360DigitalInfluence

With various types of social media (Facebook, Twitter, message boards, blogs, private social communities, Youtube and other social sites) taking up an increasing portion of consumer attention, we wanted to understand just how relevant social content exposure is to changes in sales and brand perception.

Much of the work to date has looked at direct channel impacts; for example, do direct clicks from a social media site result in sales? This study of restaurant consumers attempts to understand the more complex factors that lead to consumer purchase and perception changes.

We released our final report yesterday at Pivot Conference 2011 in New York.   We found that in the real world, social content exposure - by itself and more broadly when combined with other types of media exposure such as out-of-home, PR or TV ads - is linked with 2-7x higher likelihood of consumption and actual spend increases. And, social content exposure alone is associated with the largest impact on week-to-week brand perception changes.

The infographic below the fold provides a summary of the results.  Here’s the full study:

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What if, instead of targeting 5,000 people, you could achieve the same bottom line results by engaging 500 or even 5 people, at a lower total cost? That’s the potential of influence marketing. Is it living up to that promise and how can this type of marketing be scaled in 2012?

What we do know:

• Changes in consumer attention mean marketing is changing, and the change is dramatic
• It’s becoming clear that one of key players in this change is the individual consumer
• Individuals are playing a central role because they trust each other – often a lot more than they trust companies
• In today’s environment they’re able to better communicate and share with each other – on many things, including products, services and causes

So, do we then target all individuals engaged in social media? Our thinking is that individuals who are influential can create outsized value. There’s been a lively debate around this (see, for example, Paul Adams excellent discussion and his comprehensive collection of relevant research links). It seems to me that most of the debate seems to center around the definitions of who is an influencer. To us, an influencer is not defined solely by the number of people they connect to. Quite simply, an influencer is someone who is capable of – and wants to - bring about changes in awareness, perception or action in a group of people, around a specific topic. Below, we present 3 real world data points assessing the value of different types of influencers.

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Can social media drive sales? One recent study found that about a quarter of social network users report having had their purchases influenced by social media.  On the other hand, another recent study found that direct clicks from social media sites didn’t generate notable sales.   But this type of click study doesn’t really capture the full extent of media influence on consumer behavior.

To take a more comprehensive look at the impact of social media, we tracked a sample group of Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) consumers’ exposure to a variety of brand ‘touchpoints” and obtained pre- and post-tracking data on purchase.

What we found

According to results we are previewing from this new Ogilvy-ChatThreads study entitled Integrated Social Media Sales Impact, there is a strong link between an increase in sales and exposure to social media.

In fact, we found that in the real world, social media exposure - by itself and more broadly when combined with other types of media exposure such as out-of-home, PR or TV ads - is linked with 2-7x higher likelihood of consumption and actual spend increases for some QSR brands.

Specifically, here are some key results, summarized in the diagram and below:

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We’re pleased to announce we will be previewing groundbreaking new quantitative data on social media impact at the ARF’s Audience Measurement (AM) 6.0 conference in a special emerging hot topics general session on June 13.

The data will help marketers and senior executives better understand the business impact of social media, alone and in combination with other types of comunications (such as TV, outdoor and online ads). The study data will provide a look at the attitudes and purchase impact of social media within the Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) category, using data collected with our study partner ChatThreads’ Touchpoints consumer brand interaction data collection and reporting system.

According to the ARF, AM 6.0 is the world’s largest audience measurement conference.  The event will feature new announcements and data from executives at Google and Facebook.  Here’s a link to the event info.  We hope you can join us.

The world’s demand for resources (food, energy, water, minerals) seems to be outrunning our ability to supply these needs in a way that doesn’t dramatically impact our lives. We are increasingly exposed to threats such as rising core inflation (described recently by Chinese officials as a long-term, not short-term challenge), financial burdens of securing energy supplies (and the cost of investing in new ones), and the multiple economic and social risks of long-term climate change on our planet and way of life.

The trouble is that, according to “Mainstream Green“, a new report released by Ogilvy Earth, all this doom and gloom hasn’t been particularly effective in driving mainstream consumers to make (and push for) changes to reduce demand for energy and other resources.

In the US, there’s a 30 percentage point gap between people’s stated importance of living sustainably (80% say this is important), and their action (50% engage in sustainable behavior, e.g. taking public transportation or hiking/biking to work; using eco-friendly products and recycling). (It’s less in China — 14 points — for reasons covered at length in the report.) The mainstream consumer isn’t adopting or championing behavior change.

The possible solution?

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Join us from 8-9:30 am on Tuesday November 16th at Ogilvy (Washington), 1111 19th Street NW, Washington, DC for a panel discussion and release of a new white paper on social media and public health, summarizing key best practices in social media engagement and measurement.

You’ll learn about key developments in public health and social media, best practices for engagement, demographic trends relevant to public health and social media, and a new framework for measuring impact that goes well beyond just impressions.

