Posts Tagged ‘social media’

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.

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%.

Starbucks’ 6.5 million Facebook fans are worth the equivalent of a $23.4 million annual media spend, according to calculations by social media specialists Vitrue, reported in Adweek.

The firm has worked out  that, on average, a fan base of 1 million translates to at least $3.6 million in equivalent media over a year, or $3.6 per fan.

Vitrue arrived at its $3.6 million figure by working off a $5 CPM, meaning a brand’s 1 million fans generate about $300,000 in media value each month.

Vitrue analysed Facebook data from its clients’ 41 million fans and found that most fans yielded an extra impression. That means a marketer posting twice a day can expect about 60 million impressions per month through the news feed. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Stella Artois has launched a Facebook centred campaign to promote its 4% brand in the build up to the Cannes Film Festival in May.

The idea, developed by advertising agency Mother, is based on the premise that a famous french film director, Jacques d’Azur has gone missing, presumed dead and his estate has made an appeal to the public to find his heir.

The really clever social media bit is when you sign up to the competition through Facebook, your profile picture becomes integrated in a film taking place in his solicitor’s office about the possible beneficiary of the estate – very cool.

The winner of the competition takes Jacques’s place as a VIP at the Cannes Film Festival.

The campaign is supported with a Twitter page and a FlickR photostream of Jacques’s life.

The preposterously glamorous life of Jacques Read the rest of this entry »

B2B marketers intend to increase spend on social media by 43% in 2010, while overall marketing budgets remain static, a survey by US research firm Outsell has reported.

However, when asked which social media sites carried the most influence for B2B marketers, surprisingly, Facebook was considered effective by the most respondents – 51%, followed by LinkedIn – 45% and Twitter – 35%.

As eMarketer points out, this is at odds with Hubspot’s survey of lead generation amongst North American B2B marketers where 45% considered LinkedIn most effective with Facebook at 33%.

The contradiction perhaps reveals a gap between understanding that social networking is important and knowing how to implement a social media strategy in the B2B market. I’m with Hubspot, LinkedIn is definitely the better route for B2B marketers at this point, combined with Twitter.

Facebook overtook Google as the most visited site in the US last week.

Figures for week ending 13th March, released by Hitwise shows Facebook visits accounted for 7.07 percent of all websites, compared to 7.03 percent for Google.

Facebook has temporarily spiked ahead of Google before, on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day 2009 but Hitwise charts show that Facebook, with more than 400 million members, may now surge ahead of Google permanently.

Membership growth is one factor, the rapid rise in social gaming another, with games like Mafia Wars generating nearly 10 million Facebook fans.

Facebook’s marketshare of visits has grown 185% in a year, compared to Google’s 9% rise in the same period.