“Social media is like teen sex. Everyone wants to do it. Nobody knows how. When it’s finally done there is surprise it’s not better.” – Avinash Kaushik – Analytics Evangelist, Google
Why is that? One factor may be that traditional measures and metrics are not easily applied to social media.
Traditional measurement goes something like this:
Marketing Investment = $30,000
# of Leads Generated = 1000
Cost per Lead = $30
Social Media Measurement can look something like this:
Blog Comments + Conversation + LinkedIn x Twitter = Success
You’re probably thinking…”uhmmm… What?! How can you possibly measure a conversation?” Social media requires a tweak to the way we think about marketing measurement. We need to consider that indirect influence generated via social media can often lead to sales. It’s just a different sort of measurement.
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Reprinted from toprankblog.com by Adam Singer as “7 reasons Social Media is a no-brainier for passionate B2C brands”
Social media is fast becoming a standard element in the marketing mix of major consumer brands. And with good reason: never before has such a creative landscape existed for people and the brands they love to interact, share stories and build relationships – in all directions.
With social media marketing spends predicted to grow at an annual rate of 34% according to a report from Forrester Research, analyst trends support these thoughts. Yet, not all companies are sold, with many taking a “wait and see” approach as they believe the landscape to be risky and unproven.
Just the opposite is true – waiting may prove the riskiest move of all as brands who wait too long only succeed in yielding ground to agile competitors. This may prove especially damaging in the B2C space. When consumers pledge allegiance to favorite brands, they may stick with those brands indefinitely and outright ignore competitors.
At this point, the rewards far outweigh the risks, especially for brands following a social media roadmap, something which sets themselves up for success.
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More exciting news from Star Alerts and The Napoleon Hill Foundation. As you probably already know, Barnes and Noble in conjunction with the Napoleon Hill Foundation is releasing the new Think and Grow Rich next month. Its title – Three Feet From Gold.
Think & Grow Rich - Three Feet From Gold
This is going to be the biggest book launch in a long time and we are proud to announce that they have named Star Alerts as an Official Sponsor of the Three Feet From Gold book launch. What an honor to be a part of this monumental book series.
For those of you who don’t know the story of the original Think and Grow Rich, it goes a little something like this. It’s 1908 and the country finds itself struggling. The richest man of the time, Andrew Carnegie gives Napoleon Hill a letter and commissions him to go around and interview all the most successful people in the nation. What resulted was the book, Think and Grow Rich. This book has been attributed with creating more millionaires than any other book in the history of the world!
Now fast forward to 2008, 100 years later and the country finds itself once again struggling to stay afloat. The Napoleon Hill foundation once again commissions a writer with a letter to go around and interview all the most successful people of the time. That writer was Greg S. Reid, and the resulting book is Think and Grow Rich – Three Feet From Gold.
The book will be released to the public on October 6th and can be purchased presale at Barnes and Noble.
The book launch party will be October 24th in Irvine, California and will feature Greg S Reid, Sharon Lechter, Mark Victor Hansen and many other celebrity experts. Tickets are $99 and can be purchased here
We look forward to seeing you all at the event, it will truly be a monumental occasion!
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Recent technological developments that allow for deposits by iPhone and mobile payments could one day make ATMs as quaint as brick-and-mortar bank branches. But the biggest impact may be on the ability of banks — and even nontraditional players such as Nokia — to find new revenue streams as they branch into emerging markets where cash is still king.
USAA: Deposit via iPhone
On the home front, the technology moves apace and isn’t very hard to understand. The military bank and insurance provider USAA recently launched mobile check-deposit technology, which lets users deposit checks from anywhere using an iPhone. USAA customers take photos of both sides of a check with the phone and transmit the images to the bank, which then verifies and makes the deposit. The bank has only one branch in San Antonio and, because of its military legacy, has customers in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Read More Here
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Star Alerts is proud to announce their partnership with the Napoleon Hill foundation.
The Napoleon Hill Foundation
It is truly an honor to be working side by side with such a phenomenal organization.
Star Alerts and The Napoleon Hill Foundation are both excited about the new book Think and Grow Rich – Three Feet From Gold which is set to be released next month.
Written by renown author and speaker Greg S. Reid, and following in the footsteps of the original book. It is sure to be a major success and we look forward to being there supporting it and watching all the success happen.
More to come on both this new partnership and the upcoming book release.
For More Information on Think and Grow Rich – Three Feet From Gold you can visit Greg Reid’s page here.
Reprinted from EMarketer.com “Cost and ROI for Mobile Campaigns”
Patrick J. Moorhead
Director of Emerging Media
Razorfish
Patrick Moorhead oversees R&D initiatives on behalf of Razorfish’s Advanced Marketing Solutions group. This division helps clients and staff understand and evaluate emerging media technologies, including mobile media. He offers cross-media consultations that identify the practical applications of using emerging media as a marketing vehicle.
Mr. Moorhead discusses the mechanics of mobile campaigns, the similarity between online and mobile metrics and the fundamentals of mobile ROI.
eMarketer: What do mobile campaigns cost?
“An eight-week campaign for mobile media…we’re probably talking about $250,000 to $300,000.”
Patrick Moorhead: An eight-week campaign for mobile media—which could be a combination of mobile display and text messaging—we’re probably talking about $250,000 to $300,000.
That investment offers substantial reach and will allow us to do pretty specific targeting at the device and content levels, and even a little bit of geo-targeting. It includes the data from the test and some very favorable rates on CPMs or CPC.
With that kind of an investment, I should be able to go back to the client and explain how mobile worked for them. We’ll be able to make some real decisions after that.
eMarketer: What kind of metrics and benchmarks should marketers expect?
Mr. Moorhead: Marketers want to know, how many acquisitions of consumer phone numbers or e-mails did a mobile campaign drive? How many messages did we deliver? How many page views did we get at the WAP page? What were the most popular products viewed at the WAP level? How many clicks did the mobile banners get?
A lot of these metrics look similar to the way that we measure online media, which is one of the neat corollaries between online and mobile.
One thing that is overlooked is that mobile kind of lives in the middle of the media ecosystem. It’s kind of a thread that stitches together an experience from online to TV to a billboard to a magazine to a preroll video online. We refer to mobile as the connective tissue in digital.
In order to plan and effectively capitalize on the technology inside a large organization, you’re bringing a group of people together who typically don’t spend a lot of time together. It could be someone in the e-commerce catalog business, a digital marketing person, a IT person and, potentially, even an outdoor media person.
These people never cross paths but because of the requirements of working in mobile, they now have to collaborate. I think a separate class of metrics is needed regardless of campaign performance—how did the organization perform around embracing the channel?
Even if the campaign tanks in terms of performance metrics, if the group resolves who owns, maintains and pays for the mobile marketing and media channel, that might be a better metric for success in the short term for organizations seeking to understand it.
eMarketer: What about ROI?
“I redefine ROI as return on innovation as opposed to return on investment.”
Mr. Moorhead: I redefine ROI as return on innovation as opposed to return on investment. Return on innovation is that organizational metric that assesses how well the organization embraced the channel.
Our online display campaigns typically have 0.01% to 0.09% click-through rates. If it’s well-planned and targeted, it’s not unrealistic for a mobile campaign to have a 1%, 2% or even 3% click-through rate depending on the creative messaging and the offer. In sponsored SMS campaigns, we’ve seen click-through rates on sponsored text links go as high as 9% and 10%.
For a retail client, for example, we’ve seen unique visitor traffic to the mobile Web experience equal the online page view traffic numbers. Essentially, we were able to drive a volume of traffic to the mobile Webpage that reached parity with the traffic that we drove to the online page.
What’s interesting about that is that the amount of money we spent in mobile to drive a parity number and page view traffic between online and mobile was 5% of what we spent online to achieve the same traffic.
Reprinted from Penn State Live
Written by Jenna Spinelle & Andrea Messer published as ” Tweeting is more than just self-expression”
University Park, Pa. — From CNN to Ashton Kutcher, everyone is tweeting. In ads, many companies now display the logo of an animated blue bird holding a sign that says “follow me.”
Twitter, a micro-communication service that gives users an opportunity to express their thoughts in 140-character “tweets,” is a hit in the social media world. Companies are also benefiting from Twitter, where 20 percent of the tweets contain requests for product information or responses to the requests, according to Jim Jansen, associate professor of information science and technology in the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) at Penn State.
“People are using tweets to express their reaction, both positive and negative, as they engage with these products and services,” said Jansen. “Tweets are about as close as one can get to the customer point of purchase for products and services.”
Jansen, along with IST doctoral student Mimi Zhang, undergraduate student Kate Sobel and Twitter chief scientist Abdur Chowdhury, investigated micro-communicating as an electronic word-of-mouth medium, using Twitter as the platform. Their results were published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Sciences and Technology.
The researchers examined half a million tweets during the study. The team looked for tweets mentioning a brand and why the brand was mentioned — to inform others, express a view on the brand or something else — and found that people were using tweets to connect with the products.
There is a trend when it comes to micro-communication and what it is used for, according to Jansen.
“Businesses use micro-communication for brand awareness, brand knowledge and customer relationship,” he said. “Personal use is all over the board.”
With about six million active users daily and predictions of more than 20 million users by the end of the year, Twitter has become the next big thing on the Web. Even though Twitter is still in its early stages of adoption, he sees it being around for a while. This is mainly because people and businesses are starting to make profits from it, using it as a creative way to market their products. He also said the concept of micro-blogging as a whole can be just as influential as other social media channels.
“It may be right up there with e-mail in terms of its communication impact,” Jansen said.
Results from the study found that users employ Twitter to inquire about product information. About 20 percent of the tweets contained product information in the form of asking and providing, thus giving companies a “rich source” of information concerning issues and questions that customers have regarding their products.
Jansen’s prediction was not far off from the results, though some results did surprise him.
“A lot of the brand comments were positive,” he said. “There are some good products out there, or at least products that people are happy with.”
This research is among the first academic studies in the area of micro-communication within the business sector. Jansen will use the research as a backbone to build on. The research team is now conducting a focused study specifically on how companies manage and use their Twitter accounts.
“I’ve been really into the keyword advertising area and Web searching,” said Jansen. “One aspect of micro-communication is the use of and sharing of information. This opens up a new area that has not been explored before.”
Reprinted From Govit Journal “Will PR Firms Survive The Social Media Avalanche?”
Author: Fuat Kircaali
(June 17, 2009) – Last week I received an email from Lindsey Miller at Ragan Communications. I answered her questions for a story she was working on here.
The following is the full text of my reply to her on this subject.
What kinds of PR firm will survive the “fast-approaching social media avalanche”? What steps will firms have to take to ensure that they make it through?
I know a lot of PR firms that are chasing new accounts among publicly traded companies, which are seen as cash cows in the business. I also know a lot of firms whose sales teams are larger than their senior account staff which will actually get the job done. These firms have armies of new college-grad telemarketers spitting out press releases to the media.
For a while you can get away with both approaches. Once the laws, rules and regulations change, the first group of PR firms will disappear overnight as I mentioned in my original blog entry here.
The demise of the second group of firms will come from the social media freight train. PR firms need to catch up with the change.
More information go past the break
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“Follow us on Twitter! Become our fan on Facebook!” With the boom of all these social media sites, marketers and celebrities alike are branding their selves and their name anywhere and everywhere they can. NOW is the time to have a grip on social media. It’s no longer an option to sit back, but it’s essential to be a part of this ever-growing new generation. It’s about efficiently using your time while creating the most impact. Many brands struggle with engaging users once the space is established. The question more or less is not how do we begin, but where do we go from here.
Some people are missing the mark and failing to see the prevalence, popularity, and the efficiency of social media. Blogs, Facebook, YouTube, and microblogging sites like Twitter have become increasingly significant tools for communication and advertising between family, friends, and business partners. Unlike traditional media that deals mainly with print and broadcast, social media is a platform for interaction and relationships virtually in real time.
But even with this boom in social change, be smart in how you use these social networking sites. Ignoring this growing change and trend will hurt you more than anything. For example, the recent Domino’s Pizza YouTube fiasco has hurt the Domino’s Pizza corporation for being aware of the situation yet waiting too long to respond to the public. Every organization needs to keep a consistent and effective social media presence engaging constantly with consumers by discussing and responding efficiently to complaints or concerns. Brushing off what just seems to be a nuisance and allowing it to become viral is an elementary mistake. A response needs to be expedited. Internet consumers trust peer reviews and comments. For this matter, it is critical that organizations monitor and participate in the conversation to promote and protect brand value. You do not want to drive social content towards your company in a negative light and become one of the most watched notorious videos on YouTube and have it retweeted.
Engaging in social media allows you to cut out the middleman that is necessary for traditional media. The confusion from a game of telephone, messages being construed, or the hassle of arranging a press conference can be eliminated because with social media direct posts can be made in your own voice and as often as possible with no costs. So why are people not readily adapting to this new societal shift?
