Social media isn't just social media platforms. That message was a core theme during at least one panel at the Advertising Research Foundation 2011 Think conference in New York on Tuesday. Brad Fay, COO of the Keller Fay Group, said the firm's research, based on its TalkTrack platform -- which Keller Fay Group says is the only continuous monitoring system of all marketing-relevant conversations in America -- shows that some of the highest concentrations of social networkers are both in new and old media. "Facebook and Twitter audiences report themselves to be frequent recommenders in every category we look at," he says. "We find that people 13 to 69 who are Twitter audiences offer 100 weekly brand mentions -- they are very engaged in brands -- versus 65 for the general public," he said. But he added that traditional media also offers strong social value. "When people talk about brands even today, more of that conversation happens offline, face to face or over the phone than online," which he said accounts for only about 8% of the conversation. "The other thing is when people have conversations about brands they reference what they saw in ads, and TV ads are still the most referenced. Television does that more than any other touchpoint." Fay explained that when the firm looked at a range of media, including print, Internet, and TV, out of 113 media, the top ten in terms of the size of its users' social networks are WSJ.com, the Washington Post, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek. Traditional media also leads within market categories: auto category brand mentions within consumer social networks are highest among consumers of Car and Driver, Men's Health, WSJ.com, Go.com, Sports Illustrated, CNET, Rolling Stone and Fox Sports, per Fay. Unilever's Dove brand's efforts to reach male consumers involved the company using both big-event traditional media commitments, such as this year's Super Bowl, plus Web videos and social elements featuring New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees. Bill Pink, partner and head of marketing science at Millward Brown, which worked on the program, said each media has its advantages: TV was responsible for the big awareness boost the brand got among men, and its effects fell off at a slower rate than print, but online elements did not show any diminishing returns over time. On a graph of relative influence in terms of awareness building, online appears flat, but Pink points out that a deeper look at online elements of the campaign reveals large differences in the effectiveness of Dove's various Web programs. Videos showing Brees in the shower "were the most costly relative to Dove's other online programs, but had biggest effect relative to other creatives," Pink said, "and the most efficient. Even though we spent a lot behind it, we knew it was effective. So while online had a small incremental effect in total versus all media, within the online world we can see clearly what works."
Ten key factors drive a stronger response to fan pages, according to a study from Millward Brown and Dynamic Logic in cooperation with the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA). The report, "Value of a Fan," splits the factors into five basic expectations and five proposed differentiators. The basic expectations apply to all brand pages, while the differentiators can help pages stand out, but may not apply to all brands. The basics are regular posts, trustworthy brand news, new product information, contests and special offers. However, brands that can also deliver either a sense of fun, variety, innovation, interactivity or community will stand out from other pages and see a stronger brand response, according to the research. Successful pages deepen both brand equity and engagement. The research notes that the pages generating the strongest brand response were not necessarily those with the largest number of fans. Fan expectations of brands in the social media space are increasing all the time and marketers only get out what they put in, said Duncan Southgate, global innovation director at Millward Brown. Marketers that don't regularly add new and interesting content to their fan pages and embrace what their fans want from the page are missing out on an opportunity to build loyalty among some of their most important consumers. Most marketers are currently in the phase of figuring out the right metrics to understand the return, he says. "Behavioral metrics go a long way to helping marketers understand what's happening in social media, but some form of attitudinal quality measure is an essential overlay for a comprehensive understanding of performance," Southgate tells Marketing Daily. "Based on our research to date, most marketers are seeing a positive return, but different pages perform in different ways so it's key for brands to understand both their strengths and weaknesses relative to other fan pages." The report also identifies the perceived value that social media delivers for marketers. Of the participating WFA members, 85% regard fan pages as a means of securing additional insight and increasing loyalty, while 80% cited the opportunity to increase advocacy. Of those participating WFA members, 96% are spending more in this area and 27% are finding that running fan pages takes more time and money than anticipated. Despite increased time and money being invested, 50% of the WFA members who participated were unsure of their return on investment, and 23% believed they were getting a good return, but 27% regarded payback as just average or poor. The report is based on interviews with 24 multinational WFA companies and online questionnaires with 3,687 of their fans. The WFA represents 90% of global marketing communications spend -- about $700 billion annually. The fan pages selected included brands from the confectionery, alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, personal care and telecommunications sectors. Although some pages were global, others were specifically targeted at consumers in Australia, France, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom or the U.S.
