Content Intelligence

4 Ways To Ignite Viral Content on Facebook and Twitter

2012-10-28T11:45:00.000-07:00

Right now, on Facebook, personalities and companies have an opportunity to outperform even the biggest companies in social media. In this article, I’m going to tell you why that’s so, and give you a step-by-step plan for becoming a loud and persuasive voice in your business niche.

Before you finish this article, be sure to sign up for our November 7th webinar to learn more about this topic and how to get better Facebook results!

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Stop Being A Fan Counter And Become A Thought Leader

It doesn’t matter how many fans you have if they aren’t seeing your posts. And you want more than visibility- you want influence. You want to be able to lead your fans to fulfill their needs and dreams by taking advantage of your products and services.

Here’s a summary of the step-by-step process for becoming the strongest voice in your niche on Facebook, even if you aren't a big name brand.

First, get fans who are actually customers and prospects.

Find and share content that’s proven to get responses from people like your fans.

Learn from your audience's responses (or lack thereof)- what do they like and share most?

Create content that's more likeable and shareable, making sure it also contains messages that persuade people to buy from you.

Use sponsored story ads to make sure your content reaches as many fans and other potential prospects as possible. Then repeat.

#1: How David Beats Goliath On Facebook George Takei reaches way more people on a daily basis than Comedy Central. Remember him? Sulu from Star Trek? Well he’s experienced a resurgence of fame in the last decade, and is one of the funniest people on Facebook. He reaches about 100x as many people as Comedy Central (we can only guess at reach, but we know he gets 100 times as many likes and comments and 60 times as many shares as Comedy Central).

George Takei gets about 160 times as much interaction per post as Comedy Central And with less than 3 million fans, Takei also beats Coca Cola and its 58 million fans: he gets about 55,000 likes per post, while Coca Cola gets 19,000.

Coca-Cola has 18 times as many fans but George Takei gets almost triple the number of interactions.

No, they're not in the same niche, but they are fighting for placement in people's newsfeeds, so they're competitors from an attention standpoint. And now he's using his powerful platform to promote his new show. That means personalities can powerfully promote their arts, their products, or their services. You don't need to have Coca-Cola's 4 billion dollar marketing budget if your content is compelling.

Take a look at the following chart from InfiniGraph. Are you surprised that some of the biggest brands are losing to some of the smaller ones in engagement? How is Christian Dior so much more effective than Coca-Cola and McDonald's?

Some of the most engaged with social publishers are not the brands with tens of millions of fans. Chances are that your competitors aren't as big as Coca-Cola. You just need fans and hot content. Hot content is the posts that get shared way more than others. Highly shared content grows you even more fans.

An easy way to see what your most viral content is is to just log in to Klout. Klout shows you your most influential moments in the last 90 days. This only works for Facebook profiles and Twitter accounts, not for Facebook pages. As you can see below, my most influential post was a play on words caption I did about a MacBook. Klout shows you some of your most influential recent posts. These are hotter and more shareable posts. You might want to pay to push them further on Facebook.

If you’re a smaller operation like Takei, your advantage is agility- you can switch strategies and become an effective publisher within the next several months, while it may take big brands years to adapt to the new social publishing paradigm. I believe that executive teams at many of these big brands aren’t aware how poorly they’re doing with visibility and engagement- or they would have figured our how to do a better job.

Tips: Find out who your competitors are, and compare how many likes, comments and shares their posts get compared to yours. Note which of their posts are doing the best, and which are the worst. Learn from their successes and mistakes, and let that inspire your future posts. But also, go beyond your competitors to find standout content in all categories. Bring this into your niche, and suddenly you’re an innovator compared to your competitors.

#2: Get Beyond The 2009 Social Media Paradigm Social media content marketing is very new. Most companies are just realizing the opportunity here and seeing the obstacles. Unfortunately many social media experts still view social media through the Twitter lens. Social conversation without content (Twitter tweets and replies) is no longer king, if it ever was.

Content is king, because Facebook is bigger and more active than Twitter, and Facebook is about sharing and discussing content. Content (photos, videos, whitepapers, ebooks, etc.) creates conversations, so you need to start looking at what content works and doesn't.

Three content pieces from B2B companies are creating conversation (comments) on Facebook

If you're in B2C, are you using a lot of images to inspire and entertain your fans? If you're in B2B, are you finding out what kinds of whitepapers and ebooks your fans share?

Tips: Here’s how to think in order to win in the new content marketing paradigm… what content can you post that will stimulate discussions and shares? Are there questions you can ask? Fill-in-the blank posts? Polls? Think like a great speaker whose content creates ripples of conversation rather than a therapy group facilitator who just wants people to talk. People will remember that your brand introduced them to great content, and this will benefit your brand more over time than random conversation. Map out your customers’ problems and the series of revelations or insights or improvements they need to make- what process are you helping them go through? What peak moment does your product or service create? Then create content relevant to each step in that process.

#3: Learn Who Your Real Competitors Are & Beat Them Years ago when I began doing SEO for clients, one of the first things we discovered was that their competitors in Google rankings weren’t who they expected. In fact, often there were several companies beating them who they’d never heard of. They had to revise who they thought was in their competitive set. That’s because so many companies are slow to get the right data for online marketing, and slow to realize how each online marketing channel is different.

One kind of data we can get from InfiniGraph is which other brands your fans interact with in social media. This can surface both competitors and strategic partners. For example, Home Depot's social media fans also interact with Home & Garden TV, Best Buy, and ToysRUs. The upper right of InfiniGraph’s brand dashboard shows other brands shared by The Home Depot.

The Facebook data tells us they have the same customers. Most of these companies aren’t selling the same products as The Home Depot, so they could partner strategically. By offering a Best Buy coupon to incentivize customers to buy more home improvement supplies, Home Depot can expect customers to be interested and to respond better than they would to other copromoters.

Tips: Who are your fans interacting with and how can you partner with those brands? Search for your brand with InfiniGraph, and find out. If your brand hasn’t been mapped, you can request it. Once it has, you’ll see the brands your fans also interact with in the upper right. Now think about whether or not you can create a strategic partnership with that brand. Also, go to each of these brand’s Facebook pages and see what kinds of posts create the most and least interaction. Apply those insights to your own posts.

#4: Solve Funnel Collapse Syndrome With Hot Content

About 67% of B2C companies and 41% of B2B companies acquire customers via Facebook (from HubSpot’s free ebook “How To Attract Customers With Facebook”). But one of the biggest problems they have with social media ROI is most of their fans and followers aren’t even seeing their posts.

If you post boring content and hardly anyone interacts, then Facebook stops showing your posts to those fans- that’s EdgeRank. Not being visible to your fans completes a vicious cycle wherein you get less and less interaction. The average page doesn't reach 84% of its fans when it posts, and pages with more than 1 million fans don't reach 97% of their fans. I call this Funnel Collapse Syndrome, and most Facebook Pages have it.

Below is an example (from my Facebook Success Summit 2012 talk) of two very different EdgeRank situations, and their effect on the rest of the sales funnel. See how being less visible to fans dramatically lowers your results and revenues? Pages with equal fan counts but different visibility have dramatically different ROI potential.

The visibility part of the sales funnel is our biggest problem in Facebook Marketing, and the most accessible solution is to create or curate super-shareable content. Even B2B companies, like Marketo, are experimenting with humorous photo-based posts. B2B companies are known for being 5-10 years behind B2C companies in marketing tactics, but in this case, at least one B2B company is ahead of many B2C companies.

Associations can take a lesson from the American Heart Association. B2B folks should follow Marketo’s example. Christian Dior is one of the most interactive B2C brands on Facebook (according to InfiniGraph, it gets 150% more interaction than Coca Cola). Dior showcases the best in fashion and design as well as when celebrities get involved with fashion.

Tips: There are three ways to fix an EdgeRank visibility problem or funnel collapse syndrome.

One is to do a better job of posting, so that Facebook shows your posts to more of your fans. Over time you can re-awaken a portion of your fans. But bear in mind that part of EdgeRank is time decay. You may not be able to reach a majority of your fans if they are several years old and haven’t interacted with you in all that time.

