Tag Archives: social media

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?

Social Media is Marketers’ El Dorado: Hype or Reality?

I am sure you noticed that also: it seems that with this economy (check the recently published World Economic Report 2011 by Financial Times), while worldwide financial markets suggest to pursue a modern “gold rush”, it looks like companies are rather pursuing some kind of “social rush”. Never like in these months businesses are talking about social media, using them, investing in them, hiring people to manage them and launching new ones. And funny enough, social media are the most frequent news on the traditional press.

The debate is still open: some say social media are a tremendous business and an incredibly effective channel for marketing and invest more and more on them (revenues are expected to double for Facebook and go from $45M to $400M for Twitter) , hire people, web agencies, buy platforms and reinvent their business.

Some others consider social media just a waste of time, a hype on its way to a decline and proudly tell they are not on social networks and they don’t need to be there. Maybe they did not notice their audience is there. I wonder why struggle with sending marketing messages all over places where your clients may just walk by, instead of those where they spend their time.

I am currently running a Social Media survey (please take it here, it’s just 10 questions) and my results say it clearly: more than half the interviewed companies are planning to increase their marketing dollars on social media for 2012. Final results to be published soon on this blog.

So I am sure many still wonder: will social media last?

Breath and relief: according to a recently published study by InSites Consulting, with a population of over 7Billion and 2Billions today already connected to social networks, only half of them (about 1B) are already on social networks. So there is definitely room for an improvement!

Social media adoption is uneven across the globe: In Europe, people join on average 1,9 social networks. In USA it’s 2,1; Brazil 3,1 and India 3,9. Uneven is also the social media awareness: while Social Insites estimates that Facebook awareness is about 100% of total connected population, and about 75% used it (with over half connecting every day), Twitter is used by only 16% of those who are aware of it.

With Facebook being at around 750M and remembering about that other analysis I posted back in July about the social media adoption curve, drawing from the Rogers’ model on technology adoption, this is an additional confirmation of my thoughts: we are almost half the way on the social media technology adoption curve. And with 2B connected out of the 7B, the more time goes, the situation should not change that quickly.

So, to answer our question: are social media the new El Dorado? The short answer seems Yes.

Yes, because according to this study, people join more than 1 social network, with Asia driving the truck to up to 4 social networks per person (I wonder how much this may be influenced by languages). See this image to learn more:

Please don’t jump yet for your happyness: “No” could still be a possible answer. The study also reports – sorry Google+, bad news- that about 60% declare they don’t want any additional social network, and about 93% are either not planning to leave the SNs they are in, or not entering new ones.

Surely, results leave some room for all those startups launching new social networks in these months. And creative ideas or social networks around shared passions (shopping, travel, sports, food, business, etc) are still likely to attract members- you don’t need to abandon your favorite social network and join a new one. You can stay on both.

Nevertheless, with these numbers in mind, and the current penetration of existing social networks, the message is crystal clear: big existing social networks will get bigger; small social networks will get smaller. After all, it seems this rule applies to the entire economy in this global financial cycle.

You may had an idea of how big Facebook is willing to become if you remember Mark Zuckerberg’s speech at the f8 conference, where Facebook presented the latest news and future developments about the most crowded social networks. When talking about the apps and developers of Facebook apps, he said Facebook has been working with “over a thousand companies to develop new things on Facebook”.

To all those who are still quite sceptical about Social Media and Social Media marketing (according to the preliminary results from my survey, lack of support from execs is one of the top reasons for not having a social media strategy), I suggest they have a look at this image and see that not only their clients are on social media, their clients are also waiting for them and asking for something! Also those whose social media strategy equals to having banners placed on social networks or a facebook page with zero interaction should consider a proper social media strategy. Need help?

Lessons learned:

  • Social Media are today what IT has been in the past: not just a tool, but a nessessary component of every business strategy
  • Your clients are on social media. Why are you wasting your marketing budget somewhere else?
  • Your clients are on social media and are willing to talk to you.
  • Social media are the easiest and highest potenial for word of moouth: have your sales on social media and have them listen to your clients needs.
  • Different geographies have different social media penetration and potential. That potential also applies to your business.
  • Never underestimate the importance of the word “social” in social media / social networks.

Related posts and resources:

Social media around the world 2011

View more presentations from steven van belleghem

Customer centricity and social networks: why one cannot exclude the other.

As it may have happened to many of you in these days, I came across a video featuring Steve Jobs on stage during one of his speeches.

This one was from 1997, when Steve Jobs went back to Apple as CEO to re-launch the Apple computer business.  One of the guys in the audience asked him – not that politely- how he was planning to revamp a tech company if he did not understand about technology.


I believe Job’s statement was way bigger than how big Apple’s evolution has been since then. He said having a technology and then finding a way to sell it and make people use it it’s pointless. Having a technology that does what people want it’s what we need. Start with the customer and then have the technology department figure out how to deliver what customers want.

Steve Jobs- a genial mix of passion, usability and attention to detail (did you read that other story about the yellow tone of the second O in the Google brand not displaying correctly on the iPhone and Job’s call on a Sunday morning to discuss about that urgently? You can find it here)- got ahead of the usability for its products with that statement.

Customer centricity is what a lot of C-level  presentations have been talking about for over a decade in any industry.  A customer centric approach assists an organisation in building important relationships with internal and external customers. Wow- this is social network- We knew the recipe since over a decade!

Yet, today, while people on social networks keep showing they are desperately looking for a bigger interaction with brands, asking for that customer centricity that everybody used to talk about, only half the companies have implemented some kind of social networks strategy. Preliminary results from a survey I am currently running (take it here, it’s just 10 questions and I will share results on this blog) show that only less than 15% of companies with a Facebook page – which is by far the only social media strategy for a large majority of companies- got excellent results from it.  The reason is simple: they are not doing it right.

Social media are built to listen to customers first, and answer then.

Not sure you recall, but call centers (and the cheap Indian call centers) were the biggest talk of the town before the social networks became “the” news. The boom of call centers  was a clear signal that clients do want a direct contact with companies, regardless of where we are- B2B or B2C. B2C should learn from B2B how important this is today.

Why? Time has changed, information are more available and understandable by users, media diffusion has intensified the need for communicating two-ways. And companies cannot be deaf.

Not sure you noticed, but when social media started rising, call centers declined: there was a new way to let clients interact with brands.

Being customer centric means – with no exception- being easily reachable by clients. If traditional marketing channels were looking at providing the right message through the right channel (think about TV commercials), nowadays the keyword is still delivering these messages through the media where the audience is- but the audience has moved to social networks, and the rules have changed. Clients now have a keyboard and they write to you if they are not happy, they won’t just use their remote control and watch another TV channel.

And delivering a message through a network that is “social” means brands must be social too. I’ve seen so many companies using social networks like they used other 1-to-many channels in the past.

I have seen many companies keep placing banners on communities and using their Facebook page or heir twitter handle or their LinkedIn group like they used TV commercials in the past. They do no interact with their clients. Social media management is in marketing’s hands today- which is fine-, but it actually also requires an effort that is typical of customer service and sales (for their account management role). Social media management and a social media strategy cannot stay only in marketing’s hands. And most of all, it cannot be in the intern’s hands or with an agency – which will surely give your brand (along with its reputation) in an intern’s hands.

Think about what has recently happened to Versace with their Facebook page or to Chrysler with their Twitter handle, to name a couple: they had to sither shut down comments on Facebook or fire the media agency serving them, respectively. When I read these stories, I keep reminding a Latin sentence: scripta manent, verba volant, which means “what is written stays, words fly away”. This is why social media should be in experts’ hands and it should be part of a formal strategy.

We must remember we are constantly listened (read) by our audience, and also they are willing to talk back to us. They want to interact. This is what social networks are about: being social.  So social media marketing is not just marketing on a new channel  but it’s building a relation with clients, hat same relation that is usually built with meetings with clients, with sales calling them  and asking if everything is OK to keep the client “warm”.

And, of course, since numbers show the reason why people follow brands on social networks (see the 4Rs in the “related posts” section at the bottom of this post), companies should give them what they want. This is customer centricity. It’s not what we think they want. It’s what they ask for. And clients are surely not deaf!

Related posts:

Most common (startup) mistakes you can easily avoid when building a new website

While looking for my next big career challenge, I have been recenlty asked to review some “beta” websites, on their way to the official launch. It seems the Italian Online-sphere is picking up!

With a few years of experience in start-ups, and more in particular about the online world- with my very first experience being from 1998- and with a solid marketing background of more than 10 years, it often happens to have calls from friends and familiars asking me to “have a sight at their forthcoming online venture”.

So, it seems I am kind of getting specialized in start-ups within the online space.

Since I found there are common “mistakes” in all these beta-version websites, I thought it was good to share how to overcome initial common mistakes and stay focused on the actual business.

Choose the right name and secure your domain

In an era where fruit seems dominating the tech market (i.e. apple, blackberry), and where search engines names seem typos, choosing the right name for your business is still a big deal. If your new venture is similar to something already existing, the only thing you have to care about, is to avoid calling it in a way it may be confused with your competitor. Make sure your business name does not sound like a bad word in another language. A tip: have a kid saying your name. Think about yahoo and google.. that simple.

Once you have chosen the right name, make sure to secure the related web address and all its country-specific extensions. Calling your business Blue and having a domain called Purple, does not help.

Secure your twitter handle and if your business is a B2C, get 25 of your friends to like your page and secure your Facebook link too.

Avoid adding unnecessary complexity

I am sure you spent a few months shaping your idea in your mind, then putting it on paper and finally explaining it to your business partners with a metaphor. You get to the design of your website with all these months of experience and path in your head, and you struggle to reduce your copy for your company description. So you pick icons instead and add many functionalities to your original idea, which has become much more complex – and much more clever, you think- since that idea originated in your mind.

I remember when I was helping a friend of mine building a dating community, which had very complex algorithms and evaluations and with scores to be assigned to the best answer to a question, in addition to affinity and location, and any possible thing that can help people match. Results were actually pretty accurate, but you needed to spend about 40 minutes to complete your profile and about 1 hour a day to make sure you posted enough content to be ranked well among your competitors in this dating thing. No need to tell I predicted it was not going to work – too complex for the average user and the average free time, starting from the – sad yet true point- people mostly surf websites like this one while at work, and they don’t want to (risk being seen) spend too much time doing these things.

This is by far the most common mistake I see with start-ups: adding useless complexity to their original idea. Think about the two most used websites: Google (a blank page with a logo and a search box) and Facebook (share photos, videos, links and thoughts with people). Now think about Google+ and how many complex things you can do (hangouts, sparks, circles, etc).

You know what it is about, others don’t

Another common mistake is when a website does not have a page saying what it is about or who you are. You may think this is quite a basic concept, but out of all start-ups I have seen, with so many “experts” around, the most simple things were missing.

I recently “had a sight” at a friend’s beta version of a forthcoming website. They had a “how it works” page, but not a “what it is”. Also, in the “how it works” page, they mentioned (and bolded in the text) some key words, without explaining what they meant. So you knew these tools were important, but there was no explanation of why they were important and how you could actualy use them.

It’s been like watching the last Harry Potter movie without knowing anything about it.

But the reason is, after you spend 6 or more months telling every of your stakeholder what it is and how it works, you think it’s enough. Wrong. Didn’t you get one of those early emails about jokes on early computer usage? Like it or not, that’s the audience you have to think about when building a website, unless you want to miss a large portion of potential cllients. I’ve seen people using a calculator to sum numbers from an excel file. I could re-write the Blade Runner monologue with such examples.

I usually suggest picking random people (in your company, in your family) who don’t know about the project and ask them to tell you what is it about. If they don’t get it, your communication is not communicating what you do.

Check every single click and always provide a sitemap

If a hyperlink tells you’ll go to “page A” when clicking on it, you should never ever happen to be on “page B”. Make sure you click on every link and check it actually does what it says it would do.

