Lies, damned lies and statistics

Despite well documented examples of brands maintaining Twitter feeds, and using them to respond to customers, customer service is by and large not the biggest motivation behind brands setting up social media profiles.

This is according to social media monitoring service Alterian (via MarketingProfs) which found that fairly standard marketing objectives lay behind branded social media efforts.

“Acquiring new customers”…or rather plain old sales was the number one objective for 30.1%, followed by awareness raising (26.5%), and using it as a communications channel for existing customers (24%).   However customer services as such was the main social media objective for only 1.2% of marketers surveyed.

It’s worth noting that respondents (who were based in the US) were asked to give one answer, so this isn’t the same as saying that said marketers don’t consider customer services via social media to be important.   Still – the fact that many brands still see everything through an advertising prism, and often get it wrong as a result, can be seen in the fact that sales was the most popular answer.

At the same time another US survey has come out, this time via publisher Colloquy and the Direct Marketer Association.   This one found that among marketers who do see social media as a customer services channel, the average social media spend was $88k compared to $53k who were motivated by brand awareness and $50k by those who wanted sales.

Not withstanding the fact that this second survey was done by email and involved respondents filling out 17 questions, you do have to ask…is that it?! $50k (£33k) spend to use social media as a way to get new customers?   Unfortunately that stat confirms that marketers taking the social media sales route are sometimes also the ones who understand the least about the area.

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• Alterian Survey Reveals Brands Undervalue Customer Service Objectives with Social Media (prweb.com)

The end of search is a theme that’s been talked about a lot in the past – as long ago as in Feb 2008, Ben Kunz of Media Associates produced a series of graphs from Google Trends showing that search volumes were significantly down for a range of what you might call staple terms – music, furniture, office supplies etc.

Some of it is wishful thinking as many of us wish for the age of Google to start drawing to a close (whether the age of Facebook is any better is of course a different matter altogether).

And the latest Nielsen search stats from the US show that Google is as dominant as ever, controlling almost 2/3 (64.2%) of the search market – a share that’s hardly changed since last year, despite all the new bells and whistles that Microsoft’s Bing (on 13.6%) has been rolling out.

It’s the second table from the Nielsen post however that makes for more interesting reading. Over the past year, search activity is down 16% – 17% in the case of Google. Yahoo! (-30%) performed particularly badly, though despite it’s still small share Bing (+28%) has done well. So all those extra features are paying off after all.

OK, so with almost nine million searches being conducted in the US in July, search is certainly not dead. But a drop of close to a fifth year on year is still significant, and one explanation has to be that people get more and more of what they need and want via social media. There is that research from earlier in the year after all about Facebook now driving more traffic to major news and entertainment portals than Google.

At the very least it reinforces what Comscore found last year – that search and social media campaigns now need to work very much in tandem, with a paid search campaign supported by social activity being 2.23x more effective than if conducted on its own.

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• The Search Market Isn’t Always What it Seems to Be (webpronews.com)
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• Google starts video series showcasing hot searches (news.cnet.com)
• Numbers Game: Bing goes up as Google’s search share drops (econsultancy.com)

One of the key points from the (UK) Ofcom Communications Market Report was, unsurprisingly, the extent to which the media habits of 18-24 year olds differed from other age groups.   However, the stats also showed that 55-64 year olds were becoming much more willing to embrace new media, with the new generational divide occurring at 65 or so.   That’s now backed up by a Pew Report from the US about older adults and social media.

In summary Pew Research says that almost half (47%) of 50-64 year olds use social networks use social networks, while a quarter (26%) of the over 65s do so – this compares to 86% of the under 30s.    In other words the social media age barrier has steadily been moving from people in their 30s two years ago, to people in their 40s in 2008/9, to Web users in their 50s now.

When it comes to daily social network use, 20% of 50-64 year olds do so, along with 13% of the over 65%.

Pew says that older Internet surfers are still more comfortable with what you might call traditional past times such as emailing or reading the news.   And 20% of 50-64 year olds who use social media every day is still very much a minority.  But – it’s worth noting that a year ago, that figure was only 10%, so the number of habitual 50 something social media users has doubled in the twelve months.

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Here’s a stat from the KellerFay Group in the US about where word of mouth marketing conversations take place.   And it turns out 90% don’t take place on the Internet.  Oh nos! Time to get back to having promo staff doing stunts and giving away freebies on street corners.

The PR Squared blog says that this should serve as a wake-up call that online approaches are only ever an “ADDITIVE, not a REPLACEMENT for their “traditional” approaches.”

Though I know PR Squared certainly doesn’t fall into this camp, for social media sceptics this will be a bit of a “see! see! told you so!” argument.  It reminds me of a former colleague who used to dismiss social media marketing with “it’s all smoke and mirrors” and “you still need a good idea.”

Er…well yes, yes and yes.  Online marketing campaigns should very much work in tandem with other marketing disciplines, see a previous post on the need to combine TV and online for one example. Surely that should be self evident?

