Tag Archives: social media marketing

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest: an update

Have you read that post by BusinessInsider about how ridicously complicated social marketing has become?

social media marketingAs a marketing (including social) person I have to admit they were not that far from the truth. Also, I keep asking myself how is that possible to recover from the crisis till all these new tools come up and involve millions of people, usually during their working hours.

But that’s another story… I will soon do some new analysis on the GDP/Social Network trend relations to update the one I did last year.

I know, it’s been a while since I last posted on this blog. To be precise since when I started my new job. May you guess I am quite busy with that?

In the meantime, a few things have changed with the main social networks out there (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) and other that the inspiring and scary image by business insider, maybe it’s good to do a quick recap.

-          Social networking sites now reach 82 percent of the world’s online population, representing 1.2 billion users around the world.

-          Facebook introduced the Timeline (and so far I haven’t heard any enthusiastic comment about it. I like tho)

-          Twitter came out with a brand new app and a new version of Tweetdeck (which I personally don’t like since it’s impossible to add a column with your most recent followers and doesn’t really count well the RTs you get)

-          LinkedIn has launched a new app – which unfortunately lets you add people too easily, regardless of their networking request settings. Note to the reader: LinkedIn is NOT a Pinterest for CVs. Connet to those you want to network with.

instagram camera-          Instagram has been purchased by Facebook, that recently published its Facebook Photos app – not sure where’s the point here. Maybe they bought Instagram to avoid such a huge competitor? And was that really worth 1B$? Personally I like Instagram and I use it a lot, though mainly to adjust images that then I upload on Facebook. I also have my own fancy URL on follogram, I’d suggest you do this – it’s the easiest way to show all your insaphotos in a pinterest style, so to say.

-          3 big news in FB’s founder life: he got married to his girlfriend since almost ever, and she got her PhD a few days before. In the same week, the Facebook IPO got the attention of the media. Many criticize the IPO, many hope Zuck will fail. Have they done so much in any of their past weeks?

But probably one of the most interesting things happened out there is the rise of Pinterest – see it half the way between a visual twitter and wall (picture) posts on Facebook (picture).  Or, if you prefer, a photo version of a content curation website. This latter is definitely my favorite description

And the greatest part of it is you don’t need to fill that annoying forms to register to it. If you have either a Facebook account or a twitter account, all you need is a single click – is that easy.

You can follow your interests on this virtual pinboard and follow others’ pinboards. You can either pin from a website, or upload your own photos or “repin” others’ pins. Pinterest is fully integrated with Facebook and Twitter and it lets you share on more platforms at once.

What is really interesting about Pinterest, is that it’s a great inbound marketing help.

In fact, all links go back to the pages where you spotted that specific picture, including your own company website or eCommerce store – that’s maybe why retailers like it so much and why it’s actually driving a lot of traffic to the US (and some UK based retailers).
There is a small limit though:  for some reason it does not get the € (euro) symbol, and you can only attach prices (do you really need to?) with a dollar or pound symbol.

That’s quite common though – unfortunately though the web is open to everyone, too many US based projects tend to forget about the rest of the world.

Which Social Networks do you currently use? I’d love to hear from you about both your personal and business use of all these social media tools, apps and platforms. Are they effective? Who manages them in your organizations?

Survey Results: Social Media Budgets and Strategy 2011-2012

I decided to run this SocialNetConomy Survey on Social Media adoption and social media budget to understand where do we stand with social media adoption and understanding. And, most of all, what social media budgets have been for 2011 and what they are going to be for 2012.

Since Social media today are the talk of the town, whether you talk about Facebook with your friends or if you do a check-in in a place to show you travel and you go to fancy places (too often forgetting that your LinkedIn peers may not be interested to know where you go for dinner), or if you talk about social media during your business meeting, I thought it was good to understand how companies consider it.

I had a feeling not all companies truly understand how big the impact of social media can be and what kind of opportunity they are missing if they stay out of it.

I am glad to finally share results for my short survey – it was a 10-question survey. This survey has been realized using a free service (you can see the original survey on surveymonkey), and social media (I recruited people only on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter).

Thank You to all my Twitter peers that helped me with this survey- too many to mention!

