Shocked? Don’t be, because I still get my daily fill of timely news, information, and gossip. Only now, I rely exclusively on my “social lens” – the filtered/curated content that is passed along to me from my social connections.  It was only a few years ago when we relied on sites like Technorati to discover blogs and sift through information. Now, the proliferation of various social channels has created a virtual “firehouse of information“, curated by my social circles.

Depending on the subject matter, I then decide whether or not a story is worth checking out based on the “lens” I am viewing it through (how influential I feel a given connection is on the topic), and  if an item is newsworthy enough then other connections will also be sharing it throughout the day so I’m not prone to miss out on something. LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google+ will even highlight which stories have been most shared by my connections.

The same way people will accumulate a pile of unread back issues of The New Yorker, I don’t have the time nor the patience to read through every article on every blog or news outlet, so this filtered approach also saves me a lot of time.

A study by Yahoo Research found that 50% of URLs consumed originate from only 20K “elite” users on Twitter. Most of these accounts are either major media outlets or notable personalities. So, in essence, my connections act to filter out the noise and direct me to the most relevant/newsworthy content. To accomplish that 5 years ago, I would have had to run my RSS feeds through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to pay other humans (strangers) attempt to decide which items might be most appealing to me!

Don’t get me wrong, there is still tremendous value in RSS, but mainly “under the hood” in terms of data exchange with other platforms/applications. And yes, there are still a few blogs I visit regularly, but it’s more of a one-shot, Sunday morning ritual where I’ll sit down with my coffee and read back through the past week’s content, cover to cover.

How did you come across this post? Do you subscribe to Social Media Playground’s RSS feed, or did you follow a link posted through your “social lens”?

Photo credit: OakleyOriginals

IBM surveyed 1,000 customers around the world (including 350 executives) to understand what drives consumers to engage with companies via social media channels. The results show there is a major perception gap between what brands think consumers want versus what consumers really want:

• When asked what they do when they interact with businesses or brands via social media, consumers rank “getting discounts or coupons” and “purchasing products and services” at the top two activities
   

  but…
   
  In contrast, executives ranked getting discounts and purchasing products as the two activities consumers were least interested in doing (the exact opposite of consumers’ rankings!)

• Businesses are three times more likely to think consumers are interested in interacting with them to feel part of a community or engaged with their brand
   

  but…
   
  In contrast, those two actives were among the least interesting among consumers. Consumers are seeking value, whether it be information, advice, or a coupon. So while engaging with a company via social media may *result* in connectedness, the wish for intimacy with a brand is not what drives most of them.

The study advises (rightly so) that brands should not look at social media as an isolated program, but needs to be integrated across all other customer-facing initiatives. If you know your customer in one channel, you need to know them in other channels as well.

A successful Social CRM strategy is one that facilitates collaborative experiences and dialogue that customers value. But brands must understand consumers’ motivation for engaging with them.

(click to enlarge)

]]> http://www.socialmediaplayground.com/social-media/the-science-of-word-of-mouth-infographic/2010/05/14/feed/ 424 http://www.socialmediaplayground.com/social-media/is-diversity-the-key-to-influence-on-twitter/2010/04/16/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=is-diversity-the-key-to-influence-on-twitter http://www.socialmediaplayground.com/social-media/is-diversity-the-key-to-influence-on-twitter/2010/04/16/#comments Fri, 16 Apr 2010 18:03:02 +0000 Erica Hall http://www.socialmediaplayground.com/?p=935 The Million Follower Fallacy: Audience Size Doesn’t Prove Influence on Twitter by Sarah Perez reviews a study by Meeyoung Cha, Hamed Haddadi, Fabricio Benevenuto, and Krishna P. Gummadi* that gives the research data to back up what most social media pros already know – follower counts on Twitter are  “somewhat of a meaningless metric when it comes to determining influence.”

One of the most interesting points of Perez’s analysis is that the most influential Twitter accounts “hold significant influence over a variety of topics, as opposed to being experts in just one area.”  While many brands on Twitter speak to a particular demographic or topic area; based on this study and the popularity of celebrity Twitter users like Sean “P Diffy” Combs (who tweets everything from concert dates to bible quotes), Twitter influencers seem to be seen as experts on a wide variety of topics.  In fact the study shows that “retweeted users tended to be content aggregation services.”

This information is particularity interesting when we as social media pros think about audience development on Twitter. As we look to develop audiences on Twitter when our clients are in a niche area, gaming, sports, retail etc., is it important to make sure that a brand’s voice offers (or even re-tweets) authoritative information on a wide variety of subjects? Perhaps it is important that a brand’s Twitter voice speaks to what is popular in and around their niche.  For instance, it could make sense for a sports blog to begins discussing a less than popular sport, or maybe they comment on the antics of celebrity athletes, or even the health care debate?

The difficulties in this theory are that it could be hard to reign in “diversifying.” How much is enough? What sorts of topics should a brand discuss? How often should a brand jump on a Twitter trend?  No matter what strategy employed it is my opinion that it is always vitally important that the tweets of any particular brand always reflect back not only to the brand’s core values but to the goals of that brand’s Twitter outreach.  After all, the content aggregation Twitter accounts and news channels are not only speaking on a wide variety of topics but these topics are targeted to speak to a particular niche (current events, politics, sports, etc) and stay on brand message (CNN is the “news leader”).

Do you think this study brings up a good point about diversifying content strategies or are niche approaches more effective? I’d love to hear your thoughts below.

Read more on the study here.

*(Study institutions included: Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS), Germany †Royal Veterinary College, University of London, United Kingdom ‡CS Dept., Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil)

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!

In this post, Haque discusses the relationships that are created through all of these social mediums, medias, platforms, networks, and spheres. Are they all super-thin and riddled with layers of doubt? Are they sustainable as long term connections?

His hypothesis:

I’d like to advance a hypothesis: Despite all the excitement surrounding social media, the Internet isn’t connecting us as much as we think it is. It’s largely home to weak, artificial connections, what I call thin relationships.

Interesting.

He continues on through his “thin relationship” rationale (some I agree with, some I don’t) and then closes with:

The social isn’t about beauty contests and popularity contests. They’re a distortion, a caricature of the real thing. It’s about trust, connection, and community. That’s what there’s too little of in today’s mediascape, despite all the hoopla surrounding social tools. The promise of the Internet wasn’t merely to inflate relationships, without adding depth, resonance, and meaning. It was to fundamentally rewire people, communities, civil society, business, and the state — through thicker, stronger, more meaningful relationships. That’s where the future of media lies.

While his argument is seemingly about personal relationships forged in the social sphere and not the relationships between brands and consumers in the social space, I think the same rules of engagement and long term evolutionary objectives could apply. In fact, I believe it applies even MORE SO to brands than to people. To me, people connect online socially for varying reasons. To find other people who like to play soccer. To learn how to properly curl their hair. To find a French tutor via Craigslist. Some of these manifest themselves into deep relationships but most are thin just like they would be in real life. These types of relationships simply have a backbone in a “shared interest” or an immediate “need” which usually is more superficial and immediate than not.

However, by nature brands NEED to retain connections. They need loyalty. They need longevity. They need “thick” relationships. The future of media (and of communication) does lie (in my humble opinion) in “thick, strong, more meaningful” relationships.

They need… well… in three letters? C-R-M.

Rather than offer up any analysis or insight, I’d like to point you to the 213 (at press time) and counting comments on his blog post that I spent a good hour digging through. If you have a moment, take a peek at them. Very interesting, indeed.

[image via Wendy Bailey's blog here.]

(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.

Here are a few recent nuggets of measurement metal you might find helpful or interesting:

1.     Radian6’s Practical Social Media Measurement & Analysis – In the March issue of their Community eBook, Radian6 puts together a concise and insightful guide to measuring and analyzing the primary objectives of social marketing including Cost Savings, Leads, Conversions and Sales, and Awareness, Attention and Reach.   Each section explains the process and includes example metrics you can use to analyze the performance of your programs and generate clear and visible results.

2.    Dag Holmboe’s Social Media ROI App – Dag has posted a series of Social Media ROI explanations on his blog, and his most recent post demos his Social Media ROI Application, which plugs in specific metrics of your program and spits out some interesting insights into its ROI.  You can demo the lite version of his app here.

3.    Google Analytics on Facebook Pages – This helpful how-to made the rounds late last week, and piqued my interest as I have made it known my disappointment in the current iteration of Facebook Insights.  I highly recommend this read and testing out Google Analytics on your Facebook page for further insights into referrals, visitor statistics, and more.

4.    Omniture Partners with Facebook – AdWeek announced last week that Omniture will be adding Facebook advertising data to its dashboard, allowing for greater insights and comparisons against campaigns running on other networks like Google.  This is great news; however, I tend to agree with KD Paine’s view that data may be incomplete.  Some of the most successful ad campaigns on Facebook direct users to a Facebook fan page, or the CTA is not a click-through but to fan the page from the ad itself.  Since the action is often not of direct sales, one must measure true success through the relationships developed by way of these conversions such as conversation volume, changes in sentiment, etc. which Omniture will not have.  I’m interested to see where this goes.

If you have additional stories regarding social media measurement and analysis please leave them in the comments!

It appears now that Facebook is ramping up their Insights offering, having debuted a new ‘Impressions’ metric for page admins to sink their teeth into.   Impressions, according to a Facebook spokesperson to AllFacebook.com, is defined as “the raw number of impressions shown to users. These impressions may appear in users’ News Feeds, visits to Pages or through a Fan Box widget.”

As a marketer with a soft spot for hard metrics I’m not amped by this.  For starters, this new metric doesn’t give me unique reach, frequency, or placement.  Facebook counts impressions beneath the fold, and when the majority of these impressions are funneled through a dynamic, vertical news feed, it’s probable that some of my impressions are displayed below the fold and never actually seen by the user.

Second,  I cannot measure with any certainty the number of impressions that are targeted to my intended audience (fans or friends of fans).  Whether passersby visit my publicly accessible page, or if I have a “Fanbox” widget on a site outside of Facebook, ‘Impressions’ lumps together both fans and non-fans into one big fat super-impressive number.  In a time where measuring reach and interactivity can be pinpointed to the individual user, it seems a bit archaic to use ad-based, unwashed masses metrics.  I know neither who viewed my content nor how it was viewed, if at all.

Targeted messaging and engaging opt-in consumers is a key advantage of a Facebook page as a marketing tactic, so why doesn’t Facebook let me measure that?  I’d like to see how many fans I reached, or friends of fans, and whereabouts in the news feed my status update appeared; or integrate more specific content update data into the dashboard to better measure performance and sentiment in lieu of the ambiguous ‘Post Quality.’ I could think of a laundry list of metrics I would rather have seen with this update than ‘Impressions.’  I’m disappointed.

Unfortunately Facebook plays host to more than 400 million people and as long as they provide an outlet for brands to engage with this audience, I will take whatever insights Facebook provides.  They’ve hinted at more sophisticated updates in the past, I just hope more of these updates are in the offing so we can stop regressing and start advancing our measurement standards.

That means that of the retailers surveyed in a survey by the e-tailing Group and PowerReviews in August and September of this year, Facebook will have almost 100% brand penetration, as reported by eMarketer.

Other interesting insights  from the survey:

• More than 1/2 of retailers surveyed use 5 of 10 of the Social Marketing tools they included in the survey
• Top tools used by retailers includes: Facebook, Twitter, Reviews, Blogs & Viral Videos – all of which are over 50% usage amongst those surveyed

The sentiment measured in the survey indicated what we encounter almost weekly with potential clients – marketers are still scared of Social Media. Scared to give up control of their brand, scared about how the conversations can take a mind or path of their own, and worried that they lack the skills internally to fully understand how Social Media best works within their brand framework.

Pushing those fears aside, the resounding sentiment that they note rings true: Using social media might be scary, but avoiding it is becoming less (and less and less and less) of an option.

Ways to move beyond those fears?

• Conduct a Social Media "Audit" - hire an agency like Affinitive (naturally!) who specializes in the space to look at who/what/where is currently talking about your brand – listening and identifying where to enter the conversation is the first step
• Step away from your interns – Managing a Facebook page is no longer the work of an intern (if it ever was, gasp!), time to put some real strategy behind it
• They’re gonna talk no matter what - remember that just like the gossiping girls in your high school, no matter what you do, people are going to talk about you. Best to be there to join the conversation, curb any inaccuracies, and develop a relationship with them that is full of trust, transparency, and ultimately – value
• If the platform fails, so what? - There’s a possibility Twitter, Facebook & YouTube could be obsolete in a couple of years. Not looking likely, but always possible (Friendster, what?) but so what… if your presence in that platform becomes no longer necessary, the same applies to everyone else. Crafting an exit strategy is easy. Better to exit when it’s time to than to sit on the sidelines and watch your competitors take home a pile of innovation awards and the loyalty of your target audience.

As we’ve mentioned, it’s a land grab. The time to act is now.