The what
The most popular interests and worries of marketers revolved around social media measurement, scale, and ROI measurement. Hundreds of marketers asked about whether people were really seeing sales lifts from social, while many others sought advice on the best ways to measure social media effectiveness.
The key theme in these discussions centered on marketers taking a more reasoned and strategic approach to the space. It appears that social media marketing has graduated from reflexive reactions ("We have to do something?!?"). Now, marketers are asking important questions that demonstrate how goal setting is an integral part of the social marketing development process. Comments like this show the change:
"I would suggest that the best way to measure social media ROI is having a strong idea of what success looks like. This will let you determine whether a social campaign delivered or not by comparing expectations to actual results. It also helps to have a good social media monitoring or analytics service to effectively track and analyze activity."
This is a sure sign that social media and digital marketing have grown up, becoming just as strategic and objective-based as traditional marketing.
Now that we've explored which marketing problems each social media outlet is best suited to solve, how do they stack up against each other? We took five of the most-popular social media sites and compared the share of conversation around each one:
Demographics
Who's doing the talking? It turns out that 35 percent of those buzzing are 45 or older. This means that blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter aren't just for the younger, hipper crowd -- the older demographic is very openly interested in using these tools for business.
We saw a big spike in engagement, mostly in blogs, on July 12.
The topic? The reception problem haunting the iPhone 4. That spike occurred about two weeks after the new phone launched, creating a big PR mess for Apple.
So what can Apple do? From what we've seen, the July 17 press conference held to address this problem and the free "rubber bumpers" fix might not be enough to quell the noise.
Sample verbatims
"You can turn down the volume on it all you want but the fact of the matter is: APPLE HAS RELEASED A PHONE THAT CANNOT BE HELD A CERTAIN WAY. If a consumer has any brain whatsoever (which sometimes isn't the case) they would not buy this phone until the issue is properly resolved. I am glad the mainstream media has picked up on this story."
"Personally, I think Apple escapes valid criticism by many of the tech blogs. People are so enamored by Apple that it often seems to reflect in the reporting and articles in tech blogs. I personally would like to see tech blogs focusing more on cutting through the marketing hype and showing the negative aspects that the manufacturer glosses over in their marketing."
One of the most surprising findings was that there was very little discussion involving AT&T during this period of time. Apple seemed to be the sole whipping boy -- the mess being a hardware blunder rather than the fault of intermittent AT&T signals.
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| Data was collected from 6/30/10 to 7/30/10 |
Conclusions
Social media is definitely on marketers' minds. Most of the talk is about how to best use social media to drive real business value -- less focus on the tools themselves and more on the results. Compared to the thinking of digital marketers two years ago, this represents a massive change. Is it the economy? Perhaps. But the drivers are bigger than that. This new focus is a function of digital's arrival as a marketing tool, and social as an important and powerful marketing avenue. In short, success breeds interest in more success.
Dan Neely is founder and CEO of Networked Insights.
On Twitter? Follow iMedia Connection at @iMediaTweet.
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