Businesses are increasingly adopting customer-focused processes to gain competitive advantage. But for building a business around customers, companies need to understand them. They need to engage in regular dialogue and conversations.
Research has shown strong evidence that Social Media Engagement correlates to Financial Performance (see report on world’s most valuable brands – Who’s most engaged?). This study emphasizes quality of customer engagement through social media by concluding:
It pays to engage meaningfully in social media. Emphasize quality, not just quantity.
Engagement is more than just setting up a blog or Facebook profile and letting viewers post comments, it’s keeping your content fresh and replying to comments; it’s building your friends network and updating your profile status.
Engagement can’t be skin-deep, nor is it a campaign that can be turned on and off. True engagement means full engagement in the channels where you choose to invest.
To scale engagement, make social media part of everyone’s job. You must do something, else risk falling far behind other brands, not only in your industry, but across your customers’ general online experience.
This clearly illustrates the importance of Social Engagement, i.e. engaging customers via Social Media for building trust and loyalty towards companies’ products, services and brand.
Businesses have to shift from marketing products to cultivating customers demands.
But many companies are still reluctant to invest in social media initiatives and programs. This has recently been confirmed by findings of a recent study conducted by Burson-Marsteller: Global Social Media Checkup.
dd
If you prefer, Flowtown has summarised their findings in this graphic.
- Share Responsibility and Construct a Common Goal
he adds:
Changing a corporate culture cannot and should not be an immediate process, and neither can it be a half-hearted one. Businesses that truly dedicate themselves to building a customer-focused culture can be stronger competitively — and provide better places to work.
We at 90:10 Group, help businesses connect with global communities to discover and engage advocates. We empower those advocates through tried and tested processes, tools and creatives. We believe that the sooner businesses adopt and start using Social Media for engaging their customers, the better for them, else performance of their business will suffer.
A common feature across the Middle East region is that young people make up a relatively high percentage of the population (in some over 50% are less than 21 years old). In most countries the “net generation”, regardless of its geographic location or cultural background, tends to be comfortable with online technologies and prefer the speed and variety of content delivered through the web and mobile channels.
Next 25th and 26th of March will be held for the first time in the region (in Beirut Lebanon), ArabNet 2010, the first international conference for the Arab web industry, bringing together leaders from across the MENA, Europe and Silicon Valley to discuss cutting-edge trends and emerging opportunities.
I’ve been invited (and am very pleased) as a guest speaker (representing 90:10 Group) at the ‘Social Media’ panel, featuring among others, Ghassan Haddad, Director of Internationalization at Facebook and Timothy Bataillie, the MENA Biz Dev Manager of Netlog, the region’s largest social network for youths (14-24). Full program here.
But where does the Internet stands today in the Arab world (source: startuparabia).
At present there are roughly around 56 million Arab internet users in the Arab world, representing only 17% of the 337 million population.
More people are getting online in the Arab world, and are relying more and more on the Internet for their news, videos, social interactions and more, but only 1% of all content online is in Arabic, not offering them much choice.
Online news consumption is gaining ground with 22% to 34% of the people using internet at least as much as print media to read news.
On average, 70% of the people in the four main Arab markets researched use social networks in some capacity and about 15% use social networking sites at least once a day.
About 6 million internet users in the Middle East – or about 12% of the total online population in the region – have access to broadband networks.
People in the Arab world are spending about three hours per day on the internet on average, which is already on par with the amount of time spent on TV.
About $56 million or 1% of the total media advertising spend is online in the Middle East.
8.3% of active Facebook users come from the Middle East & North Africa, representing a 7.9% penetration. The number of users under 25 years of age represent 60% of active Facebook users in the region. Fastest growth in user adoption in the region is in the 55+ age group.
Among the Arab countries, the top 7 countries in active Facebook user numbers are: Egypt (1,820,000), Saudi Arabia (920,000), Morocco (860,000), UAE (840,000), Tunisia (690,000), Lebanon (680,000), Jordan (490,000).
Last November in Paris, at LeWeb, Joi Ito moderated a panel on the Middle East with Rabea Ataya, Chairman & CEO of Bayt.com and Habib Haddad, Founder of Yamli. Their shared with us (video below) their view and vision of the future growth of the web in the region.
