Posts Tagged: blogs

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17
Aug 09

Link roundup: read & recommended between August 5th and August 17th

Added to my Delicious bookmarks between August 5th through August 17th:

  • Facebook's Click-Through Rates Flourish … for Wall Posts – Advertising Age – DigitalNext – Sure, click-through rates for general display ads on Facebook have been criticized for being rather unimpressive, but click-through rates for content on brand pages' walls are as high as 6.49%, according to estimates from Vitrue, a startup that helps marketers manage their social-media presences.
  • 40 Superb Psychology Blogs | PsyBlog – Forty of the best psychology blogs, chosen to give you a broad sweep of the most interesting content being produced online right now.

    The list is split into three sections: first are more general psychological blogs, followed by those with an academic slant, followed by condition specific and patient perspective blogs. Other than that the blogs are presented in no particular order.

  • Celeb Product Hawkers Fail to Sway Consumers – When respondents in the survey were asked whether the presence of a celebrity in an ad makes them more likely, less likely or neither more or less likely to buy the product, nearly 8 in 10 (78%) said it doesn’t sway them one way or the other. In fact, only 8% said the presence of a celebrity spokesperson makes them more likely to buy a product. This compares with a significant 12% who actually say it makes them less likely to buy a product.
  • Understanding How a Facebook Page Grows: New Research | Community Organizer 2.0 – Facebook Page growth is “not usually the result of a single chain-reaction event,” but rather the confluence of a large number of users. After looking at every Facebook Page with over 1,00 fans (as of August 2008), the report concludes:
    Pages accrue fans as a result of many different clusters of connected people becoming fans.
    The single most important action that creates these clusters is when a user becomes a Fan and broadcasts this action to their friends’ news feeds.
  • Why Teens Don’t Tweet | Mashable – Twitter’s different than Facebook or MySpace because Twitter is not about your friends. As I highlighted in my analysis of Twitter’s new homepage, Twitter is quickly becoming the epicenter of world events. Yes, you can update your status, but you can do that just as easily on Facebook. What you can’t do on other social media sites is learn about the #IranElection crisis in real-time.
marketing / research — Comments Off
15
Jun 09

You can lead a customer to the soapbox, but you can’t make him Tweet

This post began its life as a comment on Jonathan Salem Baskin’s blog Dimbulb, where he staked a challenge to those who would have us believe that social media represents the death of advertising.

Based on recent research that shows that only a minority of people are actively creating content on Twitter and on blogs, Baskin writes:

“The perception that social media usage is today’s cultural and communications phenomena has led many companies to invest in experimental programs, then struggle to invent ways to measure them …. Now consider the possibility that the reason why the numbers don’t add up is because people aren’t using social media as much as we were led to believe?”

When you spend all your time living & breathing social media, and hanging out with friends & colleagues who do the same, you can lose your perspective.

Social media has been oversold as an immediate *replacement* for traditional modes of communication. In my opinion, it has emerged as a complimentary channel and a disruptive force, but it’s clear to me that advertising & more traditional marketing & communications will be around for a long time yet. Save for a few exceptions, mass numbers still require mass media.

Social media has enabled more people to share their thoughts online, but I think it’s a basic fact of human nature that not everyone wants to step up on the soapbox. More does not equal ‘all’.

This doesn’t mean social media is not important. Take the Twitter data on dropoff: it’s not who joins that matters, it’s who remains. I think too much focus has been put on the raw numbers (which naturally include people testing out the various tools) and not enough effort looking at behaviour in these spaces online. If the people who remain are the people you most want to reach, that’s where you need to be. Period.

This is where I start to agree with the ‘death of advertising people’: it sounds impressive that you’ve “reached” millions through your mass-media spend, but how many of them are tuned into your message? It takes more than a media buy to break through the clutter. Social media is one way to differentiate, but it doesn’t work like traditional advertising. Reach is not guaranteed, it rarely delivers immediate results and contrary to popular belief it is neither free nor ‘easy’ (defined as being achieved without effort).

As for the blogosphere, I think it’s natural that the numbers shrank. It doesn’t mean that those people aren’t still communicating online, just that they’re not using blogging platforms to do it. When blogging was booming, it was the best tool around for the purpose. Then social networking sites got better, and for many online diarists, Facebook or other socnets became a better venue for this kind of expression. Once Twitter came along, many one-time bloggers who used it primarily for link-sharing discovered that Twitter was a better medium for them, and a number of them either ceased updating their blogs or reduced post frequency.

At this stage, social media spectatorship is mainstream (i.e. awareness of it, reading blogs, etc.) but the act of creating content and other more active contribution (even commenting on blogs) is still a niche activity. If the strategy is built around content creation, it is zeroing in on a niche  audience. That’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s a mistake to assume that usage numbers are equivalent to the number of active creators on any platform. Forrester’s research also backs this up, and demonstrates an encouraging trend of an increasing number of content creators as more folks become comfortable with stepping up on the soapbox, and also as younger folks (who have fewer barriers to doing this) transition from communicating primarily to peers online to addressing a broader public.

The fundamentals of enabling self-expression, creating a sense of community and speeding up the transmission of ideas & information remain the same regardless of which platform is “hot.” Whether it’s blogging, Facebook, Twitter or another tool is a strategic decision based on personal preference, audience analysis and the technological environment of the time.

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10
Jun 09

Bookmarks for June 10th from 20:28 to 20:37

Bookmarked on June 10th

  • Local Mobile Content Audience Grows 51% – The number of consumers who seek local information on a mobile device grew 51% from March 2008 to March 2009, according to data from comScore Mobile, which also found that mobile subscribers are increasingly using downloaded applications and SMS to access local content.
  • Gays & Lesbians More Likely to Read Blogs, Tweet, Use SocNets – More than half (55%) of gay and lesbian respondents in a recent survey by Harris Interactive report that they read some type of blog – compared with only 38% of heterosexuals – and also are more likely to use popular social networking sites and microblogging tool Twitter
  • 95% of Teen Shoppers Notice Mall Ads – Nearly all (95%) teen shoppers (ages 12-17) in the US who have visited a mall in the past 30 days say they notice some type of mall advertising, according to (pdf) recent research from Arbitron and Scarborough Research. These teens also spend significant amounts of time and money in the mall and are feeling the pinch of the current economic crisis.