The Grindr app, left, and founder Joel Simkhai's profile.

A young Sydneysider who hacked a popular gay social networking app may escape prosecution as no complaint has been filed with NSW Police.

The smartphone app Grindr, which had about 100,000 Australian users as of August last year and more than a million users worldwide, was the target of a hacker who potentially exposed who people were friends with and intimate chats and private photos destined for them using an exploit that allowed the hacker to impersonate users' accounts.

Under the Commonwealth Criminal Code Act 1995 anyone with "unauthorised access to, or modification of, restricted data which occurs via a carriage service, including the internet and mobile phones" could face a maximum penalty of two years' jail, with anyone above the age of 14 liable for prosecution.

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The hacker is understood to have been under 18 at the time they hacked Grindr.

Similar legislation also applies in states and territories, a spokeswoman for the federal Attorney General's department said.

But the NSW Police's cybercrime squad had not received any complaints about the hack, a State Crime Command spokeswoman said.

If a complaint was made, the cybercrime squad would investigate to see if any laws had been broken, the spokeswoman added.

A spokeswoman for the Australian Federal Police said such cases involving individuals and small businesses were usually investigated by state or territory police.

A Grindr spokesman told Fairfax Media the company had taken "legal and technological actions" against a website created by the hacker that exploited the flaws in the Grindr app, adding that the site "primarily impacted a very small percentage of our total Australian Grindr users and it remains shut down".

"Contrary to some unfounded speculation, we have no indication that any large number of photos were intercepted - in fact, we have received no specific user reports of interceptions," the spokesman said in a statement, adding that users of Blendr, the straight version of the app, "were not affected".

But one of the Sydney users of the Grindr app, who asked to remain anonymous, said his profile was altered twice, with his name changed to obscene words.

His profile was also linked to a "shock site", a website that tries to offend its viewers.

The user said he informed Grindr about the hack - which took place in July - through emails, but was only told to update his smartphone operating system and app.

"I didn't feel that the response was adequate or that they were taking it very seriously at all," the user said.

The Grindr spokesman said the company would notify its users of a compulsory security update of its apps that was due to be released "over the next few days".

"Our users can be assured that Grindr does not retain chat history, credit card information, or addresses - and no such information was ever compromised."

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/smartphone-apps/mr-nasty-gets-away-with-grindr-hack-20120125-1qh6x.html#ixzz1vDGFDLrL

The aim of Social Media Influence 2012, now in its seventh year, is simple: to demonstrate how companies can succeed in a tough economy by adapting to the latest social media and mobile innovations and tools. We will assemble the innovators, the builders, the ones who took a chance and hear from them their inspiring stories about how companies and organisations can transform themselves into more efficient, social innovators themselves.

This one-day event will:

• Elevate the best practice in the fast-evolving areas of social and mobile business
• Offer case studies demonstrating how smart companies and organisations are committing to a genuine, ongoing social connection with their customers, employees and other stakeholders.
• Shine a spotlight on the social and mobile tools and technology companies that are thriving by innovating while staying true to the basics.
• Feature the executives who've experienced great success by investing in mobile and social innovation, and hear from them their vision of the future.

Featuring a range of speakers who have consistently demonstrated mobile and social media expertise over the course of the last six years, Social Media Influence promises to provide real intelligence as to how companies can create intelligent, interesting and meaningful dialogue with their most important and influential audience – their own customers.

Social media is no longer a geeky pastime. It is about business intelligence, innovation and growth. In the past few years it has become one of most important business growth stories for Europe, North America and Asia. And it's becoming increasingly clear that the successful innovation tied to social media and social business design could very well pull us out of these otherwise tough economic conditions. Consider these figures:

• Everyone knows the apps market is exploding. But do you know one of the fastest growing segments? B2B. Forrester predicts a nearly 20-fold increase in the apps marketplace by 2015, fueled by enterprise solutions.
• e-commerce is the fastest growing segment of the retail industry and social commerce is driving e-commerce. Social commerce is expected to be a $30 billion market by 2015.
• Similarly, social and mobile advertising is the fastest growing segment of digital advertising. The social ad spend, for example, has been growing year-on-year at a 200% rate, topping £132m a year ago.
• Step aside, Grand Theft Auto. Addictive titles like "Angy Birds," "Dark Orbit" and "Farmville" have transformed the gaming sector. Revenues for the mobile gaming sector – a category that barely existed three years ago – will top $18 billion by 2014.
• Smartphones and tablets have become a consumer phenomenon driving new business opportunities that didn't exist just a year ago. Consider that mobile/tablet gaming, publishing and commerce are now billion-dollar vertical niches.



