Are Behavior Awards Effective in Social Media Marketing?

I haven’t seen much evidence of success in three years of developing strategies and research for clients across a number of sectors. Yet it seems to still be happening – Huffington Post today is riding the FourSquare hockey stick upcurve of success; they’re giving out “badges” for good behaviour.

Are we secretly craving that return to elementary school days and getting those gold stars for good behaviour? Perhaps deep in our psyche we are. Or not.

Our attention for media channels is so fractured today. It would appear that when a new app comes out (i.e. Twitter) and begins an ascendancy in popularity, other Web services jump on to attempt to cash in – the halo effect.

But what are the expected and acceptable returns? A 2% uptick in traffic? Direct Mail campaigns are considered successful with a 2% return, 3% is knocking it out of the ballpark. Email campaigns have slid down to the 2% mark for a success metric.

Microblogging service Plurk gives you “Karma points” for building friends and engaging in conversation. Plurk has failed to garner the traffic and growth of Twitter. By a long-shot. I don’t know about you, but I have enough trouble managing my karma as it is without someone else messing with it.

While I see increased use of FourSquare and Yelp, they too rely on rewarding you for activity. The simple reason is creating loyalty since the more eyeballs and activity increases the value of the ads sold on the site. But is it sustainable? Games like Mafia Wars and Farmville are but fads.

The question is, will loyalty marketing behavioral promotions be effective? Modifying peoples behaviour through marketing techniques is never easy and often a losing proposition.

(Author: G. Crouch, MD)

Is The Social Web The Seventh Sense?

Smart phones with cameras and video cameras, email, txt and Web-connected to Social Networks, Twitter, blogs…everything. You can publish text, audio, images in seconds. It can spread across the Web in moments. One of the most common definitions of Twitter is that it is a live-feed of what is happening.

With so much interconnection (2 million emails per second, 55 million “tweets”/day, 55 trillion links and over 100 billion clicks per day) and activity, does being connected enable us to develop a Seventh Sense of the pulse of humanity all around us? There’s 8 terrabytes of traffic per day, 65 billion phone calls/year and 2 billion location nodes activated with over 600 billion RFID tags in use…and that was in 2007.

I think we’re getting there. Media channels are combining into one single platform (more on that later.) So does this mean that the more we’re connected we are connected to a new “sense”? Perhaps called Humansense? or maybe Global Awareness? Human Awareness? Cognitia?

Will such a sense of awareness lead us to think on a more globally aware level? I like to hope that means more chance for peace and the elimination of racism and prejudice.

We are so thoroughly connected now. We can easily disconnect. In fact we see this in generational terms; the Boomers are less connected that the Gen X, and they less than Gen Y and the Lost Generation…but we want to connect, because we want to learn and grow. Perhaps mental Darwinism at play?

Can you imagine yourself withut the alphabet and writing?

(Author: G. Crouch)

Social Media Marketing is Local and Regional

One of the advantages, often overlooked, of marketing in Social Media channels is that you can be highly local or regional in your efforts. Some small businesses understand this well and are taking advantage of it, but we see few regional, national or global brands that understand, or leverage this fact.

The Global Going Local Conundrum

Unfortunately for global brands like Nike, McDonald’s or Home Depot, they can’t think to such a small scale. Because everything is done on a cost-savings massive scale. The perception comes from the days of mass media and wanting to hit the largest target, versus the right, perhaps sometimes smaller, target.

With so much information available to be mined from the Social Web, an effort to start with regionalization for Social Media activities could be done. This may enable brands to have a more “local” connection to their communities. At a lower cost.

Can these large brands get more local?

The Local Going Regional Conundrum

And so the reverse is almost true for the small business that operates locally and wants to go more regional. They too can leverage the information on the Web to source regional connections, find market mavens for their product or service and expand more regionally.

Social Media is a Means of Scale

Whether it’s getting to more local markets or expanding to more regional or national markets, leveraging the information available on the Social Web may provide highly cost-effective routes. As with any effort to engage in Social Media or online channels, a little listening up front can save a lot of wasted effort.

But tying in CRM solutions and leveraging the power of these databases and the new social CRM tools can help make this possible.

Understand your scale and where you’re trying to go, along with the resources. it’s a start.

What do you think?