A significant element of collecting responses has been the help I got from my twitter peers: I asked to ReTweet my survey to help me collect more responses, and thanks to all those who shared, retweeted and took the survey I am now able to share my results. I invite you to keep taking this survey, and sharing it. I will be happy to update this post if more responses come in.

Participants to this survey come from US, Canada, Latin America and EMEA. Not much from AP. Almost all industries are equally represented, including Government, Consulting, Manufacturing, Retail, Energy, Finance, Health and Pharma, and companies analyzed include both those operating globally and those operating in a single region, country or locally.

SocialNetConomy.com 2011-2012 Social Media Survey Results:

Q- Did you have a social media strategy and a dedicated budget in the past 12 months?

social media strategy and a dedicated budget in the past 12 months25% of surveyed companies said they did not have and they are currently planning any social media strategy. 12.5% said they did not have a social media strategy and they are not planning any.

Considering how I collected these answers, it’s interesting to notice that if they answered this survey, they got the link through a social network. Nevertheless, they do not consider this channel to be good for their brand exposure for some reason (inhibitors to Social Media adoption are part of this survey too). I believe this is pretty interesting.

Talking about budget, about 65% of respondents have a social media strategy (so they say), with more than half of them saying their budget is no more than $15,000. It’s interesting to notice that about 20% of respondents said their budget was over $15,000.

Q- If you have a social media strategy in place, please let us know which social networks are you currently using – up to August 2011

which social networks are you currently using - up to August 2011We discussed about this in my previous post: having a Facebook fan page does not mean having a social media strategy. It seems respondents are not always aware of this. In fact, not all social media are used the same way, and not all social media are used for their full potential (about half of those with a Facebook page use Facebook ads, not to mention LinkedIn PPCs are way less used – I suggest to follow the links to related posts to learn more about these PPCs). About half the interviewed companies use twitter and LinkedIn and have learned about the importance of a company blog.

Q. Please evaluate your current social media strategy

evaluate your current social media strategyThe next question was about the social media strategy effectiveness, which highlights something really important: While over 70% of respondents have a Facebook presence and half of them have Facebook ads, only 17% said this approach has revealed either “very effective” or “extremely effective”. The good news is there is a lot of room for improvements!

Ads on Facebook work better than Facebook pages (IMHO mainly because they are really well targeted), and company blogs, along with twitter and LinkedIn work very well too.

Bad performance for Groupon, LivingSocial and similar solutions, as well as for preliminary Google+ company pages.

A combination of all channels is surely highly recommended.

Q. How did you/ your company implement your Social Media strategy?

How did you/ your company implement your Social Media strategyI have over 10 years of experience in marketing and social media, and I believe (I have experienced) the right approach to social media would be to have it as part of both a business’ marketing strategy (you are telling something to your clients on their preferred channel!). and a customer service / channel with a direct contact with customers (they are now expecting it to be this way), for companies to listen to customers. What you write on social media stays and should be handled no less than a press release or TV ad: with care.

Given that I noticed a few companies don’t believe in social media, but they often do it because they have to, they don’t really pay attention to it, and they don’t care about who, what or when it’s done. So I asked who was taking care of social media to the surveyed companies. Results confirm there is a lack of cultural approach, but results are quite good. Some companies still give interns the ability to talk for their brands. Maybe the same companies have a strong “permission to quote” policy in place. I hope they’ll get the importance of social media soon. It’s not hard throwing out sentences on how good we are. The thing is, you must be quick, good, professional and nice to answer to those (who might be very influent with their peers) that are complaining about you or your products. It’s advertising, and some kind of reverse (or adverse!) advertising.

Another consideration: about half the companies are either using the marketing team or a digital team. Only half of them got it’s not a 1 person thing. Another possible answer was “Other”. I did not add it since it was about a 5% saying it was the owner doing it. Nobody answered with “everybody contributes, with a dedicated team (internal or external) to handle it strategically”. Which should be the right approach IMHO.

Q. Considering your past experience with social media, are you planning to increase your budget for social media in 2012?

are you planning to increase your budget for social media in 2012Survey results have highlighted a mixed feeling about social media, as demonstrated in the previous figures. I wanted to see if the situation was going to chance in the 2012 fiscal.

About 55% of companies are increasing their social media budget in 2012, and only between 2% and 3% are decreasing it. This is a very good sign, also given that this survey was running between August and October, and I have monitored it through the weeks and I can tell no crisis impact on this decision. This means only one simple thing: companies are getting it.

