A formula for generating ad agency new business through social media. This presentation concentrates on ad agencies but can be use for mos t B2B marketers.
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Baby Boomers and Seniors Are Flocking to Facebook [STATS]. A new eMarketer report shows that the number of Baby Boomers embracing social media, especially Facebook, jumped drastically between 2008 and 2009.
Social CRM: The New Frontier of Marketing, Sales and Service (PDF). The emergence and increasing usage of social media and other Web 2.0 tools has dramatically altered the ways in which companies interact with their customers. For instance, buying advice, product information and technical help is increasingly being disseminated from consumers to other consumers, in some cases without involvement or oversight by the provider.
The Economist: A special report on social networking (PDF). Online social networks are changing the way people communicate, work and play, and mostly for the better.
Study: Consumers Are Not Annoyed by Ads on Facebook. Good news for Facebook: It turns out users find ads on social networks no more annoying than any other ads on the web.
Using Facebook fans to improve automotive marketing. Facebook Fan Pages have become the most recent in a long line of social media “must-haves” for automotive marketers –- but what do they really tell you? And are they even helpful?
All together now. Diageo, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft and Procter & Gamble are among 10 companies taking part in an ambitious project that invites brands to work together on developing new brand and product ideas and new avenues for research through in-depth analysis of existing data.
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Image credit Cris Watk
Among hundreds of other cities, companies and states, the state of North Dakota is also on the bandwagon of social media now.
Their tourist agency has gained presence for the state in almost all of the available social media channels, the main ones being facebook, youtube and twitter.
At rulegendary.com , people are asked to write about the experiences they have about North Dakota and then link back the URL with their story. The story can be written in a blog, made into a video or a photograph.
They are also giving out prizes to the first 10, but you can argue about the prize itself – being a T-shirt picturing North Dakota. Leaving out the prize though, North Dakota is doing a great job here. They have over a thousand followers on Twitter, and the amount of fans on Facebook is also growing near to that.
Since the campaign itself is relatively new, we have no data on the success of it yet. But seeing the amount of followers they already have in Facebook and Twitter, North Dakota has definitely done well. They are answering questions, engaging in conversations and telling it all about the latest activities in their state.
If the rulegendary.com campaign will be a success, they will also have great video material to put up on video sharing sites like Youtube. North Dakota is definitely going the right way here.
In our 2010 trends post we mentioned that social media marketing will start to get real budgets. Every marketer who hasn’t been hiding under the rock for the last several years has noticed that something important is happening.
In a recent MarketingSherpa study almost half (49%) of the respondents say that they believe that social media will eventually produce ROI. Seven percent of respondents already see ROI and intend to increase budgets as needed to get better results.
Emarketers Debra Aho Williamson estimates that paid Facebook advertising will grow 39 percent in 2010 and reach 605 million dollars worldwide. The total spend on social network advertising would grow to 2.2 billion dollars worldwide and 1.3 billion in US.
But that is only paid advertising. In social media adaption paid ads are only one step and not very social at that. So we expect to see a lot more budgets to be earmarked for social media marketing. Building communities, setting up Twitter accounts and Facebook fan pages, creating content, capturing leads, measuring results. There are a lot of way to spend on social that will be hard to measure or classify.
We believe that bigger chunks of media and marketing spend will be channeled to payroll to hire community managers, bloggers and other specialists who are a key ingredient to make social media marketing really social. This in-house part of the social media spend may take up to two thirds of the budgets. This means that the total social media spend may be more than 7 billon dollars in 2010.
In the same category the payroll will finance social media when engineers talk directly to consumers and support personnel answers customer questions on Twitter or Facebook. As the organizations start to open up, more and more of social media interaction will be an integral part of employees daily routine and this way “social media budgets” may look smaller than they actually are even if we include in-house.
Higher budgets mean higher level decision-making. This will probably mean that some budgets will increase simply by added frictional costs of meetings and consultants. But higher level decision-making will also put pressure to produce real and measurable social media ROI.