The second solution is to use sponsored stories ads- you pay to show your posts to your own fans. Humbling.

Or third, cut and run. In some cases it’s actually cheaper to start a new page and use ads to get fans for that page than to pay to reanimate your old fans.

Conclusion I’ve seen a number of shifts in online marketing, and each of them has presented an incredible opportunity for the companies that jumped on them early. This is the latest, and if you have the agility and ability to turn the insights in this article into action, you’ll thank yourself for it later. Becoming an excellent, attention grabbing content marketer whose Facebook posts get massively shared is a learning curve, but a doable one. If you’d rather be a leader at this than play catch up later, get started today.

Social Media Week 2011 SF

2011-02-02T11:12:00.000-08:00

Come join Social Media Week InfiniGraph will be presenting at
Monetizing Social Media Content
2:30 PM - 4:30 PM
Speakers from VigLink, Infinigraph, Huddler and isocket will discuss how to monetize social media content, what is possible now and what the future will hold.

VigLink - 420 Bryant (Between 2nd and 3rd), 94107 San Francisco, US
Register here SOLD OUT

Engaging Influencers
RocketSpace 181 Fremont Street (in-between Mission and Howard)
Start: Tuesday, Feb 08 2011 7:00 PM
End: Tuesday, Feb 08 2011 9:00 PM

This panel will discuss how to successfully engage influencers through social media. The session will cover what a successful program looks like, how to plan, the role of authenticity, crowd-sourcing content, and advanced techniques for increasing reach and harnessing the power of influencers. Whether you are a startup starting from scratch, working with an existing company on a launch, or leveraging a social graph to expand a brand's reach, the goal is to walk away with actionable techniques to help you expand your reach using sustainable social growth techniques.

Speakers:

Chase McMichael, CEO InfiniGraph.com - @chasemcmichael

Mark Sackett, Founder and CEO Reflectur - @MarkESackett

Gregorgy Shove, Founder and CEO Halogen - @GregShove

Scott James, Social Media Strategist at Attack! - @scottandjames

Additional speakers TBA

Twitter hashtag: #smwinfluencer

@chasemcmichael

Influencer, Content Intelligence and Social Engagement

2010-11-21T07:43:00.000-08:00

Talking with many brands and agencies the same challenge comes up over and over: “What should we put in our stream to engage our audience and what’s important to them?”

This is a very good question and any serious social site management has a content calendar / blog post schedule to do just that. The bigger question is what do you do on a consistent basis (daily) and is the content you’re putting in your feed getting the attention you think it deserves? “You are what you feed” and in this hyper connected 140 character news bite world we live in, your brand must be on topic and as relevant as possible to as many people in order to obtain any social velocity around your brand’s ultimate call to action.

In this 2nd part of our 3 part series, we will explore direct way to achieve greater relevancy, intelligent content discovery, consistency of engagement and being part of your audience’s conversations. Sharing and re-tweeting is a must have in the NOW world. You’re only as good as your last post. So, some may say, “Make it a good one.” The importance in understanding your audience and what drives them can dictate what we put in our feeds that appeals to the greatest number of engaged consumers that are also compelled to share with others. This is the holy grail in social content marketing today...(Did someone say I want to make this go viral?)
Most have heard about the 1% rule — that just 1% of your brand’s social media followers are responsible for the majority of sharing. They share your social media campaigns with their larger social network, passing on links to your contests, promotions, deals, and other marketing campaigns. These key Influencers are more than just fans — they’re brand ambassadors and advocates.

With the growth of major brands engaging consumers across social channels, as seen in the graph above, more brands today have a greater need for relevant engagement. How to crowd source knowledge, and leverage what’s trending for your own brand is now at your finger tips. Brands that have fully embraced the social graph’s effectiveness to deliver growth, lead generation, loyalty and direct click throughs, plus the amazing number of Comments, Like and Retweets would make any competitor envious. AXE (Unilever brand) is a great example of content that’s not brand specific, however, engages and produces traction with its followers.

To get consumers to interact more and drive them to a call to action requires engagement beyond just the brand pump or product discount announcements. AXE consistently provides these types of posts to their audience allowing them to be in the conversation. Below is a screen shot of intelligent crowd sourced content trending around pet owners connected to other pet oriented sites (Content Consumption Graph). Thus, providing a direct example of content that’s highly relevant to the audience making this process of sourcing content simpler and more seamless to deliver on a real time basis, or as required.

There has been some argument regarding content vs. conversation. Social media isn’t just conversation, it’s about .......... WHO CARES! Let’s look at facts:

* Conversations are a derivative of social media. Conversations are not social media.
* Does content drive conversation? Yes, compelling content drives engagement.
* Does good content drive good conversation? Yes, the more relevant the better.
* Does engagement for a brand have to revolve around the conversation? Yes and No. It’s about stimulating interaction which may or may not relate.
* Relevant driven Conversations and Brand Interactions are the results

All content sent in the brand’s feeds are tracked individually creates a rank list of the highest performers activity, providing instant feedback to what content is capturing Influencer attention and best social velocity:

A brand has to be more than just a great conversationalist to have long-term success in the social media. Social sites that have harnessed and engaged their audience have compelling content and tap into the passion points of their audience. This creates a huge marketing opportunity, called Content Marketing.

Using crowd sourced Social Intelligence provides a direct path to seeing what content is trending around your community (Content Consumption Graph). Monitoring the social interaction around your feeds provides a direct path by providing the most relevant content to your community and at the same time getting the most out of them.

Life is not about being liked, it's about being effective!

Your turn, how are you determining what content is on topic and are you engaging your audience and Influencers with relevance beyond your brand marketing message?

@chasemcmichael
@InfiniGraph

Our Facebook page welcomes you.

Content Curation: Advocates, Influencers and Relevance

2010-10-01T16:36:00.000-07:00

The success of Flipboard and Paper.li can be attributed to topic filtering and using the social graph of friends’ Facebook and Twitter connections to determine what content is trending. The overall success of social news generation depends heavily on this type of content creation.

Tools such as Curated.by, Tweetmeme, Topsy and twittertim.es, offer amazing features, from tracking number of clicks to who is grouping around a topic. The challenge is applying the right social intelligence to match enterprise-grade requirements and then scaling that technique to allow brands to mine this lucrative consumer data stream.
Tapping content shared among your friends, i.e. content crowd sourcing, is not new but the intelligence to parse what should be curated and how is. Enabling brands to be at the center of vertical content discovery is a valuable way to leverage this almost infinite information stream, while keeping the conversation relevant to your audience.

Current solutions can explore links from your Twitter stream, plus your followers and their followers, ranking them based on how many people link to them. These products are conceptually similar to Tweetmeme but sorted based on contributors. Paper.li also achieves this type of curation, while exposing influential people on Twitter.

Collaborative filtering has been discussed since 2002, but it was Twitter and Facebook’s sharing of links plus feed amplification through the social graph which was the game changer.
The visual below shows one such re-tweet path and links shared. The red lines show secondary re-tweets for this tweet http://bit.ly/99TmwN and illustrates something InfiniGraph dubs the “Content Consumption Graph.”

What’s the big deal? For a brand, knowing your audience and who has the most social resonance with specific content provides a valuable engagement conduit to similar communities. Finding your advocates by how much relevant action they’re engaged with in a content vertical is the best way of identifying authentic social interaction.
Below is a visual breakdown of a Twitter population based on who you follow, using segmentation categories created by Klout. Your content interests result in key social indicators that determine what content best matches a brand audience.

Tools that measure your reach and determine the best content approach are still primitive. Bit.ly and similar tools work most of the time, except when links are altered by other social services. Sharethis is trying to address this issue but requires the installation of the Sharethis widget.

Tools like SocialTALK, Zuberance also enable tracking shared reviews. Rowfeeder pulls data directly from Twitter and Facebook and counts brand mentions to help find possible advocates. While the combining social monitoring and analytics with various sharing tools is possible, challenges still remain.

