Targeting Your Facebook Ads

Far and away the most popular post on this blog in recent weeks has been one written back in February, “Do Facebook Ads Work?” The answer was a strong “yes,” and research since then, including interesting findings on ad formats by Nielsen, continue to confirm that. A recent article in Bloomberg Business Week recounts the interesting story of the Nike “Write the Future” ad that was huge during the World Cup and goes on to talk about the importance of Facebook friends and the “like” function to Facebook advertisers.
















To demonstrate, I wrote a hypothetical ad on Facebook; that’s Step 1. Step 2 shows the main aspects of the targeting process. The advertiser can target by location (essential; no one needs to reach all 500 million Facebook fans!) and by demographics—age and gender only. So far, not different from traditional media advertising, and it works like Google AdWords as far as the setup is concerned.

Then comes the difference! On Facebook, the advertiser can target by “Likes & Interests.” This shows Facebook’s own description of a user profile. The implication seems to be that this is all data that the user has provided on the profile page. Not exactly. Every time the user “Likes” a friend’s post new data is created. What else? It’s not entirely clear exactly what/how other data provided by users like location data is collected and used. Prof. Eben Moglen of Columbia University Law
School says Facebook is “spying for free all the time.” You can read a summary of a recent speech in which he lays out the privacy concerns, but that still begs the question of exactly where the marketing data comes from.

The richness of the data is not in question, however. Nor is the usefulness of the Estimated Reach tool. Each time the potential advertiser adjusts any one of the targeting filters, the ER changes, so the exact effect of each descriptor is known. That data alone can tell you a lot about potential market size in a given region—no cost except expenditure of your time. Farther down on the targeting page, not captured in the graphic above, is the ability to target to your page (or groups) own members and, separately to their friends. Using the ER tool on your own page can give you fascinating insights into the composition of your fan base. Do you see a new market segment representing an opportunity you were not even aware of? Or do you see that you don’t have as many people from your target segment as you wish and need to run a campaign to get more friends.

All this creates a rich stew of research and advertising opportunities. You can access all this information from the Advertising text link at the bottom of your Facebook page, whether you are an individual user or have a business page.

The final piece of good news is that you don’t even have to buy an ad to experiment with the options. Why don’t you give it a spin???

Social Networks -- Ubiquitous?

The scariest thing about this report is its conclusion: If your target audience isn’t already on social networks, it probably will be soon! However, according to a study by Anderson Analytics, different audiences will be concentrated on different networks. The soon-to-be-released study was shared with the ReadWriteWeb blog over the weekend; that’s where I found it.

The RWW blog has a good overview of the demographics of users of the 4 major platforms. There’s a substantial amount of overlap in usage. Just visually, it appears that Facebook has the most unique users, followed by MySpace, although the absolute number appears smaller for MySpace. Neither Twitter nor LinkedIn have many unique users. They both have a big overlap with users of Facebook. LinkedIn has almost no “unique overlap” with MySpace.

That squares with a lot of what we already know about users of the 4 platforms. It also provides interesting confirmation of the most interesting report of the day. I found this report from Morgan Stanley on an @mattrhodes Tweet. What makes it intriguing is that it was written by a 15-year old on “work experience.” MS liked it so much they published it, and if your work has anything to do with young people, you ought to read it.

Two quotes:

No teenager that I know of regularly reads a newspaper, as most do not have the time and cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the newssummarised on the internet or on TV. Ouch! Maybe double ouch!!

Facebook is popular as one can interact withfriends on a wide scale. On the other hand, teenagers do not use twitter. Most have signed up to the service, but then justleave it as they release that they are not going to update it(mostly because texting twitter uses up credit, and they wouldrather text friends with that credit). In addition, they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their ‘tweets’ are pointless. He says it’s about the profile—fascinating!!

The Anderson Analytics study breaks social media users into 4 segments. According to Ad Age:

Anderson's research breaks down general social-media users into four categories: business users, fun seekers, social-media mavens and late followers. Of those, social-media mavens are the key group, not only because of their high incomes and decision-making power at companies but also because their large social-media footprints can make them brand allies and evangelists, Mr. Anderson said. Fun seekers are also an important group because they are the up-and-coming mavens as they transition from students to employees.

The report also segments non users:

Contrary to what some might think, people who spurn social media aren't tech haters. In fact, they spend as much time as social-media fans surfing the web. But they say they don't use social media for three basic reasons: They don't have the time, they don't think it's secure or they think it's stupid. While the first two groups -- which Anderson labels "time-starved" and "concerned" -- may be swayed to join eventually, don't hold out much hope for the last group: 94% said they will never use social media.

Their commentary about the concerned non users is especially interesting:

The concerned non-users are an older demographic (one-third are retired) who don't use social networks because they're worried about their privacy. However, they do recognize value in social media and may join as they become more comfortable with it.

The study also found that almost 50% of the “time-starved” consumers expected to use a social network within a year.

Hence the conclusion: social networks are soon going to be ubiquitous among all except the oldest Internet users—and they may give in also!

There’s more to come from this interesting study. You can follow Tom Anderson’s blog and the Anderson Analytics website—and do a lot of thinking about where/how to best engage with your target audience!

Are Behavioral Segmentation and Self-Segmentation the Same?

Last week an Ad Age article with the headline “The Death of Consumer Segmentation?” caught my eye. I consider segmentation a fundamental tenant of marketing, just as catchy headlines are a tenant of journalism. Anway, I read with interest. I’ve been part of some of those really big segmentation studies he talks about as well as many smaller ones. All produced value in an earlier era. In my opinion, their day has past.

Michael Fassnacht’s three key points were:

1. Static consumer segments have little value in a rapidly-changing environment
2. Consumers are never part of just one segment
3. By controlling the communications they receive, consumers have control over marketing activities.

The key take-away: big segmentation studies are out; consumer self-segmentation is in. He also uses an interesting term, “enabled self-segmentation;” I’m unclear whether he meant that to be synonymous with “self-identification,” which he refers to in the preceding paragraph. He ends with a section on how marketers can enable consumer self-segmentation, which is reasonable but I didn’t think went far enough.

I looked at Fassnacht’s own blog and found a couple of interesting posts. I’d recommend his reflections on the election (Binary Thinking, November 9, 2008) in which he rightly states that human beings are not one or the other in a given situation, they are highly nuanced. I looked further and found a recent post describing "micro analytics," which I though was important. The key steps, developed by Huayin Wang, are:

1. Treat UGC as the raw gold of data information. Find the right methodology to score the individual UGC pieces by relevance and relationship to each other. This kind of quantitative exercise will enable one to decipher patterns within the large universe of UGC, either on Flickr, YouTube, on blogs, etc.
2. Identify the right UGC content clusters to understand marketing opportunities. This will enable one to isolate potential opinion leaders within a certain content grouping as well as unveil unleveraged perception spaces for a particular brand.
3. Build a persuasion platform that uses the different attributes of each UGC element for an interactive program, all based on the principles of behavioral targeting.
4. Analyze the modified UGC landscape after a sufficient period of time to understand if the interactive marketing program has created any positive impact for the brand.

Wonder how many companies are doing something like that--not many I'll bet! It makes wonderful sense, and it's also based on the analysis approach used in the really big old marketing segmentation studies. It just uses behavioral data, not survey data--a huge step forward.

The situation is, as I see it, that the marketer can use this approach--self-segmentation uncovered by micro analytics--for analysis of content data collected from across the web, provided by unidentified subjects, similar to anonymous visitors on a website. Yes, you could link a Facebook behavior to a member (a person becomes a fan of a brand page, for example), but would it be worth the effort? I sincerely doubt it!

But there's an even simpler solution that few companies (except publisher sites with an array of newsletters) seem to be practicing. ASK THEM! In other situations, I've called that expanded permissioning. Ask registrants what they really want to get from you and how often. That would let them self-identify, at least to the extent you offer options/segments that are relevant to them.

Then take the next step. You might not be offering exactly what they want--chances are good that you are not. How do you ask them or analyze their activity on your site to find out what else they are looking for? The answer is--you set up ways to Listen--in ways I've talked about before!

That sets up a virtuous cycle in which the marketer first asks then uses analytics for deeper understanding. Time-consuming expensive traditional marketing research need not apply!

Politics, Community and Social Networks

Political marketing is fascinating, and today my inbox is so full of political messages that I can’t resist some comments. There are the usual emails from the candidate, the vice-presidential candidate and various members of the campaign staff. The marketing question is whether they’re overdoing it. In one respect, it’s definitely overkill. On the other hand they don’t have much time, and they have to make use of it. I also got one from the Massachusetts campaign office that’s definitely appealing to community.

The one that struck me most, though, was from the AARP. I used some of their data in an earlier post on seniors on the web and it’s one of the many newsletters I follow. The one today shows just how far we’ve gone—not just the young on Facebook, which gets most of the attention, but their elders via email—in changing the way politics works in this country.

I’m being asked to submit a question for the candidates. That’s becoming standard. But reaching out to your entire email list seems less common. Even more unusual is their promise to give all questions to the candidates—not just a selected few. That’s a powerful appeal and may be especially relevant to this older target audience.

I can’t help also noticing that AARP understands its constituency in other ways. I size-reduced the text in the newsletter so you could see as much as possible; it’s clearly larger than normal newsletters. I’ve compared it to an excerpt from one of today’s WSJ newsletters so you can see for yourself.

The message is short, straightforward, and it’s focused on a single message. They use a powerful (not particularly pretty) color combination with bold and underlining for emphasis. The call to action is emphasized in a box. All good direct marketing techniques.

