Social Marketing

This past week, we spent considerable time at the Hispanicize event in Miami Beach. The Hispanicize team needs to be commended for their ability to bring together Hispanic female bloggers from their owned and operated blogger network Latina Mom Bloggers.  The ladies were flown in and put up for a couple of days in fabulous Miami Beach for an all expenses paid soiree to create and demonstrate critical mass to entice advertisers.

The social audience is growing across networks and countries. That is the takeaway from GlobalWebIndex’s “Stream Social: Quarterly Social Platforms Update.” The study found that Facebook remained the No. 1 social network worldwide, with just over half of internet users logging on to the site at least once a month in Q1 2013. eMarketer puts worldwide Facebook penetration slightly higher, expected to reach 60% of internet users this year.

Consumer use of user-generated online reviews has become critical to the automotive sector, according to a new eMarketer report, “Automotive Consumer Reviews: Social and Mobile Change the Car-Buying Game.” As trust in this content solidifies and technology enables more shoppers to contribute car-buying opinions, users reviews are becoming among the most influential type of review, rivaling once-dominant professional reviews.

In a joint partnership with comScore, BabyCenter has revealed new insights surrounding moms’ adoption and usage of social platforms across all devices. Today, moms are 20% more likely to use social media than the general population. Ninety-one percent of moms now use social media regularly – a 20% increase since 2010. And they expect their friends and family to use it too. In fact, 22% of moms say that if friends or family don’t participate in social media, they are not as much a part of their lives.

Tr3s announced the expansion of its digital voice, Blogamole, with the launch of the Tr3s Blogamole Network, an abode of go-to gurus on all things chisme, lifestyle and entertainment.

Experian Marketing Services revealed that if the time spent on the Internet for personal computers was distilled into an hour then 27 percent of it would be spent on social networking and forums across US, UK and Australia. In the US, 16 minutes out of every hour online is spent on social networking and forums, nine minutes on entertainment sites and five minutes shopping.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has yet to follow through on its years-old pledge to issue social media guidelines for pharmaceutical marketers in the US. As a result, some pharma companies are keeping their distance from the social channel.

It’s no secret that moms turn to other moms for recommendations for just about everything. Cracking that word-of-mouth – or word-of-mom – code is the holy grail for brands today. But who’s more influential? The Facebook mom or the mom chatting up other moms at school drop-off? Is there a difference in the conversations moms have online and in-person, both in terms of what they share and how what they share is received by other moms?

Now that marketers’ tenure on social networks is at least a few years old, they are zeroing in on what they are best able to accomplish on the sites, what their biggest challenges are and how to most effectively track their performance.

Social TV describes consumer engagement, communication and interaction while watching television. Gartner believes that social TV activities can enhance the value of the TV experience for consumers and offer opportunities to add new users, drive engagement and open up new advertising opportunities through existing social networks.

Women with children living at home are prime targets for marketers, making many household purchase decisions and also spending significant amounts of time with media—especially digital,

A new study by Nielsen and SocialGuide confirms the relationship between Twitter and TV ratings. In addition to analyzing Tweets about live TV, the study compared the impact of Twitter against a number of key variables in order to gauge the strength of the relationship of Twitter with ratings.

Research released by Weber Shandwick identifies a sizable segment of North American women who enjoy using their social networks so much that they prefer socializing online over dating or spending time with their partner.

McDonald’s sees an enormous volume of social media conversations each month. Social media director Rick Wion talked with eMarketer’s Debra Aho Williamson about how the company mines this stream of information to find real-time marketing opportunities.

Most US internet users across all age groups are aware that businesses frequently listen to what they say online.