Which Communications Channel is Most Popular?

You may have noticed the headline on Marketing Charts about a week ago, “Social Nets and Blogs More Popular than Email.” As often happens, the headline oversimplifies a complex reality that deserves a closer look. According to Marketing Charts:

Social Networking has been the global consumer phenomenon of 2008. Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population(1) visit a social network or blogging site and the sector now accounts for almost 10% of all internettime. ‘Member Communities’(2) has overtaken personal Email to become the world’s fourth most popular online sector after search, portals and PC software applications.

Their metric is “global active reach” and communities did, in fact, slightly outdistance email in 2008. The chart clearly shows communities to be the fastest-growing sector, which is consistent with other data. The report shows differences in use and growth rate from one country to another. If you're a global marketer, it's must reading.

To put another piece in the puzzle I looked at the OPA’s Internet Activity chart for January 2009. It’s also Nielsen data, and I’ve always believed it to be US only, but I can’t find that specific statement. What it definitely is, though, is a “time spent on the Internet” metric. It shows Internet users spending almost half their time on content, about a fourth on communications and roughly 10% on community activities. Using this metric, community is also the fastest growing—no ambiguity there!

That encourages me to return to the Razorfish Digital Outlook report I discussed last week. The chapter on “Social Influence Marketing” (their concept; pp. 27-33) predicts that the impact of social media marketing and the importance of the influentials in that context will continue to grow. They also see the interconnectedness of the various social media platforms, and therefore of personal networks, growing. That could lead to greater importance of mere acquaintances as opposed to your closest friends, as they introduce new members and new ideas into personal networks.

While Razorfish is clearly promoting their own proprietary concept, it is also obvious that marketers can’t just dive into the social media pond and expect things to happen. Whether you are reaching out to bloggers or attracting fans to your Facebook page or encouraging followers on Twitter, there are people who are more connected, more vocal, more influential.

If you can engage them in your activities, they will attract others. If they do choose to become engaged, does that mean they like you? My answer is “probably.” Otherwise, why would they engage?

Think about it!

Social Object Theory for Social Network Design

Razorfish publishes incredibly long and incredibly useful reports. Their Digital Outlook report (download here; be patient) came out last week. I want to get back to some other issues in a future post, but the chapter that really caught my attention—because it’s new to me, although not new—is the idea of social objects. This quote from the report is a good introduction for people like me:

Engeström described social object theory as the belief that all successful social media interactions and ventures center on an object — “the reason people connect with each particular other and not something else.” Another way to describe a social object is as the centerpiece in a dialogue between two or morepeople. People don’t just talk — they tend to talk “around” objects. For example, if I’m speaking to my mother about the flowers I sent her, the flowers are the social object. (p. 59)

There’s a lot of buzz in the blogosphere at the moment about designing social networking sites around social objects. According to Razorfish social objects can take many forms (hence the cutsey clip art) and they aren’t necessarily viral. My corollary is that a good marketing approach makes them viral. Your network can be built around a single object (iPhone, for example) or multiple objects. For example, Flickr is composed of objects that have been made social by making them searchable and sharable.


The advice to marketers includes an early decision on your social object—in advertising terms, it could be your big idea. Figure out what makes the object social or how you can make it social by tagging for search and tracking for measurement. The objects have to be authentic and relevant to your audience. Some social objects retain their sociability for a long time (think Burger King’s subservient chicken) and some go away very quickly (think the same company’s short-lived Whopper Sacrifice program, which drew fire from Facebook).

There’s more; I encourage you to read at least the chapter (pp.58–63) if not the entire report.

Microblogging: Tiny social objects. On the future of participatory media

View more presentations from Jyri Engeström.

One of the most articulate proponents of social object theory is Jyri Engeström, the founder of Jaiku. I encourage you to page through his presentation for an understanding of the theory and its marketing applications.

Then I’d encourage you to think about something else. If we build satisfying experience around the objects (I’m thinking about an incredible whale watch I experienced last spring; you could think about a motorcycle ride or a great glass of wine if you'd rather), that will add to their value and hence their sociability.

The take-away is that people don’t just talk—they talk about something. They don’t just share—they share something they perceive to be of value with others they believe will also value it.

How are you going to identify your key object(s) and ensure they have value for your target audience?

What About the Changes on Facebook?

If you’ve missed it elsewhere, Facebook made changes on Wednesday that affect brand pages. When C. C. Chapman visited my class that evening we looked at the changes and wondered if the inability to moderate wall comments would scare away some brands. Caroline McCarthy had a good post on CNET yesterday that explains some of the issues.

You should check out some of the brand pages that you’re interested in. Target is one that gets Facebook and does interesting things. Check out their page and notice all the comments on the wall and look at their reviews page. All of us should "fan" (note that that's a behavior) a few good brand pages and watch what they do.

I noticed on my page that C.C. has updated the page for his agency, The Advance Group. The portfolio page represents the work of the agency and their boxes page shows the other ways you can follow this group of social media marketers.


