There are some amazing stats which show how important social media is to the end user – this link is a great example which shows not only the raw numbers but also the velocity of the data vs. six months ago.
However, more important than raw numbers is a need to demonstrate the true role of social media in the marketing mix. Behaviours, trends, ethnographic studies and true analysis is needed before we can confidently start to show how important social media is for marketers. Intuitively we know that a better, deeper, longer lasting relationship with customers and consumers is a good thing and we see plenty of success stories in social media from brands who have (over?) invested or had great success in using the medium with a small budget. But how can you justify how the client’s dollar or your bosses budget be allocated?
The irony is that all these lenses can and should be applied to traditional marketing disciplines as well! TV, direct, search, experiential, PR, cataloguing, in-store, print, radio etc etc. As the media we consume starts to fragment, so does its influence on our buying decisions – let’s not let the big flashy numbers we see in social media get ahead of ourselves.
Facebook claims that 50% of active users log into the site each day. This would mean at least 175m users every 24 hours… A considerable increase from the previous 120m.
Twitter now has75m user accounts, but only around 15m are active users on a regular basis. It’s still a fair increase from the estimated 6-10m global users from a few months ago.
LinkedIn has over50m members worldwide. This means an increase of around 1m members month-on-month since July/August last year.
Facebook currently has in excess of 350 million active users on global basis. Six months ago, this was 250m… meaning around a 40% increase of users in less than half a year.
Flickr now hosts more than 4bn images. A massive jump from the previous 3.6bn I wrote about [six months ago]
More than 35m Facebook users update their status each day. This is 5m more than towards the end of July, 2009.
Wikipedia currently has in excess of 14m articles, meaning that it’s 85,000 contributors have written nearly a million new posts in six months.
Photo uploads to Facebook have increased by more than 100%. Currently, there are around 2.5bn uploads to the site each month – this was around a billion last time I covered this.
There are more than 70 translations available on Facebook. Last time around, this was only 50.
Back in 2009, the average user had 120 friends within Facebook. This is now around 130.
Mobile is even bigger than before for Facebook, with more than 65m users accessing the site through mobile-based devices. In six months, this is over 100% increase. (Previously 30m). As before, it’s no secret that users who access Facebook through mobile devices are almost 50% more active than those who don’t.
A lack of confidence in TV ad effectiveness. Sixty-two percent of respondents think that TV ads have become less effective in the past two years driven largely by ad clutter
Renewed faith in the 30-second commercial. Only 19 percent of respondents believe that the 30-second spot will be dead in 10 years, down from 28 percent a year ago.
A desire for more targeted TV ads but reluctance to pay for them. Seventy-eight percent of respondents say they would be interested in the ability to target consumers more precisely, but only 59 percent would be willing to pay a premium for it.
Dissatisfaction with measurement. Nearly all advertisers who responded think that the TV industry needs new audience metrics beyond reach and frequency, and 82% of respondents would be interested in ratings for individual commercials.
High interest in branded entertainment and interactive media. Eighty percent of advertisers agree that branded entertainment will play much more of a role in TV advertising, and 38 percent plan to spend more on branded entertainment in 2010 as an alternative to the 30-second spot. Social media, web advertising and search are stealing budgets from TV and other media.
So what does this mean? Well, my amateur analysis says that TV as a standalone marketing channel is either faltering or is dead. However TV, and by extension all mass communications, is evolving into something new – a catalyst for conversations.
You just have to look at the Superbowl last night to see that the value of the conversations spawned by the very expensive 30 second spots, likely exceeds the value of the spot itself and, indeed, the traditional measurement associate with that spot will not account for this.
At com.motion I’ve seen, first hand, how social and traditional media can live with each other in perfect harmony, each media feeding the other. How advertising can spark conversation online. How an online community can earn traditional media coverage – and vice versa.
I used to be very bullish on social media. Now I’m bullish on integration and the people who can integrate marketing efforts in a smart, cohesive and measurable way, will win. That’s what I’m interested in right now.
