Conversational Media

The Value of Social Media

57% of Conversational Marketing early adopters claim social media tools are becoming more valuable, according to a Society for New Communications report. Although 27% of respondents said social media is a core element of their communications strategy, they struggle to find appropriate metrics with which to measure their efforts.
More than half (51%) of organizations surveyed are formally measuring the success of social media initiatives. Standard measurement for other online marketing tactics, such as search engine ranking and website traffic, are also perceived as being useful for evaluating social media influence, according to the report.
In determining who are the most influential bloggers and podcasters, marketers indicate quantitative data: web and blog search engine rankings; frequency of posting; page visits/site meter rankings. Yet they also value less tangible forms of measurement, like quality/relevance of content and name recognition.
According to the report, these are the industries most and least likely to use social media tools:

• Most likely: Media, internet, communication, education, leisure, computer hardware, government, telecom, nonprofit, food and beverage, health services, electronics, retail, financial services, specialty retail and consumer durables
• Least likely: Heavy manufacturing, materials management and construction

Peter Kim listed in his blog the companies using and being used by social media marketing. The list was last updated on October 8, 2008 and contains 239 brands.

Federated Media announced in June the Conversation Measurement Toolbox, which is now live in beta. The toolbox enables marketers to track and analyze their conversational media campaigns, using an open, scalable architecture that collects, aggregates and reports data from internal reporting, third-party tracking providers, and social media application developers.
The CM toolbox will be available exclusively for select FM customers, like Intel and Best Buy, but will open to more brands in early 2009.

Digital Elections

Now through Election Day, MediaPost is hosting a one-time political media discussion board, Red, White & Blog, focused on how media is shaping the race for the White House, and how that in turn may re-shape media. As the media is playing a role that we have not seen before in any elections, this and other initiatives in the US and overseas (such as US Elections 2008, the LiveJournal community of non-US papers) facilitate open discussion of significant political issues.
How important is the internet as a source of information to voters? And, more importantly, what's the real impact of online media on these elections?

It appears as though the parties are taking two very different approaches to online media. Social networks have clearly established themselves as grass-roots campaign platforms in this election. Your friends become a part of your own very personalized debate experience and they have a major impact on its content. The Obama campaign has been particularly active and creative in how it has leveraged its base through Facebook, enrolling active on-the-ground support to drive voter registration, sell yard signs and T-shirts, solicit donations and so on.

The candidates are certainly playing the political media game online and paying attention to their demographics and media coverage based on some of the trends we are seeing in their strategies.
McCain’s campaign is present in the social media space, but not as popular. Using Facebook as an example, some quick analysis this morning shows that Obama has nearly four times as many Facebook supporters as John McCain. Obama has more than 2 million Facebook supporters, an indication that he is playing into his online demographic, as is McCain by not focusing as heavily on social media and search.
Democrats are more likely than Republicans to use both social media sites (46% versus 32%) as well as candidate websites (38% versus 24%) to find information about the issues while Republicans are more likely to find information online via news sites (81% versus 90%).
(Kaylan Malm, MediaPost)

More people are now more involved in more ways in this election than for years.

Anyone can create and distribute anything with the result that the campaigns themselves – much like advertisers – have lost much of the control they always thought they had as they crafted their messages and placed them carefully in context.  What we now determine as our media moments of this campaign are likely to be more varied and individually determined according to the context in which we consume them.
(Mike Bloxham, MediaPost)

Despite the increasing power of the Internet to the campaign is out of discussion, the social media's influence on these issues is still open to debate. In fact, the candidates are still spending most of their money on advertising with traditional media on 30-second commercials.
As Lois Kelly pointed out in an article about Social Media and the 2008 Presidential Campaign, if a goal of the candidates has been to convey a message of change, if a goal has been to engage with young voters, if a goal has been to manage positive and negative feelings about the candidate - and help people connect with candidates’ personal characteristics, the use of social media has been a hugely successful strategy.