No one is talking much about the effects on non-profits. In fact, I thought that non-profit pages were to remain under the Groups rubric. I checked out one of my favorites, the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and it clearly has been converted. MSCPA is an organization with many passionate supporters, as you can see if you look at one of their pages. This is the wall page from their Angell Memorial Hospital. They will have people bring up issues from time to time, as people are currently discussing the closure of animal shelters as a result of the recession. These people are posting with sadness and understanding, but others could post in a more critical way.

It’s nice to look at this as a great way for consumers to contribute. Businesses and non-profits also have to look at the monitoring and response function. If you have your own page, you have to keep an eye on it. But you also need to be watching what people say about you on other pages.

It sounds to me like a serious set of feeds and filters for any business or non-profit that’s serious about its online reputation. When Facebook talks about filters, they are talking about personal Facebook pages and the way individuals can control their feeds, which is fine, but I doubt that it’s sufficient for businesses. There are some third-party Facebook tools out there, but a quick search didn’t reveal the kind of tool I have in mind.

I’ll keep looking. In the meantime, if you know of any monitoring tools specifically for Facebook, let me know!

User Satisfaction With Your Social Media Site

In last week's post about objectives for social media marketing programs I argued strongly for program-specific behavioral objectives over marketing/branding objectives. I’ve seen no reason to back off that position; the program-specific metrics provide a direct assessment of customer activity, if not the achievement of overall marketing goals, which are affected by many channels and many programs.

In the discussion, however, one of my students argued for a customer satisfaction measure. I’m accustomed to thinking about customer satisfaction in terms of the more global measures of the ACSI or the annual Accenture survey that recently became available for 2008. It took me awhile to wrap my head around site satisfaction as an important objective, but the more I thought about it the better idea I thought it was—thanks, Ted!

The tip he gave me was to Avinash Kaushik’s free tool. Yes, it’s a pop-up and those are annoying. But it’s free, easy and allows the user to do a reasonable amount of editing within the basic 4-question template. So I set up an account and took the tool for a test drive.

It’s easy to revise the basic 4-question survey template, but you can’t add additional questions DIY. They do offer custom surveys if you need more. The “reasons why I came to the site” question didn’t offer exactly the reason I would have preferred “free content,” but “research” and some of the other options were close. When I was satisfied with it, I submitted it and waited for the code to show up on my results page.

My only real annoyance with the system was that I got a marketing email from 4Q before the survey was even processed and available. They have a clever approach, though. If you’ve had a bad experience with the site, send them the URL and they’ll try to get the site to install the satisfaction tool. Good thinking!

I installed it on my website so you could try it yourself if you’re interested. The installation was easy. Having set the frequency on 100% it should show up whenever you go there. The survey seems to work on both IE and Firefox but to be very sensitive to pop-up blockers, which is good. It also may set a session cookie so it doesn’t show up if you go back to the site. If I’m right about that, that’s good for the visitor, although I found it annoying when I was trying to get this screen capture!

In the process I found an interesting article. Dan Greenfield is arguing for a ranking system that would allow benchmarking of social media efforts. As he notes, we’re pretty far from that sort of a standard for social media metrics, but it’s an interesting concept to watch.

In the meantime, serious thinking about how to measure the success of your social media efforts is in order!

Would You Turn Your Home Page Over to Customers?

Mars’ Skittles brand yesterday began what is indeed a social media experiment. Prior to Sunday they had a wonderfully interactive, but still a traditional, brand page. This one is from February 14, 2008. You can see more on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which is a fascinating place to study the evolution of websites.

Yesterday it took that site down and replaced it with a site that directs visitors to the chatter around the web about Skittles. The only marketer-controlled content is the small box which rotates themes; Interweb the Rainbow is the other theme. The page is composed solely of Tweets that contain the brand name. I found over 30 pages of Tweets already archived; at that point my finger was tired of clicking and I quit. The point is that there’s lots of chatter about Skittles. Some of it is funny, most (to me at least) rather silly, and some obscene. That could prove a problem with their core teenage audience (if their parents are paying attention, at least).

Clearly they worked to stimulate the volume on Twitter. My guess is that the number of blog mentions is no accident either. This video is one of the interesting results—or are this video and perhaps some blog posts, the result of reaching out to bloggers? This kind of a spike in activity doesn’t happen by accident.


What can the rest of us learn? Few marketers are likely to be willing to go to this extreme in embracing social media. Will some be willing to bring microblogging content onto their sites? Probably not without monitoring. Can sites afford monitoring of a robust Twitter stream over an extended period of time? Will this experiment soon lose momentum? Or will it crash and burn as a result of malice or the sheer grossness of some of the content? Will something else happen that none of us has yet forseen—good or bad?

And where does Facebook fit into all of this?

What’s going on here really interesting, and I’m sure the business writers and the blogosphere will be following it with interest.