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)

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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• Marketing Doesn’t ONLY Happen Online (pr-squared.com)
• Going Deeper into Word of Mouth Marketing (brandautopsy.typepad.com)
• 5 Key Benefits of Monitoring Your Client’s Brand on Social Media (mashable.com)

An addition to that last post on Android phones leapfrogging iPhones in popularity and Gartner’s stats on the global mobile market growing by 13.8% – Ericcson has released stats showing that global mobile traffic has tripled over the past year.

Though data subscriptions only account for 10% of the total, the Swedish handset manufacturer says that data traffic is growing 10x as fast as voice traffic.

Ericsson says that global mobile data traffic stood at nearly 225,000 terabytes per month in Q2 2010.

(Source, Memeburn)

There’s been a lot of research out about how social media recommendations can increase the chances of people buying products or services.

For instance, the other week Harris in the US found that 50% of under 35s followed the recommendations of social media friends, compared to 17% who acted on celebrity endorsements.   And last year Comscore released a study showing that ‘social search’ (social media activity and paid search together) was 233% more effective than search advertising alone.

However,  a recent study featured in Marketing Magazine in particular is worth noting.   It shows that people accessing an online retailer via social media are 10x more likely to buy something than a visitor that comes to the site cold.

According to Sage Pay, on average 7% of visitors to an online store will make a purchase.   However, if directed to the retailer via social media, the % of visitors who will go to the transaction section goes up to 71%.

Especially when compared with a click-through rate that can be as low as 0.02% for display ads, those figures are fairly compelling.   Yet, in the same Sage Pay survey, only 5% of marketers with responsibility for online marketing said that social media was the most effective communications channel.

This is one of the items that we featured this week at Rabbit on our regular ‘Rabbit Feed’ – more details here

Image – Daniel Weir, Via Flickr

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• Social networks drive online commerce, says study (newstatesman.com)

Or at least that’s what the majority of (US) 18-34 year old’s say according to the National Retail Federation and BIGresearch (via Marketing Charts).   51.4% now want Internet access on their mobile / cell phones, up from 44.6% in October 2009.

However, while it stands to reason that Generation Y now expects the ability to be online on the go, it is worth looking at the stat for 35-54 year olds.   Almost half (47%) now want to access the Mobile Internet – less than a year ago in October 2009 that statistic was just over 1/3.

Indeed, back in March metrics firm Nielsen found that 36% of mobile social network use is done by 35-54 year olds, 34% by 25-34 year olds and 16% by 18-24 year olds.  As I said in a post at the time, it could well be that many people aged 35+ are supplied a Smartphone as part of their jobs and so get introduced to it as a consumer tool by using it for business first.

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• Samsung touts new tablet, smartphones (news.cnet.com)
• Nielsen: Social media use increased by 24 percent (sfgate.com)
• Shock: Students using mobile phones to cheat (mobilecrunch.com)

Perhaps not the most surprising result when you think about it: Comscore has found that on Facebook the visitors who spent the most time on the site also spent the most money online, with the top 20% of users shelling out $67 in Q1.

A few more results from the study (via emarketer): Unlike on Facebook, the most prolific users of Twitter are not the biggest spenders, perhaps a consequence of Twitter’s power users seeing the network as more of an information and news exchange.   However at the same time, Twitter users did spend more online overall than Facebook users.

Also, users of Facebook and Twitter spent more on the Web than Internet consumers in general.   People who spent no time on Facebook spent $27 online in Q1, $40 less than those heavy users Comscore talked about.

So in summary, yet another study that shows that people spending time talking about your brand on social media translates into extra £, $ or € when they start spending.

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• Facebook and Twitter Visitors Shop – and Spend – More Online (gigaom.com)
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If you started work in the early/mid 90s like myself, you’ll remember a time when going home meant just that – someone had to physically ring you on your home phone to get you to do something and the chances of you having a laptop with you were fairly slim.

Not anymore, as anyone who owns a smartphone / laptop combination will know.   And data published in emarketer (from a TNS / InterCall study) show that in the US 3/10 workers felt the need to be connected to work 24/7 – in particular men in their 30s.

A prime culprit according to the study is in fact social media and ‘always on technologies’ in smartphones.

An earlier IDC study in the states found that 57% of US workers now use social media for business purposes at least once a week.   Meanwhile 34% actually chose a consumer network such as Facebook or Twitter over a business one, due to familiarity and low cost.   The main thing that they do?  Something familiar to everyone on Twitter, asking questions and acquiring knowledge from a wider peer group.

At the same time there are doubts about how productive this is.  While 52.3% of workers surveyed by the American Society for Training and Development did say they learned more in less time, only 37% actually thought they got more work done.

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Next week The Times and Sunday Times join the FT in becoming UK newspapers behind a paywall where it will cost you ?2 a week or ?1 a day to access the articles.

The Independent asks whether it will pay off and what proportion of online users will vanish.   News International’s management freely admits that a large chunk of visitors will disappear, but according to Tristan Davies of the Sunday Times, “the business end of the company decided it was better to have a quality relationship with an audience than one based on quantity.”

With the other UK nationals (the FT aside) and the BBC continuing to provide online news for free and with online news arguably being a commodity, the Independent points out that the challenge will be to make subscribers think they are getting something they won’t get elsewhere.

Though advertising revenues don’t as yet cover online news budgets, the Telegraph for one has adopted a different model for making money online.

According to a Paid Content article last year, 20-30% of online revenues come from a core of 2-3% of users who buy into extras such as the Telegraph’s fantasy cricket and football games and the Clued Up puzzle service, which charges ?2.99 a month for basic subscription

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This is what travel website Travelocity says after paying so called ‘chat specialists’ to surf the network that’s gained notoriety as a place where males loiter in the hope that they meet passing women on cam (and where the UK has the dubious distinction of heading the Chat Roulette ‘perv index’.)

According to Read Write Web: “During (US) office hours, the gnome “surfs” Chatroulette with the help of a Travelocity chat specialist and after hours he appears alone, holding up a sign with a clever saying of some sort about how time may be better spent traveling that chatting. For example: “Traveling from person to person doesn’t count. Travelocity.com.””

The results?  350,000 impressions and 400 conversations between potential customers and its “chat specialists.”    And not only that, the promo has attracted a fair amount of coverage in the US.   According to Travelocity, “The PR alone has totally captured the ROI.”

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After showing a slight drop in US (Compete and Comscore) and Worldwide (Comscore) Facebook visitor numbers in February, both metrics firms now confirm that it’s business as usual with the social network growing in popularity again.

Comscore says that Facebook had 472 million uniques in Jan, 463 million in March and 484 million in Feb.   However, Comscore seems to suggest that the February blip was to do with social media as a whole as both MySpace and Twitter also saw drops in February and a rise again in March.

And the stats from Facebook itself?   At the beginning of February Facebook had itself down as having 400 million active monthly users. Inside Facebook then estimated it at 436 million for March using the Facebook advertiser tool.

Inside Facebook mentions Facebook staffers in saying that it’s now passed the 450 million active user mark.   To put that into perspective, there are now more Facebook users than there are people in South America (382 million).

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