This week I was interested to read an article in Content Marketing Today regarding the success a bank has had with blogging.

The following is an excerpt from that post (ok it’s the weekend time is short!):

The company under the spotlight was in a niche area - banks that were trying to get started, banks that were looking to acquire other banks or banks that were working on implementing growth strategies. According to company owner, Wendell Brock, his website,denovostrategy.com, received almost no traffic.

Wendell decided to launch a blog called, BankNotes that was integrated with his website and within a few months he went from zero traffic to 1000 new monthly visitors. About 10% of these are returning visitors and 2.5% have turned into new sales leads.

Wendell noted another benefit to his new blogging strategy, “The blog has caused me to implement a new discipline to my marketing strategy by committing to writing a blog article at least once per week. This keeps me engaged in my website and inspires me to continuously strive to make it better.” Thus, even though he is a self-confessed ‘non-marketer’, his blog forces him to think regularly about continuous marketing improvement.

What happened here? By engaging with a relatively broad universe of professionals who cared about banking issues, BankNotes became a trusted source of information. As the subset of blog readers who qualified as prospects engaged with his content, they came to trust Wendel as the expert who could solve their problems about starting, buying or building a bank.  They would then take the next step to spend time on his buyer-focused website.

It’s worth noting that his blog is fully integrated with his website. Therefore, when blog readers are ready to consider becoming customers, his comprehensive website content is readily available to provide all the information they need to make a buying decision.

Summing up: Your website is necessary but not sufficient to draw in prospects before they are ready to do serious buying research. Your blog will engage a broader audience that will return again and again. An important subset of this audience will be ready to buy from you because you have effectively engaged them early on with relevant and compelling information.

**The case study regarding the bank was published in a new book entitled Marketing 2.0: Bridging the gap between Seller and Buyer through Social Media Marketing

Could your business benefit from a blogging strategy?

As an online communicator with clients both in the corporate and non-profit sector I was interested in a post recently by Jennifer McClure of The New Communications Review discussing how the social web is a great place for philanthropic activity.

Jennifer’s blogpost highlighted new research “…funded by the Columbus Foundation, The San Francisco Foundation and The Saint Paul Foundation demonstrating that High dollar donors — especially 30-49 year-olds — use the social web, but have yet to be engaged by strong, trustworthy philanthropic organizations. This was among the key findings of the new research study, “Community Philanthropy 2.0,” conducted by Beth Kanter, Society for New Communications Research Fellow Geoff Livingston, and Qui Diaz of CRT/tanaka.”

The Community Philanthropy 2.0 research study examined the use of social media by non-profits and causes, as well as existing donors and Internet “savvy” users’ traditional and social media usage patterns. The research was designed to determine if and how social media can be used to engage and cultivate high dollar donors.

Key Findings

* The online world of charitable activity is highly social, but also fragmented. No dominant voice for charitable giving exists online, indicating the social web is still in an early phase of philanthropic activity.
* Online conversations rarely evolve into meaningful discussions about how nonprofits are achieving their missions and impacting society. Donors don’t advise other donors, and generally, philanthropic experts from foundations do not participate in these discussions.
* There is a need for a trusted source, and a lack of authoritative philanthropic conversations.
* The 30-49 age group represents the best fit to cultivate major donors using social media strategies,
* More than 50 percent of 30 – 49-year-old survey respondents are interested in the following topics:
• “Whether or not a nonprofit is successfully making an impact” (75%)
• “Learning about organizations that are actively working on issues and causes I care about” (62%)
• “Success stories and updates on the progress of nonprofits I support” (54%)
• “Information/updates on the issues and causes I care about” (54%)
• “Financial accountability and governance of nonprofits I support” (51%)
* 80 percent of the Internet-savvy respondents aged 30-49 reported that they would participate in social media with nonprofits if the information was highly credible and of strong quality, and 77 percent said they would participate if it came from a trusted source.
* Online community-oriented social media is a preferred tool over most other forms of online conversation.

Source/Credit: New Communications Review

An article in ReadWriteWeb recently highlighted the changing demographics in one social media platform: Facebook.

Summary: “ College and high school users have declined in absolute number by 20% and 15% respectively in a mere six months, according to estimates Facebook provides to advertisers  that were archived for tracking by an outside firm. Facebook users aged 55 and over have skyrocketed from under 1 million to nearly six million in the same time period. There are more Facebook users over 55 years old today than there are high school students using the site”

The graphic below demonstrates the shift that has occurred.

Out take: For those that are marketing products aimed at the older demographic don’t dismiss social media platforms as only appealing to the young.  These platforms should be utilised to talk to that segment that:

(a) have time for social networking

(b) may have physical ailments and hence the platform has great appeal

(c) many of them probably started out on the platform to communicate with family members overseas but saw additional benefits along the way.

