'Net Features : socia media

Can You Predict Social Behavior?

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:05:00 GMT

Monitoring trends and brand mentions is a key component of success in social media. The problem is that monitoring (and the subsequent management) is reactive as opposed to proactive like we really want and need it as brands; but it doesn't have to be that way - at least not any more.

"Too often, even the most aggressive brands are left chasing the conversation in social media, or hoping for that fortuitous alignment of real-time events and content they happen to have on hand," said Randy Browning, co-founder and chief executive officer of Blab, a newly launched platform for predicting social media conversations.

You didn't read that wrong - Blab's technology actually promises to apply its predictive analytics technologies to social data streams in order to show brands and social media managers what their audiences will be talking about in advance.

"With Blab, any brand, organization or cause can transform from a reactive stance to a proactive one; from followers to leaders, with a high degree of confidence in their strategy and their content," said Browning. "Since we started Blab, brands have been telling us that this changes the game for social media engagement. Now that our platform is released to the public, we embrace the challenge of proving them right."
Blab essentially is helping marketers know what their audience will be talking about in the future by capturing "lifestyle audiences" as opposed to demographic audiences in an effort to discover conversation context important to them. The result is details on relevant - but non obvious - commonalities in conversations from which insights can be gathered to inform business intelligence, content development and brand management.

See What's New in Website Magazine's Social Media Mavens Channel

Persona-Driven Data In Focus

Administrator — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 15:42:00 GMT

As part of their upcoming webinar hosted in partnership with Experian Marketing Services, we had the chance to sit down with iAcquire, a digital brand strategy and marketing services agency that offers SEO, reputation management, content marketing, digital PR and social media marketing services.

Here, a team of marketing and strategy practitioners discusses the importance of persona-driven research cross-functionally within digital marketing. Read on to get insight into market research, content, social media and SEO -- and how all of these channels can be driven by persona data:

Market Research

Norris Rowley, Jr., Market Research Manager at iAcquire -- and seven-year veteran at The Nielsen Company -- shares the value research can bring to a business' overall marketing ROI:

Why is market research an important element to the marketing mix?

Marketing is an essential action that incorporates the entire business and is vitally important to the health of any business. Market research views the entire business from the customer's viewpoint, taking into account every aspect of the client marketing mix - from the website (product), distribution channels and engagement tactics.
What areas of marketing can benefit from persona research and how can they benefit?

All forms marketing can benefit from persona research, from on-page SEO to traditional marketing. While some areas of marketing can use persona research in an instant actionable way (i.e. audience targeting and precise messaging) other forms of marketing can use persona research as a pure market research tool to build a strategy upon.

For example, I use persona research as a base for a client's social campaign, mobile marketing and organic search to detail for a client exactly who their audience is and how to engage them correctly. However when I use persona research for brand development or traditional marketing I use persona research to help shape a client's messaging and how they should target the brand to a particular segment.

How can persona data help customers' needs be met?

The persona data provides our clients with a behind-the-curtain look at who their audience is made up of, and how those demographics relate to their products. With that data, clients can better tailor their messaging to target that particular segment of the audience.

SEO

iAcquire's resident SEO, Tom Harari shares insight into organic search driven by persona research:

What, in essence, is persona-driven SEO?

Persona driven SEO is just that - optimizing your content, both on and off site with your audience segments in mind. Are you optimizing for keywords, or for customers? If the answer is the latter, how can you know for sure that you're speaking to your audience's needs and pain points without first understanding who your audience is.

What are five things enterprise brands can do to engage persona-driven SEO?

1. Incorporate SEO into the wider marketing strategy at the beginning, not the end.

2. Challenge your SEO team to compare their audience findings with that of the strategy team - do they align?

3. Forgot antiquated concepts of SEO like meta keywords and keyword density. Instead, look for content that resonates with the personas.

4. Use principles of Latent Semantic Indexing to incorporate semantically related words that support pages' topical themes.

5. Always be testing. Audience research and personas are just the first step. It doesn't end there -- constantly look to test assumptions validate which personas convert better. A/B tests and multivariate testing are crucial to accomplish this.

How can brands use consumer insights to identify link building prospects at scale?

Consumer insights help the marketing team understand where their target audience spends their time online, which in turn means your team knows which publications and influencers are needed to establish relationships with.

Can you use persona data for on-page SEO? If so, how?

Persona data touches almost all aspects of on-page SEO - from informing information architecture decisions, to copy, sites that are built for users to engage with and come back to will do well in organic search.

Content Strategy

Devin Asaro, Content Strategist at iAcquire shares the importance of persona research in the enterprise content game:

Why does the "one-size-fits-all" approach to on-page content not work?

Different clients have different goals for their content, and all websites are different - especially when it comes to the way they engage their audience. A site targeting primarily older users will utilize an entirely different strategy than one trying to engage a younger audience.

How many personas should be targeted when creating web copy? How do you diversify content to fulfill multiple buyer personas?

There isn't a definite rule here. Some companies who offer a wide range of products -Target, for instance - are going to have way more relevant personas than a company like Venus, which has a much narrower target audience. You should target as many personas as are relevant to your audience -but there is a tipping point.

Some personas are in direct conflict with one another when it comes to the content they respond to. Targeting too many personas at once can lead to lackluster, middle-ground content. Go after your big fish.

When in the process should you lean on persona-driven research in the content cycle? What is the first step a business should take?

If you're going to do it right, persona driven research will factor into every strategic decision you make with "enterprise content". Integrated keyword and persona research should be the first step in the content cycle - that comes in the content strategy cycle, way before content creation starts. If you're creating content that isn't informed by that data -either because you don't have it or because you're not consulting it -then you're not really doing persona-driven content strategy.

What type of data is the most important in persona-driven on-page content on an enterprise's website?

Need states are incredibly important, because they should be the inverse of your offerings. If client needs "A", you need to align your messaging so that it reflects the fact that you offer. Figuring out what customers want, and what they need, is essential to persona-driven research.

Do you craft your content with behavior-based assumptions in mind? If so, how do you do this?

You design your site and its content based on how you think the user is going to behave. Luckily, UX is a well-developed field with a lot of research informing what we know about online behavior, so I certainly wouldn't call them assumptions (because you know what those do).

We make research-based assessments for all of our content and UI/UX decisions at iAcquire - and then we test them to see if we were right. If we weren't (or we see places where we can improve) we make adjustments. It starts as an art but it becomes a science. Within our agency, we use tools such as Experian Market Research and Nielsen data to really deep dive into our agency's and client's persona research.

How do you tailor specific calls to action to each persona?

You look for the divisions within that persona that make it complex. Personas aren't individuals - they're types. Look for issues inconsistencies or circumstances that divide the various subgroups within your target persona, and address your call to action there. If, for instance, you know that your persona comprises higher income people of both major political parties, and you're writing a blog post, a question regarding taxes is likely to spark engagement. It doesn't need to be controversial, but it does need to address users in a complex way, or they simply won't care.

If your call to action isn't focused on sharing or engagement, but rather driving action within your site -say, to get someone to sign up for a newsletter, the call to action should offer a benefit specific to that persona's need states. This isn't a difficult thing to figure out if you've done your persona research.

Social Media

Megan Brown, Social Media Strategist at iAcquire unveils the link between persona-driven research and social media:

How do you use persona research for social media?

I seek out data that details the online behavior of personas - what blogs they visit, how much time they may spend on a social network, what they click on and more - which helps brands tailor both messaging and placement in order to guarantee a higher engagement rate. The behavioral and demographic data also helps me decide which social influencers can drive action from these personas, and I create relationships with these influencers to serve as brand ambassadors.

How does digital engagement shift from persona to persona on social networks?

Engagement shifts from network to network rather than persona to persona. Social networks are not one size fits all. This means that certain networks are better for certain tactics brands, organizations or influencers use to engage. For example, Pinterest is visual based -therefore, it is a great platform to engage with your customers through images, infographics and video content. Twitter is better for delivering short, to the point messaging designed to catch a reader's attention - and brands still must leave room for users to add their own thoughts so they will re-share it with their friends. So, networks themselves inherently attract a certain type of persona - however, the demographic or details of these personas may be very different, even if their online behavior or way they consume messaging is similar.

So, networks themselves inherently attract a certain type of persona - however, the demographic or details of these personas may be very different, even if their online behavior or way they consume messaging is similar.

Does an archetypical social persona exist? If so what do they look like and how do they engage digitally?

No, there is no archetypical social persona. Social networks are always changing -- that means how personas use and consume their content is changing as well. Certain alterations may bring in new personas to use social, other changes might turn some personas off to specific social networks or even social as a whole. That's why it is so important to continue to monitor and measure audience behavior and use social listening to your advantage to retain certain personas or capture new personas entering the social sphere.
Why does social media research need to come before execution?

If you don't know who your audience is, what they like, how they consume messaging, where they live online, what types of messaging they prefer, how they access social networks, who they have conversations with on these networks, who on these networks drives action from them.... You're basically throwing mud at the wall and seeing what sticks. Guess and check is a waste of money, time, and energy - especially when there are tools to access and analyze the research needed to create a successful campaign.

Want more information on persona research and digital strategy? Tune into Experian Marketing Services and iAcquire's complimentary webinar, Persona-driven search strategy drives better results on Thursday, March 14 at 2:00 p.m. EST. This webinar will help determine the best ways to build a campaign strategy, ultimately leading to a better customer experience and increased traffic.

Humanizing E-Commerce with a Conversation Engine from Loopit

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 19:15:00 GMT

Social shopping was all the rage several years ago. The digital dream was that like-minded consumers (shoppers) would organize themselves, discover products and shop online together, engaging with each other in the context of the merchant’s brand and exposing its products to an infinitely larger audience in the process.

While it definitely had its appeal for both merchants and consumers, the available technologies were pretty weak at the time and it never really worked as imagined. As a result, the industry somewhat lost their collective interest over time. Or did they? Merchants still want users to have an positive experience and so do shoppers (nothing really new there). But virtual change is afoot - some vendors are actually aiming to relive the social shopping dream (at least in part) by putting a greater emphasis on enabling consumers to engage in conversations more seamlessly.