Brands have long recognized the power of cause marketing to help them stand out from the crowd and generate consumer loyalty. They have often reached out to moms in social media to engage their support. What's new is that blogger-brand cause partnerships now go both ways: The women who are heavily involved in social media are increasingly recognizing that they themselves can use their influence to initiate change to help others. Bloganthropy.org, run by blogger moms Debbie Bookstaber and Candace Lindemann, is leading the way in bringing together influential social media moms with corporations and causes. The organization, launched in 2009, is dedicated to connecting social media users with corporate giving and PR departments, to encourage and facilitate charitable donations. It also empowers bloggers to become philanthropic leaders in their communities. Some of the top names in "mom social media" are on its board. "We knew many bloggers who were committed to charity and to using the influence and power of social media to improve their local communities. We also understood how eager companies were to connect with bloggers, but bloggers weren't necessarily going to write about cleaning products and new soups. In many cases, these pitches just weren't a fit for the blog's format or readers," said Bookstaber. At the same time, "many companies have charitable programs and request blogger support, but they struggle to get their corporate giving programs mentioned on blogs." Bloganthropy.org hoped to bring the two sides together in an effective way, in which blogger, brand and cause alike would all benefit. On June 24, our company and Bloganthropy.org will present the second annual Bloganthropy Awards, a program the two organizations created together and launched last year to honor those who have raised awareness for a good cause through blogging. Give Health, a Procter & Gamble social sustainability program, will sponsor the Bloganthropy Award itself -- including a cash prize for the winner as well as a donation to her cause -- for the second consecutive year. Other leading companies will have a presence at the awards presentation -- an official event of the Type-A Parent Conference, a popular blogger event taking place in Asheville, N.C. Katherine Stone, the blogger behind Postpartum Progress, received the first Bloganthropy Award, which was announced in August 2010. Hers is the most widely read blog in the United States on postpartum depression and other mental illnesses related to pregnancy and childbirth. In the last year or two alone, other important bloggers, such as Mommy Niri, have launched cause-focused programs. Kristine McCormick of Cora's Story and Maggie Ginsberg-Schultz of Violence Unsilenced have used their blogs, respectively, to advocate universal screening for congenital heart defects and to shed light on domestic violence. I see an important trend here. Mom bloggers who have focused to date on reviewing products or talking about their personal experiences are now looking to make a greater contribution -- to have real impact. This offers exciting opportunities for bloggers and brands alike.
As I write this, an interesting signpost in the advancement of social media and paywalls is upon us. To continue my theme of absolute obsession with The New York Times' new paywall, today I want to talk about whether Twitter has, or should, shut down the Twitter feed @freeNYTimes. It's an automated account that promises to tweet a link to every article in the Times, using the paper's own API to make the trick happen. This is significant because one of the paywall's many holes is that even people who have reached their 20-story monthly limit for free content can read Times' content endlessly if they got to the site via links shared on social media. Enter Twitter, which is one of the most efficient ways to use social media to jump over the wall. (I should point out that the account has gotten more publicity than traction; it currently has just over 550 followers.) Here at about 10:30 in the morning, all I know for sure is that the Times has made the request that Twitter shut down the account -- but. there's no indication on the @freeNYTimes Twitter page, or from Twitter, that the paper's request has actually been acted upon. However, in a sign of, yes, the times, it looks like the newspaper is exploiting its own loophole to ask Twitter to shut the account down; it is making the claim that the account violates the Times' trademark. (Update: A Twitter spokesperson said this afternoon: "For privacy reasons, we don't comment on actions taken against specific user accounts. But I can confirm that the @freeNYTimes account has been suspended." Meanwhile, the mirror account @freeUnnamedNews is still up and running. Its owner tweeted: "While I straighten out @freeNYTimes with Twitter, youcan follow @freeUnnamedNews, which doesn't contain a trademarked term!") Still, trademark violations to one side, let's focus on @freeNYTimes' redistribution of Times links. On that basis, should Twitter shut down this site? Or the broader question: should Twitter be in the business of protecting paywall content in the first place? In the case of the Times, the second question, in fact, doesn't even apply. The paper