Struan Robertson, Product Counsel, Google Struan Robertson is a lawyer at Google. His role as Product Counsel is to assess legal risks and advise on existing and forthcoming products, ensuring compliance with laws and regulations around the world in areas of privacy, intellectual property, content regulation, consumer protection and advertising. Before joining Google, Struan was the founding editor of award-winning tech law service Out-law.com. Frances Brindle, Director of Strategic Marketing and Communications (SM&C), The British Library In addition to responsibility for managing the positioning and reputation of the library through marketing and communications activity, Frances also has specific responsibility for engagement with business users including the creative industries, the public and learning programme, Higher education strategy, management and development of the British Library website, fundraising and priced services including British Library publishing, document supply and retail operations. Frances oversees the British Library partnerships with the BBC and the BFI and has played a key role in defining the library's strategy for moving image. Prior to joining the library Frances was Global Marketing Director at the Financial Times Alan Rutter, Condé Nast UK In 2010, Alan joined Condé Nast UK to project manage the launch of WIRED on the iPad. He then moved on to oversee the launches of GQ, Vanity Fair and Vogue on the device, and is now helping the publisher adapt to meet the challenges and opportunities of working across platforms, tablets and mobile devices. He has previously worked at Time Out, as Online Editor and Deputy Editor of the magazine, and has written for titles including the Telegraph, Men's Health, Jack and Maxim among others. He is co-founder and director of Clever Boxer (www.cleverboxer), a series of talks and events introducing people to developments in the creative industries. He is also a founder of Trashed (www.trashedmag.com), an online platform that puts teenagers in contact with leading creative professionals. Chris Reed, Founder, Restless Communciations Chris has almost 20 years' reputation management experience spanning PR and social media, both in-house and in consultancy working with businesses ranging from the BBC to TfL. In recent years Chris has helped clients including Bupa, BT, Shell and Sony navigate the social space, by developing strategies, content plans, business-integration models, and training programmes for hands-on or C-suite audiences. He's also a crisis communications expert, working with businesses he can talk about (e.g. Eurostar) and others he can't to provide hands-on crisis and reputation management support and consultancy as required. Chris recently established Restless Communications (www.restlesscommunications.co.uk), a social business consultancy which helps organisations both communicate and structure themselves more effectively for a social age, harnessing internal and external social tools and channels to do so. Chris speaks regularly at industry events and shouts a lot at Arsenal. He tweets as @chris_reed and @restlesscomms. Lee Bryant, co-founder, Headshift Lee Bryant co-founded the leading social business consultancy Headshift, which is now part of Dachis Group, and has been pioneering the use of social tools and techniques to improve business performance for nearly a decade. With clients across Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America, Dachis Group helps create connected companies, engage customers and leverage social business intelligence to measure and manage change. Alessandra Pavolini, Chief Marketing Officer, GE Ecomagination Alessandra Pavolini is Chief Marketing Officer for GE Ecomagination. With the objective of bringing viable technologies that make the world a better place, GE ecomagination efforts target the productivity of natural resources, as water and land, globally. Alessandra has worked for GE since 1993 and previously held the positions of General Manager of GE Lighting, Vice President International Marketing at GE Healthcare and Chief Marketing Officer for Global Services in GE Oil&Gas. Jamie Barnard, Global Digital General Counsel, Unilever Jamie has worked in the advertising industry since his career began. He joined Unilever in 2007, after 6 years advising ad agencies at Lewis Silkin and a brief affair with the music business. As Unilever's Global Digital General Counsel, Jamie advises on the legal and regulatory implications of digital and social media marketing, privacy and data protection compliance, from the development of digital campaigns, apps and consumer-generated programmes, to the protection and defence of Unilever's rights, interests and reputation online. Dave Coplin, Director of Search, UK, Microsoft Since joining Microsoft in 2005, Dave Coplin has worked across a wide range of sectors and customers, providing strategic advice and guidance around the cost effective use of technology in relation to their business needs. As an established thought leader in the UK and having spent a considerable amount of time in the Public Sector providing leadership and guidance around key technology policy issues like Cloud Computing, Open Government, Open Data and the "consumerisation" of IT, Dave is currently working as Director of Search for Microsoft UK's Advertising and Online business, focusing the spotlight on the power and potential of search and the way it holds the key to society's effective use of all that technology and the internet has to offer. Alex Balfour, Head of New Media, London 2012 Alex joined the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) as Head of New Media in September 2006. Alex oversees the online delivery of all LOCOG's major consumer programmes including communications, ticketing, volunteering, ecommerce, torch relay, mascot, ceremonies and education. In 2012 he will oversee London 2012's Games time Internet results and information service across web, mobile and social media which is expected to record over 1 billion visits. Previously as co-founder of Emerging Media Alex conceived and delivered the world's first international 2020 cricket tournament which was televised to 200 million viewers in 20 countries, developed a reality TV concept broadcast by a major Indian TV network. Before that as co-founder and latterly Chairman Alex turned CricInfo from a raw start up into a profitable business with 20 million customers and 65 staff in eight countries. CricInfo was sold to ESPN in the summer of 2007. Alex was also a senior member of a team that built the Guardian newspaper's websites. Alex has worked for 17 years in new media and was also responsible for award winning websites including the UK's first general election website and the first online government white paper consultation. Alex is married with two young children and is a keen competitive road and track cyclist. He is a non-executive Director of Datatracks UK ltd and The Pensions Advisory Service. In 2011 he was one of Wired Magazine's top 100 digital influencers and one of the Evening Standard's 1000 most influential Londoners. Peter Briffett, MD, LivingSocial UK, Ireland & Netherlands Peter oversees LivingSocial's UK, Ireland and Netherlands markets, communicating LivingSocial's core strategy and overseeing growth as the next great consumer brand. Based in London, Peter is responsible for LivingSocial's numerous markets in the UK and has developed a strong footprint in the UK & Irish group-buying space. Prior to LivingSocial, Peter held senior positions at Microsoft and Thomson Reuters. He has also successfully built and managed a number of technology startups including VoIP company Howler Technologies, Gissing Software, and iView Multimedia where as CEO Peter oversaw its acquisition by Microsoft. He also founded Biometric Distribution, supplying fingerprint readers and iris scanners to leading companies before being acquired by Kyotec Securities. Peter graduated from Bristol Business School with a degree in Business Studies. Matthew Yeomans, co-founder of Social Media Influence and Custom Communication Matthew Yeomans is the co-founder of Social Media Influence and Custom Communication. A writer and consultant, Matthew advises companies on social media editorial and sustainability communications. He is the lead author of the Social Media Sustainability Index and the author of two books: Oil: Anatomy of an Industry and The Gastrokid Cookbook. Bernhard Warner, co-founder of Custom Communication and editorial director of Social Media Influence Bernhard is the co-founder of Custom Communication and editorial director of Social Media Influence. Bernhard started his journalism career in the early '90s on the police beat and obituary desk, eventually moving on to even grislier assignments: Madison Avenue, Silicon Valley and eventually Wall Street and the European borses. Over the years, he has been a writer, editor and stand-in film producer working in newsrooms across the US and Europe. For Custom, he has taken this journalism experience to the corporate level, teaching communications professionals the art of effective communicating through social story-telling. For SMI, he runs workshops and training courses on e-reputation and social media crisis communications (in English… e quindi in Italiano). Bernhard is based in Rome in a neighborhood built by Mussolini, now a stronghold of the left. Talk about social! He tweets at @socialinfluence and @bernhardwarner. Bian Salis, Head of Social Media Innovation, BT Customer Service A journalist turned social media evangelist, Bian’s career saw her start out as a reporter for India’s first online venture, Rediff.com back in 2005. She then went on to be Associate Features Editor for ELLE Magazine before moving to England. Since then, Bian has worked for the likes of the Times Education Supplement and spent over 10 years at British Telecom in various roles, both editorial (as Managing Editor of BT Tradespace and Production Manager for BT Business). She now works as Head of Social Media Innovation within BT where she sets the social business strategy for BT as well as leads the team that manages their social media channels for marketing (BT UK) and customer service branded as the popular BTCare. Philip Reisberger, Chief Revenue Officer at Bigpoint Philip is the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) at Bigpoint, where he is primarily responsible for developing long-term strategies that ensure the growth of Bigpoint's sales and profits. Moreover, Reisberger is accountable for bridging long-term business strategies and their practical implementation through the development and expansion of revenue-generating channels. This includes business intelligence, marketing analysis, pricing, payment, advertising, as well as the development of new business divisions and the application of new business models. Philip has been a member of the Bigpoint team since August 2008. Before serving as CRO, Reisberger was the Chief Games Officer and focused his efforts on the strategic development of Bigpoint's game portfolio. Before coming to Bigpoint, Reisberger was one of the co-founders of CLH Container Logistic Hamburg GmbH & Co. KG (Container Logistics Hamburg). He was also responsible for CLH GmbH & Co. KG's development. In addition to fulfilling his responsibilities as one of Bigpoint's executive staff members, Reisberger is also pursuing his Doctorate at the Technical University of Dresden. His research and dissertation will cover the topic "Multi Massive Online Games in Social Networks." He studied at the EBS University for Economics and Law and graduated in 2004 with a MBA. Alex Pearmain, Head of Social Media, O2 Alex joined O2 in 2010 to lead their newly created social media team, responsible for strategy and execution across their social presences. Previously he created the first Facebook networking group for PRs and trialled using Twitter for sports results. Sadly this was before anyone who liked sports results used Twitter. Andy Hobsbawm, Founder and Chief Marketing Officer, Evrything Andy established the first international Internet agency in 1994 which merged with pioneering digital services firm Agency.com in 1997 where he was European MD then Chairman until 2009. Andy serves on the board of various online companies and co-founded the award-winning online community Do The Green Thing in 2007. He was listed among the 100 top digital influencers by Wired UK and has been recognized by industry professionals as one of most influential 100 individuals who have most contributed to the development and growth of e-commerce and the Internet in the UK. He has been a weekly columnist about the new economy for the Financial Times, a member of GartnerG2's first advisory board on online advertising and spoken at numerous conferences including TED. He has yet to receive any royalties from obscure pop songs released by a minor independent record label in Europe. Rob Crumbie is Director of Marketing & Communications at Recyclebank Recyclebank helps create a more sustainable future by rewarding people for taking everyday green actions with discounts and deals from more than 3,000 local and national businesses. With over 3m members globally, and offices in New York & London, Recyclebank's behaviour change programme motivates members on a number of levels. As well as motivating members to recycle more, Recyclebank is rolling out programmes to help consumers make smarter energy choices, choose greener transport options and make better consumer lifestyle choices. Dan Hartveld, Technical Director, Red Ant Dan is a trusted expert on mobile strategy with a proven track record in real-world business and enterprise integration. Dan co-developed the UK's first grocery shopping application and has worked with a number of top-tier retailers and FTSE 100 businesses, helping them take a share of this exciting & innovative channel through innovative applications, mobile-specific online presence, and tightly executed mobile strategy.

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Marketing/Digital_Marketing/Demystifying_social_media_2958

Executives certainly know what social media is. After all, if Facebook users constituted a country, it would be the world’s third largest, behind China and India. Executives can even claim to know what makes social media so potent: its ability to amplify word-of-mouth effects. Yet the vast majority of executives have no idea how to harness social media’s power. Companies diligently establish Twitter feeds and branded Facebook pages, but few have a deep understanding of exactly how social media interacts with consumers to expand product and brand recognition, drive sales and profitability, and engender loyalty.

We believe there are two interrelated reasons why social media remains an enigma wrapped in a riddle for many executives, particularly nonmarketers. The first is its seemingly nebulous nature. It’s no secret that consumers increasingly go online to discuss products and brands, seek advice, and offer guidance. Yet it’s often difficult to see where and how to influence these conversations, which take place across an ever-growing variety of platforms, among diverse and dispersed communities, and may occur either with lightning speed or over the course of months. Second, there’s no single measure of social media’s financial impact, and many companies find that it’s difficult to justify devoting significant resources—financial or human—to an activity whose precise effect remains unclear.

What we hope to do here is to demystify social media. We have identified its four primary functions—to monitor, respond, amplify, and lead consumer behavior—and linked them to the journey consumers undertake when making purchasing decisions. Being able to identify exactly how, when, and where social media influences consumers helps executives to craft marketing strategies that take advantage of social media’s unique ability to engage with customers. It should also help leaders develop, launch, and demonstrate the financial impact of social-media campaigns (for insight into the world’s biggest social-media market, see “Understanding social media in China”).

In short, today’s chief executive can no longer treat social media as a side activity run solely by managers in marketing or public relations. It’s much more than simply another form of paid marketing, and it demands more too: a clear framework to help CEOs and other top executives evaluate investments in it, a plan for building support infrastructure, and performance-management systems to help leaders smartly scale their social presence. Companies that have these three elements in place can create critical new brand assets (such as content from customers or insights from their feedback), open up new channels for interactions (Twitter-based customer service, Facebook news feeds), and completely reposition a brand through the way its employees interact with customers or other parties.

The social consumer decision journey

Companies have quickly learned that social media works: 39 percent of companies we’ve surveyed already use social-media services as their primary digital tool to reach customers, and that percentage is expected to rise to 47 percent within the next four years.¹ Fueling this growth is a growing list of success stories from mainstream companies:

Creating buzz: Eighteen months before Ford reentered the US subcompact-car market with its Fiesta model, it began a broad marketing campaign called the Fiesta Movement. A major element involved giving 100 social-media influencers a European model of the car, having them complete “missions,” and asking them to document their experiences on various social channels. Videos related to the Fiesta campaign generated 6.5 million views on YouTube, and Ford received 50,000 requests for information about the vehicle, primarily from non-Ford drivers. When it finally became available to the public, in late 2010, some 10,000 cars sold in the first six days.

Learning from customers: PepsiCo has used social networks to gather customer insights via its DEWmocracy promotions, which have led to the creation of new varieties of its Mountain Dew brand. Since 2008, the company has sold more than 36 million cases of them.

Targeting customers: Levi Strauss has used social media to offer location-specific deals. In one instance, direct interactions with just 400 consumers led 1,600 people to turn up at the company’s stores— an example of social media’s word-of-mouth effect.

Yet countless others have failed to match these successes: knowing that something works and understanding how it works are very different things. As the number of companies with Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, or online communities continues to grow, we think it’s time for leaders to remind themselves how social media connects with an organization’s broader marketing mission.

Marketing’s primary goal is to reach consumers at the moments, or touch points, that influence their purchasing behavior. Almost three years ago, our colleagues proposed a framework—the “consumer decision journey”—for understanding how consumers interact with companies during purchase decisions.² Expressing consumer behavior as a winding journey with multiple feedback loops, this new framework was different from the traditional description of consumer purchasing behavior as a linear march through a funnel. Social media is a unique component of the consumer decision journey: it’s the only form of marketing that can touch consumers at each and every stage, from when they’re pondering brands and products right through the period after a purchase, as their experience influences the brands they prefer and their potential advocacy influences others.

A social journey For more on social media’s relationship to the consumer decision journey, explore this interactive exhibit narrated by coauthor David Edelman.

The fact that social media can influence customers at every stage of the journey doesn’t mean that it should. Depending on the company and industry, some touch points are more important to competitive advantage than others.³ What’s more, our work with dozens of companies adapting to the new marketing environment strongly suggests that the most powerful social-media strategies focus on a limited number of marketing responses closely related to individual touch points along the consumer decision journey. The ten most important responses, range from providing customer service to fostering online communities (exhibit). One of those ten—monitoring what people say about your brand—is so important that we see it as a core function of social media, relevant across the entire consumer decision journey. The remaining nine responses, organized in three clusters in the exhibit, underpin efforts to use social media to respond to consumer comments, to amplify positive sentiment and activity, and to lead changes in the behavior and mind-sets of consumers.

1. Monitor

Gatorade, a sports drink manufactured by PepsiCo, has been diligently working toward its goal of becoming the “largest participatory brand in the world.”⁴ It has created a Chicago-based “war room” within its marketing department to monitor the brand in real time across social media. There are seats where team members can track custom-built data visualizations and dashboards (including terms related to the brand, sponsored athletes, and competitors) and run sentiment analyses around product and campaign launches. Every day, all of this feedback is integrated into products and marketing—for example, by helping to optimize the landing page on the company’s Web site. Since the war room’s creation, the average traffic to Gatorade’s online properties, the length of visitor interactions, and viral sharing from campaigns have all more than doubled.

Such brand monitoring—simply knowing what’s said online about your products and services—should be a default social-media function, taking place constantly. Even without engaging consumers directly, companies can glean insights from an effective monitoring program that informs everything from product design to marketing and provides advance warning of potentially negative publicity. It’s also critical to communicate such feedback within the business quickly: whoever is charged with brand monitoring must ensure that information reaches relevant functions, such as communications, design, marketing, public relations, or risk.

2. Respond

Valuable though it is to learn how you are doing and what to improve, broad and passive monitoring is only a start. Pinpointing conversations for responding at a personal level is another form of social-media engagement. This kind of response can certainly be positive if it’s done to provide customer service or to uncover sales leads. Most often, though, responding is a part of crisis management.

Last year, for example, a hoax photograph posted online claimed that McDonald’s was charging African-Americans an additional service fee. The hoax first appeared on Twitter, where the image rapidly went viral just before the weekend as was retweeted with the hashtag #seriouslymcdonalds. It turned out to be a working weekend for the McDonald’s social-media team. On Saturday, the company’s director of social media released a statement through Twitter declaring the photograph to be a hoax and asking key influencers to “please let your followers know.” The company continued to reinforce that message throughout the weekend, even responding personally to concerned Tweeters. By Sunday, the number of people who believed the image to be authentic had dwindled, and McDonald’s stock price rose 5 percent the following day.

Responding in order to counter negative comments and reinforce positive ones will only increase in importance. The responsibility for taking action may fall on functions outside marketing, and the message will differ depending on the situation. No response can be quick enough, and the ability to act rapidly requires the constant, proactive monitoring of social media—on weekends too. By responding rapidly, transparently, and honestly, companies can positively influence consumer sentiment and behavior.

3. Amplify

“Amplification” involves designing your marketing activities to have an inherently social motivator that spurs broader engagement and sharing. This approach means more than merely reaching the end of planning a marketing campaign and then thinking that “we should do something social”—say, uploading a television commercial to YouTube. It means that the core concepts for campaigns must invite customers into an experience that they can choose to extend by joining a conversation with the brand, product, fellow users, and other enthusiasts. It means having ongoing programs that share new content with customers and provide opportunities for sharing back. It means offering experiences that customers will feel great about sharing, because they gain a badge of honor by publicizing content that piques the interest of others.

In the initial phases of the consumer decision journey, when consumers sift through brands and products to determine their preferred options, referrals and recommendations are powerful social-media tools. A simple example is the way online deal sites such as Groupon and Gilt Groupe provide consumers with credit for each first-time purchaser they refer. Our research shows that such direct recommendations from peers generate engagement rates some 30 times higher than traditional online advertising does.

Once a consumer has decided which product to buy and makes a purchase, companies can use social media to amplify their engagement and foster loyalty. When Starbucks wanted to increase awareness of its brand, for example, it launched a competition challenging users to be the first to tweet a photograph of one of the new advertising posters that the company had placed in six major US cities, providing winners with a $20 gift card. This social-media brand advocacy effort delivered a marketing punch that significantly outweighed its budget. Starbucks said that the effort was “the difference between launching with millions of dollars versus millions of fans.”⁵

Marketers also can foster communities around their brands and products, both to reinforce the belief of consumers that they made a smart decision and to provide guidance for getting the most from a purchase. Software company Intuit, for example, launched customer service forums for its Quicken and QuickBooks personal-finance software so users could help one another with product issues. The result? Users rather than Intuit employees answer about 80 percent of the questions, and the company has employed user comments to make dozens of significant changes to its software.

4. Lead

Social media can be used most proactively to lead consumers toward long-term behavioral changes. In the early stages of the consumer decision journey, this may involve boosting brand awareness by driving Web traffic to content about existing products and services. When grooming-products group Old Spice introduced its Old Spice Man character to viewers, during the US National Football League’s 2010 Super Bowl, for example, the company’s ambition was to increase its reach and relevance to both men and women. The commercial became a phenomenon: starring former player Isaiah Mustafa, it got more than 19 million hits across all platforms, and year-on-year sales for the company’s products jumped by 27 percent within six months.

Marketers also can use social media to generate buzz through product launches, as Ford did in launching its Fiesta vehicle in the United States. For example, social media played an integral role in the success of “Small Business Saturday,” the US shopping promotion created by American Express for the weekend immediately following Thanksgiving (for American Express CMO John Hayes’s perspective on that launch, see “How we see it: Three senior executives on the future of marketing,” on mckinseyquarterly.com). In addition, when consumers are ready to buy, companies can promote time-sensitive targeted deals and offers through social media to generate traffic and sales. Online menswear company Bonobos, for example, provided an incentive for its Twitter followers by unlocking a discount code after its messages were resent a certain number of times. As a result of this effort, almost 100 consumers bought products from the site for the first time. The campaign delivered a 1,200 percent return on investment in just 24 hours.

Finally, social media can solicit consumer input after the purchase. This ability to gain product-development insights from customers in a relatively inexpensive way is emerging as one of social media’s most significant advantages. Intuit, for example, has its community forums. Starbucks uses MyStarbucksIdea.com to collect its customers’ views about improving the company’s products and services and then aggregates submitted ideas and prominently displays them on a dedicated Web site. That site groups ideas by product, experience, and involvement; ranks user participation; and shows ideas actively under consideration by the company and those that have been implemented.

Converting knowledge to action

Despite offering numerous opportunities to influence consumers, social media still accounts for less than 1 percent of an average marketing budget, in our experience. Many chief marketing officers say that they want to increase that share to 5 percent. One problem is that a lot of senior executives know little about social media. But the main obstacle is the perception that the return on investment (ROI) from such initiatives is uncertain.

Without a clear sense of the value social media creates, it’s perhaps not surprising that so many CEOs and other senior executives don’t feel comfortable when their companies go beyond mere “experiments” with social-media strategy. Yet we can measure the impact of social media well beyond straight volume and consumer-sentiment metrics; in fact, we can precisely determine the buzz surrounding a product or brand and then calculate how social media drives purchasing behavior. To do so—and then ensure that social media complements broader marketing strategies—companies must obviously coordinate data, tools, technology, and talent across multiple functions. In many cases, senior business leaders must open up their agendas and recognize the importance of supporting and even undertaking initiatives that may traditionally have been left to the chief marketing officer. As our colleagues noted last year, “we’re all marketers now.”⁶

Consider the experience of a telecommunications company that proactively adopted social media but had no idea if its efforts were working. The company had launched Twitter-based customer service capabilities, several promotional campaigns built around social contests, a fan page with discounts and tech tips, and an active response program to engage with people speaking about the brand. In social-media terms, the investment was relatively large, and the company’s senior executives wanted more than anecdotal evidence that the strategy was paying off. As a starting point, to ensure that the company was doing a quality job designing and executing its social presence, it benchmarked its efforts against approaches used by other companies known to be successful in social media. It then advanced the following hypotheses:

• If all of these social-media activities improve general service perceptions about the brand, that improvement should be reflected in a higher volume of positive online posts.⁷
• If social sharing is effective, added clicks and traffic should result in higher search placements.
• If both of these assumptions hold true, social-media activity should help drive sales—ideally, at a rate even higher than the company could achieve with its average gross rating point (GRP) of advertising expenditures.⁸

The company then tested its options. At various times, it spent less money on conventional advertising, especially as social-media activity ramped up, and it modeled the rising positive sentiment and higher search positions just as it would using traditional metrics. The company concluded that social-media activity not only boosted sales but also had higher ROIs than traditional marketing did. Thus, while the company took a risk by shifting emphasis toward social-media efforts before it had data confirming that this was the correct course, the bet paid off. What’s more, the analytic baseline now in place has given the company confidence to continue exploring a growing role for social media.

In other cases, social media may have a more specific role, such as helping to launch a new product or to mitigate negative word of mouth. Similar types of analyses can focus on mixing the impact of buzz, search, and traffic; correlating that with sales or renewals (or whatever the key metric may be); and then gauging the result against total costs. This approach can give executives the confidence and focus they need to invest more money, time, and resources in social media.

As these social-media activities gain scale, the challenges center less around justifying funding and more around organizational issues such as developing the right processes and governance structure, identifying clear roles—for all involved in social-media strategy, from marketing to customer service to product development—and bolstering the talent base, and improving performance standards. New capabilities abound, and social-media best practices are barely starting to emerge. We do know this: because social-media influences every element of the consumer decision journey, communication must take place between as well as within functions. That complicates lines of reporting and decision-making authority.

If insights from monitoring social media are relevant to nonmarketing functions such as product development, for instance, how will you identify and disseminate that information efficiently and effectively—and then ensure that it gets used? If you spot an opportunity to have a meaningful conversation with a key influencer, how will you quickly engage the right senior executive to follow through? If you recognize a fast-moving service concern, how will you respond rapidly and openly—and when should you do so outside the traditional service organization? Senior executives across the company must recognize and begin to answer such questions.

Social media is extending the disruptive impact of the digital era across a broad range of functions. Meanwhile, the perceived lack of metrics, the fear, and the limited sense of what’s possible are eroding. Executives can identify the functions, touch points, and goals of social-media activities, as well as craft approaches to measure their impact and manage their risks. The time is ripe for executive-suite discussions on how to lead and to learn from people within your company, marketers outside it, and, most of all, your customers.

More than half of consumers do not want to be bothered by advertisements on their social media networks, and businesses should be more careful in making social media marketing strategies, according to a new study by the market research agency TNS.

The study found that 57 percent of people in developed markets, mainly in the United States and Europe, do not want to engage with brands via social media. The figure in China is 52 percent, one percentage point lower than the global average of 53 percent.

The study researched the online behaviors of more than 72,000 consumers from across the globe. TNS of Kantar, one of the world’s largest insight, information and consultancy groups, revealed the findings in the Digital Life study.

While consumers do not want to be bothered by brands, Chinese consumers were still found to be more open to brands on social networks than consumers in other countries. Nearly 60 percent of them see social media outlets as a good place to learn about brands. About 46 percent see social media as a place to buy products, while only 25 percent of people in developed countries do so.

A staggering 74 percent of Chinese digital consumers write comments on products online, which is the highest among all 60 countries and regions included in the study.

The study shows that Chinese consumers see the Internet as a forum for expression, a creative platform and a social tool that enhances relationships. Shopping online is not just a quick and convenient way to shop, but it is fun and something to enjoy and share with friends.

“In the developed world, people see advertisements on social networks as a kind of intrusion. They feel they already know enough about the brands and they could make the best choices,” said Ashok Sethi, Head of Consumer Insights, Emerging Markets for TNS, explaining reason for the differences.

“China is more in a developing phase as far as the consumption of brands is concerned. Consumers are still in a stage of wanting to know more about brands. ”

Sethi added that the intrusion comes from the situation “when brands are talking very blatantly about themselves, their quality and how they are superior to other brands”.

“The main motivation for people go to social networks is to bond with your friends or to bond with your loved ones, rather than to bond with brands,” Sethi said.

The race online has seen businesses across the world develop profiles on social media networks, such as Facebook and YouTube or their Chinese equivalents like Renren, Kaixin and Weibo, to engage with customers quickly and cheaply. But TNS’s research reveals that if these efforts are not carefully targeted, they are wasted on half of the consumers.

The proper way for brands to make use of social networks, Sethi said, is for brands need to take a more educative kind of stand, for example, to talk to the consumers about the category. “A cosmetic brand can talk about different skin types and how to take care of each type, then link the brand to the broader issues.”

“The key is to understand your target audience and what they want from your brand – social media networks aren’t always the right approach,” said Serene Wong, CEO TNS Research International China.

Wong suggested that companies use other online methods, such as creating their own digital media platforms, targeted sponsorship or search campaigns.

Sethi added that businesses should develop a marketing strategy that considers both the digital and mass media elements.

Nearly half of Chinese consumers use Internet to research information about a brand that they see advertised on TV or in newspapers. “The digital and non-digital is getting intertwined. The implication is that brands should make it easier for readers to get access to it,” Sethi said.

The TNS Research International China is a leading custom market research agency in China with about 500 employees and more than 200 researchers across six offices in the country.

Sethi said that the main way TNS has differentiated itself from other research agencies is through investing in tracking the changes in the market place and the consumers such as investing in the Digital Life study. Several million dollars were spent globally on conducting the Digital Life study.

“Digital trends have totally changed the way the consumers look at brands. TNS has invested our own money in learning about the changing marketing environment and marketing scenario.

“Over the past three years we have been doing this kind of research, trying to understand what kind of change is happening and how consumers react to the changed scenario. By doing that, we can better answer our clients’ questions and help them to grow,” Sethi said.

TNS is also investing in learning about new consumers. In China, the company is reaching out to consumers in second-tier cities to meet the demands of many companies that are expanding in other cities besides Beijing, Guangzhou and Shanghai.

The company has also invested in developing new research methodologies and technical tools to better understand the views of digital consumers.

A software from the company can track the consumers’ mobile use behavior after it is downloaded to the mobile phone, as it is hard to get an accurate picture of how much time people spend on different apps and functions through direct questioning.

Fast, dramatic changes in the digital space have given brand marketers new opportunities to earn and sustain the consumer’s attention without paid media. Social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, to name just three, empower brands to communicate directly with an audience.  

While many brands rush to leverage these direct to consumer channels, few have altered their brand narratives and their approach to content creation as they move from paying others to broadcast their brand content to leveraging it themselves for direct consumer engagement.

Despite the existing opportunities, it would seem that few brands — and only a few more of their agencies — have the content, process, and methodologies in place to fully benefit from direct distribution to the audience. The current brand-agency paradigm has been effective in leveraging search and social algorithms for more efficient distribution of “brand” assets, but the efforts stemming from this approach have failed to deliver some critical elements: engagement, efficiency, and scale.

Brands looking to achieve this “holy trinity” of digital effectiveness need to shift their content creation approach even further.

Owned media, redefined

Strategist Jim Cuene recently proposed a state of constant content to help marketers behave as publishers. And the Altimeter Group’s Content: The New Marketing Equation does a great job of illustrating a “path” for brands to follow in rebalancing their marketing efforts, shifting “from push to pull.” In fact, Cuene and Altimeter both reference the need for this shift in their content creation. But what characterizes this shift, and how can CMOs get started when looking to alter the manner in which their organizations influence consumers?

The shift they both reference is to a state of “owned media” — not the narrow, “brand-controlled” definition that seems to be pervasive across many media strategy blogs. Rather, it’s to a state of “media ownership” — a more progressive definition of owned media. By simply flipping the words and adjusting the grammar, we add clarity around the model. Jim Cuene is right. Brands need look no further than many online publishing properties for a model on how to create content using an operational discipline that ultimately leads to better results.

Do you own media?

Does your brand stand to benefit from media ownership? Answer the following questions to assess your brand’s state of media ownership:

• Always-on: Are you publishing content for an audience on a daily basis?
• Editorial: Are you publishing content that an audience needs and shares?
• Independent: Do you own the technology or the platform delivering the content? Do you have the final say in all aspects of the user’s experience?
• Networked: Is the content on your platform optimized for distribution?
• Measured: Are you evaluating how efficiently you are producing media, or the consumption of your content?
• Monetizable: Could your content platform be someone else’s paid media?

If you answered yes to all of the questions above, then congratulations, your content marketing initiative is optimized for better business-building results. If you answered no, then the next step is to assess where your organization is in its journey to operating as a publisher. 

Ownership makes for better content

This assessment of owned media is important because it instills a level of accountability with content creation.

Online publishers operate by exacting principles because they need their audiences to consume, engage, and share the content they produce. Operationally, these publishers need to ensure that their editorial efforts are efficient and yielding high-quality content that resonates with their most important critics — the audience. Their very businesses depend on it. 

Brands want their audience to consume, engage, and share content, as well. By applying the same business acumen in planning and evaluating your audience engagement as any publisher would, brands can effectively achieve the three goals of engagement, efficiency, and scale. Not employing this methodology, in my opinion, is the single biggest reason brands are finding underwhelming results in their current search and social efforts.

Discovering the path

With some brands, asset creation evolves into a content strategy, wherein incremental success can be achieved by delivering the same old brand narrative but doing so with a slightly broader focus on types of content, and through innovative channels such as Facebook and Twitter. But the issues of reach and engagement are not addressed by this approach.

I’ve had brands with significant search and social programs in place confess to me “We’re not getting enough traffic to the website,” and “We have 1 million Facebook fans, but very little engagement.” And, these brands are sustaining the same paid media spend to maintain the necessary share of voice in their respective categories. This is not the kind of efficiency brands are looking for when executing content marketing strategies. 

The good news for brand marketers is that their preliminary efforts in content marketing put them squarely on the path to owned media. It’s within these initial phases of content marketing that brands soon discover how important some level of editorial process is in generating quality content at a faster rate, and at higher volumes. By editorial, I mean the constant process of determining what the audience needs. It’s also at this stage where brands discover how important the investment in a centralized platform is in helping them manage to and optimize content marketing across multiple digital channels such as Facebook and Twitter.

There are several successful, brand-owned media programs that can help guide other brands. Home Made Simple, Nutrition Possible, and The Responsibility Project are all examples of how brands can take an editorial approach to engage the entire audience — not just limited segments of it, which is where most brand marketers seem to focus. This audience-centric approach is paying dividends for these respective brands while amplifying their earned and paid efforts, as well.   This shift to true “always-on” editorial is the biggest challenge most brands will face on the path, but it is critical to creating quality content that audiences prefer, and realizing the full potential of owned media.

Editorial shift

So how do marketers go from content that represents their messages to consumers to content that audiences themselves are looking for? It first requires thinking beyond the brand’s target segments and focusing on understanding the needs of the entire audience in much greater detail. This can be particularly challenging, as marketing operations are almost exclusively geared toward distilling layers of consumer research into one-size-fits-all insights and, consequently, focused messaging. And for good reason — brands don’t have the resources to talk to the entire audience through traditional paid means. But they can accomplish this through the right owned media strategy.

For most brand marketers, becoming more informed editorially simply requires organizing all of the available data around audience behavior to define and understand consumer’s content needs. For example, Man of the House publishes dozens of articles that present unique perspectives on personal grooming — from the best grooming gifts for dad to rationales for getting a manicure. This content might fall outside the focus of brands like Gillette or Art of Shaving, but Man of the House content is informed by extensive consumer research. And by interpolating this existing audience data, Procter & Gamble knows its articles are falling in line with what interests the site’s primary audience (dads), which is likely much larger than the consumer segments Gillette advertises to.

Once this audience editorial analysis is complete, it will continue to guide your brand’s editorial strategy development and help you determine the right level of owned media investment.

Having worked with a multitude of consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketers, I’ve always been somewhat amazed with the sheer depth of consumer knowledge each organization possesses — and equally amazed at how little of this knowledge actually factors into its content creation. When brands take a deeper look at their broader audience, there is always a more detailed set of topical categories to map, and brands should follow this map in creating the content they deliver to this broader audience. The appropriate level of data analysis can help brands chart this map.

Editorial mapping

Beyond existing consumer data, analytics should be used to inform the editorial on an ongoing basis. The resources required to develop and sustain an owned media strategy can usually come from the brand’s existing investment in analytics. But even free resources, such as Google or Compete, can provide a wealth of information — especially if they are used in conjunction with more robust paid tools.

The process for mapping an editorial approach should rely on at least four key data channels:

As the chart illustrates, this process is well informed by analytics and can yield a detailed editorial map of topics that are based on the audience’s preferences. Revisiting our example around Man of the House, these various data sets are advising the editorial focus for the entire grooming channel:

• Google Analytics data is being used to identify the most popular articles, which are then served up at the top of the page to drive further content consumption.
• Google Trends helps to advise on topics that are trending throughout social media,
• Google Adwords is being used to track topic popularity by reviewing search query volume across a host of long-tail keyword phrases related to grooming. 

Lastly, it’s critical that publishers keep track of the competitive space for topics. This article in particular is a great example of observing what is being talked about and joining in the discussion. This editorial map is the foundation of an iterative process that’s always on, and optimized for producing content that gets consumed, creates engagement, and gets distributed.

And, not or

To be clear, the editorial shift required to create owned media impact is not an “or” that could replace another approach. It’s an “and” that supports a brand’s broader marketing strategy. Advertising and other paid media still work, but technology has now made direct distribution to an audience an affordable strategy (with the proper approach).

Regardless of where a brand might be in its use of owned media, it should consider developing an editorial voice that guides sustained content creation to address the needs of its audience that aren’t being met through that brand’s other marketing efforts. 

Want more content marketing inspiration? Download our ultimate eBook with 100 content marketing examples.

http://rwconnect.esomar.org/2012/05/01/introducing-the-facebook-factor/

Reineke Reitsma

It’s already been four years since my colleague Josh Bernoff published the book Groundswell, in which he discusses how organisations can harness the power of social media. Since then, there have been many heated debates at Forrester about how companies can measure the value that social media brings to their organisation — and whether they should even do so. But we’ve heard the voices of market insights professionals loud and clear: They want guidance on how to show how the role of being a Facebook fan is related to their customers’ purchasing behaviours. My colleague Gina Sverdlov has conducted a survey for a number of brands and has run a logistic regression analysis to understand this relationship. We call it the “Facebook factor,” and Gina explains how it works in the following blog post.

We proudly present “The Facebook Factor”: Forrester’s Facebook impact model quantifies the impact of a Facebook fan.

Gina Sverlov

We listened to marketers of the world’s biggest brands when they asked, “What’s the impact of Facebook on my brand?” and we decided to take a look for ourselves. We proudly present our latest research, “The Facebook Factor.” In the report, we answer the pressing question, “How much more likely are Facebook fans to purchase, consider, and recommend brands, compared with non-fans?” We used logistic regression modeling to find out. The impact? We call it the “Facebook factor,” and I urge you to read the report to find out how you can leverage our methodology to assess the Facebook factor for your brand.

In the report, we use four major brands as case studies to assess the Facebook factor for Coca-Cola, Walmart, Best Buy, and BlackBerry(Research In Motion [RIM]). Guess what? Facebook fans are much more likely to purchase, consider, and recommend the brands that they engage with on Facebook than non-fans. As the graphic below shows, Facebook fans of Best Buy are about twice as likely to purchase from and recommend Best Buy as non-fans.

And we didn’t just examine the impact of Facebook fans in a silo. We compared the impact of engaging with these brands on Facebook with the impact of other driving factors of brand engagement on these metrics. For example, being a Facebook fan has almost double the impact on purchasing from Walmart as having a Walmart near a consumer’s home.

So what does this mean for companies? The fact that Facebook fans are more likely to buy (and spend more on), consider, and recommend the brands they engage with on Facebook shows that the purchase process is not a dead-end road. Brand engagement is a driver of loyalty and purchase for companies, and Facebook is a great channel for advocates to share brand experiences with others. Read the full report to find out more about what this means for your organisation.

Interested in finding out more or having Forrester assess the Facebook factor for your brand? Please contact me for more information.

Reineke Reitsma is VP & Research Director at Forrester Research and oversees the research conducted by Forrester for Market Insights Professionals globally. On a regular basis she will present a blog post by one of the analysts on her team or herself here on a RW Connect. For more posts by Forrester’s MI analysts see: http://blogs.forrester.com/market_insights.