Posted On December 15, 2009 at 10:24 in Uncategorized
Universal McCann‘s ‘Power to the People‘ survey is now in its 4th year, or better yet – Wave 4. Every year UM researchers go deep behind the hype of social media to reveal the dramatic changes in the way consumers are using the internet to create and share their thoughts, pictures and videos. Wave 4 was conducted between 11/2008 and 03/2009 covering some 22,000 users from 38 countries, in what is considered the largest global analysis of social media usage.
Highlights:
total estimated number of global active internet audience (16-54) is 625 million
mobile internet users has reached 125 million
71.1% have visited a friend’s social network page
33% of social networkers have uploaded a video to their profile
62.5% created a social network profile
China has 111 million social network profiles, USA 57.8 million, Korea 11.9 million, Japan 10.2 million, UK 12.1 million
In short – the first (actually 4th) inside look into how social media and the internet have changed the way we behave. Must read, for marketer, consumer, business executive, anyone.
You can watch the results of that survey over at UM Wave 4 website – using a very cool visualization graph to see the changes in the past 4 years. Another option is to review the 40 pages PDF, available at Business Exchange.
Run into this survey at eMarketer.com in one of my Google Alerts the other day. With all the plethora of information sources, I find it more difficult to focus on topics and trends that interest me, as well as joining in on conversations, so it’s good to know GAlerts still has some benefits..
The survey in hand was conducted between some 1,800 social media marketers in the US, asking them about the effectiveness of their practices – meaning which tactics they used, how effective those tactics were and how accurately can they measure such tactics. The results are not that surprising, but I would like to focus on next steps – how can we make those practices more effective and measured more accurately.
The first issue we’re seeing is the negative correlation between a tactic’s effectiveness vs. our ability to measure it accurately (graph below). The 3 most effective tactics are User reviews or ratings (47%), Blogger or online journalist relations (46%) and Forums or discussion groups (42%). When looking at the ‘Very accurately measured’ column, those tactics are ranked 3rd, 4th and 5th, respectively. With the expansion of broadband and the coming of web 2.0, everyone is a publisher, and thus consumers are more suspicious and don’t believe everything they read online. In the US the FTC are targeting bloggers’ freebies (PDF guidelines), and in the meantime there are some un-official guidelines on how to disclose and authenticatea sponsored conversation. In Israel on the other hand, things are moving slower (article in Hebrew).
The second issue pertains to hooking financial success with social marketing (graph below). It’s pretty obvious that social marketing is most effective for Brand reputation (39%), Brand awareness (37%) and Search engine results (38%). I’d like to point your attention to the Sales aspects of social marketing, Generate leads and Increase online sales. The marketers who were surveyed said that social marketing is not effective at Generating leads (35%) and Increasing online sales (46%). For social marketing to become bigger and better, we have to add revenues to the game, and being able to measure it. Dell are already showing the added value of their social activity on twitter, a new study finds correlation between social media and financial success and George Colony urges CEO to understand that social marketing is here to stay.
If we want social marketing to rock, Sales indicators must be inherent to any social campaign. It’s OK to start small, but start somewhere. Move the conversation from brand (only) to revenues as well. And one last request – be honest to your readers.
Relax, not me personally, my blog got that boost. With June (and 2Q) wrapping up last week, it’s an excellent time to gather some statistics around my blog, and I decided to make a comparison to the previous period, and maybe identify some trends. The period I looked at is 1H08 vs. 1H09.
Google Analytics is truly a powerful tool, and I was able to go very deep (drill-down) and round up some interesting figures. I wanted to verify 2 assumptions I made since Jan 2008:
pushing my blog’s content in facebook and twitter actually generated more traffic
The results supported both assumptions. Traffic-wise, the first 6 months of 2009 generated 13,004 visits and 18,660 page views, almost twice than the 2008 period. The increase was expected, but the sources breakdown amazed me. I have a 3-step process for pushing my blog’s content: update my twitter, post to facebook and save to del.icio.us – between those 3 networks I cover almost 5,000 eyeballs (directly). It did the trick, big time! Facebook generated 5 times more visits – 76 in 1H08 to 480 in 1H09, and twitter generated roughly the same growth – 82 in 1H08 to 490 in 1H09. Direct traffic from Google also increased, by 110%, from 2,800 in 1H08 to 6,030 in 1H09.
Location-wise, I got 3 times more visits from Israel, jumping from 930 in 1H08 to just under 3,000 in 1H09. The US remains my main source of readers, with 4,050 visits in 1H09 (comapred to 2,700 in 1H08). The EU were also loyal readers, with +50% increase in France, UK, Germany, Netherlands and Italy. Australia, India and Canada showed similar increases.
To be honest, I expected those results. With the explosion of new media, facebook, twitter, friendfeed and others, I would be surprised to see a lower figure from those 2 sources, especially when taking into account the amount of self-marketing I did these past 18 months.
Looking into the near future, I wonder what my 1H10 vs 1H09 will look like.. what source will show the most increase in visits? will blogs still rule the world or will we all lifestream our lives? What do you think?
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