has already stated that social media sharing is A-OK. So, while it may not exactly be, well, nice for someone to share all the links -- as a way of making a statement that content should be free, or as an annoying little techno-prank -- it's not against the rules. However, as paywalls start to emerge throughout the online newspaper industry, what should Twitter's, or Facebook's, policy be towards such quasi-illicit link-sharing? To argue the point, let's try this view of content on for size: content should be free only if its owner thinks it should be. We all know having your content free, and free to distribute, is just fine when you're a marketer, or CNN.com, or Gawker, or The Huffington Post. They've decided where their place in the marketplace is, and that's as free providers of content, be it JetBlue's Twitter feed, or the ad-supported route that some of the Web's most popular content sites follow. The Times however, has decided to assign a specific value to its content and that makes the account, pretty much a conduit for "theft" -- as one commenter on @jeffbercovici's Forbes blog mused. But theft with a social media loophole, which puts it in the same category of, say, someone who, having coveted a fleece hoodie in the school lost-and-found for weeks on end, simply decides one day to take it. If that's not wrong, it's not exactly right, either. But we're not high-schoolers. We shouldn't be engaging in the theft of hoodies or content, or engaging in premeditated loophole exploitation, which is what @freeNYTimes essentially is doing. Even if, technically, the account isn't doing anything wrong in sharing links, my sense is Twitter should seriously consider whether such accounts should be accorded a home on Twitter. I have left out of this discussion the fact that @freeNYTimes has apparently already set up another account@freeUnnamedNews, which mirrors the other account without the pesky trademark exploitation. While this move should be expected, it doesn't really matter. What matters is how Twitter handles shared content that will increasingly sit on the far side of a paywall, and whether it sides with the "content is meant to be free" mob, or the content providers that help make Twitter what it is. If that sounds like a loaded way to put it, it's purely intentional.
Some time between an earthquake rattling Japan and Operation Odyssey Dawn launching to protect Libya from itself, my world was consumed by a mere four letters: SXSW. In the metaphysical sense, it seems so remote now that I wonder if South by Southwest actually occurred. In the more practical sense, this marks the start of a yearlong process to determine how much it mattered. It's hard to describe how much of a bubble Austin is during SXSW. One day, I visited the Meebo lounge and viewed a demonstration that had Yahoo News running in the background. I was so distracted by the idea that there was news happening somewhere beyond downtown Austin that I momentarily lost track of the demo. SXSW is a Petri dish. All of us attendees were microbes colliding in close proximity, reacting to each other in unpredictable ways as outside forces -- marketers, app developers, conference organizers, food trucks, friends -- manipulated our environment. Then there was the meta-Petri dish, the collective attention focused on Austin by outside observers who at times could interact with the microbes. The experiments now take their most interesting shape as the Petri dish is destroyed and the microbes fly back to their native environments around the world. Will the microbes act the same way in their native environments as they did in the dish? Will the native environments allow the experiments to keep taking shape? Have the microbes themselves changed in any way? These aren't mere philosophical puzzles. The answers determine what, if anything, becomes the next Twitter or Foursquare, or what becomes any of the other thousands of technologies that appeared at SXSW one year only to fade into oblivion. Here are some practical examples of Petri dish effects to monitor: Foursquare: With its relaunch timed for SXSW, the emphasis returned to racking up points for bragging rights. When I checked in at Austin Bergstrom International Airport, I got points for returning to Texas, traveling 1,000 miles, and checking in with various friends. Now I'm back to my typical schedule of home-work-lunch-work-maybe do something remotely interesting at night. How can I care about points again when the only way to top my inflated SXSW total is by going to SXSW 2012? Will people who weren't at SXSW care about points more because they didn't rage on point steroids in Austin? Plancast: Should SXSW just acquire this site? This is the second straight SXSW where it seems like everyone I know used it, but I barely heard about it for eleven and a half months in between conferences. The Google Trends graph tells enough of the story. Note that when you try to view the trend for plancast.com under Websites, there's not enough data. Hashable: For a few days, Hashable inspired some people to go without business cards and exchange information via the site and app. That was a great idea, until I came back, tried following up with people, and realized that I couldn't easily access