Q. Where are you placing your Social Media dollars in 2012?

Where are you placing your Social Media dollars in 2012With this question I wanted to understand “how much” companies are getting it. If they have learned what works, what does not, and how to improve their strategy.

And, of course, I wanted to know where their social media dollars were going to in 2012.

Again Facebook rules, but 10% of the surveyed companies are rather moving to other social networks and channels, more relevant for their business.

Answers to this question also provide some outlook for all those copanies developing Facebook pages, or editing videos, or for those agencies providing social media guidance and execution: 2012 will see their business flourish.

Again, no good news for Groupon and LivingSocial.

The last question of this short survey was about possible inhibitors to social media. I have noticed this is maybe the first time when a technology, used, developed and shared between consumers, get to the business world. usually with technology companies are the first large users, and then it becomes more common.

So why companies seem being so late to this (technology-based) date (on social media) with their clients?

Q. What have been/ are your company’s main inhibitors to social media adoption?

What have been/ are your company's main inhibitors to social media adoptionNo time for social media still tops the list of inhibitors (as found in many other surveys), and I keep wondering what should clients think of the fact that companies say they do not have time for their clients.

Interesting to notice that nobody selected “We had no issues”. So everybody had some kind of issues.

Other reasons such as lack of budget and lack of support from company execs are still among the main reasons.

In some circumstances companies admit lack of competences – as well as the fact that demonstrating ROI is pretty hard.

How do you compare with these results?

Related reading:

- More Than Facebook: The Time Is Right For Social Business – Forbes

- Social Media Marketing: social media is about BEING social, not about DOING social- SocialNetConomy

- Comparing Facebook, LinkedIn and Google PPC: Why Social PPC is best - SocialNetConomy

Social Media Marketing: social media is about BEING social, not about DOING social.

Social media and social media marketing are the talks of the town. Still, not all companies, including those who declare they have a social media strategy or a social media marketing strategy, got it completely right. Yet some great initiatives demonstrate some companies are getting it right.

I got inspired to write this blog post mainly thanks to a few articles (you’ll find links to those articles, as usual, at the bottom of this blog post) and thanks to an incredibly good initiative I got invited to participate into. But let’s go step by step.

While the majority of companies today get how important is to have a presence on social media, just a few of them got they need a social media strategy, fully integrated with both their marketing strategy and their company culture.

What does this mean?

I am sure you found a lot of numbers and figures before defining your social media budget and by now you know that also:

about half of the biggest companies’ websites have a link to their Facebook fan page on their homepage. So – you think- half of the biggest companies have a social media strategy, right?

Wrong.

This is the most common mistake. Not that different from the one I often do when I buy a new pair of shoes, forgetting that having them in my closet is not the same as wearing them- but the thing is, I cannot wear stilettos all the time.

So a Facebook page works exactly the same way: if you cannot be there all the time (or at least a good amount of time, enough to talk to your audience), it’s useless.

Why?

Because – not sure you heard-  about 800 million people are there too, which means surely the largest portion of your audience – regardless of your business bring B2B or B2C. And this means they may find it way more convenient to talk to you through your Facebook page than calling you on the phone (and wait for 5 minutes dialing even more numbers to go through your automated call center).

They will surely prefer to drop you a line on your Facebook page rather than sending you an email to an email address that sends them an automated reply from a noreply@companyname.com email address.

Especially if you proudly put your nice white F on a blue button to show how cool your company is- you also have a Facebook page.

And 27 fans, 3 pictures (your logos in low resolution being 2 of them) and 5 wall posts.

Each of them with one Like: yours.

And next to that Facebook button you likely have a Twitter button too, to witness your business is really social. You probably have that on your email signature and on your PPTs. Then you client clicks on it and reads “15 tweets sent, last tweet April 2009”. Nice.

And -still thinking you are really cool and social- you added your Twitter handle and a link to your Facebook all over the places.

So I follow you, I mention you, and I get you have not got the whole social media thing: I never got a reply, or a thank you for RT. ‘cause you do not monitor your mentions or your company mentions, and you have no idea who is tweeting about you, who is tweeting to you and how good comments tweeted about you are. You were told Twitter is like just having a Facebook status without the whole Facebook. (I recently got a #FF from someone that is not even following me on Twitter, and it was not a RT, of course. Can you believe that?)

The thing is, there is a huge difference between doing social (media) and being social.

Doing social (too bad) means mainly having a Facebook page or a Twitter handle, and a maybe also a LinkedIn group, private (to show how social you are).

Being social means: interact, listen, answer, accept critics, improve your business thanks to those critics, build trust, be reachable by your audience – for the first time they can talk to your brand. They could not talk to your brand when your commercials were on TV, or on magazines, or a banner the only way they could touch was with a click.

They have been waiting for decades for this chance to talk to your brand and they now deserve to be listened. Especially since they talk to each other all the time, and referrals are the new selling channel in the social media era.

A great example of social media marketing campaign that demonstrates a social media approach: Quality Hunters, by Finnair and Helsinki Airport.

I recently came across an incredibly good, social and clever initiative, that synthetizes many concepts I already wrote about in this post. Not sure you heard about it before, it’s a really cool initiative and it’s called “Quality Hunters”, now at its second year, which makes it “Quality Hunters 2”.

“Quality Hunters 2 is an initiative by Finnair and Helsinki Airport. Together they will hire 7 Quality Hunters to travel the world and seek out fresh ideas on quality and how to improve air travel and the airport experience. “ this is what their website says about this project.

First of all, what I liked the most is their approach is fully social and depicts a truly social company culture: they sent personalized messaged through LinkedIn (social), then they followed applicants and engaged in conversations on twitter, they invited everyone to spread the word about this initiative and of course- they do know this- they offer the most incredibly exciting job ever, if you love travels and writing: you get paid to travel the world, and write about your journeys.

I have to admit when I got their message via LinkedIn I thought it was a joke. It was too good to be true for someone like me who is passionate about travels and writing!

“Finnair and Helsinki airport strive to offer services tailored to fit people’s individual needs. This cannot be achieved without offering everyone a chance to have their say and engage in dialogue on what makes air travel just click” they continue on their website.

“Once the Quality Hunters have been selected, this site will also be their digital home: they will produce texts, photos and video of their adventures and their ideas on how to make air travel better.”

At Finnair and Helsinki, they were looking for 7 Quality Hunters, and got over 1,900 applications. Winners will be announced in the coming days. Applications for this season closed on October 6th.

This is just the most incredibly social initiative I have ever seen, so far. It’s not about winning an iPad, by inviting your friends to a new website, nor about exchanging follows on a Facebook or Twitter.It’s not one of those social actions purely aimed at spreading ads all over the places.

They show they listen, they show they understand the importance of referrals and feedback, and they understand that, combined, referrals and feedbacks are the most powerful weapon to win the marketing battle.

They understand quality is the most precious element of their product/service, combined with an excellent customer service, which is, in case you forgot, the ability of being responsive to customers enquiries, needs, comments, feedback, requests.

Where do you stand? Are you DOING social or are you BEING social?

Related reading:

Comparing Facebook, LinkedIn and Google PPC: Why Social PPC is best

As you probably know, I am currently running a survey on Social Media usage, to help all marketers involved in social media (and my bet is there are about 80% of marketers out there who got asked to take care about social media, on top of all other marketing activities) understand what their peers are doing in terms of budgets and efforts, what has worked best and where to place their marketing dollars in 2012. It must be my research analyst background combined with my marketing experience.

If you haven’t had a chance to take this survey, please go here now. Results will be published on this blog. Updates and preliminary results are shared on my twitter feed.

While browsing for preliminary results, I noticed that among those who already participated into this survey, the most popular social media marketing paid campaign was on Facebook, and nobody has adopted any PPC campaign on LinkedIn, so far.

One of the reasons is surely the fact that almost all respondents operate in the B2C field and that Facebook has been the talk of the town across all industries and there is a perception that it is the “easiest way” to deploy cheap marketing campaigns.

Even more surprising is actually the fact that so far, while over 70% of respondents set up a Facebook fan page, only less than 30% ran a Facebook ad, and overall my respondents do not seem too happy about these strategies.

Are you using your paid campaigns right?

Here is a quick cheat sheet to help you set up you paid campaign on the two main Social Networks (Facebook and LinkedIn) and why you should prefer them over a generic search on Google. Also, another of my recent analysis about the UK market shows that having a campaign on Social Media has a good impact on search engines. You can check this UK case study here.

