When news breaks that a traditional magazine company is looking to eliminate print and go all digital, the reflex assumption is that it’s a last ditch effort to keep a flagging franchise alive.

Take the report in yesterday’s Telegraph that Emap is looking at making some of its trade mags online only.

Editors from across the trade media and events business, which is jointly owned by Guardian Media Group and private equity group Apax, have been asked to examine “the best way of delivering content to users” between now and 2015, and to consider how they could reduce the frequency of print publications or phase them out altogether.

Is this a death sentence for the magazines that are told to cut back their print copies, or suspend them all together?

Not necessarily.  The article notes one Emap title that’s already made the change:

In 2010, Emap changed film industry magazine Screen International from a weekly to a monthly title, prompting a jump in profits and reader satisfaction.

Before you shake your head at the battering that traditional print takes, let’s spend a second celebrating the vibrancy of good brands.

I read this story on the web from a U.K. newspaper.  It’s primary journalism, sourced and cited, reporting on a development at an important company in its market.  When I saw that the story was from the Telegraph I assigned it more authenticity and credibility than I would have from another source.

Those are all attributes of the brand that were established over time, in the traditional world, and transferred into a digital world.

That’s a basic reason why we shouldn’t discount the efficacy of a brand shifting from print to digital.  As the article cites, readers experience a lot of satisfaction when they encounter a good digital content experience.

So what’s the problem, beyond the nervousness that those mired in traditional media experience when they contemplate a world without the processes they are familiar with?

The business model, or  lack thereof.

A decade or so of dis-intermediation, of booms and busts, of market re-invention, of unthinkable valuations, of technology usurping tradition, of automation, self-serve and free has cast a pall over the traditional ways of serving markets.  But what publishers are realizing, as they re-engage in conversations with marketers and look for ways to intersect with, educate and entertain readers, is that the combination of new technologies, consumer behavior and marketer demands has created a new foundation for building profitable targeted media businesses on digital platforms.

That those are common buzzwords I just rattled off doesn’t make the observation any less true.

When you combine a flexible content platform with a targeted and interactive digital distribution program, you are able to give marketers solutions that deliver high-quality connections and drive business results.  You can package solutions that enhance multiple elements of their marketing program, from brand advertising to lead generation to education to content marketing to web traffic.

A traditional print platform can’t offer the flexibility or breadth of the digital platform.

So, the examination that Emap has mandated isn’t a death knell, it’s an opportunity for a group of long-tenured brands to focus their resources on meeting their market where they can have the most impact: online.

Does that mean print is dead?

Not at all.  The printed product continues to offer high impact, engagement and value.  It just is the highest fixed-cost aspect of the integrated media model, and because of that needs to be able to justify its place in the media mix not just for the advertiser but for the publisher as well.

Our work in lead generation and social media marketing give us a unique perspective on two different dynamics that are at play in the world of interactive marketing.

The first is the idea of creating a brand online.  This is like going shopping for a new set of fancy clothes.  You start with the intention, I want to look good, and then you keep trying on clothing until you look pretty much the way that you want.  (Or, you think that you look the way that you want, but that’s another story…some of us can’t ever quite get there.)

For web marketing, this means getting the kind of look and feel, feature set and whiz-bang cool things that let you say that your web site is a pretty cool looking set of duds.

Of course, you factor in practical considerations.  After all, just like when you go shopping for clothing, you’ve got to stay reasonably close to your budget, and you’ve got to be able to sit down in it.  But, when push comes to shove, you are going to err in the direction of your heart.

The second is the challenge of converting online visitors into prospects and customers.  This, after all, is the paramount benefit of the internet, that you can provide prospective customers with the kind of information that they need in order to determine whether to work with you or buy your product.

This is nothing like buying a suit of clothes.  This is like trying to find recruit athletes to a Division III college.  You can’t give them a scholarship, you can’t influence admissions, but you need them to believe that you can give them a better experience than anyone else.  It’s about capturing interest, holding on to it and closing the sale at the right time.

That’s an entirely different kind of web experience.  Your web site isn’t designed on the basis of aesthetics; it has to be designed on the basis of data.  What are the images, information points and links that cause your users to take an action that is of an economic  benefit for you?

For most of us in business, that action is a phone call or a visit to our place of business.  And when the prospect already has gotten information that is important to them and decided to reach out and contact you, you have the highest odds of making that  prospect a customer.

As we’ve worked over the past year and a half with local businesses, we’ve discovered that there is a tremendous lack of understanding as to how to use a web site in order to create qualified prospects.  And, as we’ve  built social media footprints for our clients, and developed broader distribution of their content that has elevated their natural search traffic, we’ve found that very few have reliable processes for tracking and capturing those users.

Where do you start as a small business?  With taking the time to understand the simplest attributes of web tracking.  Anyone in business can use the Analytics tool from Google in order to track the activity on their web site.  That is your starting point.  If you are able to answer how many people are visiting your web site, what kind of things they look at most frequently, and how many of them are sending you additional inquiries, either in person, by phone or on e-mail, then you have the beginning of the information that will help you decide how to make your web site more than a pretty set of clothes.

Of all the social media platforms, Twitter is the one that puzzles marketers the most. The typical observation is that they don’t get it and can’t figure out why it’s important.

EMarketer shared some research recently from ExactTarget that provides an easy answer: Twitter gives you a way to reach people who have loud and active voices online. Once you’ve gotten their attention around your message, you’ve got a good chance that they will redistribute that message somewhere on the web.

How’s that work? ExactTarget shows that the 26 million monthly users of Twitter are three to five times more likely to comment on blogs, post to forums, participate in view sites and blog themselves than the average Internet user.

“Consumers active on Twitter are clearly the most influential online,” said Morgan Stewart, principal at ExactTarget’s research and education group, in a statement. “What happens on Twitter doesn’t stay on Twitter. While the number of active Twitter users is less than Facebook or email, the concentration of highly engaged and influential content creators is unrivaled—it’s become the gathering place for content creators whose influence spills over into every other corner of the internet.”

The conclusions suggest that the time spent investing in an audience on Twitter is likely to have an exponential impact. This is the crux of social media marketing, and provides a simple justification for using a service that at first seems fragmented and chaotic.

Any small business looking at social media ultimately has to ask, What business benefit am I going to get from being active in this media? No matter how compelling the user statistics are, any commitment of time for a small business needs to be rewarded with results.

I thought it would be useful to share a detailed case study on how one small business has leveraged a content marketing and social networking strategy to drive measurable business results.

Situation:

TMG Brand Communications is a boutique public relations and marketing communications agency in New York City. Established in 1994, the agency has developed a particular expertise serving accounts in the financial services, lifestyle and media sectors. TMG is focused on creating broad-based communications programs that convey the distinctive attributes of brands and help drive business results. [Disclosure: The principal of TMG Brand Communications, Tami McCarthy, is my wife.]

The company’s purpose is summed up on its website.

The thrill of developing a brand’s personality, giving it a voice of authority in the market and having it resonate and drive a target audience to act or think differently inspires everything that we do at TMG Brand Communications.

Over the past several years, TMG has developed a suite of skills in internet and social media marketing. One of its most notable initiatives was the integration of social media with a live webcast to launch the Citi Forward card from client Citi Cards. (A description of the project from social media maven Mack Collier can be found here.)

Not surprisingly, TMG had not developed a plan to leverage its social media marketing expertise to elevate its own profile. Tami was an early adopter of social media platforms, with an active presence on Twitter and profiles on services like Facebook and LinkedIn, but had not developed an integrated strategy for using these tools to benefit the agency.

Like many of its peers, TMG did have an excellent web site which presented its capabilities and a sample of its work. However, the site was lightly trafficked. Most of the visitors came directly to the site, driven by TMG’s distribution of its URL on its business cards and stationary.

Tactics:

In the last quarter of 2009, TMG decided to develop an integrated strategy to use social media marketing to elevate its brand presence.

The strategy was designed to add a content marketing component to an already active social networking presence. In addition, the strategy linked personally-branded social networking activity on platforms like Twitter and Facebook with the digital identities of the overall agency.

In order to accomplish the strategy, TMG established a blog on a sub-domain of the tmg-media URL. This blog, buzzcloud.tmgpr.com, was set up using WordPress and the Cordobo Green Park theme. The agency also created a TMG Brand Communications fan page on Facebook, pointing the page to the primary TMG domain. The Networked Blogs application was used to distribute blog posts to the Facebook page, and a plug-in was used to distribute posts to Twitter.

A general content outline was developed in order to give focus to the blog posts. Tami is the sole author of the posts. The purpose of the posts is to share observations and suggestions about topical communications challenges. The content only peripherally touches on TMG clients. In addition, the content plan assumed that new posts would be created every two weeks or so, so that the burden of creating content didn’t weigh down an already highly-productive team.

Results:

Tami McCarthy’s BuzzCloud was launched in November 2009. Results for the subdomain buzzcloud.tmgpr.com were tracked separately from the results for the www.tmg-media.com domain so that the impact of the new content strategy could be accurately measured.

That impact was immediate.

In the six months following the launch of the blog, TMG increased web traffic to its TMGpr.com agency site and to its new blog, Buzzcloud, by 198%.

Hidden within this gain are a couple of data points that demonstrate the impact of a well-executed content marketing and social networking program.

• Visits to TMGpr.com, the agency site, increased 32% in the six-month period following the blog launch;
• Search engines drove 61% more traffic to the agency site in the six-month period;
• The number of keywords that drove traffic to TMG’s agency site gained from 425 to 1,178 in the six-month period.

After launching Buzzcloud, TMG became much more visible on search engines, particularly Google. TMG became visible because it began to publish original content with more frequency. Each of those blog posts were distributed into TMG’s digital footprint, and as people clicked through to the site, or redistributed the content their own digital footprint, TMG began to develop a broader network of digital breadcrumbs, all of which led Google and other search engines back to the TMGpr.com web site.

Increased web traffic to the agency site was not the only indirect benefit of the social media marketing program. The digital footprint of both TMGpr and Tami McCarthy expanded dramatically, generating increased brand heft and awareness.

The easiest way to assess the heft of a brand’s digital footprint is to type the name into Google. The phrases “TMGpr” and “Tami McCarthy” both return relevant results that dominate the first page of Google.

Most people who are interested in you or your company are likely to search for you on the web. A Google search that returns a page filled with relevant links creates an aura of credibility and authority for your brand. It isn’t enough for those links to exist, however; behind them there needs to be useful and relevant information, the kind of search outcome that is Google’s brand promise.

This program has not required an incredible amount of time to execute. The most time-consuming aspect is creating the original posts. Maintaining the social networking presence is a matter of intermittent focus; TMG uses Facebook and Twitter to share interesting content, give personal updates and re-distribute content that other people have created.

What’s fascinating about this case study is how important the creation of content has been to driving overall web traffic.

During the six-months ending November 2009. TMG executed its social networking program actively. It did not, however, have an active blog. As a result, the social networking had virtually no effect on the company’s web traffic.

Launching the blog and publishing content drove a tremendous amount of traffic.

One lesson is that social networking without content marketing will not drive clearly measurable results for your business.

Of course, the big question is whether this activity has any impact on your business results.

For TMG, social media marketing has helped to drive increased visibility, more business inquiries and ultimately more account. Go take a look at the agency’s blog to see just how much.

While the buzz about social networking has shifted to the hot new thing, mainstream consumer adoption and usage of social networks is exploding.

eMarketer this week shared some of its conclusions from a recent research report defining the scale and opportunity of the social networking category.

“There is no doubt anymore that social networks, reaching more than 50% of the total US Internet audience, are an essential part of the Internet experience,” said Debra Aho Williamson, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the new report “Social Network Demographics and Usage.”

The research points to broad usage of social network among all demographic categories and continued expansion in the market.   eMarkerter forecasts that two-thirds of Internet users will participate on social networks every month by 2014.  Williamson comments that “the connections and interactions that social networking makes possible didn’t even exist a few short years ago.”

An analysis of the growth in Facebook‘s US users since this past January underscores the robust growth in the social networking category.

iStrategyLabs has been using Facebook’s ad targeting system to track the growth of key demographic cohorts on the service for the past couple of years.  In 2009, for instance, US users of Facebook gained 145% — an incredible explosion.

I was curious just how strong growth was in 2010 and went to the ad targeting system to update the iStrategy figures.

In the first five months of 2010, Facebook’s US users gained 22% to more than 125 million.  The rate of growth is remarkably strong, following the explosion of the past year.

Usage continues to grow more rapidly among adults, with the 25 – 34 cohort increasing 23% over the past five months, and the 35 – 54 cohort increasing 25%.  Interestingly, the number of adults 55+ appeared to decline over the past five months. The net effect of these trends is that the average age of a Facebook user continues to increase.

The service is remarkably mainstream.  And, as the usage data that Facebook shares indicates, remarkably utilized.

Facebook reports as of the end of May that is has more than 400 million worldwide users.

Half of Facebook’s users log in every day.  They interact with 130 friends on average and are connected with 60 pages, groups and events.  Each user is creating more than 2 pieces of content a month:  a photo upload, a status update, a link share, a comment.

This is a truly social phenomenon.

Let’s consider, for a moment, the potential impact for marketers and media brands.

If each user has 130 friends, that means that their first degree of influence is 16,900 friends…the friends of their friends.  Their second degree of influence is 2.2 million friends …the friends of the friends of their friends.

Each time a user interacts with a page, or a group or an event, that interaction is broadcast to her 130 friends.  The interaction can be clicking the “Like” button, or becoming a member, or commenting on an update, or sharing a photo or a post.  If one of the 130 friends then interacts with that page or group, that interaction is broadcast to his 130 friends.  The multiplying effect of interactions with content expand with every Facebook user.  Each of these instances of sharing are a moment where a brand inserts itself, within the context of each users identity, into the awareness of other users.

This is part of the power of marketing on social networks.  The skill is in creating instances of content that people interact with.  Remember, the interaction isn’t just about “engagement.”  Clicking a Like button or sharing a piece of content is just as powerful as leaving a comment.

The Facebook universe is one powerful indicator of the mainstream character of social networking, and the dynamics of user activity underscore how potent this new marketing platform can be for large businesses, small business and media brands.

An Emarketer analysis this week of two research studies concluded that social media was going to be a big focus on web marketing expansion by small businesses.

Our experience on the ground selling our DigitalSherpa service confirms the direction of the surveys.  Once we get into a discussion about how content marketing and digital networking can help their firm, local business people quickly move past questions about “why” to questions about “how?”

There’s a fundamental problem, though, that the research doesn’t get at.  Local businesses don’t have an interactive strategy that is geared to acquiring and converting qualified leads.

In most aspects of local business marketing, the lack of sophistication around leads acquisition and conversion isn’t that important.  But in internet marketing, it’s critical.

Take a look at the research first.  According to the “Third Annual FedEx Office Signs of the Times Small Business Survey” (that’s a mouthful), use of social media is the fastest growing tactic small business owners cite in their marketing planning.  The primary area of focus continues to be improving online presence, signaling that SMB owners consider this an area where improvement can is needed.

eMarketer then cites a Constant Contact study that shows that websites and e-mail marketing are the two most prevalent tactics or tools that SMB owners rely on to market their business.

The high penetration of Facebook makes for an attention-getting headline, but the nuts and bolts of the marketing program are in the website and continuing contact to the prospect and customer database.

The challenge is how these SMB owners are making decisions about the effectiveness of these tactics.

It doesn’t sound hard:  track web traffic, measure leads and conversions and then select the most efficient sources.

But making these kind of analytical decisions are challenges to the largest businesses in America.  Another recent survey concluded that the biggest obstacle to effective web tracking at larger companies was finding the talent to do the analytics.  If large companies can’t get to the answer, how can small companies expect to?

In traditional marketing campaigns, these kind of analytics were not as important.   A local marketing initiative drove the consumers to one of two places:  a phone number or a physical location.  At the other end of the interaction was a real person, who would ask questions, engage and impart information.  The interaction was more discursive and exploratory, and the experience of the person representing the business in adapting answers to the knowledge and personality of the person asking was critical to driving sales.

With web marketing a primary goal of the program is to drive a person to a web site where they can get information that will inspire them to either act directly or reach out for more information.

If that web site isn’t designed the right way, then you’re not going to get the return on your investment that you should expect.

One of the things that we’ve learned in our business is that creating a web site that can drive conversions is a science, not an art.  Like any science, it requires constant experimentation and adaptation.

The challenge facing SMB’s is not just putting focus on internet marketing; it’s figuring out how to find partners who have the knowledge, expertise and interest to help them participate in a science that challenges even the largest firms.

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Every marketer knows that the negative option is your friend: it increases response, renewals and profits.

As a result, the negative option can turn into a hiding place for the unscrupulous marketer. The technique can be deployed in a technically correct way, but can be so cynical about the energy and intelligence of the average consumer that it violates a basic trust of the pact between a consumer and a brand.

It’s discouraging to see Facebook slipping into the shadows of unscrupulous direct marketers, and its heartening to see Google, despite it’s position as the grand behemoth of the web, work to stay true to its core values of respect and goodness, as subjective and ultimately impossible to deliver on those values are.

First, a little detail on the negative option. A negative option require the consumer of a product to take an action to discontinue some feature or attribute of the product or service. One popular use of the negative option is when a service gets your agreement to charge your credit card automatically for the renewal of a service. I was reminded of the power of this option over the weekend when I saw two renewal charges hit my credit card for cloud software applications that I no longer use. Here’s a good definition of the practice.

Another example is when a function is installed in a software platform and you have the ability to shift to another option. The most commonly recognized example of this negative option is the installation of Microsoft Explorer with each install of Windows. Millions of dollars of lawyers fees and the injection of the Federal legal system created a higher degree of visibility for other browser options. The fact that Firefox can have such substantial market share is a testament to the power creating clarity around consumer choice can have in opening up markets.

As I shared last week, Facebook has dramatically evolved its definition of privacy over the past several years. Over the weekend, Dan Kaplan pointed me to a striking graphic that compares the approach to privacy at Facebook today to different points over the past several years ago.

The menus were lengthy, the options various, the language specific to the vernacular of Facebook and the process was confusing.

The entire system creates a disincentive to changing your privacy settings at the outset. The more likely outcome for a user is that they will go tackle the privacy settings once the horse is out of the barn and something has happened on their account that makes them angry, frightened, ashamed or embarrassed.

The approach is a far cry from where Facebook started, with an industrial design that was meant to replicate the insularity of social groups by keeping access to information directly within your privileged community.

Of course, Facebook can point to the high degree of control a consumer has over the service and say, That’s what we do. But that isn’t the starting point. The starting point is a much more open and sharing identity.

I was struck by a bit of research recently that canvassed 450 new Facebook users about how they used the system. They identified its benefits more along the line of a search engine than a social networking tool. That is a striking shift in product definition.

Of course, the value to Facebook of more openness, more search and more
databased information is that it creates the opportunity for more advertising activity. Therein lies a revenue strategy that can take advantage of the vast user base the service has created.

Google over the past year has attempted several similar expansions of it’s relationship with its users. The best example was the rollout of Google Buzz, which, we quickly discovered, was sharing activity with other people in our network without our explicit intent.

To Google’s credit, it quickly reworked the system so that we had to choose to share, rather than having a negative option that assumed we wanted to share.

The utility of buzz was diminished, but Google’s integrity reclaimed.

If you wonder why Google and Facebook have such different approaches to privacy, consumer-driven options and product design, the relative revenues of the two companies is a good starting point to unraveling the mystery.

Google has a vast pool of highly profitable revenue to protect. Anything that besmirches its brand and diminishes search traffic will have an immediate impact on their bottom line. Changing their approach to a service like Google Buzz is not just the right thing to do, it is the fiscally prudent thing to do.

Facebook doesn’t have that revenue model unlocked yet. As a result, trying things that will drive a higher revenue per user outcome is of the primary importance; in that matrix, it is unfortunately possible to loose the kind of laser focus on the consumer that ultimately drives the best experience.

Here’s what that focus looks like. In 2001, I sat in the Google offices and tried to sell Page and Brin a self-publishing tool that was a very early form of blogging software. A talented team of former Netscape engineers had developed the tool as part of a special-interest portal called Themestream. We weren’t able to get further funding for the service and were trying to unwind the assets and recover some of the investment for our backers, Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint Venture and some individual Investors led by the late Mike Homer.

My pitch to Page and Brin was that the more content there was in the web, the more inventory they would have created. While they didn’t want to compete with the big media brands, our self-publishing tool would give them a platform for consumers to generate more content on the web.

This was early in their commercial evolution. Eventually, they would move into the development of tools and bring the Blogger platform into their fold. But Page articulated their basic premise with clarity and consistency. “We want to organize information for people to find. That’s our one purpose. We’ll work the revenue out around that purpose.”

He was a young guy. I was a seasoned executive. His approach could have seemed immature and inflexible. At the time though it seemed sensible, focused and inspired.

What is Facebook’s singular focus?

Yahoo! chief Carol Bartz made an interesting point about Google in an interview with the BBC today:

“Google is going to have a problem because Google is only known for search,” said Ms Bartz. “It is only half our business; it’s 99.9% of their business. They’ve got to find other things to do.  Google has to grow a company the size of Yahoo every year to be interesting.”

People are going to focus on the bravado and positioning — after all Bartz needs to clearly define Yahoo’s value proposition in a market where the company is unfavorably compared with Google on an ongoing basis.

Search isn’t an infinitely expanding business opportunity. In fact, several dynamics at work suggest that the growth of search revenue will slow, limiting Google’s overall opportunity for growth. First, penetration of potential advertisers is higher today than it was two years ago for Google. And second, the shift of internet usage into social networks has incrementally changed the search behavior of web users.

Google’s media proposition is built on the back of search. That means that the audience that Google aggregates to the benefit of marketers — a basic definition of ad-supported media — relies to an outsized degree on search traffic.

Yahoo! has a more diverse media proposition. That’s the “half of our business” that Bart is referring to.

In this regard, Yahoo! is more like AOL than Google. Not surprisingly, AOL is facing its own challenges in terms of definition, value and opportunity.

The big issue here is that the largest diversified web media brands aren’t demonstrating the ability to grow revenues and hold on to consumers that suggest the franchises deserve premium growth valuations.

Yahoo! and AOL are predominantly content-driven media platforms that have created applications in order to enhance user engagement. That business model is an interactive evolution of the traditional media business model. In this regard, the companies are very different, and have very different challenges, from Google.

The primary challenge remains how to effectively keep content and applications fresh while managing a huge consumer audience, and how to make that base of content accessible and valuable to advertisers. The problem solving is discrete, because one approach doesn’t necessarily fit to every different content platform and user experience. (In this respect, the companies suffer in comparison to Google, which is incredibly simple to explain.)  An underlying question is whether focused media brands are more viable than diversified media brands.

When thinking about the strategic challenge of Yahoo! and AOL, I’d suggest that the most salient question is how these two platforms retain consumer interest and loyalty in an environment where Facebook is becoming a de facto operating internet operating system.

One of the Google searches that drives traffic to this site regularly is “Is Facebook the new AOL.”

The query could just as easily be, Is Facebook the new interactive media model? As an interactive media platform, Facebook is organizing and directing shared content, providing content publishing tools, generating scale audience with a high definition of individual interests and producing content within its own operating system seamlessly.

Facebook allows users to dictate what content is important and interesting.  That model is fundamentally different from the Yahoo!/AOL model.

Facebook can be an incredibly valuable tool for anyone trying to generate a business from content, and it could ultimately be a profound disintermediator for Yahoo! and AOL, which today look like legacy media brands on the web.

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Throughout our businesses at NCI, we’re seeing signs of increased consumer activity.

One notable one has been the uptick in activity from apartment shoppers.

In the first quarter of 2010, inquiries from apartment shoppers to communities (phone calls and e-mails) from Apartment Finder‘s print and internet products have increased 44% from the last three months of 2009.

That’s a big shift in activity. And, it’s confirming of reports from property managers and reflective of the improvement in the job market.

How’s that for a green shoot?

Nielsen has released a study today that looks at the effectiveness of different kinds of Facebook advertising. The goal was to determine whether ads that leveraged a brand’s social network — which Nielsen is calling “earned media” — performed differently than traditional ad formats.

The big headline: Socially-enhanced advertising has higher recall and higher purchase intent than traditional advertising.

In a blog post on Nielsen’s site, Jon Gibs, Vice President, Media Analytics, The Nielsen Company and Sean Bruich, Measurement Research, Facebook, explain the overall methodology.

Our joint report: Advertising Effectiveness: Understanding the Value of a Social Media Impression provides early insights from Nielsen’s BrandLift product which analyzed survey data from more than 800,000 Facebook users in response to more than 125 Facebook ad campaigns from 70 brand advertisers.

The study has a clear bias towards paid advertising on Facebook, and doesn’t measure the impact of a content-marketing program versus a display ad program. The study also doesn’t touch on the relative value of fan bases of different sizes, which will have an impact on ad performance and marketing expense.

I’ll spend more time in a later post delving into the entire report, but first let’s look at the two money charts that will spread across the blogs of social media mavens today.

The first shows the impact that socially-enabled ads (read “earned media”) had on response versus a controlled group: 10% more recall, 4% more awareness and 2% higher our chase intent.

The second compelling chart shows the impact that the social components of an ad has on consumer response. Ad recall more than tripled; purchase intent moved to 8%.

The social features of the ads were pretty simple: including the slug “xxx and yyy are fans of this page” in the ad unit. Organic ads, which were a proxy for sharing about a brand by users, were considered for this study to be the simple instance of a status update appearing in your stream that says one or more of your friends have become a fan of a page.

The Nielsen study is compelling and supports common sense.

When you see that someone you know has done something with a brand, particularly a brand you recognize, then your attentiveness increases.
That’s the benefit of building a fan base on Facebook. You raise your awareness in all of your fans’ social networks.

A good content marketing program, where you use your fan page as a way to distribute content and engage with your community of interest, will have the same or greater impact on your brand presence and your business results as the ad units included in the study, I believe. As the Nielsen research demonstrates, the most powerful impact is achieved when people recognize the attachment of their peers to a specific brand.

The other thing that the study isn’t meant to address  is what a brand needs to do to get and keep fans. Clearly, a deep and active fan base can benefit a brand. The steps to attracting and maintaining that fan base require a specific set of skills and focus, and have a real cost against them.

The study is a great support for the power of social networks to drive brands, but is focused narrowly on one implementation that doesn’t take full advantage of the richness of a social media marketing program.