Social Media is no more a buzzword today! It has become an integral part of our everyday lives today. Given the rate at which Social Media is spreading today, marketers can no more ignore this revolutionary medium. Whether you are interested in hiring new talent, improving your customer service, generating new leads & sales or building an Online Community, Social Media Marketing can be your answer!
Managing the flow of information of a brand, a product or a service on a Social Media Channel is the biggest challenge that is coming across organizations today. Customers’ decision making, nowadays, is largely impacted by Social Media, even if it is just Noodles that they eat or a laptop they use. Due to which, it has become need of hour for all the marketers to follow what, where and how they are being talked about.
Social media is all about your engagement and participation with your customers.
Those who are serious about leveraging Social Media to transform their businesses can contact Doug @ Mo Marketing and Promotions: doug.mochrie@mointl.com
Thank you
Thursday, May 27, 2010
Thursday, May 20, 2010
You're Using Social Media. But Just Who Is Overseeing It All?
With Marketing, Sales, R&D and Customer-Service Reps Involved, the Task Is to Get Everyone Working Together
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Social media is undoubtedly shaking up the digital landscape, but it looks to be shaking up the corporate suite as well.
As brands try to foster loyalty with Facebook pages, show innovation on blogs and address customer concerns on Twitter, social media is threading its way through the marketing and sales, research and development, customer-service departments and more. All of which gives rise to the question: Just whose job is it anyway?
SCOTT MONTY: Global-digital and multimedia-communications director is involved with Ford's marketing department.
Answer: everyone's -- so it's important to get all those disciplines working together.
Take Ford Motor Co. for example. The automaker saw $2.7 billion in profit for 2009 -- a huge turnaround from a record loss the prior year -- and it smartly used social media to help disassociate it from the bankruptcies and bailouts of its rivals. But that required breaking with custom at Ford and pooling the resources of marketing and corporate communications.
"We've been living this for the past year," said Scott Kelly, Ford's digital-marketing manager. "Historically, we had very little interaction with public affairs, but ever since the congressional bailout for the other two automakers, we needed to combine marketing and public-affairs forces to get the right message out around Ford so we didn't get dragged down by GM and Chrysler."
Gettin in early
In late 2008, Ford brought together the teams from what was then called public affairs (now corporate communications) and marketing to plan all efforts simultaneously. That means Ford's Global Digital and Multimedia Communications Director Scott Monty is now involved in marketing's launch-planning meetings. "In the past, public affairs were brought in at the end," said Alex Hultgren, Ford's digital-media manager. Now, Mr. Kelly said, "I talk to people in public affairs daily, where it used to be monthly."
Ford's social-media efforts include FordStory.com, which went from a political advocacy site when the automaker appeared before Congress in 2008 to a social-media hub today. The automaker also launched the Fiesta Movement last spring, in which Ford lent out 100 cars, along with gas and insurance, to YouTube bloggers for free. The Fiesta videos attracted 3.5 million views and won 38% awareness among 16- to 24-year-olds last fall. As of today, Ford reports that the campaign has computed to 6,000 reserved cars -- months before Fiesta goes on sale this summer.
Sometimes it's also about dragging non-marketing types into social-media meetings. "Our client contact has stayed the same, but now new people are in the room, like from R&D or merchandising," said Ketchum's Jonathan Bellinger, VP-social-media strategy. "Whether or not they've been volunteered, we've been asking for those people because it's not necessarily the marketing people that audiences are most interested in."
Southwest Airlines, for example, has tapped some flight-crew members to blog for Nuts for Southwest, which aggregates photos and videos. The blog also addresses news stories, such as the one that erupted recently when film director Kevin Smith tweeted that the airline kicked him off a plane because he was too fat. The blog is primarily a brand and PR tool, but customer service is also brought in and given a social-media bullhorn.
"If your goal is customer care, you need people inside [the company] that can take action and do something about it," said Sarah Hofstetter, senior VP-emerging media and client strategy for 360i.
Best Buy has made this model famous with Twelpforce, its customer service handle on Twitter. The retailer's employees sign up to field customer tweets and respond to service questions or requests for recommendations. Any employee can sign up, but all are subject to company-wide protocol and guidelines. Best Buy did not respond to multiple calls and e-mails for comment.
That's not to say marketers can navigate social media without agencies. Digital and PR agencies are vying for ever-increasing social-media budgets.
Agencies needed?
"In 2010, we start to see funded conversations," said 360i's Ms. Hofstetter. "Instead of funding a particular campaign, they are funding an investment in an ongoing conversation with consumers. That's a big shift." And that change isn't expected to slow anytime soon. Forrester Research forecasts social-media budgets will on average grow 34% yearly from 2009 to 2014 -- faster than other kinds of digital advertising.