Best use of PPC campaign - Cheat Sheet by SocialNetConomy (Click to enlarge)

Related posts:

Rushing for Google+ company pages? They will come in the next few months.

I am sure you all agree Google+ launch had a great marketing campaign: the invites only access to the new social network by the search giant was like lining up (queuing if you are in the UK) outside of the most famous disco full of VIPs.

Everyone wanted to get in, and someone started to sell invites to G+ on eBay!

Now, after Google announced the forthcoming pages for business, while some companies went crazy looking for Google+ experts, some other companies started their Google+ pages, ignoring that Google told them not to- and ignoring the fact that they were going to loose their page, along with its fans. I am sure you heard Google is closing down company pages and asking to put them under a person’s name.

There is only one little certain fact over here: while Google’s marketing was great during the launch of the beta version of G+, their marketing for business is way less clever. And they seem like they donìt really have a clear strategy and timing about their own product.

Shutting down a company page, changing the rules, letting someone stay in and leaving others out: this is not a great way to interact with customers that have likely used a lot of their marketing dollars over google adwords and that are willing to spend even more.

On the other side, also companies’ marketing is not too clever either: it seems companies are too busy trying to get in, and they don’t get that until Google gives them a green light (I am sure they are adding analytics to pages and adwords of course and great new tools), their company pages will just represent a waste of time and money. And they risk loosing fans too! And of course some “Google plus experts” are already out – as pointed out in this post.

If your company is in the process of deciding what to do and where to put your social marketing dollars in the next few months, Google suggests not to invest on them, basically. At least not yet, for the next few months.

In fact after this incredible mess – I can’t quite believe that a company that wants to position itself as the new Facebook makes all these mistakes – Christian Oestlien, Google’s group product manager, posted this on his profile (Google probably thinks such an important news should be shared this way) this announcement earlier today:

“A few weeks ago we mentioned we would be doing a test of business profiles and asked people interested to apply. Believe it or not we actually had tens of thousands of businesses, charities, and other organizations apply to take part from all over the world. Many of you have reached out to me personally through Google+, e-mail, chat, and even other Googlers. Thank you. Your response has been humbling.

With so many qualified candidates expressing intense interest in business profiles, we’ve been thinking hard about how to handle this process. Your enthusiasm obligates us to do more to get businesses involved in Google+ in the right way, and we have to do it faster. As a result, we have refocused a few priorities and we expect to have an initial version of businesses profiles up and running for EVERYONE in the next few months. There may be a tiny handful business profiles that will remain in the meantime solely for the purpose of testing how businesses interact with consumers.

In the meantime, we ask you not to create a business profile using regular profiles on Google+. The platform at the moment is not built for the business use case, and we want to help you build long-term relationships with your customers. Doing it right is worth the wait. We will continue to disable business profiles using regular profiles. We recommend you find a real person who is willing to represent your organization on Google+ using a real profile as him-or-herself. “

Lessons learned:

  1. Google’s marketing needs improvement
  2. Google’s customer service needs improvement
  3. Google needs to effectively communicate to their audience, possibly not through nice marketing artices published on select blogs/websites.
  4. Companies with a Google+ page will not be able to understand the effectiveness of their marketing efforts on Google+ till a final version of pages for business comes out, and their campaigns may fail if they insist with having a presence on G+
  5. Facebook may become stronger and take advantage of all these mistakes Google is doing.

Do you have a Google+ company page yet? What’s your take?

Related posts:

Facebook’s new users decline after the launch of Google+, while the two companies fight a new “War of the Roses”

It seems Google+ and Facebook have started some sort of “cold war”, with Google preventing a former employee (now with Facebook) to add more people to his circles, and Facebook blocking Google+ ads on its social network, while media and social media experts start showing their preference by publishing either too positive or too negative articles about G+.  Some independent forums also are not liking some form of censorship in G+.

Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas in "The War of the Roses" (1989)

While the new “War of the Roses” goes on, I was wondering how Google plus is affecting – or may be affecting- current and forthcoming marketing efforts.

While some sources say that a good number of companies are in line waiting to build their company pages on Google+, I was thinking of those whose marketing dollars have been invested in Facebook already:

- Is there any risk companies should evaluate when deciding about their social media marketing dollars?