I checked some Facebook ads tonight and approximately two thirds of them were just advertising some offer like a regular display banner. Hello there, we have some great stuff for you, come buy now. I think this is a misuse of social media ad space. Sure, I don’t know if these ads work or not or if anybody is even measuring. But. I think the point of Facebook ads should be starting a long term relationship not a quick sale.
Facebook ads should be about things that people care about, thing that will engage them and tie them to your brand. Gain the permission asset and the you can start selling them. There are marketers who “get it”. Some of the remaining ads invited people to become fans and promised something that might actually be interesting to these people.
Forget the quick sale. Aim for the long term. Think, what would you talk about if you couldn’t mention your products and services but had to get people interested. What would you have to do so that people would come to you and ask if you had a solution for their problem.
It is not easy and it takes time, but the base you built this way will last for a very long time.
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Image credit: Sachin Ghodke
Social media is a place where people interact with each other and, if you are luck, this may include your brand. This is engagement. Everybody wants it, but to achieve that you have to think long term not one off campaigns. We have seen politicians do that a lot. The last tweet or blog post has the same date as the election day. A few months before next election they come out of hibernation and try to engage you again.
You may have “friends” who turn to you only when they need something. This is the same thing as a campaign in social media. So, don’t do social media campaigns! I took the last sentence from Brendan Hughes who dug deeper into the matter of campaigns versus engagement in social media:
What’s wrong with a campaign then? In a campaign approach, you’re missing the essence of the nature (and thus the opportunity) of social media. It’s about relationships, and to draw a parallel, a social media campaign is a bit like a one night stand. Everyone had a bit of fun, but ultimately I feel a bit used.
In our work we meet a lot of agency people. What strikes me as odd is that if they go into all that trouble to make and launch a campaign, why wouldn’t they go one step further and make it a long term program? This campaign mentality seems to be a rule rather than exception. You should take that last step and really connect with people.
Since Facebook and Twitter are growing at an amazing speed, we also have an increasing number of companies trying to secure their ground there. With Facebook and Twitter being social networks, naturally the biggest question is: “How to build a following?” . The secret to success may lie in one of the oldest marketing techniques: give people a deal, reports Adweek.
A new consumer study by Razorfish, intended towards researching tech-savvy consumers, found that 43 percent of people following brands on Twitter do so because of exclusive deals or offers. That tops interesting content (23 percent), current customers (24 percent) and service support (4 percent) in a long run. Overall, more than 25 percent claimed following a brand on Twitter
The same goes for Facebook and MySpace. Nearly 37 percent said they’ve connected to brand pages for deals, edging out current customers, interesting content and service support.
Razorfish surveyed 1,000 “digitally connected” U.S. consumers, to learn how digital media habits are influencing consumer’s brand perceptions. “They’re clearly choosing to engage with brands in every sort of way,” Razorfish said. “Brands are so part of the culture, for them to not participate in a meaningful way, will do more damage than good.”
The survey concludes tech savvy consumers are now “the new mainstream.” Among its findings:
• 57 percent customize their home page
• 76 percent watch online video
• 62 percent use online music services
• 56 percent own a smartphone
If Razorfish is to be believed, the coming battle for brands will be about generating great customer experiences, to reach an increasingly tech-savvy population. The survey concludes that social media tools are driving greater acces to information for customers, putting added pressure on brands to match their words with actions.
We believe from our own experience, that giving people a deal really helps to grow a following. But there is a more complicated side to it. There is a difference between getting people to become a part of your following because of good deals, or having them as followers, because they really love product. Naturally, the latter is where you want to be.
When your only strategy is to gather fans by giving out good deals, then you’ll have to keep on doing that indefinetly. As soon as the good deals stop, people will forget about the brand in a matter of days. So give deals for great products to talk about and stop producing meatballs, as Seth Godin would say.