some of their contact information; often the most I'd get is a Twitter ID. Does Hashable even work if you're not in the Petri dish? It didn't work well enough in the dish, so it will need to find a way to complement analog but user-friendly business cards without trying to replace them. GroupMe: This group texting app stands a chance at surviving during the 360 non-SXSW days a year as teenage girls figure out how much fun it is to form private cliques, excommunicate former friends, and make their peers cry. Then, come March 9, 2012, every technology enthusiast will care about this again. There are plenty of other technologies that got a lot of buzz but won't matter for a while, if ever. Most of the social check-in apps fall into this bucket. Beyond Facebook Places, which has scale, and SCVNGR, which is more about gaming, Foursquare's enhancements have made most of the other such apps irrelevant. Then there are the technologies that get their share of buzz for meeting needs that safely no one has. Exhibit A: Bump.com, which allows you to register your license plate and communicate with other drivers. As a Manhattanite, I don't drive much, but when I do, most of the things I wish I could say to other drivers would make George Carlin blush in heaven. Yes, there are marketing applications of this technology. No, that's not a reason for marketers to use it. What's far more common, away from all the hype and contests that bribe people to try an app, is to encounter people toiling away at making their great ideas better and using SXSW as an academy rather than a megaphone. A personal favorite of this breed is Skweal, which allows consumers to directly contact business owners and potentially keep negative feedback off public social sites. Personally, I think the focus now is too negative, as consumers can also share positive feedback, but it does fill a need for business owners and consumers, and it may well take off. It's jarring coming back from Austin and adjusting to the real world of alarm clocks and conference rooms and hours of responding to email. Now that the Petri dish is shattered, though, there's a chance to discover what really mattered, how big an impact SXSW has made, and how many more dreams a few days in Austin will inspire.
Social media isn't just social media platforms. That message was a core theme during at least one panel at the Advertising Research Foundation 2011 Think conference in New York on Tuesday. Brad Fay, COO of the Keller Fay Group, said the firm's research, based on its TalkTrack platform -- which Keller Fay Group says is the only continuous monitoring system of all marketing-relevant conversations in America -- shows that some of the highest concentrations of social networkers are both in new and old media. "Facebook and Twitter audiences report themselves to be frequent recommenders in every category we look at," he says. "We find that people 13 to 69 who are Twitter audiences offer 100 weekly brand mentions -- they are very engaged in brands -- versus 65 for the general public," he said. But he added that traditional media also offers strong social value. "When people talk about brands even today, more of that conversation happens offline, face to face or over the phone than online," which he said accounts for only about 8% of the conversation. "The other thing is when people have conversations about brands they reference what they saw in ads, and TV ads are still the most referenced. Television does that more than any other touchpoint." Fay explained that when the firm looked at a range of media, including print, Internet, and TV, out of 113 media, the top ten in terms of the size of its users' social networks are WSJ.com, the Washington Post, Vogue, The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek. Traditional media also leads within market categories: auto category brand mentions within consumer social networks are highest among consumers of Car and Driver, Men's Health, WSJ.com, Go.com, Sports Illustrated, CNET, Rolling Stone and Fox Sports, per Fay. Unilever's Dove brand's efforts to reach male consumers involved the company using both big-event traditional media commitments, such as this year's Super Bowl, plus Web videos and social elements featuring New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees. Bill Pink, partner and head of marketing science at Millward Brown, which worked on the program, said each media has its advantages: TV was responsible for the big awareness boost the brand got among men, and its effects fell off at a slower rate than print, but online elements did not show any diminishing returns over time. On a graph of relative influence in terms of awareness building, online appears flat, but Pink points out that a deeper look at online elements of the campaign reveals large differences in the effectiveness of Dove's various Web programs. Videos showing Brees in the shower "were the most costly relative to Dove's other online programs, but had biggest effect relative to other creatives," Pink said, "and the most efficient. Even though we spent a lot behind it, we knew it was effective. So while online had a small incremental effect in total versus all media, within the online world we can see clearly what works."
