Headlines Week of December 12, 2009

(Learning about engagement and CRM at week 5 of Digital Marketing Bootcamp Plus)

• Cyber Monday' Sales Appear Strong: In a display of strength by the e-commerce sector, online shopping sites reported a surge in sales and traffic on Monday, bucking the mixed-bag results experienced by traditional retailers so far this holiday season. By 6:30 p.m. Eastern time on so-called Cyber Monday, Web shoppers had spent, in total, 11% more than they did a year ago at that time, according to Coremetrics Inc., a Web analytics company that tracks shopper behavior on the sites of more than 500 U.S. brands.

• BrightRoll: Video ad revenues are soaring, despite downturn: Ad revenues for online video are growing, because more ads are getting placed even though ad prices are falling. At least according to video ad network BrightRoll, which says it is seeing rapid revenue growth, citing third quarter financial numbers.

• Facebook’s New Privacy Settings: An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg

• MOG Launches All Access, Sets New Standard For Online Music: MOG’s much anticipated All Access music service launches today for anyone to come and give it a try. I’ve been using the service for the last few weeks and, despite my initial skepticism over the fact that users must pay for the service, I’ve been impressed. MOG makes millions of songs available users on demand over the Internet. The user experience and social aspects of the service put it far ahead of any online music service available today, and it’s well worth the $5/month.

• 100 Ways To Measure Social Media (via Media Post): At most of the events I've been to lately, measurement continues to be a hot topic. The first question that comes up is, "What can I measure?" That's where this cheat sheet can come in handy: a list of 100 thought-starters.If there's anyone out there left who says you can't measure social media, here are a hundred answers. Some entries here can be interpreted several ways. Depending on how you define them, some of these metrics may seem redundant, while others may seem so broad that they can be broken out further. Many of these can be combined with each other to create new metrics that can then be tracked over time. It's a start, though, so dive in and consider which ones may apply to programs you're working on.

1. Volume of consumer-created buzz for a brand based on number of posts

2. Amount of buzz based on number of impressions

3. Shift in buzz over time

4. Buzz by time of day / daypart

5. Seasonality of buzz

6. Competitive buzz

7. Buzz by category / topic

8. Buzz by social channel (forums, social networks, blogs, Twitter, etc)

9. Buzz by stage in purchase funnel (e.g., researching vs. completing transaction vs. post-purchase)

10. Asset popularity (e.g., if several videos are available to embed, which is used more)

11. Mainstream media mentions

12. Fans

13. Followers

14. Friends

15. Growth rate of fans, followers, and friends

16. Rate of virality / pass-along

17. Change in virality rates over time

18. Second-degree reach (connections to fans, followers, and friends exposed - by people or impressions)

19. Embeds / Installs

20. Downloads

21. Uploads

22. User-initiated views (e.g., for videos)

23. Ratio of embeds or favoriting to views

24. Likes / favorites

25. Comments

26. Ratings

27. Social bookmarks

28. Subscriptions (RSS, podcasts, video series)

29. Pageviews (for blogs, microsites, etc)

30. Effective CPM based on spend per impressions received

31. Change in search engine rankings for the site linked to through social media

32. Change in search engine share of voice for all social sites promoting the brand

33. Increase in searches due to social activity

34. Percentage of buzz containing links

35. Links ranked by influence of publishers

36. Percentage of buzz containing multimedia (images, video, audio)

37. Share of voice on social sites when running earned and paid media in same environment

38. Influence of consumers reached

39. Influence of publishers reached (e.g., blogs)

40. Influence of brands participating in social channels

41. Demographics of target audience engaged with social channels

42. Demographics of audience reached through social media

43. Social media habits/interests of target audience

44. Geography of participating consumers

45. Sentiment by volume of posts

46. Sentiment by volume of impressions

47. Shift in sentiment before, during, and after social marketing programs

48. Languages spoken by participating consumers

49. Time spent with distributed content

50. Time spent on site through social media referrals

51. Method of content discovery (search, pass-along, discovery engines, etc)

52. Clicks

53. Percentage of traffic generated from earned media

54. View-throughs

55. Number of interactions

56. Interaction/engagement rate

57. Frequency of social interactions per consumer

58. Percentage of videos viewed

59. Polls taken / votes received

60. Brand association

61. Purchase consideration

62. Number of user-generated submissions received

63. Exposures of virtual gifts

64. Number of virtual gifts given

65. Relative popularity of content

66. Tags added

67. Attributes of tags (e.g., how well they match the brand's perception of itself)

68. Registrations from third-party social logins (e.g., Facebook Connect, Twitter OAuth)

69. Registrations by channel (e.g., Web, desktop application, mobile application, SMS, etc)

70. Contest entries

71. Number of chat room participants

72. Wiki contributors

73. Impact of offline marketing/events on social marketing programs or buzz

74. User-generated content created that can be used by the marketer in other channels

75. Customers assisted

76. Savings per customer assisted through direct social media interactions compared to other channels (e.g., call centers, in-store)

77. Savings generated by enabling customers to connect with each other

78. Impact on first contact resolution (FCR) (hat tip to Forrester Research for that one)

79. Customer satisfaction

80. Volume of customer feedback generated

81. Research & development time saved based on feedback from social media

82. Suggestions implemented from social feedback

83. Costs saved from not spending on traditional research

84. Impact on online sales

85. Impact on offline sales

86. Discount redemption rate

87. Impact on other offline behavior (e.g., TV tune-in)

88. Leads generated

89. Products sampled

90. Visits to store locator pages

91. Conversion change due to user ratings, reviews

92. Rate of customer/visitor retention

93. Impact on customer lifetime value

94. Customer acquisition / retention costs through social media

95. Change in market share

96. Earned media's impact on results from paid media

97. Responses to socially posted events

98. Attendance generated at in-person events

99. Employees reached (for internal programs)

100. Job applications received

Facebook Glossary of Terms

News Feed: The News Feed is the first thing a user sees upon logging in to Facebook. It’s an automatically-generated list of all the activity of the user’s Facebook friends. For example, "Michelle added new interests to her profile,” or "Chelsea uploaded new photos.” The newsfeed is the main catalyst for all Facebook interaction.

Stream: The Stream is the new real-time version of the News Feed, which (as far as I can tell as of this writing) will be automatically refreshed to show the latest stories. The Stream will include not just a user's Friends' activities, but also the user's Fan Pages.

Story: Stories are the items that appear in the Stream or News Feed -- each individual item in the list is called a Story.

Comment: Comment is one of the options for users to give feedback about a Story in the Stream. Clicking "Comment" opens up a text box underneath the Story -- the user can add a note and the note will then appear on context with the Story on the Stream.

Like: The other option for giving feedback on a Story is to click the "Like" button -- if you don't have any actual commentary to add but you want to acknowledge the Story in some way, you can just choose to say that you "Like" it.

Friend Lists: Since the Stream will now be updated in real time and will display stories from all of a users Friends and Pages, users can use Friend Lists to filter the Stream and choose to only see stories from certain groups of people. (I'll post more info about Friend Lists when the home page changes go live.)

Profile: Facebook profiles are the pages that display a user's personal information, as well as all their interactions with friends.

Profile Tabs: Profile information is divided into sections of different content.

• The Info tab displays basic information like Birthday and Hometown, as well as interests and activities. The Info tab also lists all Groups the user is a member of, and all the Pages the user is a Fan of.
• The Wall tab dispays all the user's interactions with friends (comments and messages) as well as status messages.
• The Photos tab is pretty self-explanatory.
• The Boxes tab is not at all self-explanatory! It's where all other Application information lives. (For example, mine shows the "Growing Gifts" I've received from friends, and the i'll go! events I'm attending.)
• Other tabs: users can choose to turn their Application boxes into separate tabs. I display my "Extended Info" application as a separate tab because I want to make it easy for people to find.

