I’ve been low on bandwidth lately…so throwing this up in rough form, clean this up at a later date. Here is my quick, straight from the gut reaction to the AdAge round table discussion. Glad to see Matt, Armano, Rohit at that table.
Maybe that is why I love my Ning(s).
And I don’t really want to get on someone bad side…and this is more a poke at social media enthusiasm than her. But really…you spent 9+ hours on a Saturday night making web 2.0 Easter Eggs? I mean…I just…I just shake my head. Was it better than my Saturday night…I’m not sure it is that tough of a call.
Co-worker of mine said that quote in passing, half joking, half teasing me because of the area I work in (she also has a nick name for me that plays off my name and viral diseases…because I “spread” things in social media…I’m sure it’s meant to be endearing). But whether she realized it or not, I think that there is some actual truth in her statement.
In my own observations, I think we have hit the tipping point within the general masses of people feeling comfortable blogging. For the sake or argument, I’m staying in the blogging world…I think this trend actually holds true across all consumer created content. I say this because the same girl who said that quote has just started blogging more on a regular basis. Her friends are the same way. I’ve noticed that co-workers who have teased me in the past about having a blog…have now started their own. They post fairly regularly - pics, videos, etc.
Fueling this I believe is the combination of several trends;
In an interesting spin, I think Facebook became the Trojan horse and catalyst for people to get into blogging. For the sake of argument lets say that Facebook is basically a personal content aggregator to all your friends. It opened the door to let a group of people know that you’ve been tagged in a photo. Mentally, this helps people get over the hump of having themselves published on the internet…and actually they think it is not that bad. But while Facebook is great for aggregating content, it doesn’t really have the ability to create content, allowing for people to express themselves beyond just a photo tag. Creating a simple blog does. For the 80% of 18-42 year olds who have broadband (rough summary/estimate from this emarketer report), blogging is now just another simple login. With news stories of people micro-publishing, a la twitter, the masses also get comfortable with the idea that they don’t have to publish the next great novel on their blog.
Given, this trend is all from the observation of space 967 on the 9th floor of 110 North 5th Street. But if my co-workers who just gotten into blog stick with it…we just might be on to something. We might be able to ladder this up and say this is part of a larger trend and that ‘08 will be about mass adoption of people creating their own content, growing the content creators past the 1-10% range…but that’s another blog post.
Update: Thank you Heather for the edits.
I think one of the main “trends” of 2007 was the maturing of the discussion/idea of social media and the relationship it has with business/consumer (person)/brand. I’ve been reading some great ROI discussions that really illustrate how far the strategic thinking has come. I’m going to kid myself and say that over the holiday break I’m going to try and gather as many of these good thoughts and put them into a great client slideshare…but we all know that it is a very lofty holiday goal.
Additional suggested reading (besides from my last social media ROI round post), ROI and what it can achieve -
Stepping back from tactics, what are we going to achieve? What will we effect? Earlier this year Tom from WME Blogs post Extending Forrester’s Blog ROI matrix explores benefit, metric value. I wish I would have seen this earlier, it would have helped with the question I was getting time and time again - why does social media matter again? A article from iMedia Connection: Keys to social media pairs with this to help start thinking how getting your plan going. Along similar lines is 7 Idea for Social Media and Business from Patrick Schaber at the Lonely Marketer. And for those clients/bosses who need it more black and white, Emergence Marketing does a great job laying it down to bare bones, ex:
The Viral Garden has another post I’m thinking I should just spam my office with, understanding the value of blogging. While it does get into Google Page Rank and other analytics, the most important part is that while numbers are nice - consumers are into conversations and we need to understand what value blogs bring as a community building tool. Laddering up, its not about being stone face company anymore - need to start living and breathing, need to start “communicating”.
But to put some real “numbers” to social media, Tom from MotiveQuest is working with Northwestern University to develop an Online Promoter Score. I think we’ll see more more tools like this in the near future. I like this idea of the Online Promoter score…but I wonder what is under the hood. I know from other studies last year social media and brand engagement were having a hard time correlating to market share and sales because of ‘chicken/egg’. Does sales lead to more social media/brand engagement or do social media/brand engagement lead to more sales? And is it strictly social media/brand engagement or was it a really good online marketing program, SEO program and offline promotion that drove chatter? (And honestly, I’m not sure we really should be separating chicken/egg).
