Recently in Research Category
- 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.
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.
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?
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.
Mary Meeker's Internet Presentation 2009
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.
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?

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!
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.