Ten key factors drive a stronger response to fan pages, according to a study from Millward Brown and Dynamic Logic in cooperation with the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA). The report, "Value of a Fan," splits the factors into five basic expectations and five proposed differentiators. The basic expectations apply to all brand pages, while the differentiators can help pages stand out, but may not apply to all brands. The basics are regular posts, trustworthy brand news, new product information, contests and special offers. However, brands that can also deliver either a sense of fun, variety, innovation, interactivity or community will stand out from other pages and see a stronger brand response, according to the research. Successful pages deepen both brand equity and engagement. The research notes that the pages generating the strongest brand response were not necessarily those with the largest number of fans. Fan expectations of brands in the social media space are increasing all the time and marketers only get out what they put in, said Duncan Southgate, global innovation director at Millward Brown. Marketers that don't regularly add new and interesting content to their fan pages and embrace what their fans want from the page are missing out on an opportunity to build loyalty among some of their most important consumers. Most marketers are currently in the phase of figuring out the right metrics to understand the return, he says. "Behavioral metrics go a long way to helping marketers understand what's happening in social media, but some form of attitudinal quality measure is an essential overlay for a comprehensive understanding of performance," Southgate tells Marketing Daily. "Based on our research to date, most marketers are seeing a positive return, but different pages perform in different ways so it's key for brands to understand both their strengths and weaknesses relative to other fan pages." The report also identifies the perceived value that social media delivers for marketers. Of the participating WFA members, 85% regard fan pages as a means of securing additional insight and increasing loyalty, while 80% cited the opportunity to increase advocacy. Of those participating WFA members, 96% are spending more in this area and 27% are finding that running fan pages takes more time and money than anticipated. Despite increased time and money being invested, 50% of the WFA members who participated were unsure of their return on investment, and 23% believed they were getting a good return, but 27% regarded payback as just average or poor. The report is based on interviews with 24 multinational WFA companies and online questionnaires with 3,687 of their fans. The WFA represents 90% of global marketing communications spend -- about $700 billion annually. The fan pages selected included brands from the confectionery, alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks, personal care and telecommunications sectors. Although some pages were global, others were specifically targeted at consumers in Australia, France, Germany, Sweden, the United Kingdom or the U.S.
Jonathan Mendez, founder & CEO, Yieldbot: stop thinking about social campaigns and start thinking about the socialization of all your online properties.
What can marketing do now – right now! – to join the social revolution, or improve their existing efforts? Go test a few markets, says Steve Latham, CEO of Encore Media Metrics. “Market testing!” he enthuses. Pick a couple of markets or products, focus on growing them through social, and look at the response you get. “Focus on content,” says Adam Cahill, EVP Media Director, Hill Holliday. “Fans are meaningless unless they do something with your content.” Also, “Always have a learning agenda,” Cahill suggests. Who are you trying to reach with your social initiatives? What are you currently doing well? The more questions the better. Have a faster draw, advises Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, VP of Marketing, Involver. “Marketers need to be a lot faster” about their social decisions, Kaykas-Wolff stresses, and experiment more with as many tools as possible. Try monitoring tools, publishing tools, etc. Tag, tag, tag, proposes John Lovett, Senior Partner & Principal Consultant, Web Analytics Demystified. Lots of campaigns he sees go out to the field with no way to track their efforts. Tagging it the easiest way to do that. Bigger picture, Jonathan Mendez, Founder and CEO of Yieldbot, says to stop thinking about social media as a campaign. Your brand is social media! “There’s a greater socialization of the Web taking place,” says Mendez. “If you’re just thinking in terms of campaigns, “you’re going to get the short end of the stick,” and you competition is going to eat your lunch. Finally, Ben Straley, co-founder and CEO of Meteor Solutions tells marketers to take a look at the user experience -- how they’re interacting with your brand, etc.
In an afternoon keynote, Prof. Joseph Turow, of the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, laid out a scenario where online users become increasingly anxious and disconcerted about the social stratification they find on the Web based on personalized offers and content some people receive and others don't. In other words, the split between those who are targeted and those deemed in industry parlance as 'waste' will become more apparent and lead to growing social divisions. Targeted ads and offers will increasingly become status symbols in the digital age, defining online reputations. How to forestall this trend? Turow suggests the efforts to insure anonymity online like Do-Not-Track lists can be helpful but ultimately won't work as anonymity itself becomes meaningless online when the data from different sources from mobile phones to TV watching can be combined to pinpoint users. His recommendation is for companies to simply be more open about sharing about exactly the data they're collecting on people and giving them more control over it--what he called "information respect." "The payback will be worth it in veering away from the increasingly divisive, corrosive social media and marketing systems" operating behind the scenes, he said.