Moving forward into 2008, I really see a breaking out of social media campaigns (if not happening already). I think the tipping point is just about here - broadband adoption(eMarketer.com), social media consumer usage(eMarketer.com), smart thinking on social media (Jeremiah Owyang). I mean if my mother found a blog...yours will too. What is making me nervous is when a blogging/wiki/flickr/social network gets mashed and dumbed down enough (no offense mother) for even my mother to use(eMarkerter.com). This social media thing might really take off…
Another post escapes my agency firewall (I blog several places)
Several people have been asking/chatting about Social Media ROI lately so I thought I would pull together some quick stats and links on the topic. To sum up, nobody has really broken the code and has been able to equate a number (impressions…yuck) to Social Media or WOM. And honestly, how could you/why should you.
I’m not sure I want to know a X value on my friendship and what we talk about. More so to the point, the age of conversation and how we measure don’t fit the old paradigms. Impressions, page views, etc are all built on a broadcast reach/frequency paradigm. For social media and WOM, we need to start thinking in what a conversation/engagement really mean to us (marketers/company/brand) and what that means to a consumer (real people). But here are some links to get going on the topic.
Online Communities and ROI
From a recent Online Community Business Forum, Joe Cothrel and Bill Johnston presented Online Community ROI
Community users remain customers 50% longer than non-community users. (AT&T, 2002)
- 43% of support forums visits are in lieu of opening up a support case. (Cisco, 2004).
- Community users spend 54% more than non-community users (EBay, 2006)
- In customer support, live interaction costs 87% more per transaction on average than forums and other web self-service options. (ASP, 2002)
- Cost per interaction in customers support averages $12 via the contact center versus $0.25 via self-service options. (Forrester, 2006)
- Community users visit nine times more often than non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
- Community users have four times as many page views as non-community users (McKInsey, 2000).
- 56% percent of online community members log in once a day or more (Annenberg, 2007)
- Customers report good experiences in forums more than twice as often as they do via calls or mail. (Jupiter, 2006)
From the Forum One OC ROI Survey (April 2007):
- Only 22% of respondents had clear ROI Model
- 42% had staff of 1-5 people
- 49% Report Monthly to Mgmt
- Establishing ROI Model was a priority for most respondents in the near term
Blogging ROI
Forrester has an ROI of blogging report...might be good to track down.
Marketing ROI: Whims from Ron Shevlin has a great post digging the report. From his post -
GM’s first-year ROI on the blog was 99%. The primary contributors to the top line: 1) $180,000 in customer insight, which was estimated by assuming a cost of $15,000 for running a monthly focus group with 10 participants over the course of a year, and 2) $380,000 in press coverage, calculated by estimating the value of “high-visibility Web placements” and the cost of CPM advertising on sites like InformationWeek.
Social Media ROI
From the blogosphere, some must read on the topic -
Connie Bensen My Conversation Blog - was tagged in an ongoing pass along ROI discussion. Her post digs into both quantitative and qualitative variables on ROI measurement.
Rohit Barghava Influential Marketing Blog Guest Post: Is Word of Mouth a Discipline or Just a Channel? - Tackles some core issues of WOM
Brains on Fire - “As the engagement and involvement of your community – your passionate fans – increases, the less money you need” Awesome!
Conversation Agent ROI = Return on Involvement This is required reading!
Update: fixed Conversation Agent link. And here is another suggested link from Conversation Agent - Measurement and ROI for Social Media
(thanks Valeria for stopping by!!!)
Just a quick note. Seems there has been some unrest in the blogosphere over Facebook. A bit disturbing to me as well.
First off is Cory Doctorow post on How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook. It touches on something I felt for awhile. Do I HAVE to friend you? Even if we are just work mutual friends? It worth the read and a good think.
Next up is Facebook’s Beacon. Matt Dickman does an excellent job breaking down what Beacon is and why it matters to marketers. I had been noticing this when somehow magically Facebook posted some recipes from epicurious.com. I didn’t notice it at first, but then it got kind of creepy. The Idea Shower (which I’m adding this blog to a regular reading list) does a great job explaining the situations behind Beacon and privacy issues.
Thing is, I agree with what these post share. Facebook is kind of overstepping its bounds for my taste. The ad guy in me wants data shared, really. But within good taste. On top of that, while I like Facebook, it really just doesn’t do it for me. I’m glad its there, but I kind of want to keep it at arms reach. I mean, I like being able to keep up with my friends. But…I kind of like being able to disappear from the social scenes every now and then as well.
So I saw this idea on the Account Planning Social Network that Michael Johnston of Things do not change, we change made two custom Google searches for Trends and Research. He got the idea from MisEntropy who created a search for the plannersphere blogs. And because I really needed to procrastinate at work right now…I made one for the Social Media blogosphere. I used the 103 blogs contributors from the book The Age of Conversation plus adding a few like Techno//Marketer, Influential Marketing Blog
and Noah.
