1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 = Social Media Juice

Social Media Strategies moves to a new level with the 1/3 model of "sharing information". This article at M/C/C covers alot of groud that we are now preaching to clients:

"Don’t Be a Robot: Creating Engagement Through Personalization in Social Media"

Highlights include:

• Go Narrow - As a social media user build a niche for yourself. Whether it be tennis or knitting, if you have a passion, share your thoughts about it. Chances are someone else shares the same passion. The commonality between users is the first step in engaging with your audience in a social media environment.
• Content is King - Keep your content fresh, updated and relevant. Stick to your topic and provide information on upcoming events, industry trends and related news articles. Reach out to other users who are already talking about your interests.
• The 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 Rule - Everything that you’re doing in the social space is to serve a three-fold goal. 1/3 of your content should be promotional about your products, company or activity. The other 1/3 should serve as an educational resource for your audience. The final 1/3 should be engagement which includes responding to user comments, posting new questions and interacting with your community members on any platform.

To see the full article at M/C/C, click here.

Quirk's - Qualitatively Speaking: Going social with qualitative research

For 25 years Quirk's Marketing Research Review has been providing practical applications in marketing research. The company's mission is to be the marketing research information source for those that conduct, coordinate and purchase research product and services.

Quirks posted a very interesting article titled:

"Qualitatively Speaking: Going social with qualitative research"

OutsideIn Strategies has a broad array of strategic research methodologies including on-line and social media applications. Katie Sweeney, Founder and Principal of OutsideIn, commented on the Quirk's article:

"This is a spot-on article on how social media can be leveraged in strategic research.  OutsideIn Strategies is really excited to include this latest tool in our arsenal of qualitative methodologies to efficiently deliver valuable insights as a precursor or add on to more traditional approaches."

Some interesting excerpts from the Quirk's article include:

• Qualitative researchers use a trained eye to look beyond the obvious and pinpoint trends and translate statements into insights. That knowledge is harvested from online forums, such as social media posts and comments, and key pieces of actionable information are identified from the millions of conversations that occur publicly every day.

• Many qualitative researchers who use social media agree that it provides unparalleled opportunities for insight. At the same time, it is commonly viewed as one piece of a larger approach. There are numerous ways that social media analysis can accompany, supplement or guide traditional research efforts...Social media analysis can often be used as the first phase of a mixed methodology. When starting with a broad category, mining posts and comments on social media channels can help pinpoint areas that consumers care about the most.

• Just as social media is changing the way brands market to consumers, it’s also changing the way consumers expect to interact with a brand. More and more people are welcoming brands into their lives via social media platforms. Some consumers expect to experience a brand online and expect that brand to hear their opinions via online channels.

• One benefit of social media research is observing consumers in their natural environment. People who are familiar with the product/service chat candidly about what they like, what they don’t like and what they expect from a brand...Taking it further, understanding how consumers talk about a product or understanding what they expect delivers invaluable direction on how to market a product.

• Just as social media is changing the way brands market to consumers, it’s also changing the way consumers expect to interact with a brand. More and more people are welcoming brands into their lives via social media platforms. Some consumers expect to experience a brand online and expect that brand to hear their opinions via online channels.

• That firsthand glimpse of how consumers talk about a product reveals another distinct benefit: alternative product uses...Or, in some situations, it’s less about usage and more about audience. Social media research can reveal groups of people outside the target audience who are using the product...In addition, social media research can supplement traditional new-product development research. It can be used to discover what people are saying about competitive products or unmet needs in the marketplace.

Social Measurement update from Scot Wheeler of IMedia Connection

Very interesting series of Blogs by Scot Wheeler of iMedia Connection:

• The Path to Meaningful Social Measurement
• The Four Principles of Social ROI Measurement
• The ROI of Social Media ROI

Highlights include:

Current approaches to social media measurement come in two forms:

1. Content-based monitoring or “listening” evaluates the content of conversations to assess current perceptions, and guide future engagement.
2. Context-based “social graph” analysis evaluates relationships and interactions within and across the social graph to assess networks and their capability to drive business objectives.