Ford's Mr. Kelly doesn't see social media as something for PR and digital shops to fight over, since both types of agencies bring different skills to the table. "We consider it one budget," he said. "It doesn't matter if it's a marketing or public-affairs budget."
Ford has been less susceptible to the tug of war between digital and PR agencies for social media because its agency, Team Detroit, houses multiple shops under one roof. The WPP collective, dedicated entirely to the automaker, houses agencies spanning media, PR and creative. For Ford, creative and digital are responsible for building content for social-media channels (like apps for Facebook), while PR keeps up social page day-to-day management of things like posting events and responding to customers.
Ford has also looked to small social-media boutiques like New York-based Undercurrent for programs such as those for Fiesta. Social-only shops are the newest breed in the agency landscape and are proliferating rapidly. In January, Austin-based Powered acquired Joseph Jaffe's agency Crayon for strategy; events agency Drillteam; and Facebook-focused StepChange to create a full-service social-media agency with a national footprint.
"We're always going to start with our agency of record," said Ford's Mr. Hultgren. "We may look at a boutique agency to manage a piece of social media. Boutique agencies can be singularly focused on something. But if we want a pure focus on some social-media task, we want a boutique to focus on a pilot. Once we've proven out that model, we'll hand off to Team Detroit to integrate."
But while it's clear that social media has helped change perception of Ford, the biggest test is whether it sells cars. "Social media can fall anywhere in the range of the selling cycle," said Mr. Monty. "In our case it's on the broader end: awareness and perception. It's more of a branding tool than a sales tool. But on the local level, where the dealer gets involved, that's where it get can work for lead generation and CRM."
Three marketing models for social media
A look at how Ford, Kodak and Best Buy run their programs
CENTRALIZED
The social-media department functions at a senior level, reporting to the CMO or CEO, and is responsible for all social-media activation for the brand. "We work with a lot of clients that have appointed one person," said Ketchum's Jonathan Bellinger, VP-social media strategy. "It's nice to have a celebrity; it puts a human face on a company. You can achieve that by having one person being the public face both externally and internally, but it can get distracting because it becomes about those people."
Dangers: Having a social-media head means departments outside that person's scope might not benefit from efforts in the medium. For example, is customer care being considered if social media is centralized under marketing? This model doesn't necessarily take into consideration social media's influence on the entire business.
Essential roles: The social-media lead.
Marketers with this model: Ford. Scott Monty, global digital and multimedia communications director, joined the automaker from social boutique Crayon and has been a visible proponent of social media for the brand. Mr. Monty operates within the corporate-communications department, which reports directly into Ford's CEO.
DISTRIBUTED
In this setup, no one person technically owns social media. Instead, all employees from customer care, marketing, media and beyond are represent the brand and work social media into their roles. This is often implemented through training and encouraging social media use across an organization.
Dangers: If there's no standardized practice, social media can veer a brand off-message. For example, Jet Blue Senior VP-Marketing Marty St. George brought Twitter into the agency-of-record pitch process -- tweeting the news of the search to see how many agencies were digitally savvy enough to find it there. "That experiment is over -- and not to be repeated!" he tweeted after his tweet blew up into media coverage. Without a leader, learning about new social technology or sites then also falls on individuals.
Essential roles: Senior leadership that champions social media; training and internal communications around social-media policy is necessary.
Marketers with this model: Best Buy is decentralized because everyone in the organization has a role in social media, as Twelpforce demonstrates. Any employee can sign up to respond to customer queries on Twitter. The retailer does, however, have protocol and guidelines in place for tweets, and it has social-media experts in marketing. Last summer, CMO Barry Judge crowd-sourced a job description for a senior manager-emerging media marketing. Brands like IBM, Intel and Kodak have published social-media policies.
COMBINATION
This involves centralized best practices and decentralized execution. A brand maintains a committee of social-media stakeholders to work up its position and voice, which it disseminates to the company at large. From there, each discipline is left to incorporate social media into its individual executions.
Dangers: How do you hold departments accountable to a research council? Also, when a social-media program goes sour, who ends up as the fall guy, those who built the social-media strategy, or those who implemented it?
Essential roles: A team of social-media experts plucked from various departments.