I’m posting the code in the comments section so you can add the search to your site. If you know of other blogs that should be in the search list, post in comments and I’ll get them in. I’ve uploaded the code to a txt file, I can’t figure out how to post the code - socialmediasearch.txt. Actually, go here to get the code.
Update: Or, better yet…how about a custom search for the Top 150 Ad Age blogs (as of 10.23.07). You can go here to get the code for this search.
Update #2: I made a twitter one just for giggles…I’m sure someone will find a use for it. I know you can do this in google already…but a nice box makes things easier. Get code here.
Social Media Blog Search
Ad Age Top 150 (All 475)
Twitter search
I’ve just been wanting to get some of this out -
Catching up on a couple of my daily read blogs that I hadn’t been reading daily came across a post of Rohit’s which lead me to his personal Facebook for his work and upcoming book (I think having his own group was clever). Clicking through his group came across the discussion ‘Brands are now defined as the sum of all conversations? hosted by David Alston of Radian6. I think it is a good definition thought I would argue that brands have always been defined by the conversation, just not recently. But I’m not sure its just conversations.
Another brand definition I have spent some time thinking about is ‘A brand is a collective perception in the minds of consumers’ by Faris. How we each perceive and reflect the brand creates the intangible result. I’m currently reading Herd and really digging into the idea that we define a brand (and ourselves) through others.
If I combine the two, it is through conversations we are able to construct the idea of the brand. So why something is being said to define a brand is just as important as what is being said. So while it is the some of all conversations, it is also the reason why all those conversations are being said.
Another piece that will have a reflective property on what and why will be who it is being said to. I’ve been looking into The Strength of Weak Ties and this post that discusses ‘Weak Ties and Diversity in Social Networks‘. I have been pondering both the effect of weak vs. strong ties and the language we use within the ties have on defining the perception of a brand. Social Media and the Social Graph are adding some interesting behavior against week/strong ties. For example, who has more recommendation pull and why - the Facebook group for board game geeks vs my local social friends.
So where does this all lead? I think that for mass reach advertising to still be effective in enhancing the brand effectiveness on consumer purchase behavior the advertising has to communicate an understanding and language that aids people in constructing recommendation conversation across both their weak or strong ties. More musing on this is a bit…
Reading through my tweeted links this morning came across Read/WriteWeb’s post SocialMedia Aims to Bring Attention Economy to Advertising discussing Seth Goldstein’s presentation of Seth’s new company SocialMedia.com at the Graphing Social Patterns conference. What caught my eye was the term Social Advertising and Seth’s definition of Social Advertising.
Lately I’ve been struggling with definitions, mainly how marketing/advertising is defining social media. For the most part people get ‘it’s the conversation thingy/stuff’ that is going on. But from there I’ve noticed the jumps in discount people are making in regards to the relations on how we use/work within the social media space. I think the parring of media with social is confusing people. People understand that ’social’ is the conversational/connecting. With ‘media’ people tend to get the notion that somehow traditional media or PR people can us a broadcast form of advertising and effect the, as Herd author Mark Earls puts it, ‘endogenous word of mouth’. The disconnect is that ‘media’ is really referring to the environment that is holding/allowing the ’social’ to take place and has little to do with brand communications. So when I saw ‘Social Advertising’ it clicked with me…maybe this is the term we need to clear out some confusion.
Now, I wasn’t there so I don’t know the discussion surrounding the slides below, but I disagree with his definition. From what I can tell, his definition looks more like contextual advertising is a social media environment. The example of Social Ads are just that. But to me, that’s not social advertising.
Social advertising is the act of creating brand conversation in a social media environment. This definition high lights what social media is - an environment of conversation/connecting and that putting a banner ad in Facebook is not social media.
So, your thoughts? I’ve put up the slides show below for reference. Do we need a better definition of social media and social brand communications?
Have you run into problems with the understanding of social media? How did you get past them?
Update: Ok, after some further review…I think my instincts were right but some of my thinking a little off. My definition of social advertising is not quite right and the definition put by Seth is. Advertising, as in the act of making an announcement about a product (or something like that), in a social media environment would be social advertising. The definition I was thinking is more along the lines of
Social marketing is the act of creating brand conversation in a social media environment.
This is my personal blog where I share thoughts, idea and opinions that are solely my own.
Contact:
Tumblr rss
