Posts tagged social media
Which social site is the most powerful country in the world?
Sep 1st
With so many social networking sites springing up every month, its becoming increasingly hard to keep track of which ones really matter to marketers.
To ease the pain, Flowtown have released this social media infographic, that draws the worlds top social networks as country like shapes according to the size of their user base.
The map includes things like the land of defunct social networks, the stumbleupon sea and the triangle of YouTube viral videos.
See what campaigns have made the Social Media Hall of Fame
Aug 24th
From small companies to global organisations, social media campaigns are playing an increasingly important role in brand marketing. Now, social media agency Umpf has compiled a Social Media Campaign Hall of Fame.
The agency haslisted 54 of the world’s best social media campaigns, from iconic brands such as Coca-Cola, Ford, Nike and Nokia to lesser known names such as Ascendgence and DARPA.
Whether you’re one of the world’s superbrands or a small, local supplier, clever social media campaigns can help raise product awareness, increase sales, drive footfall, add fans, improve SEO and online visibility, or just make people think ‘cool, I like that company’, says Umpf.
The Social Media Campaign Hall of Fame is in no particular order and, as is the case with lists like this, there’ll be great campaigns you love that are not yet listed, says the Umpf blog.
This is not a list of the campaigns that have the most followers/biggest fan base/most views. It’s about doing creative, interesting campaigns. And, of course, that’s subjective.
Campaigns that made the list include Nike’s ‘Grid’ (below), Blendtec’s ‘Will it blend?’, Nokia’s ‘You are here’
Coca Cola’s ‘Happiness Machine’ and Ford Fiesta’s ‘The social media fast lane’. To see all the campaigns that made the list click here.
Adrian Johnson, Umpf owner, said: “Whether they’ve been created to raise product awareness, increase sales, drive footfall, add fans, improve SEO or enhance audience engagement, one simple thread links all these social media campaigns together, a clever concept.
“At the heart of any great marketing campaign, whether it’s a press ad, a piece of DM, sales promotion, PR, or in this case social media, you’ll typically find a brilliant idea – each of the campaigns in our Hall of Fame exhibits that trait helping generate brand buzz, conversations, interaction and engagement.”
Facebook is becoming the biggest advertising platform in the world
Aug 10th
Facebook is the second most visited website in the UK, accounting for 7.14% of all internet visits in July, according to Experian Hitwise.
Facebook is a never ending story of growth, with no sign of slowing. Well, no real fool-proof sign, anyway.
The social networking king also accounts for over half (54.48%) of all visits to social sites.
In terms of total visits, Facebook continues to trail Google UK, and recorded a 9.59% market share in July. However, using the measure of total page views rather than visits, Facebook is way ahead.
As the table below illustrates, the social network accounted for 16.73% of UK page views during July. In other words: last month, 1 in every 6 Internet pages viewed in the UK was a Facebook page.
There are 26 million British users already and Facebook’s market share of UK page views has trebled over the last five years. However, growth has slowed significantly over the past six months having grown around 1.7% since November last year, compared to a sizeable 5% growth between April and October last year.
As Facebook continues to grow around the world (last month it reached more than 500 million registered users, some are beginning to wonder when the site will reach saturation point.
Recent government statistics put the amount of adults online as 37.4 million, so the site still has a few more people to entice in with the thrills of Farmville. But it must also find a way to entice users to spend long amounts of time on the site if it wants to entice more advertisers.
The average session time on the site has leveled out to around 27.36 minutes in June/July, down from a seasonal peak of 30 minutes in December, says Experian Hitwise. This is still a good deal better than most other sites out there.
And there’s no doubt that big brand advertisers are getting on board. Facebook revenues are tipped to double to $1.4 billion (£885m) in 2010 as advertising fees continue to surge.
According to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, the biggest advertisers increased spending by as much as 20-fold in the past year. In an interview with Bloomberg she said: “Two years ago the big brands were experimenting with us. Now, they’re going big.”
Facebook is also improving its infrastructure to give more space and time to display advertisements and increasing user personal engagement with brands through social gaming and other features.
Facebook marketing has been used to improve reach for online clothing retailers, revive Buick Motor’s youthful spirit, inspire the electric car market, boost revenue for Old Spice and increase pizza delivery orders at Dominos Pizza.
Things won’t slow down either, as Facebook eyes expansion in developing BRIC countries that could double that ‘500 million’ figure.
