Archive for the ‘social media’ Category

Global fast food giant McDonald’s has reportedly signed up to leverage Facebook’s imminent location-based status updates, which will allow brands to target consumers with geographically relevant marketing. The new location feature could launch as soon as this month in the US.

George Nimeh, Managing Director of agency Iris Digital told Brand Republic this week that the service was a natural fit for Facebook and a big draw for brands – as long as they keep the service fun as well as functional.

Karsten Weide, Research Vice President for digital media and entertainment at consultancy IDC agrees, adding: “Being associated with brands can be cool… Whether a lot of people think it is cool to be associated with McDonald’s is a different question.”

Whatever the result, the fast food’s giant foray into location-based advertising will make a great case study for our tolerance of this type of advertising. Read the rest of this entry »

As the final week of campaigning draws to its close, WPP’s chief executive, Sir Martin Sorrell, has told The Financial Times that none of the UK’s political parties have managed to balance old and new media in their election campaigns as well as Barack Obama.

Highlighting once again the fact that this election race has proven the power of traditional media, Sorrell also stressed that the televised debates were often viewed through the prism of social media.

“Our attitude to the performances on these programmes has been conditioned by the polling, tweets, Facebook and Google responses we have seen as a result,” he said. “None of these elements can be isolated anymore.”

According to the Financial Times, the Liberal Democrats have had most success with new media channels: “In their most enthusiastic moments some Lib Dems believe that they can replicate the surge of voting by young people that helped Barack Obama win the White House in 2008.”

The Lib Dems now have more than 59,000 Facebook members, compared with more than 58,000 for the Conservatives and about 28,000 for Labour.

Twitter is the preferred tool of marketers, closely followed by Facebook, a survey by online business magazine, SocialMediaExaminer.com has found.

The 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, which canvassed opinion from almost 2,000 marketers, indicated that 88% of marketers use Twittter, while 87% use Facebook.

In third place was the online professional networking platform, LinkedIn, with 78% usage while 70% used blogs. Online video sites such as YouTube had the next-highest usage rate, at 46%.

An earlier version of this survey, released in 2009, found that blogs were in second place at 79%, and Facebook in fourth place at 77%. This would suggest that Facebook is growing in popularity for marketing and PR purposes. Another interesting finding was that men were significantly more likely than women to use YouTube or other video marketing tools. Read the rest of this entry »

Unmeasurable ROI is seen as the main obstacle to implementing a social media strategy, a new poll of US marketers has discovered.

35% of marketers in the R2integrated survey said there was not enough data or analytics available to measure ROI of social media, which the majority would like to use for lead generation.

Getting buy-in from senior management was seen as the second biggest obstacle, 23% citing this reason, followed by 21% who believed their audience were not yet active on social media.

35% of the companies surveyed believed they were making money as a result of social media activity with those who have a formal strategy in place, twice as likely to be making money from the new channels.

An overall majority of marketers stated that social media is ‘invaluable’ to their business, but measuring just how valuable and convincing the upper echelons seem to be the main sticking points.

(Source eMarketer)

Lady Gaga’s ‘Bad Romance‘ is now the most watched YouTube video of all time, with 180 million views, overtaking the home video phenomenon “Charlie bit my finger.”

Last month Gaga became the first artist to break a billion views on Vevo/YouTube with the combined views of three hits -’Poker Face’, ‘Just Dance’ and ‘Bad Romance’.

The use of LinkedIn for B2B sales prospecting has increased by 47.8% since last year, according to US research from OneSource, reported in Emarketer.

Around 20 percent of those polled were also increasing their use of  blogs, Facebook and Twitter for prospecting purposes, though the overall majority still do not use social media for prospecting.

The most popular approach for gaining qualified leads remains outbound prospecting, which was rated 3.7 out of five for effectiveness, followed by the company website (2.9), inbound calls (2.6), email campaigns (2.6), shows & events (2.5), social networking (2.1) , direct mail (2.1)  and webinars (1.8).

In January Hubspot research showed that 45% of US companies who have used LinkedIn for marketing had acquired a customer through the site. Company blogs were considered effective for 43% of respondents, while Twitter for 38%  and Facebook for 33%.

The internet has overtaken TV as most essential medium in Americans’ lives, according to an Arbitron/Edison research study and social media use is becoming mainstream.

For the first time, more Americans say the internet is “most essential” to their lives when given a choice along with television, radio, and newspapers. 42 percent chose the internet as “most essential,” with 37 percent saying television, 14 percent choosing radio, and 5 percent nominating newspapers. While television still leads among those over the age of 45, the internet dominates among younger persons age 12 to 44.

Evidence that social media is moving into the mainstream is revealed in the number of Americans over the age of 12 with a social network profile, which  now stands at 48 percent – double that of two years ago.

The study also reveals that consumer use of social networking sites is not just a youth phenomenon. While nearly eight in ten teens (78 percent) and 18 to 24s (77 percent) have personal profile pages, almost two-thirds of 25 to 34s (65 percent) and half of 35 to 44s (51 percent) also now have personal profile pages. Read the rest of this entry »

Increased website traffic is the main metric marketers use to measure the success of social media campaigns, according to a report by eMarketer, underlining that social media measurement remains a fairly blunt instrument.

Only half of those marketers in a Datran Media study believe social media will generate quantifiable results in 2010, with 37% unsure and 12% saying no.

“For the few marketers who do attempt to apply quantitative measures to their social marketing efforts, the metrics they use are not terribly sophisticated,” said eMarketer CEO Geoff Ramsey. “Most marketers today do not invest sufficient time, effort or money on social media measurement.”

Datran’s respondents, who are heavily invested in social media, 72% having Facebook and Twitter profiles, prefer to measure online campaigns based on clicks (72%), conversions (59.2%) and impressions (58.4%). Conversions were considered the most important metric to track.

LinkedIn has announced a new job matching service which automatically suggests qualified candidates from their 60 million strong professional database.

Called ‘Real-Time Profile Matches’ and currently in beta mode,  LinkedIn say they have developed proprietary technology “to make it faster and easier both for users to find the right jobs and for hiring companies to find the right talent.”

Hiring managers and recruiters will see qualified candidates immediately after posting a job in the form of a ‘job poster’ containing up to 24 profiles of qualified candidates, presented in business card form.

Within the job poster recruiters can view the profile of each match and contact those that are a good fit. Read the rest of this entry »

Shoe brands VANS and Converse along with Starbucks and Skittles were the four fastest growing Facebook brands this week, according to Inside Facebook, a blog that monitors fan pages.

While VANS and Converse may be benefiting from the consolidation of old Facebook fan pages into one main page, Skittles appears to be growing due to a voucher offer which allows registered fans to buy two packets of Skittles for the price of one (BOGOF).

Outside of consumer brands, the top twenty is dominated by pop stars, footballers and social media games. From a British perspective, good to see hit TV programme House, starring Hugh Laurie make an appearance at number 20 with a gain of 65,800 fans following its return to TV screens last week.

The overall rankings for brands’ fans on Facebook looks like this, Starbucks (6.1m) Coca-Cola (5.1m) Skittles (3.9m) Nutella (3.6m)  Pringles (3m).

This week’s fastest risers chart below. Read the rest of this entry »