11 social media marketing trends for 2011
Yes its February, but part of the reason this is so late is because of the launches that have been pumping out in the last few weeks. So with 11 months left of the year, I figured its a good time to look at the trends shaping the rest of 2011.
iPhones dominate Australian mobile internet
Recent statistics show the iPhone and iPod touch is dominant operating system – 93% of phones or mobile devices accessing the internet in Australia and NZ are iPhone iOS. Is Australia & NZ heavy iPhone penetration because Blackberry and other smart phones didn’t have much mainstream uptake prior to iPhone release? Or is it because Australians are the heaviest users of social networks and social usage continues as the fastest growing mobile category?
Who owns social content?
A year later, most clients are now active in social media – they are asking for Facebook apps, one of them has even replaced their corporate website with a Facebook Page and many of them are even using Twitter, personally if not for their brands. The legal/creative issues for user generated content have not gone away – the clients lawyers are still saying “no” to many creative, social content campaign ideas.
It goes like this:
1. Creative team pitch in a cool, engaging user generated/social content, game/application/tactical campaign
2. Client loves it
3. Digital producers spec it out, and it all looks like its all systems go.
4. Then it gets run past the lawyers
5. Lawyers say no
6. Campaign gets killed or its “Back to the drawing board”
Australians increasing social media use is led by Facebook
Nielsen reports today via Nielsen’s 2010 Social Media Report, that there are now 9 million Australians interacting on regularly on social networking sites with Facebook dominating – more than 83% of social networkers naming Facebook as their main social networking platform, up from 72% in 2008 and 34% in 2007.
Overall, Facebook is Australia’s most popular social network with 75% of online Australians having ever visited, and via time spent per month (more than 8 hours per month which is seven and a half more hours than its closest rival site YouTube)
Browsing websites – now there’s an app for that
My friends at Sticky Advertising have been busy launching Get Sticky iPhone app with a little help from the guys at MotherApp.
It’s basically the Get Sticky blogsite for your iPhone. It allows you to stay up to date with all the latest Inbound Marketing news and tips plus their weekly industry website ratings…all from your iPhone. You can download it here and its free. I like the feature where you can favourite the articles you thought were most important. Get Sticky joins Mashable’s iPhone app , The Guardian’s iPhone apps and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s iPhone app – where the emphasis is on getting news in a simplified browsing format for the iPhone.
Social mashup goes mainstream: Pepsi Hit Refresh
Earlier this week, Pepsi Australia’s Hit Refresh social media and heavyweight outdoor campaign started it’s promotions activation phase, via a Twitter treasure hunt and the engagement so far has been extremely high. This is a campaign I’ve been working on since late 2009, and I’ve really enjoyed seeing social brand advocacy in action at a grass roots level in the Gen Y and Gen Z demographic. Particularly on Facebook, Fans of the page are spontaneously sharing their love of Pepsi, requesting the treasure hunt come to their city, and enjoying the MTV TV spots.
There are a few points about this campaign that makes it distinctive in both the social media and advertising landscape in Australia:
Why filmmakers should care about social media
I gave this presentation at the 17th Annual World Congress for Science and Factual Producers in Melbourne on 4th December. The audience was mainly documentary and science filmmakers from around the world who came to find out about social media and what it could do for them.
what are the rules of social media?
A friend who runs a very successful business was contacted via email recently as he’d been held up as a “How not to use twitter” case study at a marketing event. While the person who emails this may or may not have had good intentions, there are a bunch of reasons why they are just completely wrong and inappropriate in judging at all. I’ll start with their Twitter profile:
the cornerstones of social strategy
I’ve been working on a number of social media campaigns lately, some really long term and some short term. What do they have in common?
* Defining social objectives
* Social media monitoring
* Channel strategy
* Content strategy
The combination varies from client to client but its really important to have these cornerstones to help build a social media conversation.
Are you marketing to your ego?
David Meerman Scott will be at the next Social Media Club Sydney (SMCSYD) event to talk about how marketers can “understand social personas and stop wasting money and resources”
David has many case studies on his blog and his book World Wide Rave, but the post that leapt out at me takes it one step earlier in the process referring to the marketplace being the outside world and not your office.
His question to all of us marketing in the new era:
1. Do you market to your ego? Or to the external marketplace?
2. Focus on your buyers, not your bosses.
3. The marketplace is the outside world, not your comfortable office
How Facebook privacy is being eroded for advertising
Facebook signup continues to grow at exponential rates across the globe. In three months since April 2009, they’ve added another 50 million users If you’re looking for statistics on Facebook’s infiltration into individual countries, the CheckFacebook site provides great stats about Australia.
How social media influences trust in advertising
Last week Nielsen released the 2009 Global Online Consumer Survey of over 25,000 Internet consumers from 50 countries. The survey covers degrees of trust consumers have for advertisers/brands. The top 3 are worth highlighting:
* 90% of consumers surveyed trusted recommendations from people they knew personally
* 70% trusted opinions from other consumers posted online
* 70% trusted brand websites
The key takeaway for me is that “strangers” opinions posted online offer as much trust to the consumer as the company website. That can be a glass half full or half empty depending which side of the social fence you sit on.
the customer experience lifecycle of a social brand
With the definition of customer experience lifecycles, marketers can calculate the most strategic influence points on the path to purchase. What interests me is the multiple touchpoints in a customer’s lifecycle where brands who use social media marketing can make a difference to a customer’s experience. I found inspiration in this post on How to define social media strategies by using the customer experience lifecycle
A standard customer experience lifecycle includes the following stages:
Qantas Travel Insider on building a social community
At the Social Media Club Sydney June event panel discussion Do you need an agency to run effective social media campaigns? Karla Courtney – Online Editor Qantas Travel Insider, and @qftravelinsider – represented the client perspective. Karla works client-side and has built a community around the @qftravelinsider Twitter account by engaging in conversations around travel. Watch the video excerpt from the evening.
HabitatUK apologises for Twitter hashtag issue
The post I did on the weekend, How not to use twitter HabitatUK a case study, hit a chord on Social Media Today. It was the most viewed post, and it obviously struck a chord with the Twitter community because of spammers use of hashtags. It was picked up by the Guardian and Sky News. As a consequence, the Habitat press office contacted me this week to apologise for the matter, and asked me to post this on their behalf. Here’s what they said:
How not to use Twitter: HabitatUK as a case study
Habitat is a trendy furniture store, set up by Terence Conran in the 1970s, for those who’ve never been to the UK its like a slightly more upmarket version of Ikea. @HabitatUK turned up on Twitter a couple of days ago, and decided to use trending topic #hashtags at the start of their tweets to get noticed. They used ones that had absolutely nothing to do with furniture, decorating, or shopping, but obviously the top hashtags for Thursday evening AEST such as #iPhone #mms #Apple and even Australia’s Masterchef contestant who got voted off #Poh. I found these on Twitter Search:
sharable content and social brand building
There’s nothing like a competition running on Twitter with a hashtag #squarespace and trending topic to make you check it out. The US-based competition would never have got through legals in Australia – they’re advertising “Win an iPhone every day” but it turns out that its a “Win a $199 Apple store voucher, which you need to add your own money to to get an iPhone”.
Which is a shame because the rest of the social brand building (on Vimeo and shared on Twitter), associated with Squarespace is highly amusing and very sharable. Watch the video and see what you think.
Death of the microsite a casestudy: Bonds Art Attack
The microsite is dying, only most clients and (traditional above-the-line) agencies have not woken up to this yet. Adam Ostrow asks Is Social Media making corporate websites irrelevant? I agree with him and with We Are Social and say microsites are being killed off by social media (and search). Even David Armano just killed his website. Microsites are usually part of the silo’d channel marketing that clients (and some agencies) seem to love. So to have a brand campaign, you put out a TVC, some print ads, outdoor and then online is just the tacked on afterthought – and its usually the “matching baggage” banner advertising, and the microsite. Microsites exist because of a need for a campaign extension: a place to enter a competition, a place to go to when you’ve clicked on a banner to “find out more”, sometimes it’s a story that continues on from a television commercial. Except in most cases there’s not enough story to keep people hanging around to engage at all.
8 reasons to use Twitter in promotions
When I was doing my 10 Twitter Strategies for Australian Brands post, I found a cracker of brand and promotion campaign on Twitter called iSpyLevis. The premise is very simple: the person running the Twitter account goes out to an inner city location every day, posting pictures of where they are. When a Twitter follower recognises her/him, they get free jeans. About 8 pairs of jeans are given away every day, in different styles, men’s and women’s. I notice that its been building followers steadily, and now the Sydney tweeters are noticing and interacting
10 Twitter strategies for Australian brands
With all the mentions of Twitter in mainstream media, one could be turned off by the hype but Twitter is one of the fastest growing social networks in Australia. Twitter is also very adaptable to long term strategies in social media marketing and there are some brands that use it well, and others who are virtually invisible.
I’ve identified 10 Twitter strategies now being used by Australian brands. I’ve divided them up arbitrarily into “Talking” and “Listening” and low interaction (one way) and higher engagement (two way interaction) and plotted some of the types (and the examples) in a matrix diagram.
