With seven in ten brands saying they plan to increase their presence across social media in 2012 (according to a recent survey by Awareness) we thought it would be a good idea to take a regular look at the current social media landscape.

So here’s a quick run down of  what we think has been hot in social media this January:

1. Farfetch.com – the future of social retail?

2012 looks set to be the year of the social online retailer. Luxury retailer farfetch.com announced that it saw a 73% rise in traffic from Facebook in the second half of 2011 and it recently raised a second round of funding to the tune of $18m.

And it’s not just luxury online retailers who are seeing the value of social. As part of its strategy to encourage social shopping, fab.com launched its live feed for members to easily check out what others are buying, liking, tweeting and sharing – all in real time.

Just 7 months since launching, fab.com already has 1.4m members – over half of which have joined as a result of social sharing, so it clearly makes business sense to encourage this channel.

2. KLM and Scandinavian Airlines encourage social flying

Following on from their popular ‘Surprise’ campaign, KLM are getting even more social by launching their ‘Meet and Seat’ campaign. The idea is that when customers book flights, they have the option of creating a public profile and then choosing who they sit next to on the plane. Romantic stuff or creepy as hell? You decide.

Scandinavian Airlines has also got in on the act by encouraging members to use their air miles by booking flights together. Their ‘Couple up, to buckle up’ campaign shared QR codes with members who had to put their phones together in order to access a unique 2 for 1 booking code.

3. Soundcloud gives Instagram a personal touch

It looks like sound hosting just got interesting with the launch of Soundcloud’s new slideshow app, ‘Story Wheel’,this month. The idea behind ‘Story Wheel’ is that members can look through their Instagram photos and record an audio description to go with them. The effect is an old-school slide-show with a personal soundtrack – you can see the founders of Soundcloud’s own version here.

Audio-hosting platform Soundcloud has grown by about 1 million members in the last couple of months and is now fully integrated with Facebook. This month, it reached a milestone of 10 million users, so diversifying their offering is a smart move to show that sound can make images that bit more personal.

With such a large audience behind them, perhaps now may be the time for brands to think about how they can use audio-hosting as part of their social media strategy.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshnetworks/~3/V3SGu2gysm4/

Image via Wikipedia

According to research from a team at Carnegie Mellon University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Georgia Institute of Technology, we think that 25% of tweets are not worth reading. The study found that, when asked to rate tweets by people they follow, only 36% of tweets were marked favourably, 25% were marked less favourably and the balance (39%) received no strong feeling either way. Press coverage of this study has invariably interpreted this to mean that up to a quarter of what we say on Twitter is a waste of time (see the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph coverage of the research).

The research itself asked users to self-nominate themselves to take part and, in exchange for having their own tweets rated, we asked to rate samples of tweets from people they follow. As with much academic research, this does take them out of their normal context when using Twitter but the results are interesting and informative. Maybe not for the interpretation that is taken by some of those reporting on it, but for what it tells us about how we use Twitter. Or perhaps how it reinforces what we should already know.

People are not interested in everything that people say on Twitter. They are not even interested in everything that the people they choose to follow say. There should be nothing surprising or controversial about this. It is fairly normal in all our social interactions that we are more interested in some things and less interested in others. I’m mainly surprised that we are uninterested in only 25% of things that people we follow say on Twitter.

Twitter is a classic social network. People who use it by following people (rather than by following hashtags or search strings) make a choice about who to follow based on who they are, what they say in their biography and perhaps some of their tweets at the time that we choose to follow them. I am unlikely to share everything in common with them – I may be interested in their tweets about BBC Question Time on a Thursday, for example, but less interested in their Tweets about the Super Bowl. I am unlikely to find you interesting all the time. And that’s nothing personal. And nothing unusual.

So as a reader I am unlikely to find everything that anybody says on Twitter interesting – I mentally filter out what I want to read and what I don’t want to read. If I really don’t want to read things on a certain topic, I can always filter it out with Tweetdeck or the like.

Just as readers are not necessarily interested in reading everything, those who write tweets are not necessarily writing them to be read. There is a clear disconnect between the person writing the tweets and the people reading them. The writer is not (in most cases) thinking about who will be reading it and why. They are just saying something. Saying it because they want to. That in itself is motivation and on the rare occasion that a tweet will be retweeted or responded to they will get further gratification.

So we are not interested in everything even our closest friends say (probably true in real life and on Twitter). And people are often writing on Twitter for the act of writing something and not necessrily composing it for specific audience or a specific reaction. Given that most people follow a collection of people with many different interests, some of whom they know and some of whom they don’t, it surprises me that only 1 in 4 tweets that we see are not of interest to us. This study certainly doesn’t show that those Tweets are a waste of time.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshnetworks/~3/XYdzA-78haI/

Over the past few months, activity on the social network Pinterest has exploded.

Pinterest is focused on the lifestyles of its members and encourages them to create different virtual pinboards onto which they can ‘pin’ things they like.

From September to December 2011, unique visitors to pinterest.com increased by a staggering 429% and over 3.3.million people have signed up to the website so far. In fact, it’s recently been announced that Pinterest has more than 11 million monthly visitors, making it the fastest website to surpass the 10 million mark.

The value of Pinterest to brands?

The demographics of Pinterest are particularly interesting for brands – an impressive 80% of users are women, and 55% of these are aged between 25 to 44.

So what does this suggest? Well, if you’re a brand targeting this demographic, you might want to start thinking about whether you should be on Pinterest.

Interestingly, Pinterest states in its terms and conditions that it is not a platform for self-promotion, but an online space for members to share their lifestyle, tastes and interests.

This means that (as with any social media platform) if you’re considering creating a Pinterest account for your brand, it’s worth putting a lot of thought into it beforehand, as part of an overall social media strategy. Whilst it might be okay to have a board dedicated to your current collection, the idea is that you will curate a wider selection of images and videos which tell the story behind your brand. You shouldn’t just be pushing product, but showing the lifestyle which is associated with that product.

How brands can use Pinterest

So for example, if you are a stationery company, you could have boards dedicated to doodles, great calligraphy or fun origami as well as those showcasing your best products. These do not have to come from you, but are just a curated collection of images which are already out there on the web.

The fact that Pinterest doesn’t have to be so focused on your brand may be intimidating for some – especially if you don’t have a concrete idea about who your target demographic is or what you’re trying to communicate to your customers. However, it also provides a lot of scope for some really fun social media marketing. Indeed, Pinterest even allows you to have other people contributing to your boards, which means that members can create user-generated fan content for your account if you wish.

With the freedom to use fresh content which isn’t necessarily generated from your design team, you can really investigate the different personalities of your brand. That could be anything from a pinboard dedicated to your employees favourite things, to one exploring where your products are made. Let your imagination go wild and dig deep into which niches your brand could become a Pinterest expert on.

Finally, don’t forget what your brand Pinterest account is ultimately there for. Whether you’re wanting to encourage online sales of your product or just looking to experiment, make sure you drive users back to your website and track the results. After all, if you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshnetworks/~3/UC2atybiRsY/

A simple social graph

The social graph is not a new thing. The concept has been spoken about since at least the 1960s and is simply a way of representing (drawing) all the connections between people. Imagine a small island community of three people with no links to the outside world; you could represent this community as a social graph – showing all three connected to each other. As well as people we might add on other things – places, events, animals – and so use a social graph to show the connections between all of these objects rather than just between people.

The concept of the social graph is not a new thing, and it is not unique to social media. But what social networks do provide is a systematised way of storing these objects and these connections. Facebook is currently the largest social graph in the world but any social network builds a social graph based on what you tell them about yourself, who you connect to and the actions you do.

An example of Facebook, the biggest social graph

Facebook, for example, knows who you are friends with (and who they are friends with). It knows when you and a friend are connected by an event (that you both attend) or by a photo (that you are both in), or by a film (that you both ‘Like’), or by some music (that you have both listened to on Spotify). It then stores this data in a systemised way and so has structured data on you, your life and the way all of the things around you connect. Think of it as a mass of data that can be used to help to define an individual. And Facebook gives brands access to this through their ‘Open Graph’ API.

Benefits for Facebook

For Facebook the benefits of building and storing these social graphs is obvious – the more they know about an individual, the more they can tailor and personalise their experience and the more useful Facebook becomes to them. They can use this data to monetise the network – mainly by selling targeted advertising. They currently earn almost $1.20 a year from every individual Facebook member, and the more data they collect the better then can personalise the experience and the more they can earn. Finally, the quicker they build an individual’s social graph, and the more information they capture in it, the bigger the barrier they build to others being able to come in and compete with them.

Benefits for Facebook members

For the individual members of Facebook there are benefits too. Whilst personalisation can be difficult to get right, there is no doubt that a personlised experience can be much more useful to an individual than a more generic one. It helps you suggest things that they might actually want to read, things you might actually be interested in, and even show you adverts for things you might actually want to buy. The more data you share with Facebook, the better they can personalise your experience and more useful you will find it. Of course, you need to remember to be informed about what you choose to share and why.

Benefits for brands

It is probably fair to say that brands so far have not taken the most advantage of the social graph. Partly this is because many are still experimenting with social media and many think of it just as a way to engage and build their own communities and networks, rather than exploring the pure data benefits that they can get. But applied correctly, brands can use this data to provide a better targeted and more personalised service, and even to help shape products themselves. Whether you are Amazon, using Facebook’s social graph to help you choose products for your friends’ birthdays, or KLM using Facebook and LinkedIn social graphs to help you choose who to sit next to on the plane, there are opportunities across sectors and audience types. In fact the biggest barrier to brands using the social graph effectively is their own creativity and ability to explore how the data they can get from social graphs (including Facebook) can help your business. And the biggest opportunity is to explore ways that data from these social graphs can be combined with a brands own proprietary data to build a bespoke data set that can let you develop products and personalise services for customers.

All brands should be exploring and understanding the different social graphs out there (including Facebook’s) and the data that these can offer. Social media is much more than just a means of communicating to and engaging with people. In fact the possibilities that this kind of data offers can often be much more interesting.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshnetworks/~3/XrU03kqyqZg/

The financial services industry feels like it’s not ready for social media. You may think that this is due to regulatory restrictions, but there is more to it than that – and there are opportunities for the brands that overcome these misconceptions:

1. Financial services companies are worried about the risk of brand damage if they start talking with people online, because the industry’s public image is seriously wounded.

It’s easier to pretend a relationship hasn’t been hurt than to talk about the awkward feelings, but the current fraught market offers a big opportunity to re-invent the relationship financial services firms have with customers. The public increasingly favours honesty transparency. Who dares wins.

2. Consumer banking isn’t where financial services firms make their money, so the compliance customer service burden of “switching on” social media doesn’t feel worth the investment.

This is a false economy, because the thing that makes social media so powerful is the way it enables small groups of motivated people to influence many people, very quickly. Financial services organisations put themselves at risk by failing to establish ways to connect meaningfully with customers online as well as in branches and over the phone.

3. Senior decision makers in the financial services sector still believe that social media effort will create the burden of monitoring new KPIs based on engagement metrics and Facebook likes.

The reality is different: these metrics are meaningless for senior people in organisations of all kinds. However, low-level social media metrics can be aligned with existing business metrics, like those normally used to measure customer acquisition and retention. If social media effort is to be useful, it should contribute to existing business aims and measures, not create new ones.

4. Of all industries, the financial services sector has been the slowest to catch on that social media isn’t just a marketing channel (see: social business).

Strategic uses of social media can include improving recruitment internal career development; enabling teams working in different parts of the world to collaborate effectively or customer-led product innovation. The key to understanding the strategic importance of social media to an organisation is to understand what separates a business strategy from a plan for implementation. A business strategy describes a way to win in the marketplace given the competition and any external forces such as regulation. In an organisation of thousands, the strategic opportunity with social media may not involve marketing at all.

It may involve discovering how many hours are wasted per working week per capita on ineffective document collaboration or customer relationship management. Let’s assume replacing MS Word or Excel document control with a collaboration tool could save an average employee 1 hour per week for 48 weeks a year. An organisation of 5,000 employees paying £15/hour would save £3.6M pa .This would be a strategic use of social media which could give an organisation a genuine competitive advantage.

5. The financial services sector is concerned about the ROI of social media investment.

I heard a great story from @benjaminellis at a conference last year:

When the telephone came into popular use by the 1930s, salesmen knocked on the doors of big businesses and said: “You’re going to need phones to talk with your customers. To enable this new kind of connection, you’ll also need a room in your office filled with expensive equipment and new secretaries to route calls. You’ll also need to create a new role for an electricity manager, because the telephone system uses a lot power.”

That must have been a tough sales job. Decision makers would have asked “We’ve managed with face to face meetings and letters for decades – what’s the ROI of this investment? Are our customers even going to want to call us?”

10 years later, nobody was asking the ROI of the telephone. I doubt any organisation in the world now works out the ROI of having telephones on the desks of its employees. It’s just the way we do business. In 2021, every organisation will use social media to talk with their existing customers and to talk with prospects, whether they work in retail, financial services or FMCG.

Which means that right now in the financial services industry, there is a significant strategic opportunity to win in the marketplace by being the first to make the move.

Photo by Richard Fisher

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshnetworks/~3/-4OdQ12GFl4/

Insights from Edelman’s full Marketing to the Modern Family study.

The essence of parenting hasn’t changed – but the definition of who qualifies as a parent, and the day-to-day role of a parent, is rapidly evolving. More than ever, parents are taking to blogs and online communities to voice opinions, seek counsel, and share experiences with other parents. All of that information, and the access it affords to parents – and the families they are part of – provides brands and other organizations with considerations and avenues to reach the family of today.

“Marketing to the Modern Family” was conducted in 2011 to explore these changing trends. Working with StrategyOne, a research arm of Edelman, we partnered with a panel of experts who represented the Modern Family, including moms, dads, multicultural and GLBT parents, and grandparents with different knowledge areas (finance, wellness, technology). These experts informed a survey that was fielded to moms, dads, grandparents, and multicultural and GLBT families.

Five Key Recommendations Resulting From the Study:

1. Join mom’s online conversation
   
   Consider this: 41% of moms say they are the sole decision maker for their family purchases. Plus, they are taking on more now than their moms did when growing up, including managing family finances and working full/part time. Converse with mom online and don’t just speak at her. Listen to mom voicing her frustrations; empathize with her – it will go a long way to gain brand loyalists.
2. Traditional has become tradition-all
   
   Mom blogs have long been a major target for brands. But today, more than just moms are writing blogs about parenting.  62% of moms and 54% of dads say parenting roles will be redefined from traditional “mom and dad.” This provides an opportunity to reevaluate your audience and see if dad or grandma has a role to play in the online conversation for your brand as well. Brands should also make their messages broader and be sensitive to non-traditional families. ConAgra brand Reddi-Wip (an Edelman client), recently partnered with parents and grandparents to celebrate multigenerational relationships in the modern family, thus reaching a variety of audiences during peak usage occasions.
3. Think outside your traditional target
   
   Dads are increasingly taking on more responsibility in the home than their fathers did in the past. 33% of dads say they take on role of a traditional mom. Use the 80/20 rule when it comes to brand messaging (80% targeted to your core audience (i.e., moms) and 20% targeted to outside your core audience.) Maybe mom is the core target, but dad should be considered an equal partner. There are several new dad initiatives happening in 2012 that deserve your attention – including the first of its kind Dad 2.0 Summit conference, which will bring together some of the most influential online voices in the dad space.
4. Adapt multi-channel marketing
   
   Given how media consumption is rapidly changing, brand messages have to be flexible enough to adapt. Use transmedia storytelling to bridge across new audiences and reach parents and other family members even further. In a world where half of moms “like” brands without doing a thing, engage in multiple channels to ensure message penetration. An advertising campaign can carry one message to your core audience, but make sure that message has many dimensions that can be carried through creative online content, search and social networks to reach all audiences.
5. Test and learn, mine data, and then optimize programs
   
   Members of the Modern Family are being influenced and are using media 24/7.  Digital represents a special opportunity for brands because of the ability to test and adapt on the fly. Tools like Salesforce’s new social hub for instance can provide a better understanding of customer data and help brands understand who is really influencing purchasing decisions. Adjust messaging to non-traditional audiences with a data driven approach.

Read more insights from the study on Edelman’s Slideshare page.

Article source: http://womma.org/researchdigest/?p=725

Weber Shandwick and its research arm, KRC Research, conducted  an online survey among both consumers and executives to answer the  frequently-raised question from corporate officers about how brand and reputation are evolving in this new see-thru, nowhere to hide world.

Products Drive Discussion, with Reputation Close Behind

Weber Shandwick wanted to answer two questions about the relationship  between the brand and corporate reputation. First, what do consumers  need to know about a company that makes it worth their hard-earned dollars?  Second, for executives charged with building and maintaining their company’s hard-won reputation, what needs to be communicated to ensure that their reputation resonates and remains unassailable? The answers to these questions are revealed in the next chart.

Click image to enlarge

Consumers Shape Reputation Instantly

What sources move consumers? Not surprisingly, word of mouth is the leading influence (88%) when it comes to impacting consumers’ opinion of a company, whether its genesis is online or offline. Conversations where company likes and dislikes are discussed are no longer out of the ordinary for the general public. What is noteworthy is the power of online reviews (83%) and online search results (81%) in determining what people say about companies and the brands they make.

Online reviews are nearly as important as word of mouth in determining perceptions and impacting public opinion. There is no doubt that user-generated online reviews such as those found on recommendation sites (such as amazon.com, TripAdvisor or Yelp in the U.S. and U.K., TaoBao, Ctrip and Dianping in China, and Buscapé and ReclameAQUI in Brazil) have fast-become omnipotent arbiters of brand trust and company assurance.

In Closing

Corporate reputation and brand reputation are now nearly indivisible. The importance of a firm’s reputation matters more than ever and is unified with the reputation of product brands to create one powerful enterprise brand. Consumers want assurance that their well-earned dollars, yuan, pounds or reais are spent on products produced by companies that share their values. They have higher expectations for the companies and the brands they like and are not hesitant to turn their backs when they are disappointed or fooled.

Read the full report at Weber Shandwick.

Article source: http://womma.org/researchdigest/?p=759

Today’s social consumer is one that can either be categorised as a high or low sharer, who utilises various digital channels differently depending on whether he or she is researching and interacting with high or low involvement products. High sharers prove to be the most valuable to brands as they recommend products 3x more often and influence others’ purchases.

By identifying high sharers, their preferred channels, and the reasons why they share, marketers can engage them with sharable content, thereby increasing the dynamic of sharing. This acts as a positive amplifier leading towards a virtuous cycle of recommendation, loyalty and purchase.

We just wrapped up our Science of Sharing event in London this evening. This event was the culmination of research by Beyond, Lexis, M Booth and Redshift all Next Fifteen Communications companies.

How has social media changed the way consumers make purchase decisions? We asked 1,500 UK consumers in two surveys what most influenced them online, as well as how and why they influenced others. What we found was that the consumer is an increasingly influential part of the conversation.

Click to Enlarge

For the full whitepaper, visit Beyond.

Article source: http://womma.org/researchdigest/?p=679

The research shows that marketers have a clear opportunity to increase conversion rates and online engagement by replacing traditional registration with social login. 86% of consumers are bothered by registering at a website and almost nine in ten will give false information or leave forms incomplete when creating a new account. Both of these results represent significant increases since the survey was first conducted in 2010.

Resistance to Traditional Registration Processes

• Four in five (86%) people are bothered by the need to create new accounts when registering on a website and will change their behavior as a result; this represents an increase of more than 10% over the 2010 findings
  • 54% may leave the site or not return
  • 26% go to a different site, if possible
  • 6% leave/avoid the site
  • 14% say they will complete the registration

Increased Brand Affinity in Fans of Social Login

77% believe social login is a good solution that should be offered, an increase of over 10% from the year prior (66% in 2010). Among that population…

Download the full report at Janrain.

Article source: http://womma.org/researchdigest/?p=688

Today, social gives consumers a direct link to brands. And brands recognize the huge responsibility that comes with this always-on, first-person input. As consumers convey exactly what they need and want, brands that take action will catapult beyond loyalty to real advocacy.

Social provides a window into your real-world customers. The data comes fast and furious, and capturing, analyzing – and, most important, acting on – these insights drives true, customer-centric change across companies, and even entire industries.

The Conversation Index takes 5.8 million data points – real input from consumers directly to our clients – and uncovers trends that help you get and stay ahead of what consumers really want.

Fully Mobile: Browsing is just the beginning

Article source: http://womma.org/researchdigest/?p=694