360DigitalInfluence

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

I whispered it under my breath as I boarded the plane from Washington D.C. to Hong Kong.  I wrote it on post-it notes.  I even considered getting it tattooed on my arm: Don’t Say the F-Word.  Don’t say Facebook. Not here.  Not in Asia.

As a recent Ogilvy transplant from Washington D.C. and the newest member of the APAC Digital Influence team based in Hong Kong, I knew I’d have a long list of client introductions and a few speaking engagements within my first 30 days.  As I prepared for the move, I was hyper-sensitive to the idea that I’d be a newcomer to the region and spent considerable time studying the major social sites for the APAC region.  All of this in an effort to avoid dropping the F-word when I should have said “Orkut” or “Mixi” or any one of the other social networks.  You might say I had an America Social Media Accent and I tried to loose it before I landed in Hong Kong.

Well, for those like me still learning the statistics that shape the social web in Asia, I have news for you.  Drop the F-bomb.  Drop it often.  Facebook, now more than ever, reigns supreme in most Asia Pacific regions with a dominate social network.  According to comSore, Facebook is the dominate social network for 9 out of the 12 APAC regions.   And, for markets in which the dominate social network really dominates (e.g. over 60% web penetration) the figure jumps to 7 out of 8.

Does that mean all my studying was for nothing?  Certainly not.  Every market is unique and worthy of special exploration.  While a few of the regions may share a similar social site (e.g. Facebook) that doesn’t mean there are not drastic differences in the way people consume media and share content online.  The mosaic of cultures and web behaviors that make up this region are more than any one blog post could possibly address.  Though, after 30 days of working in the APAC Digital Influence group, I can report that Facebook is alive and well in most corners of the world.  And yes, I hear the Facebook Bomb dropped on most days, just like in the US.

This report did not include China in which Facebook and most other networks are banned.  You can read up on the social networks that call China home (and all things related to mainland China) by following our Asia Digital Map China tag here. Hat tip to Ogilvy’s Daniel Brenikov for his recent post exploring Facebook’s growth across Southeast Asia.

My colleagues in OgilvyOne are today releasing OgilvyOne Connected – a research report into how Chinese consumers use social media to interact, both with each other and with brands.

A section that I found particularly interesting categorizes Chinese social media users according to their social media habits, assigning percentages to the relative sizes of each group:

A larger-than-expected 26% of all Chinese social media users are “Initiators” — people that regularly start conversations, create content and publish their opinions online. They are also the fertile starting point for new ideas, services and products.

A further 29% of Chinese social media users are “Commenters” — people who may not initiate, but who do react and comment on other people’s views. They are also the “accelerators” of new ideas, giving them momentum and wider acceptance.

The largest group, comprising 45% of social media users, are “Gawkers” — those who quietly browse, observe and look for entertaining ideas and brands that are already popular.

OgilvyOne Connected (Original Report)

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

In what they’re calling a “world first”, Nielsen Online is measuring Australian usage of the mobile Web. According to their press release, there are just shy of 140,000 Australians who browse the mobile Web each day, with the average session being 4 and a half minutes. Now if only they could measure usage of mobile applications such as foursquare…

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).

Nielsen Online released their “Nielsen 2010 Social Media Report” today which has a wealth of statisitcs on the social media landscape here in Australia.

Among the findings:

• 9 million Australians now interact via social networks
• content sharing is the most popular activity
• 4 in 5 Australian Internet users have shared a photo
• Twitter usage grew by 400% in 2009
• Nearly 3/4 of Australians read a wiki
• 2 in 5 Australians interact with companies via social networks

Read a PDF of today’s press release.

Asia’s Internet speed is not surprising news, but the details of this recent report on the Internet by Akamai show how much Asia and South Korea dominate the world of high speed Internet. Korea is also increasing the average national Internet speed at the fastest pace of any country in the world.

Korea, Japan and Hong Kong have the world’s fastest connections

Although South Korea continued to hold the top spot  as the country with the highest average measured connection speed at 14.6 Mbps, its fastest city (Masan) was ranked fifth among Asian cities, at approximately 1.2x the country average. South Korea, unsurprisingly, has six of the top 10 fastest cities in Asia, all with average speeds above 15 Mbps.

 
South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong are in global top 5 for increasing average speed.

As compared to the second quarter of 2009, South Korea saw a shift in the distribution of connections to higher speed buckets, with the 5-10 Mbps bucket declining from 35% to 29%, while the higher speed buckets all saw increases, with more than 10% of connections once again being made to Akamai at speeds greater than 25 Mbps. 
The increased percentages of extremely high speed connections are in line with South Korea’s third quarter growth in both average measured connection speed and high broadband adoption rates.
While having a high broadband adoption rate that approaches just half of South Korea’s, Hong Kong has the second highest levels of extremely high speed connectivity among the top 10 countries, with more than 2.5% of connections to Akamai at speeds between 20-25 Mbps, and more than 5% at speeds in excess of 25 Mbps. The distribution of connection speeds above 5 Mbps remained fairly flat in the United States between the second and third quarters, and the United States remained #12 globally for this metric.

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)

Hurry! Space is limited for this 30-minute webinar and registration is required.

Join the award-winning Social Media team from Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide for a free 30-minute online seminar powered by Citrix GoToWebinar and done in partnership with The Wall Street Journal Asia.

This webinar will provide concrete examples, action plans and case studies, including:

· 5 key steps for a business-to-business strategy;
· How to build and engage a community of potential and current customers;
· Real-life case studies from successful business-to-business strategies;
· The highly popular – and now extended – Question and Answer section;
· Much, much more…

The seminar will be led by Brian Giesen a senior regional strategist in Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence team and moderated by Graham White, Managing Director of Howorth Communications in Sydney.

Join us Wednesday, 3 March at 11:00am (Hong Kong time):

http://bit.ly/aWsvrI