Forget demographics. It’s all about the socialgraphics
Jan 26th
By Neicole Crepeau, Contributing {grow} Columnist
Traditionally, marketers have researched their customers’ demographics to have a clear idea of their age, gender, income, location, and other traits.
Marketers added psychographics to the mix, allowing them to take into account customer’s interests, values, and attitudes. A step up from the very general information that demographics provide, psychographics enable marketers to speak to customers in a way that resonates with them. Now, in the age of social media and behavioral ad targeting, we have to add another type of data to our arsenal: socialgraphics.
Socialgraphics capture the attitudes, characteristics, behavior, and, most important, motivations of customers online. Understanding an audience’s socialgraphics allows marketers to design internet marketing strategies that attract and retain customers in different online venues.
Socialgraphics helps move your message
The new world of digital marketing requires the kind of research that user experience teams routinely do, but marketers have not always accessed. Yet, it’s critical information for companies looking to deeply engage consumers and really motivate them to take the online actions crucial to the brand.
Demographics and pyschographics may have been enough when marketers were focused simply on online advertising — finding the right keywords to target an audience was enough.
But in the complex digital world of social media, content marketing, email, reviews, etc., marketers need to find ways to get online users to take specific actions, what I call social actions, such as sharing the organization’s content, recommending it to others, opening emails, writing reviews, etc. To motivate users to take action, you first have to understand what motivates them. That requires a much deeper level of knowledge about user’s psyches.
Levels of socialgraphics
To be most effective, marketers need to understand the socialgraphics of their audience at a minimum of two levels:
Audience segmentation. If your demographic segment is “college-educated working mothers of elementary-aged children,” you need to understand the general socialgraphics of this segment, too.
Platform segmentation. An audience segment may behave differently or have varying motivations in different online communities. For example, working mothers may look for emotional support and practical suggestions for balancing work and life in one forum, but be focused on career growth and networking with other professional mothers in another forum. It’s important to understand the user’s motivations within different communities in order to share the right content and engagement opportunities in each community.
The hunt for socialgraphic data
It is possible to find available data to leverage, but chances are, you’ll have to roll up your sleeves and dig deep and make your own observations through focus groups or simply immersing yourself in different groups and platforms to understand what is going on there. Some of the socialgraphic data to focus on are:
- Internet use data—Where do these users congregate online? What sites do they use? What online media do they consume? What times do they use different websites and media? How internet savvy are they?
- Mobile use data—Similarly, what are this segment’s mobile usage traits? Smartphone or not? What activities do they do on their phones? What times are they active?
- Goals and motivations—For different venues, what is the audience segment’s interest or goal in participating? What need does the community fill for this user? What does the user hope to gain?
- Behavior—How does this audience behave online, particularly in different venues? Do they create content or just consume it? Are they frequent sharers or posters? How do their patterns of creating, commenting, or sharing differ and what triggers the differences?
- Emotional and pyschological needs–What emotional needs does a given community fill? What emotional needs is the user filling by participating online? How does the user want to be perceived online or in different communities?
Socialgraphics as competitive advantage
At this point, it appears that few companies do the kind of research necessary to understand user’s socialgraphics. In fact, in a November 2011 McKinsey report surveying marketers, 38% of respondents said that their company had basic demographic data on each customer. But only 18% reported having psychographic data, such as interests or attitudes. It’s probably safe to conclude that even less had socialgraphic data.
In a noisy online world increasingly cluttered with content, understanding your customers this deeply may be the only way to create a point of differentiation for your brand in the long-term.
Does this make sense to you? Are you starting to think about customer online behaviors in your strategies?
Neicole Crepeau a blogger at Coherent Social Media and the creator of CurateXpress, a content curation tool. She works at Coherent Interactive on social media, website design, mobile apps, & marketing. Connect with Neicole on Twitter at @neicolec
The Death of Internet Marketing and the Rise of Social SEO
Sep 14th
By Robert Dempsey, Contributing {grow} Columnist
Internet marketing as we once knew it is dead. Gone are the days when a sales page was enough of a relationship to sell a product. Gone are the days when claims of riches tugged enough at the emotions to persuade a sale. Gone are the days when bloated claims could pass as truth and lies went unpunished. Now is the time of social SEO. And this time has already begun. Are you ready for it? Let’s find out.
