Social media | Just Another 24 Hours

Archive for the ‘Social media’ Category

Hack 100: Brian Solis – The Business of B2B Social Media

May 16th, 2010 by Daniel Young | No Comments | Filed in Blogging, Social media

Number three in the Hack100 series. from the Brian Solis blog again; on the topic of social media in B2B industries:

Social media has a role to play in B2B industries. It can help us understand how buyers behave. We then alter our processes and content accordingly. The information is there you just need to get it. Most B2B companies are spending more on interactive programs and social media. Programs often direct customers back to a corporate website, which are ill-equipped to provide a continuous interactive experience. Facebook and LinkedIn are the preferred networks for business engagement. Social media can deliver benefit to B2B organisations, so go plan and launch your strategy.

Yeah, I agree.

In my experience, B2B marketers tend to see social media as a nice, warm and fuzzy activity. They struggle to join the dots between this and lead generation, which is their primary performance metric. This is one area that we are working on with a third party in Australia and its why Social and CRM are converging.

Here is the original post on the Brian Solis blog.

Social Media is often misconstrued as a medium for business-to-consumer or B2C engagement and discounted as a viable communications network for those companies focused on business-to-business transactions. However, B2B, as in any other field impacted by online activity, is faced with a prime opportunity to not only cultivate communities in social networks and other social channels, but also amplify awareness, increase lead generation, reduce sales cycles, and perhaps most importantly, learn and adapt to market dynamics in real-time.

Ignorance is Bliss Until It’s Not…

Customers and those that influence them, regardless of industry, are migrating to the social Web at varying paces. While social or digital strategies do not replace proven means that are in play today, they do however, require augmentation and shifts in resources commensurate with the distribution of attention, where it’s focused and to what extent.

In my research, programs measured in hindsight are not the only views that offer 20/20 vision. Unobstructed foresight is now attainable and in some cases, predictable, based on our investment in time, energy and creativity in how we analyze online behavior, interaction, and ultimately influence. And, our ability to study and put research to work is only limited by our process for learning and adapting to earn and increase resonance within our target markets.

Perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of listening to focused online interaction, is the ability to breakdown the decision making process and how customers and influencers impact behavior. To say it blatantly, social media makes it possible to identify and segment the specific stages of decision making online and how to in turn, respond in ways that steer interest in your favor. The results of these interactions also lend to the importance of adaptation. As we learn more about the challenges, considerations, and sentiment of our potential stakeholders, we can introduce those insights into future designs, processes, and communication.

If we are not part of the decision making process, we are then absent from the decision.

Opportunity Clicks

To help make the case, Outsell recently published its “Annual Advertising and Marketing Study” and in the report, Outsell states that B2B advertising and marketing spending will increase by only .8% to $129 billion. Interactive spending, on the other hand, will escalate by 9.2% to $51.5 billion this year.

As Social Media becomes pervasive in workflow and influence, Outsell’s study shows that spending is following the trend. To that end, B2B marketers will increase spending in social networks by 43.3%. While it’s not necessarily as alluring as social, company websites are only receiving a boost of 7.5%.

When we study engagement in interactive media, we find that we captivate attention in a very dynamic environment, but we lose them with each click that we either intentionally or unintentionally introduce to lead their experience post engagement. Many times, the click path is aimed right at the company site, and if we were to analyze the design and effectiveness of B2B websites today, we might just find that a large number are stuck in time, representative of an era more aligned with Web 1.0 than Web 2.0. Opportunity clicks, and without defining a rich and rewarding click path as well as an enriching experience, which most likely requires the renovation of the corporate website, all online activity associated with increased social spending, will bear the brunt of defining and capitalizing on attention, within social networks, the moment it’s captured.

As part of the study, Outsell surfaced preferences for business engagement and activity in social networks. When asked to rate the effectiveness of particular networks, more than one-half of respondents claimed that Facebook was either “extremely” or “somewhat” effective. LinkedIn ranked second with 45% surprisingly (and not so surprisingly) ahead of Twitter at 35%, which of course, ranked higher than MySpace at 25%.

As eMarketer noted, when HubSpot ran its B2B North America survey, it found that businesses ranked LinkedIn on top at 45% ahead of Facebook at 33% as most effective in lead generation.

B2B, or any business or organization, must evaluate and implement interactive strategies in order to earn relevance and hopefully resonance in order to compete for the present and the future.

