Who is in control of your brand?

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?

Yesterday Toyota announced that they’d selected 5 advertising agencies to pitch for their social media activity where the community would determine the winners, the two best performing agencies would get more work in 2010.

B&T Today revealed last week that Toyota is running the social media pitch, pitting eight agencies against each other with four agencies then to go head to head with their ideas in the public domain. Following on from this, the two best will produce further work in the new year.

Background

Having worked on the digital account for Holden (held by Visual Jazz) for some time now, I’ve been keeping a close eye on who’s doing what. Interestingly enough, Toyota have recently been putting a lot of effort into Facebook – in particular – buying advertising and growing their fan base.

Toyota

They have also developed an application, called ‘Toyota Promise Forest‘, aligned with the Prius. The concept looks good, one of the best in Australia, however, it doesn’t work – and it hasn’t for quite some time. You’ll see when you use the app that YOUR NAME is TIMOTHY and the friends aren’t my friends, and you can’t actually use the app.

Now we assumed, when we first found the application, that it was new and being repaired, however, it’s been a couple of months now, and still it’s not working.

It makes me wonder why Toyota are ramping up their social media when their current efforts are so broken? That aside, how can you have 5 campaigns in market and effectively measure the performance of each activity separately? Would you run 5 TVCs at once to see which one works best?

Ford

I’ve also heard rumblings that Ford have also just selected an agency to roll out a social media strategy. Whilst at the same time they’ve developed ‘MyFord‘ a social media hub for their brand, however, it’s kinda broken…

Others

Lots of the other auto’s are in the space, but nothing noteworthy at this stage.

Summary: the Australian auto category will be an interesting one to watch in the coming 6-12 months

It’s not damaging or terrible but they’ll surely be losing potential fans because of it.

This advert appeared and appealed to me this morning, a $75,000 would be awesome!

So when I clicked through I’d expect big & clear instructions on how to get my hands on that $75k and probably see other people suggesting their ideas. But alas I didn’t, and it wasn’t until I returned to their page that I noticed a small piece of text explaining the situation.

So I went off to their website to see if I could find anything more about it… again I found nothing.

They paid for my eyeballs and I was ready to be converted, sign up and connect with Pringles, it was just all too hard. Also, people who organically found the fan page wouldn’t realise the enormity of the party competition.

Update: 21st September 2009

The campaign was still running, so I click on the ad and attempted to participate, and this time there was a page about the competition. I gave Pringles permissions to post messages to me, on my wall and to my friends (which is a big ask) and I was all ready to do whatever this campaign was but after I’d done all this I discovered the comp was over.

I’m guessing I had a pretty unqiue experience due to bad timing, as their fan page has increased from 90k+ to 240k+, a pretty good result.

What they might’ve done:

• wait until the comp was ready to announce
• use their fan page image & news feed to advertise the full details of the comp and what to expect
• added some information to their website about it
• created some way for me to signup via email or mobile to receive annoucements about it
• turnd off the competition adverts when the campaign was over
• changed the competition page to say ‘competition closed’ before I entered my details, not after

Twitter is certainly raising the profile of social media, although marketers/brands don’t know what it is, it does get them asking questions – which is a win for social media generally.

However, I and lots of other pessimists doubt Twitter’s phenomenal growth and how it’s changed the world. For me it’s profile is partly due to it’s value to the publishing community – basically it helps journalists find stories quick, which makes their lives easier, so they write about it lots.

However, a Hubspot report, which surveyed 4.5 million Twitter accounts gives us a good indication of the uptake of the new craze.

Some of the key stats from the study are:

• Currently 32.1M users, up from 1.6M 12 months ago
• The average user has tweeted 119.34 times in total
• The average user has a following-to-follower ratio of .7738
• 24.14% of users have a bio in their profile
• 31.32% of users have a location in their profile
• 20.21% of users have a homepage URL in their profile
• 45.12% of users have tweeted at least once
• 47.29% of users have at least one follower
• 44.50% of users are following at least one account
• You can read more here: http://blog.hubspot.com/Portals/249/sotwitter09.pdf

On the surface there’s been a growth in user-base from 1.6M (12 mths ago) to 32.1M (now) – a 2000% increase in 12 months – not bad. But as we all know not all the users are active, so lets consider the inactive accounts – inactive account could be defined many ways, I’m using ‘have not followed anyone’ as a broad measure. Hubspot tells us that 55.5% of people aren’t following anyone, which brings the active user-base down to 14.2M.

