Madison Avenue Eager To Get On Board With Social Media

Recently in The Wall Street Journal: 

As more and more advertising dollars flow into social media, some Madison Avenue firms are seeking to grab a piece of the action. But it will be a tough fight as the space is overrun with companies seeking to own the segment, from start-ups to public-relations firms.

Universal McCann, the media-buying firm owned by Interpublic Group of Cos., is bolstering its social-media offering by launching a practice this week called Rally. The division will help marketers develop campaigns, track online chatter about their brands and measure how those campaigns perform. Headed by Heidi Browning, a former MySpace executive, Rally will house several new social-media hires. MySpace, like The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp.

Publicis Groupe's digital umbrella organization, Vivaki, says it also will open a social-media consulting practice by the end of the year. The new group will pool Publicis' social-media tools and experts and use them to beef up the social-media practices that many of Publicis' agencies have already established. Rishad Tobaccowala, chief strategy officer at Vivaki, says he is willing to use his mergers-and-acquisitions budget to bolster the practice if needed.

The push to form a more formidable presence in social-media advertising is being fueled by the increasing number of marketers who are eager to figure out how they can use sites such as Facebook Inc., which has almost 500 million users, and Twitter, with more than 120 million registered users, as a marketing weapon.

"Social media is now part of all our clients' plans; we can't not be in this space," says Matt Seiler, chief executive of Universal McCann.

Ad spending on social networks world-wide is expected to rise 14% this year to $2.5 billion, according to research firm eMarketer. Although social media represents only a fraction of the $55 billion online-ad market, it is one of the fastest-growing segments.

Some corporations have taken a hands-on role in crafting their efforts: PepsiCo Inc.'s Gatorade, for example, recently created its "Mission Control Center," which is set up like a broadcast-television control room and is charged with monitoring the sports drink around the clock across social-media networks.

But as marketers look to make bigger commitments, they are increasingly seeking experts to navigate the burgeoning space.

Earlier this year, Chrysler Group LLC tapped New Media Strategies, a unit of publisher Meredith Corp., to handle its social-media tasks. In March Kraft Foods Inc. hired 360i, a digital ad agency owned by Japan's largest ad company, Dentsu Inc. The agency has been tasked with monitoring the social-media sites for some of its brands such as Oreo and Jell-O. It also develops campaigns. The agency recently created the "World's Fan of the Week" promotion that appears on Oreo's Facebook page.

Microsoft Corp. is currently searching for a social-media firm to handle duties for its Xbox videogame system, work that is now handled by several of Xbox's agencies, according to people familiar with the matter. Asset-management firm State Street Corp. also has begun looking at firms. A spokeswoman for Microsoft declined to comment.

"We have talked to some PR firms that appear to have established valid expertise over the years, and we are also interested in the new social-media firms that are bubbling up," says Hannah Grove, State Street's head of global marketing.

Creative ad agencies, digital ad firms, social-media boutiques, public-relations outfits and publishing companies are all clambering to get on board.

What You’re Missing By Measuring Social Media ROI Online

BrandSavant/Tom Webster

The short answer is: a lot. If your social media efforts are strictly tied to tweeting out coupon codes, then you have a pretty direct and reliable measure of the efficacy of your efforts: simple conversion. For the rest of us (and, that’s pretty much 99% of us), online measures are not going to capture the full impact and value of social media for your organization. There are lots of smart folks in social media monitoring and sentiment analysis trying to crack the ROI nut, trust me – but mining unstructured data alone will never truly quantify the value of online engagement to offline sales.

For instance, Southwest Airlines (SWA) has a notable presence in social media, particularly with their Twitter account at @southwestair. A lot of people talk about them online, and a lot of the chatter about SWA (particularly in comparison to some of their U.S. competitors) is positive. Buying air travel, however, is not a spur-of-the-moment decision for most people (myself excluded ) There is likely to be considerable distance between the point of influence – being favorably predisposed to SWA through their social media interaction – and the point of purchase. In the intervening time, SWA is also likely to run some kind of sale or promotion, and while it may have been that promotion that actually prompted the purchase, it may also have been Southwest’s online behavior that put them into the purchaser’s consideration set.

See where I am going with this? If the offline sale gets the “credit” for conversion, the efforts expended in social media – however important – get little or none. Parsing out the impact of cross-channel media on purchase behavior is a bit of rocket surgery, but well within the purview of a competent CMO – provided, of course, the right inputs are available. If you are only measuring your social media efforts by mining unstructured online data (monitoring, sentiment analysis, etc), then you may be capturing enough to track reputation, or the health of your brand on the social web, but you aren’t tracking enough to make the connection to purchase behavior, particularly in longer sales cycles.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t be monitoring or mining this data online; it’s an essential input to the process. You do, however, need to augment it with offline inquiries. This may mean commissioning additional online or offline research projects (depending on where your transactions actually happen), or perhaps adding a few social media indicators into the data you already collect, but the bottom line is that this isn’t really a mystery. It’s done every day by marketing departments all over the world, for other channels and media.

Here’s what prompted me to go down this particular rathole today: I am currently working on a project to measure the impact of a campaign that will target visitors to minor league ballparks across America. The campaign, which has a variety of components, hasn’t run yet, but we are measuring today, in the actual ballparks, before a single tweet, billboard or radio ad has begun. By conducting offline pre-engagement measures at those ballparks, we can sample the fans and develop a reliable baseline for our client. Later, after the campaign has run, we’ll conduct the exact same measures, in the exact same way. Our client will know precisely what worked and what didn’t work (online and offline), because we will have the apples-to-apples, before-and-after analysis to determine what components were successful, and what aspects didn’t perform.

Pretty easy stuff, really: measure before, measure during, and measure after. Measure online, but also measure offline. Works for out-of-home media, works for TV and it will work just fine to quantify the value of your Twitter account. Mining online data can give you a snapshot of what people think about your brand or product on the social web, and tracking this data might even give you a sense of how these perceptions change over time. For most brands, however, the actual behavior change occurs elsewhere. It might happen in an Amazon shopping cart, at a car dealer, or even at a local ballpark. When you can sync your online monitoring efforts with offline measures, one calibrates the other – and the true ROI of social media can be measured, understood and appreciated. For our friends in the social media space, that is what we want for you.

Social Networking Use Will Reach All-Time High in 2014

From Social Media Examiner 

 

In eMarketer’s recent report, “Social Network Demographics and Usage“, it was estimated that 127 million people (57.5% of Internet users) will visit a social networking site at least once a month in 2010.

They attributed the steady rise since 2009 as due in part to the ever-increasing popularity of Facebook. Not only is the number of users growing quickly, but also the audience demographics continue to widen from just teens and young adults. In 2010, they estimated that 59.2% of adult Internet users will visit social networks monthly, up from 52.4% in 2009.

“The connections and interactions that social networking makes possible didn’t even exist a few short years ago,” said Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report. “Status updating, commenting and sharing openly are all activities that will not go away.”

The estimates outlined in the report show a steady rise by 2014.  Two-thirds of all Internet users (164.9 million people) will be using social networks on a regular basis.  Two age groups stand out the most:  In 2014, 56.8% of 55- to 64-year-old Internet users will visit social networks regularly (34.3% in 2009).  In addition, 37.9% of seniors 65 and up will be social network users (14.1% in 2009).

These two graphs show the steady rise in social networking use by 2014.

Quotes Of Note

"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

 Albert Einstein

A Small Business & A Smart Marketing Model

This is a great example of how a small business can engage customers. Take a look and see if you can find a way to relate this to your own business!...Bet you can!

Chicago-based custom camera package sales and rental company Zacuto has put forth an interesting marketing model for its business: a slate of original web series programming focused on content creation which highlight the store’s products and resources. According to the “Content” page on the Zacuto website, “Not only do we provide excellent customer service for our customers, but we strive to be a information resource in general. Whether it be current topics of the day we discuss in our FilmFellas webisodes, or testing the newest cameras and providing real world results and experiences through many of our videos.”

Do You Have A Social Media Strategy?

A recent study by  R2integrated took a close look at the differences between the marketers who had a solid social media strategy in place versus those without one.

One major finding was that those who responded that their company had profited or increased revenues using social media were almost twice as likely to have a formal social media strategy.

R2integrated CEO Matt Goddard says, “The data compiled suggests that marketers clearly recognize the need for, and see the potential of, social media, but are still trying to develop models that increase real engagement which then leads to profitability.

The overall study took a close look at the differences between the marketers who had a solid social media strategy in place versus those without one.

Another interesting fact from the study was that the perception of social media differed depending on whether the marketer had a social media strategy in place.  Check out the chart below to see how the two different categories perceived social media overall.

Useful Research Tools Your Competitors Don’t Know About

Optimizing web content for the keywords and phrases that your prospects actually use to search is standard operating procedure for anyone wanting to draw search traffic.

Every SEO expert will start with this kind of research as the foundation. The problem is that competition of these phrases can be fierce and keeping up with changes and trends is tough.

Smart marketers are digging deeper and deeper into the emerging heap of real time search data and finding golden opportunities to grab trending topics, news, and unique ways to create and optimize blog posts, videos and web pages based on the conversations that are hot and happening right now.

Below are five relatively unknown tools that can give you insight and a competitive advantage when it comes to determining the best topics for your new content and how to adjust existing content to rise in the search engines.

1. Topsy – Think of Topsy as a people trend engine for Twitter. Topsy looks at the way people are connected and the conversations they are having with each other all over the web.

2. YouTube Keyword Tool – Most people are familiar with Google’s keyword research and related search tools, but did you know that YouTube (the second largest search engine) has the same tools? By visiting and using these tools you can find some great insights about video topics that are hot and ways to optimize your video content to take advantage of what people are searching for on YouTube.

3. Facebook Posts by Everyone – There aren’t many ways to track what’s going on inside of Facebook (unless you are a large advertiser) but you can use the search function to do searches and get some insight into who is talking about key phrases and how you might join those conversations. Make sure you click on the posts by everyone and not just your friends. You might also consider taking a look at the search tool Kurrently.

4. WordTracker Question Search – WordTracker is the paid keyword research tool of choice for most serious SEO folks, but they also have a number of great free tools. One of my favorites is the question search tool. A growing number of searches are questions posed by folks looking for something. This tool allows you to find search volume for questions related to your key phrases. When trying to determine blog post content, this is a killer place to look. If you can answer the questions people are asking most, you’ll score some big long tail search results.

5. Bing xRank – xRank is focused on capturing what’s hot right now. There are a number of trending monitoring tools, including Google Trends, but Bing’s is a sleeper and returns richer results in my opinion.

Finding ways to mine and monitor the real time conversations and using this data to inform your content is a powerful way to stay on top of what your market is looking for and one step ahead of your competition.