Marketers with this model: Ketchum's Mr. Bellinger cites his client Kodak as a company that's found a good balance. It employs Jenny Cisney, chief blogger, in marketing, but she's tasked with steering the company's social-media presence rather than own it entirely. Kodak has published online its social-media policy for employees within a guidebook for marketers looking for lessons in social media. Starting in 2005, IBM used a wiki to crowd-source guidelines for a company blog and has asked employees to collective revise the rules for new forms of social media. Those efforts ultimately feed back to IBM's social-media head Adam Christensen, who most recently spearheaded the company's Smarter Planet blog.
by Kunur Patel
Published: February 22, 2010
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Social media is undoubtedly shaking up the digital landscape, but it looks to be shaking up the corporate suite as well.
As brands try to foster loyalty with Facebook pages, show innovation on blogs and address customer concerns on Twitter, social media is threading its way through the marketing and sales, research and development, customer-service departments and more. All of which gives rise to the question: Just whose job is it anyway?
SCOTT MONTY: Global-digital and multimedia-communications director is involved with Ford's marketing department.
Answer: everyone's -- so it's important to get all those disciplines working together.
Take Ford Motor Co. for example. The automaker saw $2.7 billion in profit for 2009 -- a huge turnaround from a record loss the prior year -- and it smartly used social media to help disassociate it from the bankruptcies and bailouts of its rivals. But that required breaking with custom at Ford and pooling the resources of marketing and corporate communications.
"We've been living this for the past year," said Scott Kelly, Ford's digital-marketing manager. "Historically, we had very little interaction with public affairs, but ever since the congressional bailout for the other two automakers, we needed to combine marketing and public-affairs forces to get the right message out around Ford so we didn't get dragged down by GM and Chrysler."
Gettin in early
In late 2008, Ford brought together the teams from what was then called public affairs (now corporate communications) and marketing to plan all efforts simultaneously. That means Ford's Global Digital and Multimedia Communications Director Scott Monty is now involved in marketing's launch-planning meetings. "In the past, public affairs were brought in at the end," said Alex Hultgren, Ford's digital-media manager. Now, Mr. Kelly said, "I talk to people in public affairs daily, where it used to be monthly."
Ford's social-media efforts include FordStory.com, which went from a political advocacy site when the automaker appeared before Congress in 2008 to a social-media hub today. The automaker also launched the Fiesta Movement last spring, in which Ford lent out 100 cars, along with gas and insurance, to YouTube bloggers for free. The Fiesta videos attracted 3.5 million views and won 38% awareness among 16- to 24-year-olds last fall. As of today, Ford reports that the campaign has computed to 6,000 reserved cars -- months before Fiesta goes on sale this summer.
Sometimes it's also about dragging non-marketing types into social-media meetings. "Our client contact has stayed the same, but now new people are in the room, like from R&D or merchandising," said Ketchum's Jonathan Bellinger, VP-social-media strategy. "Whether or not they've been volunteered, we've been asking for those people because it's not necessarily the marketing people that audiences are most interested in."
Southwest Airlines, for example, has tapped some flight-crew members to blog for Nuts for Southwest, which aggregates photos and videos. The blog also addresses news stories, such as the one that erupted recently when film director Kevin Smith tweeted that the airline kicked him off a plane because he was too fat. The blog is primarily a brand and PR tool, but customer service is also brought in and given a social-media bullhorn.
"If your goal is customer care, you need people inside [the company] that can take action and do something about it," said Sarah Hofstetter, senior VP-emerging media and client strategy for 360i.
Best Buy has made this model famous with Twelpforce, its customer service handle on Twitter. The retailer's employees sign up to field customer tweets and respond to service questions or requests for recommendations. Any employee can sign up, but all are subject to company-wide protocol and guidelines. Best Buy did not respond to multiple calls and e-mails for comment.
That's not to say marketers can navigate social media without agencies. Digital and PR agencies are vying for ever-increasing social-media budgets.
Agencies needed?
"In 2010, we start to see funded conversations," said 360i's Ms. Hofstetter. "Instead of funding a particular campaign, they are funding an investment in an ongoing conversation with consumers. That's a big shift." And that change isn't expected to slow anytime soon. Forrester Research forecasts social-media budgets will on average grow 34% yearly from 2009 to 2014 -- faster than other kinds of digital advertising.
Ford's Mr. Kelly doesn't see social media as something for PR and digital shops to fight over, since both types of agencies bring different skills to the table. "We consider it one budget," he said. "It doesn't matter if it's a marketing or public-affairs budget."
Ford has been less susceptible to the tug of war between digital and PR agencies for social media because its agency, Team Detroit, houses multiple shops under one roof. The WPP collective, dedicated entirely to the automaker, houses agencies spanning media, PR and creative. For Ford, creative and digital are responsible for building content for social-media channels (like apps for Facebook), while PR keeps up social page day-to-day management of things like posting events and responding to customers.