RedStart Ventures (a venture foundry) last week launched LoopIt, a platform that enables users to poll specific members of their email address book or by posting their queries to Facebook in the hopes that their friends will join the conversation and lead them to better buying decisions. LoopIt essentially hopes to restore the human element to online shopping. Whether users are interested in publicizing their purchase considerations remains the big question.

One of the first retailers to deploy LoopIt is popular high-end fashion rental site Rent the Runway, which now offers the LoopIt conversation button for items available on its site, allowing members to poll their friends or fellow Rent the Runway style enthusiasts.

"LoopIt is the perfect resource for Rent the Runway members who have already organically formed a community that seeks outfit and styling tips from one another," said Jenn Hyman, CEO & Co-Founder of Rent The Runway. "With LoopIt, they will have an extended group of virtual stylists, including their own friends, as well as other fashion-forward members who also love to experiment with designer fashion. As a company that puts customer experience first, it is monumentally important for us to offer our members tools that will help create the most seamless and enjoyable experience possible."

Zappos Tracks Pinterest Conversions with Pinfluencer

Pete Prestipino — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 16:15:00 GMT

As Pinterest continues its slow but steady ascent to social media greatness, brands are turning to the platform in droves to raise awareness with their target consumers and, in some cases, even turning a profit. As more and more enterprises start leveraging the platform, there will be a greater need to understand, on a high level, just how well they are performing.

Case in point, Pinfluencer (a marketing and analytics solution for Pinterest) has announced that online apparel and footwear retailer Zappos has selected its solution to provide performance analytics about its campaigns focusing on the social media site’s audience.

“Pinfluencer creates a web-based platform for us at Zappos to easily track online performance of our boards on Pinterest,” said Graham Kahr, social scientist at Zappos. “Through Pinfluencer, we have been able to boost audience engagement, site traffic and virality which results in increased earned media conversations and sales for our company. We now have a way to actually measure the ROI of our Pinterest initiatives. This is huge for us as a company and for the industry.”

Zappos will have quite a bit of actionable information available to it which will further fuel its already impressive social media and content marketing initiatives. Using Pinfluencer, Zappos will be able to track the pins that are driving engagement, clicks and revenue, and most importantly to track user eligibility of contests that are run through the platform.

Pinfluencer to date has been one of the only solutions on the market for brands to get direct value out of the Pinterest platform. Brands who ran their contests and sweepstakes on Pinfluencer increased their follower acquisition rate by 156 percent while their pins/day jumped by 125 percent. Since the October 2012 beta launch of its promotions and contests platform, Pinfluencer has hosted and tracked more than 100 promotions for brands such as Gilt, Jetsetter, WayFair, Martha Stewart and Shape Magazine.

Search, Social, or Both?

Pete Prestipino — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 20:00:00 GMT

Search engines and social media platforms are for many Web workers the primary sources of user traffic to their digital properties. Over the past few years however, these two very different mechanisms used to drive awareness, engagement and conversion have become intermingled as search engines increasingly leverage the data provided by users on social networks including Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

To help navigate these complex virtual waters, Website Magazine interviewed Rob Garner, author of the book Search & Social about what it all means to today's enterprise. Garner is an idenpendent consultant, author, speaker and strategist, and is a widely recognized expert on the topic of interdependent search and social strategies and real-time content marketing.

WM: Why the need for a book about this topic – search and social? Aren’t today’s brands and Web businesses already leveraging these channels?

RG: Most businesses are engaging in each of these in some form, but they largely do not understand how the two are integrated, and how they can be better leveraging them together to gain more from their efforts. It is this intersection between the two where a new discipline has emerged. Search engines integrated social elements into the algorithms many years ago, and social has become more algorithmic. The two constantly play of each other, and the difference between being a good digital marketer and a great one is in understanding this intersection from a strategic, tactical, and logistical level. I believe that “Search and Social” is the first book to address both the intellectual case for a combined search and social discipline, and the tactical and day-to-day needs as well. This trend towards interdependency will only continue to increase its impact on the strategic and tactical aspects of a business, and the book shows how it all fits together, and how marketers can action.

WM: Are search and social complimentary marketing channels? What is the value of approaching social with a search frame of mind?

RG: Search and social are totally complementary. The game to watch in all of digital marketing is which entity combines the best technology with the best human social layer. For marketers, this means putting on your SEO hat to view your social presence, and vice versa. The fundamental way that Twitter looks at authoritative accounts is parallel to the way that Google looks at website domains for its search results. They look for theme, keyword triggers, freshness of content, external signals (links, followers, etc.). The same goes for Facebook. Google has the most robust network analysis technology, and the social networks are waking up to the fact that they need this same approach to provide a better social experience for their users. Social marketers are now finding themselves as reverse engineers to get their message across. This is a big shift from the days when social marketing was largely conversational.

WM: What role does the real-time Web play in digital success today? What “basics” of a real-time strategy can you share with WM readers?

