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.

9 Free Social Media eBooks

A friend of mine listed the social media ebooks he’s reading at the moment. There are dozens of social media ebooks around free and otherwise. So, I decided to make a list of the ebooks that seem to stand out. Here are nine of them:

The New Rules of Viral Marketing, David Meerman Scott. The smart marketers profiled in The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free tell you exactly how they used viral marketing and provide advice in their own words.

Fish Where the Fish Are- Mapping Social Media to the Buying Cycle, Chris Brogan. An ebook meant to get your mind started on how social media ties to the more traditional buying cycle. These are some thoughts I’d put together immediately after my presentation, fleshed out, lined up, and with some takeaways that you can use to dig in once you feel comfortable.

The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008, Philip Sheldrake. If you could go back to the mid-90s and offer a marketer a little box that could sit on her desk and let her listen in on thousands of customer conversations and participate in those discussions regardless of geography or time zone, it would appear so farfetched that she’d probably call security. This eBook is about that reality.

Customer Service, The Art of Listening and Engagement Through Social Media, Brian Solis. Transforming people into a surrogate sales force is the dream of any service organization. The difference today is that the landscape has shifted to the point where good customer service is no longer the minimum ante to play the game.

Getting a Foothold in Social Media, Amber Naslund. you don’t have any idea where to start. It starts with a strategy, rooted in a desire to forge better relationships with your customers.

The Social Media Starter Kit, Amber Naslund. Several times a day, I hear folks asking about how to get started with all this social media stuff. What tools they need, what sites they should look at so as not to get overwhelmed. This is the nuts and bolts stuff, not so much the “why”.

Social Media Time Management. Strategies for Tackling Information Overload, Amber Naslund. How many hours do I have to spend in social media each day? Do I have resources/people other than me? What can I expect of them? (Note: if you’re serious about doing social, you need to find an hour a day to start with, at least.) Which 2 or 3 tools and social networks make sense based on my listening efforts? What is my goal for participation on those sites? What is the culture of those communities and how will my participation line up with that?

Social Media and Network Starting Points, Chris Brogan. Some thoughts based on a question about guidelines, a toolbox, and how to grow a community.

The Simple Web: A Philosophy for Getting What You Want, Skellie. How can I get visitors, subscribers, comments, inbound links, and people saying good things about what I do?

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Image credit: Antony Ruggiero

How Game Mechanics Can Make Social Networks Addictive?

Game mechanics are behind the successes of the biggest social networks and online role playing games. But game mechanics is not only for the online, it applies to all interactions between people on-line and off. Today I read Robert Scoble’s post and decided to make a list of resources that have caught my eye in this field. Following these principles can really make a difference. So here we go:

The social behavior incentive (how your app can be as addictive as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare). Robert Scoble’s nine points on how you can make your application or tribe addictive.

Applying game mechanics to social media. From Peter Kim: If you think games are frivolous, think again – they help us accomplish the simple, like getting an infant to eat, and the complex, like warming up surgeons or disaster response. But as in all things, moderation is key and some people have died when taking games too far.

How Simple Game Mechanics Can Impassion People To Do More Business With You – with Amy Jo Kim. After listening to Amy Jo Kim in this program, you’ll see that there’s more going on under the surface. You’ll understand the levels of activity that you need to build in. And you’ll get a virtual toolbox full of tools that you can use to add game mechanics to your business and build a passionate audience that competes to take more action on your site.

Amy Jo Kim presentation Game Mechanics for Social Media from Startup2Startup

Game Design for Social Networks from Aki Järvinen.

Motivating consumer behavior through game mechanics. Often users of applications need to be encouraged to perform actions for the system to work, or in some cases for it to work better and improve the experience for others. Startups know this all too well – I’ve rarely come across one which doesn’t require some sort of input from their users on some level.

So here you go, start making your own project addictive!

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Image creadit: Davide Guglielmo

Social Media Replaces Email and IM

In our social media trends post we suggested that people will use more social networks’ messaging instead of regular email and IM tools.

We haven’t seen any real research on this yet. In my opinion the convenience of using messaging tools without leaving the friendly social network will move a lot of email communication away from mail clients. I believe that this will happen mainly to personal email. When people talk to each other it’s only natural to use the tools that are right in front of you.

But not to fear, the email will stay with us some time yet. Businesses will continue to use email until some authentic way of private B2C communication channel becomes available for them on social networks. The second factor that keeps email alive is the rudimentary user experience of messaging tools in social networks. These tools are convenient but have only very basic functionality.

Now, a smart move for social media sites would be to include email in their environment. If a social network like Facebook would build a full-blown email client into its interface then Live, Yahoo and GMail would really have something to worry about.

In the instant messaging field the desktop apps have a lot more to worry about. The IM does not have 40 years of history behind it and the most used IM clients have only about 400 million users (Usage share of instant messaging clients). Well, in China they do.

The problems with social networks’ IM clients are similar to email. Rudimentary interface, lack of voice and video. But looking at my own IM habits it is not a problem as most of the communication is text-based and I don’t much care for the bells and whistles of the desktop apps.

Facebook can have a huge advantage by implementing these tools. So, what do you think when will we see the fully-featured email and IM clients in Facebook colors?

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.

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Image credit Sanja Gjenero

Our Most Read Social Media Post For 2009

Happy, happy, happy new year to everybody! 2010 will be the best year yet. Social media will integrate into our lives and we stop counting how many times someone is checking their Facebook. Here are our most read post from the 2009.

46 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools. It’s a good strategy to see first what free has to offer and the try to find tools that fit in the gaps you need to fill.

22 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2010. This is what we think will be important in social media in 2010. The slide show in the post was featured on Slideshale and got more than 2000 views in first week.

Market Share of Social Networking Sites 2009. What is going up and where should I participate? These are questions everyone is trying to answer.

Facebook More Visited Than Google. Facebook has a good chance to become THE site people visit and a new poster boy to replace Google.

A Simple Social Media Platform. We drew a picture just to get a clear vision how a simple social media platform should look like.

8 steps to social media goodness. Blindingly obvious for some but I still felt that it’s good to write down the basics and revisit them from time to time.

World Map Of Social Networks. People are stat junkies, as with the firs post on the list, everyone wants to see the numbers.

Social media weekend: Seth Godin, relationships, marketing is dead. All our social media weekend link post got a lot of readers, but this one stood out. We’ll continue to give you links every weekend.

The Mobile Internet is Bigger Than You Think. I wa really blown away by the numbers. The mobile is BIG. Really, really big.

Social media helping to spike up Mercury sales in New England. Our take on sucessful social media case.

We’ll try to keep thing interesting. Every post we make should be useful to our readers. Please let us know what matters to you and we’ll try to cover that. Thank you for reading.
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Image credit Tibor Fazakas

Facebook More Visited Than Google

Everything social is what people want to do most. Currently the top site is still Google but it will pass. People love to talk more than search. If we look at the top sites in US for 2009 then we see that four of them are used for communicating with others (Yahoo Mail, Facebook, MySpace and Live Mail). I believe that this social chatter is fundamental human need and won’t go away any time soon.

As we pointed out in our 22 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2010, people will use more social networks’ messaging instead of regular email and IM. This will boost the visits to the social sites and decrease the usage of web mail. This all leads to Facebook becoming the most visited site in the world some time in 2010.

Experian Hitwise US tweeted that:

Facebook was the most visited site in the US on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. 1st time the site has been the #1 visited US site ever. — Hitwise_US

Search Engine Land has a Hitwise graph for the data running up to the Christmas.

Experian Hitwise UK shared their data:

Facebook was the #1 US website this Xmas. Not quite there in the UK yet – maybe next year… — Hitwise_UK

I think there are two factors holding back total domination of Facebook. Lack of news and god-awful search. If Facebook would integrate Bing search to its platform then Google would have a lot to worry about.

Research: Student Grades Not Affected By Social Networking

The study “Social Networking Usage and Grades Among College Students” (PDF) finds that students who heavily engage in social networking do just as well academically as students who are less interested in keeping in touch with the medium.

The study indicates that social media is being integrated with rather than interfering with students’ academic lives. College students have grown up with social networks, and the study shows they are now simply part of how students interact with each other with no apparent impact on grades. – UNH adjunct professor Chuck Martin

It seems that most of the time that is used for social networks comes from TV, idle surfing, and gaming. This way the time spent on social networking sites could be said to be a “higher quality” activity. The time for studying and other important thing stays the same.

The research shows that there is no correlation between the amount of time students spend using social media and their grades. Grades followed similar distributions for all colleges.

63% of heavy users received high grades, compared to 65% of light users. 37% of heavy users of social media received what were defined as lower grades and 35% of light users fell into same category.

The study showed that Facebook and YouTube are the most popular social media sites, with 96% of students saying they use Facebook and 84% saying they use YouTube. 20% said they use blogs, 14% use Twitter, 12% use MySpace and 10% use LinkedIn.

89% of students use social networks for social reasons and 79% use them for entertainment. 26% of students use social media for educational reasons and 16% for professional reasons.
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Image credit Mary Gober

World Map Of Social Networks

Italian writer, blogger and photographer Vincenzo Cosenza has put together a visualization showing the most popular social networks around the world on a map, based on recent traffic data (December 2009).

As we can see from the map, Facebook is still strong and on the rise. It is dominating most of the western world, together with Africa, Middle-East and the Pacific region. With a user base of 350 million and growing, the map will probably look even greener next year.

Friendster…is…well…Friendster. Nothing to talk about here.

Although Facebook is also growing in Russia, it is still dominated by Odnoklassniki and V Kontakte. I personally don’t see this situation changing any time soon either. They both support cyrillic and are strongly oriented on the Russian-speaking community. They are also widely used among Russian inhabitants in other Eastern European countries.

Google’s Orkut is shrinking steadily, still dominating only in Brazil and Estonia. With Facebook’s user base having grown by 50% in both of these countries in one year, Orkut probably won’t be on the map at the end of 2010. Orkut also used to be big in India, but with Facebook growing by 150% in two consecutive years there, it has lost it’s dominant position.

Mixi is mainly dominant in Japan, with it’s main “advantage” being the possibility to stay totally anonymous – The people in Japan like to generally stay anonymous when surfing. Facebook’s privacy settings haven’t really been embraced there…

China’s QQ, when only usernames are concerned, is the biggest social network in the world. QQ today has over one billion usernames, but only one tenth of them are recurring visitors, topping at 91 million in Dec. 21. Without a doubt, QQ is the biggest player in China and will probably stay that way for a long time.

There are also a bunch of smaller players, being dominant in only one or two countries. But Facebook is changing that situation quite fast:

When compared to june 2009, Facebook has become dominant in 19 countries:

India, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Czech Republic, Cameroon, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Azerbaijan, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Oman, Yemen, Quadeloupe and Martinique

So, China aside, Facebook is still growing fast. By the same time next year, we will probably see a map where Facebook is dominating most of the western hemisphere, together with the Middle-East and the Pacific. The only real players who are stopping Facebook from having a total “world dominance”, will probably be China’s QQ and V Kontakte in Russia.