The Arab Media Outlook latest report (PDF) summarizes the region’s opportunity:
Our analysis points to significant opportunities for media companies in the region to use the power of web 2.0 to develop new revenue streams and to maximize the value of both new and existing premium content. Distribution to mobile broadband devices including mobile television will play an important part in this. Another priority area is the development of audience measurement processes for both print and broadcast media. The absence of reliable audience figures makes it difficult for advertisers to target their advertising and to assess its effectiveness, which reduces their willingness to spend.
As far as Twitter is concerned, it is difficult to have any precise figures. Last July, the region counted less than 15,000 users (source SpotOnPR). Since, the growth has been phenomenal, but still difficult to measure precisely its impact on media and brands. Hopefully, I will learn more about the region’s adoption of social media and new web 2.0 start-ups at coming Arabnet conference (24th and 25th of March in Beirut). Promise you to tweet from there and blog as I return to Paris.
There is a great opportunity for businesses to use social media to enable conversations and to create communities that extend their capabilities and engage their constituents in richer ways that results in higher retention, lower risk, increased ROI, and faster operational capacity.
Businesses entering the social media space must first figure out where their audience is (isn’t it the beginning of any type of strategy?). Working with communities of any kind, whether it’s a forum, a fan page on Facebook, or a bunch of people on Twitter discussing a particular subject every week, takes care and time. It involves developing true relationships with the audience by helping community members with information they need or solving their problems. A lot more goes into developing the type of respect, authority, and relationships in communities that generate successful strategies and attained goals for companies.
Chris Pirillo, last November at LeWeb, gave us his ‘original’ thoughts about the essence of ‘community’. Community …
…lives inside us. Where I go, community goes. We create it based on our preferences, like dislikes and the people we link up with.
…is becoming increasingly distributed, as we distribute our ideas and thoughts across social networks.
…requires tools that can’t be built (so don’t try), ie if its us, we can’t scale ourselves.
…is a commodity, but people aren’t. It’s easy to set up a website or blog, but the people and voices behind it are what makes it unique, special.
…cannot be controlled, but can be “guided”.
…is no longer defined by physical boundaries. You probably have more in common with a geek living on another continent than your next door neighbor.
…grows its own leaders. the best leaders come organically out of a community, and is not an appointed one. It’s crucial that communities grow it’s own leaders for credibility and respect reasons.
…is the antithesis of ego. Community is myself and everyone else, not just me or my Twitter stream.
… is everywhere, inside you. It’s what you share, your passions — and it’s this that will spell success.
If there is one company who recognizes the vital importance of communities is Coca-Cola, who has developed an Online Social Media Principles and has put its fans (consumers) at the heart of its (online) strategy. This presentation by Michael Donnelly, Group Director of Worldwide Interactive Marketing for Coca-Cola, is a great example of how companies should embrace social media and build social communities.
Since last quarter of 2009, we’ve seen companies like FourSquare and Gowalla – companies allowing customers to check into physical locations and earn badges or points, discounts and share/show nearby contacts where they are – gaining heavy traction (more than 1 million FourSquare checkin per week).
So why many thinks that 2010 will be dominated by one theme: location-based social networking companies.
Reasons to Leverage Location
Immediacy. Location inherently breeds immediacy and action. If a consumer is at a location, close to a location, or close to a contact, they’re more likely to purchase (if they’re there), travel to purchase (if they’re close), or meet up to share (close to a contact). Immediacy enables actionable behavior, and actionable behavior is valuable because it provides measureable results.
Measurable results. Using location and proximity to measure effects is easier than measuring what happens when eyeballs read a tweet. Retailers can use the location-based technologies to further understand their consumers. When consumers check into a location, data such as when consumers visit, how often they visit, and their behavior before and after they visit becomes valuable. With added incentives from brick and mortar stores partnering with these technologies, it is valuable through the information they can receive.
Laser pointer theory. Think of the world as your company’s target – with no map, you’ll fire all over the globe and hit a fraction of your targets. This happens in business too- intentional or unintentional displaced messaging is the result of mis-firing and ill-placement. With location, companies can laser pinpoint and succeed. Misguided marketing and advertising no longer need to be the standard. Marketing and advertising are sometimes described as an art. In 2010, they become a science.
The second is an extraordinary potential to redraw the WHOLE map niche by niche (by each niche and for each niche) wresting control from the centre to the edge. It’s our world, we should map it.
So how Foursquare can help consumers and businesses (by @christuff):
I’m still amazed to see that social media still can’t get enough respect in the workplace… and still many multinationals don’t get it.
They always invoke the same reasons:
- security
- performance & ROI
- not a priority
- for young consumers
- for B2C, we are in B2B.
While it’s certain that most companies’ executives I’ve met think they should do something about it…most, don’t have enough arguments to push it internally and make it happen. Here are some:
Computing security, too, is changing. IT security staff should think carefully before exercising a reflex to prevent employees from communicating with Facebook’s e-mail or Skype’s Internet telephony.
You cannot protect yourself from everything. You must learn to balance risk and performance. The cloud and software as a service have appeal, but they introduce a huge shift in how technology is managed and controlled. Software for intrusion detection, antivirus, and firewall protection is still essential, but there are limits to what’s practical.
China’s incoming firewall revealed that while it’s possible to block some incoming information, it’s not practical to block the widespread outbound flow of information.
Don’t try to shut down the two-way flow of information, because you can’t stop it. Transparency is in.
What I generally recommend is for companies to educate users on the risks and responsibilities of online reputation management and to tell employees that corporate conduct rules apply online, too!
The following presentation about ‘The Future of Work’ is interesting, as gives us some insight about how some foresee work in few years from now.
Businesses are increasingly using social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter for marketing purposes, but those same companies don’t want employees logging on during work hours. For a majority of companies still, an employee wasting time on social media is a performance problem.
Productive employees are too busy with their work to spend lots of time in social media having personal conversations. Instead, they use social media as a mean to get their work done. This is true in any sector of the company, being marketing, PR, HR, R&D, NPD or CRM. Although social media channels seem to be mostly qualitative in nature, employee and users activities can be easily quantified.
In fact, business has not changed. Social Media has just shifted the way business is done. Hard and Soft Metrics still apply. Hard metrics for the financial impact: Cost Reduction and Revenue Generation. Soft metrics, the transactional precursors: Brand & Product Mentions, View & Click throughs and Traffic Impressions.
NOT A PRIORITY
While I might possibly agree that for small companies, with very local business, social media is not their immediate priority, it cannot be the case for companies with consumers spread across markets in one or several continents.
FOR YOUNG CONSUMERS
Let’s take a look at some of the numbers behind the top social networks in order to get a clearer picture of network engagement and user demographics. As Brian Solis had added:
Remember, it’s how you interpret these numbers combined with an understanding of the real world needs and experiences of the people you’re attempting to engage that determines the success or failure of your social media program.
Those numbers clearly show that the 25 – 54 age range represent an average of 42% of total social networks users.
Having said that, what really matters is that with social media, people of all ages are more than ever ‘connected’. They search, discover, comment, dialog, discuss, blog, create, and share all these on social media. At 90:10 Group, which I head for France and Italy, we say ‘a business that operates without a comment box, operates broken’. So get ready.
For B2C, we are in B2B
Traditional B2B marketers resist social media because it doesn’t work when they use it as another outbound marketing channel. They will often say: “We’re a B2B operation! We don’t have social-savvy customers like B2C companies.”
Instead of thinking B2B vs B2C, just think “human” said Chris Brogan.
To conclude, I recommend business to start looking ahead and transform their enterprise into an ‘Enterprise 2.0‘, for efficient collaboration and knowledge exchange, even if this mean ‘chaos’ for most managers. Enterprise 2.0 changes the traditional structured information flow and order. Information flows laterally as well as up and down, cutting the chains that hold back collaboration in a traditional office environment. But when done right, this chaos boosts overall productivity.
In my previous post ‘Media Social = Etoile de Mer‘ (in French), I mentioned the example of Red Hat a company that has managed to succeed while participating in and contributing to internal and external communities through social networks. This open source model has thus demonstrated that it is entirely possible to design, develop and deliver successful products by using communities.
More and more brands are using the Internet crowd (some calling them tribes and other communities). But still several companies are asking why?
Well, mainly for two reasons:
the 1st reason:
European consumers can be influenced. In Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, they cheerfully admitted to the agency Weber Shandwick, who wanted to know which channels play a role in purchasing decisions consumers.
Internet plays an important role through consumers’ reviews for 26% of respondents. (23% in France)
Friends and family coming second with an average of 20% of respondents who indicated that advice from this close circle played a major role in their choices. (The Germans have a greater propensity for this channel recommendation with 22% of average. Contradicting, we find the Spaniards to 17%).
Last “human” intermediary, the salesperson meets 13% of the vote.
The more traditional channels of communication shared the lowest scores: 12% for newspapers, 11% for brand sites, 9% for audiovisual media and advertising.
(an extract from the post ‘Europeans prefer the opinion of others to advertising‘ (in French) published on Le Figaro’s blog).
the 2nd reason:
Consumers do not want anymore to be only at the receiver side … they want to participate and contribute to the development of products and services they buy, they consume. They don’t want anymore to be considered as a ‘homogeneous crowd’.
Marketing 2.0 signaled the end where brands’ marketing considered consumers as a single homogeneous mass. Marketing has evolved to take into account the peculiarities of each with the appearance several years ago of affinity marketing. But with the evolution of social media, it is especially crowdsourcing that knows a boom lately.
Crowdsourcing (or collaborative marketing) is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call. This could include asking consumers to vote for a new flavor of food for a new product color or a slogan, a logo or a name of a new product.
The example of Vitamin Water (Coca Cola), which arrived in France a few months ago, is unprecedented. Instead of buying pages in the press and to be promoted in supermarkets, the new drink has used influence and word of mouth for its launch and become a fashionable drink. Some might be skeptical … but when you look closer at their US sales figures of over 650 million euros, you bow (as we say in French).
Vitamin Water has recently crowdsourced the name for its new product, with a 3,500 euros for the winner. The vote for the ‘best name’ has been submitted to Vitamin Water’s over 1 million fans on Facebook. Result: the name to be selected was ‘CONNECT’. Vitamin Water has even pushed its marketing further with the integration of the Facebook logo on its new product packaging to encourage more consumers to become a fan of the brand. This mention ‘Made by fans for fans on Facebook’ has as well been added. Wow!
Several other initiatives of the kind have seen the light in France during 2009.
Danone for example, has organized a big vote on the internet asking users to select the new Danette fragrance.
On ImagineTGV, customers’ contributions are made via their web site. The adoption of Wi-Fi in the TGV has emerged through this process.
Another company to encourage crowdsourcing via its online video platform is EYEKA. Through calls for creation, relayed to a community of over 30,000 Internet users, EYEKA allows brands to solicit quality contributions from the crowd, in a controlled and clear legal framework. The best creators are rewarded by the brands.
Lately, Honda Auto France has chosen EYEKA for its ‘hybrid for all’ project (‘hybride pour tous’). They are interested to have and share the vision that Internet users have for the ‘hybrid’ in general, without limiting the crowd to the automotive environment. I’ve selected two creations I’ve liked:
Question. Will marketing become as well ‘hybrid’? …where consumers not only participate and contribute to brands’ projects, but also invest financially in it? … as already the case in the movie industry. The new released movie Le Siffleur (The Whistler) by Philippe Lefebvre with Thierry Lhermitte and François Berléand is an example, where 372 members via the social platform PeopleForCinema, were involved in the film and invested each between 20 and 5,000 €. Verdict in a few days, when the 1st week box office figures are released.
A mix of researchers, planners, brand strategists and social media experts based in London, think that a hybrid model for open innovation can exist.
“At least one of the dominant tools for social networking will wind down and decline and people will leave it nearly as quickly as they joined it. I have no idea which one it will be, but not even Facebook or Twitter is immune from the possibility. The viral effect works in both directions.” — Jim McCarthy, Goldstar
“Many social network sites starting to charge for memberships for more quality control due to the amount of spam we saw in 2009.” – Mirna Bard, NuReach Global
“Location-based social media applications like Foursquare, Gowalla and Brightkite. Social media moving to the next level of interaction.” – Charles Harris, Coast2Coast Expert.
“Integration between platforms. Things like ping.fm, Google Wave and other utilities out there centralizing the interface and use between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Plaxo and all the others.” – Chip Ahlswede, RegalStrategies.com
“Mainstream media will actually change their 20th century business models to meet 21s century needs. Otherwise, they are toast.” – Ron Ploof, ronamok.com
“Measuring the return on investment on social media efforts will become the norm in 2010. This will mean some companies will not be able to justify their current efforts. – Jim Marks, Virtual Results
“People using social media for civic engagement with those public agencies using social media and to encourage governments that haven’t adopted social media to use these tools to have meaningful dialogue with their constituents.” – Ted Nguyen, Orange County Transportation Authority
“Growing number of things which aren’t strictly people on your buddy lists. Suddenly I think we will see people friending their laundromat to see when machines are available, the roads they use to watch traffic, and groups of their friends at once. The latter will be interesting because you will only see updates when all of your friends agree.” – Don Patterson, quub.com
“A plateau of people flocking to Twitter. This year it was the new shiny toy on the street, but soon the Twitterverse will become saturated with push marketers, spammers, and in-genuine marketing campaigns.” – Justin Moore-Brown, Mobo Media
Social video. “We may start to explore social video, not only user-generated but also brand-generated.” – Tracy Marks, Souplantation
“Google and Facebook will do something major to completely change the game, and take over the world.” – Rochelle Veturis, LPA architects
“I think that pitching stories to the media via social networks, or the media picking up stories they heard about via social media, could be the next big thing.” – Jen Dwyer, thecutekid.com
I think that next year will see the continued convergence of technologies and channels, particularly TV, mobile, search & social. The real-time search movement will continue in some way, shape or form, though the engines still need to perfect ranking & filtering.
The continued rise of mobile web, pulling in GPS & augmented reality, means that people will expect geo-results. And as TV gets webbed up (Yahoo TV Widgets etc…) people searching and chatting on and around shows will become a new way of reaching people, or at least learning about what they want.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I think 2010 will see the beginnings of a backlash against Google. There have been murmurings for some time among the tech community about their all-pervading presence, ambition to gather everyone’s data for their own marketing purposes and effective monopoly.
It wouldn’t surprise me to see them take a step too far and face political push-back over their expansion into the desktop and mobile phone markets. If they use market power in one arena to manipulate another, that’s classic monopolistic behaviour. Personally, I’d love to see Bing gain some market share. I think a strong competitor would ultimately benefit everyone.
We’ll see continued improvements in visual search. Google Goggles is one example but we’ll also see mobile applications that affect an augmented reality that combine search and location-aware search. These will let searchers show the engines what they want help with and get back results.
Privacy will also be a hot issue in 2010. Targeting becomes ever more important to companies and yet the ability not to be targeted becomes ever more important to people. It seems impossible that we’ll avoid tension on this front.
Of particular interest will be looking beyond the last click. DoubleClick offers Click Path Analysis. Atlas offers User Engagement Mapping. There will be other offerings from alternative technology providers who wish to remain competitive against these search engine owned offerings. 2010 will see sites wrestle with tagging and tracking but invest in the required technology in 2010 with the ambition of not having to return to this fight for a while.
As real-time search helps surface social media sites in the blink of an eye the aspects of ‘search’, ‘marketing’, ‘public relations’ and even ‘customer care’ will all get drawn together. We’ll see different types of agencies pitching against one another for the first time. We’ll see corporate departments defending their turf and fighting for budget against their colleagues across the hall.
Google page speed is going to have an influence over organic rankings in 2010 and is likely to have a strong impact on designers/developers as well as SEO’s. At the moment there are unanswered questions, such as how heavily will slow sites be penalised? Will fast sites be boosted in the search engines? So it will be interesting to see the impact this has.
Now that the Microsoft/Yahoo deal is now all tied-up, advertisers will need to start thinking seriously about Bing’s more sizeable market share and start to prepare for when this is integrated with Yahoo search.
Google Wave has been slowly rolled out to users so far during 2009, this has a lot of potential, which is unlikely to be truly realised until it reaches a greater audience. There’s a lot of uncertainly about how popular Google Wave will become at the moment, so it will be very interesting to see if this can really take off in 2010. I’m sure they’ll be new social media sites coming onto the scene too, along with developments to many of the current top social media sites; Twitter business accounts, for example, will be a good one to look out for.
Rumoured for a while, and discovered live on the web by a clever person over at Gizmodo, there is a new Google Interface on the way for 2010. Being referred to as the three panel layout this change will mean it will become increasing important to rank highly in Image, Video and other search results as Google gives more prominence to these sections within its interface.
Real Time search has huge implications in terms of brand protection, what results people will click, as well as creating new opportunities to rank. Google also announced earlier this month that everyone’s search results are now being personalised (to an extent) based on your previous search behaviour, regardless of whether you’re logged in or not. Are the days of the ranking report now truly numbered?
We’re in a new age of realtime information. Earthquakes, the San Diego fires, the shootings in Mumbai, the situation in Iran, and even Michael Jackson’s death. The realtime web beat the mainstream media easily to each of these stories.
But, will this disparity increase going forward?
In 2008, the terrorist attacks in Mumbai were communicated more quickly on Social Media sites than on the TV screen.
Few weeks ago, it took CNN 45 minutes to give to its viewers the same level of information about the car crash of the famous golf player.
30 years ago, our only source of information was TV, newspapers and magazines, all controlled by big organizations and governments. In the 90s, Internet arrived enabling faster flow of information. But the real revolution came from social media ‘blogs‘. Information wasn’t controlled any more by big organizations. Everyone could start a blog and share his opinion about anything, with others having the power to comment, to talk back.
But, the question that most people ask themselves: Why this global Social Media phenomenon will be (is) changing our world, although there are cultural differences around the globe?
Clay Shirky explains it well in this video: “How social media can make history” at Ted.com (it’s 17 minutes).
MG Siegler goes even further, asserting that the Internet and Twitter are better news and information delivery channels than traditional TV, radio and print – and will ultimately lead to their demise (This is Why the Internet (and Twitter) Wins):
Of course, there is something to be said for these outlets independently verifying the news, but the the fact of the matter is that there was a report out there, filed by the police department and BNOnews was able to get it and send it out via Twitter much, much faster than any traditional news source.
Information wants to be free, and the web, with services like Twitter, provides the easiest way for that to happen.
What about ethics and accuracy? When talking about social media, people always question the validity of information.
In their recent study, ‘An Analysis of the Increasing Impact of Social and Other New Media on Public Relations Practice’, Donald Wright and Michelle Hinson from the Institute for Public Relations got the following responses to the question:
“Do you agree or disagree that social media (including blogs) . . .”
Social Media and Traditional Media seem not to be in conflict with each other. For Clay Shirky, accountability seems to be the urgent point.
Last month, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, have been picking on Google for destroying their business, blaming the Google for giving away their content for free and stealing their ad revenue. Eric Schmidt has responded with a column in The Wall Street Journal, saying:
Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue – for free. In terms of copyright, another bone of contention, we only show a headline and a couple of lines from each story. If readers want to read on they have to click through to the newspaper’s Web site. (The exception are stories we host through a licensing agreement with news services.) And if they wish, publishers can remove their content from our search index, or from Google News.
The potential of social media (such as Twitter) is transforming the way we communicate in our respective countries. Information are exchanged within seconds. But I don’t think it will replace YET traditional media, because important vs popular news will only be considered credible once traditional media have confirmed it (and indeed, Google and Twitter could help to drive readers hungry for information to news sites).
Predictions for 2010?
FOLIO: has reached out to a wide selection of magazine/media industry professionals—publishers, editors, chief executives, dealmakers, bloggers—to channel their inner Nostradamus and work up some predictions. I’ve selected two. One from Bob Cohn, editorial director, theAtlantic.com and the other from Amanda Ernst from FBNY.
Amanda Ernest, from FBNY writes:
Media companies will also be looking to partner up in order to pool resources and keep costs low. Non-profit journalism organizations and Web sites that rely on citizen journalism are a good place for traditional media to look for partners.
Bob Cohn, editorial director, theAtlantic.com, writes:
Two indisputable facts: editors are constrained for resources, while the stories we’re facing-war, recession, terrorism, climate change-are not easy or cheap to cover. I predict that one way magazines will try to resolve this problem is through more frequent collaboration. Journalists have been trained to compete, not cooperate. But pooling resources, whether it’s money or reporters or technology, can make good sense for outfits that want to remain ambitious in lean times. We all still want to beat the other guy, but sometimes the best way to unpack a complex and multi-dimensional story may be to forge ties with like-minded colleagues.
More than 2,500 participants from 46 countries attended the event in Paris. More than 100,000 followed the event live from their desktop or iPhone via Ustream. All the major internet players were present on stage: Google, Microsoft, Twitter, MySpace, Orange, BT, Facebook, Ning, SixApart, Nokia, PayPal, FON, Meetic, Deezer, Zappos, Netvibes and many others.
Le Web has become a great platform and opportunity for entrepreneurs to learn about the latest web trends, to share and test their ideas/concepts and to meet the different actors of the web (i.e. bloggers, users, consultants, business angels, product specialists).
It will take me too long to write about the different subjects discussed during those 2 days, which details (videos, news, official bloggers) you can find here. I have however selected two keynote speakers (Chris Pirillo and Jeremy Owyang) which subjects I think are very relevant with what we (as consumers and businesses) have been experiencing lately in our every days’ life: real time is becoming predominant and online communities are growing faster than ever.
Chris Pirillo gave us his ‘original’ thoughts about the essence of ‘community’. Community …
…lives inside us. Where I go, community goes. We create it based on our preferences, like dislikes and the people we link up with.
…is becoming increasingly distributed, as we distribute our ideas and thoughts across social networks.
…requires tools that can’t be built (so don’t try), ie if its us, we can’t scale ourselves.
…is a commodity, but people aren’t. It’s easy to set up a website or blog, but the people and voices behind it are what makes it unique, special.
…cannot be controlled, but can be “guided”.
…is no longer defined by physical boundaries. You probably have more in common with a geek living on another continent than your next door neighbor.
…grows its own leaders. the best leaders come organically out of a community, and is not an appointed one. It’s crucial that communities grow it’s own leaders for credibility and respect reasons.
…is the antithesis of ego. Community is myself and everyone else, not just me or my Twitter stream.
… is everywhere, inside you. It’s what you share, your passions — and it’s this that will spell success.
But what I see often as well nowadays is this confusion between the concept of social media and the concept of community. They are often used interchangeably and they are not the same thing. Social media helps foster communities (examples of online communities in the TV industry, healthcare, financial services, travel industry).
Businesses entering the social media space must first figure out where their audience is (isn’t it the beginning of any type of strategy?). Working with communities of any kind, whether it’s a forum, a group on Facebook, or a bunch of people on Twitter discussing a particular subject every week, takes care and time. It involves developing true relationships with the audience by helping community members with information they need or solving their problems. A lot more goes into developing the type of respect, authority, and relationships in communities that generate successful strategies and attained goals for companies.
This brings new opportunities for people to get information when they need it and opportunities for the companies that want to provide contextual information. But information are now ‘real time’. Information is moving quicker than ever between members of communities. Data is exploding at a rapid pace with the influx of status features and mobile devices. Jeremiah Owyang says:
Yet, despite the opportunities, most companies are unable to keep up with the “Slow time” web as it is. In fact, those that can’t keep up risk missing opportunities, or worse –heading off detractors before they become mainstream.
To best leverage real time data, companies must adopt three strategies:
1. Start listening now, and quickly offer social personalization features
2. Develop an unpaid army of advocates who can respond when you’re not there, and
3. Start to invest in systems –like social CRM– that can support their overall strategy.
There is a great opportunity for businesses to use social media to enable conversations and to create communities that extend their capabilities and engage their constituents in richer ways that results in higher retention, lower risk, increased ROI, and faster operational capacity.
Communities have enormous strategic benefits to companies but require considerable investment (in resources, time, and tools) and are difficult to implement because they have a significant impact on business processes.
In 1895 the Lumiere brothers played one of the first videos in history. The film, lasting only 50 seconds, showed a train arriving to the train station at La Ciotat, a serene town in southern France. When the film was first publicly shown, the audience was so overwhelmed by the moving image of a life-size train advancing directly towards them that they rushed to the back of the room, trying to avoid being run over.
Nearly 115 years later, audiences respond more mildly to moving pictures; nevertheless, video has remained one of the most engaging forms of media. Video is now the fastest growing sector of internet advertising, with the Internet Advertising Bureau revealing that digital video generated $477 million in the first half of 2009 – a 38% increase year-on-year. Few years ago, Jim Stengel, ex-CMO of P&G said:
In 1965, 80% of 18-49 year-olds in the US could be reached with three 60-second TV spots. In 2002, it required 117 prime-time commercials to do the same.
With the dominant $5 billion online advertising market of search expected to grow only marginally, advertisers are looking to video as the major growth sector for the next five years.
Charles Tillinghast, the president of MSNBC.com, a joint venture between NBC Universal and Microsoft said
The Web is fulfilling this promise of being a medium where you can enjoy video as much as you can see it on TV. The difference online is, if you want to do something with it — share it, stick it on a blog, post it on a Facebook page, or mark it and save it — you can do all that. And that was never possible before.
Online video advertising spending in the US is projected to grow from $1.1 billion in 2009 to $4.1 billion in 2013 – quadrupling in four years. But digital media buyers may want to think twice about where they place online video ads. While Nielsen Online recently released data showing that time spent watching videos on social networks has risen almost 100% in the year to October, 2009, according to a wide-ranging report produced by third-party ad server Eyeblaster – which examined data from thousands of campaigns it executed for brands over the past year – has shown that social environments aren’t necessarily the best for video advertising.
Key highlights from the video report include:
In-Stream video ads have the highest proportion of ads fully played compared to any other format.
Creative decisions play a significant role in ad performance: Rollover user-initiated video performs best followed by auto-initiated video; click user-initiated performs worst.
Weekdays from 9 am to 5 pm is users’ preferred time to watch In-Banner and Floating video ads.
Relatively few users un-mute video ads; auto-initiated video has the highest un-mute rate.
An increase of video length by five seconds reduces Video Fully Played rate by 2.8%, on average.
Dwell Rate, which measures the proportion of ad impressions resulting in users engaging with an ad, such as mousing over or clicking on them
Dwell Time, which measures the amount of time users spend engaged with a particular ad.
They found that overall, online video boosts both Dwell Rate and Dwell Time when compared to other forms of online advertising. However, online video tends to perform better when adjacent to content or email than in social media and gaming environments—both areas of high interest to advertisers.
Ariel Geifman, research analyst at Eyeblaster, said the company was somewhat surprised by their findings.
What we found is that people browse social networks really quickly. People spend a lot of time in social networks, but it’s not on the same Web page. People don’t browse as they do in news and finance, where they read an article and have more time to look at an ad.
Users may log in and out multiple times per day, or browse between pages more quickly. As a result, the performance of video ads in these environments is inferior as compared to other environments.
But given the popularity of websites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and Linkedin, many large and small business owners are exploring the various options for advertising on social networking sites. While social media presents an opportunity for ads, it’s been difficult to measure ad effectiveness when the social media audience is so fragmented. It may not be as effective as hoped. Social media Marketing (vs. Advertising) seems to have more success within all size and type of companies, whereas the main difference between social network advertising and social network marketing is their ability to interact and engage with, and receive feedback from potential and devoted clients.
So should brands pull their online video ad dollars from social environments and stick to content? No, says Geifman. Rather, they need to consider users’ attitudes and behavior when running video ads in different environments, and adjust accordingly — ideally with custom ads. “Video is still a very much emerging medium,” said Geifman. “It is changing as we speak. This is a picture of video right now. People will find ways of engaging people in different environments . . . they need to make adjustments.”
The jury is still out as to which is the more effective method. Only time will tell.
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