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.

I’ve been intrigued by the dynamic of building lead volume in our Apartment Finder business over the past year.

As I’ve discussed before, the multi-family marketing business is a competitive, lead-generating business that is driven by consumer’s accessing print and online directories and inquiring about apartments for rent.

There are three ways that marketing companies like Apartment Finder hand customer leads over to its clients:  a phone call directly to the apartment community; an e-mail to an apartment community, either directly or through a leasing intermediary; a click-thru to the apartment community web site; and, a prospect who walks directly into the community leasing office without making prior contact.

This week, one of our biggest competitors in the space shared a few public metric related to their lead production.  According to their recent earnings release, the company increased leads 35% year-over-year, and currently produces more than 75% of their leads from their Internet and mobile platforms.

That made me curious.  How did our metrics at Apartment Finder measure up?

The chart to the right shows the increase in lead production at Apartment Finder over the past year.  Overall, leads gained 43%.  Phone leads were up 25%, e-mail leads were up 169% and click-thru’s to property web sites were up 71%.

This data is derived from two third-party sources:  CallSource, which manages our tracking number program, and Omniture, which provides us with web analytics.

Most interesting to me was the distribution between leads from print distribution and from internet and mobile distribution.

At Apartment Finder, 53% of our leads, including click-thru’s, are driven by our Internet distribution and 47% by print.  Subtract click-thru’s, which can’t be tracked back to a specific individual, and the ratio drops closer to 50-50.

But the key issue isn’t what source the lead comes from.  The issue is how useful the lead is.

I had an engaging conversation around the relative quality of leads with a leading apartment marketer at the National Apartment Association Conference this past June.  E-mails that are generated as a by-product of creating an appointment to see an apartment had a high conversion, he said.  Phone calls to the community were the second best kind of lead.  And e-mail inquiries were the lowest-converting type of lead.

That means there are other metrics that can point to how good the lead generation of a marketing partner will be.  A big one is the percentage of phone calls to e-mail leads.

At Apartment Finder, 80% of our leads from print and internet are phone calls.  20% are e-mails.   That’s an exceptionally good ratio, I think.

Go read this five-part blog series from Erroll Morris and then ask yourself the question, How do I make sure that I know when I’m wrong?

Morris is writing about a condition termed Anosognosia, which you can broadly define as not having a clue how wrong you are. No matter how smart we are, none of us are exempt from the condition: we all will encounter the famous “unknown unknowns” that influence our life on a macro- and micro- scale.

As one expert tells Morris:

But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.

The challenge for those of us who are in positions in responsibility is to minimize the potential for anosognostic behavior as much a possible.

The most important way to do this on a daily basis is to try to see things through other people’s eyes. When someone presents an alternative point of view, no matter how aggressively or impolitely, we are obligated to try to understand how that point of view makes sense to them.

When you are in a position of putative power and authority this is one of the hardest disciplines to exercise. But it is one of the most important.

The flush of this Spring’s economic activity is wearing off and the American consumer is being realistic about the economy’s prospects.

One indicator can be seen in the muting of the consumer outlook from BIGResearch in June.  Sentiment about the chances for a strong economy were down from May and unchanged from a year ago.

Sentiment is up a long way from the dark summer of 2008, the mood of the last year has stayed relatively unchanged, despite renewed economic activity.

The embedded caution about the economy is reflected in how Americans describe their approach to spending.  74.1% of Americans say they are living a simpler life, according to BIGResearch.   On balance, they are happy about this increased simplicity.  For sure, they are redefining luxury:  84.1% say they aren’t ready to spend on luxury items.  The way luxury gets defined is shifting also, as demonstrated in people’s responses.

This sentiment puts some of the recent economic reports in context.  As summarized in the blog Calculated Risk’s weekly update, the momentum in retail sales is lagging and underlying economic activity is steadying after a rebound to refill inventories that had been allowed to diminish during the initial slump in consumer spending.

These observations were echoed last week in the release of the Federal Reserve Beige Book, which looked at economic activity through May

Economic activity continued to improve since the last report across all twelve Federal Reserve Districts, although many Districts described the pace of growth as “modest.” Consumer spending and tourism activity generally increased. Business spending also rose, on net, with employment and capital spending edging up but inventory investment slowing. By sector, nonfinancial services, manufacturing, and transportation continued to gradually improve. Residential real estate activity in many Districts was buoyed by the April deadline for the homebuyer tax credit. Commercial real estate remained weak, although some Districts reported an increase in leasing. Financial activity was little changed on balance, although a few Districts noted a modest increase in lending. Spring planting was generally ahead of the normal pace, while conditions in the natural resource sectors varied across the Districts. Prices of final goods and services were largely stable as higher input costs were not being passed along to customers and wage pressures continued to be minimal.

The signs suggest that consumer has recovered, but that the recovery is marked by a wide-eyes pragmatism about a weak economy with little momentum for growth.

• Experts Talk Beige Book, Bernanke Testimony (businessweek.com)
• Beige Book and Flow fo Funds Overview (fivethirtyeight.com)
• Economy improving modestly: Fed’s Beige Book (financialpost.com)

When you are using content to influence consumer behavior, the context that the content is delivered in has a big influence on how consumers respond to the messaging. This maxim is an important factor in designing content marketing and social media programs. Experience suggests that consumers impute authority to two types of content: content that is considered and structured; and content that is personal and authentic.

Take recent research from SheSpeaks and iVillage that was reported on in eMarketer this week.

The survey examined how women interact with brands on digital platforms. The big headline was that while women follow brands on different social platforms, brand content delivered on those platforms has relatively lower impact on purchasing decisions.

I was struck by the relative weighting of different kinds of online content in influencing shopping behavior, and the degree to which context appears to have an impact on influence.

For instance, three categories of content had consistent impact on female consumers: reviews on message boards; articles on general interest websites; and content about products on brand websites.

Each of these three venues has assumptions built into the context that the content is delivered in. Messages boards and review sites have a self-policing nature, where reviewers gain credibility by their relative weight in the social group. General-interest websites present the same kind of editorial independence that traditional magazines have long benefited from. And brand sites have an underlying regulatory framework, since consumers understand that brands are required by law to make supportable claims about their products and services.

Each of the three categories has an foundation of trust that creates a positive context for the content.

The survey suggests that social platforms like Facebook and Twitter are less credible sources of information to women shoppers.

This assertion assumes, however, that the primary purpose of the social platforms is to communicate information about the brand.

Within a well-structured social media marketing program, social platforms serve two important purposes: content distribution and consumer engagement. In each case, the purpose of the program is to create awareness and to give the consumer easy access to points of contact and information.

The brand web site — and by extension, a brand blog — are the appropriate distribution points for brand content. Consumers are more inclined to trust content that lives within a trusted context.

Social media marketing is the integrated execution of two different marketing activities that are supported by content and engagement. Consumers will respond to authentic content, but not when they encounter it out of context.

Take 5 minutes to watch the following video.  [If you already know about www.wheresgeorge.com skip ahead to the 2:00 mark.]

The video is more than a curiosity.  For those of us involved in social media and social networking it’s got some interesting implications.

• Our culture is a grouping of relatively defined economic series of affiliation.  The transfer of dollars is a basic indicator of human interaction.
• Those portions of digital social networks that are incorporated into an economic ecosystem can be transferred into physical networks.
• Those portions of digital social networks that are outside of economic ecosystems will have less likelihood of transferring into physical networks.
• Political boundaries influence the creation of economic ecosystems.
• Geographic boundaries influence the creation of economic ecosystems.
• The probability of digital social networks transferring into physical social networks probably has some impact on how people behave within those networks, but I don’t know exactly what it is.

Digital social networks are both expanding and limiting.  They expand our ability to connect and network with other people, but are limited by our inability to share the affective attributes of physical interaction.  It is not precisely social; it’s more a fabrication of the intellect than the experience of the body.

A note:  “Follow the Money” was created by graduate students Christian Thiemann and Daniel Grady at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University to help demonstrate their research under Professor Dirk Brockmann in human mobility networks. It won the 2009 Visualization Challenge sponsored by NSF and the AAAS.

We’re at the cusp of an amazing cultural shift: the majority of women under 40 within 10 years will be better educated and better paid than men of equal age.

That means that the role of women‘s advocacy organizations in business is not only to strive for equality; it’s to help women prepare for the burdens of leadership.

Stark, but true.

Two recent data points help to support this assertion. The first is the disproportionate number of advanced degrees that women are earning in relation to men. Mark Perry of Carpe Diem shared a chart recently that shows that 139 women in the 25-29 year old group hold an advanced degree for every 100 men in that age group.

Perry also dug into the numbers related to equal pay and found that younger women are earning nearly on parity with men of the same age.

But for single workers who have never been married, the BLS reports that women made 94.2 percent as much money as their male counterparts in 2008. Equal Pay Day would fall on January 22 for these single females, almost three months earlier than the official, unadjusted Equal Pay Day of April 20 for all women. For a separate BLS category of single workers, those with “no children under 18 years old and whose marital status includes never married, divorced, separated and widowed,” women earned 95.6 percent as much as their male counterparts in 2008. Equal Pay Day for that group of single female workers would fall even earlier, on January 19, only a few weeks into the year.

The purpose of these data points isn’t to devalue the generations-long work to give women equal opportunity. It’s to acknowledge that it’s an appropriate time for the focus to shift.

I was struck by this recently when I found myself at a cocktail party hosted by The White House Project the evening before its Epic Awards Gala in New York.

The room was filled with a diverse group of notable and remarkable women, not the least of whom was Marie Wilson, one of the founders of The White House Project. The purpose of the organization is to prepare and present women for positions of leadership; Wilson believes that if women can fill one-third of the leadership positions in government and business, then the national dialogue would shift dramatically…and for the better.

I was at the cocktail party because of my relationship with a notable woman; my wife Tami recently joined to the corporate council of The White House Project. The video below from the Epic Awards gives you a brief feel for what TWHP does.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR6IVvDOsAM

As the cocktail party wound down, I spent a little time talking with a very passionate and engaging woman from Texas who is spearheading recognition of the anniversary of the 19th Amendment. She is an executive with a large technology company and spoke about how, just as she is entering the prime of her career, she’s confronted with the decision of whether or not to continue to commit time and energy to an organization that can’t advance women.

I probed around that point: What is it that keeps your company from becoming an attractive place to build a career?

“They don’t know what to do with us,” she said.

Her comment wasn’t colored with bravado, resentment or frustration. She was as puzzled by the organization’s inability to know what to do with a talented, ambitious woman as she believes the organization is puzzled by her.

Over my career, I’ve worked with very successful and effective women, many of whom have had positions of significant responsibility. I’ve witnessed their struggle for recognition and equality. Sometimes I’ve helped and sometimes I’ve hindered. What I have learned over the years is that the greatest reward that an organization can give women is the feeling of flexibility without punishment. I’ve also witnessed how challenging the embedded culture of organizations can be.

As I listened to Marie Wilson talk about The White House Project, I had a new sense of the power that women’s advocacy in business could have, and the benefit of organized and thoughtful dialogue around the questions of women in leadership.

The question is whether business will respond and engage in this dialogue with authenticity and integrity.

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• Meryl Streep, Megan Mullally & More Attend The White House Project EPIC Awards (PHOTOS) (huffingtonpost.com)
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• A Worthwhile Cause (perezhilton.com)

The landscape for local advertising, particularly by small- to medium-sized businesses (SMB’s) is undergoing a profound shift that is being masked in part by the overall downturn in advertising spending, two recent research reports from BIA/The Kelsey Group demonstrates. The key for local media companies is to segment the SMB client base in relation to their adoption of online media. And the key to that adoption rate is the age of the company, Kelsey concludes.

