But We Like Our Comfy Place Thanks. Sorry Seth.

We’ve conducted research on Social Media usage for over 80 companies now, from health care to engineering to non-profits. No, I’m not tooting our horn here; bear with me a moment. We’ve covered Europe, Canada, the USA and snippets of Asia and southern Africa in our wanderings. One thing we’ve learned out of examining over 780 Million (or so) bits of data? People like where they hang online and they don’t really like to change – with a few caveats. Of course.

When it comes to Social Networks (i.e. Facebook, MySpace or Bebo) citizens (I hate the term “user”) become rather attached to those brands and services. Once entrenched and engaged there, they tend to stay there. In monitoring brand and product mentions and discussions over a 6 month period for several brands – people mentioned the brand in a channel where they initially hung out. Less than 1% of over 240,000 people left their initial Social Network to engage in conversations or make comments elsewhere.

In usage patterns, we found that out of the 240,000 sample group monitored, 78% also used a separate photo service and would have an account on YouTube or another video service. Less than 5% of the sample group (Canadians, American and Brits) had more than 3 actively used accounts. Okay, a caveat here, we sampled these 240,000 people where we found the same “user name” being used – but we do estimate a less than 4% margin of error here.

To Seth Godin’s new project with Squidoo “Brands in Public” we are very interested to see what happens. Brands in Public offers brands the chance to engage with people when they mention their brand by creating a portal that sucks in any mention of their brand across Twitter on blogs etc.

The upside is that the brand can then “go” to the channel(s) where the issue is being discussed and engage with people. For the most part. I like it for microblogging services like Twitter or Plurk, but suspect it will fail when it comes to newsgroups, usergroups, the BB and Usenet etc., all areas some (like ours) services can monitor, but Google does not. Nor would this tool. It’s a great concept, and it will have a positive impact. But.

At the end of the day, citizens like the online home they make. They’ll rarely venture out and away from the services they start with, since that’s where they’re comfortable. Seth has changed the game here for many monitoring services like Radian6, RTGI or Trackur and for Microsofts proposed solution. The good side of this project is the ability for the brands to reach at least most of the services where the conversation may happen that affects them, if not all.

Key is that Seth et al have recognized a key fact; a brand in Social Media has to go to the audience, don’t expect them to come to you.

Did we miss something? What do you think?

(Author: Giles Crouch a.k.a Webconomist)

Why Search Engines Aren’t Media Monitoring Tools

Some Social Media  consultants will tell you “hey, just set up Google Alerts and do some occasional checking across search engines, it’s all you need!”. There’s two major flaws to this approach.

1. Regional Result Changes: Google, like other search engines, collects massive amounts of data constantly. To help manage this load, Google, among others, have data centres scattered around the world. If you try a search string in Atlantic Canada you will get different results from New England etc. This effect can be seen with Google Alerts for news and other data as well. The same impact is seen with Bing and Yahoo! While you may get some data, you’ll miss a lot more. Perhaps what is critical.

2. They Don’t Dig Deep: Yes, the search engines dig into a lot of content, but they miss a lot of newsgroups, Bulletin Boards, Usenet, .alt discussions and all of the Social Networks, such as Facebook Groups and Fan Pages. It’s these places where the deeper discussions about your brand, service or organization are often taking place. In fact 95% of the monitoring or “reputation management” solutions out there also miss this critical data.

3.The Context and Sentiment is Missed: Search engines just deliver results, they don’t care if it’s good or bad. That means a human resource needs to read, analyse and place into context all that information. Is that an effective use of time?

4. The Flow of the Conversation: It’s often to also understand the “flow”, “spread” and valleys of a conversation to gain perspective. Search engines don’t provide this. Neither do most reputation management solutions.

5. It’s Getting Too Local for Search Engines: With smart phone usage growing and increased free public Web access, the Web is becoming very local. As this trend continues, consumer search engines will face a challenge in keeping up. Alternative local search engines may help. But reputation management and online brand monitoring solutions have yet to catch up to small and local as well.

6. The Commercial Ecosystem Bias: That’s a fancy way of saying “search engines are more likely to deliver results in Social Media services from applications that they own.” For example, Microsoft owns Bing, and LiveJournal; if the content is “relevant enough” Bing will be biased towards LiveJournal to increase the chances of advertising click through on their ad network. In our analysis of Google, Bing and Yahoo! we found a 46% bias on the same search strings to deliver search providers ecosystem relevant content. We’re just sayin’.

In the end, we’re saying that doing the odd Google or Yahoo! search and not finding anything about yourself or your business is a dangerous way to approach understanding your reputation or leveraging a reputation management service. Food for thought. What do you think?

(Author: Giles Crouch, Managing Director)

Keep The Sales Manager Away From Social Media

Sales is, for the most part, is a “near-term results” effort. On a daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly basis a CEO is always looking at the sales numbers. Because the purpose of a business is to make a profit and sales helps drive profitability. Otherwise you’re a charitable organization. I’ve seen a lot of expectation that because Social Media seems to be so “instant” with services like Twitter or Plurk and Facebook, it should be able to bring instant sales results. But it isn’t.

