DreamGrow Social Media

Who rules the social web?

I found this really cool infogrphic. Gender balance in social networks? Chicks Rule! Women seem to be in general more sociable. This would make the social networking sites more appealing to them as places where to connect and share experiences.

I believe that the number of users may equalize in future. However, if we would look at the activity on the social site my guess would be that women rule even more.

Marketers must understand that women are directly or indirectly behind most household spending decision. Also, women lead 4 out of 5 stages of the buying process. Three of these stages are closely tied to social media sites: research, ownership and word-of-mouth.

To summarize: in social networking sites it is a good idea to target women and try to influence the non-purchasing stages of buying process. Women don’t buy brands. They join them (Understanding Women — Eight Essential Truths That Work in Your Business and Your Life). From the marketers point of view this is very important. So, adapt and get some women in your marketing team.

Here are some more facts about women spending (via she-conomy.com):

• Senior women age 50 and older control net worth of $19 trillion and own more than three-fourths of the nation’s financial wealth. – MassMutual Financial Group–2007
• Over the next decade, women will control two thirds of consumer wealth in the United States and be the beneficiaries of the largest transference of wealth in our country’s history. Estimates range from $12 to $40 trillion. Many Boomer women will experience a double inheritance windfall, from both parents and husband. The Boomer woman is a consumer that luxury brands want to resonate with. – Claire Behar, Senior Partner and Director, New Business Development, Fleishman-Hillard New York
• Women account for 85% of all consumer purchases including everything from autos to health care.
• 92% pass along information about deals or finds to others.
• 76% want to be part of a special or select panel.

And still women feel misunderstood:

• 59% of women feel misunderstood by food marketers;
• 66% feel misunderstood by health care marketers;
• 74% feel misunderstood by automotive marketers;
• 84% feel misunderstood by investment marketers
• 91% of women in one survey said that advertisers don’t understand them.

Ten Things Marketers Need to Know in 2010

A really good presentation from Eric Weaver with audio.

EVENT: 2010 Consumer Electronics Show
AUDIENCE: Marketers
SYNOPSIS: The Social Media Hype Bubble is OVER. Consumers are getting burnt out on the hype around the media. So should marketers get out of social marketing? HELL NO. This presentation provides ten suggestions that leverage current trends in social media adoption by both consumers and business.

One interesting point is that Eric is from Tribal DDB. We here at Dreamgrow helped to get the DDB Estonia Facebook fan page up.

Customer interaction becomes social

In our post about social media trends for 2010 we suggested that more and more customer interaction will take place on social networks. Here’s why.

You are endlessly transferred from a robot to automatic response to answering machine. Push 1 for billing, push 2 for tech support… This may ruin your day even if you started out quite OK.

Personal touch makes business sense. If you feel that the person that you are communicating with is someone live, who understands your needs, then you are much more forgiving and open to compromise. Personal touch can fix a potentially explosive situation.

This means that bringing the support staff out from behind the anonymous company logo will give you more satisfied customers and sh*t will hit the fan a lot less often. This does not mean that you have to give in every time there’s a complaint. By simply listening and showing a human face will get you a result that answering machine never could.

When creating our clients’ strategies we usually interview their customers. This has given us invaluable insight how to improve the communication of fix a web site. But one of the most important things I have learned from those sessions is how grateful people are when they see that you are there just for them and you really try to understand them.

Social media will help to scale that personal touch. When a brand is answering somebody else’s problem in a human and authentic way then this act will improve my opinion of that brand. Every touchpoint and channel should be personal and open, increasing the brand value. Social media is the tool that helps you do that.

____________
Image credit Sanja Gjenero

Social Media Fails To Manifest As Marketing Medium

When I read that headline on MediPost I was certain that people who are saying that have yet to receive a clue. If you ask 100 people if advertising influences their decisions then the majority of respondents would say ‘no’. That does not mean you stop advertising. They just don’t know how media influences them.

The same thing goes for social networks. Marketers may dream that some day we can call them marketing networks but I wouldn’t hold may breath. People are there to connect with each other, to talk about their dog and how their day went. I do too. Sure, sometimes you stumble upon something great and insightful but for the most part it’s just chatter. When you try to turn it into a home shopping network people will just leave.

“What we’re seeing is that word-of-mouth is still the No. 1 most influential source, followed by TV. The influence of social media isn’t at the bottom of the list, but it is somewhere in the long tail of marketing – about the same as print ads, or online [display] ads.” says Dave Tice, vice president and group account director at Knowledge Networks, and the top analyst behind the report.

But there’s a bit more to it than that. We tend to talk about brands. Some say that about 1/6 of our conversations are about brands. Up until recently this talk was cheap, just hot air. Now, with the social networks, this talk is permanently recorded, indexed and searchable. Word of mouth has found a new carrier in the form of social media. A carrier where others can tap into your conversation.

This is the marketers opportunity to engage, change minds and sell. But tread carefully as the rules are still vague…
____________
Image credit: Alex Brazhnikov

How to get your brand popular in social networks?

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.

Brands in the Blogosphere and Twitter

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.

Three-Fourths of Women Do Not Know What Influences Them on SocNets

I read that:

Though women are “exceptionally active” in online social networking activities, they are overwhelmingly uninfluenced – and often “turned off,” by brands hawking products and services in the social-media space, according to a study released by Q Interactive’s Women’s Channel in partnership with adTech: Chicago.

[...]

Moreover, an overwhelming 75% say they are not influenced by social networking channels to purchase products and services, the study found.

I think that the picture is not really that bad for the social marketeer. The thing is that most people tend to think that they are less influenced by marketing than they really are. I have see a survey where people were asked if they are influenced by advertising and an overwhelming majority of 95% answered NO. I belong to the 5% that is influenced by marketing and I believe there are a bit more than 5% of us.

Some interesting numbers in the survey are:

• 17% feel positive about brands on social media
• 4% of social network users say they have ever clicked on an ad
• 10% of women engage in product / brand-related activities
• 52 percent of women surveyed have “befriended” or “become a fan of” at least one brand

New Study of 1,000 Women Finds While Facebook a Fave, 75 Percent Uninfluenced by Social Networking Channels to Purchase

via q-interactive-women-adtech-social-networking-sites-influence-purchases-august-2009.jpg.

Who’s most engaged? The world’s most valuable brands

The world’s most valuable brands.
Who’s most engaged? (PDF). There exist thousands of social media channels, each with a slightly different value proposition. It is therefore a daunting task to figure how to objectively evaluate various marketing efforts across all social mediums. The Wetpaint/Altimeter Group ENGAGEMENTdb Report introduces a single criterion: engagement.

The goals of the study were to measure how deeply engaged the top 100 global brands are in a variety of social media channels and, more importantly, understand if higher engagement is correlated with financial performance. We found that not only could we quantifiably measure engagement, we could also understand how more engaged companies tap an engagement mindset to perform better. Below are some of our key findings.

Depth of engagement can be measured.

Two-thirds of US marketers use social media

The CMO Survey was based on a poll of 511 senior marketers by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, in conjunction with the American Marketing Association.

It found that 65.4% of companies are using social networks like Facebook as part of their efforts to connect with consumers.

This compared with 52.3% utilising video- and photo-sharing sites like YouTube and Flicker, 50.9% writing corporate blogs, and 44.4% with a presence on “microblogging” services like Twitter.

Top marketing officers are turning to new and often unproven strategies that focus on the Internet, partnerships, new markets, new products and services to help their companies.

via Two-thirds of US marketers use social media – WARC News – WARC.com.

Iconic: Michael Jackson tops Amazon – totally

This is a brand that’s relevant to a lot of people. I don’t think we are going to see anything like that any time soon or ever. After Michael Jackson’s death he’s albums have taken up a lot of space space on Amazon. 19 of the 25 top selling albums.

Click on the image to enlarge.