Posts Tagged mobile web
Study Shows Time Pays With Social Media Marketing with RoryMartin.com
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing, Social Networking on May 21, 2010
Have you asked this question: Is the time I invest with social media really worth it? Whether you’re new or an old hat with social media, chances are you’ve wondered if the time commitment is really worth the return on investment (ROI).
Make no mistake about it: a true investment of time and resources is necessary to see significant social media marketing success.
But the real question is, “Just HOW MUCH time is needed to see solid success?”
This question was recently answered in the new study, 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, authored by Michael Stelzner. Based on the report findings, ROI is top of mind for most marketers using social media.
Top Social Media Questions Marketers Want Answered
According to the data, the number-one question marketers most want answered is how to track social media ROI. A sampling of questions includes:
- How can I tell a convincing story to management about the ROI for social media marketing?
- What are the key metrics to follow for measuring ROI in terms of customer satisfaction, revenues and brand loyalty?
- How effective is social media versus the resources needed to maintain the effort?
- Are there any industry benchmarks that track the impact of social media marketing?
In the 2009 study, the number-one question from marketers was related to social media tactics, followed by ROI. Now tactics have moved down considerably and the ROI question has moved up. One reason for this could be that social media is maturing and more people have started using the tools and tactics. Now they want to know if the long-term payoff for their time and resources is really there.
Time Versus Return for Social Media Marketing
When looking at ROI, you also have to look closely at just how much time you’re investing. Unlike some other traditional forms of marketing, when it comes to social media, your investment is more time than money.
The industry report results shed some light on the amount of time marketers are really spending on social media marketing.
Out of the 1900 marketers’ responses, almost all were using social media for marketing purposes and the majority of these marketers were fairly new in the social media area.
- 91% of respondents indicated they were employing social media for marketing purposes.
- 65% of marketers have either just started or have been using social media for only a few months.
When drilling down to the actual hours spent using social media tools, the largest group was in the 1 to 5 hours per week range. Of that group, 43% are spending 4 to 5 hours each week on social media activities. A significant 56% of marketers are using social media for 6 hours or more each week and 30% for 11 or more hours weekly. It’s interesting to note that 12.5% of marketers spend more than 20 hours each week on social media.
This chart shows the overall breakdown of marketers’ time spent using social sites.
But even more interesting than the time spent on social media marketing, the report also showed a correlation between the amount of user experience and the time spent using social media tools. The median weekly time commitment for beginners was 1 hour versus 10 hours for those doing this for a few months or longer. Because 65% of respondents indicated they were newbies or just a few months in, much of their time spent on social sites could be more trial and error than solid strategy. Perhaps the difference in time spent using social tools is because the marketers who have the most experience also have more well-defined social media strategies, allowing them a clear plan of action on the social sites.
Just like with anything else, experience is golden. The more user experience one has with social media marketing, the more valuable every minute spent on social media sites becomes. The time spent on social sites is not as important as the actual results. What we really should be looking at is what kind of results are you getting for that 1 hour, 4 hours, even 12 hours per week?
Top Benefits of Social Media
When the respondents were asked about the benefits they’ve received from social media marketing, there were some clear winners that stood out above the rest. When looking at ROI on social media marketing, money in the bank can’t be your only indicator of success. Increased traffic, lead generation and happy, connected customers all are factors in deciding which social media strategies are working best for your business.
According to the survey, the number-one benefit of social media marketing is greater exposure (85%). Improving traffic and building new partnerships followed next. More than half of marketers indicated a rise in search engine rankings was a benefit of social media marketing. The report states, “As search engine rankings improve, so will business exposure, lead generation efforts and a reduction in overall marketing expenses. More than half of marketers found social media generated qualified leads.”
This chart shows how respondents viewed the benefits of social media marketing.
Outsourcing Social Media
Because time and ROI are such a central focus for many marketers, it was surprising to see that very few were outsourcing their social media efforts. According to the report, some factors may be that social media outsourcing is fairly new and the majority of respondents were new to social media, perhaps yet unaware of what they should and should not be outsourcing.
