Written on May 15, 2008 – 5:08 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
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“Marketers have no idea how to use social media”. Nate Elliot made a clear statement at Next08 this afternoon. He’s working for JupiterResearch, a New York-based research firm that interviews 10,000 executives from Europe and the US every year. So he’s the kind of guy who knows how to use social media to engage the desired target audience. There are two major problems in this field. The first one is clear, marketers just don’t get the new technologies and the fundamental changes in the way people interact with brands. Although they spend 30,000 dollars on a campaign, half of the branded social network pages only have 1,000 friends or less. Secondly, more than 75 percent of the marketers doesn’t measure whether their campaigns were successfully engaging the audience. And only 15 percent measures brand metrics like ‘awareness’ and ‘attention’.
So while consumers are talking about their brands online, marketers do a bad job in participating in those conversations. “If no one solves these problems, social marketing will have a limited future”, said Elliot. In order to prevent an early death of this new marketing branch, JupiterResearch has created some rules for social marketing - based on similarities in successful campaigns. Elliot” “They’re not revolutionary, but a vast majority of the marketers makes these mistakes”.
Rule 1: Your messages aren’t going to promote themselves
Although a lot of marketers trust on the viral effect of Internet campaigns, 85 percent of them found no viral pass along. So the viral magic only works for less than 15 percent of the campaigns (which I think is still a surprisingly large percentage). Elliot gave the example of the Intel Powers Music campaign. The chip producer started a contest to find the best MySpace bands and created “a really good site” The marketing team realized they had to run payed ads to get people’s attention. So they did. After three days, Intel stopped advertising, expecting the viral hype to take off. It didn’t happen… So lesson no. 1, you have to keep promoting your branded page as viral pass along is scarse.
Rule 2: Focusing on engagement can double your ROI
Most marketers treat their branded social network pages as micro sites. “The Rambo MySpace page looked exactly like Rambo.com. There was no interactivity, no games, nor contest. I see that happening over and over again”, Elliot complained. He stresses that at least a little bit of interactivity can generate on average twice as many friends. A good example is online retail store Zappos. Their CEO Tony Hsieh uses Twitter to promote his store. “It really works”, said Elliot, “it puts a personal face on a huge company.” The consequence of this kind of marketing is that it becomes part of your life. Elliot: “Tony has to update 25 a 30 times a day, just like everybody.”
Rule 3: if you’re not measuring results, you throw away money.
“It’s a little bit scary to learn that more than 75 percent of the marketers isn’t measuring the results of their campaigns. If you’re not measuring you don’t know whether your money is well spent nor if your campaigns are getting better”. No matter how you do it, set a goal and measure against it! When the audience asked Elliot for some ways of measuring, he didn’t really give a satisfying answer. Of course you can measure the number of friends, but that doesn’t say a lot about engagement. You can also use technology to study the online behavior of visitors or take surveys to find out what your consumers think. “Eventually, marketers have to connect the dots”, Elliot concluded.
Further reading
I was slightly shocked to learn that marketers make so many mistakes on the field of social marketing. If you count yourself to one of those marketers, I suggest your start following Muhammad Saleem, whose well-know as THE social media marketing expert and marketing guru Seth Godin, as he blogs about the way you should think these days.
Written on April 22, 2008 – 7:40 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Here at the “Free Traffic, Search Engine & Social Media Optimization” Web 2.0 Expo session, social media expert and famous guest blogger at several influential blogs Muhammad Saleem talks about social media optimization. Most of what he tells is pretty basic and informative - start a campaign on Sunday night -, but I like his overall message the most: it’s about love and appreciation people! Here’s my interpretation of what he said.
Everybody on the web seems to be eager for some attention, but the best way to get some is to grant other people attention. For starters, write an evergreen post about your specialism. For example a Howto ebook about your hobby or profession that will remain interesting for a couple of years. As soon as people link to this quality content, show that you appreciate this and link back to them by saying: this blog picked up my news, read here what the blogger has to say about it. Or allow trackbacks. Other visitors will notice that it pays off to link to you, and start linking as well. Before you know it, you’ve started one big attention love chain.
One remark that goes hand in hand with the love-thought is that you have to be genuine. Of course you can act like you dig the social media revolution and that you’re oh-so open and honest. Yet if you don’t mean it, the savvy users will be able to look beyond your facade. Also, writing beautiful and spectacular headlines on social bookmarking sites is ok and truly effective, yet you have to deliver on the promise.
So if you haven’t yet: change your mindset before you enter the world of social media. Put some effort in relationships, reward active visitors and content-creating colleagues and participate in conversations and enjoy the attention.
Written on April 18, 2008 – 8:30 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
If you follow blogs like The Next Web and Altsearchengines, you might notice that social search engines are booming. Stumpedia, Topicle, AndUnite, you name it. They’re popping up everywhere and at least twice a week, one of the founders sends me a line to tell me why his engine is gonna be the top of the bill.
Geoffrey McCaleb from Nsyght is one of them. He and his team have found a new take on social searching: allowing users to use their bookmarks and their social graph to create a customized search experience. “the real eureka moment came when I thought, how can an algorithm tell me whats relevant when my assumptions of relevancy are going to be different from everyone else.”
McCaleb believes that no algorithm can replace the objectivity of a human being. “We all have different concepts and notions of what we find relevant. So, we wanted to create a search engine that didn’t treat every set of keywords the same. What you find relevant for a search may be different from mine.”
The beta version of Nsyght provides integrations into a number of social services such as del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, simpy, digg, last.fm, twitter, and pownce. “We do a couple of things with the social graph, we preserve friendships across different social networks, and we allow for users to syndicate their bookmarks between these services. The key takeaway point here, the more information we know about a person, the more we can customize the search to make it more relevant to them.”
The holy grail
But the most important question remains, Mr. McCaleb. Why would the public choose your search engine, out of all the other alternatives?
“Well there may be a lot of competition in this space, but I feel pretty strongly no one has approached the problem in the same way we have. The holy grail in search is not having the biggest index, but the one that gets you a relevant result in the shortest possible time. While we are small - a given since we are self-funded - we obviously have a ways to go. But as we gain more users, we will gain more of their bookmarks, and then we will have even more highly relevant sites in which to crawl and index.
Another way to look at it is this. PageRank is a brilliant concept, and still does an incredible job determining relevancy. But fundamentally, even with all the data points probably looks at it still is more concerned about the source and not the content. What we can do is let the user define the sites they feel are relevant, leverage their social network, and over time see their results become highly personalized. So in a way, augmenting the algorithm for their own use and gain.”
What do you use?
The only way to end this article, in my opinion, is to ask you guys whether you really use social search engines? Since you’re probably the most web-savvy crowd out there, you would also be the first ones to adopt a new trend. So tell me, still on Google? Or already switching to the brand new social engines?
Written on April 4, 2008 – 11:09 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
You probably know Nicholas Negroponte, the man who tries to supply every student in the developing world with an laptop of 100 dollar, The Children’s Machine, to extend Internet access in the third world. While that large problem still exists, according to Robert Scoble a new digital divide is emerging. He calls it the friend divide. “In the beginning of the nineties, everybody had the same experience on every computer. The digital divide back then was that some people had a computer and some didn’t.”
But when ICQ was launched, the experiences of people started to diverge. ICQ users with a hundred friends had a different experience than those with only two. With the new web, version 2.0, this diversion becomes more significant. Scoble proved this by showing versions of Google Reader, Twitter, Pownce, Friendfeed and Upcoming, one version with only one friend and the other one with Scoble’s famous collection of friends. 1000+ on Google Reader, 500 people on Upcoming, 3000 Powncers and over 17,000 Twitter contacts. So we got to witness two extremes here, one with no activity and the other version that was flooded by updates. Those are totally different user experiences, the consequence is the friend divide.
When ‘normal people’ decide to sign up on a service, they enter a pretty lame environment since there are no friends. Or as Scoble puts it: “The first experience is a real crappy experience, since there’s no input. And it’s all about input from other users”. According to Scoble, social networks should work on improving this first experience. One network that tried this a bit was MySpace, as they introduced you to Tom. But they can do better, says Scoble. For example, if a construction worker signs up, why not introducing him to a group of construction people? He could meet an architect and find relevant construction info through him. The same goes for techies, why not immediately hand them a contact list of established tech bloggers?
I think Scoble has a point, yet I’d love to hear a more thorough analysis of this new friend divide since I don’t see the importance of it yet. The problems that emerge from the digital divide are obvious: a part of the world lacks skills and knowledge about a digital phenomenon that is changing the world. But what are the consequences of the new digital divide? A small group of people finds more info than an immense group of people? I think Scoble is so involved in the tech scene that he tends to overestimate the influence of nice services like Twitter and Friendfeed.
Would there be a friend divide that influences millions of people, I think it comes down to this question: “Are you on Facebook or are you not?”
Written on March 25, 2008 – 12:30 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
If I remember it well, one of the first interactive parts of the web I was confronted with was a poll. I used to paste them in my sites, to see how many visitors actually paid attention. Since then, the web evolved to web 2.0 and polls are quite old-fashioned. We don’t want to express our opinion by just saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’, we rather write a blog post or shoot a short video. Yet the quick voting systems seem to get more popular again. Today I stumbled upon two fancy polling tools: Strawpoll and YouPop.
Polls on Twitter
Some people say Twitter is a waste of time. I dare to differ, but of course there are plenty of ways to turn it into a time-wasting tool. One is Strawpoll. Everyday, Rob Goodlatte and Dan Romero post one of life’s most important questions on Twitter. An example: Better Harrison Ford performance: Star Wars (1) or Blade Runner (2) ? Followers can reply by sending: @strawpoll Blade Runner. I’m a replicant bird! . Yet what makes this tool earning the label ‘fancy’ is their website. They track the results in a ridiculously good-looking way:
Video polls
So Strawpoll gives a good overview of what Twitterazi are thinking about mr. Ford’s career, yet it feels like something is missing. Maybe the voters have forgot about the heroic performances of Rick Deckard in Blade Runner and are just blinded by George Lucas’ movie branding skills.
YouPop takes away this problem by offering video support in polls. So now voters can watch the two trailer to revamp the feelings they had with the movie, in order to make a good judgment:
YouPop co-founder Robb Knie suggested on ReadWriteWeb that YouPop can also be used for deciding what movie you want to watch with your friends. You just embed an YouPop with two trailers on your Facebook or MySpace account so your friends can make the call.
Functions like that make me think that this rich-media tool defines the future of web polls. We want to be better informed, visually triggered and entertained, before we make a decision. Videos and pictures create a more intense experience which not only leads to more engagement (= better monetization) but will also generate some viral magic. Especially when it comes to the category ‘chicks‘.
To support the last statement: the most popular YouPop isn’t using any videos, just cleavage pics of Lindsay Lohan. How typical..
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