Social Media and Advertising - The State of the debate

Last week I attended the IAB Europe's Research Showcase on Social Media (hat tip Andrew Gerrard). Speakers were:

- Tom Smith Managing Director of Trendstream
- Bradley Little Director Industry Solutions Online, Nielsen
- Pawel Petkowicz, from Poland’s largest social networking site, Nasza Klasa.
- Charlie Osmond, Managing Director of FreshNetworks

Here are my snapshot views from quite a thought provoking day:

Tom Smith - European Social Media Trends

Tom put up a "Hype Timeline" from blogs to twitter, Facebook is so last year, MySpace falls off the groovy scale. Reality of course is different, as usage is opposite to hype - and Internet forums on Google and Yahoo are still most active still, despite Geocities demise.

He also put up some market research charts on Usage Motivation (you can get them here) including the above one showing - guess what - that Usage is mainly driven by "Staying in touch", "sharing views" (which is of course why the popularity of simple connection tools - email, sms, twitter) confound verey generation of tech pundits. Also very popular usage is market research to buy stuff. He notes the Rise of Iphone, and the most popular apps are around getting access to social media.

This balance shifts by country - Russians and emerging mkts are more social whereas UK, Germany most purchase research based. I saked why re Russia et al, Tom's hypothesis is that these countries have more rigid social structures, so fewer alternatives for good old open comms. I also wonder if its harder to buy online....

On Social Networks, the online ones are bigger than F2F (due to lower transaction costs in my opinion - does this impact the Dunbar number?) but not so many online friends are "have a beer with" friends - also noted different social nets have different "mean distance of relationships" vs. F2F and each other

On research to buy, he notes Twitter is becoming more heavily used to promote something, and Trusted recommendation are moving to online social network from geographic/professional recommendation sites.

A few other nuggets:

- All content will be somewhat social eg the Social Electronic Program Guide (EPG)
- We will all have one identity across all media (I Disagree)
- Augmented reality will be driven by social, not commercial metadata (much to the disappointment of those hoping to cash in on Advertising)

Marketing implications are:

- social in path to purchase
- it's good to talk
- make purpose clear
- social media impacts all the voice of the customer stuff and HR, Recruitment
- so trend monitoring (eg Www.trendstream.net) will be key

Brad Little - State of the Debate

Key points were:

- metrics still emergent
- Pepsi pro facebook page 250k Coke homebuilt by fams 2.5m friends
- social media is like a big focus group

The Industry is still in learning curve mode, basically trying to use push metrics on pull media. PR and Marketing are "early in" to being reshaped by the new technologies, and he sees big future market in:

- Customer service - as Big companies make it into a profit centre
- Insight and research
- Product development based on the above

How to unlock value? Some thoughts are:

- understand all data is not equal.
- Corollary issue is too much data - needs filtering, explaining
- use dashboards, and use "zero bse" metrics to see progress
- combine research approach
- derive testable insights (and test them)
- Interaction - just listening leads to insight, then try to understand, then interact

He gave the Snuggies "Outstanding Success" Example (Snuggies are blankets with knitted arm tubes)

- The Standard media view was that Snuggies was a functional product, had good ads and well defined benefits = market win
- The "Real story" - people mocked it on social media, and so it went viral online and was bought by many.

If you stuck with the Standard story you would make the wrong investments in media, marketing and possibly product development.


Next up - Andrew Gerrard chairing a panel Talking ROI

This featured some of the afternoon’s presenters, plus Facebook's Trevor Johnson, Head of Planning & Stratgy EMEA. Issues are:

- Getting organisations used to new metrics & blending it with other media
- People are asking a lot more of it than Older Media because of data available, but its still in its infancy so less able to answer
- Not everything that can be measured is worth it and vice versa

Other useful comments I noted were:

- All new mediums have struggled with ROI in early days - also need to differentiate between direct, indirect and added value ROI
- The "you have no option" argument - lots of "social media e-forces" today
- Good start is using it for cost cutting areas eg customer service to build experiences
- Social networks massively dominated by women and their values (this is something we have banged on about tima and again)
- Many types of social media means lots of different ROI,
- Social Media goes across boundaries also structurally hard to do in Silo companies
- Don't worry about detailed metrics do monitor the big things
- Story key for internal sell - how to link to CRM etc

I had to miss most of Pawel's Sony case study due to real work related tasks, but picked up that they found the "Recommend to a friend" is best way of promotion

Charlie Osmond Fresh Minds - building online research communities

Having aon Online Research Community Allows better innovation to customer led organisation eg Dell Ideastorm as response to MyDellHell. Some thoughts on how to make them work are:

- Use their language, so if thy use txt 2 spk u hve 2 follo suit
- Using social media for insight risky as 90% are only readers, you will never see their views
- Need to be able to get the more detailed info from follow on questions

Some other points made

- Social network is about me, online Community is about us
- You need a social community hub (a blog, website etc)
- Control is a dirty word but some is needed - (nudge?)
- Need to differentiate between buzz and sustained impact (buzz is by definition ephemeral)

How to build an online community:

1. Listen
- ongoing monitoring
- snapshot audit

2. Planning
- website is 20% of work
- community recruit takes time
- plan demographic
- need to get org online, how do you deal with umpleasants

3. Platform

Different channels for different reqmnts - hub idea
Tools key to reduce labour

4. Community Management

Not just about moderation, more like being a host at a party, creating conversation, external outreach

Eg Starbucks wound up 20 people heavier due to poor design of community, tools etc

5. Measuring results

As per discussions above

All in all an interesting day, the analytics alone made attendance worthwhile.