And, also, you should have a chance to move to virtually every page from virtually every other page. Subject index, industry index, content index, etc, they should all be on every page. Think about the biggest newspapers sites.

Check every word on every page- read it loud

This is something I have learned at school, nothing new to social media and websites: when you write a text, read it loud, twice. Piece by piece first, and then all together. This will help you find inconsistencies and mistakes. Having another person doing the same it’s also warmly suggested.That person might get what your eyes don’t spot.

An example? When testing a beta version of a soon to be launched portal, I registered, and go to a welcome page. It said “welcome Cinzia” (title) and then second line “welcome to..”. Out of the first 3 words, 2 were the same. I am sure nobody read that page before pushing it live.

Avoid asking more information than that required to fill in your tax return

Not sure about you, but I really can’t stand those websites whose “complete your profile” section takes ages. Before asking me all that information – which is clearly a way to sell me something or flood me with emails and text messages- tell me something that I want to hear. And tell me why you need that information from me and how I can benefit from it.

If you cannot give something in return, don’t ask. Users get online to find something, to earn something or to get something. They don’t get online to help you meet your budget target.

I recently got an email after registering to a portal whose beta version has just been pushed live. It stated “we just got a new profiling form, come add information to your profile”. Yeah right. You haven’t started yet, you haven’t sent me any welcome email yet, and you are already asking for more? Unsubscribe. How many emails do you get everyday? Aren’t them enough?

There are a million small details that may slow down your journey to go live. Avoiding being superficial and getting things done right – as much as you can- the first time, will help you save time, and money.

For all those who are embracing such new venture or for all those who happen to be in a fast growing company (which faces the same issue as a start-up, I would suggest reading this blog about how to handle conflicts)

Why You Should Have a Social Network Company Policy

Raise your hand if you have either a Facebook profile, a Twitter handle, a LinkedIn account or if you just got an invitaion on Google Plus, and you accessed any of them, at least once, from work.

Does your company have a company policy regarding social networking? It seems only 55% percent of the companies do, according to a survey by the International Labor & Employment Group at Proskauer Rose.

I always wondered how Social Networks are impacting our life, and this SocialNetConomy blog investigates on this topic. Surely, in my opinion, social networks have a huge impact on business. They of course have both a positive impact (when we think about companies whose visibility and marketing efforts on social networks made the companies earn good profits, saving jobs and helping the economy), and a negative impact (check my post on the correlation of Facebook visits growth and GDP decline in the US in the past 5 years).

According to Proskauer, survey data show more than three-quarters of responders use social networking for business, and some 40% of the businesses in the survey have had to deal with employees misusing social networks.

The figure below shows that 25% of companies have a strict social network policy, with filters preventing all employees to access social networks. Some 26.7% of companies allow access to select employees.

Source: Proskauer Survey 2011

Source: Proskauer survey 2011

Interesting enough, survey findings show that out of the 55% of the interviewed companies with a social network company policy in place, some 16.5% say their policy is for working hours only. Virtually, this means employees can lament about their company – hence negatively impact their company brand- if they do it when they are not working.

Considerations:

Why shall you care about having a social media policy?

Social networks, like it or not, affect brand reputation. In my opinion, having a social media policy in place should be one of the most important pages of the employee handbook of every company. Not only: a social media policy should be on the use of social media regardless of where it’s used and if employees have access to it or not from work.

The more a company brand is visible, the more that company should have a social media presence and a social network policy. Morgan Stanley as first large financial firm got his advisers use social networks (with a policy in place).

More and more surveys on social networks and business reveal that not all companies have understood the importance – also in terms of brand reputation and seniority of those in charge of social media. In a recent post I highlighted only half of the major websites have social media buttons on their home.

We are surely at the beginning of the adoption curve of social media, but, as I wrote a long ago, in times of global economic uncertainty, understanding and anticipating trends is critical for maintaining your competitive advantage.

Who should be in charge of your social media policy?

Surely it’s a teamwork between your marketing department, your HR and your legal department (if you have one), with some little work from your IT department.

Related posts:

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.