economics of social media


Social media in numbers too big to ignore

Jul 17th

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I recently read a post summarizing a few eye-popping social media trending stats that just demand attention. If the “powers that be” in your company think social media marketing is a fad and a waste of time, dangle a few of these gems in front of them …
5.0 billion … Minutes spent on Facebook every DAY
3.6 billion … Photos uploaded to Flickr as of June, 2009
100 million … YouTube videos viewed per DAY
13 million … Articles on Wikipedia
6.5 million … Dollars contributed to Obama campaign by online donors
3 million … Tweets per day on Twitter
1382% … Month-over-month growth rate of Twitter Jan-Feb 2009
93% …. Of social media users believe every company should have a social media presence
20 … Hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every MINUTE
Your customers are there. Your competitors are there. Get in the game.
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Two approaches to attain large, engaged Twitter groups

Jul 16th

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This week I’ve been featuring the insights of Dr. Ben Hanna and the provocative findings of the social media strategy he is revealing month by month on his B2BOnlineMarketing blog. He just released information from his fourth month of experience. Some highlights:
What is the fastest route to a large, engaged group of Twitter followers? To research this, his team followed experienced B2B Twitter accounts with 5,000+ followers and started watching for patterns. There were two starkly different groups, and strategies, in terms of Twitter follower-friend ratio.
The Interpersonal Approach — equal ratio of followers-to-friends
“The follower-friend ratio caught my eye,” he said, “because there are two very different, and often conflicting, perspectives on the right way to engage in social media. The first is a view of social media as an interpersonal medium governed by interpersonal rules. For example, if someone wants to be your friend, the polite thing is to shake hands, say “hi”, and try to be friends – most people would consider it just plain rude to walk away. Those pro business tweeters with a follower-friend ratio around 1 seem to be following this norm and with automatically following someone back. Since there’s no obvious, objective benefit to blocking a follower if you decide not to be their friend, follower and following counts grow together.”
>> Hallmarks of Interpersonal Approach: Probable use of spam-and-cull approach to building a following; wide range of people in follower base, attract followers interested in tweet content.
The Mass Communication Approach — 5x more followers than friends
“The other group with a follower-friend ratio on the 5+ range seems to be viewing social media as a mass communication medium governed by mass communication rules, and the pro business tweeters in this group are often larger companies, business media and/or experienced execs at mid- to large-sized companies. From a mass communication perspective, its perfectly acceptable and even expected for the relationship to be one-sided or interactive only on demand (such as when a customer has a question). After all, it’s utterly impossible for someone to follow 5,000+ other Twitter users, let alone 500, and pay attention to all their tweets. If you think reading and processing 100 emails a day is a challenge, try 5,000 tweets.”
>> Hallmarks of Mass Communication Approach: Attract people interested in tweet content only since it is unlikely they will follow you back; may be big brands or long-established Twitter users; don’t tweet a lot of thoughts/observations — mostly just relevant content.
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Developing a social media strategy when the rules aren’t clear

Jul 15th

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M.C. Escher
This part 3 of my interview with B2B marketing pioneer Dr. Ben Hanna, VP of Business.com.
Part 1: Four breakthrough Twitter research insights
Part 2: Essential B2B social media start-up strategies

You’ve decided to lay bare the evolution of your social media campaign — warts and all. It’s a fascinating read. What made you decide to expose your strategy to the world?

It was a simple decision, really. Business.com is focused on helping people find actionable solutions to business challenges, and what better way to add to the “solution set” for B2B social media than to chronicle our own challenges, insights and solutions?

We also took this approach to accelerate our learning about the value of social media for business, and for our business in particular. If we blog about the evolution of our B2B online marketing Twitter account with updates every 30 days, will we get useful feedback from other business people using social media? What does it take to get a discussion going around a topic of interest that produces real, valuable answers?

You’re a company executive but take an extremely hands-on approach to your social media initiative through blog entries, tweets and presence on SM platforms. Is this typical of your style, a new demand of social media, or something you just do for fun?

It’s a combination of the three, united by the requirements of the situation. In my experience, the fastest way to develop effective marketing strategy and tactics for a new channel where the rules are still being written (as is the case for B2B social media!) is through a combination of the following, which form a nice acronym – REAP:

Research – Collect as much of the current “best practice” info as possible and triangulate findings, in the context of your unique business and business goals, to establish an initial position on where to focus and what to do. At Business.com, we started with an overview of the current state of B2B social media.

Experience – Immerse yourself through direct experience, taking existing best practices as hypotheses to be tested rather than inviolate rules to follow. I personally took on a decent sized chunk of the work on our new blogs and Twitter accounts so that I could get a feel for the medium, test assumptions and get a jump on cross-channel strategic planning. I can’t, and won’t, be as directly involved as we transition from tests to regular programs but the early direct experience is essential.
Action – Act before you think you have all the answers. In a rapidly changing marketing channel, relying too much on the research or experience of third parties will often lead to over-analyzing and inaction. Instead of watching from the shore for the perfect opportunity, get your boat in the water so you can start actively observing, testing, learning and adapting.
Perspective – Engage multiple people in the new marketing channel and share insights to learn more quickly. Ideally, you’d like a combination of experts and novices in the new marketing channel, other marketing channels and the business. Our initial social media initiatives at Business.com involve myself, an experienced social media marketer, corporate communications expert and our editorial director (a long-time small business journalist).

Tomorrow, Part 4: Executive tips for managing the social media time commitment

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Essential B2B social media start-up strategies

Jul 14th

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This part 2 of my interview with B2B marketing pioneer Dr. Ben Hanna, VP of Business.com.
Click here for Part 1: Twitter for business: Four breakthrough insights

Ben, your company evidently took a very well-thought-out and measured approach to embarking on a social media campaign. But even the best plans usually go awry. What have been some key lessons you can pass on to somebody starting their own B2B social media initiative?

Whether we’re talking about eCommerce, online communities, display advertising, search marketing, blogging, micro-blogging, social networks or other channels, most B2B marketers shoot themselves in the foot the first time they use it for a couple related reasons.

First, they use available data to convince themselves and others that success is inevitable in order to drum up support for the campaign. Unfortunately, the base rate for success with newer media is highly distorted in B2B because it’s primarily the rare successes which make the B2B marketing headlines, not the complete failures or inconclusive results.

Second, focus on the campaign over future scalability. OK, so you put your best people together for six months and ran a successful campaign, but did you learn what you needed to get 3-5x the return next time?

Third, even with the best talent and creative, there are simply too many variables that will interact in unexpected ways during an initial campaign in a new online channel to expect a home run.

Here are a couple key things we picked up in our learning phase:

Start with listening broadly, and then join the conversation – It’s critical to get a feel for the ebb and flow of online conversations around your brand or other brands in your industry, and to do so by observing, not just online thought leaders but also the comments, tweets, posts, etc. of the occasional, peripheral social media participant.

This definitely takes time but it’s time well-spent if you REALLY want to understand the potential of social media for your business. It’s both patently obvious and somewhat sad when a B2B company just dives into the conversation without listening first – you see the flash of activity using tightly-controlled marketing-speak, little response from the online community, and you know that company is now thinking “well, we tried it and social media certainly doesn’t work for us.” That’s like playing golf for the first time with a baseball bat and then deciding golf is impossible. You need to watch and understand the game first to give it a fair shot.

Focus is absolutely essential – In B2B social media, with lots of hype, a broad range of tactics, and no clear best practices playbook, it’s very easy to take on more than your team can handle. We chose to focus initially on blogging, both with our own blogs and micro-blogging via Twitter. Even managing these initiatives well seems like twice the work we expected. Have a great idea for an integrated social media campaign across a new company blog, Facebook group, Twitter account and YouTube? Table that until you establish a firm presence in each.

No one is a social media expert today when it comes to your business – This is a bit of an overstatement to make a point: don’t expect that anyone has the recipe for a successful social media campaign for your company right away. B2B social media is too new, the platforms and users are evolving too quickly, and there is too little objective data available for anyone to say “If you do A, B and C in this social media campaign, you will generate $X in new business.” The apparently hard-and-fast rules in this domain are constantly being written and re-written so the best approach is to learn what you can from the pros and try things in a variety of ways.

For example, we have two Twitter accounts (see graphic above) that we approached differently: @whatworks for general business and @B2BOnlineMarketing for B2B online marketing topics. With @whatworks, we’ve been much more interactive with the Twitter community (more replies and direct messages), followed and retweeted more of the twitterati, did more “what’s happening now” type of posts like live tweeting events and just generally followed more of the standard rules for building a Twitter following.

On the other hand, with @B2BOnlineMarketing we’ve taken a more broadcast-focused approach with less interaction, more scheduled tweets and tweets covering useful but less timely B2B online marketing info. The result? Follower growth (graph), and clicks/tweet for tweets including links are much higher for our @B2BOnlineMarketing account than the @whatworks account where we took the more traditional approach to Twitter for business.
Tomorrow, Part 3: Ben’s perspective on hands-on B2B social media management
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