Who is in control of your brand?

One of the most discussed IPOs in history, Facebook will attract an over inflated initial share price (in my and a lot of other people’s opinion).

Here are some interest facts about Facebook when considering it’s value. One VERY misleading stat is where they compare Google and Facebook ad revenue at the bottom, Facebook is bigger than Google’s but it’s not taking into account the very important Paid Search advertising which makes up nearly all of Google’s revenue.

(As a side note, this infographic was put together by accountingdegreeonline.com in what seems to be a very smart SEO link baiting strategy)

Our second to last event for 2011 is an exciting one, and you only have a couple of days notice (apologies)

Over the last two years the world has gone casual gaming mad, with 5 million hours of Angry Birds being played every day and 200M people playing Facebook games for over 40mins each per month. Facebook is set to make a huge $1B from gaming in an industry set to make an incredible $70B in 2015.

This broad adoption of gaming has driven the rise of branded gaming & gamification as a marketing strategy. At this event we dive into the opportunities, examples & challenges for brands entering the gaming world.

We have an esteemed panel that will cover:

• Media opportunities in social gaming on Farmville (Zynga) & Pop Cap
• The process & thinking around game creation & gamification
• How to integrate gaming into marketing strategies

This event is a limited ticket release due to the venue size.

RSVP’s are essential click here http://socialgaming.eventbrite.com/

The Panel

Event location

The Order of Melbourne

2/401 Swanston Street, Melbourne

http://www.theorder.com.au/

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Hashtag for event #SMCMELB The Social Media Club Melbourne is a volunteer not for profit and events are organised by @nikski, @inBloome, @gutta, @simontsmall and @timbeveridge.

So, last week I had a rant that Google+ will not cause the instant demise of FB and one of my points was that Facebook are smart and they’ll respond…Well they have. Already.

Tonight I discovered Facebook ‘lists’ which directly combats the Google+-Circle-mania that’s been going on. But it’s a whole bunch better because FB knows so much about YOU that it can recommend lists (i.e. your work place, or your suburb) and who’s on them. (Seems to have been rolling out over the last 6 days)

This is FB’s second attempt at grouping contacts, their first was back in 2007 and didn’t really get traction.

From what I can see there are a few standard ‘friend lists’

• Close friends
• Family
• Work
• High-school/University/College
• Who live near you

Here are some examples that came up for me…

It’s also integrated into your friend’s profile pages, suggesting which list they fit into if you haven’t assigned them already.

And it’s very helpful when creating lists

Hmmm… Google+ destroy’s Facebook? Anyone?

I also read an article tonight from ReadWriteWeb with “5 Things Google Plus Can Do To Outbox Facebook“ which provides some interesting observations. However, the FIVE things will really only bring G+ up to speed with FB, not outbox them.

Google+ hit 20M users in three weeks smashing all targets and overloading their server capacity.

I hope these points bring some kind of sanity to the current public debate about how G+ is going to solve global warming and dramatic demise of Facebook.

And if I’m being a completely hypocritical ass tell/punch me.

** I’m not saying G+ isn’t great and plays a role, but anybody predicting anything about what’s going to happen is lying.

Have you added Google’s +1 to your website yet? It’s Google response (in my opinion) to the Facebook like, and is currently in beta on search results, although I haven’t personally seen/used that version of it yet. And now you can add it to all the pages on your website.

It’s really easy to do, just like Facebook’s Like button, simply add two lines of code to your HTML. (Here’s the low down on how to do that: http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button/index.html)

What it does for you as a business isn’t 100% clear, yet.

Google does say (in the video below) that it’ll tell your friends if you like something (not sure how) and seems to infer that it’ll be effecting search results too. Either way it’ll be as big or bigger than the the Facebook like, so get on board.

And here’s how Google are explaining it to consumers.

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.

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.

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?