On Social Business

Twitter has been nothing short of a world phenomenon, popular in countries around the world and an undisputed factor in significant political change – and a star for customer service. It continues to grow rapidly, with a recent emarketer study projecting Twitter growth up to 4x higher than Facebook (on a lower base) in 2014. And, there are many of us who greatly value the discovery and connections we achieve through Twitter.

Our own research suggests exposure to social content has a significant impact on brand perception and sales impact (2-7x increased probability of purchase lift based on a restaurant study).  So, the general outlook for social content is bright.

The Problem

Yet even with its success in some high visibility areas and its fantastic growth, it just doesn’t seem like Twitter has quite hit its stride yet.  It has been overshadowed by Facebook and – at least for now – new entrants like Pinterest.

• It’s the #2 social network based on visits, but its current total user active user base is still much lower than Facebook’s (about 1/6 of Facebook in the US, according to eMarketer)

• Engagement is low — monthly average time spent on Twitter (36 minutes) is 91% lower than time on Facebook (6 hours 33 min) and 54% lower than Pinterest (1 hour 17 min), according to Mediabistro/Statista

• As a partial result of this (and probably as a result of other factors such as ad tools and analytics), monetization has lagged, with estimated 2011 revenues of $139.5 million (eMarketer), or about 1/25th of Facebook’s $3.71 billion actual 2011 revenues (S-1 filing).

It seems that these issues are among those threatening Twitter’s ability to increase its momentum with brands and organizations.

The Way Forward

Based on the data above, some of our own research, and some thinking based on work with brands, it appears that there are 3 steps that could make a dramatic difference for Twitter:

John Bell and I formally introduced the Conversation Impact(TM) measurement model at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience Measurement 4.0 on June 23rd.  Here’s a brief overview of the model, its goals and planned evolution.

The model was developed by our team to provide brands with a comprehensive, recognizable framework for tracking social media campaigns.   We relied heavily on our experience with a range of social media campaigns for both B2B and B2C clients, and considered the types of questions and reporting requests we receive with every new project or request for information.

We focus on simplicity and comparability across media – the latter, to help guide marketers with media allocation.  We categorize our metrics into 3 areas, corresponding roughly to objectives and “marketing funnel” stages; each is shown below, with representative metrics (the metrics are selected based on unique client needs).   Included are both familiar and new metrics.

Image courtesy of Crimson Hexagon

A new experimental site, Photocracy.org, is a crowdsourcing initiative to explore whether images are useful in providing brand identity information. The people behind the site, Princeton University student Josh Weinstein and Sociology Professor Matthew Salganik, are currently collecting information on perceptions of 3 countries – the United States, China and Japan – using votes on images of those countries.  Visitors from each country are asked to choose which of 2 pictures is more representative of the country.  Since the site’s launch a few weeks ago, over 100,000 votes have been cast for comparisons like this one:

Photocracy.org US comparison images - cowboy on horse vs. Obama

Why is this useful?  To find out, I asked the people behind the project some questions.

Many of us are familiar with Techmeme, a useful news aggregator with a focus on aggregation of tech stories across the web and the blogosphere.  Techmeme has an entertaining sister site (Wesmirch) that aggregates celebrity gossip.   Other popular blog news aggregators include Technorati and search services such as Twingly.

Polymeme is an interesting new entrant attempting to focus a bit differently by clustering stories from a database of over 25,000 blogs across the following relatively unusual categories:

In an earlier post, I summarized the results of a study suggesting that several characteristics of movie word of mouth or buzz correlated well with expected total revenue over the movie’s release cycle.

There’s been a tremendous amount of word of mouth buzz surrounding this past weekend’s release of The Dark Knight, so I wanted to see what types of opening box office might be associated with pre-release buzz.

As a comparison, I also looked at volume of word of mouth around Hellboy II (the top release last weekend).

Direct marketing has long relied on good experimental design and techniques such as A/B testing to optimize ROI.  One of the appeals of Internet marketing has been the ability to optimize and track ROI on campaigns, and that’s also one of the ways that early Internet advertising was able to secure a foothold in the savvy marketer’s budget.

The use of (and buzz around) social media has been growing rapidly.  Is it possible – and, just as importantly, appropriate and desirable - to bring a comparable level of experimental and planning rigor to social media?

My short answer: yes, it is possible, appropriate and indeed very desirable for at a subset of social media and a subset of objectives (specifically, for branding/advocacy and for purchase/intent to purchase).

The art commissioned by the Spanish Olympics organization (ADO) struck me as an example of a creative and authentic campaign with high passalong potential: the artwork is striking, original and appealingly non-commercial.

The art is by Jaume de Laiguana.  Here are some representative examples portraying Spain’s boxing, gymnastics and synchronized swimming teams; visit ADO’s online brochure to see the full set.

In deciding how effectively a new product (or service) can leverage social media, among other factors, I look for whether the product offers a genuinely different/unique and communicable benefit that’s relevant to a socially addressable demographic, i.e. a market that can be efficiently reached or influenced through social media.

As a pet (dog) owner, I’m interested in solutions that can help clean up after my happily shedding dog.

Let’s take a quick look at Eureka’s recently launched Boss 4D pet-friendly vacuum cleaner.

There are some brilliantly creative uses of social / conversational media – desktop apps, conversation monitoring, customer service programs, word of mouth and buzz creation services, facebook and myspace apps and games (to name a few) – that could potentially be very helpful for a brand seeking to expand its presence online and gain market insights.

From the perspective of a brand manager, marketing manager or agency seeking to maximize the value of their company’s /client’s marketing budget, however, it’s very important to understand how to allocate funds.  What metrics make sense to use for allocation optimization?

Here are some suggestions based on popular social media objectives. A TNS Media Intelligence / Cymfony late 2007 phone survey of 71 marketing professionals in the US, Canada, the UK and France suggests that marketers generally have the following objectives for social media:

Marketing messages that are delivered across multiple (overlapping) media are often more effective than those delivered across just one or two media – even if the reach and frequency in those one or two media is high.

It’s worth exploring extending this marketing campaign notion to the creation of “distributed branding” through a web strategy that creates brand presence wherever target consumers “live” on the web. This strategy effectively maintains brand awareness over time at a relatively low cost.

In implementing a distributed interactive branding strategy, it’s helpful to know both what your target users are doing online and by whom they might be influenced (friends, children and colleagues)*.  While you’ll probably want (or already have) more detailed use data for your target audience, below is a helpful overview graphic from Forrester Research / Businessweek (main article) that summarizes online activity by age segment. In a nutshell, for people age 18-40: