I refer to these concepts as Social Referrals and Social SEO - two related, but very different concepts that any social marketer needs to understand:

Social Referrals:

Traffic to your site via content and/or links posted on social outposts such as Facebook and Twitter by yourself and others.

Social Referrals are driven by a combination of brand-driven referrals (posting a link to your Twitter/Facebook accounts), amplified sharing (consumer retweets), and via built-in sharing tools tied to content on your site.

For many companies (especially those with constantly fresh/dynamic content such as news sites and blogs), social referral traffic has risen to probably the #2 or #3 source of referral traffic (behind organic search and any online advertising).

Types of Social Referral Content:

• Breaking News (people share this quickly because they want to be the first to 'break' this to their friends)
• Viral Content, such as a funny video or photo (sharing this via Facebook/Twitter is considered ok/non-intrusive versus through email)
• Online Coupons/Sales/Offers (what can I say, people love free/discounted stuff!)
• Interesting/Informative Stories/Blog Posts (again, this content acts as social currency for the person sharing it, making them look good/in-the-know - the reality is, many people share this sort of content without even fully-reading the article! I'm as guilty as anyone else)

Social referrals tend to have a very short shelf life, and while true, some of the major search engines are starting to index them, their "relevancy" value in the eyes of search engines diminishes quickly.

Social SEO:

Traffic to your site via search engines, based on consumer-generated content relevancy to keywords.

Social SEO is a side benefit of facilitating user-generated content on your company's website. For example, consumers aren't necessarily seeking out information on, let's say, a bottle of Redwood Creek wine. But, what if the brand has a thriving consumer community of outdoor enthusiasts who love to post/share BBQ and campfire recipes? Over time, the relevancy of that content trickles up the search engine ranks, and eventually can work it's way to the top! We refer to this valuable, relevant, organic, indexable content as "Google Juice".

Next, you've connected with this consumer based on their interest, while introducing your brand to them in the context of that interest. Not only will they find the user-generated content they discovered as relevant and informative, but they may in turn go on to become a part of your community to connect with other like-minded folks.

(note: Social SEO only truly works if you have also implemented proper search engine optimization techniques into your website, i.e., title, meta tags, <h1>/<h2> html tags, etc.)

Types of Social SEO Content

• User-Submitted reviews, recipes, photos/videos (with proper meta info)
• Forum Posts/Discussions/Knowledge Bases
• Comments
• User Profiles

The value of Social SEO builds over time, since this content acts as a permanent archive/repository. It also creates a "long-tail" of relevant content, as each piece of UGC becomes in itself an SEO landing page. This makes it easy to measure/learn  what types of content drive the most search engine referral traffic.

Measuring the Impact of Social Referrals and Social SEO

If you are not measuring (both quantitatively and qualitatively) the impact of Social Referrals and Social SEO , you are leaving out a large component of the Social ROI equation! Some examples include:

• Short term traffic bumps (Social Referrals), long term traffic growth trend (Social SEO)
• Increase in engagement metrics, time on site, etc.
• Community registrations, email signups, fan/follower acquisition
• Coupon redemption/conversion to sales/transactions
• CRM insights (do social referrals result in larger/more frequent purchases? Are community members who joined via Social SEO more active/engaged than others?)
• Insights into consumer interests/needs and where your brand is resonating/standing out (i.e., wine + campfire/BBQ recipes = brand positioning)
• Customer support savings (consumers solving own problems via locating answers provided by other consumers on your community/knowledge base)

Let's me finish by asking you a question - how did you come across this blog post? Was it via a link someone tweeted or a Google search result? Drop me a line or leave a comment below if you'd like to discuss/debate further!

I'm as excited as anyone about the social marketing potential of the 'real-time' web, particularly as it applies to the mobile/location-based space. As more and more people flock to apps such as Foursquare, Gowalla, and BriteKite to document their every movement, everyone from local businesses to global brands are taking notice and trying to put together strategies to engage and reward consumers with "badges" (virtual "social currency") and discounts/offers (tangible incentives) through these platforms (for the sake of my post, we'll assume these are mostly actual consumers and not just all of us industry folks).

But the question remains - are you engaging/rewarding the right people? Let me use an analogy to illustrate…

Growing up, I spent a good deal of time working/hanging out at my family's pizza business. Like a typical small-town local business, there were always a few interesting characters/regulars who would make it their home away from home, hanging out in the store day after day. They'd interact with other customers, tell jokes, and drink soda. Lots and lots of free soda. But they would never buy more than a slice of pizza during the course of a day.

In their minds, they were the "mayors" of the restaurant, where "everyone knew their names" and in a way they felt like they "owned" the place. But to us, they were "mascots" - nice folks, fun to have around, but of no real value to the business (and in some ways, potentially distracting to both customers and staff). They often came alone (didn't have many friends), nor did they go out of their way to promote the business. My point is, don't equate activity with influence.

So, when executing your location-based (or any consumer engagement) strategy, ask yourself - are you actually targeting "Mayors" or "Mascots"?