I don’t pretend to know where this is going, much less where it will end, if at all. However, what I do know is that candidates and organizations are building huge email lists. Many of them have great potential for segmentation. Consider the AARP. “Submitted a question” is a potential identifier of an activist segment. What is the potential for using more advanced segmentation—question included the term “health care” or the term “health care for veterans”? The potential seems enormous if the organization has a use for segmentation at that level.

There’s an exciting communications frontier ahead of all of us. One aspect is to use email better—not to “blast” your email list as politicians do, maybe out of necessity. Segment and deliver relevant messages—that’s the email challenge.

Demographics and Internet Behavior

If you missed Peter Francese’s analysis of 2007 Census data yesterday in AdAge, you should read it in its entirety. His focus is on the impact on brands with little specific about Internet behavior. I recently reported on a survey by AARP that shed light on the Internet behavior of older Americans, and Marketing Charts followed a few days later with some good graphics. Today they have material from a Stores study of Boomers. Boomers are generally considered to have been born between 1946 and 1964. That means they are now 44 to 63 years of age.

Let’s mash some of the data together. Quoting Francese:

“The average U.S. head of household is now nearly 50 years old (49.5, to be precise). But here's the bigger story: More than 80% of the growth in the number of households in the next five years will be among those headed by people 55 and older.” In other words, the average head of household is a Boomer.

What does their media behavior look like, according to the Stores study and report in Marketing Charts:
Television:
•95% watch TV, with 77% of their viewing occurring between 7:30 pm and 11 pm.
•Two-thirds subscribe to cable TV and are most likely to watch Discovery Channel, A&E, the Food Network, ESPN and Fox News.
•They don’t like reality shows.
Radio:
•76% listen to the radio - more than any other demographic.
•49% listen to the radio during morning-drive time.
•Radio programming preference varies, from oldies to country to talk formats.
•6% subscribe to satellite radio.
Newspaper:
•57% read their local daily newspaper regularly.
•68% read their weekly community paper.
Internet:
•87% surf the internet, spending an average of 123 minutes online daily.
•93% regularly or occasionally use the internet to research products before they buy them.
•46% say online searches are triggered by traditional advertising or an article they’ve read; 45% are prompted by television or other broadcast media.

Add in the fact that Boomers have the highest discretionary income of any age cohort and that they are willing to buy online (eMarketer, April 10, 2008). The Internet is clearly a channel for reaching the ready-to-spend Boomer group.

Francese has a wonderful quote on their spending behavior relative to their children: “Households headed by people under 35 [born before 1973] account for only a little more than a fifth of consumer spending by themselves, but they cause vast spending by others on their weddings and babies. There really should be a separate category in the national GDP figures for competitive grandparenting by baby boomers.” Ouch! But it’s a natural; affluent Boomers spend on many things; spending on their grandchildren is one of the most enjoyable.

Marketers need to confront the fact that Boomers and Seniors are active on the Internet. They both acquire information and make purchases there. It seems to me there may be a difference when it comes to entertainment, though. It may be a reason for the non-linear behavior I pointed to a few days ago.

Most Boomers are still working. Their Internet behavior may be more instrumental—whether content on e-commerce is their intent. They need to accomplish things. Seniors are more likely not to be working, more likely to have time to browse the Internet. So their behavior may have more expressive components that that of Boomers. Think about it!

Ubiquity of Content--Users' Perspectives

Read Part 1 here.

This series started with a headline that predicted that users will watch 25% more video five years from now. The challenge for content producers is to make content of all kinds accessible “anywhere, any time, on any device” that users want. How much do marketers know about what they do want? Here are a few of the things we’ve learned recently.

A study by Deloitte reported in eMarketer (newsletter, June 5, 2008) focuses on entertainment and the differences between age cohorts. The fact that this is a trend lead by the young is not a surprise. Look at the Boomers column, though; does it surprise you that boomers participate in a lot of these activities—but mostly on the desktop, not on their cellphones. I’m reminded of the friend who ran around taking videos of a patriotic celebration over the weekend and the discussion of where to upload them that followed. The whole point was to share the celebration with distant friends.

Another study, this one by Ipsos and featured in Marketing Charts, found that the percentage of video watching on TV had gone down from 75% to 70% from 2007 to 2008. This chart gives a lot more detail on the devices used. When you look at it carefully, there’s something really interesting. As you would expect, TV watching is lowest in the younger age groups, but the trend is not linear. Look at the “portable DVD players.” It’s much higher among the very young (too young to pay for one themselves), lowest among the two middle age cohorts, and higher among the two oldest. Is this an affordability issue among the 18 – 34s, who are the lightest users? Or is it a preference? Marketers beware of extrapolating trends!

With that warning in mind, here are some related factoids from two recent Pew studies:

From a telephone survey in December 2007:

• 48% of internet users said they had ever visited a video-sharing site such as YouTube. A year ago, in December 2006, 33% of internet users said they had ever visited such sites. That represents growth of more than 45% year-to-year.
• 15% of respondents said they had used a video-sharing site "yesterday" -- the day before they were contacted for our survey. A year ago, 8% had visited such a site "yesterday." Thus, on an average day, the number of users of video sites nearly doubled from the end of 2006 to the end of 2007.

A later release from the same survey revealed that 62% of respondents had accessed the Internet or data from a mobile device:

• 58% of adult Americans have used a cell phone or personal digital assistant (PDA) to do at least one of ten mobile non-voice data activities, such as texting, emailing, taking a picture, looking for maps or directions, or recording video.
• 41% of adult Americans have logged onto the internet on the go, that is, away from home or work either with a wireless laptop connection or a handheld device.

According to John B. Horrigan, Associate Director of the Pew Internet Project and author of the report “People’s growing reliance on their cell phones, together with wireless internet access from laptops, suggests a shift in expectations about cyberspace. For many people, access to digital information and resources is an ‘always present’ utility for answering questions and documenting what is going on around them through photos or video recording.”

Marketers should remember that age matters when deciding how to provide content for mobile users, but it may not matter in easily predictable ways. It’s important to find out how your own target audience wants their content and on what device. You can assume they want it when they want it!

Seniors Go Social

We’ve already established that seniors read and publish blogs. Now a new study by the AARP and Center for the Digital Future finds that seniors are increasingly social on the web. Here’s a summary of findings, primarily comparing respondents over 50 to those under 50.

They are more active in some ways:
•They are more likely to check the web for news—at least once a day, sometimes several times a day.
•Those who are members of online communities are more likely to log onto their community sites at least once a day.
•They are more likely to engage in social activism as a result of participation in online communities.
•They are more likely to play online games.
They are equally likely to engage in certain activities or have certain Internet-related attitudes:
•They are equally likely to research products online before purchasing offline.
•They are equally likely to feel the importance of using the Internet to maintain social relationships.
•They are equally likely to say that their online communities are important.
Younger users, especially those under 20, are still dependent on the Internet for content and communications tools:
•Younger users are more likely to say that the Internet is an important source of information, but the number of respondents who agree with this statement has grown since 2002.
•Younger users are more likely to use instant messaging and to download videos.


This table from eMarketer (June 10, 2008) presents comparable data from another recent study. No one is surprised by the fact that younger users to more of virtually all the activities or that email is ubiquitous. Try reading across the rows from right to left. It’s also not a surprise that the frequency of use grows as you move down the age cohorts. Is is a surprise how much the activities increase and how active the 45 to 54 age group is?

AARP has long been a huge user of direct mail for membership acquisition. Their bi-monthly magazine has long enjoyed the highest circulation of any magazine. It helps to maintain that dominance with age-based publications;
Rate Base: 23.5 million
50s edition: 7.6 million
60s edition: 7.5 million
70s edition: 8.4 million

AARP has not let the Internet grass grow under its feet, however. In April they relaunched their website with a greater focus on interactivity and social connectivity. One aspect was the establishment of Bulletin Today page. To better understand the AARP perspective on seniors, note that they offer a RSS headline feed as well as email subscriptions to their weekly newsletter.

I registered for the Bulletin page to see what was going on. They immediately established my personal page and sent me to the profile page. They even offered me help in filling it out! Way cool! When they sent an email confirmation, it stressed that “you'll find exciting new ways to get involved, express yourself, and connect with others.” They keep reinforcing the connectivity message. Even cooler!

As far as I can tell, it’s a success. According to Kevin Donnellan, Executive Vice President and Chief Communications Officer, “Our Web site, aarp.org, is experiencing steady growth among people 50+. Not only are they visiting our site for information, but they are also using our social networking, gaming, and news channels in ever-increasing numbers as this study confirms.”

Seniors are online. They are connecting with content and people there. Marketers who understand the needs of this cohort—growing not only in numbers but in technological sophistication—can indeed connect with them online.

What Do Consumers Want from Mobile?

A few weeks ago I made a post on a mobile service that caught the attention of Sachendra Yadav, a product manager in the Indian telecommunications industry. He posted a reply on his very interesting technology blog, “What I Want from My Mobile Social Network.” If you missed his comment and the link, it’s a formidable list that is well worth considering.

We all know that the US is well behind on the mobile curve and can look to mobile services in other countries for insight. Two recent studies are helpful.

Accenture uses Forrester data to point out that “there is currently a huge gap between what users would like to do on the mobile Internet and what they actually can do” (page 4; download the full study here). Sachendra is apparently not alone! Most respondents in the Forrester survey don’t find the mobile Internet very useful or easy to use.

Another 2008 study, this from the IBM Institute for Business Value, concentrates on strategy for MDMs (mobile device makers; download the full study here). In the process it gives some interesting data from a survey of about 700 consumers in the US, Japan, India, China and Germany. They didn’t include South Korea, another advanced mobile economy which should be watched. These consumers want many services from maps to games. The chart divides the services up between Utilities and Entertainment—interesting. Note that browsing the Internet sits squarely on IBM’s dividing line between the two. Note also that if you combine “very interested” and “somewhat interested” a majority of their respondents are interested in the services from maps, most desired, to mobile TV, desired by just over half the respondents. That represents a large opportunity for providers of both services and content.

It provides a widespread opportunity because these respondents are more interested in services than brand. They prefer a mobile device that “Lets me choose andconfigure which mobile Internet services I want to use” and continue to “be able to install additional applications and services as desired” (page 9). Lack of brand loyalty is also displayed. When asked about brand preference for the same set of services, a substantial majority chose “Would take up ANY brand as long as I find service valuable” for all the services listed in the second chart (page 11). However, these respondents also find the mobile Internet expensive, slow and generally inconvenient.

How to improve? Accenture recommends:

1.Innovate from the customer’s perspective
2.Own the customer experience
3.Serve the social needs of customers
4.Develop the ability to cater to individual needs
5.Look for value in aggregation

Both these studies stress the need for personalization and usability in the mobile experience. They also suggest that the mobile Internet has a long way to go before it provides these desirable features and becomes a staple in the lives of most of us. That’s even more true of the US, which is already behind but can use the experience of others to quickly move up the learning curve.

The importance of the customer perspective and customer experience also indicates that marketers need to take an active interest in mobile applications. A number of target audiences are already aware of what should be possible and eager to have those services. Others will join their ranks. It’s the job of marketers, whether they are services providers or users of mobile applications, to keep developments customer-focused, not technology-focused.

Do Seniors Blog?

A few days ago I made the point that it’s not only the young and very young who participate in social media. Boomers and seniors do also. While I was sure it was a true statement, I was interested when I ran across some data on the behavior of older boomers and seniors. The first is from a Groundswell/Forrester post. Josh Bernoff points out that these two demographic groups are more skewed toward the Spectators Technographic segment than to the Creators. His advice: “help them out. Seed your networks and applications with content and make it effortless to respond. Seniors are a lot more likely to participate if you make the on-ramps easy to navigate.” That’s good advice for all target segments! Want to get a picture of how your target demographic scores on the Technographics? Try Forrester’s free data tool.

Interesting, but not surprising data. I kept looking and ran across a study by Ronni Bennett, owner of the As Time Goes By blog. Results were posted on her blog in five sections starting on May 5, 2008. As is the case with most Internet surveys her 402 respondents are self-selected from her readership, so the data only reflects over-50s who are active on the Internet. Pew data says that 72% of Americans 50 – 64 are on the net; it drops down to only 35% of those 65 and over. Ronni Bennett points out that almost 94 % of her respondents are White and 81% are women. So the data is skewed, even for the over-50 demographic, but it gives a fascinating glimpse of their activities.


Almost 88% read blogs, while “only” 54% publish one. The 63% who comment include the Creators, Critics and Collectors in the Forrester Technographics survey ladder (the Joiners seems to refer specifically to social networks, not blogs). It’s hard to compare a response percent to the index on the Forrester chart but they both show a high level of commenting or being a Critic. Interesting.

Respondents in the Elderblogger survey are active in a lot of categories. The number who list blogs and the number who say “banking” are both a surprise to me.

Other data reveals that over 69% visit blogs directly with almost 24% using RSS feeds and only 7% retail subscriptions. The RSS is not what I expected from this segment; the great majority who go directly to blogs suggest considerable reader loyalty. Almost 74% read blogs daily; again something of a surprise to me.

What are they looking for? Information and fun are the two top categories; tis may imply that these people have more time to just read for entertainment than some younger groups. There’s a pretty high level of socializing here too.

Elders are looking for useful content, entertaining content, and connectedness—and a surprising number are looking for it on the web. That’s something else that’s only going to grow in the coming years. Marketers need to connect with this group online!

The News Media and Marketers

I have friends and colleagues who are bemused by the fact that a lot of people get most or all of their news from the Internet. I’m not because I’m one of those people. I read more “hard news” from traditional sources because they are fed to me by email and RSS. I supplement that with trusted Internet sources--some run by traditional media, many by trusted Internet publishers. I’m always tempted to add “even though I’m not part of the demographic,” but that assumes that only the young turn to the net for news. My conversations with Boomers suggest that many of them see the Internet as a major news source also. A Pew post from last week gives several more interesting references that support the argument.

Over the long weekend I stumbled onto an interesting report on the broader subject of changing journalism. The report by The Media Center of the American Press Institute is full of food for thought. It begins by saying , “In this report we describe a landscape in which citizens are increasingly informed – and inform each other – through means and relationships that disrupt journalism as it has been traditionally practiced.” There is an agenda; the report calls for a new journalism think tank/research center, but they make a cogent argument for a change that is dramatically affecting marketers. Unfortunately, the full report is 61 pages long; the shorter summary doesn’t deal with the issues most relevant to marketers. So here are some of my take-aways if the Walter Matthau imagery doesn’t completely convince you.

They call it We Media:

WE MEDIA: Audiences, not institutions, are shaping the future of news and information. The emerging ecosystem relies on a symbiotic relationship between traditional and new media. Civic, social and economic systems are set in motion. Standards of trust, influence and relevance are being redefined.(page 7)

It’s a complex ecosystem in which citizen journalists both compete with and provide sources to traditional media vehicles. See some great stores on pages 12 – 14. Did you remember that a blogger saw John Kerry’s plane take off, snapped the Kerry-Edwards sign with her cam phone, and posted it on her blog? She beat the Democratic committee announcement of the vice-presidential choice by 1 hour and traditional newspapers by 24 hours. I didn’t.

It has become a complex ecosystem with citizen journalists operating under different rules from traditional journalists and trust being a major issue for both (see the stories to refresh your memory). This graphic shows The Media Center’s view of the ecosystem (page 15). The image is pixilated in the original, but I can read Filtering of the News in the top quadrant and Conversation in the right. Maybe someone will fill the other two boxes in for us.

If you don’t have time to read anything else, I’d suggest the Convergence section on pages 21 – 28. It’s a thoughtful discussion of where the business models are/should be heading. They summarize by saying:

Unfortunately, the defensive strategies [reliance on the advertising-supported model] have yielded mostly narrow, and largely disappointing, results. Even the most successful online operations – those at The New York Times, Knight Ridder and Tribune companies – have generated revenues equivalent to less than 4 percent (and typically 2 percent or less) of total revenues at news companies. These meager revenues fail to replace losses of 15 percent or more in print classifieds and display advertising – advertising that has migrated to the Internet – in each of the past three years. Not only have online news operations failed to replace this lost business, they have failed to either create a growth strategy or to define news media in the visible future. Most of the $10.5 billion in online revenue generated in 2004 will go to the top 50 Internet sites such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and eBays. Only a handful of news sites – CNN.com, USAToday.com, New York Times.com, and MSNBC.com – crack that list, sharing less than $100 million in revenue, or a relative sliver of Yahoo’s $50 billion market cap.(page 28)


The lengthy ending section on the industry (page 52 on) is also relevant to marketers. This brief summary captures a great deal of it (page 4).

I recently quoted the statistics that suggest that advertising expenditures are not keeping up with the changing media habits of the consumer. This study puts a flesh on the bones of that argument.

Marketers must shift their efforts to the content channels where their customers are. And they must not rest on the comfortable assumption that it is only the young who rely on the Internet for most of their information. Two reasons; first, it’s not true of demographics up to, and increasingly including, Boomers. Second, the younger demographics—Gens X through Z, if you will—are going to get older, and they’re going to continue to rely on non-traditional, interactive, user-generated media. There will be ongoing change in specific channels, but the trend is inexorable and it's ongoing. The disruptive change we have seen so far is not over. Marketers need to be riding the wave, not fighting it!

Men, Women and Social Networking Data

Late yesterday afternoon a headline on this subject caught my attention. It must say something about the rapidity of change and news in this space that this morning I can’t find it on either of the sites where I think I saw it! Fortunately, I used the time-honored tactic of making a cryptic note on a sticky pad and it led me back to the site Rapleaf.

I was looking for the data from their social media study, but on the way I took a small detour. Who can resist looking up their own email address to see what’s out there. The site knows correctly that I belong to Facebook and LinkedIn. It also has my Amazon Wish List—wonder how they got that? The data on my profile all came from MySpace (try it yourself, and you’ll see). I thought I had cancelled that account a long time ago. The link was connected to my very minimal profile on MySpace that still exists. I looked up the directions and tried to cancel the account—we’ll see.
Having satisfied my curiosity, I looked for the study. It’s not terribly new having been released in November 2007. It’s also not comprehensive; it covers only social networks on Google’s Open Social platform. Still, it’s very interesting. I just choose to take headlines from various articles on it; that gives you the links:

•The Social Media Gender Gap (Business Week, May 18, 2008)
•Women ‘Lead the Way” in Social Networking (UK)
•Women ‘Hold Down the Fort’ of Social Networking (UK)
•Women ‘Outpacing Men’ on Social Media (UK)
•More Men are Uber Connectors
•Men More Likely to Use Social Networking for Business
•Women Make More Friends on Social Networks
•Women Like to Socialize But Men Are All Business on Social Networks
•Men and Women Differ on Social Networks

Paints an interesting picture, even if you just read the headlines! But there’s more. They offer business services that, according to the site:



Analyze the social web footprint of your consumers to effectively plan online ad campaigns and engage with your consumers across social networks.




Discover the demographics of your customer base, including age and gender groups across social sites.





Identify influencers and friend groups among your consumers, to drive new referrals and viral marketing.


Yes, there are privacy issues. But it gives marketers who want to reach users of social networks not only a lot to think about, but a tool that may help them connect with networkers.

Customer Retention--How the Internet Has Changed It

Read the first installment (strategy) here.
Read the second installment (acquisition) here.
Read the third installment (conversion) here.

When I began to think about this series of posts, my initial reaction was that retention had changed less than acquisition and conversion. I like the Peppers and Rogers model of retention – Identify > Differentiate > Interact > Personalize. It’s a data-driven approach to retention and that’s as is should be.

Long before the Internet, marketers who were able to identify their end customers and obtain a mailing address for them sent retention mailings—letters, catalogs, and offers of all kinds. The main difference is that the Internet allows more marketers, especially traditional mass media marketers, to identify their customers and communicate with them.

I was half right. Or maybe I was right until social media burst upon the scene a year or two ago. With that the retention scene was changed just as radically—and as permanently—as acquisition and conversion.

First, there’s email. My sense is that most marketers are using it badly. We have an email list and we blast emails to it frequently. It’s cheap—so what if we only get a small open rate or smaller (and declining) click-through rate? It’s not hard to get an ROI that looks pretty good. We should be asking how it looks to our customers. Are we contacting them too often with communications of too little relevance? Do we need to go back to the chapter on Segmentation 101 and begin applying it to our electronic communications? It will take a bit more time and effort, and therefore will cost a bit more. Will it be worth it in terms of both conversions and—even more important over the long run—the image of and trust in our brands? Look in your own inbox, take a quick tally of how many commercial emails are really relevant to your needs, and answer the question for yourself.

Second, there’s social media in the broadest sense. It gives us opportunities to push content—in a totally permissioned environment—to customers. In the process, it also allows us to reach people who might become customers, but my sense is that most of the best marketer uses of social media are for customer retention.

This whole blog is about social media, so let me just give you two brief examples, both from one of my favorite best practices sites. National Geographic publications and broadcast long predate the Internet, but they moved onto it well and smoothly. Take a look at the site and see how well they do cross promotions.

But my examples are pushing content to users on other sites and pages, all in ways that drive people to the site. They always have a great selection of screen savers and I change mine often. I’d love to show you the current Madagascar hibiscus, but my desktop is too messy. What I can show you is the bar that remains at the bottom of my desktop page. That’s a constant reminder of who provided the lovely photograph that improves my pc experience and imprints the National Geographic brand in my mind.

Then there’s the widget I downloaded to another blog a couple of months ago. The Green Guide Tip of the Week widget is perfect for the “Living Green at Wellfleet Bay” blog. I had to cut the size down a bit to fit in the column, so it’s a bit

small, but it works. If you look carefully, you can see that there’s the tip itself and two more pieces of “green” content that would drive readers to the National Geographic site. What you can see is the large “Get This Widget” bar. It should be somewhere; it is one way to increase the distribution of the widget. However, it’s the largest item and it’s easy to mistake it for the content. When you click, you get HTML, which could be confusing to the non-Web 2.0-savy reader. Overall, it’s a great performance, though! Their newsletters are wonderful in terms of content, but I don’t get the sense that the content is personalized to my activities on their site.

We all need to do branding. That applies to current customers as well as prospects. We all want to bring users to our site. We want customers to return frequently to consume content, purchase goods—whatever our objectives are. We want non-customers to come to our site in a way that makes them prospects for conversion. Good Web 2.0 applications can do both, but I maintain that retention is usually the primary objective.

For retention to work we have to be present in customers’ lives in ways that are non-intrusive but that support their needs and lifestyles. We have a lot to learn, a lot to experiment with, to make that happen. I suggest that Web 2.0 applications are a great way to accomplish retention in ways that are welcomed by our customers.
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Avatar Wrap Party

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Cathy Taylor’s experiment with the Burn Alter Ego campaign in Europe. She wrapped it up on Friday and I wanted to close the loop. Her participants identified three major problems; probably some of you—like me—just took a look at the Facebook page and said either, “Not me,” or “Too much trouble,” so the reactions of the people who played along are instructive. However, most of us aren’t part of the target market, and we’ve got to be careful about that. According to Stanford Green of Coke Europe, Burn is a drink for people who haven’t yet launched their professional careers. He says that, “Burn is a nightlife drink.” Yep, that’s not me.

The three problems identified were:
•Technical—the slow loading interface. Apparently anything faster would have seriously pixilated the image.
•Interactivity—some of the participants didn’t like the fact that the night life experiences were “prepackaged,” not of their own choosing.
•Blatant Salesmanship—avatars explicitly promote Burn in various ways.

One young professional—Ellen Kelly of Peculiar Productions—gave it high marks:

"I loved that you could completely customize the avatar, environment, and so on. And the random stories people came up with… hilarious! I think there are a few tweaks that need to be ironed out, but overall it's an interesting application. My coworkers loved it too, especially the designers."

