The Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has followed up on its 2007 and 2008 studies of social media usage by the Inc. 500. Adoption and awareness continue to trend upward, with 91% of firms using at least one social media tool in 2009 and three-quarters describing themselves as “very familiar” with social networking.
Social networking and blogging have seen the most growth in adoption, while other technologies have flattened or even declined in use, including wikis and online video. Twitter usage, of course, has caught on quickly—more than one-half of businesses reported tweeting in 2009. This was the first year respondents were polled about Twitter.
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Word-of-mouth is the top influencer for just about everything consumers do, and many social media marketers take that as an encouraging sign. After all, social media are about conversations. But, at least when it comes to video viewing, online dialogue is not as valuable as what Knowledge Networks refers to as “verbal” word-of-mouth.
Online video viewers were most likely to discover content and decide what to watch based on conversations that took place either in person or over the phone, according to the “How People Use Video Navigation” report. Traditional TV viewers were most influenced by TV ads, but verbal word-of-mouth ranked second for them as well. Social media was significantly more influential for discovering online viewing than traditional TV viewing, but still did not come close to real-life advice.
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Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over.
In its place, a new generation of services is starting to take hold—services like Twitter and Facebook and countless others vying for a piece of the new world. And just as email did more than a decade ago, this shift promises to profoundly rewrite the way we communicate—in ways we can only begin to imagine.
“I’ll stick with e-mail — write when I want, as often (or not ) as I want, to whom I want privately. No interest in letting the world know that I overcooked the spaghetti.”
—–Don Brazier
We all still use email, of course. But email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging off and on, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected, whether we are sitting at a desk or on a mobile phone. The always-on connection, in turn, has created a host of new ways to communicate that are much faster than email, and more fun.
Why wait for a response to an email when you get a quicker answer over instant messaging? Thanks to Facebook, some questions can be answered without asking them. You don’t need to ask a friend whether she has left work, if she has updated her public “status” on the site telling the world so. Email, stuck in the era of attachments, seems boring compared to services like Google Wave, currently in test phase, which allows users to share photos by dragging and dropping them from a desktop into a Wave, and to enter comments in near real time.
Little wonder that while email continues to grow, other types of communication services are growing far faster. In August 2009, 276.9 million people used email across the U.S., several European countries, Australia and Brazil, according to Nielsen Co., up 21% from 229.2 million in August 2008. But the number of users on social-networking and other community sites jumped 31% to 301.5 million people.
“The whole idea of this email service isn’t really quite as significant anymore when you can have many, many different types of messages and files and when you have this all on the same type of networks,” says Alex Bochannek, curator at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
So, how will these new tools change the way we communicate? Let’s start with the most obvious: They make our interactions that much faster.
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Social influence on Gen Y trendsetters
Generation Y females have redefined the idea of “peer group” to encompass online friends, bloggers and anonymous reviewers, according to the “Why Y Women?” report from PopSugar and Radar Research.
Looking to this expansive group of peers, rather than experts or celebrities, Gen Y women are particularly influenced by social media.
Younger women are nearly twice as likely as their Gen X counterparts to say they had discovered a new brand or product when a friend mentioned it in an online status update. They are also significantly more influenced by blogs, by both professionals and especially by “someone like me.”
One of the biggest misconceptions with online marketing is that social media is only for large brands. Truthfully, a small business that invests its time wisely can improve customer (or client) loyalty and traditional word of mouth marketing efforts.
Social media is useful for almost every type of business. Cafes, retail stores, and even professional services can build their online reputation and increase trust. By taking advantage of social media, businesses can make themselves more accessible, more personable, and maintain long term connections. For a small business looking to increase referrals, social media can be a powerful tool.
Here are five ways small businesses can capitalize on this new form of marketing.
Why use social media?
The best way to illustrate why small businesses are using social media is with a story. Think back to the days of the wild west. In those days, towns had one general store, and the store owner knew everyone. People trusted him and knew what they were getting. Enter the industrial age, and efficiency trumped personalization. People didn’t mind where they bought from, as long as goods were cheap.
Now, that mentality has changed. Consumers are once again reverting to a need for personalization from businesses large and small. The need has been rekindled by the Internet and our ability to find anything we want, as well as a mistrust of advertising (think used cars salesmen).