Assuming all of the original 1.6M users were ‘active’ the growth year on year is 787%. Now which ever way you want to skin that, or define ‘inactive’ that’s still impressive growth. Maybe it’s not as big as Facebook or MySpace, but how often do MySpace & Facebook get press based on their ‘active users’?

I still believe that Twitter is an over-hyped application, however, it is changing the game – and making marketers & businesses sit up and atleast ask questions.

Other discussions on the report

• GigaOm: Ironic But True – Many on Twitter are Just Silent
• SFGafe: Most Twitter Users are less than Twitter-obsessed
• VentureBeat: Twitter Study Finds More Lurkers than Active Users
• Mashable: Are Twitter Users Inactive?

Moving away from the tech crowed, Twitter has become THE buzz word of marketing managers over the last two months – and I mean old skool marketers, who haven’t used any form of social media before…

One of many reasons why Twitter isn’t going to solve your marketing problems is that of the definition of followers… It might sound fantastic that I, some guy from Melbourne, have 920 followers and that I have the power to reach 920 people with any given tweet – right?

If it was an email database, which achieves 20-25% open rate, you’d expect to reach 230 people at most.

If you’re talking about a Facebook page you might get 1-2% interacting with your page after a message, so 10-20 people.

But with Twitter, due to its nature and the speed at which it moves, you’re only going to reach anyone who is on Twitter at the moment that you post the message, which could be from 0.1-0.2%. Which varies massively depending on the day of the week and time of the day. However, 920 followers might result in 5-10 people viewing your Tweet. (This all assumes you’re posting boring content, that those 5-10 people wont ReTweet on to their followers – which is the true power of spreading your message on Twitter)

Now if you’re not focusing on reaching lots of people, then good, great, you understand social media and the importance of building strong connections, however, if you’re looking to reach thousands of people, Twitter aint for you.

On top of that I would estimate that 20-30% of my and everyone’s followers are spammers, they’re people who follow anyone and everyone and don’t really care about you…

There are a few reasons why people might follow you on Twitter, TwiTip thinks there’s 6:

1. Because they’re a follow whore! Meaning they follow anybody in the hopes they will get a follow back.

2. You just might actually have something interesting to say…that’s a big might!

3. You either have Internet fame or you’re some form of celebrity outside of Twitter.com

4. You’re one of the people that Twitter automatically recommends an user adds when they first sign up for Twitter. Basically meaning your one of the “Toms” of Twitter.com

5. You were tagged in the #FollowFridays train. Which in this case you probably have internet fame and just joined Twitter.com or either have something VERY interesting to say or your friends were tired of you stealing all their followers and/or watch your follower count lingering below the double digit count

6. Because you used a Twitter spammer site like twitterfollower.com or the others. If you don’t understand that refer to “Real” reason number 1.

All this means, is that 10,000 people following you on Twitter isn’t the same as 10,000 people on your email database or Facebook group.

UPDATE (20/5)

Jack Dorsey comments on the difference between Facebook & Twitter users here, including this comment from O’Reily

The feature has skyrocketed the popularity of users who get that endorsement — netting an average of 53,000 new followers in an account’s first week since being featured, O’Reilly writes. But it’s not the ideal solution for the user retention problem, Dorsey said.

It’s a somewhat brash and simple campaign I discovered this morning reading twitter in bed. However, it’s far from new, from sometime June last year…?!?!?

To get your $100 voucher login to Facebook, add the VISA business network app (http://apps.facebook.com/visabusiness/signup/ ), and you’re done. You’ll receive an email with a $100 voucher!

With knowing if it’s worked or it’s actual objective, it looks like they’re trying to be a little like linkedin. Now VISA couldn’t possibly be paying $100 per lead so there must be something in it for FB.

Well done to VISA for building a community around something they value.

Thanks to @ourielohayon for tweeting it this morning, and dave at red fly marketing for the old but still relevant post.

Ps I’m posting this entry from my iPhone, excuse me if the links aren’t active, or anything else, it’s realm hard to use wordpress on an iPhone.

Thanks to Krisite Wells at Social Media Club for finding this market research by Rubicon. It’s a very comprehensive study, however, social media‘s influence on purchasing decisions is second only to word-of-mouth/personal advice.

It’s funny when companies says “Social media sounds exciting, and we’ll getting into it once we’ve upgraded our website” as it’s in no way their choice if their product, service or organisation is ‘in social media’.

The following graphs summarise these findings well.