Ford has also looked to small social-media boutiques like New York-based Undercurrent for programs such as those for Fiesta. Social-only shops are the newest breed in the agency landscape and are proliferating rapidly. In January, Austin-based Powered acquired Joseph Jaffe's agency Crayon for strategy; events agency Drillteam; and Facebook-focused StepChange to create a full-service social-media agency with a national footprint.
"We're always going to start with our agency of record," said Ford's Mr. Hultgren. "We may look at a boutique agency to manage a piece of social media. Boutique agencies can be singularly focused on something. But if we want a pure focus on some social-media task, we want a boutique to focus on a pilot. Once we've proven out that model, we'll hand off to Team Detroit to integrate."
But while it's clear that social media has helped change perception of Ford, the biggest test is whether it sells cars. "Social media can fall anywhere in the range of the selling cycle," said Mr. Monty. "In our case it's on the broader end: awareness and perception. It's more of a branding tool than a sales tool. But on the local level, where the dealer gets involved, that's where it get can work for lead generation and CRM."
Three marketing models for social media
A look at how Ford, Kodak and Best Buy run their programs
CENTRALIZED
The social-media department functions at a senior level, reporting to the CMO or CEO, and is responsible for all social-media activation for the brand. "We work with a lot of clients that have appointed one person," said Ketchum's Jonathan Bellinger, VP-social media strategy. "It's nice to have a celebrity; it puts a human face on a company. You can achieve that by having one person being the public face both externally and internally, but it can get distracting because it becomes about those people."
Dangers: Having a social-media head means departments outside that person's scope might not benefit from efforts in the medium. For example, is customer care being considered if social media is centralized under marketing? This model doesn't necessarily take into consideration social media's influence on the entire business.
Essential roles: The social-media lead.
Marketers with this model: Ford. Scott Monty, global digital and multimedia communications director, joined the automaker from social boutique Crayon and has been a visible proponent of social media for the brand. Mr. Monty operates within the corporate-communications department, which reports directly into Ford's CEO.
DISTRIBUTED
In this setup, no one person technically owns social media. Instead, all employees from customer care, marketing, media and beyond are represent the brand and work social media into their roles. This is often implemented through training and encouraging social media use across an organization.
Dangers: If there's no standardized practice, social media can veer a brand off-message. For example, Jet Blue Senior VP-Marketing Marty St. George brought Twitter into the agency-of-record pitch process -- tweeting the news of the search to see how many agencies were digitally savvy enough to find it there. "That experiment is over -- and not to be repeated!" he tweeted after his tweet blew up into media coverage. Without a leader, learning about new social technology or sites then also falls on individuals.
Essential roles: Senior leadership that champions social media; training and internal communications around social-media policy is necessary.
Marketers with this model: Best Buy is decentralized because everyone in the organization has a role in social media, as Twelpforce demonstrates. Any employee can sign up to respond to customer queries on Twitter. The retailer does, however, have protocol and guidelines in place for tweets, and it has social-media experts in marketing. Last summer, CMO Barry Judge crowd-sourced a job description for a senior manager-emerging media marketing. Brands like IBM, Intel and Kodak have published social-media policies.
COMBINATION
This involves centralized best practices and decentralized execution. A brand maintains a committee of social-media stakeholders to work up its position and voice, which it disseminates to the company at large. From there, each discipline is left to incorporate social media into its individual executions.
Dangers: How do you hold departments accountable to a research council? Also, when a social-media program goes sour, who ends up as the fall guy, those who built the social-media strategy, or those who implemented it?
Essential roles: A team of social-media experts plucked from various departments.
Marketers with this model: Ketchum's Mr. Bellinger cites his client Kodak as a company that's found a good balance. It employs Jenny Cisney, chief blogger, in marketing, but she's tasked with steering the company's social-media presence rather than own it entirely. Kodak has published online its social-media policy for employees within a guidebook for marketers looking for lessons in social media. Starting in 2005, IBM used a wiki to crowd-source guidelines for a company blog and has asked employees to collective revise the rules for new forms of social media. Those efforts ultimately feed back to IBM's social-media head Adam Christensen, who most recently spearheaded the company's Smarter Planet blog.
by Kunur Patel
Published: February 22, 2010
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Social Media Tips For Small Business Owners
You will be seeing a lot about social media over the coming months. You probably already have!
Social Media works for local business advertising if you use it!
Even doing 1 or 2 things the right way can really boost your traffic and enhance the credibility of your small business in your local market.