Social media now offer marketers a way to map relevant conversations ranked by influence, something that was previously impossible. But identifying brand advocates based on true social interaction and authenticity is still not possible.

Yet it’s becoming critical for brands to better understand how their content is being shared, how similar content is being consumed and where the content of competitors is being shared online. Using large-scale social intelligence techniques lets marketers and community mangers find the most relevant content to supply their news feeds, while engaging their audiences with far greater relevance.

Going beyond keyword monitoring and looking for opportunities to optimize the word-of-mouth effect of your social network content will greatly increase your reach. So key questions to ask your team are: How do you track your content today? What content are you curating through your feeds and what is getting the most traction?

@chasemcmichael
@infinigraph

Our Facebook fan page is now live please LIKE/Follow us!

The “Now What” Syndrom: Retaining and Engaging Fans/Followers

2010-08-23T10:06:00.000-07:00

In Chase McMichael’s upcoming talk at INTEGRATING EMAIL MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA, we're addressing the challenges brands are having with their social sites once they get one rolling. The question is “NOW WHAT” with regards to retaining and engaging their fans/followers.

Brand managers are challenged with managing and making their social presences engaging; what should I post to my audience over just product update after product update, or special discounts, over and over again. Social is not about force feeding a one way message to your audience but more about starting conversations, becoming a leader in information discovery and content creator. Even the company blog needs content that’s highly relevant and meaning full, overall providing value to your consumers.

How brands obtains a greater following which produces high social density (people with same or similar in common connections to the same brand) is based directly on connected consumers with similar interests. The higher the social density is around a brand the higher the social resonance a brand has among a community; therefore creating greater conversation and sharing.

Fig 1 and 2 illustrate high and low social density around one topic.

Low social density results in low social resonance. The top image has zero in common connections therefore the probability to cause social resonance is approaching zero where as the lower image has high social density around a specific vertical topic causing retweets, sharing and people commenting.

When consumers share, go to and make comments on content; these actions create the Content Consumption Graph (CCG). Billions of views on content are happening right now and a fraction is being shared or interactive with to expand that content reach. The word “Viral” is a word used to describe a small set of consumers who send out content to enough people in turn sending to others and so on, hence, Viral spreading. What’s great about all this behavior is Brands can leverage this with desire to share and create content discovery with content that’s highly relevant to their brand and resonates with their target audience.

The ability to do continuous social insight management of my many social points is vital to leverage the CCG. With recent advancements in social technologies brands have access to real time recommendations of content that’s important to their audience. Being in the stream and being relevant is a big deal. There are 100,000’s of social sites that are dead because no one is fuelling the jet and providing ongoing lead nurturing and content discovery around their social presence.

Do you know what your brands social density is and who is engaging your posts? How are you sourcing content that’s relevant to your customers? Tell us what steps you’re taking to engage with content.

@chasemcmichael
@infinigraph
sales@infinigraph.com

Pursuing the Content Sharers

2010-07-28T16:06:00.000-07:00

My first ADOTAS – Every day consumers are interacting with content — from location-based services to content creators to digital content sharing. Currently there are millions of highly motivated consumers sharing content daily.

The Content Consumption Graph (CCG) forms a social currency ecosystem based on how often and who shares content. This drive and desire to obtain a nugget of information and be the first to seed such an information discovery among ones followers/friends (give them something to talk about) is a major opportunity for brands to intelligently source and feed their feeds.

Content worthy of being shared is passed, retweeted (RT) or pushed in a Facebook stream as status updates or posts starting the conversation tsunami; however, brands are not taking advantage of this viral conversation. This highly desired sharing behavior is prompted by consumers using shared information to drive discovery within specific networks which is an amazing conduit for
brands.

Every brand has a set of prolific content sharers who are directly connected to the brand on many levels. These hyper-sharers may never mention or post directly on your brand, exposing a major flaw in keyword-based social monitoring platforms.

Mashups and infographs such as recently launched Facebook Stories are hot because they drive more sharing and conversation around the same set of topics. A great example of this CCG interaction was spawned from the Fast Company Influencer Project.

Here we show the interaction breakdown putting Amber Naslund at the very top of the CCG and other sites gaining less share reach.

Today’s brand managers face the challenge of what they should post to their audience versus just product update or special discount offers over and over. Social is not about force-feeding a one-way message, rather more about leading in information discovery.

Information about information - Seth Godin

2010-07-18T23:38:00.000-07:00

I had to put this up and full cred to Seth Godin http://bit.ly/a5uHNg

Information about information

The first revolution hit when people who made stuff started to discover that information was often as valuable as the stuff itself. Knowing where something was or how it performed or how it interacted with you can be worth more than the item itself.

Frito Lay dominates the snack business because of the information infrastructure they built on top of their delivery model. 7 Eleven in Japan dominated for a decade or more because they used information to change their inventory. Zara in Europe is an information business that happens to sell clothes.

You've probably already guessed what's now: information about information. That's what Facebook and Google and Bloomberg do for a living. They create a meta-layer, a world of information about the information itself.

And why is this so valuable? Because it compounds. A tiny head start in access to this information gives you a huge advantage in the stock market. Or in marketing. Or in fundraising.

Many people and organizations are contributing to this mass of data, but few are taking advantage of the opportunity to collate it and present it to people who desperately need it. Think about how much needs to be sorted, compared, updated and presented to people who want to choose or learn or trade on it.

The race to deliver this essential scalable asset isn't over, it's just beginning.

@chasemcmichael
@infinigraph

A/B Testing Social Media @ Social Media Marketing 2010

2010-07-12T08:45:00.000-07:00

A/B Testing in Social Media please see InfiniGraphs YouTube channel for the rest of the program.

In this clip I talk about what InfiniGraph is doing on the social graph and the great innovation we have coming out soon.

Full length is here

Social Media Marketing 2010 - A/B Testing for Social Media from InfiniGraph Chase McMichael on Vimeo.

@ChaseMcMichael
@infinigraph

A/B Testing for Social Media July 8th

2010-07-02T07:21:00.000-07:00

Exciting next week I will be speaking at #SSMSF A/B Testing for Social Media July 8th. Will be talking directly about how to drive and measure target traffice to your site while optimizing the content for increased relevance. Using Social Intelligence in this context is a big deal and will be our first showing of what we have been doing recently. Get over to Hotel Nikko starts at 9am.

Social Media Marketing 2010 - San Francisco - July 8th, 2010

A/B Testing for Social Media

Panelist: Hiten Shah ( @hnshah) – KISSmetrics, Dan Martell – FlowTown and Chase McMichael (@chasemcmichel) - @InfiniGraph

Overview: Over the past decade or more, A/B testing has proven an invaluable method of marketing testing to optimize landing pages, emails, ads, and text. Learn how to apply the A/B testing methodology to your marketing campaigns for increased social media engagement. Find out what the experts are currently using as engagement metrics, learn major pitfalls to avoid, and hear their take on everything from optimizing blog post lengths to optimizing websites for most searched keywords

Register with this link and use discount code: 10smmsf1 to save 10%

Come and join us in the conversation!

@chasemcmichael
@InfiniGraph

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Social Intelligence and Social CRM – a powerful combination

2010-06-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

Re-post from InfiniGraph blog

In our last blog we talked about Social Relevancy and the fact that your customer are connected and interacting with many brands and content types that all have to be considered when developing a strategy to engage and ignite your audience.

Social CRM (SCRM) is the new big buzz word for now, however, there is a great deal of definitions and interpretation to what SCRM really is (see Social CRM Pioneers). Several recent studies (link) on what a Facebook Fans “LIKER” is worth brings light to Social Media is serious business when it comes to the companies CRM strategy when your customers on Facebook are more valuable.

A fraction of your online customer base moves your brand or insight community interaction around your brand enabling social crowd sourcing. If the brand engages with right set of people the crowd wins. Social Intelligence is a key to understanding your audience and the best engagement points. The flaw in social listening or monitoring platforms is not all customers are talking about you. Being keyword base also poses another challenge in that what keywords your customer are using are not the obvious ones such as your brand name.

