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With all due respect to Ad Age and Edelman, I feel the analysis of the Edelman Trust Barometer 2010 maybe a little misleading. The headline "In Age of Friending, Consumers Trust Their Friends Less" obviously implies that people are trusting their friends less when making decisions. While that makes great copy, when you click on the chart what you really see is that trust in all forms of media (the alternatives were TV News, Radio News, Newspapers and Friends/Peers) has dropped dramatically by approximately the same percentages. Trust in Friends/Peers hasn't dropped considerably more versus those other categories.As we debate (again and again) the value of influence from friends and peers, lets keep two extremely important factors in mind.
- The subject being discussed makes a big difference. For example, I'm not going to trust my friends very much when I'm deciding whether to get open heart surgery. However, if I'm buying running shoes (as I did yesterday), advice from my friends will make all the difference. I'll of course be asking the friends who are runners for advice and not the ones who don't.
- And secondly, lets not confuse trust in companies with trust in products and services. They are two separate categories (with of course connections to one another). This research was about trust in companies versus trust in products. As we talk about friending and trusting peers, it matters most with products that people have experienced and less so with the companies behind them.
This is the paragraph that I'm struggling with the most -
If consumers stop believing what their friends and the "average Joes" appearing in testimonials say about a product or company, the implications could be significant not just for marketers but for the social networks and word-of-mouth platforms selling themselves as solutions to communicating in a jaded world. The influence of peers has been considered the leading rationale for brands' shifting marketing dollars to social media.
If the coverage focused just on information about the company, then that would be fine. But generalizing to products doesn't seem fair.
Disclaimers - I work for Razorfish and my company research shows that trust in peer recommendations around purchasing decisions is not dropping but rising. My analysis is also based on reading the Ad Age piece and the Edelman executive summary only. I do not have access to the whole research report
FEED, The Razorfish Digital Brand Experience Report was just published. Primarily authored by @gschmitt who shares the credit for it generously, FEED focuses on how consumers are engaging with brands in an increasingly digital world. Here are my favorite findings. The full report is available here.
- 65% of consumers report having had a digital experience that either positively or negatively changed their opinion about a brand. Yes, we all talk about social monitoring but I'd argue maybe not even enough as yet. You need to understand your consumers beyond the perspectives that they share publicly but as they interact with you digitally.
- 73% of consumers have posted a product or brand review on a website like Amazon, Yelp, Facebook or Twitter. Talk about social influence marketing being real! The reality is that no website can exist now without enabling product reviews. Customers share their opinions and learn from each other.
- 44% of those that follow twitter do so for exclusive deals. They're not looking for conversations from those brands. This is similar to the Fluent research and isn't surprising at all. It shows that brands have a lot of work to do.
- And finally, 64% of consumers report making a first purchase from a brand because of a digital experience. Wow that's a huge percentage. Are you paying enough attention to your digital experience?
You can find FEED in its entirety here. Don't miss it. Its great work and if I may add, gorgeous design.
This Tuesday I'll be on an 8:00am panel discussing how the social media worlds are beginning to collide. On the panel with me will be Todd Defren, (CEO, Shift Communications), Adam Hirsch (COO, Mashable), Mike O'Toole (President, PJA Advertising) and Emily Riley (Senior Analyst, Forrester). This should be a good panel as we're quite a mix of people - from analysts and agency types, to PR and publishers.
You can bet I'll be discussing the different types of influencers and lamenting the fact that we don't pay enough attention to them. This is part of the BMA (Business Marketing Assocation) Leading Edge Series.
I'll be speaking next Monday (11/16) at 9:00am at the Web 2.0 Conference in NY. I'm on a panel with Jennifer Zeszut (Scout Labs), Peter Kim (Dachis Group), James M Smith (Disney Online), Randy Ksar (Motorola) and Aaron Dignan (Undercurrent). Here's the panel description.Social media isn't just for community managers anymore. The rise of Web 2.0 content and community is changing marketing operations - making marketers more efficient, customer-centric and prepared to make strategic decisions like product and service enhancements, feature prioritization, pricing and customer segmentation. And, the best part? It's free and available in real-time so any size company with any size budget can leverage it.
Real-time marketing means understanding and responding to the movements of the market on both individual and strategic levels. This session will show you how to apply the instant, unprompted customer feedback from Web 2.0 to media buying, campaign optimization, creative development, customer community management, CRM, PR and promotions.
Hear from companies that are operationalizing their use of social media feedback as a source of strategic advantage, and walk away with 6 new ways to integrate real-time marketing practices into your organization.
I hope you can join. And whether you can or can't, I'd still love your thoughts on this. If I use your insights, I promise to give credit where its due.
This is an absolutely must view presentation from Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker. The theme for her this year is mobile and the internet. I'm starting to agree that mobile's time in the sun may have finally arrived.
Mary Meeker's Internet Presentation 2009
Mary Meeker's Internet Presentation 2009
Before you make the decision to purchase a book, it is always good to scan the table of contents. Here's the detailed table of contents (it follows the Contents at a Glance) and a sample chapter (the introduction) for Social Media Marketing for Dummies.
Social Media Marketing for Dummies You'll notice that the book makes some very strategic and academic concepts actionable and easily understandable while still helping the reader with the fundamentals.
My five idea theme for presentations continues. Organized by Chris Brogan each year this conference attracts some pretty amazing speakers (think Gary Vaynerchuk and Brian Solis) and I was flattered to be included in the group.
If you're interested in more on this, buy the book! And don't be turned off by the fact that its titled Social Media Marketing for Dummies. That just means it has a lot of thought provoking, strategic concepts explained in simple, easy to digest and practical terms. It does not mean that its for dummies.
If you're interested in more on this, buy the book! And don't be turned off by the fact that its titled Social Media Marketing for Dummies. That just means it has a lot of thought provoking, strategic concepts explained in simple, easy to digest and practical terms. It does not mean that its for dummies.
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.
Continue reading Social Influence Marketing & 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:
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?
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?
I'm excited to announce the launch of Fluent, the Social Influence Marketing report from Razorfish. This is the first report of its kind which understands who and what influences consumers at different points in the marketing funnel.
The insights in this report are built on three pillars - a survey with 1,000 North American consumers, six months worth of real conversational data to frame the introduction of a new social index and the experiences of Razorfish Social Media Leads across the world who advise marketers in industry leading companies everyday.
The survey and conversational driven research also busts three myths about Social Influence Marketing.
1. That companies have figured out how to build their brands in social media. They haven't. For example, six out of 10 consumers don't bother to seek out opinions of brands via social media.
2. That television is dead. It isn't. Consumers view TV ads as more trustworthy than ads on social networks. Marketers need to do more in the social realm, but they need to do it in a way that builds trust first. Brands don't have the trust today.
3. That you cannot measure in the social web. Not only do campaign specific metrics matter and can be measured but we believe a SIM Score for the social web is extremely important. Think of it as the blood pressure for the brand in the social web. In the report, we introduce this index and show the SIM Scores of 5-6 brands in 4 industries. We also compare the online numbers to offline share of voice data to demonstrate how those two worlds are blurring.
Read Fluent, the Social Influence Marketing report and come back to the blog to share your thoughts, comments and criticisms. Over the next few weeks, I'll be delving into the insights more deeply over here. And if you like the report, please tell others about it!
A few weeks ago I was on a panel at the Advertising Research Foundation Audience Measurement Summit with Ed Keller (The Keller Fay Group), Rob Masters (Unilever) and Colleen Fahey Rush (MTV). We discussed the relationship between online and offline influencers and the importance of each. Also discussed was the role that influentials play (they're ten percent of the population but impact 25% of all brand conversations) versus the social influencers who are the everyday people who influence their peers around decision making for specific products and services.
My take - the influentials are very important but they're not the sum total of all influence taking place online or offline. The social influencers and the known peer influencers (think close family and friends) increasingly play more important roles in brand affinity and purchasing decisions. They're harder to reach but thanks to social graph technologies they're more traceable online. It is getting as important to market to them as it is to market to the influentials. Maybe there's room for both Duncan Watts and Malcolm Gladwell in this world!
Here's the presentation that I gave at our 9th Annual Client Summit. This was presented to 600 odd senior marketers from industry leading companies. My key messages were that in the social realm one big idea is not enough, you need many little ideas that work in harmony with each other. I also pushed for the reorganization of the marketing department, a focus on what I referred to as Social CRM and the necessity in innovating with others. Take a look at the presentation and let me know your thoughts.
Big Ideas for Social Influence Marketing
View more presentations from shivsingh.
Less than a week ago Alltop launched its Personalized Feed Reader. Alltop is an online magazine rack that aggregates RSS feeds of every major topic from wine to personal finance and everything in between. It saves a reader from having to identify and add RSS feeds to a personalized Google page. All the best feeds on a given topic are easily scannable and can now be added to a customized page with a single click. Alltop is a simple, useful service for those who don't care to spend time creating RSS feeds and customizing them.
But Alltop has been bashed in the technology community. And in my opinion this bashing represents the worst of the technology community. This can be summed up in one phrase - technological determinism. I feel that many of the digerati and even folks in the social media space suffer from a technological determinism bias ( I do too at times). Technological determinism's doctrine is based on the premise that a society's technology determines its cultural values, social structure or history. It is the belief that technology is good for humanity and that it shapes humanity for the better. Got a problem - solve it with better technology. Technology is defined as the central causal element that promotes social change.
Continue reading Alltop fights technological determinism. The experts are wrong.
Last year a group of renowned scholars and business leaders got together to discuss the future of management. Organized by Gary Hamel of the Harvard Business School, the two day event was designed to think about the fundamental principles, processes and practices of management that will drive success in the future. The group identified shared beliefs and after much contentious deliberation also "moonshots of management."
The shared beliefs included the notion that management is one of humankind's most important social technologies, a recognition that current management models are seriously out of date and third that management must be reorganized to become more adaptable, innovative and inspiring places to work. Of the 25 moonshots of management, a few stood out for me which I'm discussing here because they jive with social influence and the role it plays inside and outside of organizations.
Continue reading Reinventing Management in the 21st Century.