People use the internet to find things they need. In the past they used the Yellow Pages and now they mostly use their favorite search engine or social media method for local business searches.
1.Facebook is starting to beat Google as the #1 source of traffic online. You should be using social networking or advertising here. You can add content to your wall every time you make a blog post, submit an article, create a video and so on. There are internet services that will do it for you.
2. Google is still the world’s largest search engine. You should use them for total market dominance and to be found via Google Maps, organic searches and pay per click advertising.
Setting up a ppc campaign is a fast way to get on page one of Google for your targeted phrases. You need to learn about this or pay someone to do it for you.
Organic searches take the longest time to rank for, but can really give you long term traffic when you target the right keywords. Getting listed with Google Local is easy to do.
3. You Tube is the #1 video site. Over 50% of all traffic comes from videos so you need to some video marketing every month. Article Video Robot is a neat program you can join and create videos from articles. This is a good way to get videos online with zero technical experience.
4. Blogging is a good way to use SEO and get traffic and create search engine bait. It is also a good way to interact with your customers and prospects. Blog articles do not have to be long to be effective.
You can say a lot in 100-200 word blog posts. If you can talk you can blog.
You can also hire a blog writer for $4-$5 an article and order 1 months of content in advance. You can then submit your articles in advance to your blogging platform and set them to post at a predetermined time.
There are many other ways you can use social media to the advantage of your local business marketing.
The risk of not doing it is being left behind and eating your competitor’s dust! This is a risk you can not afford to take, so you might as well embrace social media for your business and start reaping the rewards.
Published by: Paul T. - May 4, 2010
Mo Marketing and Promotions
Social Media works for local business advertising if you use it!
Even doing 1 or 2 things the right way can really boost your traffic and enhance the credibility of your small business in your local market.
People use the internet to find things they need. In the past they used the Yellow Pages and now they mostly use their favorite search engine or social media method for local business searches.
1.Facebook is starting to beat Google as the #1 source of traffic online. You should be using social networking or advertising here. You can add content to your wall every time you make a blog post, submit an article, create a video and so on. There are internet services that will do it for you.
2. Google is still the world’s largest search engine. You should use them for total market dominance and to be found via Google Maps, organic searches and pay per click advertising.
Setting up a ppc campaign is a fast way to get on page one of Google for your targeted phrases. You need to learn about this or pay someone to do it for you.
Organic searches take the longest time to rank for, but can really give you long term traffic when you target the right keywords. Getting listed with Google Local is easy to do.
3. You Tube is the #1 video site. Over 50% of all traffic comes from videos so you need to some video marketing every month. Article Video Robot is a neat program you can join and create videos from articles. This is a good way to get videos online with zero technical experience.
4. Blogging is a good way to use SEO and get traffic and create search engine bait. It is also a good way to interact with your customers and prospects. Blog articles do not have to be long to be effective.
You can say a lot in 100-200 word blog posts. If you can talk you can blog.
You can also hire a blog writer for $4-$5 an article and order 1 months of content in advance. You can then submit your articles in advance to your blogging platform and set them to post at a predetermined time.
There are many other ways you can use social media to the advantage of your local business marketing.
The risk of not doing it is being left behind and eating your competitor’s dust! This is a risk you can not afford to take, so you might as well embrace social media for your business and start reaping the rewards.
Published by: Paul T. - May 4, 2010
Mo Marketing and Promotions
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Facebook's Ads Work Pretty Well
When Social Ads Collide With Stated Interests, Awareness Goes Up
BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- It pays to have fans on Facebook if you want your ads to work there too, according to the first public study to come out of the collaboration of Nielsen Co. and Facebook.
Ads that included mentions of friends who were brand fans saw an increase in recall of 16%, and 30% when the ads coincided with a similar mention in users' news feeds.
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.
The impact on awareness and recall is even more pronounced when a home-page ad coincides with what Facebook and Nielsen term "organic" social advocacy, i.e. an item in a user's news feed indicating a friend has become a fan of a brand.
In short, so-called earned media generated when people mention or advocate brands makes the paid media considerably more effective, according to the study. Nielsen and Facebook plan to discuss results of the study in a session at Ad:Tech in San Francisco on Tuesday.
Increased recall
Facebook-home-page ads on average generated a 10% increase in ad recall, a 4% increase in brand awareness and a 2% increase in purchase intent among users who saw them compared with a control group with similar demographics or characteristics who didn't.
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.
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.