The chart below shows how the majority of marketers are not outsourcing their social media activity.
Where we’re seeing the outsourcing trend is in the larger organizations. According to the report, “the larger the organization, the more likely outsourcing is taking place. For example, 25.7% of large businesses and 25% of mid-sized businesses are currently outsourcing, compared to only 10.6% of sole proprietors.” Like many marketing trends, what starts with the “big guys” tends to make its way to the smaller businesses—therefore, we may be seeing more outsourcing overall in the coming year.
Check out the full report here.
Now it’s your turn! Do you feel your time using social media marketing is worth the return? Does your own experience match up with the results? Share here—we want to hear from you!
For Social’s Sake: Managing A Brand With Socialized Communications
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing, Social Networking on May 5, 2010
Don’t let your brand be a social outcast. Especially in Seattle, NY, LA, and Portland
It used to be that brands sought partnerships with publications to publicize their offerings, host events or write about their products. And many publications did and still do an excellent job at providing these services to help promote a company’s products to specialized audiences. However, the dynamics of buying and selling has shifted the power from the media over to the brand and consumer.
Now, in order to launch a new product, a brand needs to extend its identity in many more channels and to many more audiences. Thus in addition to promoting itself in worthy publications, a brand must have a strategic digital marketing strategy, a solid list of target–and often splintered–consumers, and a multitude of social networks to engage them. Many marketing activities are now direct-to-consumer instead of company-to-consumer. In fact, new research predicts that spending on Internet-based marketing is expected to overtake print ad budgets in 2010 for the first time. For these reasons, traditional media is now adapting to this new marketing reality.
Today’s savvy consumers will respond to a brand that speaks to a need they have identified, resonates with them on an emotional level, or solves a problem that they maybe didn’t even know existed. Brands today are actively harnessing social media platforms to create content and communities to find their brand loyalists or advocates. Once identified and engaged with, brand advocates do the marketing campaigns for them. These brand advocates might enter an online contest to help name a new product or create a new food flavor that then gets produced and distributed. They may select music they want to appear in a videogame. And they can decide to tell all of their friends and networks about how they have taken control of their brand relationships in this new marketing paradigm.
The new model of targeting brand ambassadors is about two-way, open, social engagement and not just top-down and inside-out pushing of products. It is as much from the outside in–from consumers back to the brand. While most brands are implementing social communications programs using one or two social platforms, only a handful are thinking holistically about managing communications across all media and touch points. The requirements are now to communicate who you are as a brand and what you stand for through social media in a far more consistent, strategic and global way. After all, unlike traditional media, online content and experiences are inherently open and accessible everywhere around the world.
RoryMartin.com helps clients educate their markets and build brand awareness while winning and retaining customers with engaging and impactful websites and web marketing. We offer a comprehensive set of services from website design and web development to search engine optimization and search engine marketing and social media marketing.
The Albert Einstein Guide to Social Media
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on February 14, 2010
11 February, 2010 | Written by Amber Naslund
Albert Einstein knew an awful lot. And if you pay attention to his work and his most famous statements about it, you might just think he was talking about us, the social media crew.
We might not be looking for a unified theory for all things quantum in our day jobs, or pondering the discrepancies between particle theory and relativity, but here are a few things Einstein has managed to summarize for us just the same. Funny how some concepts apply pretty universally…
As a Seattle Web Design company that specializes in Seattle Search Engine Optimization and Seattle Social Media Marketing, I really like this stuff.
A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem.
It all starts with the goals and objectives, but look around you, and you’re sure to see the folks that still think the Facebook Page is the holy grail of social media success. Know what you’re aiming for before you choose any one path to get there.
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
We’re hell bent on creating convoluted indexes and formulas to calculate and measure the fuzzy stuff like influence, affinity, or loyalty. As if somehow putting an algebraic formula to it will make it legitimate. Are there simpler ways we can be approaching these seemingly complex problems from a more human level?
Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.
You can count a zillion fans and followers but what are you going to do with them when you have them? Are they moving you toward something, or are they just there? And things like having genuine intent or an authentic mindset (not one on a mission statement somewhere) are much harder to quantify and put on a report, but they matter a great deal. They’re part of the untouchable essence of outstanding companies.
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
We need more clarity, accountability, and translation of social media into terms that everyone can relate to. Enough with the buzzwords and lingo already. “Joining the conversation” doesn’t explain anything.
Peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding.
Teaching and guiding adoption of social media can be an arduous task. But forcing too many rules without context and understanding is a recipe for resistance and resentment. And dragging people unwillingly into the social web before they’re truly culturally equipped will undoubtedly end in failure. Understanding new concepts and ideas takes time, patience, and the willingness of some to make small strides instead of huge leaps.
People love chopping wood. In this activity one immediately sees results.
We all wish that you could just throw up a blog and instantly see a lift in your sales numbers, but it doesn’t work that way. Cultivating a social media community takes more time than many businesses would like. They’re so anxious to know whether they’ve made a good or bad investment, so they demand results and guarantees before they start. But much like the business relationships you’ve built the old fashioned way, creating trust and loyalty is an investment, not a transaction.
Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.
In a world where content is everywhere, it’s not enough to just have a bunch of eyeballs see what you do. Value is a wonderful aim, if you understand that value is defined differently for everyone. Your definition of value doesn’t matter when it comes to offering it to someone else. You have to figure out how your customers, prospects, and community define it, and deliver that to them, relentlessly.
We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
Social media is, in many ways, a solution to some of the problems we’ve created ourselves. The divide we’ve created between the company and the customer is one of our own design, and social media is helping to shorten that distance again. As a result, we cannot try and cram social media into the same mindset we’ve used for sales, marketing, and customer service for the last several decades, or we’ll just end up right back where we started, and end up blaming social media itself for not living up to our expectations.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
We collected impressions for ads as if having a million people see a billboard without any notion of what they did with that information was actually effective. We build call centers to automate customer service. We talked in “key messages” and soundbites, and we buried our mistakes under PR gloss-overs. Customers are now pushing back on those ideas and demanding better from businesses. Yet, we’re approaching Facebook as an eyeball collection tool, or Twitter as a press release distribution service, or throwing interns to manage our customer support forums, and we’re wondering why we’re having trouble seeing value in these tools?
Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
We’re talking about new approaches to business problems, here. We’re talking culture shift. Adjustments to our approach, the courage to evaluate our weaknesses, and the willingness to invest in things that aren’t the same as we’ve always done. All that means that mistakes are inevitable. And rather than lynching and publicly vilifying those that fall short, let’s learn from each other, from ourselves, and start allowing social media a legitimate place in business process innovation.
Not bad for a guy with crazy hair who never tied his shoes, but who managed to single-handedly and drastically change our understanding of the universe around us. I’m thinking we can help businesses do the same for the online world we’re creating here. You?
As a Seattle Web Design company that specializes in Seattle Search Engine Optimization and Seattle Social Media Marketing, I really like this article…for more information please visit our site at RoryMartin.com
The Seattle Social Advertising Trends of 2010
Posted by Rory Martin in Social Media Marketing on January 28, 2010
Forecasts and predictions about twenty-ten are EVERYWHERE. We looked deep into our crystal ball here at SocialMedia.com, but it seems someone swapped it for a beach ball.
So rather than try to guess the future, we put together a list of five emerging trends that are already stirring up social advertising. To be successful in 2010, you must plan for how these trends will impact your business.
As a Seattle Web Design company that specializes in Seattle Search Engine Optimization and Seattle Social Media Marketing, I really like this stuff.
1. No stone is left unturned when it comes to finding social data.
Social networks are gaining a larger chunk of online advertising dollars, in large part due to the effectiveness of using social data from these sites to deliver targeted brand messages. But data from social graphs is not exclusive to social networks. As more money shifts to social networks, traditional publishers will want to get a piece of the action.
TAKEAWAY: To offer social data to advertisers, publishers are working hard to uncover and grow their existing social graphs – and succeeding. Don’t get left behind.
2. Social relationships are more than just friends.
At SocialMedia.com, we break social relationships down into one of three categories: friends, influencers, and communities.
- Friends are the easiest to spot; they are a one-to-one connection, approved by both parties (e.g. connections on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, etc.).
- Influencers are characterized by a one-to-many relationship, bloggers and micro-bloggers being the best examples. For instance, a wine lover blogs about new wines she has discovered and others wine drinkers read her blog and view her opinions as a trusted source of information, even though she does not know the identity of all her readers.
- Communities include individuals who are largely anonymous to each other, but relate to the group around a similar interest (characterized by a many-to-many relationship). For example, fans of new TV show might discuss recent episodes in a discussion forum. In this particular case the community may only last for the duration of the television series. In other cases, the community relationship may persist much longer, e.g. moms trading advice on a website dedicated to parenthood.
TAKEAWAY: Because communities have been largely overlooked as a significant social relationships, there is a tremendous opportunity to execute social campaigns on sites other than social networks, where the voice of a given site and/or community is leveraged as a whole. This opportunity appears even more promising when advertisers consider the upward trend of online users embracing social activities and identifying with online communities. (We believe that the nuances of social relationships are so important that we’ll be following up with another blog post that digs deeper into this topic).
3. Consumers turn to online social connections for recommendations.
The rapid growth (not to mention sheer number) of social media users is bolstering the credibility and perceived value of social media channels, tools, and most importantly, content. This larger base of active users allows people to connect with virtual peer groups in more niche categories. For example, a foodie follows a list of local restaurant critics on twitter, a CIO joins a LinkedIn group for IT leaders and discusses cloud computing, an indie rock fan blogs about new bands and other indie rock fans read her posts. These connections are real and authentic (establishing trust) and are hyper-targeted, which means users get highly tailored opinions by turning to these groups.
TAKEAWAY: More open-minded consumers actively seeking advice and recommendations from online peer groups, creates a gold mine for advertisers who can be armed and ready with real brand messages from real people.
4. Online endorsements are happening in real time.
Not only are more consumers using online social connections as an input for decision-making, but when they do they are also finding real-time information from other consumers. Reviews of retail locations are posted before consumers even leave the stores. Bad (and good) customer service experiences are tweeted, blogged, and posted to social networks within seconds, when emotions run highest. And all of the content created in real time is distributed immediately through viral actions like posts, shares, and retweets. Moreover, new services like Aardvark allow users to pose questions via web, chat applications, twitter, or Facebook to get immediate answers from an extended network of peers. What does it mean? Your reaction to real-time reviews must be in real time too.
TAKEAWAY: By monitoring real-time conversations, brands can put out fires, leverage positive endorsements, and participate in the conversation. But that’s just scratching the surface. Brands that go beyond monitoring may find opportunities to initiate endorsements at the time of interaction by providing prompts and channels to leave feedback, thus maximizing positive word-of-mouth recommendations.
5. The objectives of online creative are shifting from consumable to sharable.
As a social online experience becomes the new norm, online display advertising follows. Whereas in the past online advertisers wanted big flashy ads that shouted messages and captured eyeballs, now advertisers want ads that inspire consumers to take action, particularly using social channels to spread brand messages to friends and followers.
TAKEAWAY: Our experience and research at SocialMedia.com has shown that the most effective ads: 1) include real people, 2) spread real messages, and 3) are adapted to the environment in which they are served.
As a Seattle Web Design company that specializes in Seattle Search Engine Optimization and Seattle Social Media Marketing, I hope everybody does this stuff…it’s free and easy.
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