Are you dismissing the appeal of social media for this demographic? It might just be time to take another look.

Article of relevance:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/02/health/02face.html

Interview with Diffusion’s Stephen Byrne regarding the impact of social media on brands:

http://diffusionblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/in-turning-bay-some-questions-on-future_24.html

I came across a great article today in Harvard Business about some of the less sexy sides of Social Media – the continual maintenance that you need to do such as ‘seeding’ and ‘weeding’ that are necessary if you want your social media engagement to flourish.

It is an important area and one that I talk to my clients about – who will be the designated social media champions internally? do they have time? what is the org. structure? who has what skillsets/interests and who is already dabbling in the space?

It reminds me of setting up and managing intranets years ago. Initially intranets were managed in either IT or Comms but over time to have fresh content and relevance you needed buy-in and resourcing from all areas – effectively a decentralised model – which today is the norm.

Social media strategies are starting to follow that shift. While they might be owned technically in marketing or by one division to have real relevance and cut through decentralising and building social media champions throughout the business is integral.  Not only will your maintenance activities be shared, you will get buy-in from the whole business and the benefits to the organisation will increase four-fold.

Digital consumers have stronger relationships with brands than non-digital consumers. This was the finding from Millward Brown, who analysed WPP’s BrandZ database recently.

The report compared the brand relationships of digital consumers with those of non-digital consumers across all categories and countries. The findings: that digital consumers have  15% stronger relationship with a typical brand.

For some categories such as airlines they have a 93% stronger brand relationship while others such as soft drinks and fuel (items you don’t usually buy online) both recorded a 5% stronger brand relationship.

The chart below shows the categories and impact of digital on that category to consumers brand relationships.

So what is the BrandX definition of a digital consumer?  This is “someone who has either bought or researched that category online”

Digital consumers were reported to have have stronger relationships in all 24 countries examined.

Key Takeouts from the Report:

• Willward Brown discuss the ‘digital branding circle‘ where consumers are more interested in brands, research online increases brand knowledge, digital purchasing increases brand knowledge further.
• As more digital researching and purchasing takes place the brand relationship gap between digital and non-digital consumers widens
• Some consumers will be digital consumers in some categories and non-digital consumers in others
• Brand managers should examine if their category has a strong digital relationship, examine  their competitors digital relationships and integrate the research into a smarter digital marketing strategy.

(Report Background: The report was compiled using 2008 BrandZ data with a total of 100,000 consumer intervierws and over 8000 brand measurements. Interviews covered 24 countries and an average of 15 categories per country. The report pointed out that the digital relationship difference ” is not a measure of brand equity – it has no correlation with the absolute strength of the brand’s pyramid.)

How do you help build engaged digital consumers?

So how can you build a closer relationship with your consumer and make it easier for them to interact with your brand online?

(A) Search Marketing and Organic SEO can help you answer the ‘visibility’ question ie getting your brand found on the web. There has been much written about the fact that during recessionary times consumers are spending more time researching products and services online (lending more relevance to the ‘Digital Branding Circle’ theory discussed above.  

(B) Social Media Marketing. While search marketing might help you get found on the web social media marketing will help with the ‘engagement’ of those consumers. In fact a study released recently by The National Retail Federation’s Shop.org and Forrester Research found that:

• Amongst retailers that are reducing spending, 56 percent are cutting spending on search engine marketing, while only 24 percent will cut their social media marketing budget.
• Amongst retailers that are performing well (“beating expectations” according to the study), 12 of the 20 will increase spending in social media marketing.
• Further, amongst retailers that are increasing budgets, 80 percent will put more money into search, while 65 percent will put more into email marketing.

Tight economic climate right for building ‘digital consumers’

The recessionary climate where consumers are increasingly researching your products is the opportune time to start engaging with them online.   

Yesterday I joined a swag of Australian online community managers at a roundtable organised by Editor and Com Mgr Essential Baby, Ms Alison Michalk. The group of over 15 of us from all around Australia met at Fairfax the home of Essential Baby to discuss online community management.

The group involved a great mix of online community startups such as Nick Gonio’s SportsPassion, through to the effervescent Ms Venessa Paech from the highly established and well regarded Lonely Planet, large media corporates were representated with Bob Dobson ( Entertainment Community Manager, NineMSN) and Ben Mott (Product Manager, Network Ten) as well as the ever-present and unmissable Scott Drummond – Sports Hydrant (not to mention many many others…)

Key discussion points from the day:

• The role of the Community Manager: leaders, the concierge, party hosts, traffic as well as other many descriptions. Community management is a highly complex role!
• The challenges included: head-count in recessionary times how to do the job well with limited resources; moderation is a continual challenge and technology can be your best friend or nightmare – with all agreeing technology platforms need to be nimble enough to adapt to the times.
• Sponsorship -  how to ensure the bottom line survives; the challenge of securing sponsors and ensuring sites remain objective is crucial.
• Benefits of online communities: a great way to gain insight from your key members, help you spread the word (WOM) regarding your product and brand and help you get a great understanding of your consumer.
• Metrics - lots of discussion on this topic with qual and quant discussed deeply. The usual page impressions etc were discussed and ever-present AVE (pr metric) but this time wearing the web 2.0 hat – is there validity in this metric? most agreed their was, metrics such as sharability and engagement were also discussed.
• Metric Relevance - of note was the point that you will need to look at member metrics vs metrics for sales and marketing these are naturally going to be different. We also discussed the old ‘conversion’ chestnut – that many clients asked. We agreed that as case studies come out we can put some figures to it but in reality conversion may in fact be a long bow to draw (ie sales) and if it happens – it wont ‘happen overnight’.
• Transparency: No surprises here authenticity/trust are the domain of a healthy and hence successful online community.
• Friction is healthy in an online community one com mgr said ‘it is in our real offline lives so it should be online as well’ – it keeps the community real, vibrant and engaged (too much though is a bad thing)
• Marketing your online community ideally should be a mix of social media strategies,offline activities, combined with some ppc (although some disagreed with ppc being of value). Obviously as a start-up without a brand name it is a lot harder to get that top-of-mind position than online branded communities (think Dell etc)
• Size - The interesting question of do you need to be a large site to be valuable arose. The answer was in fact both yes (particularly if monitisation is involved) and no if you are creating a niche(not a lot of breadth but depth re engagement) – the scalability of communities was also a good topic of conversation.
• Staffing of the community provided lots of variety with some online community managers existing with only paid staff and others relying heavily on volunteers – and every combination in between.
• Reporting Lines: So who do the community managers report to? a large range of responses from CEO through to general manager, marketing, global support/km to finance. We discussed the future of reports and how they typically report into marketing but wondered if it will always stay that way because online communities were providing tangible benefits to ALL areas of the business.
• Privacy is a continual issue for community managers and we agreed that some technology platforms simply don’t have the flexibility with functionality to allow for subtle privacy changes. One manager mentioned the importance of letting your members ‘grow’ with the site and that may in fact mean their privacy settings would need to change from teen/adult etc
• De la Soul -  the question was raised is there a magic number for getting traction within your community? the answer we all agreed was in the 50-80 range because at that point the community starts to run itself which is the ideal scenario (with the com mgr in the background)
• Technology was a source of frustration for many managers that had bought into systems that were not nimble enough to adapt to the times. Many believed that open-source systems were indeed the future.

My interest in community management was sparked when I was moderating online research communities for companies such as Kelloggs, Weight Watchers and Sara Lee. While the nature of my work has a research bent manyof the above issues regarding technology, resourcing, engagement and moderation still applied.

Today I am keen to stay in touch with the online community management field as Forrester’s Five Eras of the Social Web indicated communities are going to continue to have an impact on the social web and hence brands.

If you are an online community manager or company starting up an online community based in Australia feel free to join our Facebook group

P.S. Came across this memo to New York Times staff regarding the appointment of their social media editor (who has some com mgr responsibilities) it makes interesting reading.

As marketing students we all probably remember the four Ps: Product, Pricing, Placement and Promotion – the traditional model of marketing.

Today marketing has been reinvented and the Ps are being replaced with Cs – Collaboration, Creativity, Connection and Communication.  Brands now need to tap into those online community connections and hence the term Swarm Marketing was born.

Recently Dell revealed Dell Swarm a new marketing scheme in Singapore. As discussed by the Ebiquity Blog it goes like this: If you agree to buy a laptop on Dell Swarm, the discounted price drops as others join your “swarm” and also buy.

Here’s how the Dell system is described:

-Start by picking the laptop you would like to purchase. Be the first buyer to join a Swarm and you’ll enjoy a price lower than Dell.com’s best discounted price (after cash rebates).

-Join a Swarm after, and you’ll enjoy a new, lower price – as will all previous buyers. 

- Once the swarms closes – which is when the limit of 15 buyers or 72 hours is reached, whichever is the earlier, the price is then finalised. This final, lowest price now becomes everyone’s purchase price – including yours!

