360DigitalInfluence

There are more than 30,000 non-executive members of company boards across Australia. If you are one of them, what are the questions you should be asking about how the business you manage is handling social media?

We’ve put together five “starter” questions that corporate board members should ask to gauge how well the companies they oversee are managing the risks and taking advantage of the opportunities presented by social media.

What other questions should board members be asking?

An item that clients often ask for when rolling out a campaign, is the obligatory checkbox, that says Twitter. Unfortunately, Twitter is not the gift that keeps on giving, unlike services such as Slideshare.

Allow me to clarify. Client asks you to roll out a campaign, there’s an event, the event hashtag goes crazy, you’re trending on Twitter, client loves you. Three days later, you do a search and find NOTHING. Zilch. Nada. That’s because Twitter search does not persist. So when people go looking for information after the event, you get no link backs to your campaign site, and there’s no ‘word on the twittersphere about your campaign’. Not ideal right?

Now just to clarify what I meant about Slideshare. If you upload any presentations from the event to Slideshare, it will live there and your content will be searched for and found ad infinitum.

OK, so the headline is a little bit controversial and a bit of bait. But here’s the dealio. What you want to do, is aggregate the hash tag stream on an open, search engine friendly platform. That might be a WordPress site as an aggregator, Tumblr or some other bespoke system, this has to be done if you want the conversations to be found down the track.

Thanks to Jeremiah Owyang for the prompt to commit this post to paper. He talks about using a live blogging application which is great idea. This works well if you have an official blogger at the event. What a campaign aggregator will do though is capture everything on the hashtag (and any other social media) not just what your official blogger is doing.

The web is continuously sprawling with vast amounts of content, and the time needed from users to consume what’s relevant of it is shrinking by the minute. From web to mobile (and now tablets, ie..IPad), the digital attention span is at an all time low.

Switching between devices and platforms is becoming a bit overwhelming in helping users get the content they need. However, there is a bigger headache brought about by the basic foundation that paved the way for all of today’s innovative online offerings: Web Browsing.

Web browsing habits today are significantly affecting how users absorb and internalize online content, mainly because their declining digital attention span is forcing them to open multiple browser tabs.

Studies are now showing that since browsers have started supporting tabbed browsing, users have paid less and less attention to the content being offered on web pages.

Early this year, Jeff Huang, an information scientist at the University of Washington, studied the behavior of 50 millions web surfers and habits regarding tabbed browsing(on 60 billion pages). Here are some of his interesting findings:

•         Tabbed browsing occurs 85% during browsing time

•         Users switch tabs at least 57.4% of the browsing time, meaning parallel browsing is more common than linear browsing

•         Most web surfers do not create tabs (branch out) from search engine result pages, but more from non-navigational queries

•         Using multiple windows and tabs was a key strategy in engaging elsewhere while one page was loading

•         5-10 page views per tab are common, meaning users often visit a handful of pages in each tab.

•         Tabs do not result in users viewing more pages; it simply leads to multitasking

•         In activities engaged online, web search is a close second in popularity behind email

•         Below are “interesting” search queries that most and least result in tabbing (branching)

His research findings are great because they allow digital media agencies to ask the following web usability questions:

How are tabs being used?

•          Act as reminders

•          Allow people to multitask

•          Useful for comparison

•          Act as bookmarks

•          Used significantly instead of the back button.

What could this affect?

•          Time spent on a page/site

•          Activity carried out on the website

•          Visitor Intent and relevant course of action

What does this mean for Web Designers/Developers?

1.      Try to get your content across to the user in the least amount of time…make it as straight forward as possible

2.      Design pages easy enough for a 8 year old to understand

3.      Don’t expect users to stay on your site/page longer than 10 seconds. Expect the users intention to be: “Get the info I need in the shortest possible time” (check site web analytics for trends/habits)

4.      Include simple courses of action for the user to take within the page (ie..click here to..)

5.      Easy to access navigational features on every page are essential

What does this mean for Digital Creatives?

1.      If the fusion of beauty, brand, and style do not support the page’s content, users will probably leave the site

2.      Users will hardly ever give your page their full undivided attention

3.      Think of your page as a “reminder” for the user to access later, so dont put all your brilliant creative work in just the first few seconds of an animated page.

4.      If the creative images and animations are big…meaning heavy to load, good chance users will switch tabs and forget your page

There are some companies that are still unable to understand the true value of social media for their business. Now there is a better way to convince them, in a language they understand: ROI.

A recent study (pdf), conducted and published by Syncapse, examines social media in terms of ROI.  It does this by quantifying and understanding the impact of social media marketing investment on the top 20 brands on Facebook. The findings were pretty interesting.