To put the entire opportunity in context, it’s useful to revisit BIA/Kelsey‘s U.S. Local Media Forecast, released earlier this year, where BIA/Kelsey chronicled a devastating decline in local advertising spend in 2009 and 2010. The firm doesn’t anticipate any recovery until 2011, nor any real strengthening of the local ad market until 2012.

That is more than $27 billion of local advertising that will have evaporated during the recession. Within this macro trend, a fundamental secular shift is underway, says points out Polachek, president of BIA/Kelsey

“The general economic conditions worsened during 2009 causing advertising dollars to remain on the sidelines as businesses — large and small, local, regional and national — reined in spending levels,” said Polachek. “Even with improvements in the overall economy, we do not anticipate a rapid recovery among traditional media over the forecast period, because we believe the structural change in the local media industry has accelerated.”

This structural change is highlighted in BIA/Kelsey’s most recent update to its Local Commerce Monitor, a local tracking study that the firm has been doing over the past several years.

The ground-level research of SMBs reinforces the overall outlook for local advertising.

The Local Commerce Monitor study also revealed a decrease in overall ad spending by SMBs, owing to unfavorable economic conditions and the long-term substitution of traditional media with lower-cost digital/online media. SMBs decreased spending on advertising and promotion by 23.5 percent, from $2,734 annually (reported in August 2008) to $2,092 annually (reported in August 2009). In spite of the overall decrease in spending on advertising and promotion over the past 12 months, on average, SMBs increased spending on Web sites and profile pages by 26.8 percent, from $608 in 2008 to $769 in 2009.

Kelsey does chronicle on notable shift among SMBs: they have personally begun to use more digital media than traditional media. This usage shift will drive accelerate the shift in marketing purchases, BIA/Kelsey contends.

The younger the business, the more likely they are to spend heavily on internet advertising, BIA/Kelsey points out. Businesses less than 3 years old will spend close to 1/3 of their budget on internet, while businesses more than 10 years old will spend only 13%.

The obvious conclusion, Kelsey points out, is to target younger businesses with digital offerings.

The success rate is likely to be much higher.

The dollars at stake are meaningful.

Indeed, a steady shift toward digital media continues. BIA/Kelsey forecasts spending on traditional media to decline from $115 billion in 2009 to $108.2 billion in 2014 (CAGR of -1.2 percent). During the same period, spending on online/interactive media is projected to grow from $15.2 billion to $36.7 billion (CAGR of 19.3 percent).

Over the next five years, a focus on emerging businesses as the foundation of digital growth is a strategy that is likely to be rewarded.

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• Local Ad Spend to Climb 2.2% through 2014; Shift to Digital Continues: BIA/Kelsey (marketingvox.com)
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• Highlights From the Most Recent BIA/Kelsey Local Commerce Monitor and User View Surveys (blogs.praized.com)

The housing market is recovering. At least, 1 million people think so.

That’s the number of people who bought homes in the first three months of 2010. And that’s more people than have bought homes in the first three months of the last two years.

Let’s throw out caveats and the concerns and step back for a moment. It’s easy to point to a lot of different reasons why the home sales figures are inflated, or why home prices continue to have risk.

The two charts below show the sustained trend in recovering home sales over the past two years.

The first chart plots the number of homes sold in the first quarter over the past decade.

The 1 million home buyers in the first quarter don’t measure up to the levels of the real estate boom. But that’s not what a recovery means.

A recovery does mean changes in momentum. The second chart looks at how the market pacing has looked at the start of each of the last four years. This first quarter of this year was up 12% in sales versus the year before, breaking a decline that started in 2006.

The resale market is clouded by a lot of external factors that are driving price and inventory, but the actual number of homes sold show that there is an underlying increase in demand. From it we can infer that consumers feel good about buying homes. And that’s what the recovery will look like.