Archive for August, 2010
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.
Women are more susceptible to online ads than men. They notice…
Aug 4th
More than half of all women online (62%) notice and/or interact with online advertising, says a new report from Unicast.
Women aged 18-24 use the web more than other age groups for all activities except keeping up with news, 53% vs. 67% overall, says the ‘What Women Want From The Web Report’.
The report found women who visit blogs notice online advertising far more than overall respondents. While this group is just 13% of women who read blogs regularly, it shows females are potentially more open to ads from relevant sources of information that they trust.
Women aged 18-24 are also more receptive to online advertising in various formats than the overall population, are more interested in localised information, surveys, social media formats and downloadable content.
According to the report, the ads that resonate with women:
* 46% – include sales, discount codes
* 31% – feature creating/submitting an entry to win a prize
* 24% – provide customized local information
* 22% – offer interactive surveys/quizzes
Marketers still don’t know enough about SEO
Aug 3rd
A survey of marketers by SEO agency dotSEO reveals nearly a quarter of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) still don’t know much about search engine optimisation (SEO), despite Google being the first port of call for most people looking for goods and services.
A fifth of those surveyed said that although they know what SEO is, they don’t spend any of their marketing budgets on it. Only 14% identified SEO as being strategically important to their business. 23% of marketers were also unsure about the benefits delivered by using SEO, with 14% saying there were no benefits as far as they could tell.
The survey findings are revealed in a new dotSEO report entitled “Naked SEO”, which is designed to demystify what SEO actually entails. The full report can be downloaded by clicking here.
Naked SEO also includes the results of a new benchmark study into how 50 of the UK’s leading SMEs, as ranked by The Sunday Times, are optimising their websites for natural search. The study found that the majority are failing to take simple steps to improve search engine rankings, with only 28% using relevant keywords on their site.
The dotSEO benchmark study shows SMEs were generally getting the more basic SEO requirements right with, for example, 76% using heading tags in titles on their homepage and 64% using meta descriptions to give a good summary of the site. But at the more technical end, the results were poor, with only 22% of page titles beginning with a keyword and only 44% having a clearly visible sitemap.
Skip Fidura, Digital Director at dotSEO said: “SME marketers in the UK are clearly unsure about the benefits of SEO, which in turn means they aren’t making the simple changes to their websites that could dramatically affect their rankings. The SEO industry itself isn’t helping to educate businesses. Too often SEO techniques are shrouded in mystery as a dark art, not within the reach of ordinary marketers. Our report reveals how there are simple steps that any company can take to make tangible SEO improvements and drive real business returns.”
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.
Recent Comments