This is particularity important, because quantifying the ROI of Facebook marketing efforts might change how we present social media as a marketing strategy to our clients.

The study examined the five leading contributors to Facebook fan value.

(1) Product Spending (2) Brand Loyalty (3) Propensity to Recommend (4) Brand Affinity (5) Earned Media Value.

Significant Findings:

ROI:

· Fans spend an additional average of $71.84 on products for which they are fans compared to those who are not fans.

· The average value of a Facebook fan was $136.38. On a McDonald’s fan base of 2,232,328, the worth of annualized value would equate to $580,003,461.

· No two brand’s fan values are the same: Fan value of BlackBerry ($83.98) versus Nokia ($180.87).

Repurchase

· Fans are 28% more likely than non-fans to continue using the brand

· 42.5% of fans indicating a heightened likelihood of continued product usage

Loyalty

· 81% of fans said they feel connection/empathy with the brand, compared to 39% of non-fans

· 87% said they felt warmth, gratitude, happy or satisfied, compared to 49% of non-fans

Word of Mouth:

· Fans are 41% more likely than non-fans to recommend a fanned product to their friends

· 44% Likelihood to try a product if close family member or friend became a fan

· 68% of Facebook fans indicated that they are very likely to recommend a product (One of the highest was Victoria’s Secret with 79.4%)

Shaping Fan Value:

· Factors influencing and impacting fan value include: Product price, purchase lifecycle, sales penetration, brand health, product health, Facebook marketing success, loyalty, spending, fan acquisition cost, affinity and media value.

Key Takeaways for Digital Marketers and Their Clients:

· Frame It In $$: More and more, we should present social media marketing to clients in terms of ROI, ##’s and $$. This allows us to demonstrate the power of this marketing platform in a business language most can understand.  It also portrays social media in a context that makes good financial sense. “Social media can make you money”

· Digital Deep Dive: This study, along with specific case studies should act as a digital gateway, by helping us in convincing clients to dive deep into social media strategies and allocate a bigger budget for social marketing.

· Act Now, Look Later: Social media marketing is a long-term process which aims at building networks of loyal and brand hungry consumers.  It might be comprised of various short-term campaigns, but brands must have a long-term view of social ROI

· Online Efforts Boost Offline Sales: The 20 brands examined in this study rely on offline sales to succeed. They use social media to drive offline traffic into their stores.

· Social Actually Works: The more you reach, connect, and effectively engage audiences on social media, the more you increase:

1. Long-term ROI

2. Brand perception and awareness

3. Brand loyalty, connection & repeated purchases

4. Organic marketing (facilitated online word of mouth)

· Ask Why?:  Finally, we should be able to easily explain to clients that “There is a reason why these big brands are pouring millions in social media, and moving away from traditional media:”

1. Cheaper and more effective than most mass media marketing

2. More targeted and audience specific

3. Generates added brand empathy and connection with consumers

4. Provides consumers access to the brand, anytime, anywhere and at their fingertips

5. Allows consumers to market & recommend brand products themselves

6. Timely and compelling, moves consumers to take action

7. Allows consumers to engage with brands in a FUN WAY (and not interruptive)

Connect with Haysam on Twitter: @hisom

I’ve come across a few interesting ideas this week. The first:

1. Mountains and Mona Lisa - Samsung >> this has limited application as an emerging media I admit, but I offer it firstly because I was bought up on Wales, but more importantly because it was the precursor to the second idea – which is much more applicable:

2. Monuments and masses – Samsung 3D projections>> 3D projection will grow and grow as a brand experience format. These two ideas  in tandem create quite an interesting space that Samsung is beginning to own – innovation with LED and lighting -  similar to the Crowdsourcing ideas in Liverpool Street and Trafalgar Square that T Mobile had so much success in. There are lots of examples of monumental 3D projections – one most recently by BMW in Singapore. I adore this sort of creative work, because it is the true fusion of physical and digital. It creates both a physical and digital Theatre for the Brand in which consumers co-exist and co-create. Developing these “sustained conversations and dialogues” is core to building brands and emotions between them and consumers.

I also really enjoyed Google Chrome’s browser speed test. In a world full of complications I think it is a good example of how to make an intangible USP, more tangible. Until your competitor, the Opera Browser,  responds with their own  repost the Opera’s Speed test. Both ideas are sort of traditional “advertising stories” but neither will ever pay for media on TV.