Pages: Facebook Pages (possibly called "public profiles" now) are for any entity that's not an individual. They were created as a way for users to connect with brands and organizations. (For much more on Pages, read my February E-marketing E-ssentials article.) Pages now have the same layout as user profiles.

Status messages / Publisher interface: There's a text field at the top of the home page and the Profile page that asks, "What's on your mind?" (formerly "What are you doing right now?"). If you type text in the box and click "Share" (or "Post), the text will become your new status message (e.g., "Michelle is writing blog posts about Facebook.").

That same field can now be used to share links, photos, etc: if you add a link or photo by clicking the links directly below the field, the text in the field will instead be attached as a comment from you on the link or photo (instead of updating your Status).


Mini-feed: The mini-feed was the section on a Facebook Page that displayed the recent activity of the Page (e.g. "Carnegie Hall posted a new note;" "Playwrights Horizons added a new event"). On the new layout of Pages, the Stream serves the same function.

Updates: Until now, the only direct way for a Page to communicate with its Fans was to send out an Update. With this week's changes, that's no longer the case, but Updates may still provide to be an important communication channel. More on Updates to come in a later post.

Week 4: Social Media & Marketing

Below is a list of links to social media topics discussed in last night's class on social media and marketing:

• RSS Search Engines: Many people mistakenly refer to RSS search as "blog search." While it's true that many blogs offer RSS feeds (automatic feed creation is a feature of most blogging software), not all blogs have feeds. Furthermore, RSS can literally be used with just about any kind of web-based content. RSS fundamentally is a relatively simple specification that uses XML to organize and format web-based content in a standard way.
  
• Breaking Through: Do not adjust that dial! During this excellently executed advertisement, your YouTube browser window may start to tremble and shake and seemingly implode, but it's all just a part of the very clever campaign for Acciona, a sustainable development firm based in Spain. View Video Here. Set to the song “Pure Imagination” (made famous by Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory), the 80-second clip was the result of two months of labor by director Marcel Burgos for McCann Erickson Italia (we’re still not sure if we understand how he did it). Of course, it’s not just the novelty of the advert that makes it so fun and effective: Breaking through the old to make room for the new, it could not have done a better job of illustrating better solutions. Plus, the company chose not to use traditional media but to air Re exclusively online to fund its production costs—proving that every medium can stand for a little “re”-thinking.
• Ad Age: Brands on Twitter, 76% of Accounts Are Infrequent Users: Most companies fail to realize Twitter's full potential as a market engagement platform. While 73% of Fortune 100 companies registered a total of 540 Twitter accounts, effectiveness based on level of activity, interaction and engagement were off the mark. Brand-squatted accounts, as reported last week in Ad Age, remains an issue for many companies. For those that are on board, many more are largely tepid accounts with limited activity and interactivity (76% of accounts tweet infrequently). Even more telling is how companies apply currently traditional marketing practices to this new media channel.
• LinkedIn and Twitter Partnership: Do's and Dont's for Users:

• Social Media Lessons from Bill Cosby: has taught us about a lot of things over the years, like parenting skills, how to pick out snazzy sweaters -- and now, how to succeed at social media. Cosby held a "virtual town hall" on Oct. 19 to discuss issues that face the African-American community and support his latest album, "Bill Cosby Presents the Cosnarati: State of Emergency." It features rappers Jace the Great, Brother Hahz and Super Nova Slom.
• 5 Tips For Creating Compelling PPC Ads: Search engine marketers are always looking to capture a valuable and relevant click throughout their pay-per-click campaign. Here are five ways to help target those all-important searchers through compelling and effective ad copy.

And last but not least, Tips to help you optimize for success on Facebook. Top 10 Ad Creative Tips: