The whole point of social media is to understand what the customer is saying about brands and life in general. Try to stifle the dialogue and your brand will be the lesser for it.

Embracing anarchy

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google said “The internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had”. It is precisely this great experiment in democracy that is so invaluable.

No longer do marketing executives need to indulge in expensive and often fatally flawed focus groups to get insights into what people are thinking, feeling and how they are behaving. They just need to click onto the social media sites and forums and read. This is not fool’s gold. This is the real deal unencumbered by intermediaries with an agenda.

The power of word of mouth

Customers’ word of mouth has always played an important part in the development or decline of a brand. Hoteliers for one have discovered the power of customer advocacy through websites such as Trip Advisor which has en-powered customer opinion.

Fiat engaged customers through the web to help design the Cinquecento, and Comcast to improve their service. If you have a cable problem in the US, Comcast use Twitter to ask customers “Can I help”. When customers respond, Comcast send out their Field Support Teams to solve the problem.

Through this process of finding customers to help, Comcast develops a reputation for pro-activity in customer support, reinforced through relevant and timely interaction with customers in need. This experience produces a word of mouth endorsement that is another powerful dimension of social media.

Word of mouth sells

Indeed the experiential, word of mouth, advocacy is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions according to McKinsey: “Its influence is greatest when consumers are buying a product for the first time or when products are relatively expensive, factors that tend to make people conduct more research, seek more opinions and deliberate longer than they otherwise would.

And its influence will probably grow: the digital revolution has amplified and accelerated its reach to the point where word of mouth is no longer an act of intimate, one-on-one communication. Today, it also operates on a one-to-many basis: product reviews are posted online and opinions disseminated through social networks. Some customers even create Web sites or blogs to praise or punish brands.”

Adjusting to a new paradigm

Marketing professionals need to adjust to this new customer democracy. It will take the savvy marketer on a wild and exciting journey that is more far complex than conventional channels of communication where dialogue was absent or paid lip service to. It is a journey where the marketer can win friends and just as easily lose friends. In many cases the marketing effort must change: from less focus on brand advertising at the initial consideration phase to developing internet properties that help customers gain a better understanding of the brand when they actively evaluate it.

This may mean that a process change is necessary from pushing a brand message onto customers, to providing information, support, and experience of the brand (even if just a virtual one) that engages the customer in a dialogue so that they can make their decisions based upon their authentic experience or that of others.

This is the power of social media’s free speech and experience exchange. Embrace it and learn to let its freedom to express an opinion help to sustain and develop your brand.

Garry Titterton , Intelligent Positioning, April 2010

These marketers defined it as “ …seeking to influence social behaviours not to benefit the marketer but to benefit the target audience and the general society.” It in short, created a dialogue between consumers and the brand and leveraging the value that was created in that process.

Social media is primarily Internet based: whilst your website provides company and product information and Internet tools such as search, pay-per-click, and webinars enable customers to reach further, social media is all about leveraging the connecting of people through dialogue and the formation of networks.

Social media is one part of the marketers’ multi-channel marketing tool kit. Its importance is in its ability to get under the skin of the consumer and gain invaluable insights into attitudes and behaviour of the consumer.

Social media sites represent a major entry into the internet. As current data from Alexa demonstrates, users spend more time on social networks in an average day than do most major portals like Google and Yahoo (as we point out here in Where do we spend most our time online).

So how do we measure social media?

We are in an age of metrics. There is a constant pressure to measure the effects of every activity and to refine and reassess every aspect of the marketing budget. Marketers are asked to be effective (do the right thing) and be efficient (do the thing right).

So we use return on investment (ROI) as a measurement of output (return) from input (investment).

One of the dangers of measuring everything that is done within the marketing context, is moving to the default tactic of using communication tools that are more easily and accurately measurable. The problem with this is that the most effective channels of communication are not always easily measurable. This is especially true in social media marketing where qualitative measurement is needed rather than quantitative.

Marketing Sherpas carried out a Social Media Marketing and PR Benchmark Study in 2008. (See the chart below).

How accurately can you gauge the ROI of Social Media tactics?

What this study demonstrates is that the respondents feel that advertising on blogs or social networks are the most easily and accurately measured. The cost of “advertising on blogs or social networks” is usually based on pay-per-click and conversion metrics, so advertisers are more motivated to use these tools and are more easily able to measure these tactics.

Near the bottom of the chart is “blogging on a company blog.” With this there are fewer direct costs other than staff time. This means that there is little inclination to measure the return on investment.

However, there can be considerable return if you measure this on a qualitative basis. Here we need to measure the quality of the comments on the blog rather than the quantity. You can have many comments but if the majority are negative then I would suggest that this particular metric is unhelpful. It underpins the need for quality measurement to be able to gain a deeper and richer insight and to see if the blog is, in Kotler and Zaltman’s metric, “ …seeking to influence social behaviours not to benefit the marketer but to benefit the target audience and the general society.” Quite simply, if a blog is seen to be placing a blatant brand message it has a far lesser impact than if it is seen as authentic, balanced and objective. The latter is far more effective for brand development.

The ability to measure qualitative values in these blog interactions is more challenging but not overtly difficult. If we don’t include qualitative factors in the measurement of effectiveness and efficiency, then we will find ourselves utilising marketing tools that are more easily measured, rather than those that more fully meet the brand’s development objectives.

So, even if social media is producing a good return in terms of a quantitative metric, if it isn’t increasing the business outcome it will be necessary to review the content of your social media programme and investigate and refine how you are measuring its contribution to your business objectives.

To Find out more about Social Media and how you can get a decent return on your investment give IP-SEO a call.

Contributor – Garry Titterton, CEO IP-SEO and Author of Brand Storming.

More popular than a cool pint of shandy on a bank holiday Monday, Twitter was positioned by many as the best thing that had ever happened to the Internet. There is no denying the fact that it is popular, very popular, with around 1 million user in mid-February.

We Love Twitter…

Everyone was using it and every single article and TV show seemed to be mentioning it. There was Barack Obama famously using it to win the US presidential election. The cleverest man in the UK, Stephen Fry was telling his 100,000s of followers about his travels, oh how we laughed. And then there was Oprah. Infact the “Oprah effect” on Twitter, as TechCrunch suggested, encouraged more than one million people to sign, and Hitwise said it led to a 43% spike in Twitter traffic. Plus many many more celebs (Shaq, Wolverine, Russel Brand, Jonathan Ross and my favourite Jeremy Paxman, got involved).

We Hate Twitter…

Now just a few months later, we have a bit of a morning after feeling and embarrassing hangover. President Obama didn’t write anything for weeks after he won, this great marketing machine seemed to stop once people had spent their vote. The Oprah effect too may have brought people online, with a massive 850,000 followers Oprah has managed just 29 updates after she first posted – The chat show hostess is now reportedly bored of Twitter.

Twitter is Boring – The Facts

These hard-hitting celebs are not the only ones who think Twitter is a bit like Ricky Martin. Apparently most people see it as a short-lived craze, enticing and the centre to everyone’s conversation at first, then a bit of a one-trick pony later. Twitter’s traffic is not as good as first thought, numbers are high but people are not getting into it. Apparently a Nielsen study has shown that 60% of Twitterers don’t return after the first month of joining.

Apparently at this current rate, Nielsen say that Twitter will only reach about 10% of online customers. – Something that probably needs to be told to the plethora of salesmen frequenting the said website.

Twitter still very popular and lots of traffic

Twitter may be like a large room of lots of people shouting and not a huge amount listening, but whatever we think, there is still many people turning up to have a yell. But if Twitter traffic is slipping we shouldn’t blame Twitter for the tedium, we should blame the content providers – us.

Twitter Usage

If you haven’t a Twitter you’re so 2007! Everyone has one nowadays including me – Andy Francos (hello!). So what can you do? You can type in a maximum message of 140 characters explaining what you’re up to. In terms of functionality – that’s about it! However, there is plenty more things Twitter can offer you, which we will touch on in a bit. But for now here is my message for you guys – which is known as a Tweet:

So all of my many followers (sure) will be able to read what I am up to and tweet back with comments of their own. Or Twitterers scouring the ‘Public Timeline’ – might even consider following you:

Everyone that is anyone has a Twitter account – check out the BBC, SkySports and FourFourTwo – who don’t even have to update their feeds regularly! An RSS feed can be setup so that news items appear as a Tweet – meaning that followers can keep up to date with the latest news and views of that organisation – brilliant!

Celebrity Twitters

Other than climbing a tree across the road with a pair of binoculars and a box of doughnuts – you don’t get to find out what your favourite celebrities are upto on a daily basis. You could have found out what Barack Obama, Larry David,Stephen Fry, Britney Spears and Lance Armstrong are up to! – Like I said, anybody that is anybody is on the sensation that is Twitter!

Help Engine

This is where it gets very interesting as Twitter is now defining a new way in which we search for information. Of course Google is the king of information, hence the enormous market share the big G has in the UK – but we are now seeing the creation of help engines – namely the big T.

Using this article as an example – I made a Tweet about famous people on Twitter:

Rather than going to a search engine and looking for the information, I asked my beloved followers if they new the answer to my question. Low and behold – I received a tweet back from HighRankings adviser and fellow SEO – Jill Whalen:

So in less than three minutes I’d received a great response to my query! Brilliant! You can also even search for Twitterers who include your keyword within their Tweets:

So as you can see, Twitter usage is endless and there are so many things you do to appeal to your audience. Whether it be getting news items across, updating clients on specific information or generally using it for social networking with your friends – Twitter is here and it looks like staying for a while.

Facebook’s UK audience grew by over 100% during the past 12 months to total 17.6m unique users. This figure concretes the lead over Myspace and Bebo which grew by just 7% and 6% respectively last year.


MySpace UK’s audience now exceeds 5.4m, ahead of youth-focused network Bebo which has 4.3m unique UK users in January, less than a quarter of the premier netowrking site Facebook.


But these dominant figures don’t just stop at vistors or click throughs to the site. The chasm forming between Facebook and its rivals was also seen in the time users spent on each of the social network sites, perhaps more of a real reflection on the quality and usabilty of the experience. Facebook users averaged almost 6 hours a month – i repeat – AVERAGE – a 128% increase on last year, but MySpace dropped nearly 50% with users averaging 47 minutes on the site, pretty good if you take away their much more omnipresent competitor, but dwarfed nonetheless. This figure however is down from one and a half hours the previous year, a high that is still a third of Facebook’s omnipitent position.


Bebo user behaviour remained stable, however, and its members averaging one and a half hours on the site in January 2008 and 2009.


Nielsen Online the stats and web user analysts quite obviously pointed out that Facebook’s online dominance was looking good……


“The growth in time users are spending on the site is particularly impressive considering that it might get huge numbers of people coming to the site to see what all the fuss is about but then finding it’s not for them,” he said. “MySpace is struggling as its audience has plateaued in the last couple of years and has been more of a casualty of Facebook than Bebo.


“Facebook has the audience and users, but conventional wisdom is that MySpace generates more ad revenue. If Facebook gets its demographic targeting right, the potential is enormous,” Burmaster added.


To comment, yes maybe Myspace may have more Ad revenue, but who cares? Facebook have many many more users and five times more stickability – I’d rather have more attention and better quality service than a short term ad capaign, read into that what you like. If Facebook’s whole lifeplan was to make money from ads then it will almost certianly kill the golden goose – so well done Mark for holding off on that.


It seems to me that Myspace has gone down in the recent past because it has suddenly become an advertising revenue source. However, when i first read these figures, i felt for Facebook – like with Google, Apple and Yahoo before them, when a fad becomes mainstream, and then behemoth, it loses its charm, and therefore its appeal, then the corps get involved, then the hackers kick in. Will Facebook go the same way as Myspace and MSN? Who knows, but Twitter you should watch with anticipation.


Author Sam

Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of the ever popular social networking site “Facebook”, said today that the site will be returning to its original ‘terms of service agreement’ with regards to stored user data. This change of the site’s ‘terms of service’ agreement hasn’t even been made apparent to the majority of users until now. If you have a Facebook account, you should see that Mark Zuckerberg has personally posted a site wide bulletin stating that all will return to normal.

Not much had changed in regards to the written language of the document, however, it was re-worded in the manner to which seemed to suggest that Facebook would own the rights to any personal information ever exchanged between their servers, even if the user chose to delete there account. This in effect means that Facebook would have the ownership rights of any picture, video, personal comment, message, birthdate and contact information ever made/accquired. In Mr Zuckerberg’s defense, he said “it was to better reflect how people used the site” and that should someone delete “his or her account, any comments or messages he or she had left on a friend’s Facebook page would not also disappear”.

In Mr Zuckerberg’s most recent blog entry, he said: “the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.”

Mr Zuckerberg also said that “Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand.”

Author Paul