- Are there countries where Facebook-based marketing campaigns could be at risk?

- are there countries whose Facebook campaigns are “safer” and not impacted by a migration of fans to G+?

In order to answer these questions, I started comparing some figures about Facebook users growth by Country, and compared the last two weeks of June (before G+ was launched) with the first two weeks of July (when G+ was launched).

Analysis by SocialNetConomy, 2011

Interesting enough, in the past two weeks, while Google got 10 million new registered users since its launch, Facebook’s new users grew less than the previous 2 weeks. As shown in the picture above (SocialNetConomy, 2011), out of the 213 Countries where Facebook is present, new users registrations declined by some 3.4 million during the past two weeks.

Which Countries got the biggest decline?

The figure below represents the top 20 countries in Facebook (those with the majority of users, regardless of the Internet penetration in that Country). Top 20 countries decline, in terms of new Facebook registrations as a total, is slightly over 2 million.

Analysis by SocialNetConomy, 2011

Some countries slowed down more than others – and there is some confirmation in the recently launchedunofficial Google+ statistics website.

Analysis by SocialNetConomy, 2011

Data show a vast majority of countries experienced a slowdown – between 0.2 % and 1.3% of their overall Facebook users base for the top 20 countries. The table shows the difference between the number of new users registered in the June 15-June 30 (2011) timeframe, minus the number of new Facebook users registered in the the past two weeks (July 1- 15, 2011, after G+ launched).

The table shows the top 10 “declining countries” (additional data are available on request).

Suggestions to marketers investing on Facebook:

We are still at the beginning of G+ vs Facebook, but surely something more to consider on the marketers’ plate is how to keep people engaged on the platform they invested on. This could also be a good reason for Facebook to get closer to those brands whose pages may be keeping their fans on Facebook and that may keep Facebook growing. It could be a win-win if thhey manage to get closer to each other and become more “social”.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+: who is using social media and what to expect from social media marketing in the future

There’s no day you open a news website or a printed newspaper and you do not find any article about social media or social networks. And increasingly, there are no talks with friends where you don’t mention the word “Facebook”, whether it’s about an event, a birthday or a photo album or some other gossip about your friends.

So, while the big giants of the web (unless you spent the past couple of weeks in a cave you should know I am talking about Facebook and Google) place their army on the two main buttons of your mouse, I started investigating how big is the social media effect on the business side of our life and what we should expect in the future.

Surely, when scrolling down the virtual wall of my Facebook friendsfeed, I can tell there is a huge Facebook penetration  in the business world (at least considering how active my friends are on commenting pictures and updating their status during their working hours). After all, if one every 6 minutes is spent on Facebook (according to ComScore’s research), some of those minutes must come from your office time. I heard someone bought an iPhone to stay on Facebook during office hours, after their company blocked access to it.

But, seriously: how big is Facebook penetration in today’s business? We all know big brands and large companies have a massive social media presence. But how many companies are really adopting social media as part of their strategy?

I found an interesting study on adoption of social links and plugins by the world’s 10000 largest websites. It provides a clear proof point we are just half way through the way that brings business close to their customers.

Less than 50% of the top 10000 websites have links to either of the two major social networks (Facebook and Twitter) on their front pages.

This gives us an interesting view of where we actually stand, what Social Media really is, and gives us room to understand what we should expect in the forthcoming months.

I believe we should take some little assumptions before moving ahead and get to the point:

  • Social media are about a new technology-based channel, and this is exactly how we should consider it.Social Media are not about a new marketing strategy.
  • While IT has become part of every company strategy, since it affects all units of a company, it seems social media (yet being substantially a “technology”), has not become part of the company strategy, though it’s about the company brand, and not just the number of fans on a facebook page. At least, this is true for about half the companies, it seems.
  • We need to consider Social Media’s users lifecycle like other technologies (please note the graph below has been authored in the 60’s by Everett Rogers) and we should keep in mind this is about SOCIAL, not only about media:

Rogers' bell curve

According to Rogers, who analyzed the technology adoption for farm practices, the adopters categories can be summarized as:

-          innovators – had larger farms, were more educated, more prosperous and more risk-oriented

-          early adopters – younger, more educated, tended to be community leaders

-          early majority – more conservative but open to new ideas, active in community and influence to neighbours

-          late majority – older, less educated, fairly conservative and less socially active

-          laggards – very conservative, had small farms and capital, oldest and least educated

We should of course consider those “less educated” companies in terms of being less educated in social networks.