Earned and paid media
One major takeaway from the research is that paid and earned media work together in ways that could have implications well beyond Facebook, said Jon Gibbs, VP-media analytics at Nielsen. "The market has been talking very much about how to buy paid media and earn earned media, but there's been very little attention to the types of hybrid impressions and hybrid experience that blends these two," Mr. Gibbs said.
While Facebook's social ads present a fairly unique way of blending the paid and earned impressions, Mr. Gibbs noted that it's not a totally isolated example. He cited rich-media vendors that allow for Twitter feeds, social commentary or other kinds of consumer input within their ads. But he said having specific friends linked to a brand, as Facebook does, appears to have more impact than just incorporating social commentary broadly.
The recall levels for home-page ads on Facebook appear "slightly higher than standard norms we've done on other projects," Mr. Gibbs said. "What we've seen in both social ads and organic [mentions] are much higher than we've seen in other campaigns along these lines."
Results 'unremarkable'
Rex Briggs, CEO of the analytics firm Marketing Evolution, which has conducted numerous online advertising effectiveness studies, called results for Facebook's regular home-page ads "unremarkable and in line with banner ads [generally]," but he added that the results for social ads and the impact of organic mentions make for "a really interesting story."
Nielsen appeared to employ a good methodology used since the first online ad effectiveness studies in the mid 1990s, Mr. Briggs said.
"It does what Facebook wanted to do, which is legitimize the advertising and business model of Facebook," he said. "What it doesn't do is give the cross-media understanding of how does this piece fit into overall marketing plans."
What Facebook also hasn't done, he said, is open its doors and data to a variety of research companies as others, such as Microsoft, Yahoo or AOL have done. That its internal data remain largely under wraps, and its template for creating fan pages remains relatively limited compared to what marketers can do with their own sites or other networks may also be limiting revenue for Facebook, he said.
Paid media cheaper
In all, Nielsen projects around 18 million Facebook users saw ads measured as part of the study, of which around a million also saw organic mentions of their friends in social ads. Roughly another million saw organic mentions of the brands featured in the study without seeing the ads.
Based on those numbers, it's still a lot easier -- if not necessarily cheaper -- to buy scale on Facebook than earn it by winning fans. It's also an indication to Mr. Gibbs that marketers need to focus on winning Facebook fans over the long haul if they want to improve their odds of success when advertising there.
Of the 18 million users exposed to the ads, only around 130,000, or less than 1%, "engaged" with them by clicking on them. But around 40,000, or around 4%, of users who saw organic mentions of their friends become brand fans clicked on those news items. The higher click-through on organic impressions is another indication of the power of earned media on Facebook, Mr. Gibbs said.
"I do think it requires a level of ongoing investment in social media," Mr. Gibbs said, as opposed to a series of short-term projects. He also said marketers who have large e-mail databases should probably be encouraging consumers in e-mail programs to join their Facebook pages.
Mr. Gibbs said he doesn't believe Facebook's plans to move from "become a fan" to the more click-prone "like" as a means of joining brand pages would have much impact on the numbers in the study. And he believes, though it wasn't part of the survey, that users by now have been exposed to enough of Facebook's social ads to realize that when they become fans of a brand, they may also become endorsers in that brand's Facebook ads.
The Nielsen BrandLift polls used to survey Facebook users was a "lightweight" poll, generally with only two questions, aimed at maximizing response rates.
Nielsen didn't incorporate actual purchases, as opposed to purchase intent, "because this is the first generation of this research," Mr. Gibbs said. "We wanted to stick to branding because it's language the market is very comfortable with. In next generations, I would assume we will start incorporating offline purchase and other transactional data as part of the analysis."
by Jack Neff
Published: April 19, 2010
BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- It pays to have fans on Facebook if you want your ads to work there too, according to the first public study to come out of the collaboration of Nielsen Co. and Facebook.
Ads that included mentions of friends who were brand fans saw an increase in recall of 16%, and 30% when the ads coincided with a similar mention in users' news feeds.
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.
The impact on awareness and recall is even more pronounced when a home-page ad coincides with what Facebook and Nielsen term "organic" social advocacy, i.e. an item in a user's news feed indicating a friend has become a fan of a brand.
In short, so-called earned media generated when people mention or advocate brands makes the paid media considerably more effective, according to the study. Nielsen and Facebook plan to discuss results of the study in a session at Ad:Tech in San Francisco on Tuesday.
Increased recall
Facebook-home-page ads on average generated a 10% increase in ad recall, a 4% increase in brand awareness and a 2% increase in purchase intent among users who saw them compared with a control group with similar demographics or characteristics who didn't.
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.
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.
Earned and paid media
One major takeaway from the research is that paid and earned media work together in ways that could have implications well beyond Facebook, said Jon Gibbs, VP-media analytics at Nielsen. "The market has been talking very much about how to buy paid media and earn earned media, but there's been very little attention to the types of hybrid impressions and hybrid experience that blends these two," Mr. Gibbs said.
While Facebook's social ads present a fairly unique way of blending the paid and earned impressions, Mr. Gibbs noted that it's not a totally isolated example. He cited rich-media vendors that allow for Twitter feeds, social commentary or other kinds of consumer input within their ads. But he said having specific friends linked to a brand, as Facebook does, appears to have more impact than just incorporating social commentary broadly.
The recall levels for home-page ads on Facebook appear "slightly higher than standard norms we've done on other projects," Mr. Gibbs said. "What we've seen in both social ads and organic [mentions] are much higher than we've seen in other campaigns along these lines."
Results 'unremarkable'
Rex Briggs, CEO of the analytics firm Marketing Evolution, which has conducted numerous online advertising effectiveness studies, called results for Facebook's regular home-page ads "unremarkable and in line with banner ads [generally]," but he added that the results for social ads and the impact of organic mentions make for "a really interesting story."
Nielsen appeared to employ a good methodology used since the first online ad effectiveness studies in the mid 1990s, Mr. Briggs said.
"It does what Facebook wanted to do, which is legitimize the advertising and business model of Facebook," he said. "What it doesn't do is give the cross-media understanding of how does this piece fit into overall marketing plans."
What Facebook also hasn't done, he said, is open its doors and data to a variety of research companies as others, such as Microsoft, Yahoo or AOL have done. That its internal data remain largely under wraps, and its template for creating fan pages remains relatively limited compared to what marketers can do with their own sites or other networks may also be limiting revenue for Facebook, he said.
Paid media cheaper
In all, Nielsen projects around 18 million Facebook users saw ads measured as part of the study, of which around a million also saw organic mentions of their friends in social ads. Roughly another million saw organic mentions of the brands featured in the study without seeing the ads.
Based on those numbers, it's still a lot easier -- if not necessarily cheaper -- to buy scale on Facebook than earn it by winning fans. It's also an indication to Mr. Gibbs that marketers need to focus on winning Facebook fans over the long haul if they want to improve their odds of success when advertising there.
Of the 18 million users exposed to the ads, only around 130,000, or less than 1%, "engaged" with them by clicking on them. But around 40,000, or around 4%, of users who saw organic mentions of their friends become brand fans clicked on those news items. The higher click-through on organic impressions is another indication of the power of earned media on Facebook, Mr. Gibbs said.
"I do think it requires a level of ongoing investment in social media," Mr. Gibbs said, as opposed to a series of short-term projects. He also said marketers who have large e-mail databases should probably be encouraging consumers in e-mail programs to join their Facebook pages.
Mr. Gibbs said he doesn't believe Facebook's plans to move from "become a fan" to the more click-prone "like" as a means of joining brand pages would have much impact on the numbers in the study. And he believes, though it wasn't part of the survey, that users by now have been exposed to enough of Facebook's social ads to realize that when they become fans of a brand, they may also become endorsers in that brand's Facebook ads.
The Nielsen BrandLift polls used to survey Facebook users was a "lightweight" poll, generally with only two questions, aimed at maximizing response rates.
Nielsen didn't incorporate actual purchases, as opposed to purchase intent, "because this is the first generation of this research," Mr. Gibbs said. "We wanted to stick to branding because it's language the market is very comfortable with. In next generations, I would assume we will start incorporating offline purchase and other transactional data as part of the analysis."
by Jack Neff
Published: April 19, 2010
Monday, April 12, 2010
Powersport Market Trends
What are companies such as Nike, Wendys, Toyota, Jeep, Target, Gatorade, Verizon Wireless, Axe, Paul Mitchell, Nerf, Ball Park Franks, Playstation, Dickies up to?
Companies across the world are re-developing their marketing and branding strategies to directly target the Action Sports industry - specifically Motocross, Skateboarding, BMX, and Snowboarding. The companies listed above are just the tip of the iceberg.
Why Action Sports?
Recent studies have shown that over 25% of the North American population age is between 10 and 24; this cohort has a significant buying power estimated at more than $250 billion dollars. Studies have shown that using action sports marketing through establish events can infiltrate manufacturer products into the lifestyles of the generation Y and Z demographic 19% stronger than partnerships with mainstream sports.
Similar to social media growth, Action Sports growth and expansion is rapidly increasing and has been for over 10 years now. Action sports are growing at a rate of 9% per year for participation and 23% a year for event and athlete knowledge and recognition. These results and increased impressions are resulting in a direct increase of product sales, as companies target the generation Y and Z market place.
Why is this important?
As the generation Y and Z demographic grows older and reproduces, all resources point in the direction that the children of these generations will participate and recognize action sports events and athletes further growing and increasing the marketing and brand structures for all companies.
What’s In and Out with Action Sports Trends?
In - Growing event attendance, television coverage, web presence and video clips - American based "Dew Tour" is broadcast on NBC, MTV and USA Network, as well as distributed worldwide, in over 100 different countries!
Out - Magazines - "Syndication and subscription is down on action sports magazines. Newsstand sales are tanking. Action sports brands are afraid of the shift but corporate companies are not. For having the enthralling sought after “risk taker” image, most of the action sports brands haven’t lived up to it and instead continue to play it safe sticking to what they know; print advertising. One person who really gets it in this industry is Tony Hawk. Everyone needs to start from ground zero and a newbie intern won’t cut it. Sorry. Would you hire an intern to be your lead media buyer for television and billboard ads? No. It’s the same thing, different medium. Time to ride into a new type of branding. Be humble and understand it’s a new world." Quote by Espree Devora (Co-Founder at Women in Action Sports Organization) (Action Sports (Extreme Sports) & Youth Market Connoisseur)
Where is Canada in this?
Canada is just beginning to follow the trend of utilizing what the action sports culture has to offers in regards to the wide open possibilities of sport marketing and brand in which the USA has been doing since 2007. Is your company ready to jump in the Action Sports Market?
Doug Mochrie
MO Marketing & Promotions
Originally Published by Mark Perrin - MPI Sport Management
Companies across the world are re-developing their marketing and branding strategies to directly target the Action Sports industry - specifically Motocross, Skateboarding, BMX, and Snowboarding. The companies listed above are just the tip of the iceberg.
Why Action Sports?
Recent studies have shown that over 25% of the North American population age is between 10 and 24; this cohort has a significant buying power estimated at more than $250 billion dollars. Studies have shown that using action sports marketing through establish events can infiltrate manufacturer products into the lifestyles of the generation Y and Z demographic 19% stronger than partnerships with mainstream sports.
Similar to social media growth, Action Sports growth and expansion is rapidly increasing and has been for over 10 years now. Action sports are growing at a rate of 9% per year for participation and 23% a year for event and athlete knowledge and recognition. These results and increased impressions are resulting in a direct increase of product sales, as companies target the generation Y and Z market place.
Why is this important?
As the generation Y and Z demographic grows older and reproduces, all resources point in the direction that the children of these generations will participate and recognize action sports events and athletes further growing and increasing the marketing and brand structures for all companies.
What’s In and Out with Action Sports Trends?
In - Growing event attendance, television coverage, web presence and video clips - American based "Dew Tour" is broadcast on NBC, MTV and USA Network, as well as distributed worldwide, in over 100 different countries!
Out - Magazines - "Syndication and subscription is down on action sports magazines. Newsstand sales are tanking. Action sports brands are afraid of the shift but corporate companies are not. For having the enthralling sought after “risk taker” image, most of the action sports brands haven’t lived up to it and instead continue to play it safe sticking to what they know; print advertising. One person who really gets it in this industry is Tony Hawk. Everyone needs to start from ground zero and a newbie intern won’t cut it. Sorry. Would you hire an intern to be your lead media buyer for television and billboard ads? No. It’s the same thing, different medium. Time to ride into a new type of branding. Be humble and understand it’s a new world." Quote by Espree Devora (Co-Founder at Women in Action Sports Organization) (Action Sports (Extreme Sports) & Youth Market Connoisseur)
Where is Canada in this?
Canada is just beginning to follow the trend of utilizing what the action sports culture has to offers in regards to the wide open possibilities of sport marketing and brand in which the USA has been doing since 2007. Is your company ready to jump in the Action Sports Market?
Doug Mochrie
MO Marketing & Promotions
Originally Published by Mark Perrin - MPI Sport Management
Sunday, April 11, 2010
MO Marketing & Promotions provides online services
MO Marketing & Promotions provides online avenues for companies to expand their markets!
Companies such as Royal Distributing - Canada's largest powersports retailer of aftermarket parts and accessories has utilized the services of MO Marketing & Promotions. Check out their Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Guelph-Innisfil-Sudbury/Royal-Distributing/251716905024?ref=ts
If you would like to inquire on the services of MO Marketing & Promotions please email: contact@mointl.com
Thank you
DAM
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