As observed by Kaylan Malm on Red, White and Blog:

By far the biggest take away I see from this election when it comes to media is the fact that candidates are paying attention. They are looking at the numbers, bringing together online strategists and pairing them with their offline media strategists, and they are not risking their fate by ignoring emerging media. It will take many elections before we fully understand the impact of online media specifically.
Issues change, candidates change, new media emerges, and just as the candidates are challenged on how to respond in the space, we are each challenged by how to measure their response.

Social media across the globe

In an interview on DM News, Scott Monthy (Ford Motor Company's new digital/multimedia communications manager) talked about what some of the challenges are at a multinational corporation.

US brands looking to leverage social networks internationally know that while their messages need to stay con­sistent regardless of the region, the language, cultural reference points, platform and tactics all need to be tailored for each market.

There are different social media sites used in Brazil than in India or in the UK,” he says. “So we need to be sensitive what the most popular social media sites in these regions are [as well as] the region-specific differences in the ways people consume content and interact with each other online.

The same article also quoted Shiv Singh (VP of media and global strategies at Avenue A/Razorfish):

One of the major reasons why social networks and social media have become a runaway phenom­enon is because it is very localized. It is very much a local activity with local friendships and local relationships.
If it's a developing country, it's more at the elite end of the spectrum, while in India or China, it is sort of an alternative culture where online is seen as an escape. The industry is still very young, so we're still figuring out which ad formats work best in each market.

Singh also warns that a brand's reputation can vary dramatically across regions. Like Bob Pearson (VP of communities and con­versations at Dell) said, you can't simply translate the same conversation and send it around the world.

According to eMarketer's reporting on a recent Synovate study, specific social networking penetration in countries peaked with the Netherlands at 49%, the United Aram Emirates at 46%, and the United States at 40%. Also worthy of note is that the UAE, Indonesia, India and Bulgaria all rank at the top of countries where social networkers register for multiple sites.

Social Media: Numbers and Predictions

According to the latest findings from Universal McCann's "Media in Mind" study, half of U.S. adults use social media (blogging, social networking and text messaging). The numbers of social media users reach 85% in the 18-34 year-old demographic, who rely on one of the three platforms to stay in touch with others.
The same study revealed that 1 out of 10 U.S. adults now publish blogs (up from 5% last year), and 1 out of 5 18-34-year olds publish blogs (up from 10% last year).
Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report  analyzed the trends and themes of blogging and delivered insights into the blogging mind. The report (which provides a global snapshot of bloggers, a segment snapshot and a description of global bloggers by gender) shows that personal bloggers are 79% of total bloggers, professional bloggers are 46% and corporate bloggers are 12%.
As Valeria Maltoni points out

So far, corporate adoption is the lowest of the three figures. That's because many organizations still do not recognize blogs and other forms of social media as useful. Some companies have gone as far as putting in place policies that exclude participation in social media by employees during work hours.

Yet, almost 60% of Americans interact with companies on a social media study, and one in four interact more than once a week. 93% of Americans believe that companies should have a social media presence and 85% believe that in addition to being present, companies should interact with customers via social media. 56% of customers feel both a stronger connection with and better served by companies when they can interact with them in a social media environment.

As for Social Networks, Facebook tops the charts in terms of unique users, at 153 million - as of August 2008; and MySpace is still the leader in terms of registered users, with over 230 million by various estimates (when it comes to reach and engagement, Facebook ranks higher than MySpace).
In this post Sandeep Amar discusses the trends that will boost Social Networks even more. One for all, global markets will contribute to overall growth: 

Social networking markets vary by geography. The mature social networking markets like the U.S., Canada, Western Europe, and China have high levels of Internet penetration. Markets that are still in high-growth mode, like Brazil, India, and Eastern Europe, are at a different point on the product life cycle curve. The mature markets are consuming multi-layered applications and sophisticated social networking engines. The growing markets are still busy on connecting, messaging, meeting people, and adding simplistic widgets. Together, regions in different stages of growth will boost the overall social networking profile.