Customer interaction in the social web is one key mechanism to dive the crowd to participate. This quote from Seth Godin “you don’t manage your customers, your customers manage you” really sums up the truth about what the dynamics are between consumer to brand relationship in the social web.

Beyond understand your customers’ interaction with your brand and connecting the dots of your customers numerous social personas, accessing the Content Consumption Graph (CCG) becomes another critical step to harnessing intelligent crowd sourcing.

Enhance your knowledge of your customer by developing strong SocialCRM foundations;

· customer-controlled

· integrated

· interactive

· connected

· lifecycle-based

· value-focused

· community-driven

· cross-divisional

· marketing-driven

What does all this have to do with Social CRM and the relevant impact? The entire organization needs to socialize and optimize in order to affect decisions and earn relevance.

Social CRM takes a different view on your customer base to enable empowerment and crowd sourcing beyond traditional customer support and put it on its head.

1. Employees and Customers contribute to this echo system

2. Customers have reach and meaning in their own micro communities

3. User generated content like videos, blogs, reviews, forums etc all become the source of consumer ownership.

4. Customer Service becomes a central theme because customers have an amazing broadcast capability and the ones super connect can start a grown swell

5. Marketing is a function of service and who is being engaged is extremely important

Brands now have new opportunities for building customer relationships like never before and are 1 degree separated for a massive collective that operate in real-time. Understanding your customer and what motivates them is a key attribute to finding those who are moving your brand.

According to Solis, 'the ability to identify active communities of relevance, tracing influential people and channels, and the dissection of all phases of the process of decision making, all in real-time, are crucial aspects of social media marketing.”

Using Social Intelligence enables this Identification and involving these ‘influencers’ and communities. Linking a company CRM to interactive marketing actions are some of the core elements of an integrated, Social CRM solution. Interactive marketing, customer interactions based on real-time data, and customer actions should be linked with one and another. That’s the technical and tactical aspect: you communicate with the customer in a way that he wants to, based on the digital signals and ‘triggers’ they give you.

If we define influence as the ability to inspire action and measure the corresponding activity, the socialization of influence now expands beyond the strategies and software that organize and optimize customer relations and the management processes that govern it.

@infinigraph
@chasemcmichael
@stephaneosmont

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Ready for Social Relevancy & Facebook Open Graph?

2010-05-09T18:33:00.000-07:00

With all the hype over on Facebook launch of Like and Open Graph, it is time for me to highlight areas that marketers have to consider besides just dropping in a widget or a plug-in on their pages. Facebook has opened big opportunities in information discovery, consumer opt-in, expanding Social CRM (SCRM) and increasing Social Density around your brand. SCRM has now expanded beyond social listening and seeing your consumer overlaps with vertical products to a whole new level. Below is a great example of how to identify consumers that match other brand preferences and expand reach through loyalty.

With Open Graph, users now don't just become a "fan" of a brand, band, sport, or style of music. They will simply decide whether they "Like" something. By using the "Like" button or making a “comment” on a site, users automatically authorize Facebook to publish this information on their profiles or their friend's news feeds. Below are examples of categories listed in the Facebook Open Graph API. Plug-ins provided by Facebook allow the segmenting of friends who "Like" something by publisher.

Facebook Object types currently supported:

This provides much greater access to user information, but the majority of companies don’t really know what to do to enhance the social velocity of their brands. Since greater access carries greater responsibility in consumer privacy protection, brands must offer a level of transparency to assure integrity.

As of last check, Facebook has added nearly 300 website "Like" buttons per hour and now over 100K. Marketers are salivating over Facebook's 500+ million users but without a clear way to comprehend what is information is available and how to maximize their conversational presence. The publishers are organized by top level categories enabling network based content interaction across many publishers.

The vision here is to build a network of discovery tools and information that operates at a higher level than search. The goals are to answer questions for users. What are my friends doing? Where are they eating? What do they recommend? This clearly doesn’t eliminate the need for search, but it does represent an alternative way in which to discover information. For This will make it easier for marketing professionals, who will have yet another set of content connections to manage, to make sense of the new services.

The mountain of data that Facebook will gain is going to improve the site's search capabilities as well as integration of Bing. For example, if Facebook knows the most “Liked” Caribbean restaurants in Miami and my friends like these same restaurants, the site can show that information in my search results. This hypothetically makes Facebook search much more social, turning the site into more of a "recommendation engine” than Google in its current state.

This is all speculation for the moment. Since Facebook doesn’t have a really good search experience, it remains less useful than Google. However, it is possible to imagine much improved Bing integration combined with data and metadata gleaned from millions of profiles and “Likes” across the internet — making Facebook a more personal, more social and much better “discovery engine” than it is today.
This social discovery also applies to Brands and consumers sharing links about where they are or what they are Twittering about is a bonanza for smart marketers who want to be more in tuned to the audience they service.

Viral link sharing in the context of social density of who is sharing what provides a MUCH better discovery experience for Brands that want to understand their social ecosystem and the relationship between consumers who want to find people interested in the same topics. This radically different approach disrupts old ways of searching over a massive web-based indexes welded to link structure. By zeroing in on collective group movement, viral link sharing provides greater relevance to all parties. Twitter and Facebook reflect what’s resonating among the community affinity matrix right now.

I’m working on this real-time aspect of leveraging brand ranking and social preferences to understand social resonance and relevancy of a particular fan page and linked content that a key audience is collectively resonating around. We now have the ability to determine relevance of a page beyond the number of links it has.

Influencers are interacting with content and sharing links all the time. The Social Syndication Acceleration is based on the number of shared and the influence Rank of the person sharing the links. Google-style search is based on web links and document content where as real-time search is linked to what people are talking about now and provides radically different search results for users who are linked to brands/tribes.

Also see Trend: Social CRM Consolidation

@ChaseMcMichael

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The Future of Social Ad Targeting

2010-03-28T19:28:00.000-07:00

Facebook is by far the most user generated content rich sites when it comes to aggregating consumer’s preferences to real world products and services i.e. people fanning pages (1.5MM+ fan pages). The overall challenge with Social Ad Targeting is respecting consumer privacy and the fact that a great deal of social information is now public domain. Companies like MyLikes.com “Word of mouth advertising platform connecting advertisers with influencers Share your likes with friends, make money or donate it to charity” are using peoples “networks” like on Twitter to broadcast brand offers they get paid when others click. The big question is authenticity and will this increase relevance?

Now we’re seeing a fast move towards more audience targeting, where demographic, behavioral and contextual data are aggregated to create a unified view of a target audience. Social graph ad targeting is a way for marketers to target consumers based on who they're connected to within online social networks but its hard to see if these companies are really using the graph or just doing cookie based re-targeting as we talk about below.

The offline world has been doing this for years and has highly structured data trading processes where as the online marketing world is just starting to really trade in this valuable currency.

The consumer self selected information is becoming the nexus of this equation, however, with Facebook recent changes in its data use policy ad platforms that once got data from API / FB Connect sites are now or should be disconnected.

Special Provisions Applicable to Developers/Operators of Applications and Websites
2.6. You will not directly or indirectly transfer any data you receive from us to (or use such data in connection with) any ad network, ad exchange, data broker, or other advertising related toolset, even if a user consents to that transfer or use.

Analysis: This entirely new clause strongly suggests that some online advertising companies have been doing exactly what it says they shouldn’t be. This is unsurprising given that many online advertising companies have built their businesses on secretly buying and selling user data, however that data might have been gained, then using the information to do things like target ads. It’s not clear how Facebook can enforce their good behavior on its site, but the clause is a good first step to limiting abuse.

Using cookies and attaching those cookies to Personally Identifiable Information (PII) violates privacy laws created to protect consumer’s privacy, HOWEVER, brands, publisher sites and ad platforms have figured out that consumers check the box on the privacy policy and terms of use policy without reading anything opened up the door to PII and cookie. We’re seeing major players engaged at scale to improve ad targeting (re targeting) using data obtained from database marketing, social sites and other highly segmented data to improve ad efficiency. The NAI is pushing hard on policymakers from enacting tough online privacy rules recently released a new study showing that ads targeted based on users' prior Web-surfing behavior are more valuable than run-of-network ads.

