Why Do Some Social Media Projects Fail?

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The Brand Science Institute (BSI) conducted a study lasting seven months and was conducted
in twelve European countries to understand what “What goes wrong?” when launching a social media initiative. 563 marketers representing 52 brands participated and this is what they found:

  • 81% of all companies don’t have a clear social media strategy!
  • Corporates tend to take twice as long as start-ups for social media projects
  • Only 7% understand the real value of customer interactions
  • Only 27% have a clear understanding of their customers
  • Social media projects are there times more under control
  • 73% had to show money after 12 months
  • 76% feel that legal departments hinder social media projects
  • 87% had to correct their social media expectations
  • 72% thought social media must be viral
  • 68% never heard of the 1-9-90 rule
  • 84% compare social media performance with standard media measures
  • 76% don’t moderate social media projects accurately (if at all)
  • Only 7% understand the CRM value of social media
  • 91% allocate budgets the wrong way!
  • 37% think that social media is a media buy
  • 53% were stepping into the geek-trap
  • 92% are not aware of their FB dependency
  • 71% take expensive upfront investments to secure technical functionality
  • Only 11% have social media guidelines
  • 86% don’t have a clue how to handle a social media backlash
  • Only 4% share their social media experience throughout the company

Personally, I am not too surprised with these results. It does go to show however, that a clear lack of planning and goal setting can result in poor results. If you had to benchmark your company with these results, how would it stand?

Twitter Updates Notifications

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Twitter has started to upgrade user accounts with updated notifications features. The only problem is that you will now receive an email every time you receive a direct message, a reply, details of a new follower, updates when your tweets are marked as favourites and finally when your tweets retweeted! 

To avoid an inbox full of spammy notification emails, you can easily make a few small changes within Twitter’s notifications tab. If you don’t see the settings above, don’t panic. It just means Twitter hasn’t updated your account just yet. Just sign in to your Twitter account and go to the notifications tab within the settings section and untick the boxes that you don’t want notifications emails for.

Time and attention are the next big fight in social

Steve Rubel presented an excellent talk at The Next Web recently and I highly recommend that you watch and absorb it. Rubel’s argument is that as most brands now post their content on Facebook and Twitter, the way that content is seen may not always reach its intended audience. Brands are “fighting” each other and individuals for attention.

Social marketers needs to understand that that the decay, or half life of a tweet, a Facebook update or posted video is incredibly short. Having compelling content is one thing, but making sure that content is timely for its intended audience is also a crucial factor. Here are some of the key points from the talk:

Economic Value is linked to attention

As content proliferates, it is all increasingly filtered through hyper-personalised social streams. Therefore, captivating attention is even more critical today for effecting a behaviour change.

The Digital space is infinite, yet time is finite

According to Google’s Eric Schmidt, the web fills with a deluge of new content equal to all the existed in either digital or analogue form prior to 2003. Yet, our time remains relatively finite, Attention doesn’t scale as noise escalates, content rapidly decays.

Twitter is recording 110 million tweets per day. However, like “wet snow,” they evaporate as almost soon as they hit the ground. This means your messages many never reach your intended audience. When your content is snowing, content has a shelf life shorter than milk.

Personalised Social Algorithms Curate

Every month than 30 billion pieces of content are shared globally on Facebook. Their EdgeRank algorithm curates art from junk in your feed based on personal affinities, content formats and timeliness.
Trust in the age of streams requires frequency

People need to hear things three to five times for it to effect a behaviour change. Therefore, you must craft a strong narrative and have it reverberate across both traditional and social news streams. 

Source: http://www.edelman.com/trust

How Twitter content decays

  • 71% of tweets get no reaction
  • 23% get an @ reply
  • 92% retweets are within the first hour
  • 85% of tweets with @ replies get just one
    Source: http://www.sysomos.com

How video content decays (Online video Attention Span)
>5 Minutes 9.42%
>3 Minutes 16.62%
>2 Minutes 23.71%
>60 Seconds 46.44%
>30 Seconds 66.16%
>20 Seconds 80.41%
>10 Seconds 89.61%
Source: http://www.tubemogul.com

Step One: Hand-Craft Your Content For Each Embassy

Networks aren’t homogeneous. Identify the micro communities driving the conversation, vary your content formats for each., deploy natives as ambassadors and maintain a robust content calendar.

Step Two: Activate Expert Employees as Thought Leaders

Experts and those in the know are among the most trusted. Digital thought leadership can break the space-time challenge. Make digital engagement 1% of 100 people’s role, not just 100% of one person’s job

Step Three: Tightly Integrate Owned and Social Assets

Social isn’t a channel. It’s a behaviour. People expect it everywhere. You can increase your social surface area by building such hooks into your site – and vice versa. Give stakeholders options.

Step One: Mindfulness Through Bifocal Awareness

Build an understanding of the world around you and the best times to engage by practicing mindfulness on two levels with situational and ambient awareness. These simple processes complement monitoring

Step Two: Optimize For The Best Times to Engage

Mining builds off mindfulness. Using an array of low-cost tools, businesses can determine
the idea times to engage. This includes engaging both at a macro level in a given network, like Twitter or Facebook, as well as within micro communities that are deep inside.

Thinking Digital 2011 – Nancy Duarte

 

“You have the power to change the world and the most powerful device to change the world is an idea”.

Nancy Duarte’s talk was one of those most engaging this year. She looked at how ideas are most effectively conveyed through storytelling. Nancy spent years researching into why we physically react to a story, but not to a presentation. Through the study of cinema and literature, she looked to find a better way to build presentations.

Stories are essentially made up of a three part structure:

  • A likable hero
  • Who encounters a roadblock
  • And emerges transformed

The TED talk above is essentially the same talk that she delivered at the conference, and looks at how Steve Jobs’ 2007 iPhone launch speech and Martin Luther King’s speech are overlayed to show the attributes of an engaging presentation. 

Thinking Digital 2011 – Erin McKean

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Image Credit: Christian Payne

Erin McKean is a lexicographer and CEO of Wordnik and is passionate about words. Her talk discussed about how many of the features of today’s online dictionaries are skeuomorphs. During the transition from print to online, dictionaries have not evolved and still remain largely digital versions of their printed forms. Erin’s business hopes to reinvent the dictionary for the digital age. Wordnik is a site for everyday words and everything that is known about them. Wordnik users can add new words and edit the meaning of existing ones.  The site has become a discovery engine and can answer a variety of text based queries.

Erin is a TED fellow and her recent  talk about Wordnik can be seen below:

Thinking Digital 2011–The Firehose of Inspiration

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This week I attended the Thinking Digital conference in Newcastle. The conference is organised by Herb  Kim and the Codeworks team, and brings together an amazing mix of innovation, technology and great speakers. In the next series of blog posts, I reflect back on two days of what I call the “The Firehose of Inspiration”. Thinking Digital is the highlight of my year and each year gets better and better.

Gerd Leonhard kicked off day 1 of the conference with a talk on the rapid flows of information. He discussed how common it has become for new stories to ‘break’ on Twitter, rather than regular broadcast media. Other key points discussed included: The number of connected devices is expected to grow to around 50 billion around the year 2020. Tomorrow’s challenge for brands, is not going to be distribution. Rather it will be a fight attention. Advertising will need to be re-thought to capture the hearts and mind of people. It will need to improve, so it becomes itself as useful content. 

My notes from the talk follow below:

  • By 2020, more than 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet
  • A fight for attention and not distribution” is the next challenge for digital
  • Interactive television is the future, TV will evolve to be social – We are moving from the network (MTV) broadcaster, to networked broadcasting (YouTube etc).
  • Social networks are the broadcasters.
  • Data is the oil of the Internet and the new currency of the digital world (Everything we do generates data).
  • We are people of the cloud – accessing content through Spotify, Instapaper, Flipboard, Netflix, iPlayer etc. When we think media and marketing, we must think ‘Cloud’.
  • We are also people of the screen – digital comes first, objects and physical “stuff” is now coming second
  • Sharing is the default mindset of the digital generation and we consume differently
  • Collaborative consumption, there’s a shift today. The trend is not to OWN but to SHARE” e.g. Netflix, ZipCar, Boris Bikes etc.
  • We need a new public licensing standard – people usage rights
  • Twitter and the web is beating all other form of media
  • http://lastnightapp.com, The world’s first “morning-after” app that can erase your past
  • Locking things down is a death wish. If you don’t allow sharing, you will be toast
  • The future of media is bundling and upselling
  • The internet is a big copying machine so we need to rethink our approach to copyright
  • No longer is the web just about technical innovation, it’s now also about social innovation
  • On the web you can’t force people to buy, you have to attract people to buy
  • Think outside of the ivory tower
  • If copies are free – then need to sell something that can’t be copied – Kevin Kelly
  • Work out how to monetize customers who are living in the cloud

Gert’s free books, including Friction is Fiction and Music 2.0 are available to download here: http://gerd.fm/ibXx2G & http://www.musicfutures.com

Gert Leonhard’s presentation from Thinking Digital, can be seen below:

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Top 100 Social Brands–How we came 15th!

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I’ve always regarded working in social media a gift. A gift that allows us to work directly with customers and the wider community at large. In my current role as Head of Communities for AVG Technologies, the team and I have worked very hard to build an environment where we can make it easier for our customers to directly connect and engage with us. Our social outposts on Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and LinkedIn are all designed to listen and speak directly with our customers and together they form part of AVG’s Community.

In Headstream’s recent Social Brands 100 report, our community efforts are starting to get recognised by the industry. The Social Brands report ranked us 15th, and  puts AVG as the number 2 technology company behind Dell. Our social engagement efforts have outranked every day brands such as Amazon, Sony Playstation and Nokia to name but a few. We are incredibly humbled to be nominated by our community and also delighted to be recognised. Page seven of the report demonstrates in a small way how we drive Advocacy at AVG. We don’t just have followers and fans and vanity metrics, we have a real People Powered Community!

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I would like to say a big thank you to Headstream for commissioning the report, the esteemed panel of judges and especially Steve Sponder for coming up with the idea!  My co-conspirators within the #TeamAVG community team:  John, Cappy, James, Charlie, Ema, Maria, Javier, Dirk, Bridey and Kate for being some of the best people I have worked with. The AVG Management team for letting a bunch of passionate crazies go out with a vision to disrupt and a belief in the power of community.

Finally, I would like to thank (and hug) the awesome AVG community, we pride ourselves in offering People Powered, Protection in the world of computer security protection. We strive to build products that you all love, your trust and respect drives us to serve you harder. Next year we aim to be in the Top 10!

P.S.  Here’s a video we shared with our community last year, the stats are old now but it does go to demonstrate how we connect and engage at AVG.

You can read a  copy of the report below and click here to download your own copy for offline reading.

Social Brands 100 Report – March 2011

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@Jas

Evil Plans by Hugh MacLeod – A Book Review

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“Everybody needs an evil plan. Everybody needs that crazy, out-there idea that allows them to actually start doing something they love, doing something that matters. Everybody needs an Evil Plan that gets them the hell out of the rat race, away from lousy bosses, away from boring, dead- end jobs they hate. Life is short. Thanks to the Internet , it has never been easier to have an Evil Plan, to make a great living, doing what you love, doing something that matters”.

These are words that kick off the introductory chapter of Hugh MacLeod’s new book, entitled Evil Plans – Having Fun on the Road to World Domination. Evil Plans picks up where Hugh’s last book, Ignore Everybody left off. This book describes how ten years ago, he came up with his very own “evil plan” – to get 10,000 people a year to buy his stuff on the Internet.  So he launched gapingvoid.com, which quickly gained him a reputation and mass following online for dark humour, common sense marketing and cartoons drawn on the back of business cards. Since those early days, he has set up his own online art gallery that sells his artwork to fans from around the world.

Much like the idea of Cube Grenades, the book is designed to provoke a reaction and stir a call to action. If there’s one key message to take away from the book it is this:

Many people can make “a good living doing what they love, doing something that matters, becoming the person that they were born to be despite the odds. Finding that. Doing that. Discovering “the Hunger” that lives inside us all”.  Think about what you are passionate about, is it better than the job you have today?

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Indeed, it is this creative “hunger” that burns inside many of us that Hugh wants to set free. Even though each chapter is just a few pages, it contains golden nuggets of  insight to help you formulate your own evil plan. During my reading, I often paused and went back to previous chapters just so I could wrestle with the points in my head and absorb Hugh’s wise words a little longer. The text and message are both explosive stuff.

Evil Plans is a book I wish I had been given just after I had left university. It is one of those defacto book’s that should be given by ALL mentors to their mentees. The following excerpts are some of my favourites passages in the book. I find them inspiring and I hope you do too.

 

  • “Seth Godin once said, “You can’t drink any more bottled water than you already do, Or buy more wine, or more tea. You can’t wear more than one pair of shoes at a time, You can’t get two massages at once. So, what grows? What do marketers sell that scales? I’ll tell you what: Belief. Belonging. Mattering. Making a difference. Tribes. We have an unlimited need for this. It’s not what you make, it’s what you believe in [A lesson for all marketers here].

 

  • We like telling stories because they defy the odds and that is what gives us hope. Hope of filling in our own “narrative gaps”, Whatever your Evil Plan might  be, there has to be some sort of adventure, some sort of “triumph over adversity” baked in. Otherwise, people won’t want to talk about it, and your story won’t spread. People aren’t merely buying your product, your Evil Plan; they are buying the story you are telling… a story that’s not just about you, but about them, and what they could be.

  • How do you get your stuff on the radar screen of the “The Twenty”? By creating brilliant stuff. By creating brilliant stuff that “speaks” to the market in a way it has never been spoken to before. If your stuff is different enough that it changes “the conversation” of your market for the better, other folk will notice even the Big Boys. “Improve the conversation by improving the language”. All great marketing breakthroughs are evolutions of language.

  • If your boss won’t let you articulate your evil plan during company hours, quit. A good boss wants her employees to have their own sense of sovereignty and destiny. Why on earth would you tolerate a boss who didn’t?


  • …once your Evil Plan starts getting traction, you’ll start noticing a much more polarized world begin to emerge, People who love what you do. and people who utterly despise it.

 

  • Steal time every day. You can only live life to the full in the moment, the past and present are distractions.

 

  • Your Evil Plan won’t make your life any easier. In fact, it’ll probably make it harder. But knowing that beforehand will make the experience of being alive, here and now, far richer and more enjoyable. I happen to think it’s worth it.

 

I found the book spoke to me in many different ways. It is a very handy motivational tool and a marketing book. But, mostly it speaks to the hearts and minds of those that have the potential to change the world for the better.  Are you one of these people? I’d like to think I am one of them.  Learn more about the background of book and Hugh’s ideology on his Gaping Void blog.

I highly recommend reading it, a fantastic follow up to Ignore Everybody.

Buy Evil Plans from Amazon below

A Snapshot of Facebook in 2010

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Flickr Credit: Markus Pacher

As 2010 draws to a close we can take a look at some data that provides a window into the lives of the millions of people around the world who use Facebook everyday to share their lives, feelings and interests with friends. Here is a snapshot of 20 minutes on Facebook showing the huge number of photos, links and statuses posted everyday demonstrating how much the internet has changed the way we interact with our friends, making it easier for us stay in touch or share our interests, with Facebook being at the centre of that change in 2010.   Source: Democracy UK on Facebook

Relationship Statuses in 2010:

43,869,800 changed their status to single

3,025,791 changed their status to "it’s complicated"

28,460,516 changed their status to in a relationship

5,974,574 changed their status to engaged

36,774,801 changes their status to married

What 20 minutes on Facebook looks like

Shared links: 1,000,000 every 20 minutes

Tagged photos: 1,323,000

Event invites sent out: 1,484,000

Wall Posts: 1,587,000

Status updates: 1,851,000

Friend requests accepted: 1,972,000

Photos uploaded: 2,716,000

Comments: 10,208,000

Message: 4,632,000

Top Feel Good Story Shared on Facebook

Most Liked Celebrities:

Lady Gaga

24,712,169 people like this

Eminem

23,729,700 people like this

Megan Fox

19,575,080 people like this

Vin Diesel

19,425,325 people like this

Rihanna

18,903,844 people like this

Barack Obama

17,229,885 people like this

Bob Marley

17,168,034 people like this

Lil Wayne

17,004,850 people like this

Justin Bieber

16,779,874 people like this

Shakira

16,520,790 people like this

Connected Canadians Spend More Time Online

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The Globe and Mail reports that Canadians spend more time online than other web connected country. Measurement company comScore, found that Canada also had the highest penetration of Internet access. This research is quite interesting, the focus in 2010 has very much been on emerging markets such as Indonesia and China. However, established markets such as Canada are spending longer online. Comscore’s data shows:

  • About 68 per cent of the Canadian population is online (estimated in April 2010), compared to 62 per cent in France and the United Kingdom, 60 per cent in Germany, 59 per cent in the United States, 57 per cent in Japan, and 36 per cent in Italy.
  • Canada was the only country in which users logged an average of more than 2,500 minutes online a month, which is almost 42 hours. Israel was second with an average of around 2,300 minutes, while a few other countries were around the 2,000-minute mark.
  • “In Canada, YouTube per capita consumption of video is No. 1 in the world, it’s just absolutely crazy in terms of how passionate Canadians are about YouTube,” said Chris O’Neill, Canada’s country director for Google.
  • It’s estimated that about 21 million Canadians visit YouTube each month, compared to 147 million Americans. But considering the U.S. has 10 times Canada’s population, Canadians are way ahead on a per capita basis.
  • Canadian users also view more videos, with an average of 147 watched each month compared to 100 per U.S. viewer. In terms of most minutes watched, 18-to-24 is the biggest demographic with a monthly average of 244 videos viewed over the course of 1,095 minutes, or 18.25 hours.

The world is catching up to Canada on Facebook

According to socialbakers.com, Canada has more than 17 million users, and is neck and neck with India for 9th and 10th on the list of the countries with the most Facebook accounts. But Canada’s penetration rate of about 51.2 per cent of the population, or 65.9 per cent of the online population, is still one of the most significant on Facebook.

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Source: Social Bakers November 2010

Twitter nowhere near as popular as Facebook but growing rapidly

Twitter still has a long way to go before it even comes close to nearing Facebook’s user base — Twitter is believed to be around 200 million, a far cry from Facebook’s 575 million — but it did add more than 100 million accounts worldwide in the last year.

“What we can share is that the number of Twitter accounts in Canada has increased by 75 per cent since the beginning of the year, and the number of daily tweets more than doubled,” a Twitter spokesperson said in an email.

Vancouver-based company Hootsuite Media, which has a popular Twitter app with more than 1 million users, saw 250 per cent growth in usage among its Canadian users in 2010. About 5.5 per cent of its daily traffic, 55,000 tweets, comes from Canadian users.

According to an analysis of traffic by measurement company Trendrr, Canadian female Twitter users are more active than male Twitter users. And one Canadian user is among the most influential of them all. Justin Bieber, with more than 6.4 million followers, gets mentioned in about 200,000 tweets daily, Trenddr estimates.

Canadian users check Wikipedia more than any others

The average Canadian web surfer reads 16 Wikipedia pages a month, which is the most in the world — one more than German users, two more than Polish users and four more than Americans. Canadian users generate about 217,000 edits a month, which ranks 8th among the most productive countries.