Panelists will include:
– Susannah Fox, Associate Director, Digital Strategy, Pew Research Center
– Irfan Kamal, Social Media Evaluation Expert, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence Group
– Marie Cocco, Director, National Communications, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids
– Jessica Kutch, Website Coordinator, Service Employees International Union
– Joel Selzer, CEO and Co-Founder, Ozmosis

The white paper to be introduced was developed under the Social Marketing Fellowship created by Ogilvy and the Center for Social Impact Communication at Georgetown University.

Could significant advances in science come not from machines alone but from the clever co-creation effort of both humans and machines ?

That’s the tantalizing promise of a novel social/crowdsourced downloadable game and the focus of a first-of-a-kind pharmaceutical industry-sponsored “protein folding” contest.

So what’s protein folding and why does it matter? The brief version: There are many ways that proteins can fold, and the prediction of the most likely shapes is extremely hard for computers to do. Yet, the more we know about how certain proteins fold, the better we can design new proteins to combat disease and find cures for such afflictions as cancer and Alzheimer’s. For a longer version, check this out.

Enter Foldit: this new game was designed and built by Zoran Popovic’s team at the University of Washington to allow people to fold proteins – without any special knowledge of biochemistry. Foldit uses humans’ ability to “see” in 3D – combined with a fun game environment - to help find the shapes that proteins will be most likely to fold into.

As part of its desire to support innovative work among rising new scientists, MedImmune (a client of ours, and a biologics company that’s part of AstraZeneca) teamed up with Foldit to launch the 2010 University Protein Folding Challenge last Friday.

The protein being used is one that’s important to understanding pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest cancers.

To date, 20 teams from a range of universities are competing in the 2-week long Challenge.

Here’s the contest leaderboard:

Share your thoughts – is this type of human-machine co-creation a fun but niche idea?Or is this something that could become much bigger?

According to Comscore, over 25 million users accessed Facebook via a mobile phone in Jan 2010, a 112% year-over-year increase.

With its initial US-based rollout of Places location functionality on the 30+ million iPhone installed base, Facebook joins Twitter and others in embracing the growing use of smartphones for social networking.

Importantly, this change allows Facebook to expand users’ social graphs beyond such items as friends, product/service affinities and demographics to now include location.

Here are three thoughts on implications for marketers, agencies and social location startups:

Location checkins should help drive impulse and, to some extent, planned purchases. It’s clear that coupons, discounts and other promotions will be important for increasing share of wallet — particularly for the impulse purchases estimated to account for 20+% of consumer spending. Companies like Shopkick are already implementing functionality to enable this, and it’s clearly going to be of value in driving revenue for a wide range of companies.

Checkins will provide new opportunities to build relationships and better understand customers. Less promotional location-driven engagement will be helpful in increasing preference and loyalty. If a user must check into a location manually, they’re either doing so for convenience (e.g. to locate friends or offers nearby) or as self-expression. The latter provides an interesting opportunity for a brand to engage — for example, by providing messaging or advice that’s related to the type of location visited.  This also provides an opportunity for B2B brand engagement.

Social network partners may well provide more unique experiences for brands. Much as well-designed social games from companies like Zynga and Playdom have created a powerful draw for Facebook users (consuming ~40% of Facebook user minutes), startups like SCVNGR, Gowalla, Foursquare and Booyah will likely use Facebook graph + location data to create interesting experiences. They’ll have the added opportunity to integrate data across Facebook, Twitter and other non-Facebook smartphone users.

One of the biggest potential issues to consider is user privacy — the current implementation has some issues that have been widely written about. However, in the past Facebook has eventually responded with changes to enable users to manage their privacy in an acceptable way.

Read more about key steps for brands to start taking.

Photo credit: Graph, by Librarian by Day

According to the most recent numbers from Inside Network’s Appdata, there are currently over 82 million people - or about twice the entire population of California - playing Zynga’s social game Farmville.

Aside from the growing magnitude of the player base for social games like Farmville, a recently released Information Solutions Group / Popcap study also suggests that these games are reaching a broader and more diverse segment of the population than one might expect.

Here are some of the US-specific findings about social game players from the study*:

- average age is 48

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There’s been a lot of interesting discussion recently on how to best leverage channels like Twitter to communicate.  This post talks about a bit about the co-creation of new social experiences that drive conversation and engagement in innovative ways, with the potential to then communicate the co-creation activity across multiple channels - including Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and Flickr.

More than ever before, people have tools to help them co-create products and services in social environments.  It’s an exciting trend that’s still very much in its infancy.  Many of us are familiar with Cafepress, Zazzle and Nike’s custom shoes NIKEiD program.  These were early - and still successful - examples of firms that help people remix and create everything from shoes to skateboards.

We’re now seeing signs of continued evolution of this general trend, in areas as diverse as fashion, fabrication and finance. The ideas these companies are introducing will change the way a range of industries introduce, sell and market products.  For marketers, these companies all demonstrate useful and innovative approaches to genuine engagement of audiences around co-creation.

Instructables (DIY)
Part of the rapidly growing online “fab” and DIY trend, this site provides one of the best communities centered around creating almost anything - including an Electric Umbrella, Pulled Chicken, a Cardboard Frisbee and even Homer Simpson’s 3D Doughnut Trophy. The site reaches over 4 million monthly unique visitors globally.

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