One of the comments on the Social Media Insider blog gave a link to a post “10 Facebook Applications that Don’t Suck.” It’s well worth looking at to see the kinds of fairly practical, “useful-in-my-daily-life” sort of applications referenced. It’s also instructive that most of them don’t have a huge number of daily users. But that’s probably not the right issue. Presumably it should not be just the number, but how well users reflect the target audience for the sponsoring brand, how often they use the app, whether there is any brand conversion, and whether use of the app affects brand image. We probably have to get past sheer numbers to understand the usefulness of Facebook apps and other widgets and that’s going to take continuing thoughtful development of metrics.

But it was a great experiment! More of us ought to take part in some of these things, even if we feel a bit out of place, and try to develop a deeper understanding of what’s going on in social media space.
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Social Media Participation

Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff recently published their segmentation of social media participation in their Groundswell Blog. I’m sure it’s also in the book, which is now available and I look forward to reading. (I saw a copy about a week ago, but the owner wouldn’t even let me hold it because he was afraid I would abscond with it!). I’m not a shill—I like their work and Forrester has admittedly been kind about letting me use material in my books through the years and I appreciate that.

But back to their Social Technographics ladder of participation, which does a good job of identifying segments. Not surprisingly, Inactives and Spectators make up over 80% of all Internet users. This is “new stuff” and most people are just interested in what’s going on.

I can support this through personal experience. I run a blog for a non-profit organization; the primary target audience is donors but we publicize it to all our members and it gets a lot of search traffic. So the majority of the regular readers are older, upscale adults. I’ve tried for over 2 years to make it an active, participative forum. I’ve explained how to comment, encouraged people to comment, asked questions and asked for people’s experiences in posts. When I’ve been with a group in person, I’ve encouraged them to contribute. Nada. I just can’t get them to contribute to the blog. They do email us and tell us how much they enjoy the blog and how useful they’ve found some of the posts!

So my point here would be twofold. First, this whole social media thing is in a very early evolutionary state. Some people will move up the ladder, and as marketers we can encourage them to participate in ways that will be mutually beneficial. I’m guessing that as time goes on and more companies join in, that encouraging participation will take more and more incentives, so I’d keep looking for what works, how much you have to spend, and how much ROI you get. Second is my hypothesis that a lot of individual people will stay on the bottom two rungs of the ladder permanently. The upper rungs will become more populated with younger demographics, but a lot of older Internet users will be happy to just observe.

The second point is to understand your segments. The chart that Charlene included in the original post makes the point that the segments do behave differently with regard to Internet activities and even brands chosen. Understanding where they are on the participation ladder is key to what social media activities you include in your marketing plans and how you execute them. So think carefully about your own target customers as you enter the brave new world of social marketing!
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Who Are Heavy Video Viewers?

Heavy user segments are not news to marketers—virtually every product category has them. Heavy usage continues to demonstrate the universal application of the 80/20 rule. A recent study conducted by comScore and the Media Contacts unit of Havas Media and reported in Marketing Charts shows that it also applies to video viewing. Only 20% of heavy video viewers account for a huge portion of the use—140 times that of light users!
YouTube reaches 54% of all video users (3.3 billion videos viewed in December 2007), but heavy users are much more likely to use niche video sites. How many of the rest of us have heard of ouou.com (web television)or MegaVideo (international user-created videos)for example? Less than 99% of us, based on their smaller than 1% penetration, according to comScore. Except for Google/YouTube other video sites aren’t much larger with Fox Interactive and Yahoo! (next largest behind YouTube) each getting only about 3% of the video viewership.

The study identified four video-watching segments and provided some detail about the types of content they prefer and their demographics. The segments are:

Sights & Sounders (over 1/3 of the online video audience) who prefer the variety of television programming as well as its sound quality and screen size. They are light video viewers and are older than the other segments and watch more television.
On Demanders who dislike advertising and who find it difficult to find desirable content but like the convenience of watching video online, especially movies. They are more likely to be heavy viewers and fit the mold of being younger and more affluent and are only a bit less likely to be female than male.
Television Devotees who look to network sites for television shows, especially episodes they missed. They are more likely to be female and watch more television than the other segments.
Content Explorers who like user generated content and surf and search to find videos and tv shows. They have a tendency to be moderate or heavy video viewers and to be female and to be in the desirable 35 to 54 age range.

This echoes findings of a summer 2007 study that found online video having broad appeal to all age segments. Younger viewers were more likely to prefer funny videos while older people are more likely to watch news videos. Media Post describes the segments identified in this study as

Escapists, who compose 30% of the audience, are low-frequency male viewers looking for some type of entertaining distraction. Power users (19%) are heavy users who watch a wide range of video, while news junkettes (24%) are older females who watch a moderate amount of video. Buzzy bees (27%) are young viewers focused on entertainment and viral videos.

There is agreement on one issue: video watching is becoming pervasive among all Internet users. It is no longer a domain solely of the young. However, older vs. younger and, to an extent, male vs. female do have different content preferences. Beyond that, the segments depend on the type of data and probably will continue to do so for a long time. Marketers who want to integrate video into their content or advertising programs will need the assistance of behavioral targeting and their own marketing research for some time to come.
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