Archive for the ‘Social Media’ Category
The great David Ogilvy once said, “I notice increasing reluctance on the part of marketing executives to use judgment; they are coming to rely too much on research, and they use it as a drunkard uses a lamp post for support, rather than for illumination.” Those words from the great David Ogilvy are as true today as they were then.
Market research professionals, firms and organizations from IBM to Forrester Research are projecting the next trend in market research to be “making the transformation from research to insight.” If you ask me, that’s what market research has always been. An effective market researcher should be able to plan, conduct, analyze, and report actionable market insights and solutions to clients.
If you can’t do that, you’re probably just sharing stats that you found on eMarketer. I’m not discrediting eMarketer, which is an excellent research provider, but I see many advertising and marketing professionals searching for and relying too much on the latest stat or trend instead of taking that data point and translating it to something of value. Does that trend even make sense for your client’s unique situation? Or are you simply trying to impress them? This is not a problem with the research provider, but the researcher himself.
Instead of projecting the next trend in market research to be “making the transformation from research to insight,” which should already be innately infused into the mantra of the market researcher, I project the future of market research to be the convergence, or mash-up, of emerging technologies and lateral creative thinking across industries with the discipline of market research.
We are all living in a perpetual state of beta. We all have the ability at any time, to analyze our past and present to optimize for the future. And for market researchers, now is the perfect time to seize the opportunity to innovate the industry in ways George Gallup could have never imagined. So borrow from other competitors, borrow from other industries, borrow from culture – use lateral creative thinking to expand your potential and create new methodologies to reveal new insights and solutions. Below are five examples of this approach, which will continue to grow, especially in 2012.
Continue reading The Future of Market Research: 5 Innovations to Watch for in 2012
April 4th, 2012 by The Adcom Group in Analytics, Brand Management, Content Marketing, Creative, Impact Marketing, Integrated Marketing, Marketing Strategy, Media Planning & Strategy, Social Media, User Experience | No Comments »
Beginning March 1, 2012, Facebook Timeline became available to brand and business pages. Businesses have one month to set their Timeline up to best serve their brand and their fans before Facebook automatically upgrades all of the pages on March 30, 2012.
Before you turn your Timeline on, learn how the latest Facebook feature can benefit your brand or company:
The Cover Photo: Similar to personal profiles, the cover photo is a large, banner-like image that lives atop your Timeline. Brands may immediately think of this as a large space for advertising, but proceed with caution. The cover photo can of course put an identity to a brand, but can’t be an advertisement, can’t be a call-to-action (‘Like Our Page!’) and can’t include any contact information. Take a look at some impressive cover photos: Today Show, SportsCenter, Coldplay, Nike.
Pin to Top: With the Timeline, the landing tab is no more. Those brands who utilized a ‘Welcome Tab’ or a promotion as the default tab will need to find new and engaging ways to gain attention from their potential fans and current audience. Brands can, however, ‘Pin’ items on their page, which will be prominently displayed at the top of the Timeline.
Tell Your Story: In line with the profile pages, companies can now tell their story with the Timeline. When did your brand make its debut? Did you acquire another company years ago? Have you won awards you want to highlight on your Timeline? Companies need to think about key dates and historical data about their brand to paint a larger picture for their Facebook audience.
Like (and more): Facebook actions are a new part of the Apps tool for Timeline. Not only can users ‘Like’ something, they will be able to express their ‘love,’ ‘want,’ ‘need,’ ‘own’ along with a variety of other verbs towards a product.
Messaging: At last, brands can send private messages to their fans. Instead of messaging the entire community, brand managers can build deeper, more personal relationships with fans of the page.
If your brand is ready to upgrade to the Timeline before it switches automatically, learn more here.
- Written by: Alana Munro, Social Media Manager at Optiem, part of The Adcom Group of Companies.
March 2nd, 2012 by The Adcom Group Tags: brand timeline, facebook timeline, timeline for brand pages in Social Media | No Comments »
Social Media as Common Ground
Consumer behavior has always been an interesting topic. At The Adcom Group, we strive to break down behavior into personas and help develop audiences around the fundamental behaviors of the consumers we are looking to engage. A persona can consist of many things, depending on the customer. To create a persona, we look for things in common; such as media consumption, age, gender, race, socioeconomic status, purchasing habits, etc. The overarching goal for developing a persona is to engage a specific person, at a specific time, in a specific way, to generate a result. How do we engage these people? We try to meet them where they are and start a conversation. Where are the majority of people sharing conversation these days? You guessed it, social media.