-To get the maximum discount, grow the Swarm by Sharing with your friends. You can share via Twitter Or post a note on your Facebook® profile and tell all of your friends Point others towards your Swarm using Digg, del.icio.us and other tools. Or simply send your friends an email directly! Not ready to buy yet? You can also choose to Follow the Swarm. You’ll then receive updates via email. As well as through free SMS alerts.

What other examples do you have of swarm marketing? are there examples in Australia?

Could your business benefit from a Swarm marketing approach?

It has been a week of ‘Influence’ locally with Ross Dawson launching the Influence Landscape Framework and Gavin Heaton summarising and commenting on some of the recent findings and blogposts.

Internationally ‘influence’ was also being discussed in a  paper by the Harvard School of Business and in the latest issue of Business Week where the cover page stated “What’s a friend worth”.

The Harvard Paper

The Harvard School of Business paper entitled  Do Friends Influence Purchases in a Social Network? (by Raghuram Iyengar, Sangman Han, and Sunil Gupta) undertook research to to look at the influence of friends on purchasing decisions.

The Study

Using data from Cyworld, (a very popular Korean social networking site) the study empirically assessed if friends indeed influence purchases. Using 10 weeks of purchase and non-purchase data from 208 users they built an individual level model of choice (buy-no buy) and quantity (how much money to spend).

Findings

The key takeouts of the paper were:

• There is a significant and positive impact of friends’ purchases on the purchase probability of a user.
• The study identifies three distinct group of users
• However, there are significant differences across users. Specifically, this social effect is zero for 48 percent of the users, negative for 12 percent of the users, and positive for 40 percent of the users.
• “Moderately connected” users exhibit “keeping up with the Joneses” behavior. On average, this social influence translates into a 5 percent increase in revenues.
• Highly connected users tend to reduce their purchases of items when they see their friends buying them. This negative social effect reduces the revenue for this group by more than 14 percent. This finding is consistent with the typical fashion cycle wherein opinion leaders or the elite in the fashion industry tend to abandon one type of fashion and adopt the next in order to differentiate themselves from the masses.

The researchers said: “…The members in high status group have an influence on those in the middle status group for the diffusion of a new product. However, a successful diffusion in the middle status segment may make high status members lose interest in the new product.”  

The findings naturally have implications for the way you engage differing users within the social networks.

You can download the full report  to read more.

Business Week

In addition to the Harvard paper above the cover story on the June 1 BusinessWeek edition,  asks “What’s a Friend Worth?” 

The article examines how  “Companies are working fast to figure out how to make money from the wealth of data they’re beginning to have about our online friendships“.

The article is of note as it not only examines networked relationships in the external world (around social networks and marketing) but also examines them within companies from a knowledge management – KM perspective (ie how can we more effectively transmit knowledge around the organisation). 

Many years ago when I was involved in developing Knowledge Management strategies understanding social network analysis theory and identifying the ‘connectors’ within an organisation was vital in understanding knowledge flow and who would ideally make the ideal ‘knowledge champion’ within each companyand division.

The same connector/influencer knowledge was then applied when I crafted Internal Communication plans – particularly around ‘Change Communications’ or introduced a new decentralised Intranet that need the ‘influencers’ involved.

Social Network Analysis (SNA) has been around for many years its not new but with the focus on online social networks researchers are now scrambling to crack the code.

About the Author: Jenni Beattie is the Director of Digital Democracy a Sydney based Social Media Consultancy .  Enjoy the article? please subscribe to the RSS Feed

Yelp

I recently read a fascinating  interview from econsultancy with Laura Nestler, Community Manager of Yelp. Yelp is an online review site that started in the US in 2004 and recently launched in the UK with new features. It is interesting to see how the site has been continually developing and adding new elements over the years.

The most interesting aspect of the new version of Yelp is the additional functionality that gives business owners the opportunity to respond to reviewers favourable or unfavourable reviews.  This is a key development and I believe much overdue. The ’two way dialogue’ model that forms the foundation of Social Media needs to occur to ensure continual dialogue and transparency.

So what else is new for Yelp? as with many online applications they have now launched our most recent iPhone application – Yelp for iPhone – and they expect to roll out further apps for other devices in future.

Review Sites in a Tight Economy

As the economy tightens consumers are spending more time on the internet researching product purchases before they buy.  Online product review sites are one of the leading types of user-generated content on the web today and their role will become increasingly important.

The following figures show the significance of review sites for consumers.

Does your website have a review element?  it might be a great way to start engaging with your customers today.

Review Statistics

Article of note: Tips on building your review site

About the Author: Jenni Beattie is the Director of Digital Democracy a Sydney based Social Media Consultancy .  Enjoy the article? please subscribe to the RSS Feed