Does this mean social media in business has hit the skids? Let’s take a closer look at what’s happening.

The details are part of a longitudinal study of corporate use of social media by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. The first results of this research were released in 2007 where it was shown that 8% of Fortune 500 companies were blogging compared to 19% of the Inc. 500. The numbers increased over the years with 2010 data showing that 23% of Fortune 500 blogged vs about half of the Inc. 500.

In the 2011 study, the numbers were down: 37% of the Inc. 500 (34% responded to the survey) maintained corporate blogs vs a steady 23% of the Fortune 500.

Which types of social media does your company currently use?

But what does this really mean? Fortune 500 companies are showing the same percentage of blog use.

Growth in blogging, Inc 500 vs Fortune 500

Why do they continue to blog at the same pace? Because it’s working. According to eMarketer, 53% of Internet users will read blogs this year.

53.5% of Internet Users Will Read Blogs This Year

Corroborating the forecast, the Center for Market Research found the same thing. 92% of the Inc 500 said blogging has been successful.

If you have been using social media, have they been successful?

Well, that’s strange. An overwhelming number say blogging has been successful, but use trended down this year. Why? I have a few thoughts.

1. Blogging is hard work. Well, blogging the right way is hard. Producing insightful and useful blog posts requires research, expertise, and a lot of thought. Taking the easy way out and blogging about any inane but slightly related topic is easy.

HubSpot, for instance, found this out when they started a manufacturing blog to increase their presence in search engines…like they advise their clients. (We advise blogging as well, but the customer should come first when you blog. Search engine rankings are an added bonus.) Unfortunately, HubSpot was all over the place on topics: lean manufacturing, safety footwear, John Deere, tin manufacturing, ceramic bearings. Who’s going to be interested in a lightweight overview of random manufacturing news? No manufacturer that I know. Not surprisingly, the last post on the blog as of today was July 19, 2011. At least they realized it wasn’t the right approach and turned their efforts elsewhere.

2. Inc 500 companies are on a hell-bent growth curve. This is great news! We love to see companies innovate and, as a result, rise to new heights. But that means they have to make some very hard choices about how to use their resources. Did I mention that good blogging is hard? I’d rather see them spend time Tweeting and interacting on LinkedIn, which almost half Inc 500 are doing (see above, and successfully, see below), then jump in and blog half-heartedly. The more bad corporate blogs out there, the more readers are going to be discouraged and stop reading.

If you have been using social media have they been successful?

Here is an example of a good corporate blog. For those of you who know Telesian, you know we have great respect for the work Jim Cahill of Emerson Process Experts is doing. Jim is focused on process control and does a deep dive into relevant technologies and markets, such as continuous process verification, advanced biofuels, and Fieldbus. Occasionally his internal marketer overcomes his internal engineer and he comes up with titles like, “Achieving Potash-stic Results.” Emerson Process Experts is an example of one of those 23% of Fortune 500 companies who continue to blog. Why? Because it works. Jim attests to the fact they they see millions of dollars in opportunities based on the interactions via the blog.

I’ll end with a link to a little data from eMarketer on what makes a good corporate blog. Note: comments won’t happen as often in the B2B world, but that doesn’t mean the blog posts aren’t being read. Check your blog analytics report so you know what’s working and what’s not.

Attributes that make a great corporate blog

Let’s start with “bricklet.” These are customizable chunks of web content, usually set off in a box or other such enclosure. They may contain an ad or a piece of content that you want to break apart, with the hope of emphasizing its contents for faster recognition.

But here’s the big question. What actually gets people’s attention faster?

According to Djamasbi and colleagues, “Visual hierarchy is a cognitive approach to user-centered design. In practice, web pages with a strong visual hierarchy will have contrasting perceptual elements of varying visual importance. Without the variation in emphasis, Tufte states, ‘nothing is emphasized; the design will be noisy, cluttered, and informationally flat.’ By creating a visual hierarchy, companies can naturally guide users in viewing their web pages in an effective and meaningful way.”

But what form should this emphasis take? This study tested size, graphics, color, and location with users ranging from age 23 to 60.

We assume a LARGER SIZE area will attract attention faster than a smaller size. The eye-tracking study showed that doesn’t seem to make much difference, even with a bricklet that’s twice as large.