Ways People Make Decisions Using Social Media
We almost always need a second opinion, so we ask people. In a traditional format, we call or text a friend or relative, ask a few questions, weigh the feedback we get against our desire to purchase and then make a decision. This is a great way to gain perspective on the items we are considering and since we trust the opinions of the people closest to us, we value the information they provide. But what happens when the item we want is not something that anyone else you know is familiar with? What happens if you have questions that cannot be answered by your BFF or Uncle Dan? Well, in today’s world, we turn to social media and review websites to get what we need. It usually works like this; we do a little homework on the product or service we want. Next, we post specific questions about what we need to know, using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Then we wait for the feedback to roll-in. While we’re waiting for feedback, we troll a few review websites. Possibly look it up on Yelp, RateItAll or ePinions. Some of the more savvy folks will turn to industry specific websites, for example, if researching a vacation or travel destination we might use Kayak or TripAdvisor. To get a more substantive view from colleagues or thought leaders we might turn to Quora. We gather all of this information and then make our decision, feeling comfortable in our purchase because we did our homework.
“If you can reach them at that early life stage, you can create a loyalty relationship with the consumer” - Eddie Combs, CMO for Sears Holding Corp
Family vs. Social Media for Decision Making
An article over on AdAge was posted recently about how family is still the go-to for feedback and reviews for the products and services we’re considering purchasing. The article cites a study that shows that 90% of people leverage family before asking an online review website or social network. That is huge. So the natural question to ask is, how do you reach an entire family? The answer can go in many directions and will not always have a concrete answer, but in general, you have to consider the family as a persona or audience. Going back to the persona discussion we started earlier, part of the development should be taking into consideration the reach and influence of the family. For example, if we are targeting a person with an electronics product, we should know that some electronics are difficult to understand. As a result, this person may ask a family member for help. This is key for social media marketers as they will need to find ways to reach all of the people involved in the target audiences decision making community. An ambitious endeavor, no doubt, but most organizations that rest on brand to generate business already attempt this because they understand the value of engaging people at an early life stage. As mentioned in the AdAge article, Sears is trying to do just that by developing personas and engaging potential customers leveraging social media as a means to connect, convey and communicate the value of their brand, products and services. Makes sense doesn’t it?
December 9th, 2010 by The Adcom Group Tags: branding in Social Media | No Comments »
Optiem worked closely with our partner, Exact Target, to develop a new interactive tool for visualizing how people participate in content consumption and creation. The research report developed by Exact Target covers 12 distinct social personas, each with specific traits, behaviors, and tendencies. This in-depth market research paints a broad picture that helps marketers understand how different channels are used and what activities people engage in.
Coupled with age and gender demographics, the tool allows marketers to dive deep into a specific demographic for any person to see channel use in email, Facebook, and Twitter as well as participation in 21 creation, consumption, and contribution activities.
Powered by Exact Target’s excellent data and analysis, Optiem integrated this information with a rich Flash UI that contains more than 7.5K data points. The plot chart shows where each persona falls on the axes of consumption and contribution. Clicking on a persona reveals a deeper look at how the persona uses social and email channels and participates in online activities.
Check out the tool below and sign up to receive the report. Pass the word to anyone you know who might benefit from this amazing tool!
To learn more about Social Media Marketing visit ExactTarget.com/SFF
July 23rd, 2010 by The Adcom Group Tags: Interactive Tool, Market Research in Social Media | No Comments »
The big question on most marketers’ minds is “How do I measure social media performance?” For me, anytime you say the word measure, I immediately think of analytics. Since we have been implementing Google Analytics for the vast majority of our customers, I am going to focus on how to build a solution that will allow measurement in that tool.
There are two approaches to understanding the impact that social media is having on your website. The first thing to consider is what you want to measure. Are you putting effort into Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn as part of your effort? If that is the case, you might want to just track those tools to see the traction you are getting through advanced segments.
If you are active in multitudes of social networking tools that include sites like Digg, MySpace, Wikipedia, friendfeed or others, you might want to take a different approach and create a filtered profile.
Advanced Segments
One of the simplest ways to see traction in your analytics is to create Advanced Segment. In the left-hand panel of the Google Analytics screen, there is a section called “My Customizations.” This section will contain a link for Advanced Segments. Once you are on the screen you will need to do the following to set up a segment:
- Click the Create new custom segment in the top right corner
- Under Dimensions, select Source from the Traffic Sources list.