Naturally we talk about brands all the time (60x a week according to KellerFay) , and tend to do so in our normal day to day lives when not glued to a computer screens.  Similarly, most “new” news is still broken by what’s considered to be traditional media – check out this stat from Pew Research earlier in the year.

Where online channels do however come into their own is in amplifying and rapidly spreading messages.

For example, Twitter stories can become front page newspaper ones in as little as four hours.   And a separate study by Harris shows that Americans under 35 trust social media recommendations over newspaper ones….and far above celebrity ones.   Finally, people who are most active on Twitter are also the ones who are most likely to post ratings and reviews, comment on news and upload articles to share.

(via Lauren Fernandez)

Image – Kit Cowan

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A quarter (25.9%) of consumers in the big five European Union countries (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain) now browse the Internet via their mobile phones.   This is according to comscore’s MobileLens survey (via Marketing Charts), which shows that the rates of mobile Internet use range from 36.7% in the UK to 20.4% in Germany.

The UK also leads in the % that accessed news (36.5% compared to the European average of 29.7%) and accessed a social network while on their mobiles (23.8% vs 14.9%).   It’s Italy however that has the highest rate of Smartphone users (33.6%), while Spain (56.1%) has the highest number of 3G subscribers.

It should be said that the UK figures are a little different to Ofcom’s recent Communications Market Report (summary here), which showed that only 18% of Brits access the Internet via their mobiles – however comscore’s figures come from June, while Ofcom’s report is a comprehensive year in review and so draws data from Q1.

Comscore says that the number of mobile music users has grown by 10% over the past year, meaning that there are now 54 million consumers in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain who listen to music via their mobiles – or 23.8% of the total.

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• UK citizens flocking to the mobile web (v3.co.uk)
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The other week Hitwise came out with stats questioning whether Facebook’s growth was beginning to slow in the UK. This was on top of US figures from June showing that the uptake among 18-44 year olds had dropped.

Now more evidence, this time from emarketer and Inside Facebook.

The latest figures for the UK show that Facebook fell in June and rose by only 1.8% in July, meaning that on 1 Aug there were less British Facebook users than two months previously. US growth however seems to be back on track, albeit slightly at 2.4% from July to August.

Do these stats give any indication that Facebook is likely to fall out of favour anytime soon? Not at all, Hitwise’s Robin Goad says it might actually be a sign of Facebook hitting maturity in the major markets of the US and UK and not really being able to hoover up any more users. As a result, trends from now on may well be more seasonal in nature.

For example, in July 44.2% of UK residents visited Facebook, an astonishing number when you think about it. Only the US at 42.1% penetration comes close. As the Google of social media, Facebook is becoming pretty ubiquitous, and if you are a marketer unavoidable.

By comparison, emarketer says that France with 30% visiting the network offers much greater growth potential. As a result those double digit annual growth figures will still be happening. Just not in Facebook’s largest two markets.

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• Facebook nears saturation point in UK (newstatesman.com)
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An earlier post was all about the (UK) Ofcom Communications Market Report and the way in which TV and social media campaigns can work in tandem.

Deloitte has now looked into this as well, releasing a report to coincide with the upcoming Edinburgh Television Festival.   Deloitte commissioned research among 4000+ adults, and found that, as much as people like myself talk about ‘social TV’, only 7% of those polled had become fans of their favourite programmes.

At the same time, the generational shift that Ofcom found in its research, also comes into play here.   Among 18-24 year olds, 46% liked their favourite shows on Facebook.

Also, Deloitte’s research is about actively liking a programme, there is of course a stage before that of people simply tweeting about live TV while its taking place, or exchanging Facebook / IM messages about it.

TV ads skipped by 86%

Another reason why combining online +TV could become more attractive for brands could come down to 86% of viewers with PVRs skipping ads. This is the result of a second Deloitte study conducted to coincide with the Edinburgh TV Festival.

In fact, it’s younger viewers, the very ones likely to be online, who are more receptive to advertising messages.   Deloitte found that while a third of over 55s said that no form of advertising impacted them, only 13% of under 25s felt the same.

Image – ccharmon

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German research consultancy Brand Science has come out with research involving 563 European marketers on why most social media projects are “failures” (via PSFK) – their presentation is embedded above.

The reason?   It all comes down to a lack of understanding on what social media can actually do for brands.  The usual case of unrealistic expectations.

So, while a King Fish Media, Hubspot and Junta 42 study says that 72% of companies have a social media strategy, you wonder whether that strategy is any more detailed than ‘create a Facebook page’, or ‘make a viral video.’

Some study highlights:

1 – Unlike in the King Fish Media study, Brand Science found that 81% of companies actually don’t have a clear social media strategy

2 – 73% had to show a financial return in twelve months.  This doesn’t seem unreasonable though it depends of course on what the social media campaigns in question actually involved.   And comes back to the point that not every SM campaign can be viral

3 – And on that note, 72% felt that social media really did have to be viral.  A case of reach over engagement?