Social Media is a managed investment – like marketing and communications. It’s been argued and I agree, that through Social Media there is a true model for Integrated Marketing Communications (IMC). Properly researched, planned and implemented, marketing has an ROI. Marketing essentially paves the path for the sales team to close the deals…to ensure they have deals to close in the future.

Social Media enables marketing (and sometimes sales) to foster deeper relationships in the marketplace in order to aid the organization across all aspects of the company. Product feedback for the product management team, company feedback from shareholders, indicators for increased market uptake and feedback to human resources for hiring issues.

Simply looking to engage in Social Media for immediate sales opportunities will only lead to disappointment. Engaging in Social Media means you must be prepared to make an investment with resources; your company’s most precious resources – people. A senior manager wouldn’t execute a marketing campaign without research and planning just as a sales manager wouldn’t let a sales team loose without a good plan – ideally sales and marketing work together.

So it is with Social Media; you need research, then a plan, then you execute. Over the longer term. Look for metrics to measure progress as you would in marketing. Expecting instant results is setting up for failure. We’re not saying don’t let the sales manager near your Social Media efforts, but they shouldn’t expect to instantly expand the sales funnel or salivate over huge sales gains in the next sales period. Social Media takes time to garner results – that means months.

And if you’re calling your agency to create a video that will go “viral” to get those instant results – hang up now. Certainly you can make a cool video – but it’s the public, not your marketing team, that decides if anything will go viral as Shai Agassi so truly stated among others.

Social Media Gets Rural

Likely, most of us associate Social Media usage with the under 25 crowd and city slickers. There’s two things wrong with that assumption and a trend we’re noticing in Atlantica (New England and Atlantic Canada.) Here’s what we’re seeing.

Social Media Use by Age: There’s a plethora of research showing average ages (this old RapLeaf study said youth last year and that’s already changed.) Here in Atlantica our own research shows an increase in the average age of a Facebook participant from 47 in late 2008 to 53 by August of 2009. Twitter shows the most usage by the 30+ crowd and MySpace is the hang-out of youth. Social Media is not the exclusive domain of youth.

Rural Usage: As governments in New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland has funded high-speed infrastructure into rural areas, we’ve monitored Social Media activities in those areas since 2008.

What we’ve found is that as new areas are “lit up” so to speak, usage of tools such as Facebook, LinkedIn, FastPitch, Flickr and blogs spikes. In Cape Breton as the Straight-Highlands area expanded Internet access, Social Media usage rose steady as new communities came online. In the small community of Arichat as it came online for high-speed we saw over 150 residents go on Facebook within 3 weeks and a 20% increase in photo’s posted in online photo services with Arichat tags and locations. In Southern Vermont, we saw a similar increase to Arichat, in fact, almost exactly the same numbers in the area of Hanover.

This is but a small sampling of research indicating rural uptake of Social Media services. For marketers, the rural markets are reachable in an affordable way. For general thought, this shows people in rural areas are finding their voice as well. The more communities going on line, the more we will hear from the rural voice. This is relevant in terms of where we will see significant growth and I suspect, participation, in Social Media services over the next year. As wireless carriers push 3G and other similar services into these markets as well, we expect to see increased use of mobile Facebook and Twitter apps. Increasingly, Social Media will get very local. Soon smaller, regional and local businesses will have to take notice even more than today.

(Author: G. Crouch, Managing Director)

Why Not To Start Your Own Social Network

I’ve had 2 calls in the last week from businesses looking to build their own Social Network and over the past several months, similar inquiries. When I ask them if they have about $40 Million to invest in getting it going I either get dead silence or a nervous chuckle. My advice is “forget it and invest elsewhere.”

The space is well established now. The leaders are Facebook and NetLog followed by MySpace and MyYearbook among others. Perception-wise Facebook is leading internationally. The others vary by country (these come from a simple but good site for this data.)

One might and I emphasize “might” succeed with a micro-Social Networking site that caters to a specific ethnic, cultural or special interest group. But often those are well supported by services like Ning. Of course it’s one thing to build it, then you need to attract people. Even in ethnic/cultural group terms, they’ve tended to have found their piece of turf inside Facebook or other services. For clubs and organizations there’s services like Qlubb – well, there’s over 60 of them out there. In the business world it’s a fight now between LinkedIn and FastPitch.

Only about 5% of people spend more than a few hours a week inside a Social Network and less than 3% belong to more than one Social Network (our research, March 2009). Once they have established a presence and entered their personal data and made connections, it’s very hard to move them. Porting the data over is hard enough to do, but porting their connections? Almost impossible.

Venture Capital companies are not financing Social Networks. Raising debt to finance them is personal financial suicide. And quite frankly, you’ll need at least $40 Million to build a presence. If you can figure out a very compelling reason to switch for a person (porting over data and friends included) then you might have something. Over time, opportunities might present themselves. The one sector we see some opportunity through our research is better ethnic/cultural focused Social Networks in countries like America, Canada, England and Europe. Possibly. But there are services for those markets (BlackPlanet and Migente are two) and the revenue opportunities may be limited based on demographics and adoption.

Our advice then is, work within a Social Network to build community if that’s your goal (here’s an example). For big brands, I’ve yet to see a sustainable model – the reality is, once the brand has accomplished it’s marketing objective, are they really going to want to spend the money required to maintain that presence? Not likely.