Who is in control of your brand?

LinkedIn third social networking site used by Marketers

What I find interesting about this study of how marketers are using social media is that over 80% are using Facebook & Twitter, followed very closely by LinkedIn at 78%. Why I’m surprised is that from my experience LinkedIn is a very difficult channel to achieve the objectives they listed in the diagram above (right). LinkedIn is mostly a place to improve your personal career, not your employers brand.

Social Bookmarking a priority over MySpace

It’s also funny how we’re all still interested in social bookmarking site but so bored of MySpace, when the ability to use Social Bookmarking sites to achieve marketing outcomes at any scale is extremely hit and miss and you can build a MySpace page, buy some media and have an effective reach of 100,000-1,000,000 in Australia. Maybe it’s because it was once so mighty and now that it’s not number one we’ve all moved on.

The full report is available here in video and PDF formats, thanks to Social Media Examiner.

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-marketing-industry-report-2010

Thanks to Flowtown for turning data into pictures, again.

You may or may not know that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is more of an art than a science whilst it’s well known that there are things on your site and things off your site that impact your ranking in Google.

The most important concept to understand is that Google see’s it your website very differently to you. Google loves text & links, images & videos are OK and flash (as a general rule) is BAD. Without getting into the details of how to develop content, links and a site structure that helps your ranking in Google (there are many people who talk at length about this) I’ll show how you can quickly see your site how Google sees it, and the results may not be pretty.

Once you’ve done the quick audit below the best way to resolve any issues is to talk to an SEO consultant or your digital agency or web developer, they will help you understand what keywords should be in there, how to structure it and write the content for you.

Approach 1 – Quick and dirty

1. Go to Google.com

2. Search for a term your know you already rank on

3. Click ‘cached’ just below your listing in Google

4. Click ‘text only’ in the top right hand corner

5. Now you’re looking at the text & link component of how Google see’s your site. If there’s not much there, or it’s not accurate then you’ve got some work to do.

Approach 2 – More detailed analysis

1. Go to http://www.seotoolset.com/tools/free_tools.html

2. Add your website URL to the Keyword Density Analyser

3. It will provide a comprehensive analysis and provide some direction for you

Approach 3 – Employ a SEO specialist

You can spend days, months and years analysing and optimising your website, if you want to be at the top of your category you may need a team of them.

Doing some simple analysis of Facebook users in Australian confirms the belief that we want to be younger (or older); and we’re happy to lie about ourselves to the world.

It also reinforces the uncomfortable feeling I get when researchers (including people in my team) do focus groups, surveys & other prompted research – when you ask someone about their values, views or habits it’s likely that they’re going to lie.

So back to Facebook where we have a very unique scenario, 46% of all Australians 13 yrs+ are on Facebook and they have to answer a series of questions to create an account, resulting in a very large sample size of data, although not many ways to cross tabulate the data.

Using Facebook’s advertising system, where you can build demographic profiles based on all kinds of attributes; you can estimate the number of people in any given segment on Facebook.

Using the tool I discovered the following audience sizes, 25-34 being the largest, and more women than men in every age group.

Australian’s on Facebook (blue) vs. Men (red) vs Women (green)

For kicks I compared these numbers to the actual population in Australia with the intention of understanding the % of Australians in each segment on Facebook. Instead I discovered that Australian’s want to be younger (or maybe older) and are happy to lie about it.

Australian’s (red) vs. Australian’s on Facebook (blue)

The graph above shows the number of Australians in each age group compared with the number of people on Facebook who claim to be the given age.

Digging a little further it was clear the discrepancy was only with the women.

Australian Women (red) vs. Australian Women on Facebook (blue)

And the discrepancy isn’t tiny, it adds up to over 257,000, even with some margins of error that’s a big gap. Another way of looking at it is that there’s 115% of Women aged 25-34 on Facebook, an awesome stat, if only it could be true.

% of Australians on Facebook (blue) vs. % of Men on Facebook (red) vs. % Women on Facebook (green)

I’m making a big assumption here, as it could be an error, 13 year olds wanting to be 18 or something else, but I believe it’s a reflection on the pressure from society, media & our peers to be and live more youthful lives.

It highlights the impact of the new world we live in where Facebook (and social media generally) plays an interesting role in our social & professional lives, giving us more power to manage our own brand, reputation & image, unless someone else takes control, uploading those awkward photos of us from our best friend’s birthday party.

Oh, and to point out the obvious and the reason I actually did this analysis, 46% of Australians are on Facebook. Just for good measure here’s another pretty chart of visits to three sites in Australia from Google Trends to confirm traffic is trending up or down, and it’s up.

The Age reports that Gillard tops twitter’s list today and that

It is a result Julia Gillard will hope repeats itself on election day.

Being popular isn’t just about noise

Getting high volume on Twitter doesn’t mean you’re going to sell more widgets, or get more votes, it just means more people are mentioning you.

What you’d want to know is how much of that volume is positive, if it’s mostly positive that’s a good thing, if there’s lots of negative that’s a bad thing.

How do you track sentiment?

It’s something the social media industry has been struggling with since social media listening tools we first created. Each of them has their own patent pending sentiment algorithm that somehow tells you if a particular mention of a brand is positive, negative, neutral or mixed.

We’ve been doing listening for clients for a couple of years, and still to this day have found NONE of the sentiment tools reliable, so we take a large sample, read and categorise them.

Why’s it so hard?

Slang, sarcasm, jokes, responses to positive, saying one brand is crap but the other is better… and the list goes on.

So I’ve run a few tests, using some freely available tools, to illustrate the point, but you should decide whether Julia’s achievement is actually a good thing or not.

Twitter Search – The latest mentions of Gillard

Twitter Sentiment by AppSpot

Social Mention (Searches more than just Twitter)

TweetFeel

Twitrratr

Twends

So don’t blindly trust the latest sophisticated sentiment algorithm, test the heck out of it and probably just do it manually.

Optimising your eCommerce is simple math; if you increase performance it directly improves the bottom line.

Online Shopping in Australia is at an all-time high, with 37.6% of us spending a total of $23B. Yet so many big brands are so late to the game. We’ve reviewed a range of studies that will help you either enter the eCommerce game or improve your current platform.

There are many important areas that impact sales, today we focus on some critical components that fall under User Experience & Shopping Experience. Applying just one of these learnings has proven to increase sales by 257%.

I’ve summarised the most important & impactful findings on the VJ Blog in the following categories.

1. User Experience
   1. The checkout process
   2. Checkout load time
   3. Make it easy to fill out forms
2. Shopping Experience
   1. Shipping & Handling costs
   2. Price & Product comparisons
   3. Free & easy returns policy
   4. Choice of delivery time
   5. Ratings & reviews

See my full post on the Visual Jazz Blog: http://blog.visualjazz.com.au/strategy/getting-the-most-out-of-ecommerce/

AdAge has just posted a story discussing a big Nielsen study on Facebook advertising. The study of 800,000 people illustrated the benefits to brand recall and purchase intent. They look at the combination of Earned Media and Paid Media.

The study of more than 800,000 Facebook users and ads from 14 brands in a variety of categories shows a marked increase in ad recall, awareness and purchase intent when home-page ads on the social network mention friends of users who’ve become fans of the brand in the ad.

For standard paid media they found a 10% increase in ad recall, a 4% increase in brand awareness and a 2% increase in purchase intent, compared to a control group. And where it get’s interesting is the impact of having both Earned and Paid which resulted in an increase of recall to 16% when ads included mentions of friends who were brand fans, and 30% when the ads coincided with a similar mention in users’ news feeds.

But the increase in recall jumped to 16% when ads included mentions of friends who were brand fans, and 30% when the ads coincided with a similar mention in users’ news feeds. Brand awareness saw similar bumps: up 2% from just a home-page ad, 8% with a “social ad” bearing mentions of friends who were brand fans and up 13% when a home-page ad appeared along with a mention of friends who were brand fans in the users’ news feeds.

The most powerful outcome from this study was their ‘other’ finding, that purchase intent increased in similar ways.

Purchase intent was 2% higher among viewers of home-page ads vs. nonviewers, but got a four-times-bigger bump, up 8% either from social ads or when ads appeared alongside organic mentions of the brand in the news feed.

And to all you digifolk, clicks only made up a small proportion of the whole picture. (Digifolk are those that have grown up in a world of focusing on click throughs, not good old fashioned reach.)

Only around 130,000, or less than 1%, “engaged” with them by clicking on them

And why’s this so important?

For years we have worked hard to get in front of our audience for 30 seconds, or half a page, with pretty profound results, reaching millions, building great brands and generating revenue. Sure now, with social media, we try to get consumers to tell each other about our message, but that’s still the same outcome – REACH.

As I’ve discussed in other posts our growing addiction to clicks is taking us away from the very valuable outcome of reaching our audience. Yes, if they click it’s great, but we all know how few do, so studies that discuss and highlight impact of digital reach – be it display, search or otherwise – on brand awareness, purchase intent and other metrics add value to our good old friend REACH. It’s not the first study of it’s kind, Nielsen released one last November – funny to see I reacted in a similar way…

Thoughts?

Some good research from Nielsen came out recently as you may have read in B&T and Digital Media that argues the value of online advertising in terms of recall, recommendation & purchase influence.

The research also revealed intention to purchase increased by 4.9% following exposure to an online advertising campaign, with brand sentiment increasing by 5.3%.

Display advertising also correlated with a rise in awareness, with top-of-mind awareness jumping 3.1% while prompted awareness increased by 3.5%. The likelihood of a consumer recommending a brand following exposure to an online advertising campaign also increased by 4.4%.

This leads me to 2 main thoughts

1. How does this compare to TV, print & radio? (using the same benchmarks & research approach)

Without context these numbers might be under or over valued as it could smash or be smashed by these other channels? It would be good to put them side by side to see how they interact. And what’s the impact when multiple touch points occur, say TV & Online, does it improve, reduce, increase, change the impact of the communication?

2. More importantly can marketers drop their addiction to clicks?

Clicks, performance & data are both the power and the Achilles heel of digital media. Thanks to many publishers, like Google, you can buy a visitor to your website. This is great because it reduces the risk, it’s not so great because the value of the exposure to media (banner, search result, edm, etc) is missed, all the focus is on the click.

So what?

I recommend clients establish an ROI (return on investment) calculator, where you add up all the outcomes from a campaign and compare it to the cost of the communication. This helps you learn & evaluate performance in a more balanced and reasonable manor. (I’ve explained how to create an ROI calculator here)

One piece of the ROI puzzle should be exposure, it may not be as valuable, but it has to be considered.

This kind of research helps us understand the value, however, we (marketers) need to assign value to it first, both rationally and in our guts.

This swell article on SMH yesterday arvo enlightens us on the fact that Australians no longer only use mobiles for phone calls & texting, lots of us are using it for email, web browsing and entertainment. These kinds of reports are critical to my job as it helps make or break business cases on where clients should invest their money.

Some interesting results in the research report got my attention including:

• 9% of participants have iPhones
• 32% of respondents accessed social networking sites from their handsets
  • and half of those accessing social networks daily

However, skepticism started to creep in as the second stat seemed a little out of kilter with general social networking site usage in Australia…. So I dug a little deeper into the research report. One of the first places I usually look (and I’m no researcher) is who they surveyed – sometimes this skews the results – and in this case there was an issue.

The decision to implement the survey online and to promote the survey via mobile banner ads has some implications in terms of disseminating the results to the wider population.

SOME IMPLICATIONS?

I’d say a little more than SOME IMPLICATIONS – considering the survey is about mobile usage.

If you do a survey of people who are clicking on mobile banner ads it’s pretty stupid to ask them if they use mobile internet and applications – THEY JUST CLICKED ON A BANNER AD.

If AIMIA or the research agency can clarify the number of people that responded via mobile devices the report might be of some value – maybe not.

Footnote: I’m a digital advocate, believe in all things online/mobile/social, but flawed research reports make it difficult for me to judge the potential value of the research & therefore difficult to recommend it to my clients.

UPDATE: 13th October

Marisa from mNet has clarified the issues that I raised in this post in the comments below. Until I’ve reviewed the report in further detail assume that the research is sound. My question is why they didn’t clarify this important fact in the report.