We’ve reached a point where the consumer wants to know the store owner’s name and that he can be trusted. Small businesses must look beyond their want to grow into corporations, and instead focus on their core customers. Thanks to social media, we’re able to foster these relationships easily and quickly.
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Earlier today, we reported that Americans now spend 17% of all of their online time on social networks. This makes a lot of sense and many readers commented that Facebook or Twitter are the first things they pull up on the web every single day.
But what types of individuals are the the heaviest users of social networks and social media? According to a new study put out by Nielsen Claritas, if you live in the U.S. and use Facebook , LinkedIn or MySpace, you are likely to be more affluent — and more urban (that is, live in a larger city) than the average American.
Demographic Differences Between Facebook and MySpace
Even back in 2007, there
was heavy discussion over the differences between the MySpace and Facebook demographics. Of course, much has changed in the past two years.
Facebook usage has skyrocketed and the types of users that flock to both services has changed (and are, on average, much older than they were in 2007). These changes seem to have created a disparity in wealth between users of the world’s two largest social networks.
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Social media is helping to forge a new era in business transparency and engagement, creating both new challenges and opportunities. Gone are the days when companies could rely on carefully crafted press releases or flashy ad campaigns to communicate with their customers, often in an attempt to convince people that their products are the best in the field. In the age of social media, the rules have changed radically, and people today demand a more honest and direct relationship with the companies with which they do business.
Companies now face a clear choice: wall themselves in and become increasingly controlled and hidden, or use social media and other means to reveal their human side, welcome transparency, and forge new relationships with their customers. The old game is undoubtedly over, and the question now is, “what can businesses do to transition and succeed in this new era?”
Below are the top four broad shifts that social media is causing in business. Please feel free to share any others you have observed in the comments.
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It is hard to know sometimes how our life has changed until we stop for a moment and look at how different it is from ten or even five years ago. In recent years social media, likely more than anything else, has significantly impacted most of our daily lives. Envisioning the global conversation that has developed over the past few years because of tools like Facebook and Twitter might have been unimaginable for most people at the beginning of this decade.
But social media communication tools have profoundly changed our lives and how we interact with one another and the world around us. Here are the top areas that social media has affected in our daily lives.
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I know: You feel like you’re already taking social media seriously. You’re Tweeting and posting, blogging and following. You’ve got accounts on every site that allows you to share and you’ve got them all linked together. You’re out there and you’re social.
Big deal.
It doesn’t take much effort to set up an account on most social sites, and the effort involved in putting out content is fairly minor as well. With social media, success isn’t 90 percent showing up.
Just showing up doesn’t get you anything. It’s time for brand marketers to show up to social media with a purpose and goal, as well as a clear strategy on how to get there.
First, become extremely serious about measuring the effort you’re putting in and determining the value you’re getting out. Several companies begin just the early stages of measurement, but — just as frequently — their overall approach to measurement goes horribly wrong.
So, to help you determine how to best measure social media, let’s examine five ways people go wrong when measuring social media. I’ll also give some tips on how to do things better.
Read More Here
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Re-posted from Forbes.com written by Daniel Adler, “Twenty-One Top Twitter Tips”
You’ve heard about Twitter–that curious, strangely addictive social-networking technology that facilitates torrents of truncated messages among millions of users. You might even know your hashtags from your re-tweets. But how can you make money with it?
Forbes canvassed scads of businesses and pricey social-networking gurus looking for honest answers. Admittedly, we were skeptical. After all, how much can you accomplish in 140 characters or less?
Turns out there are myriad ways Twitter can have an impact, and not just as a marginal marketing tool. Indeed, we found 21 clever ways to use Twitter–for everything from boosting sales and scouting talent, to conducting market research and raising capital. Chances are, there will be many more.
“I believe Twitter is a communication platform,” says Nathan Egan, founder of Freesource Agency, a social-networking consultancy in Philadelphia. “In a year or two, everyone will be on it, using it in totally new ways.” Better yet, getting results “doesn’t take a year or six months, but a matter of weeks,” adds Mark Schaefer, head of Schaefer Marketing Solutions in Knoxville, Tenn.
Some strategies take more time, or are more industry-specific, than others. Taken together, though, this collection of techniques and real-world examples constitutes a powerful online arsenal for companies large and small.
Go past the break for highlights.
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