Social Media Chronicles Engagement in Super Bowl 2012

How many people watched the Super Bowl with a smart device or a laptop handy? According to Nielsen over 111 million people, 53.3 million households, watched the game itself. NBC says that 2.1 million unique viewers watched it online, the most ever for an online sports event.

Even more than the number who streamed, two questions especially interest marketers:

1. How many people actually watched with a smart device handy?
2. Who were they, how often were they socializing, and what were they talking about?

There will probably be a number on actual two-screen watchers soon, but a pre-game survey gives an interesting preview. According to Velti, 60% of mobile users planned to use their mobile device during the game. Here’s how their plans broke down:
1. 13% intended to use their devices during game play; 26% were going to use them during commercial breaks
2. During the halftime show, twice as many men as women (26% to 13%) planned to use their mobile devices
3. 18 to 34 year olds had the highest anticipated usage; they expected to check their devices an average of 19 times during the game.
4. The mobile users are not loners; 97% will watch with someone else; they expect 47% of their co-watchers to also be checking their mobile devices.
This is confirmation of the multitasking study I wrote about a few months ago.

CNN has an interesting perspective on what they did. According to their data from Trendr there were over 17 million interactions during the game. The traffic data supports their pregame plans. CNN chose some of the best tweets on various topics. Some are great; check them out.

I thought the approach taken by CNBC was most interesting to social media aficionados. According to Collective Intellect their Ad Tracker went  beyond overall buzz and general sentiment scores to ranks each brand based on their percent share of several conversational indicators we call dimensions. They ranked the funniest ads and also the “best.” There’s a lot of similarity to the traditional best ad ranking of USA Today and a variety of content-oriented rankings from Ad Age. Facebook had an ad meter on the official SB site—another sign of the times!

View video here

What is the take-away from all these numbers? It seems inescapable: social media and smart devices—and social media on smart devices—has become a mainstay of the lives of many consumers, especially the Millennials and their younger siblings, the Net Generation. Older generations are heavy users also, but perhaps have not integrated social/mobile into the very fabric of their lives to the same extent. The message to marketers seems clear. This is the SoMo portion of SoLoMo: marketers who are not in this game are missing the trend. The scary thing is that this is probably not the last trend; marketers who ignore the message of integrating their communications can only fall further behind.

Rich Text Article first published as Social Media Chronicles Super Bowl XLVI Engagement on Technorati.

Mobile is the Choice of Multitaskers

Are you seeing more QR codes on your TV screen and wondering who scans a code while watching TV? It could be up to 80% of the mobile Internet users who responded to a recent study by Razorfish!

Multitasking is hardly a new phenomenon, but laptops, smart phones and tablets have taken the activity to a whole new level. An earlier study by Yahoo!, which interviewed over 8 thousand Internet users and over 5 thousand mobile users, found a whopping 86% of mobile users (92% of mobile users aged 13-24) viewing mobile content related to the TV program they were watching. That is too many multitaskers to be ignored!
According to the ReadWriteWeb graphic, a fair amount of the multitasking activity is communication, specifically social networking or texting (about brands or TV programs, I wonder?). 70 percent is use of apps, many if not most of which connect to the web, and 37% is plain old web surfing. That’s a lot of people conducting a lot of potentially brand-related activity! Neither study breaks out search as a separate activity, but given the explosive growth of mobile search, I have to believe that there’s a lot of searching buried in the surfing data.

Specific types of content are also more likely to stimulate sharing. This graphic from the new Razorfish report shows what they are. I see a strong reflection of target audiences, many of them young. My hypothesis would be that young men are heavy sharers of sports news; moms are heavy sharers of food content. What about reality? Everyone, or is that sharing somewhat female also? These are questions the marketer needs to pursue for her own brand.

Marketers can direct the activity and conversation by creative promotions and learn from their results. For example:
• Pepsi gave a free bottle of Pepsi Max who shared an ad with their friends using a Yahoo! social tool called IntoNow.
• The “Old Navy Records” campaign offers incentives including free music to people who tag ads with Shazam.
• A Heinken app allows users to play along with soccer games, trying to predict who will score in the next 30 seconds.
Read more here. And while you do, notice that these campaigns use special tools/applications to create just the right context for social sharing.

There are two important take-aways:
• It’s more than just not ignoring mobile; it’s also creating content that can move seamlessly from one channel to the other, as the Timberline scan tag and mobile site I described in my previous post.
• Then it’s devising ways in which to get people to interact with programming content or with advertising.

Marketers need to follow the lead of their customers. They are sharing web content. How does the marketer make content worth sharing and participate in the brand-related conversations?

Article first published as Mobile is the Choice of Multitaskers on Technorati.

Attracting the Attention of Internet Users

Reports on multitasking always amuse me. That’s probably because I see when I am sitting in front of the computer with the TV on in the background, maybe playing a video clip or webcast loud enough to be heard over it. I’m a member of the group, and I’m always interested to see what we are doing.

Marketing Charts quoted a recent study by Burst Media in which they found both men and women of all ages multitasking while they are online. They found that:

• ”Watching television (58.3%) is the most common offline activity while also online.
• Television viewing is followed by job-related activities (33.0%), reading a book (31.1%), reading a magazine or newspaper (29.7%), talking on a cell phone (23.6%), listening to the radio (21.6%), school work (17.9%), sending text messages by cell phone or other device (17.8%), and playing video games (15.5%).” See the full report here.

Not surprisingly, young users 18 – 34 do a bit more, but I doubt the differences are significant until you get to the 45s and older. USA Today did a series last year that went into depth on the media habits of the younger set, elaborating on issues I wrote about earlier in the week. They are trend-setters and it’s important to watch them, but don’t let that obscure the fact that multitasking is universal.

The question then becomes how we attract their attention in any medium—and it’s becoming increasingly difficult. There has been a lot of buzz recently about both MySpace and Facebook offering targeted advertising that is based on behavioral profiling. The buzz is a bit overdone because behavioral targeting is an established sub-discipline of Internet marketing. eMarketer, quoting the Connected Consumers study cited in an earlier post, consumers find personalized ads useful at the same time they have some qualms about being tracked.
There is also the time-honored direct marketing technique of offering them something. That approach is going mobile, and it’s especially popular with the young. However, a couple of recent ads from my friends at BostonNow shows that it’s taking hold in urban environments too. Mobile advertising has a way to go in the US, but if you are heading in the direction of one of the restaurants, why not text ahead for a free serving of nachos or a free cup of coffee? As direct marketers know, “free” is the operative word, and it attracts attention. Good marketers will carefully acquire opt-in permission to continue offering these customers mobile promotions. Let the dialog begin!

These two ways of attracting the attention of consumers have something in common. They do not rely on what pundits from Seth Godin to Bob Garfield have described as “interruption marketing.” It just doesn’t work anymore. Consumers are doing something else important and they don’t want to be interrupted.

Relevance works. So does embedding targeted offers in entertaining content.

What doesn’t work is trying too hard--too obviously--to sell them something. Online advertising needs to avoid the meaningless blandness of most offline advertising. Presence on social media must offer something useful in a life-style appropriate manner. Mobile absolutely must be invited.

We are in search of a new advertising (or is it non-advertising?) model. Any thoughts on what it’s going to look like?
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