Hack 100: Brian Solis – With social media comes great responsibility

May 9th, 2010 by Daniel Young | No Comments | Filed in Blogging, Social media

Gosh, there’s a lot to read on the World Wide Web.

Trying to keep up with the rapidly changing world of new media is a full-time job. The long posts take even longer to read, and sometimes you wonder why you bothered. It’s increasingly hard for the ‘Social Media Experts’ (so called) and industry thought leaders, to find things that are genuinely new and different to say. That doesn’t always stop them posting though.

So I am launching a new series of posts (which may go nowhere) entitled ‘Hack 100′. I will condense recent and landmark blog posts down to less than 100 words. I will identify the point that I feel lays at the core of the posting by underlining it. I think this will usefully provide you, dear reader, with the gist of what is being said and give you the option to click through to the full-length post if you so wish. Hopefully, you’ll find the ‘Hack 100′ version sufficient and will be inspired or in agreement with my brief thought or question posed at the end of the hacked post.

The inaugural ‘Hack 100′ post looks at a recent contribution from the wordy Brian Solis. I regularly read the Brian Solis blog and find it useful from time to time. I have also spent time, which I’ll never get back, sorting through the flowery Brian Solis language to get the nub of the matter, sometimes without success (maybe it’s me).

So here goes (fanfare please)…

Hack 100’s intepretation of… Brian Solis: With Social Media Comes Great Responsibility

Social media is a revolution for business. With it, brands become media and form communities. External forces pique interest in social media. Like email, it has no single owner. Ultimately, social media should permeate core business, with each department maintaining a social presence. Looking ahead, companies will use social media in new ways. This is necessary as sound relationships are earned, not acquired. Aligning departments and conversations is good planning process. Social media can improve culture and competitiveness, when supported. Social media challenges us but those that rise to the challenge will benefit.

Thanks to Brian Solis for this contribution (original post).

I agree with the sentiment of the post but I don’t feel that its saying anything new. The emphasis on the impact of social media is over stated but I agree with the general point that social media becomes more powerful when the conversation is hosted by the relevant department or expert. I also agree that a flat comms structure within a business represents mature social media strategy but its not as easy and evolutionary as Mr. Solis might have us believe.

So what do you think, dear reader?

Tags: blog, evolution, hack100, socialmedia, solis

A new system for the protection of creative content necessary for a diverse and functioning democracy

April 20th, 2010 by Daniel Young | No Comments | Filed in Media, Social media, Technology

I attended a UTSpeaks event this evening featuring Professor Michael Fraser, who addressed the following topic:

Are we ready for a new age in how creative content is sold and stored online?

Michael Fraser laid out his vision of a transformed copyright system arguing that the creators of original content ‘deserved to be rewarded’. Fraser said that must build an information economy and knowledge society in Australia, as a sustainable economic engine for the country that would supercede Australia’s natural resources. Copyright represents a legal infrastructure for creative content, he said.

Fraser laid out four necesary conditions for viable creative industries.

Access (which he said was coming in the form of the NBN)
Content (Australian is proven as a market for creative content in his view)
Copyright (effective law and protection)
Business models

The latter two were the areas that needed to be addressed. Passive and unresponsive business models combined with ineffective copyright laws were undermining the necessary conditions for an information economy. He said that content owners are not providing content in the form that customers want. In other words, its far too difficult to identify the copyright owners for content today and too costly (dollars and time) to negotiate the right to use their content. A large swathe of the population ilegally access content, as a result. Illegal downloads and piracy cost creative industries 10% of their revenue per annum.

As an aside, I thought it a little ironic that Fraser didn’t credit or source any of the data points that he included in his slides – and there were many.

Fraser than ran through some of the existing copyright protection systems, and the shortcomings of each:

Creative Commons: ‘makes a useful contribution at the fringe for free content’
Revenue from ads connected to content: ‘only supports the content that attracts enough advertising dollars and there cannot sustain free expression’
Patronage: ‘again, cannot support free expression, which is essential for a functioning democracy’
Content producer databases: ’siloed, not meeting consumer expectations’
Online content shops: ‘do not meet demands for re-use’
Google books: ‘adopted an opt out model for publishers which it combines with a revenue share model but there is an inherent data in corporations owning this content’
Social Networking Sites: ‘advertiser pays revenue to the site not the creators’. Fraser was generally dismissive of the amatuer approach.
He also mentioned the not very mainstream academic journals and copyright collecting services

A new model is required that provided instant access to content together with the rights in one transaction.