(Note: Even one of my company's clients, Sports Authority, recently dove head-first into the location-based marketing space by offering $10 in-store cash cards via Foursquare to the "Mayors" of each of their stores nationwide. While it has made for a great PR/industry piece, the overall impact is just a blip on the radar compared to what they have seen by providing Facebook and Twitter-exclusive offers to their hundreds of thousands of fans and followers (or millions of others through weekend circulars), and won't have solid loyalty metrics for some time. And like any other business, unless these location-based social tactics are integrated into a larger CRM/loyalty initiative, you will never know if you are in fact targeting "Mayors" or "Mascots")

(click to enlarge)

]]> http://www.socialmediaplayground.com/social-media/the-science-of-word-of-mouth-infographic/2010/05/14/feed/ 8 http://www.socialmediaplayground.com/social-media/a-real-time-look-at-social-web-growth/2010/04/09/ http://www.socialmediaplayground.com/social-media/a-real-time-look-at-social-web-growth/2010/04/09/#comments Fri, 09 Apr 2010 17:22:46 +0000 Bob Troia http://www.socialmediaplayground.com/?p=931

I recently came across a pretty nifty widget that illustrates the exponential growth of the "social web". Similar to the famed National Debt Clock, although the chart doesn't pull in "real-time" data, the information it dynamically presents is based on a number of key social web data points from a number of sources, i.e.:

• 20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
• Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
• Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
• iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future (Aug 09)
• 900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
• YouTube daily, 96 million videos watched, $1mill bandwidth costs (source Comscore Jul 06 !)
• Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
• Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
• Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
• Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)
• SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)

Although not "real-time", the chart still provides some interesting visual cues - for example, note that iPhone apps are being downloaded at a faster rate than new blog posts are being posted!)

If anyone has come across any similar types of charts, please let me know in the comments area below. Thanks!

(click the image for an easier-to-read version. Note that this a 'living' chart that I have been soliciting feedback/input on - if you have any suggestions/additions/changes, just post a comment below or at the SlideShare page!)

I've already noted how social media is not the same as Word of Mouth. And as the social landscape broadens, it's simply causing more confusion as the term "social" gets slapped on just about anything to make it sound cool and relevant.

Above is a chart I've been working on that tries to illustrate the "social" landscape in terms of tactics and goals. You should be able to take any social touchpoint/tactic/business model (brand community, Twitter profile, blogger outreach, CGM sweepstakes) and plot them on this chart.

Essentially, this chart segments the social landscape into four quadrants... as a function of:

• CRM (social CRM or sCRM)
• Marketing (social MARKETING)
• PR (social PR)
• Media (social MEDIA)

The horizontal axis represents "owned" social channels (that you own/control) versus "leased" ones (i.e., paying a company for access to their network of consumers willing to try and/or talk about your product). The "partially owned" area represents social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook where yes, you can establish a brand presence but you don't own any underlying data and are at the whim of the service provider in terms of metrics or even having your account suspended. The vertical axis represents the depth of engagement from very 1-to-1/personal to impersonal/3rd-person - i.e., "engagement" vs. "reach":

In conclusion, there is nothing wrong with leveraging the social web to facilitate high-impact, quick hit consumer promotions, but at the end of the day was your goal to "reach" 1,000,000 consumers with a message about your product, or simply "acquire" a 10,000 email addresses into your company's email database? As the social landscape broadens, marketers need to ensure that their success metrics are in line with the tactics they are leveraging. And that unfortunately can't happen until you have properly educated the folks holding the pursestrings.

That being said, I find it surprising that more brands aren't providing simple ways to allow their customers to share information offline.

One company that has it figured out is high-end audio manufacturer Bose. I've been a happy owner/early adopter of their QuietComfort noise-canceling headphones for a number of years (on my second pair, in fact, after leaving my last pair in a hotel room safe - Marriott, hope your cleaning staff who "didn't find them" is enjoying them!). When these headphones first came onto the scene, chances are if you were wearing them while on a crowded business flight or vacationing, someone would come up to you and ask about them. Now, seems like everyone is wearing these $300 headphones everywhere I go!

So, what's the ingenious thing that Bose has done? They have simply included informational pass-along cards right in the headphone case. That's right - for probably less than $0.10 in packaging, they've incorporated a offline referral tool right with the product.

When someone asks, regardless of whether or not I feel like talking about the headphones, how they work, etc., I can simply hand them a card which directs them to a website where they can get all of the information they need. (Note to Bose - why not direct these referrals to a special landing page that acknowledges they were referred by a friend, with reviews/testimonials, etc. as well as provide a way to better track the referrals? Drop me a line and we can talk more...)

Bose has made it easy to spread the word. How is your company making it easier for your happy customers to pass you along?

(Oh, and JetBlue and Enterprise, hope each of your cleaning crews are enjoying the two 32GB iPod Touches I also managed to leave behind over the past year... but that's a story for another day!)