We just miss another piece of information to understand what the possible future scenario can be: how old are today’s social media users? I found a nice infographic and took the numbers I needed from this analysis:

Keeping in mind what we just saw about the Rogers’ bell curve, the fact that LinkedIn users are usually older than Facebook and Twitter users, is another factor to keep in mind, and here is why:

-          traditionally, when talking about marketing, B2C marketing has been the one of the “early adopters”. Data confirm this theory for social media adoption by business brands: B2C companies are those topping the ist of most followed pages on Facebook and handles on twitter.

-         Interactions in the B2B business are those who likely happen in the senior executive level of companies: they are those taking decisions, they are those likely more “aged”, and they are those who we may likely consider being in the “late majority” and “laggards” portion of the “Rogers’ bell curve”, and they seem also those who have a higher presence on LinkedIn (the business network), which, in fact, has older users than the two most used social networks Twitter and Facebook.

Future scenarios for business: What shall we expect in the future of social media?

-          Social media marketing is all about building and increasing brand reputation while dealing directly with clients. To listen to them mainly, and to tell them also. This means increasingly, companies will centralize their brand strategies and integrate it with the company (marketing) strategy- which means social media strategy will call marketers and IT departments to talk more and more, like IT talks with company execs today.

-          B2B marketing will increasingly adopt the social media channel, and will likely develop a bigger presence on major social networks, including LinkedIn. This also means those companies operating in the B2B business will have to learn how to develop a “brand” strategy. The good news is B2B already knows how important is to “listen”.

-          LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter users will have a more similar average age.

-          Google+ and its pages for business will have a relevant impact on the social media marketing games and they have the huge potential of attracting those markets whose presence is not yet that high in social media.

Facebook to announce something “awesome” next week – is it really about Skype?

As you will recall, at the beginning of last week, while Google was creating the buzz around its forthcoming Google+, Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook was going to announce something awesome next week.

Mashable, one of the most followed news portals around new tech and social media, yesterday announced the “awesome” news was about the integration of the Skype Video chat with Facebook. While surely this would definitely be a good improvement for Facebook, I don’t see it being that “awesome”. So I decided to investigate a bit further.

This is why I believe it may not be just that:

Facebook and Microsoft started a long-lasting relationship back in August 2006, when they signed an exclusive agreement which made Microsoft the exclusive advertising platform for Facebook. This deal was worth 900M$  and it was for 3 years. In 2007 Facebook and Microsoft Corp. announced that the two companies were expanding their advertising partnership till 2011 and that Microsoft was taking a $240 million equity stake in Facebook’s next round of financing at a $15 billion valuation.

In 2008 Facebook implemented Microsoft’s Live search in its pages and in 2009 the two companies announced a further integration with Bing. While Facebook was integrating search with social network, Google launched its first OS: Chrome (2008). In 2009 Facebook purchased FriendFeed, somehow similar to twitter, but not as “followed” as the original.

Big things happened in 2010.

Bing search service started to mine anonimized data from consumer usage of Facebook’s (recently introduced) Like buttons, and Microsoft signed a partnership with Bing, and then added Facebook into Outlook. [Question to self: will Google use anonimized data for our searches while we are logged in on G+?]

In the meantime, some other partnerships didn’t go through: Apple and Facebook didn’t find any agreement for Ping, Apple’s music-social-network on iTunes, and Microsoft and Twitter didn’t partner on Bing (Twitter recently announced an agreement with Yahoo Japan). Apple made it to Twitter though, and the next iOS will have Twitter already integrated. And still during these times, Google had again social network troubles, with Buzz (its first attempt was Orkut, only successful in Brazil).

2011, so far, seems an year of surprises, or at least the year of the truth:

-          Facebook hires: starting with Orkut’s business development person, and going to Microsoft’s global ad sales head Carolyn Everson – which was about to turn into a possible legal action, till the most recent hacker who jailbroke the iPhone and PS3 seem actually going to mark another milestone in the Facebook story. Facebook also buys some software companies, such as Sofa.

