Bulmers: Facebook fans are worth £3.82 more than non-fans

"What is the value of a Like?" is understandably still a common question. There's some interesting coverage regarding Facebook Fan value at the moment, the 'ROI of social media' is always a hot topic, after all. Research conducted by TNS and We Are Social, working with Bulmer's Cider, found that brand preference was higher in Facebook fans than the control group - and that fans were more likely to pay more and recommend Bulmers to others. Sounds fairly obvious so far, yet Bulmer's wanted to know the actual ROI, something tangible, which is what makes it interesting. This is an outline of the methodology which aimed to look at the value generated by fans of the brand.

The research, unveiled at…

Using RACE to structure your social analytics

Social analytics is still relatively new and yet there are already many tools offering to give you the insights to empower your marketing. Often, these tools won't give you a full picture of how your social media marketing is contributing to your business since they only look at one channel like Facebook. As I work with clients, I find you need to use a range of tools and integrate the data to provide a unified report. As with everything in analytics, 20% of the data will generally give you 80% of the answers you need. So it's necessary to identify the "measures that matter". In this post I'll outline the process and measures I use at First 10 to enable the required level of analysis for our clients.

It all starts with…

Basic tactics for building trust in your brand: Part 2

Part 1 of this article outlined the role of familiarity, transparency and accountability in building trust in and through your email program. It also mentioned another set of appropriate "trust" tactics: demonstrating quality and consistency. Well, yeah....you mean keep subscribers happy with worthwhile content or top deals on a regular basis? You might have heard that advice before. Actually I don't mean (just) that. Quality here refers to more than just "valuable content and/or offers". It also covers the quality of the whole email experience, which doesn't just depend on the actual nature of that content or offer, but also on its presentation and context. Here are four examples...

1. Email design functionality

We can argue long into the night about what makes an aesthetically pleasing email. But equally important is ensuring your email retains its functionality and clarity of communication at all times. Specifically: How does…

6 Recommendations to broaden your playlist

I've found podcasts to be a pretty good way to keep up-to-date on new marketing techniques and tools. I don't travel a lot, so I'm not a big podcast user, preferring working to music, but I do have two regulars I enjoy when on the Tube, etc. These are at the start of my recommendations below. Update: July 2012. I recently recorded an Episode with the Digital Marketing podcast discussing approaches to developing digital strategy and publishing - thanks to Daniel and Ciaran for arranging this. You can listen here. I'd really recommend these, but am looking to add a few more to my downloads, so I asked on the Smart Insights LinkedIn Group for recommendations on the best digital marketing podcasts. Thanks if you contributed - my playlist is now longer and better. I would also be interested to hear about other recommendations to those…

Why social media dashboards aren't a substitute for deeper customer understanding using digital ethnography

Considering how fast social media came upon us, social media marketing has reached an interesting point in its evolution: complacency. Not in the media itself, nor in how users are behaving online, or in how quickly new spaces are popping up and evolving – but in how marketers are becoming comfortable in how they are using (and not using) social media. This complacency is driven by marketers’ need to create short cuts in analysis and implementation without necessarily understanding the ground-level view of what it is they are analysing and implementing.

Speed trumps understanding

On the face of it the very premise of trying to speed up assessments and actions in social media seems absurd: we are trying to cut corners from the fastest, quickest medium we have. It might be…

An introduction to the main social signals used by search engines and how this changes SEO

If you have followed the first 9 steps in this SEO series, you’ll have picked up tips on what have been the core elements of SEO since the optimisation of organic search listings began. In step 10 we move on to one of the newer components of SEO, one that is increasing in importance and likely to have a greater impact as search engines evolve from thinking about optimisation to rewarding interaction and influence. Social media signals started to play a part in search engine algorithms back in December 2010 but it wasn’t until 2011 that the likes of Google really started to pay attention and dedicate more effort to indexing social content and using social signals to boost content in search results. For a neat…

Setting yourself and your marketing presentations apart using five steps and one change in behaviour

According to some estimates, between 30 and 40 million PowerPoint presentations are created each day. If each presentation averages 35 slides, simple math tells us that enough slides are produced to provide every man, woman and child on the planet with a new slide each week. But of those millions of presentations delivered each day, how many are effective? How many provide information of value to the audience, making the presentation a good use of their time?

The state of the presentation art

During the past 20 years at my workshops and seminars, I have asked more than twenty thousand people to raise their hands to each of the following statements in turn: Raise your hand if most of the business presentations you’ve attended in the past few years have made extensive use of visual aids. Raise your hand again if…

A review of Google's key site quality-related algorithm changes in 2012

You will have heard that the Google update known as ‘Penguin’ was rolled out earlier this year; the 24th April 2012 to be precise. It came at a time when Google had rolled out a number of other updates, some more significant than others. Given the negative effect on ranking for some sites there has naturally been an awful lot written about the Penguin update, however I can’t help but feel that there has been some confusion over what Penguin addressed and how to tell if you were a victim or not. In this post I will discuss just what Penguin is likely to have affected, the other updates around this time (that some webmasters could have confused with Penguin), and what to do to recover if you have been affected by these updates. …

Applying PR Smith's SOSTAC® planning to digital marketing

SOSTAC® is a marketing planning model, originally developed by PR Smith in the 1990s to help marketers develop marketing plans. Paul is my co-author on Emarketing Excellence, so when we created this book it was natural to work together to show how SOSTAC® can best be applied to planning for digital marketing. This new infographic, that I've developed with Paul and the designers at First 10, summarises the key issues to consider at each stage when developing digital marketing plans [click infographic to expand]: See our more detailed post where we introduce how to apply the SOSTAC® template to Digital Marketing. You can also find out more about the SOSTAC® approach for marketing planning in this Ebook: The SOSTAC® Guide - to writing the perfect plan V1.1 by PR Smith. The "5S's and KPI's" refer to the…

An introduction to persona-based segmentation using an example

The beauty of persona-based segmentation is that it provides a much easier grip on the data than almost any other method of presenting Web analytics. Marketers can really use this type of data - and you can see how it lends itself to testing. We’ve been doing persona-based Segmentation for many years as part of two-tiered segmentation. Indeed, it was the main technique we adapted from days in credit-card marketing to the Web. Persona-based segmentations (typically built using either Cluster Analysis or Neural Nets), are designed to aggregate many separate variables into a multi-dimensional map in which visitors tend to cluster. This sounds very complicated (and mathematically it is - though fortunately other statisticians and programmers have done all the hard work building the tools), but the end result is designed to deliver a much simpler view of digital behavior to marketers. I…