September 2009 Archives

I'm flattered and humbled to be included in this year's Media Maven listing from Ad Age. They also put me on the cover of the publication. Each year they recognize 16 people for their contributions to the marketing and advertising industry. I was recognized for my contributions in social media marketing to the industry and at Razorfish. Ad Age is one of two industry publications for the marketing and advertising industry in the United States. These listings are annual.

There's been a lot of debate about GM's latest advertisements which feature its new Chairman Ed Whitacre promoting the company and its vehicles. Most of the criticism has been focused on the fact that GM chose its Chairman to represent the brand in an age where trust in big brands (and their CEOs) is at an all time low. Now, I don't have a problem with GM using Whitacre in its ads. My problem is that GM has missed an important opportunity.

Fluent, our new Razorfish report, examines the rise of Social Influence Marketing - the method of employing social media and social influencers to meet a company's business and marketing objectives. The report features a new proprietary survey that explores how social media informs consumer purchase behavior, and introduces the SIM Score - a new benchmark Razorfish developed to measure a brand's social influence and favorability relative to its competitors. Here I discuss specifically how the SIM Score appears for the Auto Industry.

According to new research from ViTrue, click through rates on wall posts that appear on Facebook Brand Pages are highest on Tuesdays at 9.89%. ViTrue is certainly asking the right questions but I must admit I'm not convinced that their research is based on analyzing enough brand pages on Facebook. I can find no logical reason why Tuesdays do so much better than any other day of the week.

Mark Walsh over at MediaPost has the story about ViTrue's research and he included my feedback in the article. Here's what I had to say:

Shiv Singh, vice president and global social media lead at Razorfish, agreed that the timing of new messages on Facebook pages is an important consideration for marketers. "So the question ViTrue is trying to answer is a very valuable one." But he added that interaction can vary among specific pages depending on a variety of factors including the type of content and audience demographics, making it hard to generalize about the timing of new posts.

He added that he'd have to dig deeper into ViTrue's research and methodology to gain more assurance of its validity.

Now I could be wrong too but for now I certainly feel that I need to know more about this research before I start  making publishing decisions off of it. Maybe the answer is for me to do my own tests on specific brand pages and see whether I get similar results. What do you think? Do you agree with the findings? How would you explain them?