What is the true meaning of online influence?
We hear a lot about influence now, it’s a commonplace term when we’re talking about social media marketing. With so many tools available to help us understand what that means and what to do - tools such as Klout, Kred, PeerIndex, and Radian6 – what does influence really mean to us, as individuals and brands? And, what about all of those tools that claim to be able to help us leverage it?
The new report
Brian Solis (now Altimeter Group’s principal analyst) has released a free report to help us understand the tools available, what they do and how we might best make used of them when marketing to influential people. He’s done this through interviews and software demos with vendors, detailed reviews of 17 services providers, a review of 6 brands that have publicly piloted digital influence programs and a final quantitative study of…
Are you dormant, testing, co-ordinating, optimizing or empowering?
On Smart Insights, Paul Fennemore recently recommended his social media adoption framework which was popular, so I thought I'd alert you to a new approach to review social media maturity. Forrester have released a report that offers a social maturity model to help illustrate the common stages of change that occur as marketers optimize their social activities from dormant to empowered workforce.
Where are you on the 5 stages of social maturity?
Customers and employees are becoming increasingly empowered by social technologies, dramatically changing the way they communicate and collaborate. We know now this isn't a fad - it's a fundamental shift. To succeed in this new world, companies must make fundamental changes to resources, skills, tools, processes, and culture. Forrester calls this process of change 'social maturity', and it consists of five stages:
Dormant
Testing
Coordinating
Scaling and optimising
Empowering the workforce
…
New Boston Consulting Group report on the Economic impact of Internet on retail
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: BCG Perspectives March 19th article
A new report on consumer and business use of the Internet in the G-20 countries
If you've been working in online marketing or Ecommerce for a while, it's easy to lose sight of how new digital platforms are, and the opportunity they will still bring in the future.
A major new research report by the BCG Group reminds us of the future potential by its review of the size of the opportunity - $4.2 trillion by 2016 they estimate. To put it into a more meaningful perspective, if it were a national economy, the Internet economy would already rank in the world’s top five, behind only the U.S., China, Japan, and India, and ahead of Germany.
You can read the full report summary above, here is what stood out for me:
1. UK…
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14 Mar 2012
How to control social media ‘bush fires’ to protect your brand
Prior to the digital social media era, brands could control most marketing and communications channels.
Marketers could determine which messages were conveyed, to whom, where and when, thus ensuring their precious brand image was preserved intact.
Enter social media - the tinder to set fire to a previously dry marketing environment.
Social media’s power and reach deliver real power to consumers
Social media lets consumers refer, recommend, vote, score and comment positively or negatively on anything they feel or experience about a product or service.
A particularly big dose of fuel is added to the 'brand communications bush fire' by social media’s interactive real-time capacity to broadcast messages. Reach is potentially unlimited, extending through compelling multi-media formats, such as pictures and videos ‘taken on the go’ with smartphones.
Brands must be…
Ignoring customers will cost you revenue
Marketing emails from major and minor brands alike are often sent from a noreply email address - you will have seen them.
Either quite literally an address noreply@, or the email footer carries a statement like; "Please do not reply to this email, the account is not monitored, please contact customer support at ...". I think there's a lot more to them than meets the eye...
If a shop assistant failed to answer your questions you would shop elsewhere. So why are brands ignoring customers, in their millions, through email and social media communications?
Ignoring customers in social media
Interestingly, the social media marketing world is following the same approach as email marketing. This article notes that only 5% of wall questions from consumers on brand pages ever receive follow-up interactions from the brand.
The key to answering the…
Creativity paves the way to commercial success
Let's face it, in the grand scheme of things, people don’t care about brands that much, they care about themselves. As individuals busy in our own worlds, we care about what we want, need, worry about or want to solve.
It stands to reason then, that if we want people to pay attention to our brands (to Like, Click, Share, Comment), we often hear this as "engagement", then we have to face up to this fact and the human emotions where our brands risk falling in to the 'whatever' category, our target audience simply have better things to go and do. This is all getting worse for brands with the advance of mobile technologies and access to more information, tools, apps and social platforms.
"I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you…
Case study: KLM's 'Meet & Seat' initiative
In the latter part of 2011, international airline KLM Royal Dutch Airlines announced its new 'Meet & Seat' programme. Participating passengers could view each other’s Facebook or LinkedIn profiles and use this information to choose who to sit next to during a flight. I always find it interesting to review how KLM are using social media since they're definitely an innovator rather than a laggard. These often aren't just campaigns, but integrate with KLM services.
Source: Wikipedia
This idea might be good for KLM's PR, but can it succeed? And what lessons can you take back to your business?
KLM's previous use of social media to personalise service
KLM is no stranger to social media. In November 2010 it launched 'KLM Surprise'. This test involved flight attendants searching passengers' social media profiles and meeting…
How E-retailers can make a sustainable ‘price match promise’ to grow business while protecting margins
As recession continues to bite, forcing even well known and loved names into receivership, we all know it’s essential to keep customers buying from us. And, in order to achieve this, you have to be absolutely certain you are offering the best price around.
Of course in any market sector, there are many online retailers, all competing for the same customers and, more importantly, their money. To triumph in the face of such intense opposition you’re going to need an angle or edge; something to make sure you’re ahead of the competition and that allows you prove it too.
This is where services like Competitor Price Watch (CPW) can help. In this post I'll describe the concept behind these services and finish with three…
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01 Mar 2012
A new adoption framework for social media strategy
There are now enough examples and evidence to know which social media marketing strategies and tactics work and which don’t. Enough for organisations to move beyond the baby steps of adoption that typify where about two thirds of the UK remain today.
The board of directors is usually culpable
The key issue in most organisations, particularly at board level, is they are still being held back by their failure to gain a fundamental understanding of the medium. Neither, perhaps as a result of this failure in understanding, are they recruiting the right calibre of skills into digital and new media roles.
I have interviewed and worked with scores of organisations concerning their plans for social media. Many say they now want to make social media strategic.
However, they put their hands up and say the issue is they don’t know what ‘strategic’ means when it comes to…
Google Analytics have rolled out their latest change to the tool's user interface. This post explains 8 of the changes they've made, along with screengrabs comparing old vs new.
If you've used Google Analytics for any length of time, you'll know that these updates usually take one of 3 forms:
A large series of user interface tweaks, all at once.
Introduction of individual (or small groups of) functionality changes.
Both together.
This time the change is largely user interface tweaks, though there is also a couple of neat little functionality changes.
Change 1: Left Navigation
The left navigation (the main way of accessing all reports in Google Analytics) has been updated. All of the categories within this are the same, but the layout is a little cleaner, and they've added icons here:
This is purely a visual thing, and there is no recategorisation of reports within this area. 'Advertising' still…