We assume a bricklet containing a GRAPHIC will attract attention faster than one without. The study showed a tiny increase in noticeability, but it’s not clear how significant that difference is. This study may have not differentiated the two ads clearly enough, as I consider the green box with $500 to be a graphical element as much as the actual graph. More research required here.

We assume CONTRASTING BACKGROUNDS will attract attention faster than areas without a contrasting background. This one is interesting because we have to take into account “banner blindness” before we got any further.

What is banner blindness? As banners have become more prevalent, mostly for advertising, site visitors have learned to ignore those parts of a site that look like colorful ads. We see this in the advertising work we do for clients. Graphic display banners are not a good lead generation device. They can be used to support your branding efforts, but there are better ways to generate leads online.

Back to contrasting backgrounds. The research showed that background color made a BIG difference in viewing time. The backgrounds WITHOUT contrasting colors were much more quickly noticed. If you stop and think about it, it’s not that surprising. Advertisers have always tried to find ways to make their messages look more like editorial content. Same principle applies here.

Lastly, the study looked at LOCATION. We assume content on left hand side of a page is noticed faster than on the right side in Western countries where we read left to right. Turns out, location doesn’t seem to make any difference.

Download the full research report from Dr. Soussan Djamasbi at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, “Designing Noticeable Bricklets by Tracking Users’ Eye Movements.”

This week, the questions all relate to search and mobile marketing. These are complex topics; if anyone tells you either are easy, they’re lying or they don’t know what they’re doing. It’s incredibly easy to waste a lot of money on pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, search optimization of web sites, and mobile marketing.

Today let’s focus on Blogsvertise as this is a sink hole for technology marketers. (No, I’m not going to link to it to give it any inbound link points; it doesn’t deserve them.) This site has a dual purpose:

(1) They pay bloggers to blog about advertisers’ products and services, and to run PPC ads from same on their blogs.

(2) They take money from advertisers who want their products blogged about to raise their search rankings, and/or who want to run PPC ads on blogs.

If this sets off your warning bells, there’s good reason. First, why all this focus on blogs? Because Google has taken steps to give blogs more visibility in search rankings. So Blogvertise has come up with a way to talk unwary marketers into parting with their Internet marketing dollars by claiming to help you get higher search rankings. ThomasNet and GlobalSpec say the same thing, but at least they are in the technology / engineering / manufacturing space and their site visitors are engineers and purchasing agents. Who knows what you’re getting with this other site?!

Kinda reminds you of link farms, eh? If you don’t already know, search engines don’t like link farms cuz they only exist to trick them into thinking you have more incoming links than you deserve so you get higher search rankings. But search algorithms are looking for RELEVANT incoming links, not random ones. For more info, see the article “How Google Works.”

Second, who are these bloggers? From what I’ve seen so far, they are mostly people looking to make a few bucks. I’m a big fan of capitalism, but when it comes to talking about my product, I want someone who comes out of the industry and is familiar with the underlying technology. If they aren’t, I run the risk of associating with people who can undermine the brand I’ve so carefully built (another strike against link farms, too).

Third, this approach undermines the whole world of blogging. The money is lousy unless the bloggers do a lot of these paid gigs. That means their blogs will, over time, end up being one big advertisement…either a copy/paste of press releases or a hatchet job on a lot of different topics. But for you, the marketer, blogging is like public relations — its power lies in its IMPARTIALITY & CREDIBILITY. As soon as you lose those, the blogger loses all reason for anyone to read his/her blog.

On a related note, there are still a few 3rd-tier tech magazines out there that will run your press release for a fee. Most are out of business because quality readers abandoned them, but I still get the occasional request for $$.

Last, let’s look at the PPC advertising side. Yes, there is a time and a place for advertising. Oh look, Blogvertise offers PPC ads, too. But why would you want to pay for a random blogger to run your ad when you can find a higher quality blogger via Google’s AdWords / AdSense PPC program?

Ok, rant over…for today

Check out the data below.  And set up your account pronto!

So we decided to test it out. We converted the Telesian “What’s Working in Marketing” enews & blog into app format. You can input four RSS content feeds, so we included the ISA Marketing & Sales Summit blog, as well.

Download the What’s Working in Marketing app to see the final version.

The design elements include the company logo and a new mobile icon:

Here is the final app:

Here is what you see when you click on an article:

It appears that the initial design will only show one image per article, so at the end, you get a link to the full article on your blog or web site or wherever…

And, finally, here’s the control panel where you can make changes:

All in all, quick and easy to create an app. The hard part is…and always way…creating informative and compelling content. Feel free to call us for help with that

Generation Y (18-31 years old) is a large, economically powerful group that spends about $200 billion annually. They are children of the Baby Boomers. In the US there were about 76 million births in the Baby Boomer generation. Gen Y has surpassed those numbers, coming in at about 80 million, according to Wikipedia.

According to Djamasabi:

They are significantly more likely than older Internet users to create blogs, download music, instant message, and play online games. Additionally, Generation Y searches for health information, conducts job research, banks online, and makes travel reservations. For this generation, who has grown with technology, usability is a given and aesthetics are not a bonus but an EXPECTATION.

This study looked at four main web design elements: large images, images of celebrities, small amount of text, and a search feature. For the purposes of B2B marketing, most of us don’t have the budgets to get celebrity endorsements. So let’s focus on the results of the other three areas with our goal being to answer the question:

–> What can we do to keep users from moving away from our web sites?

According to the study, there are 6 primary factors that influence where a person’s eyes fall on a web page.

Ok, so we know that animation, large size objects, images, bright colors, text style, and top elements draw more attention. How does that actually play out on a web page?

Let’s take a look at several heat maps generated during the study. They show us that Gen Y responds to:
• Large pictures because they draw the eye in quickly
• Images of people as they generate a sense of warmth
• A search bar in the upper right hand corner because they have shorter attention spans and like fast service; this is especially important on a site with lots of elements that can appear confusing
• Low word count on the home page; the maximum number of words on a page in the study was in the low 200′s

Here are the MOST LIKED web pages:

Here are the LEAST LIKED web pages:

While heat maps tell us what part of the page attract the most attention during the entire time of the test, it’s also important to consider what was viewed during the first few seconds and the order the components were viewed. This tells us what information is being used to generate a web site visitor’s first impression.

The study’s eye tracking data shows that users fixated on main large pictures, faces of celebrities, and the search feature. It also shows relatively few fixations on the text. Pay attention to the order of the fixation below.

Fixation order for the MOST LIKED web pages:

Fixation order for the LEAST LIKED web pages:

Of course, these observations are specific to Gen Y and may not apply to all audiences. We know there will be some leeway in dealing with Gen Y engineers, for instance. But the general trend is probably true for most in this age group:
• No more big blocks of text, use shorter blocks and more bullets
• Add big graphics that add to the story you are telling, not just eye candy that wastes their time
• No matter what the size of your site, include a SITE SEARCH function

Download the full research report, “Generation Y, web design and eye tracking” for additional details.

In early November, word hit the Net that Apple had fired an employee for disparaging remarks about Apple stores in a “private” posting. The post was shown to the store manager who let the employee go on the spot. Key issue: There is no privacy on the Internet. Digital bits are now incredibly interconnected. Even without the intrusive reach of Google’s search spiders (which can be blocked), it’s just as easy, maybe easier, to copy-paste than it is to head to the water cooler to spread gossip. So if you want to keep something private, keep it to yourself.

In a related article on ZDnet, author Charlie Osborne sums up the dilemma:

Companies can often be left in difficult territory when social media rules are not defined. A recent Cisco study suggests that amongst the Generation Y, two-thirds of college students will ask about social media policies during a job interview, with over half not accepting a job that bans social media in the workplace.

Social media is a tricky one to control. Anybody could copy and paste, and then tag — or not, if one were to be clandestine about it — and repost a comment; something which in itself leads to the spread of viral activity.

Many have been caught out by social media, particularly when it comes down to commenting on their jobs or colleagues. It was only during the summer where the U.S. National Labor Relations Board had to contend with a series of cases where employees were fired over Facebook.

So what can we learn from Apple, who is savvier than most, re social media guidelines? First, read their guidelines. When you go to write your own, start with a template from one of the companies that understands this environment. Then modify to fit your organization. The situation over the fired Apple employee resulted in Apple’s social media guidelines going public. A bit of irony there.

ZDnet sums it up well.

In general, what employees do in their own time is their choice, but Apple states in its guides that: “The lines between public and private, and personal and professional are blurred in online social networks. Respect your audience and your co-workers. This includes not only the obvious (no ethnic slurs, personal insults, obscenity, etc.) but also topics that may be considered offensive or inflammatory. In sum, use your best judgment.”

Some interesting points include:

• Employees may run their own websites, but are not permitted to discuss Apple on that website.
• No speculating on rumours is allowed. This includes confirming or denying any information concerning new products, Apple regulations or services.
• Blogs, wikis, social networks and other tools should not be used for communication among fellow employees. This regulation goes further in stating that differences shouldn’t be aired online, co-workers should not be discussed without their permission, and any images relating to other staff members cannot be posted anywhere without their express permission.
• Staff are not permitted to post messages or commentary on any Mac or Apple related websites; whether they identify themselves as Apple employees or not.
• If you identify yourself as an Apple employee, you connect yourself with co-workers, products, and the global brand itself — so conduct online needs to be consistent with Apple policies.
• Apple’s full business conduct policy applies to employees and any who do business with Apple retrospectively. Apple retains the right to discipline (up to termination of employment), or cut ties of any that do not comply with these regulations.
• Customer privacy is viewed as a priority for Apple as a brand. Any information concerning customers is not to be discussed online in any circumstance. Apple employees are also not permitted to contact customers for social reasons or soliciting outside of business.

We can’t say this enough — BEFORE you launch into the world of social media, BE PREPARED:
• Have your strategy in place
• Know what resources you’ll be relying on
• Have an editorial calendar of who will be posting on what topics and where (blog vs LinkedIn vs Twitter vs Slideshare)
• Prepare corporate guidelines for social media.

You’ve been warned!

I gave a presentation last week at ISA’s Automation Week (summary here by Jim Cahill) where I talked about social media in automation.  I shared some data from a survey I completed earlier in the year – and general usage for the automation engineering community broke down like this:

No surprise Facebook was on top – primarily for personal use. But other social networks like Twitter that has good potential for engineer-types have lagged in adoption.  Based on some conversations I had with several folks at that event,  there is a confusion factor that can overwhelm users at first.

The real issue around late adoption is that our customers are moving in this direction, and by not knowing how to use the social networks, we are at a disadvantage.   The flip side is that we are also customers and have the option to tap into this power too.

Brian notes:

But as social media becomes part of our cultural fabric and even as we witness businesses, governments,sports teams, and almost every organization socialize communication efforts today, much of what we see is merely the beginning of something that will one day become something far more important than the medium itself. Indeed, social media is affecting behavior and nothing is more important than the ability to influence decisions and ultimately behavior”

Brian summarizes some statistics from a Nielson study:

1) Skeptics will now be recognized as laggards as they now officially stand in the way of progress. According to Nielsen, and well, reality, social media isn’t a fad. The report opens with a key finding that social networks and blogs dominate how Americans spend their time online, which accounts for nearly 25% of their total time spent on the Internet.

2) Four out of five active internet users aka everyday people visit social networks.

3) Looking beyond the U.S., in 10 major global markets, social networks and blogs reach over 75% of active Internet users.

4) 60 percent of people who use three or more digital means of research for product purchases learned about a specific brand or retailer from a social networking site. And, 48% of these consumers responded to a retailer’s offer posted on Facebook or Twitter.

5) 70 percent of active online adult social networkers shop online.

Bottom line is that this is truly becoming a norm in the way we communicate and do business.  What was also interesting was the way people are accessing social media, with 37% using mobile devices.  This growth will only increase since we live untethered to our laptops and PCs.

Source: Nielsen Social Media Study

I know that I’ve come to depend on social networks for both personal and professional learning and sharing.  I also use it for researching products and services and seek other opinions before making a buying decision.  Sometimes these choices are simple ones, like a book on Amazon, other times its more significant.   And while the data is still sketchy about how engineers research products and services for their work/business, it is anticipated that social media and blogs will become more of a mainstream approach to researching a brand, its reputation, and its products and services.

Find out more in this year’s ISA Marketing & Sales Summit 2011 SEO update — Panda and what it means for your SEO efforts, latest search engine eye-tracking studies, how to use social media for optimization, and insights into more effective pay-per-click advertising including an inside look at the role Quality Score plays in PPC.

This was presented as a 4 hour workshop at the Summit and is available customized for delivery on-site for organizations investing in SEO and PPC programs. Contact Shari Worthington at (508) 755-5242.

In this ISA Marketing & Sales Summit 2011 presentation by Juliann Grant, Telesian, and Gary Wagner, Ophir Photonics Group, learn which social networks are being used and why, how customers pursue product research (Google is still king of the hill), and the challenge of finding trusted sources online.