4 – 76% blamed legal for getting in the way

5 – 76% don’t moderate social media projects accurately.  Or not at all

Most importantly, 84% run their social media campaigns through the same KPIs as their other marketing activity, and 37% treat it as a media “buy” – so they compare it to buying ad space.   In other words, it comes down to the usual reach figures, or even worse advertising value equivalent (AVEs)

Whose fault is that?  It’s both of ours of course, the agency and the client.   The other month the outgoing CMO of Unilever Simon Clift said that brands were faced with a so-called “lost generation” of marketers.

By that he meant marketing professionals aged 30-45 who have budgetary responsibility and who obviously use the Internet in a personal capacity, but who – unless they were forced to learn it like I did in one of my early jobs – don’t know how to apply it to their working lives.

On the other hand, it’s worth looking at Patricio Robles’ (of econsultancy) article on ten common social media mistakes.   His sixth one is “pretending social media is free.”

It isn’t free of course, at the very least it takes a certain amount of time and expertise.  But we can be guilty of trying to get the business 1st and asking the difficult questions later.

As a result, no surprise that Brand Science’s research found that 87% of marketers had to “correct” their social media expectations.  Despite all the noise created by so-called social media ‘rock stars’ (ugh), many of us are still learning the hard way.

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More stats from the 377 page (UK) Ofcom Communications Markets Report, in particular ones that reinforce the fact that TV-led campaigns or properties are very often more effective when combined with online.     Three findings in particular (with graphs)

1 – Live, scheduled TV carries a low attention threshold. Compared to other forms of media, consumers are least likely to give live TV and radio their undivided attention.     Social media and print have medium attention scores, while games and downloaded video content rank best when it comes to consumer focus (hence the wisdom of spending money on in-game promotions).

2 – We’re now more likely to ‘media stack.’ 20% of media time is now simultaneous – very often involving TV + the Internet and mobile phones.  Among the under 25s that proportion rises to 29%.  16-24 year olds managed to fit just over nine and a half hours’ worth of media into a little  over six and a half hours of actual time.

3 – The most popular YouTube channels are variations of mainstream media properties. It’s a myth that we want to spend our time on YouTube watching home made ‘world’s funniest animal’ type videos.   Instead, much as we do on TV, we want to see content with high production values, involving recognisable names.

Where’s the proof that TV + online work in tandem works?  Here are three random examples:

1 – PHD and Medialets developed a True Blood iPhone ad to support the last series.   Though we can question whether HBO’s 38% increase in viewers was down to the mobile campaign, the best click-through rate of 8.73% that the campaign achieved was way beyond the usual display ad rate of 0.02%.

2 – Speaking of click-throughs, Coke achieved one of 6%, when it ran a Promoted Tweets / Twitter World Cup campaign.   Running a World Cup promo while people were tweeting about matches made sense – Twitter saw a clear spike in activity, including a record for the number of tweets per second during the recent tournament.

3 – One of my favourite examples is this one:  US broadcaster Oxygen piloted a “real time viewing party” called Oxygen Live around one of its hit shows – Bad Girls Club.   This pulled in comments and conversations from several networks such as Twitter into an online hub while the show was airing.

Oxygen Live kicked off 30 mins before each show started, meaning that it was trending on Twitter 5 mins before each episode and there was a consistent increase in viewers over the hour.   In fact in the US West Coast when they *didn’t* run Oxygen Live, ratings were up 9% among women aged 18-49.   Once Oxygen Live launched that ratings then saw a much bigger increase, up to 57%.

And as far as a successful example of integrating TV advertising and an online campaign goes….Old Spice anyone?

As a final point, it’s worth noting that two of the new social networks that have created a buzz over the past few weeks, Miso and Glue, have a model that’s directly related to people checking into entertainment events and TV programmes, as opposed to locations.

We’ve got a more detailed summary of the Ofcom report in the latest (agency) Rabbit feed, the html version is here.

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Ofcom (the UK equivalent of the FCC) has produced the latest version of its communications market report.   Its a huge document that goes into every element of media (including Internet) consumption in the UK and is available to download here.

Out of the hundreds of charts Ofcom includes, I usually go straight for this one – what one media would UK consumers miss the most?  Rather than the usual ‘do you read more / less newspapers’ question, by asking consumers to pick one channel as essential, Ofcom gets to the heart of changing media consumption habits.

Last year showed mobiles leap-frogging the Internet among the under 25s, and less than 5% of consumers identifying print and radio as their one ‘must have’ medium.

The updated figures (compiled in Autumn 2009) are as follows.  TV is still the most essential (50%) media for UK consumers, but for the under 25s mobile phones (32%) come close to TV (36%) as the one thing they can’t do without (click on image below for a bigger version)

Print was the most important media for less than one in twenty (4%) consumers – for the under 25s that drops to one in 100 (1%).