The Web Has Always Been Social
From the time the Internet was called the World Wide Web people have been using it to send communications back and forth. There was Arpanet (1969), bulletin board services aka BBS (1978), Usenet (1980) and then the email system Listserve (1986). The Internet was created as a communication medium not only between computers but between the users of those computers – us. And since those early days we’ve been trying to connect with each other more and more.
Then Came SEO
With advances in computing technology came the ability to create and post web pages. As more and more people connected to the Internet the need arose to help people find those websites. You may remember getting in your (physical) inbox an AOL cd, or perhaps 10-20 of them. AOL provided a human-filtered gateway to the Internet. Then came Yahoo! and other search engines and web portals. It was during the mid-1990s that search engine optimization came about.
In the beginning people used to try all sorts of things to get their sites to rank higher – stuffing keywords into a page, hiding keywords using white text on a white background, buying links and more. Today these other assorted tactics will get you banned from Google or at the very least ensure that you never show up in the search results. Then in the late 1990s the next shift came about.
Blogging Hits The Social Scene
What began as a way to tell the rest of the world about what was going on in yours, blogging turned into an SEOs happiest dream. Now it was easy to create a metric ton of pages all optimized for search. But unlike static sites people could comment on blogs. No longer the domain of chat channels, instant messenger and walled gardens, websites became a two-way communication channel. In 1998 Open Diary was the first website where readers could add comments to someone’s blog entry.
And the web was forever changed.
And Then Social Media Hit The Fan
Fast forward to early 2000. Social media came into it’s own and really started to take off. Here’s a brief timeline with a few you may recognize:
- 2002 – Friendster
- 2003 – Myspace
- 2003 – LinkedIn
- 2004 – Facebook
- 2006 – Twitter
- 2011 – Google+
For a time SEO and social media were separate. As I alluded to in the introduction, that time is over.
The Rise Of Social SEO
Social SEO is the combination of social media and search engine optimization. The term itself is an acknowledgment that the two are no longer separate. In a recent post of mine – Google Proves Not Being On Social Media Will Kill Your SEO - I discuss the changes already in progress at Google. In a recent video with Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson of Google mention in a rather off-handed way that Google is working to incorporate social signals into search engine rankings. This isn’t anything new. Google has been personalizing search results for quite some time. Now it’s going to an entirely new level.
In today’s world of social SEO you must be publishing content that is optimized for the search engines AND is shared within social networks such as Twitter and Google+. In Google’s eyes which already measure authority using somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 factors, social shares from others are another indication that you know what you’re talking about. In addition, they are now supporting the rel=“author” and rel=“me” tags which allow you to indicate if a piece of content is authored or about you.
Already in progress, the content you create everywhere is being linked to directly to you. In addition, people’s reactions to that content is also being measured and noted. It has been said that every person is a content producer. Now every person is an authority, or can be.
This is where the death of traditional Internet Marketing comes into play.
The Fall Of Internet Marketing
When I say “traditional Internet Marketing” what I’m talking about is a certain set of tactics used to sell products online, specifically:
- Sales pages with big red headlines that insult our intelligence
- Outrageous claims of instant or close-to-instant riches with very little work
- Hard-sell sales tactics
- Ups-ellathons mixed in with cross-sell-athons
- A bombardment of swiped affiliate emails that are impersonal and arrive by the dozens
On the social web it takes more than well crafted paragraphs to create enough trust and authority to make a sale. Now I’m not hailing the death of e-commerce, far from it. But the way products and services are sold online by non-e-commerce businesses has changed. A relationship built on trust and authority is now what makes the sale.
Embrace The Change
15 years ago businesses were told they needed a website. Many didn’t listen.
10 years ago businesses were told they needed to use SEO. Many didn’t listen.
5 years ago businesses were told they needed to blog. Many didn’t listen.
2 years ago businesses were told they needed to be on social media. Many didn’t listen.
But many did.
