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.

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?

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.

The last time I checked

About 3 months ago I did some work researching the viability of developing a mobile website for one of our key clients. We reviewed the potential traffic we could drive through search plus the total traffic already coming from mobiles.

From the research I found that about 25% of Australians had access to 3G (this doesn’t mean they use it) and this % had grown rapidly since the introduction of the iPhone. However, based on potential mobile paid search & our current mobile visitors we were able comfortably get 1-2% of our total website traffic to be mobile, pretty darn low. So we, and the client, decided to hold of on a mobile site and focus on other digital activities.

A profound Sensis research study

It’s 3 months later and Sensis have released a research report (pdf) by Sweeny Research that indicates that 26% of Australians have accessed the internet from their mobile – a pretty astounding number.So therefore all advertisers should start spending more on mobile…

So I dug a little further

So I jumped back into their 2008 report to see what the change was year-on-year and I was surprised to see that it wasn’t there… weird. At this point I got a bit skeptical and something else popped out at me – Yellow Pages (Sensis) just released an iPhone app of their directory – what a perfect time to release research that tells their advertisers to spend on mobile.

So maybe I’m skeptical, maybe it is finally the year of the mobile (which the mobile industry has been claiming for 3 yers now) or maybe not. I’m just questioning the background, approach and validity of the research. Maybe they should’ve asked “How many times have you accessed the internet via your mobile in the last 12 months?”.

My personal recent experience

In a recent campaign for another client, the media agency negotiated some bonus media with a big publisher, some mobile media. The publisher also offered to build a mobile site for the product, as there was no cost or risk to our client we couldn’t resist.

So we received a bunch of banner impressions and a really nice mobile site and we measured the results. This client has an ROI calculator that helps compare the performance of different media online, it calculates what the value of the media was to the business. So, if we calculated the value of the mobile site and the media provided by the publisher it would’ve been worth about $50 – not awesome at all.

What does this all mean?

Now I love and advocate mobile apps and advertising, particularly considering it’s potential growth with iPhone, Google Android and many others entering the market, and telcos rapidly reducing the cost of data. However, will it currently deliver a strong ROI? Is this the best place to spend $50k? That all depends on your marketing objectives, but for some of my clients I’d say no

In a recent report prepared by Sysomos and it indicates that we’re beating massive countries like Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, France, Indian & South Africa in terms of new user sign ups on Twitter.

Full report here: http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/appendix

JWT regularly release a great piece of research called the Anxiety Index. It’s a global study that creates an index for each country in a range of particular measures. The top level measure is how nervous/anxious each country is, and Australia is feeling good – at the moment.

The key takeaways for me are

1. Austrlaian’s are currently at ease (relatively)

This could be a result of not actually having a direct noticable impact yet, i.e. losing jobs, however, we know many large companies are continuing to cut back staff. So maybe we’re happier because the impact of the GFC took longer to hit our shores?

2. We’re happier in all areas, compared to the rest of the world

Unsurprisingly the economy and cost of living are our biggest concerns, but surprisingly we’re as anxious about Military Hositlities as the rest of the world.

3. Australia’s aren’t confident about the short term

With the exception of the property market we’re very anxious about the short term (next 6 months), especially unemployment, company failures & food prices – all pretty important measures.

What does this mean to marketers? What does this means to everyone else?

We’re on our way to financial recovery, but leaders need to keep in mind that the anxiety around the short term could undermine our stability as an economy. Marketers need to continue to ensure they’ll be employing people, reducing cost of their products and aren’t going out doing something random, lavish and risky.

What do you think about the research? What does it mean to marketers?

Full research report here: http://from.simontsmall.com/index.php/2009/08/05/research-australians-the-recession-the-environment/

It’s sometimes hard to find valuable, insightful and new information online. If you’re into marketing like I am, these blogs should all be regular reads. Whether they’re an industry voice, thought provoking or factual, each of these blogs/news sites will help you stay at the forefront of marketing. (Some are organisations and some are individuals)

These are my top 14 marketing thought leaders:

• A Digital Perspective – Jye Smith on social media, marketing and the internet
• a shel of my former self – Blogging at the intersection of communications & technology
• acidlabs – Conversation. Collaboration. Community.
• Ad Age – CMO Strategy
• Chris Brogan – Solving business strategy challenges with social media
• Laurel Papworth – The business of being social
• Marketing Charts – Charts and data for marketers in web and Excel format
• Marketing Magazine
• Mumbrella – Everything under Australian media & marketing umbrella
• Servant of Chaos – A blog by Gavin Heaton
• Seth’s Blog – A blog by Seth Godin
• The Steve Rubel Lifestream – Daily links, insights, photos, videos and more on emerging technology.
• Web strategy by Jeremiah Owyang – Social Media, Web Marketing
• Love Digital – A weekly interview podcast – digital marketing
• Come Together – Thoughts on community and conversation

Is there something you read regularly that you would add to this list? Or do you disagree with one of my recommendations? Post a comment.