Celebrating Social Success

I thought I would end the year, covering one of my favourite topics;
social media.

We are all aware of the user growth and engagement figures. But, I
thought I would look at celebrating social network business success to
highlight why it is such a useful business and marketing tool.

Here are my top 10 picks I have used to help convince my clients
social is a viable tool and in turn help them sell it into their own
business;

1. Dell sold $3,000,000 worth of computers on Twitter

2. Recent W/A study found business that were widely/deeply involved in
social media outstripped their competitors in terms of revenue &
profit e.g. company sales with the highest levels of social media
activity grew on average by +18% vs. those with the least amount of
social activity saw decline -6%.

3. Lenovo realised 20% reduction in call centre activity as customers
were redirected to community website for answers

4. Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice Facebook program incentivised users
to give up ten of their Facebook friends in return for a free Whopper.
The campaign cost c$50,000 and received 32 million media impressions
equating too c$400,000 in press/media value.

5. BlendTec sales increased five fold after running the “Will it
Blend” YouTube segments; blending everything from an iPhone to a
trainer.

6. 25% of Ford’s marketing spend has been shifted to digital/social
media initiatives and here’s why… they realised 37% of GenY audience
awareness through simply giving 100 Ford Fiesta’s to 100 influential
bloggers.

7.  Over five million clicked on an “I voted for Obama” Facebook button and
this resulted in three million online donors contributed $500 million
in fundraising to his election campaign. An astounding 92% of the
donations were in increments of less than $100 (an old one, but a good
one!)

8. eBay found participants in online communities spend 54% more money

9. 71% of companies plan to increase investments in social media by an
average of 40% because: Low Cost Marketing or Getting Traction or We
Have To Do It

10. Finally, a great quote from McDonalds USA; “Our head of Social
Media is the customer”

Have a great Christmas and NY and see you in 2010!

Posted via email from digispeak’s posterous

Less is more in online brand measurement

We have seen another flurry of research releases, to help guide the digital community on what online success looks like.

 The latest was Nielsen’s 3 year study, which thudded on our desks late last week.

Highlights included:

“One third of consumers (33%) exposed to an online ad are able to recall it (when prompted), intention to purchase increased by 4.9% following exposure to an online advertising campaign, with brand sentiment increasing by 5.3%. Display advertising also correlated with a rise in awareness, with top-of-mind awareness jumping 3.1%. The likelihood of a consumer recommending a brand following exposure to an online advertising campaign also increased by 4.4%”

On first impression, this paper only seemed to build on already substantial evidence highlighting online display is a powerful brand ‘lever’ rather than simply a response channel.

However, it was surprising to see mainly traditional brand measures were being applied and reported in the research paper, the further I read. No sign of dwell ratio/time (sorry eyeblaster – it only tells half the story!) and thank goodness, no stray CTR graphs!

This then got me thinking…

Many recent papers and campaign evaluations measuring brand get themselves in a knot when using analytics and online ‘buzz’ data. Does this still mean many feel compelled to use it all, just because they have it (research publishers and campaign managers included)?

The trick, is both clearly articulating what your campaign objectives are and focusing on the right methods to test/measure success will be, up front.

Sounds simple, but when you have many tools to measure, selecting the right one isn’t easy. particularly, if you have to feed the results into a predefined global online performance spreadsheet, which nine times out of ten only include response fields and certainly not a focus group sentiment section!

However, like the Nielsen research, the best methods tend to be a careful blend of traditional brand (pre and post sentiment/NPS online polls/focus groups) and the right online analytics (engagement).

That way you deliver a clearer and more robust campaign evaluation with less tools. Far better than wasting time with more tools that simply present a cloudy, half story.

I suppose it’s about using less, but seeing more?

Posted via email from digispeak’s posterous