The companies that blog, that use SEO, that use social media continue to thrive despite uncertain economies. The businesses that embraced stronger relationships with their customers continue to thrive. The businesses that acknowledge the upward trend of social seo will be the companies that continue into the future.
Will yours be one?
Robert Dempsey specializes in direct response social media and blogs at http://DempseyMarketing.com/journal/.
Prediction: A Paradigm Shift in Social Media Sharing
Aug 25th
By Neicole Crepeau, Contributing {grow} Columnist
Google + Circles has finally provided sharing in the way that most people want. Even Google may not realize the avalanche of changes it has started, though. Google’s implementation of Circles will usher in a new paradigm for sharing: one where we no longer focus on where we want to share but instead focus on who we want to share with.
The current state
Right now, when you share content you pick the network you want to share to. You click a Tweet or Retweet button to share to Twitter, click a Facebook Like, etc. This is because social sharing began with social networks–locations where people congregate online.
Some of your contacts operate mainly in one location, say Facebook or Twitter but you’re probably connected with other contacts across multiple locations. And still other contacts are mainly accessible via email or text messaging. To reach all of the people you’d like to reach with a piece of content, you have to make the effort to go to each network and share or use a tool such as Hootsuite or ping.fm to share across multiple sites. If you want to share selectively within each site, such as to only certain LinkedIn groups and Facebook friends, it becomes even more time-consuming and difficult. Even in the third-party tools, there is poor support for sharing to select Lists, pages, or groups.
Circles and Lists will let you focus on people
Now, Facebook, Twitter, and others will be forced to catch up with the Google + model (though Facebook could have been leading the change). Facebook will follow suit and add Circle-like capabilities. (Breaking news–Between drafting this post and publishing, Facebook announced changes in their Lists and sharing features to begin matching Google Plus.) Expect Twitter to enhance their List feature in response, as well.
As each social network implements a rich user experience and feature set equivalent to Google + Circles, it will be easier to focus on who you want to share with. While you will still need to go to each social network to share, you will be able to more easily select groups of people within each network that you want to share with.
Instead of having a choice of sharing publically or to friends-only on Facebook, you’ll easily be able to share to selected groups, such as Work Colleagues or Gamer Friends. Similarly, you’ll be able to tweet at your list of Gamers in order to share selected tweets and content just to the people most likely to be interested in that information.
Thus, at first, you will have two-step process of choosing where you want to share and then who you want to share with.
What we need are Enhanced Share buttons
Google Plus will likely lead the way in providing a Share button for websites that lets you select the Circle you want to share with right from the button. (Breaking news–Google Plus just announced on 8/24 that they are enabling sharing via the +1 button–and the ability to select the Circles you want to share with.)
Shortly after that, I predict Facebook, Twitter, and others will add the ability, so that you can target your sharing to specific groups of people in their network, as well.
Evolution – Third party tools consolidate circles across platforms
Before long, though, third party tools will enable you to consolidate your Circles/Lists across platforms. (And if you’re a VC, contact me and we can talk about being the first of these tools!) You’ll be able to create meta-circles that let you define your different social groups, ala Google + Circles. However, you won’t have to worry about whether your contacts are on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
Using these third-party tools (unless Google, itself, decides to build it), you’ll be able to authenticate with Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc., and then assign your contacts from across these networks into Circles or groups. You can build your Professional contacts, your Best Friends and Family group, your Gamers group, etc. People may reside in more than one circle, of course, so that Joe is in both your Best Friends and your Gamers group.
Similarly, you’ll be able to use Circles to segment your audience. If you have followers on Twitter or fan of your Facebook page, you’ll be able to group them into segments, such as Product Managers or Marketers, Small Business CEOs, Bloggers or Consultants, and so on. Again, people may reside in more than one Circle and you may have contact with them via more than one social network.
Retweet, Like, and other buttons are replaced
At first, people will use these third-party tools to share to their meta-Circles. Instead of going to each social network and sharing a piece of content within it, you will be able to simply use the third-party application. For example, Feedly might build in this ability and you can share content to your meta-Circles from it. You’ll select the Gamers or Bloggers circle to share your content to. The application will then use the Facebook, Google +, Twitter and other APIs to find the appropriate Lists or Circle in each social network and share your content just to those audiences within each network.