RG: A real-time marketing presence is the new optimization, and the crux of social customer relationship management. Over the last 3 years, consumers have become almost totally networked in the United States and Europe, and these individual Internet users are comfortable interacting fluidly, and “highly addressable” by businesses. When they act fluidly and in-the-moment, they expect businesses to do the same. Real-time marketing is not a new concept, and was first written about by Regis McKenna back in 1995, and touted by many other brilliant marketers at the time. The Internet has always been real-time, but the difference between now in then is that real-time is now a daily reality for marketers. Real-time requires a human presence – an ubiquitous digital existence, if you will – in addition to a technical presence. Being present in real-time doesn’t mean that marketers should go about in a harried manner, but rather that they are prepared and simply present. Being present is the new optimization, and will guarantee more visibility in search and social spaces than a passive approach.

The basics also include understanding of the evolving language of your audience, being a trusted source for content by both algorithms and audience, active conversation with your audience, real-time curation, and understanding the real-time user experience of your audience.

WM: What role does preliminary research play in the execution of search and social marketing campaigns? How should brands prepare?

RG: Preliminary research is critical to an effective search and social strategy. Even if businesses are already engaged in search and social, they should go back and assess their audience – who they are, how they communicate, and where they congregate. Stepping back and asking the question of “why?” helps to provide key focus for your strategy as well, and I believe every business should thoroughly consider this question in preliminary research. Businesses should also study the history of language used by their audience (keyword research and content popularity), but also study how language evolves in real-time as well.

WM: Any guidance for engaging in online communities? What drives response from today’s digital consumer?

RG: Of course there are all the standard considerations – be transparent, non-salesy, helpful, and sincere. One key area is being present as conversations are happening, and try to strike like lightning when someone is seeking information. Consumers like a fast and knowledgeable response, and this is one of the toughest challenges for businesses. To be fast, you must prepare well in advance by knowing the keyword language of your audience in order to active listening tools that will help you find them. For example, if you sell laptop computers and support via social CRM, then it would be wise to monitor forums, social networks, and answer sites for questions related to the term “laptop computers.” As questions arise, you are able to quickly jump in because you are already listening. Again, response from digital consumers comes from being knowledgeable, authoritative, and being fluid in your responses.

WM: If you were to advise WM readers on one metric/measurement to determine a combined search/social success, what would it be?

RG: If a robust content, SEO, and social strategies are in place, I would recommend looking at the network reach of your efforts. This is found in a variety of ways in different social networks (Ripples in G+, network reach in Facebook, retweets in Twitter, etc.). The core of this philosophy is to get out of the “one-to-many” approach to communication, and extending it to “many-to-many.” Network reach metrics help you gain a sense of how your efforts are working.

A Lack of Social Media Cohesion

Pete Prestipino — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 19:50:00 GMT

New research from eCommerce and digital marketing company Acquity Group reveals that more than 75 percent of brands lacked a cohesive social media presence across the major platforms.

Results from the agency’s 2012 Brand eCommerce Audit, which evaluated Interbrand’s 2012 Best Retail Brands on customer engagement across major digital channels, indicated that while every brand on the list (except one) had a Facebook page, and 45 out of 50 are on Twitter, only 12 of the brands had a cohesive presence across all five of the major social networks that were analyzed ( Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube.

Twitter had the largest gap between usage and interaction according to the study. Less than 27 percent of brands analyzed actively participated in Twitter conversations with consumers, even though 90 percent of those brands had a presence.

Other highlights from the Acquity study include:

- 80 percent of the brands analyzed leveraged YouTube with an impressive 85 percent engagement rate.
- 56 percent of brands do not yet utilize Instagram, but there is a high level of interaction at 79 percent.
- 60 percent of the brands had adopted Pinterest and interaction rates on the social pin-board were 70 percent.

Acquity Group also profiled 10 brands that scored best overall in social interaction including Target, Home Depot, RadioShack, Bath and Body Works, Nordstrom, Gap, eBay, Coach, American Eagle Outfitters and Banana Republic (in the order of their ranking).

"Although most brands are signed up for the major social networks, many struggle to understand how they fit into their overarching business strategy. As a result, our audit revealed several critical areas of improvement when it comes to actually connecting with consumers across social channels," said Jay Dettling, Executive Vice President at Acquity Group.

"The important take away for brands is to avoid haphazard or sporadic use of social media. When a new social media channel is introduced, brands need to take the time to analyze the potential impact and return, and develop a solid strategy from there."

The Marketing Main Event: Search vs. Social Media

Michael Garrity — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 20:38:00 GMT

For Internet advertisers, the main event face-off for 2012 is the on-going battle between social media and search for the attention of advertisers.

On the one hand, search has a much longer, more complete history than social media, and it has been ingrained in the fabric of online advertising for virtually as long as it has been a thing on the Web. This means that search advertising is refined and proven, with many well-established best practices that provide a useful template for all marketers. And perhaps most importantly, search is almost always a major component of any online ad campaign from the very beginning, and rightly so.

However, nothing has altered the way that we all use the Web as quickly or dramatically as social media, which evolved from a way for teenagers to kill some time to one of the very pillars of the Internet in just a few years. Now, marketers use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest and a plethora of other, smaller social media platforms to reach out to consumers, expand their audience and intimately engage with users, all of which helps them drive interest and create advocates for their brands.

But which one is better? Where should advertisers be focusing most of their attention? It turns out that Florida-based ad agency MDG Advertising was curious, as well, which led to the company creating a helpful infographic (which you can view below) that compares the two marketing realms in four different categories to see how they stack up against one another based on the various surveys and studies. So who came out on top?

Lead Generation
The first category remains one of the most important goals for many digital marketers: Lead generation. Marketers love to gather leads as they provide pre-qualified prospects, making it considerably easier to market to them and, ultimately, providing higher conversion rates. According to MDG Advertising’s survey, both B2B and B2C professionals agree that the combination of search and PPC advertising absolutely dominate in terms of generating useful leads for their business. B2C respondents said that SEO make the biggest impact at 41 percent, with PPC coming in at 24.8 percent and social media marketing clocking in at 34.2 percent. Meanwhile, B2B marketers said that SEO impacts their lead generation by a considerable majority, 57.4 percent, followed by social media marketing at 24.8 percent and PPC advertising at 17.9 percent.

Brand Awareness
While lead generation is dominated by search marketing, it actually ranks second in terms of the top objectives of search engine optimization below increasing website traffic and above generating brand awareness. However, as the infographic explains, brand exposure is listed as the primary objective of social media, according to Web marketing professionals. So, while search engines may be able to help consumers find you, it won’t help them know who you are. If you want to generate interest in your brand, turn to social media.

Local Business Visibility
Despite the Internet, many consumers still like to do much their shopping locally, although many still use the Web to find out information about their local businesses, and for the most part, they’re using search engines to do it. That is the case if the consumer is looking for information about a restaurant, bar or club, where they’ll use search engines 38 percent of the time, “specialty” websites 17 percent of the time and social media just three percent of the time. But it’s not just diners and nightclubs that rule the search engines, as search also dominates as the most popular method for users looking for “other” local businesses at 36 percent, followed by specialty sites at 16 percent and social media trailing far behind at one percent. Needless to say, local businesses absolutely must emphasize SEO as part of their online ad campaigns.

Interactivity
I think we all know where this one is going. When it comes to interacting with eager consumers and (hopefully) turning them into brand advocates, social media is the ideal platform, although not by the incredible margins that one might think. A survey of over 600 marketers asked them what they preferred as an interactive marketing tool, and social media came out on top at 65 percent. However, 54 percent of respondents said SEO, while only 34 percent said they use paid search to interact with consumers. This isn’t terribly surprising, however, as the nature of social media obviously lends itself to being, uh, social and engaging customers.

And the Winner Is…
…Those marketers that are smart enough to leverage both search and social media as essential aspects of their online ad campaigns. Search engines aren’t dumb, and the last two years have seen a massive push to integrate social media into search algorithms, and it seems that with every Google or Bing update, social has a greater impact on search rankings.

According to the MDG Advertising’s infographic, 50 percent of marketers said that social media has had an impact on their search marketing efforts, while just 29 percent have actually taken steps to merge parts of their social and search strategies. This has to change in 2013, as the two are going to grow more reliant on one another, as well as more integral to the success on online advertisers, as the line between social and search continues to blur.

In-Stream Transactions Come to Instagram

Michael Garrity — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 19:21:00 GMT

Social commerce payment system Chirpify is no longer just looking to monetize content on Twitter. In fact, it seems to be banking on the hope that a picture can be worth a thousand dollars, as the company recently expanded its platform to include in-stream commerce from Instagram.

At present, approximately 40 percent of the world’s largest brands have a presence on Instagram, but until now, they never had any way of turning that directly into dollars. Chirpify for Instagram is now the only way for businesses and consumers to either buy, sell, donate or otherwise exchange funds on the social network by turning comments on the site into real-time in-stream transactions.

Sellers (or fundraisers) can create a listing from within the Instagram application; all they have to do is post a photo and make sure that the initial comment reads, “#InstaSale $amount” (with “amount” actually being the price of the item being sold). Once this is done, Chirpify automatically creates a listing, and buyers can make a transaction by simply commenting.

Once a buyer comments, Chirpify will post another comment with purchase instructions. The shopper’s Instagram account will be securely connected to his or her PayPal account, and then they just have to leave a comment that says either “buy” or “donate” (depending on what they’re doing). It’s as easy as that, and then Chirpify will email them a secure download or receipt.

There are already many notable names using Instagram commerce, including Bogs, Fearless Records, Invisible Children, Kat Von D and many others.

Superfans Drive Facebook Engagement

Allison Howen — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 16:00:00 GMT

Bigger is not always better – at least when it comes to a brand’s social media following.

In fact, when it comes to Facebook, brands should focus on acquiring active “Superfans” rather than a larger quantity of fans. A recent study from Napkin Labs, which monitored fan engagement across 52 Facebook Brand Pages that each had between 200,000 and 1,000,000 fans, found that only 6 percent of the more than 31.7 million analyzed fans actually engaged with a brand’s Facebook content.

This means that increasing your fanbase does not necessarily correlate to a boost in fan engagement. For example, the study showed that brand pages with more than 900,000-1,000,000 fans had 60 percent less engagement than brand pages with 500,000-600,000 fans – which is why brands should focus on providing their Superfans with a better social media experience.

Superfans are defined as a brand's top 20 most engaged fans. The reason these fans are valuable is because the engagement of one Superfan is equal to that of 75 fans – meaning that although brands work hard to build a big fanbase, only a small fraction of those fans are active on their Timelines and influential to other social media users. This is important to note because the study found that Superfans influence how much other fans interact. For instance, the top 10 most engaged Superfans received 2.3 times more Likes and 1.8 times more comments than less active Superfans.

"Superfans are vitally important to telling a brand's story," said Riley Gibson, co-founder CEO of Napkin Labs. "These numbers show that brand marketers need to focus less on the volume of fans and more on engaging the fans that they have. Involving engaged fans in richer experiences rather than just pushing messages is one key way to keep communities active and interested."

In order to build a community of Superfans, brands should encourage their fans to engage with posts as well as avoid superficial interactions, such as posting too many promotional messages and offers. Additionally, brands should show appreciation to their Superfans by offering them special incentives or rewards.

Trend Spotting (and Funding) with Dataminr

Pete Prestipino — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 14:30:00 GMT

As if you needed it, here's a little more evidence that social media remains of great interest to the venture capital crowd these days (as it should be with the Web technology worker, too): social media analytics company Dataminr has secured $13 million to grow its client roster and drive further technology innovation in the Twitter-powered "sensor" network.

Dataminr provides an "earling warning" system of sorts that has been used primarily in the financial (big banks, hedge funds, wall street, et al) and government sectors to identify market-relevant information, noteworthy events, and emerging trends. Being able to mashup their own data set with raw data from Twitter proves incredibly valuble to these companies as their own viability is so closely connected to market demand and interest.

Dataminr is one of only a few social media analytics providers today that has full "firehose" access to Twitter, which affords the company the ability to analyze upwards of 400 million tweets per day in order to identify any activity hotspots. As Twitter tightens its control over its developer API, expect the likes of Dataminr and others to take center stage.

Winning Strategies for Search Marketing

Administrator — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 16:15:00 GMT

In today’s global marketplace, utilizing a winning online media strategy means remaining aware of the wide array of tools available to savvy business professionals and entrepreneurs looking to expand web presence. Digital marketing and social media advertising has become even more popular with the ubiquitous adaptation of mobile devices. Such convenience makes it possible for customers to engage with business interests anytime and anyplace. Being aware of key online marketing considerations can help you build a more comprehensive Internet marketing strategy. Consider the following four factors when seeking to expand your Internet presence:

1. Use SEO content and link building strategies to enhance your results!

Search engine algorithms evaluate websites for “trustworthiness” when establishing rank. Creating relevant, engaging and frequent new content can help you drive traffic to your site. Likewise, linking your site to other valuable and trusted sites can also boost your results. Keep in mind:

- Links that connect your page to another site that has referenced your content is a valuable tool to enhance results.
- Linking to appropriate business directories can increase ranking.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies indicate that content in the form of blog posts or “expert” articles imbedded with keywords can inform your clients while building a more powerful and effective online marketing campaign for your business.

2. Use Social Media’s “signal and influencing signals” to build a better site!

By this stage in the game, everyone knows that having a social media strategy is important to increase brand recognition and build client confidence. What you might not be aware of is that search engines read social media and website interactions for “signals and influencing signals” when ranking a site; here are the basics:

“Signals” include indicators that rank a site based on relevancy and freshness which include parameters for reading:
- Traffic that follows reviews that a client posts on your site.
- Customer engagement with your site and links on your site especially tweets and re-tweets.
- Upstream and downstream data to and from your site.

“Influencing signals” include indicators that provide ranking data through:
- Tracking traffic from specific top ranking sites that then lead to your site.
- Reading data such as videos, photos, and consumer quizzes as a positive factor in relevancy, especially when the data is repeatedly shared.
- Following bookmark usage.

Being aware of the ranking parameters above can help you better utilize tools like widgets. This awareness can also provide insight about how adding content to sites like StumbledUpon may also increase your chances of landing on top in search engine results.

3. Use Mobile Marketing strategy to its fullest!

Optimizing your mobile website maximizes ease through which customers can engage with your business. This is an important factor driving sales in today’s changing marketplace. Here are a few tips for getting the most out of your mobile marketing strategy:

- Use metrics to monitor peak usage times so you can add fresh content at those times.
- Expand use of mobile emailing - it makes it easier for your customers to engage with you while they are on the go.
- Maintain and expand an active list of clients who sign up to receive SMS (Short Message Service) communications; make content relevant and engaging.
- Place high priority on contact information and reviewer links to easily engage customers new to your site.

4. Consider “Pay Per Click” (PPC) options!

Using PPC advertising as one component of your overall online marketing strategy can help drive business to your site, which in turn can help boost your search engine ranking. While PPC can get expensive, it doesn’t have to be. In order to squeeze the most out of a PPC campaign, while not breaking the bank in the process, here are a few tips to consider:

- Use PPC to help drive response and generate a buzz about a short term marketing campaign.
- Use PPC once you have your online store up and running; if you are a direct response business then PPC can be used easily to fill your needs.
- Use PPC to exploit your niche – highly targeted key words can be less expensive and yield positive results.

Just as with all mobile marketing strategies, and Internet marketing campaigns in general, you need to be careful to plan out your goals thoughtfully, set a budget, and then utilize the best strategy to build sustainable success.

While the up side of mobile marketing and online marketing in general is that once you get your website in place, many of the tools to promote it are free. The downside is that it takes time to filter out which tools are best for you and your business goals. While some business leaders hire consultants others engage in additional training through online Internet marketing programs. With all the great information out there, it is important to devise a powerful online marketing strategy before you engage in the wide array of tools available. Being aware of key mobile marketing tools and other online search engine parameters can help you build a winning strategy for search marketing and put you at the head of the search engine results race time and time again.

About the Author: Dean Vella who writes for University Alliance on topics pertaining to the subjects of mobile marketing training and social media courses.

Twitter Ups Relevancy of Targeted Ads

Michael Garrity — Wed, 05 Sep 2012 13:20:00 GMT

After a significant amount of time spent testing and tweaking, Twitter has finally rolled out a new feature to all of its advertisers that may dramatically improve the relevance of targeted ads on the microblogging social network.

See, before, Promoted Tweets or Trending Topics were displayed without taking into account how relevant or useful the ads were to a given individual user. This was largely because the site, by its nature, isn’t able to cull the kind of personal information about its users as Facebook can, since they don’t specify their interests on their profiles.

Twitter is now developing a way to glean this information from what users are actually saying on the site, as well as who they follow and some of their other activities. Unfortunately, that’s about all of the information the company has given up so far.

These changes will also allow advertisers to specify the specific @handles of users, but rather than only target those individuals, Twitter will show ads to all of their followers who share interests with them. So, for instance, if you wanted to target people who like a certain type of food, a marketer can use this feature to target people who follow a restaurant that serves a similar menu.

Digital Strategy for This Year's DNC

Administrator — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 14:45:00 GMT

When Business Empire Consulting (BEC), a digital agency specializing in integrated campaigns developed from big data insights, accepted the challenge of making this year's Democratic National Convention the most open and accessible convention in history, BEC cofounders Matthew Laster, Brandon Blair and Bryan Young didn’t waiver, instead they confidently relied on their own methodology — vision before execution — to tie all of the moving parts together, creating a seamless integration between the actual convention in Charlotte, N.C. and its global footprint. With the DNC fast approaching, the trio shares its thought processes behind designing the DNC’s digital strategy.

To successfully influence customers, you must optimize your message and provide a seamless experience across multiple mediums. Just like the Democratic National Convention, every business has objectives it wants to accomplish. While a presidential nomination convention is only held once every four years, there is plenty that can be learned from the DNC's goal to produce the most open and accessible convention in history.

For the DNC, increased interactivity through the inclusion of social media, interactive maps, event creation tools, calendars, forward-to-a-friend tools, a video gallery, polling, commenting, sign-up forms and automated or moderated displays of user-generated content allowed for a greater level of voter engagement. For your site, this real-time data can show you what visitors are most interested in and help develop calls to action that support those interests. But how do you decide which interactive elements are most important to your site? Take a look at social media.

B2C businesses are starting to get social media, just like they got search before it and display before that. Social has been around long enough for us to have enough examples of how to do it right and wrong. Unfortunately, most organizations in the world are repeating the same mistakes they made with display and search; they build a “social team” and silo all social media efforts to that team, which leads to an isolationist approach to our newest, and possibly greatest marketing tool.

We now live in a world where the young professional (and many older professionals) can’t imagine life without social, search, display or all things digital. We, the marketers, need to stop speaking to our audience in one place and then restarting that conversation in another, while refusing to have it in a third. That is, we need to integrate our efforts and view our website as more than just a brochure for our services. If you have had the privilege of being at the helm of a marketing campaign in the last six months, ask yourself these questions: Did your SEO keywords match the differentiators you advertised in your display and video? How accurate was your audience model, predicted conversations and responses to actual results? Most importantly, what did your audience teach you about your brand? A political convention exposes these questions on a broader scale to a much wider demographic, but if you’re not searching for these answers, you are likely missing opportunities.

One way to avoid this, is to separate the vision from the execution.

As marketers it is becoming more apparent and imperative that we change how we think. Rather than siloing ourselves into print, direct, search, social, display, mobile, location or whatever comes next, we need to begin looking at the bigger goal of driving and regaining ownership of our respective brands across all disciplines, in an integrated approach. To build a holistic vision of your brand, you must put time into building buyer profiles and audience models, developing rich content banks alongside well-defined and strong conversational gates. Then, when you have a strong core, expand it outward, executing in each discipline your audience resides in. When you finally launch your campaign and get to see that first set of results on your integrated monitoring dashboard, you’ll be amazed.