"It's clear that behavioral targeting has the potential to significantly elevate the value of the inventory -- to the advertiser, to the publisher and to the network," says report author Howard Beales, a former head of consumer protection for the Federal Trade Commission.
The study is based on a survey of 12 ad networks -- all NAI members -- about their 2009 ad revenues. For the study, researchers surveyed 12 ad networks that belong to the NAI about their 2009 ad revenues. Beales reports that marketers paid average CPMs of $4.12 for behaviorally targeted ads, compared to $1.98 for run-of-network ads.

As of last week Facebook’s deputy general Michael Richter announced “ In the proposed privacy policy, we've also explained the possibility of working with some partner websites that we pre-approve to offer a more personalized experience at the moment you visit the site. In such instances, we would only introduce this feature with a small, select group of partners and we would also offer new controls.” In other words, partners are going to use social targeting and leveraging your graph to increase Facebook and their monetization.
The off-site and in game opportunity is enormous using consumer data to increase ad relevance. Using social data to improve ad efficiency is not new concept and a recent study by Razorfish shows that those who fan have 3 fundamental elements; Love of the Brand, Exclusive Deals/Offers and Service/Support

This is the year were more companies will push the boundaries of the social graph to increase sharing, conversation and click through probability. With all good things there will be the bad apples abusing consumers. We hope that targeting will reduce the visual spam were getting now and add continuous value.

Chase
@ChaseMcMichael

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Facebook / Twitter Stats Show Buyers are Followers

2010-03-08T13:01:00.001-08:00

A new study from Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies found that consumers are 67% more likely to buy from the brands they follow on Twitter, and 51% more likely to buy from a brand they follow on Facebook. Moreover, they’re 79% more likely to recommend their Twitter follows to a friend, and 60% more likely to do the same on Facebook:

This was obtained from The Retail Advertising and Marketing Association, a division of National Retail Federation, released new research at NRF’s Retail Innovation & Marketing Conference on the habits of social media users. They are comparing social media users to the average U.S. adult, which is to say is the SM user different or desires more media stimulation. The survey looks at the differences in demographics for each group, including male and female usage as well as age differences in social media users compared to other adults. I like to compare these results to what the Fortune 100 is doing with social media and see the overlap.

•Seven out of 10 social media users between the ages of 18-34 regularly use Facebook more than other sites such as MySpace, Twitter and Classmates
•71.8 percent of social media users say that after an online search, they communicate with others about a product or service with face-to-face communication
•More people who use social media prefer to give advice about a product or service rather than receive it
•Social media users are more likely to use other new media compared to adults 18+
•70.6 percent of female social media users regularly use Facebook, compared to 61.0 percent of males
•More men than women prefer to communicate with others via a cell phone conversation after searching for a product or service online

Above came from "The Global Social Media Check-up" Insights from the Burson-Marsteller Evidence-Based Communications

This is very supportive to my position that social analysis is a key element to any social strategy, however, the only problem is there is not one single solution making it more difficult to do quantitative measurement. Here is The top 4 things all business must consider when launching their social presence.

1. Monitor Your Own — And Competitors — Social Media Presence.
Ton of social listening product only problem is who are you listening to. If you don't identify who is connected to you and who are you customers you will find fast that you can get overwhelmed with the flood of data. The key is WHO has the reach to your audience that matters.

2. Get Top Management “Buy In.”
This is so important and the big question is who in your company at the management level really uses say Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin. You will find there use of the technology many not be the same as your consumer or the brands social equity value to a consumer.

3. Develop a Social Media Strategy.
If the plan is to set up a fan page and twitter but not to feed it and co opt in people in the organization or find and grow social brand evangelism for a long term objective the results will case number 2 above to fade. People in the organization need to be involved and own this not just your agency with the next big idea.

4. Define and Publish a Social Media Policy.
I have done many corporate social analysis and found major bloggees and ultra connectors in companies that are not being valued at all. These people and the entire employee base is a HUGE asset to the social media equation. The number of people in a company that are connected to friends ie your customers most likely is massive. If you don't provide guidance and how to leverage this base the base will do it for you.

I'm still working on the next post regarding industry penetration based on type for Facebook.

Chase

Moms and Social Marketing 2010

2010-01-28T09:03:00.000-08:00

Over the past year I have been observing my wife and the use of social media. It's been amazing what I have found out and her overall behavior around social brand interaction. The Mom Marketing BIGresearch, 2009 did a great job highlighting things I was able to directly observe. Here is a great verification to what I observed.

According to a Retail Advertising and Marketing Association survey conducted by BIGresearch, women with children at home are more likely to use Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter than average adults. Additionally, 15.3% maintain their own blog.

Mike Gatti, Executive Director for RAMA, suggests that "... retailers who aren't engaging customers through social media could be missing the boat... the web provides efficient, convenient ways for brands to stay in front of their most loyal shoppers and attract new ones."

On a scale of one to five, when asked what types of promotions most influence their purchases, product samples in the store, product samples delivered to home, loyalty cards, and special displays rank as moms' favorites, says the report.

32.9% of Moms prefer department stores and 23.2% head to specialty apparel stores when shopping for clothes for themselves. Shopping for their children's clothes, 30.7% say they head to discount stores, 19.6% say department stores and 17.5% prefer specialty apparel stores. 45% of Moms also most prefer discounters the most for their children's toys and for their own personal health and beauty products.

When it comes to the traditional media preferences, the Food Network and the Discovery Channel are the top cable TV picks, People and Cosmopolitan are the most-preferred magazines, and the daily local and weekly community newspapers are at the top of the list of most-read.

Though individual comments don't constitute a comprehensive study, they are valuable in considering the marketing message. When asked what advertisers on Facebook should do that they aren't currently doing, moms say:
• "Provide exclusive offers (i.e., printable coupons, etc.). Exclusive offers would entice me to respond to the message (not just read/glance at [it]), and I might look them up on Facebook and become a fan."
• "[Be] more interactive. Starbucks is a good example - they just had a Facebook campaign where you could send a coupon for a free Starbucks ice cream to a friend on Facebook."
• "Offer samples."
• "Certificates or coupons for freebies or special discount offers. I always print those and use them."
• "Coupons/discounts for family places [such as] restaurants or coupons for grocery stores."
• "[Be] a little more targeted with online store specials."
• "Just talk to us. Direct us to Twitter or a blog where we can talk back. It's too complicated to carry on a conversation on Facebook. Make it easy for us."
• "I'd like to be able to comment on something they post without being alerted every time someone else makes a post. Sometimes that becomes distracting."
• "Provide something that would actually help me, not just market their product."
• "I like being a fan and following the products/companies that I choose to follow. It makes me feel like I can make the choice of what advertisements I am willing to pay attention to. Advertisers need to move toward fan pages and away from the sidebar ads. Running the occasional contest is always fun!"

For more depth on the report check out http://www.nrf.com/modules.php?name=News&op=viewlive&sp_id=786

Chase McMichael
@ChaseUNBOUND

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Brand Growth on Facebook Part 2 Year End Addition

2010-01-02T09:29:00.000-08:00

“Twenty Ten” is being called the year of social driving ROI and measurement. The year 2009 held a great deal of social experimentation with wins for Dell, BestBuy and Target all pushing exclusive discounts to their Facebook ”fans” or Twitter “followers”. (unlike calling them “buddies” in the day of instant messaging). This is UNBOUND’s 2nd series of Brand Growth on Facebook year end addition. For any marketer the truth be told that your customers online, 20% of the clickers on the internet make up 80% of the buyers. These numbers have been kicked around for some time. In a recent Forester article saying “Social Marketing will go from ‘cool’ in 2009 to ‘strategic’ in 2010” and I fully agree.

Now with social network, the ability to instantaneous broadcast to your “friends” on what you fan or tweeting out a recent discovered discount or good experience with a retailer is most likely the biggest game changer for marketers to not only harness but better understand their consumers over all passion points and product preferences. In this blog post we have compiled the Top Fan page categories based on what we call Top Brands. Top Brands are those that have links to a known brand or the actual brand themselves maintain. There are over 1.4 Million fan pages on Facebook making a very long tail where in this post we have segmented out the top 100,000 and organized them to see how the leaders in their categories are mastering the social graph. For their competitors, 2010 will be a game of catch up inserting themselves into the Social Conversation. Brands start taking advantage of social graphs. If the late '00s were the era of the social network, the early '10s will see the rise of the "social graph" -- the network of you, your friends, and the friends of your friends.

On Facebook fan pages can be set with a type such as:

In the past year Facebook has greatly diversified brand sub types adding in Fashion, Other Business, Sports / Athletics. UNBOUND has done an extensive amount of cleaning the data since fan pages are user generated. We will show the “Other” category we created to assist in organizing consumer affinities.

All major brands have an Industry Type SIC Code and we have also assigned SIC codes to fan pages to enable vertical industry segmentation. From the top listings it's now each to see what industry types dominates Facebook.

Here we have highlighted the Top Ten winners for specific categories.
Games is the smallest category, however, has some of the largest fanning on Facebook.

Tapping into consumers' entertainment preferences such as TV shows and their relation to other products, services provides a brand the most comprehensive foundation for performing large scale consumer affinity analysis. By ranking these affinities aligned with the categories we reviewed here creates an in-depth consumer insight of your community as it grows.

Brand now have the ability to not only see the direct consumer reach (friend of friend) their fan base has but also the collective top affinities organized to build ultra high viral campaigns using Social Network Intelligence. (If you guessed the above affinity map links with a female consumer product you would be right)

Consumers have created over a million Facebook fan pages since Facebook opened up the fan page creation. Below is just a sample of what we call miss typed fan pages whereby the Fan page Admin selected a type. UNBOUND has taken great care in typing these into the “Other” category to produce clean affinity maps. However, this information is great value for many marketers using these Other types.

The amazing aspect of analyzing UGC Fan pages is seeing that a large set of consumers are sleep deprived, want more leisure time and desire laughter in their life.

In conclusion…… well maybe there’s not a conclusion just a big wake up call for the brands that have yet to realize social is not just some check box or insertion order but a viable way to tip the balance of getting to the hearts and minds of loyal customers making them super fans or brand beacons.

Twenty Ten will be the year brands demand better social analysis and measurement as more dollars are shifted in this not so “New Media” channel. Brands have to understand their social graphs, who are their top rank consumers, who have blogs, who is on twitter and how many of their customers are on what social networks to start maximizing their social asset.

Callan Green Killer Facebook Fan Pages: 5 Inspiring Case Studies did a great job highlighting some examples that will inspire you.

Chase McMichael @ChaseUNBOUND

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Brands start taking advantage of social graphs.

2009-12-30T08:57:00.000-08:00

I got this off of Ad Age today and added in a few things.
Brands start taking advantage of social graphs.
If the late '00s were the era of the social network, the early '10s will see the rise of the "social graph" -- the network of you, your friends, and the friends of your friends.

There is going to be a play here for using consumers presence with Instant Messaging and the use of realtime as well .

Everyone has a social graph. In fact, the point of social networking has been to build one. We will now see services like Facebook and Google start to use social graph data more aggressively as we move away from the "destination web" towards a "social web" whereby people get information through their networks rather than a specific site. Facebook's new "reconnect with" feature is one implementation of social graph data.

The social graph needs two kinds of tool to work. At the service end, it needs algorithms -- the formula that use your graph to determine what information and connections you value most, which allows services to predict what information you're going to like (including, of course, which products and marketing communications you'll appreciate). At the user end, it needs filters -- the ability to group people and information more effectively to get the most out of a network. The effectiveness of both algorithms and filters are improving rapidly, and these will be a big factor in the continued evolution of social media.

In 2010 there will be a heightened need for brands to understand how to be more social in order to access these more segmented networks. There's increasing evidence that the ROI of social media is definitely worth the effort.

In my next post will talk to some of the above approaches in Social Brand Growth Part II.

2010 social intelligence and e-mail marketing trends

2009-12-15T19:43:00.000-08:00

2010 looks to be a big year for marketing plan integrating social intelligence to drive lead generation and rethinking their spend on how to leverage social targeting and email marketing combination.

Karen J. Bannan “Looking ahead: 2010 e-mail marketing trends” references leader StrongMail in the “2010 Marketing Trends Survey” indicates 89% of respondents plan to increase or maintain marketing spend in email marketing and social media budgets in the New Year. Of the 1,000 global business leaders found that the positive outlook is supported by 50% of polled businesses that expect their customers to spend more in 2010, and nearly a quarter more that expect them to spend the same. Only 8% of businesses expect their customers to spend less.
Email and social media marketing are the two leading areas of investment at 69% and 59% respectively.

(Thanks for the blug Kristin)

They will do so using several strategies, said Kristin Hersant, StrongMail’s director of corporate marketing. “We see marketers getting a lot more sophisticated, leveraging the viral aspect of the Web,” she said. “For example, using targeted segmentation to create a referral program with their top influencers, who they know are most active with their brand.”

Hersant said tools are finally coming to the market that will help marketers tease out the most active users on their lists by examining engagement metrics. Companies such as UNBOUND Technologies . can scrub those lists to determine which recipients are active in the social networking world and the networks they are on.

Among their goals, marketers reported a desire to increase relevancy by adopting segmentation and targeting, cited by 46% of respondents.

With social media marketing a clear focus for businesses, Respondents identified the top three benefits of social media marketing as:
• Awareness building (64%)
• Customer loyalty and retention (49%)
• Expanded reach (46%)
Bill Wagner, executive vice president of business operations at StrongMail, notes that “… this survey reveals a strong focus on high ROI channels like email and emerging ones like social media… (with) an unprecedented number of companies look to integrate email and social media in 2010…”

Reported survey highlights include:

89% of businesses plan to increase or maintain marketing spend in 2010

50% of businesses expect customers to spend more; 23% to spend about the same; 8% to spend less

69% of businesses plan to increase marketing budget for email; 59% social media; 42% search

69% of businesses plan to integrate email and social media in 2010

64% of businesses identify increasing awareness as the primary value for social media

The key here is you need to have a clear understanding of your consumers’ passion points, where they are interacting and your possible influencers. 2010 is a big year for Social Intelligence and Social Consumer Insight making email the quick hit for marketers in the new year.

Chase McMichael

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Incorporate Social Network Intelligence in your Marketing Strategy and Win!

2009-11-21T07:16:00.000-08:00

Posting the presentation at AdTech NY 09:
Social networks are about conversations. Effective social marketing is about having those conversations with the right people. At this session UNBOUND Technologies Chase McMichael and Room 214’s James Clark will demonstrate a case history of the Travel Channel to show how they used Social Network Intelligence to identify, target, and analyze customers across the social graph and then tapped into their passion points. Hear how to create and nurture highly targeted marketing conversations that impact not just individuals, but influence entire online communities.

Results in 6 Months

* Social Media Traffic Drivers

o Facebook Top 10 Referring Source

* Fan Base

o 375,000 Community Members

o 1.8 Million Kidnap! Users

* Fan Base

o 375,000 Community Members

o 1.8 Million Kidnap! App Users

o 350,000 Uniques to “I Have The Bug”

o 81,000 Hungry for More App Users

o Over 40,000 online conversations about Travel Channel

o 80% Positive Sentiment

o 150 – 1,500 Live Chat Participants

Ad Tech UNBOUND Room214 11 2 09

View more presentations from Chase McMichael.

Interested in getting results like this? Contact us and will show you at sales@unboundtech.com or call 888 377 1264

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Social Brand Growth: Part 1

2009-10-17T10:14:00.000-07:00

I have worked up a 3 part series on Social Brand Growth. Enabling database marketing companies the ability to truly appeal to the customers with relevance and communicate with your audience through social intelligence.

Social networks have changed the dynamic between businesses and consumers from two-dimensional to multi-dimensional. This shift occurred because social networks have allowed brands to become active listeners and participants in broader conversations that consumers with common affinities.

Going beyond antiquated marketing campaigns to create true, meaningful social interactions with consumers is not an easy task. Regardless of whether companies decide to outsource their social network efforts or manage those efforts in-house, UNBOUND Technologies' SNI (Social Network Intelligence) technology platform is a fundamental step that will enable data base marketing companies, email service providers and any marketing or sales organization to take full advantage of these rapidly emerging opportunities in social media.

The Growth of Social Networks

As most already know, a social networking friend is anyone who associates with another user. A friend can be a close acquaintance or a stranger, with whom the user shares some affinity, including jobs, music, movies, television or fashion. Social networks have experienced significant growth in recent years. 48 percent of American adults have either a MySpace or Facebook page. (1) 16 percent of these adults update their page at least once a day. (2) 74 percent of online users from 18 to 34 years of age have a Facebook or Myspace page.(3) MySpace brought social networking into the mainstream but it has been surpassed by Facebook. As of 2009, 19 percent of Google's unique visitors are referred by Facebook. (4) This suggests that Facebook may actually overtake Google in terms of number of unique visitors between 2011 and 2012. (5)

MySpace was the first social network to allow companies to create fan pages that users can join as friends. MySpace fan pages are not cheap: prices start at close to $100,000. Facebook followed suit, albeit with its own spin, offering both free fan pages and fee-based fan pages that can attract a significant amount of followers. For example, the Facebook fan page for actor Vin Diesel grew to 3.8 million followers in just a few months. In comparison, Coca Cola's Facebook fan page has 3.4 million fans. Facebook now boast more than a million fan pages with over 60 thousand that are consider top page having a /brandname over just a name and id.
Now Twitter houses massive consumer brand affinity , whereby, consumers “Follow” a brand Twitter feed and every major brand you can think of has a Facebook Fan page. What does this all mean?

For starters is creating a wealth of Social Intelligence never before seen enabling marketers to be smarter than ever before. The ability to truly understand their direct consumers as well as friends of their consumers and possible influencer is a major game changer in conversation induced marketing.

Marketers tapping into their social conversation is priority number one and reaching the right audience and affective composition is a driving force of these brand page going main stream. Utilizing UNBOUND's SNI platform enable the visualization of paid brand fan pages on Facebook.

As the chart illustrates, the growth of companies using the /brandname URL grew from 805 to 3301 from December 2008 to June 2009. Figure 2 provides a detailed breakdown of the friend growth of popular brand fan pages from December 2008 to April 2009. Now with Facebook opening up to any page owner that has over 5000 fans and had a page for over a year this has grown to an impressive 67K brand pages.

1. http://www.kenradio.com/content/view/1861/1/
2. http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/pubs/Harris_Poll_2009_04_16.pdf
3. http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=91395307068
4. http://www.businessinsider.com/henry-blodget-facebook-could-kill-google-analyst-2009-3?mtcCampaign=7662
5. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/09/compete-facebook-us-traffic-nearing-google-yahoo/

Over a Billion Affinity Connections and Counting

2009-10-04T08:39:00.000-07:00

UNBOUND has reached a major mile stone going way beyond friend counts and general psychographics. Unbound has established unparalleled access to consumer brand affinities through the largest consumer brand insight database; which is available to brands, marketing professionals, researchers, and database marketing companies. Combining the four major social networks, UNBOUND leveraged the power of direct brand connections to your consumers by creating a 1 billion consumer brand segmentation linking to over 20 thousand major brands and over 1.4 million consumer generate vertical brand pages.

By using UNBOUND’s proprietary friend proximity algorithm, though the wealth of known affinities, UNBOUND has taken the community insight and social intelligence to the next level.Using brand affinity clusters provide large scale pin pointing of influencers; igniting consumer conversation where it matters the most. Come see the power at Ad:Tech NY Nov 4,5 - booth 2146

STARTING A BRAND CONVERSATION WITH AFFINITY-BASED MARKETING

2009-06-24T08:34:00.000-07:00

STARTING A BRAND CONVERSATION WITH AFFINITY-BASED MARKETING

A. WHAT IS AFFINITY-BASED MARKETING?
Affinity-based marketing brings together merchants and consumers by identifying and communicating with “influencers” in consumer’s social networks. Consumers have brand affinities based on either a particular product’s identification as a status symbol or common “feel good purchases.” Consumers on social networks connect to brand-based groups and pages, as well as fan pages for musicians, films, and other content. Consumers who link themselves to brands can serve as possible brand advocates. The interaction with the influencer creates an association that links brands to large-scale social networking communities, thus generating ongoing sales revenue.

B. BUILDING AN AFFINITY-MARKETING SYSTEM
Three major components interact to form any powerful affinity-based marketing system: consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketing, business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing, and network-to-network (N2N) marketing.

1. CONSUMER-TO-CONSUMER (CNC) MARKETING

a. CONSUMERS
Most consumers do not save or “bookmark” the websites of major brands. The reality is that social network profiles are the most frequent destinations for users. As a result, sites such as iGoogle, My Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL are all fighting to become the user’s home page. This means that traditional internet marketing is becoming less effective. There is only so much screen real estate for banner ads. Search keyword marketing is also becoming less useful. Businesses are competing for the same key words, which makes it less effective and more expensive than in the past.

The strongest alternative to banners and keyword advertising is word-of-mouth marketing. Taking advantage of the viral nature of consumer conversations has always been the best way for brands to obtain both public mind share and market share. Affinity marketing is word-of-mouth marketing for the Internet age. It combines traditional word-of-mouth marketing approaches with the quantifiable reach of the Internet to build a stronger, more substantial connection with the target audience.

b. INFLUENCERS

A growing body of research is establishing that certain people have more influence than others on the purchase decisions of friends, family and associates. Brands ranging from the largest to the smallest need to understand that knowing who their potential customer’s influencers are and how to tap into their networks can be the deciding factor for a product’s acceptance.

Influencers can be categorized into a few different types. First, celebrities can be influencers. These people may include sports figures (e.g., professional or Olympic athletes), musicians, politicians, actors, and entertainers of all types. Another type of influencer is the person who has a closer connection with friends and family. These are people who have a direct relationship with an individual and are connected within their social circle. Regardless of the specific type of influencer, brands must both identify with these individuals and incentivize them to talk about their products or services. Thus when marketers purchase web advertising, they are not only communicating to their prospective customers, they are also advertising by proxy to the friends, colleagues, and family members of influencers.

c. WORD-OF-MOUTH MARKETING AND WIDGETS

In the face of the dwindling effectiveness of banners and keywords, widgets are an essential component to word-of-mouth advertising over the Internet. Most significantly, widgets can go “viral” when injected into social networks, and through the use of influencers, a widget can carry a brand’s message further more people than ever before.

d. THE MOMENTUM EFFECT

The C2C value of affinity-based marketing comes from seeing the brand represented within one’s social network. The proliferation of a company’s brand through a social network allows the creation of a momentum effect: the active participation of consumers in communicating personal stories that use a brand, product, song or film as the reference point. The benefits of the momentum effect are significant. Research conducted by Yahoo! found that influencers or advocates have a 2:1 conversion impact across categories. This means that each single sale to an influencer converts two people to the same product. Influencers also tend to embrace consumer-generated media more than their peers, often to an online retailers' advantage. Customers benefit by gaining access to quality goods and services, usually at a discount, while supporting the association or group of their choice.

2. BUSINESS-TO-CONSUMER (B2C) MARKETING

Affinity-based marketing leverages the momentum effect C2C interaction to develop a B2C value creation model. Thus, the measurement of value isn’t just a message sent from a business to a consumer; the measure is the impact the message has on the consumer who receives it. The initial communication is B2C but the message takes on a life of its own as consumers use it, forward it and share it amongst themselves. Thus, social networking becomes part of the product experience, and the value of social networking extends to increase in advocacy and loyalty. Impact repeats as pass along continues. Each interaction is an impression.

3. NETWORK-TO-NETWORK (N2N) MARKETING

By far the most important step for any brand is to establish a N2N presence based on consumer registration. The latest web technologies have created a unique opportunity to truly engage an audience and build a presence where consumer’s friends give brands the power to create syndication networks within networks. Corporations have collected consumer emails from a variety of points such as newsletter signups, product registration and contests. The main problem with consumer email lists is that they are only as good as the collected information. A corporate email list is a treasure trove once these emails are mapped directly to a person’s social presence. Emails lists are valuable assets if they are intelligently segmented based on social demographics, social connections and matched affinities. Companies may create widgets to initiate B2C communications. Users may then share these widgets in C2C interactions. Consumers are demanding more interactivity and a richer media experience on the Internet, thus requiring data-driven C2C interactions. The N2N approach provides a real collaborative hub that empowers companies with the ability to connect and understand its customers.

C. UNBOUND’S AFFINITY-BASED MARKETING SOLUTION IS SUPERIOR TO TARGETED MARKETING

1. SOCIAL MAPPING TECHNOLOGY

For companies interested in reaching consumers, including influencers, the single most important question: where are consumers gathering and who are they connected to? UnBound’s affinity-based marketing platform, which builds upon the previously mentioned concepts, provides the answer.

First, UnBound has developed affinity maps, which are data sets identifying large numbers of social connections. This is achieved by grouping individuals in a social network who have allied themselves with a brand. Second, UnBound has created the first algorithm that enables social ranking based on social connections, thus allow companies to identify influencers.

This algorithm creates social density maps. The creation of a social density map is a multi-step process. It begins with a consumer’s micro-graph, which details a person’s direct connections to other people, places, things, and other affinities. Through the analysis of a large set of these micro-graphs, a macro-graph is created based on second degree connections. By monitoring the social density linked to the most popular key categories, one can determine possible influencers: people that are the most connected to others in a particular social network. Social density mapping can be combined with cross-affinity maps to create very powerful view into the make up of user communities.

2. UNBOUND’S ULTIMATE ADVANTAGE

Brands that have a clear understanding of their consumer’s connections, affinity and social density have the unique opportunity to start a conversation with their key social influencers. UnBound’s technology platform provides the only available tools to analyze social density through consumer affinity maps. The competitive advantage provided by this toolset is essential in developing a truly sustainable social campaign. Established brands that have the insight to collect email from newsletter options, contests, consumer registration and ecommerce sites can both see where their customers are on the social graph and find which existing customers are social influencers. Brands can then target conversation starters.

Social Influence Marketing, the Portable Social Graph and Friendsters

2009-06-17T07:55:00.000-07:00

Thank you Susan and Shiv this was a great pod cast and the blugs were cool for UNBOUND.

http://personallifemedia.com/podcasts/232-dishymix/episodes/42919-shiv-singh-razorfish-social-influe

Episode 103: Shiv Singh, Razorfish on the Social Influence Marketing, the Portable Social Graph and Friendsters

Shiv Singh is VP, Social Media and Global Strategic Initiatives at Razorfish, one of the top digital agencies in the world. In perfect alignment, he also holds an MSc (Research) from the London School of Economics and Political Science on social network theory. And he’s writing, “Social Influence Marketing for Dummies.” Dude knows of what he speaks...

Suz and Shiv discuss four of the top "Trends in Social Influence Marketing" from the insightful and masterful Razorfish "Digital Outlook 2009" report:

1. The Focus Will Shift to Influencers
2. Social Advertising Will Grow Up
3. The Portable Social Graph Will Fuel Marketing Innovation
4. Not Just Friends, but "Friendsters," Will Start to Matter

Shiv breaks down his thoughts about where the three categories of Social Influence Marketing are going - listening, advertising and participation. Shiv's favorites are companies doing Appvertising, like ContextOptional, BuddyMedia and SocialMedia.com and companies doing social graph analysis like Media6Degrees and Unbound Technologies.

Unbound Technology's ability to cluster social graphs by kinds of products, services, public figures and media they "fan" on Facebook (called Affinity Maps) is giving marketers a distinct advantage in gaining insight into clustered preferences. Suz shares some of the key affinities in her map on the show.

If you are interested in tracking the most cutting edge thought about where marketers are taking the social media opportunity, this show will delight and educate you.

Click now to listen!

2009-05-30T08:43:00.000-07:00

This is hot "businesses have to be thinking about how to incorporate the social map into the way they deal with customers and prospects. "This is going to be huge," " I agree :)

How Social Nets are Changing Advertising
BusinessWeek
Fresh questions are being asked about Facebook's ability to monetize following the huge $200 million cash injection secured earlier this week with Russian firm Digital Sky Technologies. A $10 billion valuation is a lot to live up to, after all. Meanwhile, the argument still goes that people go to Facebook to socialize, not hunt for products.

BusinessWeek's Jonathan L. Yarmis thinks that that argument misses the point; he thinks the focus should be more on how Facebook and other social networks are changing advertising. "I'm loath to affix the 2.0 moniker to yet another phrase, but if ever an industry needed to be 2.0-ized, it's advertising," Yarmis says.

"The good news is that we're on the verge of a major rethinking of advertising's fundamental premises," he says, noting that one of the biggest challenges facing the industry is ad credibility. Consumers don't trust ads, but they do trust their friends, and telling friends about the products they use has never been so easy. As Yarmis says, through social nets, "credibility now has a channel for mass distribution."

He adds that businesses have to be thinking about how to incorporate the social map into the way they deal with customers and prospects. "This is going to be huge," he says, "and the opportunities are immediate." - Read the whole story...

2009-05-24T11:55:00.000-07:00

Where are the Users of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter

This is from Kenradio I know about the Harris Poll and agree with the 48% of internet users ie 250 myspace and 210 facebook but there is a ton of dups and non users that don't come back We are on track to find the real answers with the cross map so will see.

51% of Americans do not use Twitter or have a MySpace or Facebook account. 48% of adults have either a MySpace or Facebook page, with 16% of adults updating their page at least once a day. While the media may have found Twitter, only 5% of Americans are currently using it, according to a Harris Poll. There are some substantial differences in who is and who isn't using these social networking sites, says the report:

I think for Twitter the realiaty is a great deal don't know how to use it so to say that the % is coming back to still use that's another question we are working on to have on twitter cross tabing.

* 74% of those aged 18-34 years old have a Facebook or MySpace account but this quickly drops off the older one gets. Only 24% of those 55 and older have an account

* 8% of 18-34 year olds use Twitter, 7% of those 35-44 use it, 4% of those aged 45-54 and just 1% of those 55 and older

* Men and women use Twitter at the same levels (5% each), but women are more likely to have a Facebook or MySpace account (52% versus 45%)

From our SN Analysis this is spot on

* Two in five people with a high school degree or less have a Facebook or MySpace account compared to 55% of those with some college and 52% of those with at least a college degree

There has been some discussion about whether these social networking sites may, at some point, become a threat to search engines such as Yahoo! or Google. Right now, that doesn't seem to be an issue, as 45% of adults believe the sites are popular, but they won't pose a real threat to the domination of search sites while just one in ten say they may become a threat. 46% of Americans are not at all sure. Even among the largest users of the social networking sites, 18-34 year olds, 62% say they will not become a real threat to the search engines.

While the younger age groups are all about the social network sites, they haven't yet migrated to Twitter. The report concludes that if they had found it before the media had, there is a stronger possibility they would be increasing their usage, but they may already be looking for the next big thing.

We are in the mist of getting more data to back these numbers based on cross tabbing facebook to twitter to linkedin to myspace so stay tuned
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2009-05-18T11:52:00.000-07:00

Why Online Video Ads Still Don’t Work

http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20090515/why-online-video-ads-still-dont-work/?reflink=ATD_wsj_quotes#mod=djemTECH