You won’t have to think about where your audience and contacts are. You will only have to think about who you want to share with.
Then, one or the other of these third-party tools will create a single Share button that publishers can put on their website. With this button, you can share to your contacts just by clicking the button and selecting the circle of people you want to share with.
Your content will then be shared with the correct groups of people on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and whatever other networks you’re active in. You won’t ever have to think about where your audience lives. All you’ll have to think about is who you are targeting with this content or status update.
And that’s the paradigm shift we can expect in the next one to two years!
Neicole Crepeau a blogger at Coherent Social Media and the creator of CurateXpress, a content curation tool. She works at Coherent Interactive on social media, website design, mobile apps, & marketing. Connect with Neicole on Twitter at @neicolec
Social media gold lies in the inner circle
Aug 10th
By Neicole Crepeau, Contributing {grow} Columnist
As content marketing grows up one thing is becoming apparent: the real gold is in getting your post to the inner circle. Back in March, I blogged about the value of the content curator as a way to reach the smaller networks where friends share with friends. Recent research only validates the importance of getting your content into those smaller, close networks of friends and family.
Let’s look at the facts.
A recent AOL-Nielsen study showed that 23% of social media messages include content. 60% of that content is shared as a link back to a published piece. Another 36% is embedded in the share. In other words, people share content a lot, and the majority of the time they share it as a link.
What may surprise you, though, is that “overwhelmingly, people prefer to share content with friends and family.” Most of the sharing that people do isn’t to the public at large, but to their own smaller network of family and friends. (Though, a good quarter of people do share with colleagues regularly.)
In other words, most of the sharing that average folk do involves sharing to a limited set of relatively close friends and family.
Another study of sharing via apps on Facebook showed that auto-generated “broadcast” messages that appear in users’ social streams massively drive up user adoption of the application. When users added a personal message (like “Check out this cool app I found!”), adoption increased by another 98%. Messages in the users’ stream are 10 times more effective than banner ads for gaining adoption.
Again, content shared in the inner circle carries greater influence, especially if accompanied by a personal message.
The challenge is how to get your content into that inner circle? Most of us share our content with as large an audience as we can garner, or we share with influencers who have large audiences. We hope that enough of the audience will pass our content on so that, eventually, it gets shared by individuals with their close friends, family, or colleagues, increasing the chances that the content will actually be seen by our target customers.
It’s a pretty inefficient approach.
There are a couple of other factors, though, that change the picture.
People want to share information from people they trust. 38% of people say that this is the type of content they want to share the most. (That’s true of industry-specific content, too, by the way.) People are also more likely to click on links shared by someone they know. If that link is reshared to people who don’t know the original sharer, the click-through rate drops.
At the same time, when established influencers share links, they get far higher clickthrough rates than average users do (400% higher). If these influencers add a personal message, the rate is another 20% greater. These perceived experts are trusted, and garner results because of it.
People tend to share and click links in specific categories or genres, too. This study of Facebook sharing showed that “frequent linkers on Facebook have distinctive genre, topic and source patterns particular to their interests.” TechCrunch reports on another study that indicated, “When it comes to sharing, 80 percent of people share only one category of links and more than 70 percent will only ever click on one category, whether that is business, politics, or entertainment.“
So, the real strategy to get content into those valuable inner circles? Become a trusted source for content on specific topics, i.e., a content curator. Being a good content curator gives you a better chance of buying entry into the inner circles of large numbers of your target customers—and increases the likelihood that users will read the content that you share.
Neicole Crepeau is a partner in Coherent Interactive, which specializes in web, mobile, and social media design and implementation for small and mid-size businesses. You can read more of her original material at her blog, Coherent Social Media or on Twitter where she is @neicolec. This month, Neicole’s company will be releasing a new tool to help you become a better content curator. Called CurateXpress, our product will help you share better content, and get more value and a larger audience from it. So, follow @CurateXpress on Twitter or sign-up on our CurateXpress website to be notified when we launch the beta!
Illustration courtesy http://designmoo.com/
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