Like countless others, I've been glued to my TV for the past few days absorbing all of the Olympics action, from the opening ceremonies to the drama of the women's snowboard cross final. At first it was fun watching the Twitterverse provide funny side commentary via the #Olympics hashtag (even I’m guilty of posting a few tweets during the opening ceremonies, hoping that the Canadian band Rush would perform along with their laser show).

However, the opening ceremonies were the last thing I watched "live." Because I'm at work while many of the events are happening, I've made a habit of recording all Olympics coverage on my DVR, then camping out on my couch for a few hours each evening before bed to catch up on the day's happenings. In addition to skipping commercials, I'll skim through the less-exciting parts of events such as the biathlon (will skip most of the cross-country skiing sections, but will watch the shooting!).

But, for me, watching the Olympics has been somewhat bittersweet. No matter how much effort I make to avoid finding out any results in advance, I somehow keep getting spoilers, mainly because a good part of my workday is spent interacting online. It seems like just as I tune out one information spigot, another one leaks:

• Twitter/Facebook: The usual suspects. It goes beyond just monitoring the #olympics hashtag.
• News: I frequently access CNN and ESPN during the day to stay on top of the news, but when I see a headline on the homepage that says "Miller takes bronze in downhill," it's a bit of a buzzkill for the evening.
• Mobile: Mostly related to international soccer matches we might get on delay here, but I’ve gotten text message spoilers from friends with game scores/congratulations/condolences. I’m a big fan of the official Olympics iPhone app (I've been using the app to check out the schedules), but the other day came across the real-time results of the men’s snowboard cross (another buzzkill).

It's forced me to take a self-imposed "Social Media Blackout" during the day (i.e., I'll only check in during the morning when I know there are no events in progress, or, only push out messages from my phone so I can avoid seeing any conversation).

There are several ways that a person will encounter programming in a time-shifted manner:

• Consumer Time Shifting: People elect to manually record programming (DVR, VCR) to watch at a later time, at their convenience.
• Network Tape Delay: TV network determines that certain content will air at a later time, e.g., moving the men's downhill finals to prime time.
• Location: People in later time zones are forced to watch network time-shifted programming so it falls in prime time (e.g., can't air "Lost" at 5 p.m. PST).

While problem #1 is self-imposed by a person, they have no control over problems #2 or #3 (that's the fault of the TV networks).

Therein lies the paradox. We live in a time-shifted world, yet we are getting our information in an increasingly real-time manner.

The repercussions go well beyond the Olympics, as this essentially impacts *all* entertainment we watch on TV (awards shows, "Lost," sport events, etc.). In an effort to avoid spoilers, people will be forced to take self-imposed social media blackouts until they have watched their time-shifted entertainment. And for sports in particular, there will be repercussions to the networks, since the fact is, consumers will be less likely to tune in to something if they already know the result.

So, how can we prepare/deal with this problem? "Time delay" filters on Twitter and Facebook that will stagger tweets/posts from your east coast friends by three hours? "Hide results" options on sports news sites?

Please share your suggestions below!

Word of Mouth is the act of people talking.

Word of Mouth Marketing is giving people a reason to talk.

Social Media is simply one of many channels for Word of Mouth to occur. Just as is a telephone. Or standing around a water cooler. It benefits from the fact that it can scale quickly due to its online nature.

The point is, they are related, but different.

More case studies here.

Total spending on WoM marketing is expected to increase 10.2% to $1.70 billion in 2009 and grow at a CAGR of 14.5% during the 2008-2013 period, reaching $3.04 billion as more brands include WoM in their media mix and ROI metrics improve.

Other Key Highlights:

• "Spending on U.S. word-of-mouth (WoM) marketing increased 14.2% to $1.54 billion in 2008, as brands recognized the need to get involved in consumer and business conversations and allocate resources to WoM. Spending increased at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 37.6% from 2003 to 2008. "

• "Spending on WoM content and services increased 13.0% to $1.26 billion in 2008, as major marketers integrated WoM into the media mix and shifted to specialized WoM firms that help drive long-term campaigns. Spending rose at a 37.3% CAGR of 37.3% from 2003 to 2008. "

• "Spending on WoM ancillary products increased 19.7% to $286 million in 2008, due to growing demand for return-on-investment (ROI) data and the impact of WoM campaigns on consumer purchasing behavior. Growth can also be attributed to the increasing sophistication of WoM tools that are being used to monitor online and offline conversations. Spending grew at a CAGR of 39.1% from 2003 to 2008. "

Who's Investing in WOM?

According to the study, consumer product goods (CPGs) companies are the major adopters of WoM, accounting for 17.4% of spending in 2008. Other top categories include food & drink, finance & business-to-business services, electronics & telecommunications, and retail (they note that auto & transportation would have been in the top five if not for their industry's recent financial woes and cuts in spending).

Shift in Consumer Behavior

Not really a surprise here, but the study notes/validates that consumers are abandoning traditional and ad-supported media, migrating to digital and consumer-supported media.

For more information (or to purchase the report), click here.