Category — Social Media

Lately, everyone associated with marketing or advertising is talking about creating “communities” and having “conversations” with their consumers through Social Media Marketing.

What is missing are good examples of how Social Media is being used effectively and, most importantly, how are they measuring that effectiveness to calculate ROI.

I’ve tracked down a couple of recent examples that I feel do a good job in both levering Social Media and tracking results from their efforts.

This case study of Sea World San Antonio (hat tip to Alex Nesbitt at Digital Podcast) shows how working with communities of roller coaster enthusiasts through YouTube videos and Flickr images the marketers at Sea World were able to create significant pre-launch buzz for a new water ride, Journey to Atlantis.

The best part of this example, as demonstrated in this video case study done by Shel Israel at FastCompany.tv, is how they were able to provide concrete measurement of results from the campaign through multiple sources, including use of custom surveys and online site statistics.

Through their research, they were able to clearly separate those visitors who came through their Social Media efforts, versus the rest of the people who visited the park on a daily basis.

Carnival Cruise Lines has had a track record of success in Social Media Marketing for some time now. Tameka Kee of Online Media daily shows how they built on that success through an online partnership with ScrapBlog.com (a community built around scrapbooking) that allows guests from their cruises to share snapshots and video clips with friends and family in a branded environment.

As Carlos Garcia, CEO and co-founder of Scrapblog says of the initiative:

“A Carnival cruiser comes back and has pics and video that are essentially already branded. When they share it with friends and family, they’re sharing the brand. Allowing them to create a scrapbook online increases the number of people that can interact with the brand exponentially.”

Additionally, like the Sea World Example, Carnival also was able to get a better understanding of their initiative through concrete performance metrics by tracking the number of scrapblogs created by their guests, visit stats to the created scrapblogs, and registered conversions at CarnivalConnections.com due to scrapblog visits.

Creating effective Social Media Marketing campaigns is good first step for brands. Measuring that effectiveness on the back end is the critical next step that all brands should be taking as well.

A tremendous amount of content is being generated nowadays that refers to Social Media as if it were some large and homogeneous form of communication and interaction.

The problem with this type of thinking is that when content providers or marketers start to develop Social Media strategies, they quickly realize that generalized “Social Media” thinking leads to one size fits all ideas and a lack of focus.

In actuality, Social Media comes in many distinct forms, which I think of as different faces of the same general concept. Understanding the nuance behind each of these faces is critical to understanding Social Media as a whole.

Social Knowledge networks such as Yahoo! Answers allows users to ask questions about a wide range of topics and then allow other users to answer them. As I have written about before, they are also one of the fastest growing forms of Social Media.

Social Bookmarking sites, such as De.licio.us are mostly about saving and tagging web pages for future reference. They become social by allowing others to read your profile and access other pages that you have tagged and saved.

Social Content, as seen in sites such as YouTube, Flickr, and most forms of blogging, is the most pure form of Social Media. In fact if we didn’t use Social Media as a catch all term for all the above types, it would be a good way to describe this group, which focuses on the submission and discussion of user generated content such as videos, music, photos, and the written word.

Social Networking is a form of Social Media that enables people to connect with other people. While there is a user generated content aspect to social networking, it is less about the content and more about collections and connections of friends, and keeping up with what they are thinking and doing. This is where sites such as Facebook and MySpace reside.

Social News sites such as Mixx, Stumbleupon, and Digg facilitate the sharing of news and different forms of social content by allowing members to share, comment and vote on what they like or don’t like. These sites are heavily involved in the viral aspect of Social Media.

Social Gaming is a form of online gaming that moves beyond the personal experience and adds a layer of social interaction. Two of the most well known examples are World of Warcraft and Second Life. While WoW has built upon a PC game by taking it online and adding a huge world centered on collaboration and social interaction, Second Life makes a game of social interactions by the simple fact of allowing people to fully act out self-created avatars and allowing them to interact with other avatars in a virtual world.

Social Collaboration has many different aspects, but I see it primarily being less a form of media and more a form of crowdsourcing. It can range anywhere from wikis to prediction markets to something like Wikipedia.

I’m sure there are some distinct faces of Social Media I may have missed, or that I’ve grouped together into one of the above. Are there any others out there that people could suggest?

Of all social media outlets, the one that may get most of the buzz this year from a marketing potential standpoint is one that’s been around for a bit already, YouTube.

As the viewership of YouTube becomes more mainstream, its potential for buzz marketing is becoming more viable as well. Unlike something like Facebook and their Beacon program, the buzz marketing potential for YouTube seems more organic and less intrusive, since in many ways it falls along the lines of traditional television advertising.

As this article by Tameka Kee at Online Media Daily outlines, Google is piloting some very interesting tools, including the placement of in-video ads through use of their buzz targeting algorithmn:

“YouTube buzz targeting works on an algorithm that looks at a number of viewer activities, including how many times a video is chosen as a favorite, how favorably it’s rated, and how quickly it picks up views, to determine which clips are about to ‘go viral.’”

One of the pilot participants was Lionsgate, which utilized buzz targeting for its April 18th launch of the movie, “The Forbidden Kingdom”. Danielle DePalma, Lionsgate’s director of digital media feels the potential of buzz targeting with YouTube will be strong:

“With so many videos going viral on YouTube at any given time, buzz targeting allowed us to reach a very large, diverse audience….It) was an amazing opportunity for us to capitalize on the most popular videos on the site.”

In addition to their in-video advertising, Lionsgate went beyond the obligatory movie trailers and included an interactive video mixer tool, which allows viewers to create their own clips with sound and video transitions from provided footage from the movie.

It’s these type of viewer engagement tools that makes Google CEO Eric Schmidt bullish on the increased marketing potential for YouTube for 2008.

“We believe the best (YouTube) products are coming out this year,” Schmidt said, in an interview with CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo. “And they’re new products…much more participative, much more creative…much more interesting in and of themselves.”

If 2007 was the year that the marketing potential of Facebook flashed on and off with Beacon, 2008 may be the year that YouTube gets it right with buzz targeting and other tools.

While Social Media Marketing has seen explosive growth, the tools and metrics necessary to measure the effectiveness of this new medium haven’t seen quite as much innovation.

In fact, the tools I’ve seen discussed are a lot of the same tools that marketers in Search have had success with.

Unfortunately, these tools generally lack the ability to capture the viral nature of programs and campaigns in Social Media.

The chart below is from a study by the Society for New Communications, entitled “New Media, New Influencers, and Implications for the Public Relations Profession” which asked a couple hundred industry professionals a series of questions about Social Media.

This is in response to a question about what Social Media metrics they found most important:

What struck me is that things like search rankings and visitor tracking are the only tools that are seen as being very effective. And I don’t think it is because they truly reflect the nuances of Social Media, it’s just that they are what people are used to measuring when it comes to digital media.

Jeremiah Owyang pointed out a potential measure on his blog that may be more appropriate, something he calls Velocity.

“Velocity, when applied to Social Media, is the measurement of how fast an idea, embed, widget, or other like media spreads over web properties. Benchmarked over time, acceleration and deceleration indicate relevancy.”

He also gives the following example of Velocity in use:

• Week One: A widget was installed on 5,000 Facebook profiles within 7 days, resulting in a weekly velocity of 714.
• Week Two: A widget was installed on 15,000 Facebook profiles within 7 days, resulting in a weekly velocity of 2142.
• You can then look at this over time and benchmark, and then look for accelerations and decelerations, in this case, week two accelerated from week one by 300%.

While the measure itself is very interesting, the challenge for most market researchers trying to work with this new measure will be capturing all the data necessary for analysis in an automated way.

However, at least it is a step towards measuring the concept of relevancy with a measure that is itself relevant.

• Germans tend to comment more on social media than participants in other EU countries, but not half as much as those in urban China.
• People in the UK are not as big on tagging or using RSS feeds as others, but they lead Europe in social network participation.

These were just some of the factoids I uncovered while having some fun over the weekend playing around with this social media segmentation tool from Forrester Research (I’ll be the first one to admit that only someone who works in market research would call playing with social media segmentation tools a form of fun).

Thanks to the blog mentions by Jeremiah Owyang and Charlene Li at Forrester Research, I found the application, along with its corresponding social media segmentation.

The tool looks at broad groups of internet users and classifies them into segments based upon their level of social media participation. This chart shows the different groups and their definitions (click for a larger image):

My only quibble with the segmentation is that I believe there is a lot more granularity out there for Creators (e.g., I’d imagine there could be some significant differences between those who strictly blog versus heavy YouTube or Flickr uploaders).

But the segmentation does do a good job of grouping the population as a whole on something more meaningful than demographics in order to make better sense of them. Maybe, however, there is a micro-segmentation of Creators lurking somewhere under the hood of Forrester’s research.

Here are some other facts that Charlene Li mentions on the Groundswell blog that you can find if you twiddle around with this tool:

• Although social media participation significantly increases the lower on the age range you go, even among the 55+ group in the US, you’ll find that 33% of them are connecting with social applications in some way.
• 41% of Koreans are Joiners — members of social networks — more than anywhere else in the world.
• In Urban China, a full 36% are Creators, which means that this very significant percentage of the population is creating blogs, maintaining content, or uploading videos or music.

I’d like to play around more with this dataset (hint to Forrester!) and maybe later I’ll have some more insight nuggets to share.

Having spent a lot of time recently behind the glass at focus groups, I had a chance to pick up a recent copy of the Qualitative Research Consultants Association magazine, Views.

In it was a very insightful interview of Dr. Robert Cialdini by Sharon Livingston of the Livingston Group for Marketing.

Dr. Cialdini is a professor of Psychology at Arizona State University and is president of Influence at Work.

In the interview, he mentions several Principles of Persuasion that he developed by studying how different companies and organizations approach influencing their consumers or members.

Of these principles, I found four that led me to direct corollaries or implications across different aspects of Social Media Marketing.

1.) Social Proof:
Social Proof is when someone is confronted with something new or uncertain, they tend to look to the behavior and opinions of others, which then plays a strong influence on their own behaviors and attitudes. This behavior tends to snowball, which then can lead to a phenomenon I’ve written about before, crowd cascades.

A simple example from the interview is that when a restaurant flags a particular entree as “This is our most popular dish,” it generally becomes more popular. Another restaurant example I’d add is how the number cars in the parking lot can influence someone’s opinion of the quality of the food or the atmosphere inside, simply by providing Social Proof that the restaurant is popular.

• From an online marketing standpoint, Social Proof is the engine behind the exponential popularity growth of certain posts on social news sites as soon as they manage several thumbs up or votes.
• Receiving a certain amount of votes leads to Social Proof, which then creates even more votes as a post’s popularity cascades.

2.) Authority:
In social environments, most people look to legitimate experts and authorities to provide guidance. The more someone develops themselves as an authority, the more likely they’ll be able to influence behavior and have people follow their lead.

I really like the example Cialdini cites of a sociological experiment that tried to get at the effect of perceived authority:

“They put a man on a street corner and had him cross the street against the light, against the traffic, against the law. Half of the time he was dressed in jeans, an open-neck shirt and running shoes and the other half of the time he was dressed in a business suit, pressed shirt, tie and shiny shoes. Then they counted how many people followed along behind him. An amazing 350 percent more people followed him when he was wearing a suit.”

• Authority in Social Media is both a perceived thing (You look like you know what your talking about, so I’ll listen to you) and a tangible thing (The higher the PageRank and network of friends, the more likely someone can drive traffic to sites or garner votes in social news).
• These are both factors that Robojiannis has covered extensively on his blog and in his master thesis on “Attention and Participation In The Social Web”.
• Tangible social media authority was also the underlying topic of a very interesting blog post by Kimberley Bock about new users and voting patterns on Sphinn. I felt the subsequent comment exchange also added a ton of insight into the concept of authority as well.

3.) Reciprocation:
By providing something to people first, you increase the likelihood that people will want to do something for you as well.

The example of Reciprocation mentioned in the interview is of a direct mail campaign by the Disabled American Veterans association.

“When they send out their direct mail requests for contributions to their organization, they get about an 18 percent hit on their rate. But, if they include a little packet of personalized address labels in the envelope, their hit rate of contributions goes up to 36 percent because people have received something. Now they feel obligated to give back.”

• From an online marketing standpoint, the Social Media best practice of mutual Diggs and Stumbles is an example of the principle of Reciprocation in action.
• Additionally, providing white papers, widget tools, calculators, etc., are all value adds that engage users and bring them back for more.

4.) Liking:
Liking, not surprisingly, is based upon the fact that we are more likely to listen to and follow the actions of people we know and like.

Cialdini breaks Liking down to two key aspects:

“One is similarity; we like the people who are like us, especially in values and attitudes and opinions and so on. Secondly, we like the people who like us and say so by giving us compliments.”

• Social Media, by its very nature, tends to cluster people with similar attitudes and values. I believe what sets effective Social Marketers apart is their ability to respond to others in a group with empathy, to publicly recognize the achievements and good thinking of group members, and to always treat others the way you yourself would want to be treated.
• Flaming social group members and their opinions may generate buzz and controversy, but its long term negative effect will far outweigh its short term bump in interest.

Since this is by no means an exhaustive list, I’d be curious to know what other principles people have when it comes to persuasive Social Media Marketing.