The results of an update to the comScore highly publicized “Natural Born Clickers” research, conducted two years ago with Starcom USA and Tacoda, indicate that the number of people who click on display ads in a month has fallen from 32% of Internet users in July 2007 to only 16% in March 2009, with an even smaller core of people (representing 8% of the Internet user base) accounting for 85% of all clicks.
The study illustrates that heavy clickers represent just 6% of the online population yet account for 50% of all display ad clicks.
heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers.
Other comScore research has shown that online display ads generate significant lift in trademark search, online and offline sales, and brand-site visitation across all verticals, among those internet users who were exposed to the online ad campaigns – whether they clicked on the ad or not. via Mediapost
Seth Godin wrote about this yesterday in The unclicking 84%.
comScore released the results of a UK study of online display advertising on social networking sites, based on data from the Ad Metrix service. The study found that social networking sites accounted for 13.8 billion display ad impressions in August 2009, representing 25.5 percent of all display ads viewed online.
The good news is that demographically active people with money (25-54 year olds) make up almost two thirds (61,3 percent) of the unique visitors to social media sites. Marketeers are a bit slow to grasp that and so the percentage of display ads shown to this group was only 59,3 percent of the total impressions. At the same time younger people (15-24 year olds) who make up 23 percent of social media visitors got 29 percent of the display ads targeted at them.
I would suggest that in absolute numbers display advertising to all age groups will grow. Advertisers start to target older age groups and then the display ads served by the age group will reflect more closely actual percentage of unique visitors from that group.
Other important findings include:
Top 10 Online Display Advertiser Categories. Ranked by Total Display Ads Delivered on Social Networking Sites, August 2009, Total UK Age 15+ – Home & Work Locations, Source: comScore Ad-Metrix.
| Advertiser Category | Total Display Ad Impressions Viewed on Social Networking Sites (000) | Total Display Ad Impressions Viewed Across Total Internet (000) | Percent of Advertiser Category Display Ad Impressions Viewed on Social Networking Sites (%) |
| Total Internet | 13,805,923 | 54,243,070 | 25.5% |
| Telecommunications | 949,078 | 3,499,401 | 27.1% |
| Retail | 752,726 | 2,498,512 | 30.1% |
| Banking | 247,595 | 1,186,369 | 20.9% |
| Travel | 212,531 | 1,844,621 | 11.5% |
| Entertainment | 181,336 | 1,072,914 | 16.9% |
| Online Gambling | 158,770 | 800,919 | 19.8% |
| Online Dating | 136,718 | 404,972 | 33.8% |
| Online Gaming | 131,521 | 1,188,177 | 11.1% |
| Government | 101,648 | 342,173 | 29.7% |
| Teens | 99,809 | 267,646 | 37.3% |
The travel industries low number (11,5%) seems a bit odd to me. I think there are a plenty of opportunities to engage consumers on social networking sites with travel. The possibilities for travel ads to be relevant in social sites are much better than for let’s say retail or telecom.
“CPMs on social networking sites have traditionally suffered relative to other content categories, in part because of the perception that much of the audience are younger consumers with lower spending power,” said Mike Read, comScore managing director, Europe.
In my view the biggest problem with the social media CTR is that people are there to hang out with their friends and this is cognitively long way from interacting with brands or thinking about buying stuff. I would guess that advertisers who manage to get involved in these conversations will see stellar CTRs.
“Given the overall reach and volume of ads delivered on social networking sites, brand advertisers who ignore this channel may be missing a significant opportunity and enabling their competitors to gain a dominant share of voice in the channel.” Mike Read, comScore managing director, Europe.
| Demographic | % Composition Display Ads in Social Networking Category | % Composition Unique Visitors to Social Networking Category | Composition Index of Display Ads to Visitors |
| Persons: 15-24 | 29.0% | 23.0% | 126 |
| Persons: 25-34 | 22.3% | 21.2% | 105 |
| Persons: 35-44 | 21.1% | 22.0% | 104 |
| Persons: 45-54 | 15.9% | 18.1% | 88 |
| Persons: 55+ | 11.7% | 15.8% | 74 |
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.
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
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