Superbowl Sunday is fast approaching and I realised that I’ve never done a Superbowl ads post.
Without doubt, my favourite Superbowl ad is one that I did not see during the big game. It’s one I constantly talk about with existing and prospective clients as an example of using marketing to create compelling content which lives on as an online asset – something which will spark conversations for years to come.
When I was starting out in PR, a lot of the discussions our team had with clients was what “newsworthy” or not. Was this new RFID reader newsworthy? What about this new wifi standard? Business Intelligence dashboard?
Or, how can we put the right context around this product to make it newsworthy? Chocolate fashion shows, national canonball championships etc etc.
But the world is changing. More and more I’m speaking to my clients about the need to create content to fuel the direct interaction with the audience. In an era dominated by shortform content and instant interaction, the sort of content which works doesn’t have to be newsworthy, it just has to be “huh-worthy”. Your goal in creating content is to ellicit a reaction. Within Facebook, for example, you’re looking for the end user to just click “like” or make a short comment – thus sharing the content throughout their network.
In the real Web, your content doesn’t have to change the world, it just has to inspire the reader to share it – via email, their blog, Twitter or myriad tools which allow social sharing.
Your news doesn’t have to be newsworthy but it does need to be huh-worthy. That doesn’t mean it can be any less remarkable though.
The weekly com.motion TD&F Special Teams is from me, on the one thing that has been engulfing the social media space. Without being too much of a self-serving, self-satisfied narcissist, the opening line is one of my better pieces of work.
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Apple announcement day is to geeks what New Years Eve is to drinkers – it’s when all the amateurs come out of the woodwork. This week was no exception as Apple CEO Steve Jobs finally ended months of speculation and announced the latest in the iPod franchise – the iPad tablet computer.
The social media space has literally been throbbing with excitement trying to predict what Jobs would announce – to the point where the product itself didn’t even matter, just the dimly held view that there was going to be a product. “Leaks” have been published, analysed and dismissed on an almost daily basis as Apple’s communications and marketing strategy of staying silent continued to fuel the online excitement. On launch day, the corner of the Internet usually reserved for geeks and propeller heads was invaded by normally rational citizens wanting to know the very second the announcement was made.
The microblogging platform Twitter and the popular blog Engadgetstrained under the weight of users … and their expectations as the launch was reported in real-time. Finally, following the launch, the iPad is the lead story on radio, TV, print and online publications around the world.
Whether the product can live up to all this hype is not a matter for TD&F (which has already purchased 76 iPads and counting). It’s a no brainer to give this almost perfectly executed strategy of silence a Touchdown (see “Quickdraw’ Fumble by my colleague Orli). After all, it’s hard to think of a consumer electronics device which has gotten more publicity, before, during and after its launch.
I’m a big fan of the work that Forrester does. I buy its reports, use its data, subscribe to its blog and use a lot of the frameworks it has developed in our everyday consulting at com.motion. In a lot of ways, Forrester is the pre-eminent thought leader in our space with the research capabilities to provide marketers with the data they need to make informed decisions about their target audiences and the technologies that can be used to reach them.
In 2009, what was the ROI of your investment in life insurance? The vast majority of you paid your premiums and filed no claims (or you wouldn’t be reading this). You received a negative ROI, so clearly that means you’re suspending your life insurance in 2010, correct?
Followed by:
Social Media is like corporate reputation insurance. You pay premiums in the form of building relationships, listening, responding, creating widgets, and building communities.
Now, I completely agree that the best crisis communications strategy is a proactive one – see my com.motion University: Crisis Communications presentation below. However, to argue that a major social media engagement is being undertaken in the off chance that an all-encompassing crisis overtakes a brand or organization is not something that many brand marketers I work with will sign off on.
However, I do agree that there are two ways to measure ROI – both of which directly affect the bottom line:
Sales and cost avoidance.
Both are important, both need to be measured but it doesn’t benefit our industry to focus on one and ignore the other, especially with analogies like the one Forrester is using.
What do you think? Am I off base? Does the life insurance analogy hold up and will your clients (internal and external) “buy it”?
This blog was supposed to be an account of my life, what I do, and how I got here. Today it has been transformed into a weapon to be used by an unscrupulous, nasty person against some of the people I care most about.
Pretty damming stuff but based on the TSA incident a few months back, I do wonder if there are two sides to the story and I’d be interested to hear the journalist’s point of view on why this happened.
Apart from the human element, I can see a couple of major learnings from this:
1. Ensure you have copyright over everything you write and post online. From Sally’s post:
One of the things I tend to do with any blog I write per myself or a client is pop a copyright statement on the site.
Good idea – this blog also has a disclaimer which means any comments to the blog are forever licensed to me:
By posting a comment to this blog, you are granting its author (me) full and irrevocable license to your comment and acknowledge that the authors do not have a duty to modify or withdraw posts, but that we may do so if we choose, for any reason.
2. More prescient for our industry as a whole is just how time-strapped journalists are and how desperate they are for good, compelling content. If a journalist at a (relatively) prominent national newspaper is prepared to do this, what else is going on that isn’t being reported? Journalists are under huge pressures and many don’t know exactly how to deal with a new world which requires them to write their features, do daily blog entries, record multimedia, interact with readers and maintain the same standard of quality throughout.
As I have been saying for years, the future of marketing is content. If you are marketing, one of your KPIs should be how your content is shared. If you are in PR, you should be considering how easy it is for the media (and I would include bloggers in this) to share and repurpose/reprint your content – with recognition of the source and ideally in the proper context.
I can’t begin to think how Melanie feels after something of this magnitude.
Interesting stats from eMarketer – why do people follow brands in social media? Clearly deals are first and foremost in consumers’ minds. After all, we are in a recession and we are selfish species:
I’m disappointed to see that interesting or entertaining content is third on this list. I believe branded content is the future of marketing but I guess this is also an opportunity – there is just not a lot of good content out there being produced by brands.
From a more philosophical standpoint, I’m very much encouraged to see that consumers follow brands which they already buy from – that emotional connection is starting to be formed and consumers are feeling a sense of ownership over the brands they choose.The more “skin in the game” the consumer has, the more likely they are to buy from you.
Fred Wilson picks out the highlights of an NYT feature on Rex Ryan, the coach of the New York Jets. More importantly, he distills down some of the core skills a great leader needs.
A great leader:
1) Knows how to connect to the team and make them feel good about their work
2) Someone who walks the halls and works on the product with the team
From a survey released by the Marketing Hall of Legends, in association with Hotspex. Sample size was just 216 so while we can’t take the following as gospel, the stats provide an interesting jumping off point.
What are the most important traits young marketers look for in a mentor?
Honesty: 89%
Offering relevant insights: 89%
Asks tough questions: 74%
Is motivational: 72%
Transparency: 60%
Elsewhere in the survey:
Of those without, 88% are interested in having a mentor, with younger respondents indexing higher; only 18% have one
40% of mentees feel that having more than one mentor is beneficial because it provides different perspectives
Less than 1/3 of marketing professionals seek career guidance outside of their company
71% of marketing professionals are mentored by fellow colleagues or managers – raising interesting questions around the objectivity of the guidance they are receiving
Thanks to the team at Maverick PR for passing this one on.
I'm Ed Lee, still fresh faced from five years on the front lines of PR and online communications. I'm now managing director at com.motion, an online and social media marketing consultancy with offices in Toronto, ON and Cleveland, OH.
In 2009, I was named one of Marketing Mag's "Ones to Watch" in its annual survey of top marketers under 30.
An Englishman living and working in Canada, this is my journey of exploration into the world of social media. Join me at e_v_lee[at]hotmail.com
Posted by Ed Lee 
