Social Marketing

Marketers – we’ve news for you. The bad news is that, with the internet as the enabler and social media as the driver, today’s consumers are the new brand custodians. Yes, your power base is being eroded.

Digital resources have upended the traditional linear path-to-purchase model, with consumers now relying on a number of resources to shop for and purchase goods online. Social media has certainly played a role in that process, but research from L2 Think Tank found that little traffic was flowing from social media to retail sites.

New research released by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte reports that when asked to rank their company’s social business maturity on a scale of one to 10, 52 percent of respondents from around the world gave their company a score of three or below. Just 17 percent ranked their company at seven or above.

Pantene’s #WantThatHair Twitter program for the Oscars in February 2013 took the kind of unplanned twist that only an agile marketing team can be ready for, according to Kevin Crociata, marketing director of haircare, North America, and Rotha Penn, communications manager, US haircare, for the Procter & Gamble brand. Crociata and Rotha spoke to eMarketer’s Danielle Drolet about the real-time marketing effort for Pantene undertaken during the awards show.

Organic posting is fine for community management but it’s not marketing. Photo and video posts work OK but marketers need more flexibility in the stream. The next phase of social media marketing will fuse creative, content and paid advertising and for the first time we will be able to drive sustained business and brand value from social, at scale.

Brand marketers are sobering up and asking hard questions around the ROI of social marketing. Perhaps no question is asked more often than “What is the value of a Facebook brand Fan?” According to new Syncapse empirical research, the average value of brand Fans in key consumer categories has increased 28% to $174. Not only do Fans tend to be brand users first, they spend more, engage more, advocate more, and are more loyal. The significant and increasing value of a Facebook brand Fan affirms past social marketing investment and mandates deeper commitment and accountability in the future.

Marketers are devoting more time and energy to monitoring real-time conversations in social media and then rapidly developing creative to take advantage of those discussions. However, according to a new eMarketer report—“Advertising in the Moment: Real-Time Strategies for Paid Social Media”—to be truly effective in real-time marketing also means moving more quickly with paid advertising.

The effect of social media on regular viewers – or, “repeaters” – of a television show is much higher relative to the impact on people who infrequently sample a show, according to the findings. Infrequent viewers are mainly influenced by off-line word-of-mouth, which can be five to 10 times as effective as social media in reaching these potential viewers. Conversely, TV show promos were found potentially to be a distraction for repeaters of that show.

Burst Media released the results of a survey revealing how and why web users interact with brands via social media. Conducted in March among 2,577 U.S. online adults aged 18 or older, the study found that the effectiveness of social cues in advertisements varies by the medium the ad appears in. Among respondents who recall social media prompts in advertising, digital ads (61.0%) and television ads (58.7%) are most effective at driving interaction with a brand’s social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These are followed by print ads (52.4%), radio ads (41.5%) and outdoor ads (39.4%).

Over the past week, the University of Florida has been targeting me on Facebook as part of a lead-generation campaign to drive enrollment for its journalism and communications school’s Master’s in Social Media. The copy reads, “UF is now offering the first of its kind Master’s in Social Media – 100% Online.” I didn’t believe it was real, at first. But I clicked through and, sure enough, it was. If people will buy it, why not sell it?

Consumers’ interaction with social media in relation to their television viewing is relatively modest compared to other forms of communication and lags behind other online media, TV promotions and, especially, offline communication, according to a new study. Only 12% of respondents use social media one or more times per day concerning TV.

The study analyzed 32 different mobile rich media campaigns with the same or highly comparable creatives trafficked simultaneously to both, mobile publishers and social networks, and focused on ad engagement metrics, such as ad engagement rate, ad engagement time, and various feature engagement metrics.

Viacom and its Viacom International Media Networks (VIMN) division unveiled the results of “When Networks Network: TV Gets Social,” its new multi-country study investigating the relationship between TV and social media usage. The findings uncovered three key types of motivations leading fans to engage in TV-related social media activities: Functional, Communal and Playful.

MSLGROUP – Publicis Groupe’s strategic communications and engagement network – published its latest global report titled “Now & Next: Future of Engagement.” The 94-page report identifies the ten most important evolutions pushing forward the frontiers of communications in today’s Social Age.