As Krisite comments

that shows online reviews and comments written by users are second only to word of mouth as a purchase influence for most Americans. Some great stats in this document for you all to chew on including items such as websites that Americans value most are (in order), Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Facebook.

This article was originally posted at Digital Ministry.

I’d like everyone to pay 1 minute silence for the late Digsby Minnie, Digital Ministry’s fictional Facebook profile. The killer, Facebook terms and conditions.

This is a follow-up to Chris’s article last August on the limitations of Facebook for advertisers.

So, Facebook is a profit seeking organisation, no news here, it employs over 700 people (news to me too), and I’m sure some of them are pretty smart. Like Free-to-air TV, Facebook’s offering is effectively free for consumers, and they seek to generate revenue through alternative channels, like advertising.

Their challenge

Therefore FB’s product, in effect, is people, the people that use it. How it monetises this is the key challenge, one which many Web 2.0 companies are yet to crack. They do know, as a rule of thumb, that the more people they have spending more time in their product the greater the revenues will be, when they figure it out.

Entertaining the masses

And the 150,000,000 people using FB seem relatively happy, they’re uploading over 800,000,000 photos every month (5.3/person), 13,000,000 (8.6%)  are updating their status atleast once a day and they’ve all gotten over the ‘new layout’. So, they’re happy. (More stats here)

Spammers rejoice

Now businesses wanting to reach those 150M people have jumped on the web 2.0.socialmedia.conversational marketing bandwagon and started building databases, promoting events, creating profiles (like poor Digsby) and they’re getting some great value out of it.

The fine print

This is where FB are extremely smart. In the terms and conditions there are cerain details which most people seem to overlook, like the fact that businesses can’t setup groups, they’re only for having fun and community groups.

So why are they smart? Well they’re letting you break the rules, and watching what happens…  If it gets to a point where you’re getting lots of value, they pull back your features, or delete your profile.

They’re doing market research.

So FB needs to make money and they’re figuring out what will work by letting businesses trial applications for free… Events, groups, pages, polls, photos and analytics to name a few. Once they think you’re getting value out of anything, they see they’ve got a product to sell.

It’s in the best interests for everyone.

1. FB need to make money to survive

2. FB need to keep their user base happy (keep spammers out)

Without either of those being fullfilled FB will no longer exist, everyone losses.

Should they care about businesses?

Well not really unless you’re paying them lots of money. And how much would you be willing to pay to manage your 2000 strong member base on your group? Probably not enough to keep them afloat.

I believe they’re realising all kinds of value that they could be charging for and are weighing up the potential profitability of all of them.

But all the while keeping their massive user base happy.

Advertising features, based on cost and benefit:

1. Polls (now called Lexicon)
   They were free, but they changed how it works and you have to pay. (As the SMH reports)
2. Advertising
   It’s always been a paid service, however, advertising your page will give you added benefits, like telling your audience which of their friends is in the page.
3. Groups
   Businesses aren’t ‘allowed’ to setup groups, if you reach 1,000 users sending emails becomes more difficult. If a single profile users sends too many emails their profile gets deleted.
4. Pages
   Considered an advertising product, although it’s free, FB pages provide comprehensive stats on your user base, and works well with advertising. One major weakness is that it’s difficult to reach out to your members, emails aren’t allowed.
5. Events
   Still a free application anyone seems to be able to create an event. Like all aspects of FB it goes viral through the news feed. The added benefit is you can send emails to people attending the event. Only two limitations I can find are, you can only invite 100 people at a time, and have 300 pending invitations at any point in time. But keep any eye on the terms page, things may change.
6. Photos
   It’s one of the main reasons people come to FB. By tagging photos you’ll get exposure to the people you tag, and their friends.
7. Search Engine Ranking
   Until recently nothing inside FB would appear outside FB, which in the most part is why people use the site. Now it appears groups, pages & profile summaries now appear on Google. If you’re not logged in to FB and visit the link from Google you will see a highly limited version.
8. Application Platform
   A massive part of FB which, with photos and status updates, makes up the balance of the majority of user’s acivity. There are currently 140 applications created daily, it’s potentially a great way to reach your audience, but you’ve gotta be better than the 52,000 applications that exist. It’s currently free to build an application on the FB platform.

If you don’t want to pay Facebook to help you market your offering, creating engaging & entertaining content, it will spread like wildfire if it’s worthwhile for someone to forward on, and everything I’ve discussed above doesn’t matter. The problem for most of us is that we’re not  professional entertainers, we’re good at spending money to reach eyeballs.