Because you properly planned your campaign you’ll have much better engagement. However, it's more than that; it's engagement around the differentiators you want to focus on, using the keywords you want to use – which, by the way, are the same ones your main assets are optimized for, so your SEM cost will drop as well. With your new insight, you’re also able to start testing your audience model as a whole against the entirety of your marketing efforts, which leads you to better placement parameters for your display and video efforts. By integrating all of your planning efforts, you’ve created a clear and concise vision, which has enabled you to have streamlined and more efficient execution. When done properly, you are then able to determine which interactive widgets go beyond being cool and actually become useful.

Best Practices

1. Sit down with all of the stakeholders and make a plan, beyond visual elements, of what you want your website to accomplish. Your key message (content) and calls to action (CTA) should back these goals. If you want engagement, tell the consumer something interesting. Make the value of your product or services easy to distinguish.

2. After you’ve created a clear and compelling call to action, develop your audience models. This may take a while, but the effort is more than worth it. Look to support your gut decisions with as much real-time or empirical data as possible. For example, one of the goals of the Democratic Convention was to increase the level of engagement with the Hispanic community, which meant going beyond making the site bilingual. Through research, we found the number of Hispanics, who use a smartphone as their primary way to access the Internet, has increased to one quarter of all Hispanics, according to Mintel. Creating in-depth audience models will help create your best- and worst-case engagement models.

3. In the case of the DNC, in about the same time it took for our initial comps and branding to be polished, we had our vision. Execution was fairly simple in theory, as we wanted to spread the conversation to everywhere. We wanted the conversations around the DNC to be the same conversation across multiple platforms, with questions asked on one platform showing visible answers on another. Suggestions made on one platform would impact other platforms in near real time. We wanted the very same conversation going on in the press pit on the main floor to be the same conversation going on in your living room, on Youtube, Facebook or that you see being tweeted about on the live tweet streams. Anyone can participate in that conversation and let their voice be heard in the most open and accessible convention in history.

Your plan may not always be good, but a plan for when to listen and when to engage can go a lot further than trying to avoid engagement altogether or just ignoring the negative. After all, we're human, and we must act like it, even online.

About the Authors

Matthew Laster, Brandon Blair and Bryan Young are the co-founders of digital agency BEC. They been named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year nominees and one of Bloomberg Businessweek’s top young entrepreneurs under 25.

HootSuite Adds Yammer to App Directory

Allison Howen — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 20:05:00 GMT

HootSuite is constantly adding applications to its ever-expanding App Directory, but this newest integration grabbed our attention because it features one of the most popular private enterprise social networks – Yammer.

The new app enables social media managers to conveniently monitor and reply to Yammer conversations without leaving the HootSuite dashboard. Once Yammer is accessed within HootSuite, users have the ability to view and engage with conversations from Yammer’s main feed, inbox and groups, as well as post updates, add attachments and search for content across Yammer networks.

This app should prove to be very useful, especially for teams who may need to collaborate quickly to answer customer questions from other social networks, such as Facebook or Twitter.

“The integration of Yammer demonstrates the increasing role of social collaboration in business. As companies grow, employees become increasingly decentralized from one another and rely on multiple tools like Yammer to work through and complete projects.” says Ryan Holmes, CEO of HootSuite. “Use of social media continues to grow beyond marketing. We see departments including customer service, human resources, sales, public relations and research and development teams are looking to HootSuite for solutions to tackle collaboration problems.”

The Most Popular Social Media Management Systems

Allison Howen — Sat, 11 Aug 2012 16:30:00 GMT

Although we all know the large audience that businesses can potentially reach through a strong social media campaign, one of the biggest complaints from professionals is that this marketing channel is too time consuming to manage and monitor.

And while social media may be time consuming, there are many tools available that can help ease the commitment of posting content to multiple networks on a regular basis. In fact, many brands leverage some type of social media management dashboard to help with their social media campaigns.

Until now, we weren’t sure which social dashboards are the most popular among the Web’s top brands. However, a new survey from Pingdom reveals which social media management systems (SMMS) are the most used among 96 of the world’s top brands, including Coca-Cola, Google, IBM and McDonalds.

The study took a look at the last 20 tweets from each brand, and then examined which tools were used to post each status update. And the most popular social media management system is...

HootSuite!

The survey reveals that 20 percent of the examined brands use HootSuite, including H&M, eBay, UPS and IBM. The second most popular SMMS with 16 percent of the examined brands leveraging its services is TweetDeck, followed by 9 percent who use SocialEngage. However, one of the study's most interesting finds reveals that 28 out of the 96 examined accounts didn't use any SMMS for posting tweets.

Other survey findings show that the examined brands used a total of 42 different apps to post tweets, including Instagram which is becoming an increasingly popular posting alternative. Additionally, it is important to note that some accounts actually use more than one SMMS to post updates from. For example, @ciscosystems tweets from Crowdbooster, Tweetdeck, StockTwits, Sprinklr and Twitter’s website.

Which social media management system do you use? Let us know in the comments section below.