Adam Bohannon's List: Social Media Marketing

• the online study found that 72 percent of respondents used social media to research a company's reputation for customer care before making a purchase, and 74 percent choose to do business with companies based on the customer care experiences shared by others online.
• 59 percent said they regularly use social media to "vent" about their customer care frustrations, suggesting that consumers looking to make a purchase decision first wade through a mass of negative commentary.
• Savvy consumers "will not support companies with poor customer care reputations, and they will talk about all of this openly with others via multiple online vehicles,"
• Only 33 percent of respondents said they believe companies take such online complaints seriously.
• As for which industries made best use of social media, technology and retail ranked highest, while insurance, utilities and healthcare ranked lowest.
• "Search allows consumers to find their information without being tied to the company, and now we have social media, where the customers voice is not only heard, it's louder. A customer's voice can now be global," she said. "If companies provide that care it can impact the reputation of the company itself."
• conducted online with 300 respondents who voluntarily opted in.

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• In the United States, $21.1 billion was spent on online advertising last year, up from $16.9 billion in 2006, according to eMarketer. Search advertising — Google’s stronghold — is the majority of that spending, according to Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein.

• Numerous studies have shown that peer recommendation of the type embodied in many blogs consistently receive much higher credibility ratings when compared to normal advertising channels.
• the company has created a branded widget that soon-to-be mothers can use to count down due dates, and that can be easily embedded on a local desktop or on the Web in the Facebook or MySpace pages of its consumers.
• Additionally, it is utilizing online tools like Meetup.com to facilitate face-to-face contact between loyal consumers.
• "While the brands themselves in a way are marketing to the Meetup organizers, they're hoping to connect through them to the members and -- the big win -- through the members to their friends outside the Meetup sphere."

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• According to analyst firm IDC, the online advertising segment grew 27% in 2007, and yet when considering if and when to invest in online marketing efforts, many manufacturers go through a litany of excuses.
• "If your company doesn't have an online presence that can easily be found in search engines, product review sites, industry Web sites and user forums, you can be assured that these searchers will find one of your competitors," warns Komack. "Even if you're already well entrenched with a customer, your lack of online presence has just given a competitor a window of opportunity to establish a dialogue that may eventually lead to a shift by your customer to that other vendor."
• If your Web site doesn't serve at least two primary purposes -- acting as a lead generation vehicle and providing technical resources for users -- you're losing half the battle, observes Komack. "Even if your primary sales channel is a dealer network, your Web site should serve as a means of generating leads to pass on to your dealer network."
• Not only should your Web site serve as a means of capturing leads (which also can build a nice in-house mailing list), a manufacturing Web site should also provide excellent, up-to-date content about technical specifications and, ideally, provide content that will help end users utilize your equipment more efficiently (this goes for finished products as well as OEM products, says Komack). "This additional content will help build loyalty to your brand and will drive search engine traffic in a variety of ways."
• "online marketing allows for a high level of tracking capabilities, so you can associate spending choices online with leads generated and sales that come later in the sales cycle."
• Another payoff comes in the form of gathering marketing intelligence about your industry, assures Komack. "You can gather valuable information about how people search for your products, such as keywords used in search engines, and leverage that information to other marketing efforts such as creating marketing collateral and identifying customer needs that you may not have been aware of in the past."
• Komack tells his manufacturing clients to consider that "every time a prospect finds you online, that is one more opportunity to keep that potential customer from your competitors."
• Manufacturers that do not use their Web sites effectively and do not build an online presence, Komack concludes, are missing significant opportunities for generating leads, building customer loyalty, gathering marketing intelligence, and keeping prospects from competitors.

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• the goal is to establish long-term relationships with your customers -- and that's what bloggers are: your customers.
• It's about the relationship over time, not overnight. Do you want a one-night stand, or a commitment? If you want a commitment, take the time to get to know them.
• Do Your Homework. Since bloggers are your customers, you should have a pretty good idea of what matters to them, but don't simply rely on the mass media approaches you may have used in advertising and direct marketing -- demographic analysis, segmentation, "targeting," models of consumer behavior and so on. These tools aren't sufficient to build a relationship. Building a relationship with a blogger is much like making a friend. You don't make your friends based on their demographic profile; you make friends by getting to know them.
• Your products only matter in as much as they connect with your customers' passions.
• Be Transparent. When you reach out to a blogger, he or she is also part of a social network, of which the blog is one piece. Everybody e-mails everyone else. They are also on microblogging platforms like Twitter and social nets like Facebook. Nothing snowballs faster than bad news. If something does go wrong, whether it is with a product or a program, get out in front of it fast. Don't wait for other people to tell your story. Tell it yourself.

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• Asian markets (not including Japan) are leading in terms of participation, creating more content than any other region
• sian markets (not including Japan) are leading in terms of participation, creating more content than any other region
• 57% have joined a Social Network, making it the number one platform for creating and sharing content: 55% of users have uploaded photos, 22% of users have uploaded videos
• 23% of social network users have installed an application – 18% of bloggers have installed applications in their blog templates
• Blogs are a mainstream media world-wide and a collective rival to traditional media (184m bloggers world-wide, China has the largest blogging community in the world with 42m bloggers) – 73% have read a blog, 45% have started a blog
• Social media has strong impacts over brand’s reputation – 34% post opinions about products and brands on their blog – 36% think more positively about companies that have blogs
• Interestingly, comments on news websites show almost no increase
• Estimated 272m users world-wide.
• Users are posting variety of content – 55% uploaded photos – 21% installed applications – 23% uploaded video • Social Networks becoming social utilities for managing peer to peer relationships: 74% use them to message friends

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• Spreading as many internet memes as possible is good.

• "The move toward social media is as big a change as Gutenberg and the printing press," said Karl Long, a product manager at Nokia. "Social media is the ability for anyone to publish anything without any cost."
• Panelists said the social media sites are changing communications.
• The panelists said businesses are beginning to recognize the benefits of having conversations with consumers.
• businesses can learn from young people who create their own sites.
• Social media can be used to create word-of-mouth advocacy for products or services,
• real estate agents, for instance, are using Web sites that include reviews from clients after their homes have been sold.

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• According to the survey - brand familiarity clearly affects teens’ choices as consumers. Moreover - yesterday’s leading brands are still hot today:
• 74% reported that familiar brands guide their purchasing decisions.

• Google has already been selling mobile text ads through its cost-per-click AdSense program, which it is now expanding to offer contextually targeted graphical banners, formatted to fit within the constraints of the mobile browser.
• Nevertheless, Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPhone has shown that with a decent screen size and intuitive navigation, U.S. consumers will use their phones for activities other than talk and text messaging. Google is hoping that efforts such as its own Android initiative will lead to a new generation of handheld devices that help the mobile Web live up to its promise.
• JupiterResearch analyst Neal Strother concurs with Google's claim that mobile display ads have a higher clickthrough rate than Web display ads. A clickthrough rate of 5 percent to 6 percent for mobile ads is common, Strother said, whereas a 3 percent clickthough rate for online display ads is very high.
• Part of that success for mobile ads could relate to the novelty of the format, Strother suggested. As people grow more accustomed to seeing ads on mobile Web pages, clickthroughs will decline, the argument goes.
• Over the past year, Jupiter estimates that fewer than one-fifth of all companies created any type of mobile advertising. The firm projects that in the next year, 34 percent will be advertising on mobile devices, but of those, more will engage in some kind of texting campaign than search or display advertising.

• While "some of the bigger brands have made some serious commitments to mobile," Strather said that the tendency among advertisers is to make mobile a microcosm of an aggregate digital budget, or to treat mobile advertising as an experimental expense.  

  "Very few companies on the advertising side have made mobile a standalone item on a line-item budget," Strother told InternetNews.com.
• The company is trying to keep file sizes small, so that the ads do not unduly slow the load times of mobile Web pages, Agarwal said. Slow speeds have been a common complaint about the experience of browsing the Web on a mobile device.
• Google also said it will only show one display ad per page.

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• Wolfe's three laws of the brave new Web 2.0 world are: Mobile is the new desktop, the home page is dead, and social networks like Facebook and MySpace presage the media company of the future.
• No one, and I can't stress this enough, gives a shit about your brand. They care about what user experience you deliver to them. This obtains whether you're in the physical world selling a product, or online serving up content.
• The new go-to destination of users won't be home pages but instead will be Web apps. That is, users will access content -- news, blogs, video -- and interact with your (their) communities via apps, hopefully apps that you develop and sell ads around.
• One pundit at Web 2.0, Brian Fling, put it more succinctly. He sees the iPhone as a new medium in and of itself, as significant as radio, television, and the Internet itself have been.
• When you think about it, the Smartphone is the first device that fulfills McLuhan's prediction that electronics will become an extension of the human nervous system.

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• So what’s the difference between branding fifty years ago and today? What’s the most important factor for successful brand building? One word, relationships. That’s right, relationships. It’s not about how many people you reach, how many impressions you get, or how many times your commercial plays on the television. It’s about the conversations you are having with people, it’s about the relationships you are building. Your customers are your friends, treat them as such.  Your brand should be a massive relationship builder.  Branding is becoming less and less about sitting behind your computer and writing press releases.  Branding is becoming more about in person interaction, about face to face contact, and about one-to-one marketing.

• A definite step in the right direction for the company, with actual employees communicating about their individual areas of interest, with minimal company shilling taking place.
• The bold TERMS AND CONDITIONS of the blog also state: "McDonald's owns any comments or other content that you post on this site. That means that McDonald's has the right to make, have made, offer for sale, use, sell, copy, distribute, perform, transmit, display, modify, adapt and otherwise use your submission(s) throughout the world in perpetuity in any manner that it sees fit without compensation to you. McDonald's also has the right to use your name in connection with any use of your submissions."  This is not the best method to develop trust and a long-term relationship with a customer.
• The key thing that Starbucks realizes is that these conversations are taking place anyway.  If this site didn't exist, customers such as the individual above would be making these comments in other forums that were removed from the organization, or on his or her own blog.  With My Starbucks Idea, the organization is getting the feedback in realtime, and has the opportunity to address issues in a rational and constructive way.

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