A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to co-present at the American Marketing Association Special Interest Group on Social Media (AMA SIG for short). I worked with Steve Bell, Founder and Principle at Strategic Marketing Innovations Consulting. It was so much fun working with Steve, who is one of the smartest guys I’ve ever met. Steve’s rich history as an analyst at Forrester gave our presentation a level of depth that would not have been possible otherwise.
Our presentation focused on how Social Media is changing the ways Corporations do business. We were able to draw parallels to the days of when the Internet first broke onto the business scene. The similarities to then and now are striking. We also got into organizational structure which included snippets of a video interview I did with Ryan Squire, Director of Social Media at OSU Medical Center. Ryan is extremely knowledgable and gave us candid information about how OSU is succeeding with social media, from org structure to policies and procedures. (you can watch the full video interview HERE).
Some people still say “social media is a fad”. In fact I have heard several individuals say they will not advertise or spend time on social media marketing because they do not think that people use it. They think it’s for teenagers to chat with each other after school. But new reports are showing this “fad” is now being seen by business and marketers as a way to influence brands and build their relationships with customers.
According to a new report from The Nielsen Company, in August 2009, 17 percent of all time spent on the Internet was at social networking sites, up from 6 percent in August 2008. And the marketers are well aware of this. Estimated online advertising spend on the top social network and blogging sites increased 119 percent, from approximately $49 million in August 2008 to approximately $108 million in August 2009. Most industries are seeing a surge in advertising revenue this year.
Year-over-Year Percent Change in Online Advertising Spend by Industry (U.S., August 2009)
Estimated Spend on Top Social Network Sites*
Year-over-Year Percent Growth
Industry
Aug-08
Aug-09
On Social Network Sites*
On All Sites
Entertainment
$1,097,700
$10,012,800
812%
40%
Travel
$473,700
$2,198,200
364%
-11%
Business to Business
$683,400
$1,941,700
184%
-8%
Automotive
$1,110,200
$3,085,800
178%
-26%
Health
$1,131,500
$2,754,900
143%
8%
Web Media
$11,231,800
$26,855,700
139%
30%
Software
$526,400
$1,202,500
128%
-29%
Financial Services
$3,233,900
$6,415,900
98%
-10%
Public Services
$6,836,500
$13,203,100
93%
13%
Telecommunications
$12,449,500
$23,550,300
89%
-1%
Consumer Goods
$1,913,400
$3,349,200
75%
8%
Hardware & Electronics
$654,000
$1,022,900
56%
-47%
Retail Goods & Services
$8,101,400
$12,556,800
55%
-12%
Source: Nielsen AdRelevance
*Estimated spend on social networking sites is based off of data for the top ad-supported member community sites ranked by unique visitors in August 2009
To read the entire News Release from the Nielsen Company, click here.
I was honored to be recently spotlighted by the eduWEB Conference. The eduWEB conference is an “annual, internationally recognized event for the higher education community, attracting those who are involved in online strategy, marketing and technology”
I had the privilege of speaking at the conference this past summer in Chicago. It was at this innovative conference where the InnoGage team joined up with the great folks at Jadu to pioneer a new kind of sponsorship. Instead of just running a table, we sponsored the social media for the event. We hired social media consultants who were on the run during the entire conference shooting high quality images and video which were loaded to eduWEB branded Flickr and YouTube pages. We also ran a live video feed off the conference through Ustream and pushed a lot of information through the very active Twitter back channel.
Overall it was a great success - people both at the conference and those who were unable to attend got a lot of value out of the work and we’re on the schedule to do it again next year!
There is a new Delicious in town - it’s called Toobla! Toobla is simply the coolest way to gather and organize content on the Web. This innovative startup was created by entrepreneur Jake Saxbe. As web content continued to grow at an exponential rate, Jake realized there should be a better way to organize content across the web - using a rich visual interface instead of just URL links.
What’s really cool about Toobla is that not only can you visually organize web pages, videos, photos…etc. into buckets, but then you can share that entire aggregated bucket with whoever you want! You can even embed your containers on websites and most blogs via the Toobla embed code.
A new report issued by enterprise wiki provider Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group details four major profiles companies fit into and shows that the ones most heavily engaged in social media have experienced an 18% growth rate in the last 12 months and 15% gross margin growth.
Of the four profiles, “Mavens” are brands heavily engaged in seven or more social media channels - like Starbucks and Dell, for instance. “Butterflies” are like wannabe “mavens,” and are also engaged in seven or more channels but are spread too thin, investing in some channels more so than others. “Selectives” focus on six or fewer channels but engage customers deeply in the ones they’ve chosen. Finally, there are “wallflowers,” or brands engaged in six or fewer channels with below-average engagement; these include companies like McDonalds and BP.
Out of the top 10 brands engaged in social media, the mavens dominate the list. All of the top 10 are mavens and have seen financial success even in a down economy:
1. Starbucks (127)
2. Dell (123)
3. eBay (115)
4. Google (105)
5. Microsoft (103)
6. Thomson Reuters (101)
7. Nike (100)
8. Amazon (88)
9. SAP (86)
10. Tie - Yahoo!/Intel (85)
Social Media pays off financially for companies
To find out more, please read this amazing report here. Thank you to Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group.
Our presentation focused on how Social Media is changing the ways Corporations do business. We were able to draw parallels to the days of when the Internet first broke onto the business scene. The similarities to then and now are striking. We also got into organizational structure which included snippets of a video interview I did with Ryan Squire, Director of Social Media at OSU Medical Center. Ryan is extremely knowledgable and gave us candid information about how OSU is succeeding with social media, from org structure to policies and procedures. (you can watch the full video interview HERE).
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