Facebook’s Q2 earnings show mobile growth, U.S. customers love to complain on Twitter, Flipboard makes users’ magazines available on the Web, the CIPR issues guidance on social media measurement, the mix of journalism and marketing needed in brand newsrooms, the royal fuss over real-time marketing and more, it's This Week in Social Media.
Each week, I compose a newsletter for our team that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, social media, mobile, communications and marketing in order to keep our wider team up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in their jobs. These are those links.
If you have additional links, sources or ideas that might be helpful, I'd encourage you to add some via a comment below or tag me in Google+. And if you’re on Flipboard, you can get these links in the This Week in Social Media Magazine, which is now available on the Web.
The point with so-called "real-time marketing" is not to say something clever quickly, but to find an intersection between ongoing cultural trends and your brand. The reason the Oreo Super Bowl image keeps getting hyped is because Oreo had already built up expertise in the area based on their previous summer's activities, taking place over 100 days. It takes more than a wise crack and Photoshop to do that well. As an example of a brand that did it right, Shinola responded to the Detroit bankruptcy filing with it's "we give you the birdy" ad this week.
The temptation to try to insert your brand into the trend of the moment is strong, and we've seen it play out from the Academy Awards to the royal baby craze. But these events are not about your brand. Building a newsroom and real-time marketing efforts require an understanding of journalism, marketing, analytics, research, cultural anthropology and probably a half dozen other things. It's a complex process, which is why such shortcuts are tempting. But ultimately, efforts should be tied to strategy, business goals and what outcome you're looking to achieve - always with an eye toward the value you're creating for the consumer.
Frank Eliason, SVP of social for Citi summed it up thusly: "Companies have to remember that being in social media is being part of a community, not trying to be the center of it."
Image credit: drew domkus (Flickr)
Each week, I compose a newsletter for our team that includes a series of links about current events and trends in the worlds of technology, social media, mobile, communications and marketing in order to keep our wider team up to date on changes, newsworthy items and content that might be useful in their jobs. These are those links.
If you have additional links, sources or ideas that might be helpful, I'd encourage you to add some via a comment below or tag me in Google+. And if you’re on Flipboard, you can get these links in the This Week in Social Media Magazine, which is now available on the Web.
Industry
- Digital moms are connected almost everywhere - but there's a limit to how much they want to hear from marketers, according to eMarketer's report "Mom Shoppers: Using Digital to Keep Their Heads Above Water"
- Compared to their UK counterparts, US consumers are much more likely to complain about brands on Twitter., according to a study by 360i. In addition, US Twitter users are most active after 6 pm, whilst those in the UK are highly engaged between the hours of 10 a.m. and 1 p.m.
- At a digital roundtable of 100 senior marketers the state of digital marketing in Hong Kong was discussed. Some highlights:
- Cross-channel marketing is rampant, but an attribution model has yet to emerge.
- Social media is a hot topic, from defining its role, senior management support and how to organize for success.
- Most companies focus on customer acquisition and not conversion or retention.
- Few companies are strategic about content planning and development.
- In a series about the socially-connected brand, Digiday concludes with a story on the maturation of the role of social media manager.
Platforms
- Facebook is testing a new feature that prompts users to sign up for notifications when they like a page, thus giving brands more peace of mind that their posts can be seen by more users.
- The mobile space continues to dominate: comScore indicates that time spent on Facebook's mobile platform more than doubled in Q2.
- In its second quarter earnings report, Facebook showed some impressive gains:
- A 51 percent increase in monthly active mobile users to 819 million monthly users.
- 1.15 billion monthly users as of June 30.
- A 61 percent increase in advertising revenue - 41 percent of which was from mobile advertising.
- 100 million monthly users for the Facebook standard cell phone app (non-smartphone).
- Desktop and mobile based ads in Facebook's Newsfeed perform significant better than the right-hand sidebar.
- Facebook Connect may be prevalent, but consumers still want a variety of options of social logins to your sites.
- In an effort to support its content creators, YouTube has launched an embeddable subscribe button for channels to place on web pages.
- Flipboard's user-generated magazines rolled out earlier this year on iOS and Android platforms, but are now available on the Web.