A week would not be a week without some passing mention of an iPad, so here are two explorations of the iPad on the left side of leftfiled – the first is the iPad magic show from Japan; the second a low tech adaptation to make the hi tech, better: Velcro + iPad

Also several bookmarks on data visualisations and info-graphics this week – helping creative and data minds meet, or not:
David Armano’s excellent visualisations of our communication and social world: and a few others from Hubspot’s 22 social media Diagrams: and finally a good collection from Nowsourcing .

By now, almost all the western world — and a good chunk of Asia and Africa — have all heard of Apple’s latest breakthrough product, the iPad.

The sheer number of impressions this launch has generated is in itself impressive. But what is even more impressive is the use of early adopters and key influentials to drive the story, enthusiasm, excitement and buzz for Apple, not the company itself.

Remember that Apple is not a company that is that into social media, yet check out the Twitter hashtag #ipad and end user blogs to get a sense for the mountain of coverage and interest generated for the iPad.

How does it do this? Good old-fashioned smart PR and a communications strategy that relies on the magnification effect of early adopters and influentials to amplify launch noise via traditional PR, Word of Mouth (WoM) buzz and aspirational excitement.

Here’s some of the ground rules:

1. Carefully pick and choose your hero product(s) for the year and put as much wood behind these arrows as you can. The iPad was THE launch of 2010 for Apple. The company maintains ongoing influencer relations, a thorough reviewer’s program, and ongoing engagement for other products, like their laptops, iPods, etc., but the focus was iPad and later this year iPhone OS version 4.0. That’s it. Laser-like focus, picking and backing your product bets, not spreading the wealth across a wide product range that all cry out for PR support, even though they may be close to end-of-life (EOL) and have reached the downward side of the S-curve. The other products bask in the halo of the hero products. See what the iPod did for Macintosh sales post launch? See what the iPhone has done for iPad sales?

2. Focus on long term influencer and early adopter relations and engagement. These are your natural allies. Cultivate them, let them talk for you because they ultimately carry far more weight and credibility than your own Press Releases, blog posts or advertising. Engage with not just technology influencers, but with business, social and celebrity folk that give you brand cache and style. It’s no accident that Stephen Fry is an Apple fan boy, so is half of Hollywood, thanks to decades of engagement with product placement on set and off set, with the stars themselves. Every episode of Seinfeld has a Macintosh and a small statuette of Superman in the background. Check it out next time re-run comes on. At one point, Jerry Seinfeld had a Mac too (and probably still does even though he did ads with Bill Gates last year).

So how does this translate into the iPad launch? How do these uber-strategies map with launch tactics? Well, here’s a synopsis:

The iPad launched officially on April 1, but embargoes were set for March 31. This means a wave of launch buzz and hype 24 hours prior to people being able to buy one (not counting the rumours and speculation in the prior nine months).

Key influencers were seeded with Product Verification & Testing (PVT) units three to four months out in some cases, depending on when these units were deemed stable enough and of sufficient quality to pass muster for people that will forgive non-production machine foibles because they love the technology and because they consider themselves Apple-insiders. These units went to key Apple business partners/friends (remember Google CEO Eric Schmidt got a pre-production iPhone and not so surreptitiously flashed it at Davos, where it stole the headlines rather than dry economic prognostications?), celebrities, technology gurus, etc. Also note that they all honoured the strict Apple NDAs — no insider wants to be ostracized and get thrown out of the club.

Journos/key bloggers in the US (a very select few, high impact folks) had their iPads under NDA for a week prior to launch, enough for them to play and enjoy, but not enough time for them to be too heavily critical. Launch reviews reflect that and it’s commonsense when you think about it. The shine always rubs off the shiny new toy the longer you have it. This early enthusiasm sets the tone for the launch coverage, providing the initial launch gestalt.

Celebrity Twitter-ers helped fuel the social media buzz. Stephen Fry was on the US West Coast at launch (funny how that happened) and put up video of the un-boxing of his iPad. He openly Tweeted he had one a day prior to the rest of the population. Robert Scoble did the same thing, except for the video of the unboxing (he later went out and bought two more iPads because his family kept hijacking his — and Tweeted about it). Reviews popped up the day before the official launch by Walt Mossberg and David Pogue in the US — two of the most highly respected tech journos in the country. Surgical media placement and engagement for maximum impact rather than a broad ‘hit as many as you can’ approach most companies take.

Foreign (that is, non-US) media got flown to a glitzy New York event and even if there was no pricing for their markets, they got to play with units at launch in salubrious surroundings and with high profile Apple execs. They in turn also had the opportunity if they were keen enough to buy their own units in the US, which judging by the coverage, a good few did, thereby continuing the buzz momentum.

And the result is, as you can see, a wave of initial great coverage that drives WoM, then sales and sets the tone.

More importantly its a self-reinforcing cycle of clever, surgical market engagement that fuels Apple’s mystique as a cult rather than as a technology company.

And the interesting thing is that other companies with ‘insanely’ great products could be doing the same to build their own mystique and stories. Mass communications doesn’t have to be massive, just smart.

Postscript: The iPhone OS 4.0 was announced a few days ago. Only Apple developers are supposed to have the beta code for testing. Stephen Fry, who last time I checked can’t cut a line of code, Tweeted yesterday that he had just installed it on his 3G iPhone. General availability for the masses is not expected until the northern hemisphere summer/autumn (fall).

Thanks very much to the nearly 300 people from across Asia who dialled into our webinar on “Social Media for B2B Companies”, hosted in partnership with the Wall Street Journal Asia and Citrix Online.

As promised we have uplosed the presentation deck to Slideshare and have updated to include links to a few great additional resources that you can use to help your business get started. These links include the following:

• Ogilvy On: Social Media for Crisis Management  
• Ogilvy On: Twitter for Business
• Ogilvy On: Facebook for Business
• Social Media in Asia Presentation
• APAC Statistics and Research (Asia Digital Map Blog)

Over the next week, the 360 Digital Influence team from across Australia and Asia will be sharing some of their favourite social media sites, applications, personalities and tools that are worth bookmarking. Sites that are, so to speak, delicious.

I’ll kick off the series by talking about Listorious – a new site that’s focussed on a topic that’s all the rage right now – Twitter lists. As you likely have heard by now, Twitter recently rolled out a “lists” feature that allows you to publish lists of people to follow on Twitter, categorised by topic. Listorious is simply a directory of “awesome” (their word not mine!) lists on Twitter and is a great place to look if you’re interested in hearing what people who talk about a specific issue or topic have to say.

Here are a few things about Listorious that are worth checking out:

• Tags: You can browse Twitter lists by tags
• Top 140 Lists: Organised by the most-followed Twitter lists and includes names you know such as Robert Scoble, Pete Cashmore & Tim O’Reilly
• Twitter Profile: The Listorious team regularly Tweets great new lists, so this is a good account to follow
• Australians: Heaps of Australian-related lists (e.g., Perth Twitterers, Awesome Aussies, etc.)
• Asia: Same for Asia (e.g., HongKong News, Mandarin-Culture, etc.)

And, if you’ve taken some initiative and created a killer list yourself, you can submit your list to Listorious as well.

Whether you are brand manager, marketing director or sales person, you will probably have heard the term “listening”. Although many understand what it is, few truly know how to effectively “listen” to customers they care about, and even less about how “listening” can be done powerfully in the social media process.

Tim Ho raised a good point in his post predicting that social media listening will replace tele-marketing and consumer surveys – which I believe will happen soon! – simply because insights derived from social media listening posts would be so much more accurate than consumer surveys. Think about it, I am more likely to spend more time telling my friends about myself than a stranger. As a typical Hong Konger, I despise random calls – they are irritating, tele-marketers talk like robots, and I feel disrespected. I might give tele-marketers 5 min. max listening and responding to them when I’m in a good mood – afterall, tele-marketers too are just trying to earn a living. But with social-media listening, there are no tele-marketers – simply because we’re eavesdropping and not questioning.

Whether you agree with this, we are more likely to tell our friends the truth, disclose more information to them and be happy to spend more time interacting with them – than people we don’t know. By eaves-dropping on online conversations brands can save an awful lot of manpower just to dial those cold calls, and results would also be more accurate. More importantly with “bloggers” where you can track them down, and do followups. With cold calls, telemarketers have numbers – But what’s their name? Age? Job? Interest? No one would give away such personal information to strangers. Remember with Social Media Engagements, “listening” is only is only beginning step. After targeting the influential netizens you want to engage with, “FRM” (Friend-Relationship-Management) says the rest of it.

According to yesterday’s SCMP article “Telemarketers to Police Themselves” – just a 1 percent success rate of the average 491,459 cold calls in Hong Kong per day would generate good business for a brand. That’s 99% of the time effectively down the drain – very inefficient in my perspective. From a psychological perspective, social media listening beats tele-marketing by miles. We are more honest to our friends than strangers. Economically social media listening beats telemarketing by continents!

Pat Law, a digital strategist based in our Singapore office, was recently featured in Her World Magazine as a leading “digerati diva” in Asia Pacific. It’s a great article and, in a five-page spread, it shows why we’re pretty lucky to have Pat on the Singapore team. You can read an excerpt of the article on Pat Law here.