Euro RSCG Discovery has announced the availability of “ASL Teen Segments”, the first actionable behavioral segmentation of teens, designed to help marketers more effectively target teen consumers on a one-to-one basis. The segmentation groups teens according to characteristic gender, social and behavioral differences.
ASL Teen Segments survey. Picture from MediaPost.com
The full list of female teen segments includes: In-Style Socialites, Jockettes, Most Likely to Succeed, Style Meets Thrift and Traditionalists. The male segments are: Big Man on Campus, Red-Blooded Boys, Technosapiens, Tuned Inward, Under Construction and Young Metrosexuals.
Gender is a key driver of teen consumer behavior, which is why all segments had to be defined along gender lines.
“Jockettes” are the largest category of female teen consumers, representing more than one-fourth of females. These girls lead healthy and active lifestyles, enjoying outdoor activities and sports.
“Young Metrosexuals” or social, popular boys caring about their outward appearance, are the largest male segment. They comprise more than one-fourth of all the male teens
Although teens are online in large numbers, TV, radio and magazines are still among the most trusted channels teens look to for both information and relaxation. However, the Internet dominates for certain male teen segments. Both genders shop online at the same frequency (14%) and are more likely to make purchase decisions in stores.
“This segmentation breaks down not only what teens are interested in, but where and how they shop, and how they respond to direct mail, digital advertising and in-store marketing. It also shows how teens use different forms of traditional and new media.” – Don Damore, CEO of ASL
IMPORTANT!!! Once you have claimed a username by clicking the “Confirm” button, it is not possible to edit it, or to transfer your username to a different account on Facebook. Additionally, when an account is removed from the site, its username will not be made available to other users for security reasons.
Now with the important stuff out of the way here is a short overview of the Facebook’s Questions and Answers about usernames for pages. It is a good idea to get a username to promote your page with a short URL (facebook.com/mypage). You can use it in your marketing, website, business cards, etc. Now, there are some rules and guidelines:
You have to be an administrator of a Facebook Page to choose your username at facebook.com/username. You can manage the usernames of all your pages in the same place.
All Pages created after May 31, 2009 or that had less than 1,000 fans on that day are eligible to claim usernames if they have more than 25 fans.
Your username should be straightforward and easy to remember.
Create a username that is as close as possible to your public figure or business name (e.g. AshtonKutcher, PizzaHut).
Generic words such as “flowers” or “pizza” are not available as usernames.
If you own the rights to a given name, make it your username so that others cannot obtain it.
Usernames can contain only alphanumeric characters (A-Z, 0-9) or a period (”.”).
Increasingly more automakers are diving into social media to sell their production. New-England’s Mercury dealerships just rolled out with a new webisode – “Follow Me to Bliss”. Rolled out as part of an Internet “reality mini-series” to illustrate the green technology of the 2010 Lincoln Mercury Milan Hybrid. The seven-Webisode campaign features “Deal or No Deal” models Lindsay Clubine and Katie Cleary as they partake in a series of unconventional wedding planning events… The series also features the fuel efficient 2010 Mercury Milan Hybrid – dubbed “Millie” by their celebrity drivers – and follows them all as they take a road trip across all six New England states on just one tank of gas. Follow Me to Bliss also reached Twitter.
Although the videos themselves are quite tacky and the campaign hasn’t ended yet, its success is already evident:
In August – the month the road trip itself was being promoted online – the New
England Lincoln Mercury dealerships generated more Web-based sales leads than any other region nationwide
Additionally, the New England Lincoln Mercury dealers’ Web site, www.BUYLM.com, broke a new record for site visits in August
In August and September, the Follow Me to Bliss campaign became the second
most popular click-through among 16 sources on the New England Lincoln Mercury
homepage
On the campaign’s Twitter channel there are already talks of repeating the same campaign sometime in near future.
A really cool counter that gives some perspective into what’s really happening in the social media. The original page is here Social Web Count. There’s a similar counter for mobile.
It’s all about being human and engaging in conversation with other humans. We have done it for thousands of years and we really like it. That’s why social media is spreading like wildfire. Sir Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, said it best:
“I had (and still have) a dream that the Web could be less of a television channel and more of an interactive sea of shared knowledge. I imagine it immersing us as a warm, friendly environment made of the things we and our friends have seen, heard, believe, or have figured out. I would like it to bring our friends and colleagues closer, in that by working on this knowledge together we can come to better understandings.”
Location
Go where your audience is. People will not spend time on your site it’s not interesting enough. Most of us like to spend time with other people and this usually happens in social media sites so you have to be there.
Identity
Don’t try to hide who you are in social media. The key in social networks is that people like to talk to other people not some anonymous entities. Full disclosure is the best way to go. Be authentic, be believable, be you.
Connections
Concentrate on relationships with people and get involved in relevant discussions with consumers. Try to find and connect with those who have influence and authority in social media sites. But don’t forget others who are not “A-list”. Thousands of regular people might give you more stable audience than few A-list influencers.
Understanding
Use search to find out what your customers are talking about your brand, competitors and industry. Search Twitter, Facebook and Google Blog Search for relevant keywords. Set up Google alerts to get the latest news.
Give value
To be a successful in social media doesn’t always mean the number of followers, friends, or postings you have managed to get. It is more about trust and your reputation. Giving out consistent and useful information will help you to become an expert in your field.
Interact
Don’t use social media platforms as a new way to yell at people by giving out one-way marketing messages about your brand. Do not sell! Help, share, engage people, ask questions, give support, promote others… and then they will buy.
Long term
Building a following in social media sites will take time. It is not one-off campaign media. You may have a slow start. Just keep going. When you have accumulated enough value on your social bank account then your fans will pay back by spreading your message and buying your products.
Measure
In the end we want results. Some metrics to follow might be: incoming traffic from links, number of people subscribed to news feeds, members, fans, followers. How many mentions you get in the form of trackbacks and links to posts. Number of mentions in social media. Comments on blog and other social media posts. And the most important of all sales and leads.
Facebook executive Mike Schroepfer announced recently during a Web 2.0 summit, that the average amount of time people spend on Facebook is on average 8 billion minutes per day! That’s 15, 220 years spent on Facebook every day. Some 2 billion pieces of content are shared every week, and 2 billion photos are uploaded each month–1.2 million served per second on a “peak day,” he said.
Facebook’s vice president of engineering was also on the scene, focused on talking about the challenges of scaling a social network to the more than 300 million active users it has today. One of the big challenges is that Facebook’s home page news feeds have to be able to process 50 million operations per second. In order for that to be possible, they went for an open source software called Memcache, customized it and deployed it with five times it’s original performance.
What about the growth statistics of Facebook’s user-base? Well, three months ago in July, they had 250 million users. Three months before that, they had 200 million. That’s 100 million new users in 6 months – Facebook is clearly having an unprecedented growth here. A growth, that even a year ago most people wouldn’t have believed.
What does this mean for companies? The answer is, if your company still isn’t on Facebook, it should. You could have been a sceptic some years ago, but today we are seeing Facebook emerging as one of the most important channels for delivering your brand message to people. If the growth rate will stay the same, we will have half a billion active people on Facebook by the same time next year. If you already are on Facebook, then there’s always more that you can do.
Start an active conversation with people on your fan page, answer to their questions and try to give them value. Go ahead an try out advertising on Facebook. It may not work for all, but the beauty with advertising on Facebook is, that you can segment down your target group to age, sex, education and even their hobbies. If you have done all of that, go and tie your Facebook page tightly together with Twitter and your Youtube channel. Be visible. As we are seeing today, the company websites themselves are getting less and less important. People are getting increasingly more used to with the idea of getting information about brands from other networks, Facebook being one of them.
What about Facebook a few years down the road? Only time can tell – personally, I’m quite sure to see the one-billion-mark some time soon. When by that time you have already established your company on Facebook, you can have a big advantage over your competitors.
“We’re just getting started.”, as Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.
Day 4 of the annual State of the Blogosphere report from Technorati titled Blogging Revenues, Brands and Blogs. One of the interesting points in the post is the data about how much brand chatter is going on in the blogosphere.
More than two thirds (70%) of the bloggers say that they are talking about brands in their posts. About half (46%) of the bloggers write about brands they feel strongly about, while more than a third are doing brand or product reviews.
The numbers for blogs are a bit higher than in Twitter. A recent study from Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (Jim Jansen, Mimi Zhang, Kate Sobel, Abdur Chowdhury) found that about 20 percent of the tweets are brand related, containing product information in the form of asking and providing:
“People are using tweets to express their reaction, both positive and negative, as they engage with these products and services,” said Jansen. “Tweets are about as close as one can get to the customer point of purchase for products and services.”
I read somewhere that in our everyday conversations we talk about brands approximately 16 percent of the time. I can’t find the source for this data. I you know where it came from please put the link in the comment.
When looking for trends that are crowing in importance in the next year I found two blog post from Eric Tsai that look what will continue or accelerate in the coming year.
A Shift in Web Properties to Blend Online With Offline Campaigns
New Measuring Matrix: Hybrid Measurement
Marketing Platform Extends to Mobile, Social, and Local in Real-Time
For different points there are benefits to consider, ideas for action and myths to consider.
The main trend is move to the social media where people hang out and spend more and more of their time. As one of my friends noted on Facebook today
I don’t want to click a link and discuss something in some blog, but if you bring the conversation to me, here on Facebook, I’m willing to hang with you.
What are the differences in online and offline advertising and marketing. Why do campaigns fall on their faces when marketeers are trying to use old strategies in new channels. This excellent paper looks at the social component and tries to find key points to achieve success in social marketing.
It is clear that social networking marketing is very different from traditional marketing. In fact, online and offline advertising are two different fields. One cannot use the old model of advertising in the new landscape.
In this 162 page paper by Weng Wah Wong looks into online advertising, social advertising in the social media environment. The main question of the research is “What strategies can be successfully employed by advertising and marketing practitioners within the social networking platform?”
To address the main question three sub-questions were answered:
What elements do current social marketing campaigns exhibit? A social marketing campaign exhibits five types of characteristics which are participation, openness, conversation, community and connectedness
What elements make marketing with social networking unique and different from other forms of online advertising? The flexibility, the precision targeting and the viral element that is in built in a social networking site are the main reasons that make marketing with social networking unique and different. It allows brands to target specifically to their target audience while no other forms of online advertising can provide such accuracy. Harnessing on the social power of recommendations, the consumer no longer hears only from the brand but hears the brand message through friends which increases the credibility and trust of consumer and the brand.
What strategies can be devised to enable advertisers to maximize success on the social networking platform? An integrated campaign, offline and online will be the most strategic strategies that will maximize their success on the social networking platforms because it reaches the consumer through all touch points and driving traffic to the web through offline activities and online activities. In order for the web strategies to work, advertisers need to understand their consumer and learn how to interact and engage with the consumers without being intrusive. Successfully executing this will allow the brand message to be passed along (that is, by word of mouth).
The research is from 2008 but not to worry, the findings are still valid and probably will be for some time. You can find the full paper in Scribd.
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