- Social sharing continues to grow and some platforms are serving specific purposes. Half of all content shared to social networks is done through Facebook, but other networks are strong as well: Pinterest for e-commerce, Twitter for consumer brand sites.
- Similarly, B2B decision makers use different social networks for different purposes.
Metrics/Measurement/Big Data
- The CIPR Social Media Panel have issued new guidance on social media monitoring.
- McKinsey & Company has released a report on Big Data, Analytics and the Future of Marketing & Sales, looking at the most meaningful content around this often-discussed topic.
Legal/Regulatory
- The Digital Advertising Alliance, representing the nation's largest media and marketing associations, announced mobile principles for behaviorally targeting advertising, the first major step in offering consumers a way to opt-out of targeted ads the same way consumers can now opt-out of online ads.
Content
- Transparency engenders trust, and McDonald's could use more trust. Their Canada operations have embarked on a bold approach, by answering questions with great candor and even producing videos bringing people behind the scenes. Reputation gains are already apparent: the "curious skeptic" audience segment showed a 21% increase in marks for "good quality ingredients," and other areas such as "being genuine," "improving nutritional content" and "food I feel good about eating" also saw increases.
- Corporate media (or brand journalism or company newsroom) is a growing trend among brands. Here, Jonathan Wickmann, Maersk's head of social media takes a look at what it takes to pull it off successfully, including hiring journalists - not marketers - for the roles.
- Slate and GE Capital partnered for a branded content effort that combined three topics - job creation, advanced manufacturing and competitiveness - with geographic stops across the country to look at middle market businesses that are often overlooked, but key economic drivers.
- For Immediate Release #713 (beginning at 15:48) discusses an article in The Guardian's Media Network section titled "The lessons brands can learn from today's newsrooms" in which Matt Andrews makes some crucial points about the complexity of taking on such an assignment. Some of them include:
- To a large degree, brands are still stuck in the old "newspaper" world, planning rigid campaigns many months out.
- The brand newsroom needs to be able to distribute the brand story unbundled in many formats with different perspectives personalised to particular audiences.
- The brand story is a story told by many in a myriad of ways; the marketer is only one of these many voices, but like the journalist is in a position to shape and craft the story.
- Relying on the product alone is not enough to sustain an ongoing story.
- Perhaps now, brands will directly fund quality journalism and journalists in order to provide a continuously sustained brand story.
Bookmarks/Read-Watch-Listen Later
- In this commentary piece, Seth Godin notes that more people are doing marketing badly. And it doesn't have to be that way.
- Youtility is all about providing value to customers - making your brand, your content, your services useful to them, rather than making it all about a stream of advertising and marketing.
Commentary
The excitement over real-time engagement and cutesy content based on trends seems to be waning (The Atlantic Wire: "That Was Fast: Twitter Is Over Your Real-Time Royal Baby Marketing"). Or at least patience is wearing thin. This week's #RoyalBaby birth was seized by no less than a dozen brands, who went out of their way to ensure they got to be part of the attention. The debate raged, but some decided that the efforts were downright cringeworthy.The point with so-called "real-time marketing" is not to say something clever quickly, but to find an intersection between ongoing cultural trends and your brand. The reason the Oreo Super Bowl image keeps getting hyped is because Oreo had already built up expertise in the area based on their previous summer's activities, taking place over 100 days. It takes more than a wise crack and Photoshop to do that well. As an example of a brand that did it right, Shinola responded to the Detroit bankruptcy filing with it's "we give you the birdy" ad this week.
The temptation to try to insert your brand into the trend of the moment is strong, and we've seen it play out from the Academy Awards to the royal baby craze. But these events are not about your brand. Building a newsroom and real-time marketing efforts require an understanding of journalism, marketing, analytics, research, cultural anthropology and probably a half dozen other things. It's a complex process, which is why such shortcuts are tempting. But ultimately, efforts should be tied to strategy, business goals and what outcome you're looking to achieve - always with an eye toward the value you're creating for the consumer.
Frank Eliason, SVP of social for Citi summed it up thusly: "Companies have to remember that being in social media is being part of a community, not trying to be the center of it."
Image credit: drew domkus (Flickr)