There’s no denying that Facebook is on its way to being the biggest advertising platform in history…
Why companies should not Wave goodbye to email and social integration
Aug 9th
By Ryan Deutsch, VP of Emerging Media, StrongMail
Google has become the first major brand to fail in its attempt to integrate email with emerging media channels, following the collapse of its Google Wave application.
Although aimed at the consumer market, Google Wave’s collapse raises questions on how businesses looking to integrate email and emerging channels will be affected. Social media has experienced a stratospheric rise, but is this collapse an indication that integrating email and social media for marketing strategy is doomed? Absolutely not.
The Google Wave failed because the application was too complicated –resulting in lower than expected adoption. The Wave was a collaboration tool built for individual communication. Not a marketing application designed to enrich customer relationships and brand perception. That said, the failure of the Wave should remind marketers integrating social media and email to invest in strategic guidance in order to take full advantage of combining the two mediums.
Email is a common thread that connects every touch-point in the customer’s lifecycle, but to build effective customer relationships brands must first understand how it affects channels like social networks and mobile. A recent report from Forrester Research finds that “given the increasing complexity of the email marketing channels – including the need to integrate email with social and mobile channel – the call for strategic guidance will only continue to grow in importance.”
The ‘strategic guidance’ on offer includes listening and monitoring services; lifecycle communications frameworks; email and social media campaign tools and execution services; community management services; analytics and loyalty marketing programmes that encourage and reward participation across the social web. When leveraging emerging channels such as social media, this guidance can be the key to establishing the customer bond and connecting with them at a meaningful level.
For example, research suggests that ‘best’ customers represent around 20 percent of a businesses customer base, and account for 80 percent of sales. Identifying and striving to create a unique experience for those customers should therefore be the aim of nearly every marketer on the planet. This is where companies need to start thinking more strategically to identify their best customers and create unique, special experiences for them.
As part of this strategy companies must… Read the rest of this entry »
How to put the ‘social’ back into ‘social media’
Aug 6th
While 90% of technology companies have a presence on two or more social networks, a significant majority are just not being social, reveals a new whitepaper.
Twitter is the most popular network used by technology brands with 74% tweeting.
Twitter is followed by – crazily enough – Linkedin (72%) and then Facebook (20%).
Less than half (48%) have a blog!
This is baffling to us as technology brands are at the top of the ‘cool’ list at the moment thanks to the likes of Apple and Google.
The study, from Wildfire PR confirms many technology brands view social media as an opportunity to push out marketing messages and corporate content with 60% of companies with a Facebook page using it purely as a distribution channel.
More than half (57%) of companies with a Twitter account used it solely for one-way marketing activity; and only 25% of blogs received comments on a regular basis.
Where’s the engagement?
Social media should be a strategy, not purely a presence. Many brands tend to fall short when it comes to social media simply because their customers can’t figure out why the brand is there. It’s that age old rule, if you’ve got nothing to shout about, shut up.
Debby Penton, managing director at Wildfire, said, “Social media marketing is not some black art requiring vast experience or knowledge. After all, the vast majority of us use social networks on a regular basis to chat with friends or network with colleagues. It is therefore surprising to find that so many technology companies are trying to force old marketing techniques onto the way they use social media. They are using it to simply ‘push’ marketing or corporate messages.
“To be truly effective, social media requires a different mindset entirely to traditional ‘push marketing’ and our research demonstrates that brands haven’t factored this into their thinking when using social media. With correct foresight and planning, social media can be a wonderfully effective and cost efficient way of developing relationships with end users and achieving bottom line returns.”
Epic fail?
A large proportion of technology companies in the study are ignoring feedback from their audiences. While 66% of Facebook pages received comments from users, 75% of these companies failed to reply to the comments.
Only 3% of the tweets in the study were retweets and just 12% were replies. Shockingly, 43% of brands with a Twitter account had never replied to a tweet. A tiny 9% of companies replied to comments on their blog.
Putting the ‘social’ back into social media’ can be downloaded by clicking here.
OMO’s innovative use of technology led it to a privacy trap
Aug 5th
There’s no doubt that technology has ‘revolutionised’ marketing. But the ideas of how to use technology in order to attract more customers and make headlines are not always going to bode well with all, as washing powder giant OMO is finding out.
One of the biggest setbacks marketers (and social networks for that matter) are facing these days is privacy. What is out of bounds when it comes to privacy and how far should the humble marketer be allowed to venture into private space. Actually, what is our private space?
Consumers are happy to give away their private details when they are given something in return, as we reported last week, but if they are unaware that someone is ‘watching’ them or taking their details, that seems to upset them.
So when OMO decided to plant tracking devices in its packs of washing powder, it should have come as no shock that consumers would be just a tad upset when all they were offered in exchange was a ‘chance’ to win a video camera…
The Unilever brand planted a GPS device in 50 special OMO boxes in Brazil.
When a winning box is bought, the GPS activates and leads an OMO team to the purchaser’s house in order to give them the prize.
If someone turned up on my door step handing me a video camera and telling me I had ‘won’ I’d be suspicious…and very scared.
In case the person lives in an apartment block, the team is equipped with even more sophisticated tracking equipment that allows them to narrow the location down to a much smaller area.
In fact, according to Unilever, it’s possible the teams handing out prizes could potentially beat purchasers home.
The issue here: fear of not only having your privacy invaded but your details being shared. People are rightly fearful when a major conglomerate can turn around and say “I know where you live”.
Once they’ve got their hands on that data, the temptation will be to try and aggregate it, retain a record and then find a way of monetising it.
Also this week we talked on UTalkMarketing about digital billboards that can gather information about you as you walk past and therefore target their ads at you.
This ‘tracking’ as scary as it sounds, could very well be the future of marketing. That ‘Holy Grail’ Zuckerberg promised all those years ago.
Is Twitter too big for its own good?
Aug 2nd
Twitter has received its 20 billionth tweet over the weekend raising questions about the information overload that is the micro-blogging service.
The message didn’t make much sense – it came at 12:44 am Sunday from user GGGGGGo_Lets_Go in Japan and was part of a longer conversation between two users.
It didn’t take long before GGGGGGo_Lets_Go was inundated with congratulatory messages from around the world for hitting the social networking milestone. The user bio changed shortly thereafter.
While it took Twitter four years to reach tweet number 10 billion earlier this year in March, it took less than five months to double the figure thanks to its increasing popularity worldwide.
My question is, with all these tweets, doesn’t the intended message often become lost?
When I log in to Twitter I am inundated with updates and the information I could actually use are often lost or trumped by something else. How do you achieve stand out on Twitter?
The bigger Twitter becomes, the less valuable it becomes to advertisers because there is no way to target somebody and reach them among the other 1,000 people they are following. Furthermore, there is actually no way to do it in an honest way.
The launch of Promotional Tweets was risky for several reasons.
Firstly, the monetization of social media platforms, while inevitable, goes against the very attributes that made social platforms so compelling in the first place. People could connect free from advertising and its ulterior motives.
Now, all these tweeters are simply filling up the new feed with spam. Advertising on the site is so vast it is being seen as disingenuous.
But what do you think? Is Promoted Tweets working?
Meanwhile, here are some other Twitter figures to celebrate the 20 billionth tweet:
* Twitter now has 105,779,710 registered users.
* New users are signing up at the rate of 300,000 per day.
* 180 million unique visitors come to the site every month.
* 75% of Twitter traffic comes from outside Twitter.com (via third party applications.)
* Twitter gets a total of 3 billion requests a day via its API.
* Twitter users are, in total, tweeting an average of 55 million tweets a day.
* Twitter’s search engine receives around 600 million search queries per day.
* Of Twitter’s active users, 37% use their phone to tweet.
* Over half of all tweets (60%) come from third party applications.
* Twitter itself has grown: in the past year alone, it has grown from 25 to 175 employees.
Twitter still evolving and experimenting with digital media ad space
Jul 27th
Twitter has unveiled a whole host of new features over the past six months, but could this new surprise be the icing on the cake?
Remember about a year ago when Twitter co-founder and CEO Biz Stone said that 2010 would be the micro-blogging site’s revenue year?
Finally the site has delivered something compelling enough that could see that wish, I mean, assertion, come to fruition.
The social site has just added a new feature that will allow Twitter users to upload videos and other media to their tweets. That also could mean video advertising…
‘Tweet Media’, is: “By default, you’ll only see images and videos shared by people you’re following, and reveal those by people you’re not. Check this box to see media from everyone on Twitter,” describes Twitter.
The feature will enable the embedding of multimedia into the stream. It comes after a string of other innovations this year such as Promoted Tweets – which is already earning the site much need advertising revenues.
The ‘media’ approach is though contrary to the ethos of the site. Adding embeddable media to the stream has the potential to complicate the traditionally simple, 140-characters-of-text aesthetic of the network. This may have something to do with why Twitter has now removed the feature.
Mashable unearthered ‘Tweet Media’ earlier today. But when we went poking around we discovered the feature no longer existed.
Here’s the line from Twitter (from Mashable) “We’re constantly exploring features and settings. What you saw was a small test of a potential consumption setting for inline media.”
Twitter also notes that this feature is already a part of both the official apps for iPhone and Android, as well as for certain third-party Twitter apps.
But it’s worth remembering that many users already share photos and videos – either via TwitPic or their other more ‘social’ networks such as Facebook. However, it could be a golden opportunity for advertisers looking for cut-through on the site.
Does the Twitter feed need media? Or, an even better question is, who is still using Twitter anyway?
With so many users, Twitter needs to do something more compelling not just to attract revenues, but to attract creative ads that get people to stop and watch.
Switching on to social media’s new challenges
Jul 26th
Simon Robinson, marketing and alliances director, EMEA, Responsys, explains the challenge that the astronomical growth of social media sites poses to marketers.
Last week, Facebook reached its much sought after milestone of reaching 500 million users – that represents 8% of the world’s entire population.
There is no denying the impact that social media tools are having on the way in which we communicate, both at a business and a personal level. From micro-blogging sites such as Twitter to professional networks like LinkedIn and of course, the force that is Facebook, social media is now as big a part of our daily lives as drinking a cup of coffee or taking the tube to work.
For marketers, this presents an interesting challenge but also one that cannot be ignored. The trick lies in finding the most effective way of communicating with your target audience. However, this is complicated by the fact that consumers now expect to find relevant information not just in their inbox or on a web site, but in whatever channel they decide to use, whenever they feel like using it.
Against this backdrop, the businesses that succeed will be those that can switch on to social media in the same way they have embraced more traditional approaches to marketing such as direct mail and email marketing. They must also appreciate that all consumers are different and social media has helped to harness and grow this individuality, it is here that the secret to success lies. Savvy marketers can take this knowledge and use it to power more personalised and targeted communications.
Now is the time to for marketing teams to evaluate how they can integrate social media into their marketing campaigns in order to drive engagement and ultimately business profit.
How digital and interactive advertising has come of age
Jul 23rd
In a saturated advertising and consumer market, brands are constantly battling against each other for airspace. So what’s the best way to stand out through digital channels? One beer brand has proved itself with the ‘experience’ route…
First, appeal to your ‘fans’, the consumers you already have.
Secondly, reward them by inspiring them to act in the favour of your brand.
One such brand that has done brilliantly at both is Tooheys – an Australian beer brand that was last night crowned as ‘Best in Show’ for its ‘Six Beers of Separation’ campaign.
Here’s a video of the initial campaign:
Aussie agency Lion Nathan and ZenithOptimedia created a campaign that saw four Tooheys fans travel across the world to find how they are connected to their idols…with six beers.
The project included a number of TV episodes that aired on pay-TV channel Foxtel and online. Digital, print, FTA TV and cinema activity also supported the long form ads.
The episodes showed participants travelling more than 150,000km between them, across three continents. The brand gave each of the four $12,000 and 18 days to find their idol.
There’s a micro site here if you’re interested in the journey and a dedicated YouTube channel here.
Mark Uncles, professor of marketing and judge at the 2010 IAB Australia Awards, said, “If there was ever any doubt, digital and interactive advertising truly has come of age. Many of Australia’s biggest mainstream advertisers have had text book success using online to excellent effect.
“Key to this coming of age, are campaigns that engage consumers in the longer term. This is essential if advertising is to build brands and not simply secure immediate promotional benefits.”
The Tooheys campaign makes use of multiple platforms to deliver a insightful and witty messages that build significantly Tooheys Extra Dry as a strong brand.
The campaign is reminiscent of another Aussie campaign, The Best Job in the World. However, where the ‘Best Job’ campaign succeeded was on the global stage.
A simple YouTube competition catapulted the northern Australian state of Queensland onto the world map and it will certainly be a while before anyone forget the media frenzy it caused. Out of the campaign, the Queensland brand managed a true brand advocate (who is now actually employed as Queensland Tourism’s Ambassador and is travelling all over the world).
That goes to prove that advertising and a lot of money can buy you promotions…but there is more to it than that.
These campaigns both play on the ‘experience’. It shows the audience its consumers having a fantastic experience with their brand. That experience is so great they blog about, they talk about, the even put it on video and that is what resonates with consumers in this age of social media and ‘recommendations’.
These campaigns have won out (‘Best Job’ won a few Cannes Lion’s awards!)because of their innovative use of a number of different digital channels to build an experience and total immersion of the brand.
Yes, digital has come of age, so has marketers’ use of it. The opportunities are endless and I hope these examples give you inspiration. There’s also a great case study at mcn.com.au. Click here to watch it.
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