360DigitalInfluence

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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Please join us at an 8 am - 12 noon “unconference” on Friday, August 21st, in Atlanta - PR Camp Atlanta - organized by Dan Greenfield of Bernaise Source Media.

This event will be a fast-paced interactive learning experience free of panels and Powerpoint.   Learn and exchange ideas about social media relevance to senior executives, new approaches to measurement and effective sharing of knowledge.

We”ll be co-leading a session on measurement.  Here’s the full list of who’s helping guide the sessions:

- James Andrews, Managing Partner, Everywhere
- Melanie Babcock, SVP, Digital Strategy & Services, Manning Selvage & Lee
- Debbie Curtis-Magley, Public Relations Manager, UPS
- Bert Dumars, VP, E-Business & Interactive Marketing, Newell Rubbermaid
- Peter Fasano, Principal/Lead Catalyst, mass+logic
- Carol Flammer, Managing Partner, mRELEVANCE, LLC
- Christopher Jones, Digital Strategist, Ketchum PR
- Irfan Kamal, Vice President, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence
- Katie Mingo, Senior Marketing Associate, Delta Airlines
- Marilynn Mobley, SVP, Strategic Counsel, Edelman PR
- Shirley Powell, SVP, Corporate Communications, Turner Broadcasting System
- Jenny Schmitt, President and Director of Client Strategy, CloudSpark

Register here.

Earlier today John Bell and I formally introduced the Conversation Impact(TM) measurement model at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience Measurement 4.0.  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

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John Bell and I will be introducing Conversation Impact ™ - Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence’s simple, actionable model for evaluating the impact of social media - on June 23rd at the Advertising Research Foundation’s Audience Measurement 4.0 in New York.

Conversation Impact sorts through “metric chaff” to focus in on tracking and measuring a small set of metrics that impact brand relevant awareness, preference and action.

More to follow on the model, but for now, you can take advantage of a special $545 discount we are able to offer our readers through 5/22.  We look forward to seeing you there!  Read on for discount details.

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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:

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

My pick for the most interesting social media trend of 2008 was the growing focus on talking about social media engagement results - not just actions - across a broad spectrum of social media initiatives.

Here are three innovative uses for social media that generated strong quantifiable results (engagement, awareness, or conversion):

- In crowdsourcing, My Starbucks Idea reported receiving over 75,000 suggestions since its inception in early 2008; the company has implemented several of those including complimentary wi-fi at stores

- In microblogging, Dell Outlet reported selling over $500,000 in refurbished items through Twitter promotions

- In applications, Acuvue reported greater brand awareness and an 18% sales lift in the quarter following the introduction of a creative corporate Facebook application: Acuvue Wink

We’re doing some interesting work within the Digital Influence group on improving social media measurement, including comparability to other marketing media.   Stay tuned for more in 2009.

Word of mouth campaigns have occasionally played an important role in the marketing of new entertainment and media (movies, music, books and games), but research to establish the major drivers of success has produced mixed results.  

As a result, social media spend and monitoring is still a relatively small portion of the overall entertainment media spend.

However, a recent research paper by Dellarocas, Zhang and Awad, has used different analytical techniques to demonstrate that – among other factors like box office revenue, marketing budget and star power – a movie’s early word of mouth (quantified as volume of online movie reviews, tone of review and the gender mix of online reviewers over the first few days of a movie’s release) has a significant impact on forecast movie revenues.

As you might expect, more positive reviews are associated with higher revenues.   In addition, however, a greater total volume of reviews (regardless of tone) and a greater diversity of reviewer genders are also associated with higher predicted revenues.   Without this online metric data, the accuracy of projections declines by over 1/3.

Another interesting finding is that online review volume, tone and gender are especially good at predicting the expected performance of so-called “sleeper” movies, i.e. movies with initial release on only a limited number of theater screens.   Since the majority of movies aren’t blockbusters like Spiderman and fall into this category, the value of online metric tracking is high.

So what’s this all mean?

For movie exhibitors, movie marketing companies and rental companies like Netflix and Blockbuster, this research supports the use of online word of mouth tracking to significantly improve inventory, marketing and merchandising decisions.

What’s most exciting, in my opinion, I’d guess that:

(1) this model should apply not only to movies, but to many products and services that have similar launch patterns – including new books, music and games;

(2) creatively dialing up the volume of word of mouth could produce better gains than dialing up other types of marketing spend typically used for new movie marketing; and

(3) starting online conversations across a variety of demographic groups may be a better strategy than targeting just one group; and

(4) occasionally, building on  highly polarized discussions (i.e. both highly positive and highly negative)  to increase conversation volume may be  an effective marketing tool

Source:

Chrysanthos Dellarocas, Xiaoquan (Michael) Zhang, Neveen F. Awad, “Exploring the value of online product reviews in forecasting sales: The case of motion pictures”, Journal of Interactive Marketing, 21:4, pp 23-45, 2007 © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. and Direct Marketing Educational Foundation, Inc

You might wonder what types of conversational and social media to engage in online. The answer is probably more than just one type. In traditional media, it’s been shown that marketing messages delivered across multiple overlapping media (for example, television and print) are often more effective than those delivered through one channel - even if the reach and frequency in that one  channel is optimized.

Consider  extending this offline marketing campaign notion to the online space by  creating “distributed branding”.

The idea behind this strategy is to ensure your brand/positioning messaging is visible wherever target consumers live on the web. This strategy effectively maintains brand awareness over time at a cost that can be carefully  optimized.

In actually implementing a distributed branding strategy, you’ll be pulling together all the usual basic knowledge about  your online audience:    what your target users are doing online, where they’re spending their time  and  what are the behaviors of influencers  (i.e. friends, children and colleagues and others who will probably have a significant impact on the decisions of your core audience).

While you’ll probably want (or already have) more detailed use data for your target audience, below is helpful data from Forrester Research / Businessweek (see a longer article) that summarizes online activity by age segment. In a nutshell, for people age 18-40:

• 30-70% use social networking sites
• 40-60% read blogs, watch videos, listen to podcasts
• 25-35% comment/rate/read/write reviews
• 15-20% subscribe to RSS feeds, tag web pages

Even the best home sites typically engage consumers for only a limited time, often in connection with a specific activity. A distributed and pervasive presence can engage consumers through:

• widgets
• desktop apps
• screensavers or wallpaper
• podcasts
• blogs
• video
• games
• rss
• microblogging
• social networks (white label)
• social networks
• and more

Keeping your brand top-of-mind is a key objective, and the full variety of tools available online should be considered - if not used - in achieving this goal.