Fraser then took us back a few hundred years to the industrial revolution to provide some thoughts about the governing principles of a new copyright system.

He cited the following milestones from history and their impact on the respective industries and consumer adoption.

The introduction of property rights prior to the Western Europe’s industrial revolution. A similar system if applied to creative content would secure intellectual property and “make a market for creativity”.
A national infrastructure is a pre-requisite for effective trade and competition similarly our creative industries require a national infrastructure for content.
The introduction of standards in the rail, power generation and shipping industries, which each had the effective of reducing cost and improving efficiencies in their respective industries.

Fraser’s new copyright system – his proposed National Content Network – would apply these principles to creative content. It would provide an active registry (providing metadata) and actionable information for every piece of creative content that was produced or made available in this jurisdiction. Individuals that wanted to re-use a piece of content would refer to the registry where they could access the following information:

Details of the copyright restrictions that apply to that piece of content
The ability to procure and pay for access and re-use rights
Contact details for the content creator

The NCN would interoperate across all types of content and would be administered by the Government. The system would reduce illegal copying, he claimed – allowing a sustainable funding model for culture and knowledge products. Equal access would be applied to paid and copyright free content. Fraser said that the system would enhance competition between creators.

I agree with Fraser’s assertion that individual content producers deserve to be rewarded.

I think there is a danger that a failure to reward content producers may result in a narrowing of our creative and cultural horizons. Having said that, the Internet provides opportunities for creators to reap the reward via other means, such as the accumulation of influence but then is this a sustainable model for large numbers of people over the long term, I don’t know.

Fraser didn’t use the word ’sharing’ once during this presentation, which I found interesting. The experience of Social Networks shows that individuals are willing to share ideas, content and creativity in an communal or altrustic frame of mind. I think Fraser would challenge the quality of this content and maybe he would have a point.

Quality content can be niche content, in fact perhaps you could argue that the greater the niche the higher the quality.

Which of the existing content infrastructures and business models will support niche or specialist content in the future? That is a real challenge.

Will brands stand for more or less in the future?

April 20th, 2010 by Daniel Young | No Comments | Filed in Media, Public Relations, Social media

Thought leadership is something of a holy grail for the PR industry.

It is an interesting area for PR consultants to get involved with as it provides an issues rich environment for them to really add value through research, insight and execution.

The best PR practitioners recognise that thought leadership presents an opportunity for their client to add value to its customers and differentiate itself. In practice, PRs often struggle to find clients that can enunciate and commit to a thought leadership position.

Organisations encounter a number of issues when it comes to executing against a thought leadership strategy:

They believe that thought leadership exposes them to risk – what if people disagree?
They’re happy to fly below the radar – no-one else is taking a position so why should we?
They don’t have the industry insights required to take a credible position on a topic
They don’t have the individual talent to deliver the content or are unwilling to invest in it
They’re focus is lead generation and sales – they don’t see the reputational value in thought leadership
They’re not prepared to invest in the necessary research or partnerships required to establish a thought leadership strategy
They unable to take an industry view - their industry perspectives are insular, biased and self serving
Marketing investments are focused on promotional outcomes, rather than ongoing corporate objectives

Occasionally, you see organisations jumping onto an issue because it has become a business imperative, a good example of this is the Environment where many organisations are keen to be seen to be doing the right thing. Don’t get me wrong, I believe that most companies are genuine in their intention to reduce their impact on the environment but the adoption of these goals was largely responsive in nature – it become a business imperative. It was not a proactive altruistic motivation that could be described as genuine thought leadership.

The challenges in this area can be mighty frustrating for the PR agency and in-house team that recognise the opportunities presented by thought leadership to:

Build positive brand perceptions
Proactively lead the media agenda and add value to media relationships
Initiate discussion and generate publicity
Provide PR campaigns with a consistent theme or message
Raise the profile of senior executives
Add value to their industry and been seen as a positive contributor
Motivate and engage employees and partner organisations
Help drive a shared agenda with stakeholders
Engage new audience groups; Government; Industry Associations; Industry Leaders

I think the importance of thought leadership will grow in the future as brands become more attuned to their customers and marketplace. Brands will need an agenda in order to ensure the sustainability of their online communities. They’ll need to have opinions and insights in order to drive activity online and empower customer advocates. They’ll also need to respond to increasing customer expectations about the role that their brand of choice plays in the community.

As a result, we’ll see brands re-assessing their thought leadership strategy and working to identify the relevant opinion platforms for their business. I think we’ll begin to see support from brands for thought leadership topics that genuinely reflect the interests of their community and, as a result, more credible, personalised, actionable and specific.

What do you think? Does this also apply to individuals online? Will it become more important to take a personal position on an issue or are we more likely to exist in communities that reinforce our own world view?

Tags: insight, leadership, Media, opinion, PR, socialmedia, thought

unfriend and unfollow to improve your social media experience; don’t live your life on shuffle

March 18th, 2010 by Daniel Young | 1 Comment | Filed in Social media

I have recently improved my Twitter experience.

How?

I unfollowed all of the people that were filling my timeline with what I consider to be inane, self obsessed, nonsensical and worthless tweets.

Don’t get me wrong, my tweets are occasioanlly inane and pointless but some people seem to spend a large part of their day sharing the most intricate and mindless details of their lives.

The example that sticks in my mind is: ‘I spilt a lot of water onto the floor during my bath’.

For a while I thought I should follow these people – some of them supposedly serious people in my industry. I didn’t want to miss out on anything but after 12 months or more of perseverence (and annoyance) I realised that I wasn’t going to miss anything and unfollowed.

Twitter is, as a result, far less annoying and vastly more useful, more enjoyable.

It’s like the Shuffle function on the iPOD, a run of great random songs on Shuffle is a great thing. But there’s always a chance that that run can be rudely interrupted by a random song or the artist that you’ve outgrown or overheard, or your simply bored of. Or something that you downloaded for a ‘laugh’ once (example: Mel and Kim’s Respectable).

The next step for me is to edit my iTune library by de-selecting the songs that could barge in and spoil a great sequence of songs on Shuffle.

People can do what they want with Twitter and its not for me to judge what’s inane and what isn’t – its all relative. But if you’re finding that you’re on the receiving end of an excessive amount of noise via your social media channels and not enough signal then maybe think about the steps you can take to improve your chances.

Tags: content, facebook, noise, sharing, signal, socialmedia, twitter

Deciduous marketing is a big barrier to authentic brand conversations

March 14th, 2010 by Daniel Young | 1 Comment | Filed in Advertising, Public Relations, Social media

Marketing Communications is analogous to a conversation.

It is particularly true today. The Internet has empowered consumers to challenge, advocate and interact with the companies of their choosing via readily available and inexpensive forms of mass media.

Marketing conversations were largely one dimensionl pre-Internet. Regular and hopefully relevant messages were filtered via various marketing channels and disciplines to the end customer. They were generally self serving:

Look at this new product!
Take up this offer on this new package!
Here’s what we think about this. Aren’t we smart/committed/interesting?

The conversations were intermittent and short lived – more often than not the communication existed to drive sales, acquire new customers or build a brand image. Budgets and marketing finance decisions were similarly focused on near-term outcomes. Business priorities were identified at the beginning of the year and then in quarterly planning cycles. Dollars, Pounds, Rupee, Dinar etc. would be allocated.

Most companies still manage their marketing programs in this way today.

At the end of the fiscal year, if the marketing department has done its ‘job’ properly, all of the dollars are spent. Like a deciduous tree all of the leaves have fallen off and the tree remains bare for a period of time .

The conversation goes on hold.

This isn’t a problem if the company is continually talking about itself but if the company has been successful in initiating a conversation, then consumer’s will notice – unhappily.

Many well established marketing practices are no longer relevant or useful in the context of social media, including traditional approaches to budgeting. Social media demands that brands commit fully to the online conversation – you can’t pull in and pull out when it suits you.

One way for companies to tackle this issue is to embed social media engagement (and related costs) inside standard business process.

Ford has a plan to have 2% of its workforce telling the story of their lives at Ford via social media. This combined with a dedicated resource for social media strategy and measurement allows the company to engage in authentic conversation over the l0ng term.