Web analytics has an established competency in building a data-driven management culture and providing business insights from digital data. Thus, it is a natural candidate to advance organizations from the raw volume or “count” metrics such as “Followers”, “Likes”, “Views” etc. to give managers integrated performance insights from ratios such as “comments/post”, “comments/page likes”, “links followed/re-tweet” and “conversions/social click-through”, which will be even more valuable when used in conjunction with the content analysis mentioned above.

Finally, as new solutions begin to align social media profile, content and relationship data with existing CRM databases, the web analytics function transformed into 'Marketing Science' has a clear role in developing digital strategy and performance insights from these combined data-sets.

Many disciplines have faced significant challenges with emerging technologies, methodologies and organizational readiness to bring social media measurement to its current state. Web analytics must now help advance the cause by bringing its competencies, experiences, requirements and standards to bear on the next generation of tools and approaches.

S.O.C.I.A.L. - Tom Friedman from the New York Time's on the current revolution.....

Tom Friedman of The New York Times has been one of my favorite columnist, and he typically takes on the political and economic questions of the moment. In his latest column "One Country Two Revolutions", Friedman talks about the shift from Wall Street to Silicon Valley that is going on and how it is a SOCIAL event. At one point in my career, I did a Silicon Valley start-up and it failed in the "dot-bomb" era. Problem was there were too many ideas, too much capital and not enough customers. The difference is this time things are SOCIAL:

• S = speed — everything is now happening faster.
• O stands for open. If you don’t have an open environment inside your company or country, these new tools will blow you wide open.
• C is for collaboration because this revolution enables people to organize themselves within companies and societies into loosely coupled teams to take on any kind of challenges — from designing a new product to taking down a government.
• I is for individuals, who are able to reach around the globe to start something or collaborate on something farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before — as individuals.
• A is for alignment. “There has never been a more important time to have all your ships sailing in the same direction,” said Benioff. “The power of social media is that it is easier than ever to both articulate, and reinforce, the vision and values that create and inspire alignment.”
• L is for the leadership that does that. Leadership in a SOCIAL world has to be a mix of bottom-up and top-down. Leaders need to inspire, enable and empower everything coming up from below in a company or a social movement and then edit and sculpt it with a vision from above into a final product.

Friedman goes on to say:

"SOCIAL is the latest phase in the I.T. revolution is being driven by the convergence of social media — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Groupon, Zynga — with the proliferation of cheap wireless connectivity and Web-enabled smartphones and “the cloud” — those enormous server farms that hold and constantly update thousands of software applications, which are then downloaded (as if from a cloud) by users on their smartphones, making them into incredibly powerful devices that can perform myriad tasks.

The emergence of the cloud, explained Alan Cohen, a vice president of Nicira, a new networking company, “means than anyone can have the computing resources of Google and rent it by the hour.” This is speeding up everything — innovation, product cycles and competition."

See the entire Tom Friedman column @ NY Times.

Below is Film Annex's film "Occupy Wall Street".

Watch more on webtvs.filmannex.com/mikesweeney

Neilson examines the impact of Social Media on Brand Marketing

We work very closely with Nielsen and one of its subsidiaries who are both leaders in consumer research. Among many innovations in consumer-focused marketing and media research, Nielsen was responsible for creating a unique retail-measurement technique that gave clients the first reliable, objective information about competitive performance and the impact of their marketing and sales programs on revenues and profits. Nielsen information gave practical meaning to the concept of market share and made it one of the critical measures of corporate performance. Like many in the industry today, Neilson has shifted its focus to Social Media. In this study "How Social Media Impacts Brand Marketing", Neilson takes at how "Consumers are spending more time than ever using social media."

"This report helps uncover what impacts social media may have for marketers trying to build their brands and connect with their audience more directly.

Social media plays an important role in how consumers discover, research, and share information about brands and products. In fact 60 percent of consumers researching products through multiple online sources learned about a specific brand or retailer through social networking sites. Active social media users are more likely to read product reviews online, and 3 out of 5 create their own reviews of products and services. Women are more likely than men to tell others about products that they like (81% of females vs. 72% of males). Overall, consumer-generated reviews and product ratings are the most preferred sources of product information among social media users."

See the full story and survey @ Neilson