(Author: G. Crouch, MD)

Top 10 Hottest Topics on Societal Issues in Social Media

Social Media is nowhere near being used braodly for bigger social change in developed nations, like it is in Iran or Sudan or the Ukraine. Eventually it will be. We wanted to look at what were the hottest societal topics in Social Media channels.

But it seems that for Social Media to be the underlying technology that enables broader social change, as a society, we aren’t mad enough about a major topic; it’s just too fragmented. Yet. The undercurrents are there. Here’s a look at the largest social issues we see trending in Social Media channels (Sept. 2008 to March 2010);

1. Financial Crisis: It remains top of the list across the U.S., Canada and UK (where we conduct our research.) A number of sub-topics feature in here (i.e. lending practices, citizen and government debt.)

2. Corporate Greed: Ties into #1 but is more related to issues around corporate leaders, their bonuses and making too much money; perception or otherwise. The volume of discussion was high enough to warrant it’s own segment.

3. Aid Relief: Over the past two months this has mostly been focused on Haiti, but China’s recent earthquake trended upwards for a few days.

4. National Politics: It’s hot, but not that hot. In the U.S. it’s Tea Party related, in Canada it was Proroguing Parliament and ongoing scandals and in the UK it was MP expenditures followed by the election. Debt related we placed into the financial crisis.

5. Iraq & Afghanistan: Perhaps this can also be said of foreign policy of U.S., Canada and UK. But it mostly focuses on Iraq and Afghanistan – in a negative manner. Broad public support is not there.

6. Energy: This is trending upward. Discussions revolve around alternative energy sources such as solar power and are negative towards our reliance on fossil fuels.

7. Healthcare: While this ranked very high in the U.S., Canadian and UK discussion is there but brought the overall ranking down.

8. Food: We see a lot of discussion going on around food, namely the source of our food and then as it relates to our health. This is fairly equal across the U.S., Canada and UK.

9. Climate Change: Could be categorized with energy, but we see this as a separate issue since it covers energy, industrial pollution, foreign and domestic policy and the G8. While discussion goes on across Social Media channels, it is surprising to us it is not higher up the list.

10. Privacy: It’s out there, perhaps on the low side, but the launch of Google Buzz and other apps has kept it simmering in the background.

Methodology:

Using mediasphere360, we looked into the blogosphere, newsgroups, forums, microblogs, social networks (10) and 256 non-profit websites for traffic rankings. We used a set of common keywords around the issues above. Keywords were identified by using Google Insights. We then filtered out celebrity discussions and entertainment properties. The search methodology and analysis as it relates to our technology are proprietary to MediaBadger. Searches were refined to U.S., Canada and UK (colonies and territories excluded.)

Traditional News Media is Still Relevant

Here I argue that traditional news media (a.k.a. industrial news media) is still and will continue to, play a critical role in how we consume our news and share it. Only now citizens can participate in the story.

Internet memes or stories are a key part of the mix, but often the big online memes or stories don’t become so until they are covered by industrial news media. Industrial media still has 1) mass reach and 2) credibility (maybe that is declining in some ways, but they still have credibility over the average citizen.)

Let’s look at just a few of examples;

Rogers iPhone Launch in Canada: We posted an article on the research we did while this was happening. Not until the online petition had attention from mainstream news media did it take off.

United Broke My Guitar: While it was raging across the Web as a meme, only 600+K people had viewed the story until CNN and a few other mainstream newsmedia outlets reported it. Then within 2 days the video on YouTube had surpassed 2 million views.

Motrin Moms: While the story simmered over the web through Social Media channels, it wasn’t until newspapers, radio and television news picked it up that it went truly viral. Motrin pulled the ads within 72 hours and no doubt their marketing department was taking a lot of Tylenol.

These are just 3 examples that point to the proof of how mainstream, industrial news media still plays a relevant role in spurring on a story. So while some may say traditional media is dead, I beg to differ. We still look towards these sources for actual news.

Traditional news media does face challenges though. The story of Gordon Lightfoot being dead was broken by a traditional radio news station. It was false. They didn’t do a fact check beforehand. It’s the fact checking and source analysis that citizens expect news media to do. Validating the back story. This factor will feature prominently in the future over who grows as a news source and who doesn’t. What we can say is that traditional news media is still very much alive, well and relevant.