Failure to identify the necessary resources for social media engagement is one of the main reasons why projects fail to get off the ground, in my experience. Lack of resources is one issue but cultural and procedural structural barriers to the long term view are another.

Senior marketing professionals need to adjust their mindset, and that of their organisation, to the new dynamics of social media and continuous conversation.

Tags: Advertising, branding, Budget, conversation, finance, marketing, promotions, socialmedia

Facebook Must Change Search Engine in Order to Rival Google in Search and Discovery

February 20th, 2010 by Daniel Young | 4 Comments | Filed in Search, Social media

Recent data from Compete and comScore shows that Facebook has passed Google to become the top source of traffic to major portals. The announcement and the resulting discussion prompted this post by Facebook, which includes the following section:

According to comScore, Google still has nearly two-thirds of the U.S. search market, but dropped a fraction of a percent from 65.7% in Dec 2009 to 65.4% in Jan 2010 [source: Information Week]. While Google is still the leader in the search space, and Facebook only accounted for just under 400 million searches in January, that is a gain of 13% over December. If this trend continues, Google may have ample reason to fear Facebook.

The Compete data shows that Facebook is the second most popular site in the US with 134m unique visiter in January 2010, ahead of Yahoo! and just behind Google.

Facebook is in the ascendancy but the company must make changes to its own Search engine if it is to become a genuine rival to Google, the vastly dominant player in the space.

Facebook, like other social networks, represents opportunity for brands because of the simple fact that this is where a lot of the action is taking place online, as demonstrated by slews and rising traffic. Switched on brands are already tapping into the Facebook community. But Facebook Search serves marketers poorly today as a place of discovery. Check out my search results for ‘mobile handset’:

Not particularly useful. Three users groups with 210 members between them.

No sign of the brand sponsored pages where Facebook Users can learn about new products, participate in competitions and promotions, chat with other users and potential customers, communicate directly with the company and link through to relevant pages on the Web.

The Sony Ericsson WorldPage has more than 445,ooo Fans (Sony Ericsson is a client) but the way that Facebook Search works prevents this page, which is clearly relevant to the search term, from appearing.

This is an issue for Facebook.

We see the same issue if we run a search for ’sneakers’:

The retailer Sole Provider Sneakers comes out on top here, simply by virtue of having the search term embedded in its company name (also the name of the Page). Yet Sole Provider Sneakers sells a lot of Nike trainers and a search for ‘Nike’ would not have produced their Page in its results.

Facebook has to play a delicate balancing act here. Ultimately, user activity, personal profiles, user content, sharing and discussion are the currency of social networks such as Facebook. The company needs to avoid giving users the impression that they are being marketed to via the network, failure to do this could well become its undoing.

One way around this could be for Facebook to adopt a model similar to Google’s Universal Search, which would allow users to chose and filter the types of results that are presented to them via Facebook Search. This could be built into the privacy settings that Facebook has been so keen to promote recently.

Interestingly, Google listed Facebook as a formal competitor for the first time in a recent 10K filing, as reported by SearchEngineLand:

Our business is characterized by rapid change and converging, as well as new and disruptive, technologies. We face formidable competition in every aspect of our business, particularly from companies that seek to connect people with information on the web and provide them with relevant advertising. We face competition from:

Traditional search engines, such as Yahoo! Inc. and Microsoft Corporation’s Bing.
Vertical search engines and e-commerce sites, such as WebMD (for health queries), Kayak (travel queries), Monster.com (job queries), and Amazon.com and eBay (commerce). We compete with these sites because they, like us, are trying to attract users to their web sites to search for product or service information, and some users will navigate directly to those sites rather than go through Google.
Social networks, such as Facebook, Yelp, or Twitter. Some users are relying more on social networks for product or service referrals, rather than seeking information through traditional search engines. (my emphasis)

Some subtle and simple changes to Facebook Search would accelerate the trend towards Facebook and other social networks as a primary channel for Search.

The challenge for marketers will (continue to be) to resist the tempation to sell via social networks and to engage with social networking users in a way that adds value, build relationships, earns trust and facilitates creativity and connectivity. Facebook will have to manage the sensitivities of its users delicately but if managed well Facebook could become a natural home to Search, delivering value to users and marketers alike.

Tags: Discovery, facebook, Fans, Google, keywords, Pages, Search, Yahoo!

Archive for the ‘Social media’ Category

Your Blogger

Topics