DreamGrow Social Media

If You Need Influential Consumers And Word-of-Mouth Go To Online Forums

True fans are the people who really like you and won’t miss the opportunity to tell others about you. A recent study from PostRelease reveals that a place to look for brand advocates could be online forums.

Online forums are one of the first tools of social media. Early web-based forums date back as far as 1996. Our experience from running online forums the core users are very opinionated and very loyal. Usually a community develops around forums with regular users.

The new study shows that their influence reaches online and off. The users of online forums post reviews, share links, organize offline meetups and proactively recommend a purchase more often than regular internet users. About one fifth of Americans contribute to forums.

Some of the results from the survey:

• 79.2 percent of forum contributors help a friend or family member make a decision about a product purchase – compared with 47.6 percent of non-contributors and 53.8 percent overall
• 65 percent of forum contributors share advice (offline and in person) based on information that they’ve read online – compared with 35 percent of non-contributors and 40.8 percent overall.
• 66 percent of forum contributors post online ratings/reviews of products/services, compared with 16.8 percent of non-contributors and 26.4 percent overall.
• 57.7 percent of forum contributors proactively recommend that someone make a particular purchase – compared with 16.9 percent of non-contributors and 24.9 percent overall.
• 43.6 percent of forum contributors share links to articles about new products or with reviews of products – compared with 12 percent of non-contributors and 18.2 percent overall.
• 35.6 percent of forum contributors attend an offline event or meet up where people with similar interests or who share the same hobby connect – compared with 13.8 percent of non-contributors and 18 percent overall.
• 20.6 percent of forum contributors publish a blog – compared with 2.1 percent of non-contributors and 5.7 percent overall.
• 18.8 percent of forum contributors take an active role in organizing an offline event or meetup for a group that met originally online – compared with 2.4 percent of non-contributors and 5.6 percent overall.

So it seems a really good idea to find the forums relevant to your business and identify the key players in those forums. Here are some free tools that will get you started.

Boardreader
BoardReader can be used to find and information on the forums and message boards. Boardreader uses proprietary software that allows users to search multiple message boards simultaneously.

BoardTracker
A search engine in the ‘traditional’ sense. All the information in our database is from forum threads only, all extraneous text on a page is excluded by default which allows use to return even more relevant results without the ’spam’. Corporate users can arm their sales and marketing staff with BoardTracker accounts to give them essential business intelligence.

For other free social media monitoring tools visit our post: 46 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools.

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Image credit Peter Suneson

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.

B2B Business Case for Social Media

Almost all business buyers use social media. On the other hand the same people are not convinced that they should use social media for B2B communication. The problem is in the lack of knowledge and experience. Christina Kerley has put together a presentation that helps to fill in some blanks and pave the road for the social media adoption in B2B. The 10 key benefits from the presentation are:

1. Social media extends branding
2. You can expand your reach
3. Tap into relevant communities
4. Influence the influencers and get positive word-of-mouth
5. Boost your thought leadership position
6. Cut marketing costs
7. Get faster sales by sharing more information and having two way communication with the buyer
8. Stand out! Be the first!
9. Decrease complexity of decisions by helping and guiding
10. Strengthen CRM efforts

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…
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Image credit: Alex Brazhnikov

Resources: How to Use Social Media?

In my search for different cases of social media I have stumbled on a lot of lists about organizations using social media. To make them easier to find I post them all here for reference. Special thanks goes to Peter Kim for starting the huge list in A Wiki of Social Media Marketing Examples.

A Wiki of Social Media Marketing Examples. Pure gold! 1,140 examples at the time of this post. You can sort them by company name, type of social media, industry and country.

Ray Schiel’s list of uses of social media by category: online video, applications, widgets, social networks, blogging, podcasting, crowdsourcing, bookmarking and tagging, microblogging, photosharing, wiki, virtual worlds, mashup, word of mouth, pr, etc.

26 Social Media Marketing Examples in Detail on Ignite Social Media’s blog. 22 cases analyzed four more to go. This list goes deeper and gives an overview of what’s really happening.

Social Media Blogs Top 200. Learn from the gurus and improve. The list uses PageRank, FeedBurner, Alexa, and Technorati, the average number of comments for ranking.

The Top 50 Social Media Blogs Of The Year EvanCarmichael.com has created a list of great social media blogs.

15 Top Social Media Agencies. Who are the top dogs on the business. Learn guys. Social media companies can be research focused, software heavy, app developers, monitoring services or consulting firms. The social media agency is one that helps companies extend their brand and marketing through training, long term strategy, and execution.

It’ll take a lot of time to go through all that material but if you know a really good resourece then please add it in the comments.

Study: Tribalization of Business 2009

Organizations are not yet tapping social media’s full potential. Deloitte’s Technology, Media & Telecommunications practice has released the results of the 2009 Tribalization of Business Study. The study evaluates the perceived potential of online communities and identifies how enterprises believe they may better leverage them. The second edition of the Tribalization of Business Study measures the responses of more than 400 companies including Fortune 100 organizations which have created and maintain online communities today.

The study shows that companies are aware of the social tools. Companies are trying to see more than just the active users and look for ways to capture data about non-active users or „lurkers“.

• 32 percent of respondents are capturing data on how lurkers derive value from the community
• 20 percent of respondents have set up formal “ambassador” programs, which give outsiders preferential treatment in return for being more active in the community
• 39 percent of the respondents indicated that more full-time people are being deployed to manage the communities

The biggest obstacles in building communities are getting people to:

• Join (24 percent)
• Stay engaged (30 percent)
• Keep returning (21 percent)

There are solutions to overcome these obstacles but companies are not very active in taking the necessary steps.

The main business objectives of online communities are to increase:

• word-of-mouth (38 percent)
• customer loyalty (34 percent)
• brand awareness (30 percent)
• idea generation (29 percent)
• quality of customer support (23 percent)

In addition to the obvious need to be customer-centric the next steps recommended by Deloitte are:

• Think tribe, not market segment
• Think network, not channel

What are the biggest obstacles in social media adoption for your company?