-          Microsoft buys Skype for 8.5B$. Definitely a big thing for Facebook, after the integration with Live Messenger, definitely Skype would have been the next one. So not really awesome I would say- at least not such a surprise, we all knew it was coming. It would be awesome if we could share videos in real time – a true real live feed and video, from our mobile – which is the most used way to upload pictures on Facebook- made possible through the integration of Skype and Facebook. This would also make sense if we keep in mind the Seattle-based team who developed this “awesome” thing is definitely focused on mobile-related technologies and applications.

(Click to enlarge- this has been adapted from http://www.flickr.com/photos/michperu/3702942040/ )

-    In the meantime, Google launches updated profiles in February and then more recently Google +, integrating and enhancing its previous unsuccessful social attempts and its successful apps, and tapping into common users for gathering feedback, while creating great expectations by limiting the access to a few users only.  [I’m one of the lucky ones- see my preliminary thoughts here]

So now, what shall we expect as forthcoming awesome announcements? Surely the Skype one is a big thing, but let’s try and think about what we could really call awesome (and surprising):

-          Not sure you noticed, but LinkedIn is looking more and more like Facebook. I just noticed in the past couple of days how comments on LinkedIn and Facebook look so incredibly similar in terms of shape, colors and available links (Like-Comment-Share). And not sure you noticed, while Facebook was testing quietly its own LinkedIn app (BranchOut) since a while using LinkedIn API with no issues, as soon as Monster announced its own Facebook app (BeKnown) quite loudly, LinkedIn closed its API quickly – to both apps. What if the “awesome” announcement was an integration of Facebook and LinkedIn? After all, they are the two big ones in the social space.

-    Another big thing could be a “Triangle”, with Facebook, Microsoft and Apple all together.

I would definitely call awesome an announcement about Facebook being implemented into the next iPhone5. After all, each of them has a good reason for competing with Google this hard battle -and a triangle, on a funny note, would be the perfect opponent to Circles ;-)

  • Google’s Chrome OS didn’t make Microsoft its best friend
  • Google’s Android apps are Apple’s apps biggest enemy
  • Google’s “Plus” social network now seems a much serious obstacle to Facebook’s growth

While waiting for the announcement to become official and for the next big things coming to our browsers and our phones, it’s good to consider that all that happened during these past 4 years of strategic partnership between Facebook and Microsoft, and all that Google and Apple made during these past 4 years,  are depicting an interesting scenario for a number of markets, not only the social networks one:

-    the advertising market – think about how Facebook has changed it and how Google+ can add our personal habits to all already know information about our searches, all company websites traffic and all other G-apps that we use every day- and don’t forget about related implications on all those sectors who are increasingly “socializing” their marketing strategies. A lot has been said about Facebook and privacy: shall we worry about Google and privacy? Google may know too much about us: our circles, how we influence them, what we look for, how we purchase, where we click, how our websites are performing and what are our Internet habits, other than our life habits, what are the files we share for work and for fun, what we like to play and what we want to read. Think about applying advertising to Sparks and to Circles we influence. G+ may be 1984.

-          the mobile phones market – once upon a time there was RIM’s Blackberry, whose aim was to increase workers’ productivity, and today the mobile war is moving to Apple’s OS and Android, with Microsoft gaining shares, with less focus on productivity and more on internet traffic (on social networks… somehow killing productivity). Don’t forget about mobile carriers and their increased revenues coming from data. Here the battle is more interesting between Google and Apple.

-    the OS market, with Google launching its Chrome OS in 2008 and openly declaring war to Microsoft (and Apple)

-    the app development and gaming market – just think about Facebook’s revenues with Zynga and about the recent announcement that Google+ will soon launch games on its platform, not to mention Microsoft’s Live meeting gaming platform. Did you know people on Facebook install 20 million applications every day?

-    the social networks market – just think about MySpace. Or just about Facebook’s revenues. Then add Google and Apple’s Ping. And don’t forget about LinkedIn and Twitter.

-    the cloud: Google did not invent it, but definitely contributed to make it become one of the biggest thing under the spotlight. Apple recently spoke about the iCloud. Microsoft’s Office 365 is there too.

Whatever it will be, we will surely be impacted. Not sure about you, but I am happy I am here witnessing these happenings.

These are my thoughts. What’s your take?