Social Media and the Wall Street Crisis

In the past few days everyone's attention was drawn to the financial crisis and how it is going to affect individuals and businesses.
Are troubles on Wall Street good or bad for Social Media? Could the use of any kind of social media at Lehman Brothers have acted as a barometer? What elements connect the Federal bailout of international financial services firms and Social Media?
According to MediaPost's Social Media Insider, networking, as in business networking, will be hotter than ever. This, along with the fact that we’ll be spending more time at home, will drive up traffic to social media sites. On the other side, because for most marketers social media is still an experiment, advertisers probably will pull back on social ad spending, unless they can prove its efficacy.

The problem with social media is that, as a marketing medium, it’s about where Internet advertising was in 2000: really cool, part of a hot, new medium, but with metrics that make it hard to sell to the CFO.

CEO blogger Debbie Weil expresses dismay that the 25,000 Lehman Brothers employees learned of the firm's decision to file for bankruptcy allegedly through the New York Times.

Are we to conclude that Lehman has no internal blog with RSS alerts, no Twittering Execs (who could protect their Tweets, of course, so they wouldn't be publicly visible), no interest in using social media tools to stay connected to their employees and treat them with courtesy and respect?

Albert Maruggi believes that some aspects of our corporate culture need to change if social media is to become integrated into America’s regular business environment. He finds the connection between the bailout of financial services firms and social media in some of the elements that he believes will be part of the response to this mess: great transparency and disclosure; institutional incentives that are longer term in nature; accomodations for the interconnected nature of economies.

Last year at the Society of New Communications Research  symposium we had several excellent group conversations about the limitations placed by the finance and legal departments on social media implementation in a corporate environment.
We surely have a long way to go in addressing these cultural obstacles. As the dust settles around Wall Street, the blame assessed and the remedies constructed to prevent a reoccurrence, watch for these elements of longer-term corporate perspective incentives and greater disclosure. These characteristics will help social media advocates change a corporate culture in ways that will allow the organization to see greater benefit from social media.

Social Media events, 2008

June:

June 23
OMMA Social, New York, NY
http://www.mediapost.com/ommasocial/

June 24
Social Media Breakfast 8, Cambridge, MA
http://www.socialmediabreakfast.com/

June 25
Social Media Club LA Chapter Kick-Off Meeting, Los Angeles, CA
http://www.socialmediaclub.org/

June 25-26
Intranet 2.0 Forum, London, UK
http://www.melcrum.com/intranetforum/index.html

July:

July 10-11
Social Media Conference, San Francisco
http://www.socialmediaconference.com/

July 18-20
BlogHer '08, San Francisco, CA
http://www.blogher.com/blogher_conference/conf/2/general/1

July 19-20
SocialMediaCamp London, London, UK
http://barcamp.pbwiki.com/SocialMediaCampLondon

August:

Aug. 14-16
New Media Expo, Las Vegas, NV
http://www.newmediaexpo.com/

September:

Sept. 16-19
Web 2.0 Expo, New York, NY
http://en.oreilly.com/webexny2008/public/content/home

Sept. 20-21
Blog World and New Media Expo, Las Vegas, NV
http://www.blogworldexpo.com/

Sept. 22
The Future of Media Forum, NYC
http://www.mediapost.com/thefuture/

Sept. 29
Social Media Forum, Hamburg, DE
http://www.socialmediaforum.de/

October:

Oct. 21-23
Web 2.0 Expo Europe, Berlin, DE
http://en.oreilly.com/webexberlin2008/public/content/home

November:

Nov. 5-7
Web 2.0 Summit, San Francisco 
http://en.oreilly.com/web2008/public/content/home

December:

Dec. 9-10 Le Web '08, Paris, FR
http://www.lewebparis.com/

Politics 2.0

According to a new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, already in this campaign the level  of activity online is ahead of what was taking place at the end of the 2004 race.
35% of Americans have watched online political videos, and 10% have used social networks such as MySpace and Facebook to get information. That figure jumps to 50% for voters under 30, the poll found.
"In the pre-Internet days, the centerpiece of any campaign was press relations, and candidates depended on mainstream news reporters as gatekeepers. Now, they have a chance to have their story consumed unfiltered by people who are really into the campaign."
The Pew report emphasized that Americans aren't just using the Internet to access news and "unfiltered" campaign materials, but to take part in the political process.
The candidate who has benefited more from this upwelling of online activism is Barack Obama. Among voters, more than one-third (36%) of Democrats have created social network profiles, compared to 28% of Independents and 21% of Republicans.
"In this season, just the 12th year of presidential politics online, there is no disputing the fact that the Internet has moved from the periphery to the center of national politics," states the Pew report.

The Socialization Of Knowledge

User Generated Media, which encompasses all user generated content (UGC) has grown so significantly that it has begun to split into three primary Social frameworks: Social Media, Social Networking and Social Knowledge.
In an article for Online Media Daily, Robert Formentin attempts a review of the differences with a focus on the most unique of the three: Social Knowledge.
"Whereas Social Media is amorphous (the basic "unit" is simply whatever I choose to write) and Social Networking is egocentric (the "unit" is me), Social Knowledge is informative (the "unit" is an article or an answer). It's a framework where anyone - not exclusively experts - can educate other people by sharing what they know."
  Referred to as the "wisdom of crowds", current sites include the encyclopedic (like Wikipedia, written and edited by the masses) and the growing collection of Q&A sites, including Yahoo Answers and WikiAnswers, where everyone benefits from this sharing of knowledge.

How can marketers leverage Social Knowledge?
Within the social knowledge platform, users are actively looking for information regardless of the source.  Thus becoming a source of qualified answers through a Q&A site presents marketers with an opportunity to provide a service to consumers by partnering or answering questions, while being a way to get answers in front of thousands of consumers extend a brand's visibility.

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The Essential Guide to Social Media - Free eBook

The Essential Guide to Social Media is a "quick start" overview of how to listen and participate in social media and new media marketing. An executive outline of Social Media tools and resources needed to listen and participate, guiding PR, Customer Service, Product Development and Marketing.

"Over the last year", says the author Brian Solis "I've assembled the most commonly asked questions and the answers into a free, downloadable ebook as a way of contributing to this active social community that has so graciously shared knowledge, insight, and experience."

Table of contents:

Introduction; Social media tools; Social media is about social science and not technology; What are the social sciences?; Social sciences and social media; Differences between listening and research; Social media voyeurs; The breakup – a comedic view of one-sided relationships; Getting to work… observation and next steps; Social tools for listening; Creating a social map; Immersion; Becoming the customer; Resources - personnel and budgets; Establishing policies and guidelines; Your personal brand; Summary.

Huge Risk Reward For Viral Campaigns

A growing number of marketers, says Business Week, are taking their chances with having their ads rated, and possibly banished, on social networks and community-oriented Web services that have grown popular by inviting users to rate what they see.

EBay's StumbleUpon is one such service that allows users to recommend sites they've visited. It also recommends sites to its users based on the community's rating. Almost a year after its purchase, StumbleUpon's ad revenues have more than quadrupled. Advertisers are allowed to pay for inclusion in StumbleUpon's recommendations, but if the sponsored sites get poor ratings, they get yanked. Other sites also allow users to weigh in on ads: News Corp.'s MySpace lets users to comment on a brand's MySpace page while YouTube lets users rate any video, including commercials.

Why subject your brand to the scrutiny of a social media site? The easy answer: a community endorsement could propel your brand or campaign to the kind of prominence bought by a massively more expensive TV commercial for a fraction of the cost. In other words, good creative is good entertainment is good content. Good content will always find its way to a big audience, so why not accelerate the process by letting users rate your ads?

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