- You can either select a specific source from the drop down list, or you can type in a series of sources for you to track like digg|wikipedia|linkedin|facebook| twitter|feedburner
- If you enter multiple sources, you will need to choose Matches regular expression from the drop down list
- Give the segment a name in the box below
- Click Create
The benefit of selecting an Advanced Segment is that you can compare the social media traffic to the other traffic on the website. This setup will allow you to see the behavioral differences that are happening between your direct, organic, paid and social traffic users. Where do you want to drop the social users? Is it in a different place than paid search? Do you need to create social media landing pages for your Facebook or Twitter programs?
Advanced segments will allow you to leverage all of your existing reports and show a comparison to the overall site and existing basic segments created by Google.
Filter Profile
I had written a blog post talking about filtering traffic for your profile. In order to create a social media profile, you would just need to create a filtered profile as described in the previous post. When creating the filter, just name it Social Networks and add the sources to track. It is done in the same way as the advanced segment “digg|wikipedia|linkedin|facebook| twitter|feedburner”- you can add other domains to track such as technorati, blogger, tinyurl and others as well.
By creating a filtered profile, every report you run will be specific to the social media outlets you are tracking. You can copy any custom reports you created and see all of your e commerce information in this profile.
Regardless of the way that you create the tracking, the ability to see the traction and behavior of social media users will give you greater insight into the value of these users to your website and business.
June 8th, 2010 by The Adcom Group Tags: advanced segment, filtered profiles, google analytics in Analytics, Social Media | No Comments »
There can be no debate that social media has captured the imagination of the online world. Companies are jumping headlong into the space in hopes of riding the conversational wave and reep the rewards of the ‘good vibrations’ on these social networks.
SocialTwist did a recent study on Social Media Sharing Trends for 2009. The study found that 59% of respondents preferred email as their channel for sharing. Making the 14% for social networks and 25% for IM pale in comparison.
Even more telling is a recent “Social Influence Benchmark Report” put out by StrongMail. The best platform converter for sharing online content is email. Strangely enough embedded badges came in a distant second with 20.5%. Facebook and Twitter were left in the dregs with only 3.2% and 0.4% respectively.
Can you blame people? Email is like your car. A private little space in the public world. I have friended far more people on facebook than I would EVER give me email address.
In 2009 and for 2010, it might be social media getting all the buzz, but email still delivers.
December 23rd, 2009 by The Adcom Group Tags: informaiton sharing, social media influencers in Email, Social Media | No Comments »
As I was reading one of my eMarketer emails, I saw the chart on the top 10 website for US Teens. Although the top contenders were the monster social networking sites, what really struck me was websites that were different between males and females.
It wasn’t really a revelation that teenage males are playing video games online at websites like Addicting Games,Miniclip and IGN, but that there were 3 games websites in the top 10. Yes, the NFL’s website was in there too. We know boys like their football.
If you are going to go after teen boys, advertise on gaming websites. That really isn’t news. I think that is why people started to advertise in the games.
As for the females, It seemed a little strange to me how they stuck to more mainstream websites like AOL and Amazon. Although they are looking for celebrity gossip on Perez Hilton and TMZ, even those websites are relatively mainstream in the adult world.
OK – let me sum up. Understanding marketing to teenage boys. They like social communities, football and gaming. Teenage girls – social communities, gossip and buying things.
Pretty much nothing has changed since I was a teen (yes, it was decades ago) except they have just moved it online.
December 3rd, 2008 by The Adcom Group Tags: gaming websites, gossip, teen websites in Social Media | No Comments »
In my last post, I explored social media in the b-to-b world. A vast majority of marketers were not using web 2.0 techniques because of staffing, executive buy-in or knowledge. Where does that leave them? With a great opportunity.
With tightening budgets, marketers can turn online to start understanding and participating in social networks. As a matter of fact, the same participants who stated the main three reasons for not getting involved, overwhelmingly indicated they are planning on breaking the social media barrier (see chart below) by almost 3 to 1.
The best advice for these marketers is to make the person in charge of analytics your best friend. If you set up your analytics correctly, it can help you to further understand several aspects of your social media campaigns including:
- Increased traffic to your website (that was a gimme)
- Increased user engagement through time on site
- More inbound links for your website from sources like Twitter, Facebook, Bebo, Delicious, etc.
- New sources of customers when you mine the inbound traffic source list past the top 25
So overall, the economic downturn might prove a great opportunity for marketers to start using social media because the big budget for trade shows or tv ads just doesn’t exist.
November 17th, 2008 by The Adcom Group Tags: b to b, web2.0 in Analytics, Social Media | No Comments »
Before you turn your Timeline on, learn how the latest Facebook feature can benefit your brand or company:
