains the WHO phasing from a communication/messaging  perspective.

There has been considerable debate within the social media industry in Australia regarding the current in-fighting.

Things hotted up in Mumbrella and then later in this post at Online Marketing Banter 

A little wisdom from the King may be called for:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSkDQYe2FYw]

In the middle of April this year in the middle of a recession I resigned my current role and started my own social media consultancy called Digital Democracy. 

Why? because with 20 years of media experience gathered in pr agencies, advertising agencies, media houses and market research agencies I believe I can support both agencies and companies that need assistance navigating the social media landscape.

As the year draws to a close I thought it was time to start my own blog. After contributing to many blogs since 2006 including FreshChat, Digital Ministry, The Digital Edge and Slice Media and leaving them behind when I moved jobs I decided the mature thing to do was simply start my own.

Digital Democracy reflects the current environment in which consumers have their say and in which brands and companies are all judged daily.

I hope you will also have your say on the blog in coming weeks.