Archive for the ‘Social Media’ category

Measuring the ROI of Social Media

September 21st, 2009

The last post got me thinking more about social media and how to take those benefits and apply them to a measurable ROI. Depending on your business model this can be either simple or complex to measure, but there is a way to place a reasonable estimate on the contribution value of social media.

The simplest model is web based media that basically has 1-3 revenue streams – ads, leads and info (data for market research). Measuring the number of mentions on twitter, facebook, shared links, word of mouth, RT’s, widget installs, etc. and plotting a time line that maps these against the business metrics (clicked ad, provided some demo data, etc.) that contribute to your revenue. Also don’t forget to include the users off your website if you have widgets or distribute your content to other sites.

A more complex type of business to measure the ROI of social media would be a retail chain with physical stores as well as a website. Since I’ve not been in the physical retail industry for a very long time (pre-internet :-) ) I decided to see what others have been doing. I found this great presentation given by a marketing consultant named Olivier Blanchard. This was given at a small conference in South Carolina called Social Fresh. It is not only very helpful but its also quite entertaining as well. I would have loved to have been in the presentation. Thanks Oliver, this is great! :-)

Check it out here:Olivier Blanchard Basics Of Social Media Roi

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Are more US Marketers using social media for market research?

September 19th, 2009

A friend and mine, Rob Ellison (CEO Cucku), and I were at the Old Pro in Palo Alto the other day, drinking some beers and talking about social media amongst other things. One of the topics was around the benefits of social media and trying to assess a value for different types of business models. So I was curious what data was out there on this so started searching. I came across an article on eMarketer that included a Poll from the Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG). While it didn’t have the exact data i was looking for I found one of the responses very surprising. Only 42% of US marketing executives thought social media provided market research benefits.

Now in fairness I don’t have access to the question so it could be how it was worded explains low response, but I’ll assume it was worded clearly, probably something like “select the Main Benefits social media provides (or can provide) to your business. Pretty standard right?

Why so low? I mean think about it. When you want to make a product or service you have a target customer profile. You spend a lot of time and often money on research to learn what they want, you spend a lot of money to advertise and get your message out to them, you build your products and services based on what they want, so doesn’t the ability to engage directly with your audience (customers) give you direct access to finding out interest in a product and valuable data to assess market size and demand? So why then would only 42% of marketing executives think social media provided any market research benefit?

I’ve not found an updated version so am curious if this has changed and by how much. With all the visibility of facebook and twitter and the growing increase of marketers venturing into social media over the last year I have to believe this will be much higher. Sure, it’s not the only source you’ll need but it’s a pretty darn important one.

Do you use social media for testing product ideas and willingness to use/pay?

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This is no fad – latest social media stats support behavioral sea change

August 19th, 2009

Most of us by now had seen the “Shift Happens” and its revised stats “Did you know” by educators Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod. Well Erik Qualman, the global VP of online marketing for EF Education, in Lucerne, Switzerland has created a new version called the “Social Media Revolution” and posted it on his blog Socialnomics.net

I find this interesting so wanted to share it here.

If you’re like me you were probably trying to write all these stats down to use in some future presentation. Well to save you some time, here they are:

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network

2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web

3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media

4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users:  Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.

5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia

6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)

7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network

8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction

9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum

10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%

11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females

12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama

13. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?

14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen

15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…

16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube

17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English

18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs

19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily

20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth

21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour

22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0

23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content

24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands

25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services  than how Google ranks them

26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations

27. Only 14% trust advertisements

28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI

29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do

30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009

31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone

32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available

33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.

34. In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services they will find us via social media

35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.

36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second

37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser

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Bing powering facebook search and adwords like ads

July 25th, 2009

When did this happen? look on the right, Bing web results and then sponsored listings a la google style. This should be a good lift for bing. Just think of all the user interest and behavior data they will get as well.

Here’s the screenshot.

facebookBing_700

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ABC LOST producers make anti-social media move

July 19th, 2009


My friends and neighbors have all been
getting into ABC’s LOST lately and have been telling me I’m really missing a great show. I actually don’t watch that much broadcast TV and when I do it’s usually cable networks like science channel, history channel or comedy central. I spend much more time online and watching web TV shows and you tube videos. Now I have seen the Lost parody videos on youtube by the fine brothers.

While I wasn’t interested in adding a TV series to my things to do I decided to google lost and see what’s out there that could at least give me the background on the show so I could have a better understanding and even be able to participate in the conversation.

I searched around the ABC LOST site and found the untangled video they just released

http://abc.go.com/primetime/lost/index?pn=index

As I watched the video I recognized a part that had used dolls that looked just like the ones used by the fine brothers.

At first I thought maybe ABC hired the Fine brothers to produce the web clip, which I thought was cool of ABC. But then I went to the fine brothers site and there was a post on their blog about how ABC basically ripped them of and completely copied the Fine brothers Lost parody series. http://www.ravenstake.com/blog/

lost3

Now why would ABC do this? I mean they already have all the budgets and perks and talent. Why would they need to risk trust and credibility by stealing an idea?

This is the part about social media that the big brands just don’t get. They think it’s all about letting the people watch their shows online like at hulu.com. Just take the same shows from TV, throw in a couple of other scenes that were cut and distributed them online. This is all good but it misses the big and more important part about social media – the SOCIAL part.

If I were a TV producer I would as a first step hire the Fine brothers and let them lose. Then I would open up to the social media creators and give them clips and tools from the show to create new takes and mashups. And I mean ABC should open up all the assets and let these people create variants, remixing shows, like a LOST meets Desperate Housewives or something. That could be funny.

But this move by ABC is just bad taste and counter to the spirit of social media.

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LA is new Social Media Hub – claims Mashable

April 9th, 2009

I just read this post from Mashable about how LA is leading the way with social media. I guess it makes sense given all the video production talent down in SoCal. But is this really social media or mostly independents and aspiring actors that found a new distribution channel online when they couldn’t get TV distribution? I’ve seen some good web TV shows that frankly should be on broadcast TV but there’s not a lot of social to it, they’re just online videos made by independents (notice I didn’t say amateurs because some of them are very professionally done). I think one can say LA leads the way in web TV but I’d question the social media capital part.

Felicia Day

Felicia Day

I guess the root of this could be that the definition of social really means Video (if you look at all the examples provided in the mashup story they are all video related) and not innovative engagement applications like facebook.

Don’t get me wrong, I love many of the new Web TV shows and have even been encouraging my teenagers to jump in on this trend (I tell them now one wants to see a 40 something on Web TV :-) and make thier own shows. But I was just questioning if when we say social now, we actually mean video.

Just my opin… follow me on twitter @robblewis

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