What’s the most important and tangible goal for marketers using social media? To drive web traffic, according to an ongoing benchmarking study conducted by the consulting firm MarketingSherpa.
73% of the more than 2300 respondents to the MarketingSherpa survey says they target the goal of increasing web traffic, and measure results against that goal, when they deploy social media marketing programs.
The next three most mentioned goals are equally tangible: increasing sales revenue, improving search engine rankings and increasing lead generation.
Within the general discourse about social media, there is a lot of emphasis placed on the opportunity to open up organizations and create a new level of engagement with prospects and customers.
In our implementation of social media marketing programs, we’ve seen the potential of that activity.
Yet, the most tangible impact comes from the increase in visibility on search engines, and the direct conversion of consumers to website visitors, that accompanies the expansion of a company’s digital footprint.
The brand marketers surveyed by MarketingSherpa recognize the central role their corporate web site plays in their business strategies, and are assessing the impact of social media in terms of how well it helps to improve those strategies.
For those of us providing social media marketing programs, being able to articulate the benefit of a service against these objectives, as well as providing measurable results, will be at the crux of long-term success.
The video was designed by the agency Jess3. Their blog is a fun place to spend some time — they do a lot of cool graphics and data visualization work.
Owyang’s commentary is interesting. His conclusion:
While the numbers help us track adoption now, the future of all these numbers is moot. In the long run, social networks as destinations will fade into the background (like air) and we’ll just be able to access or be guided by our friends wherever we are in life at any given time we want.
That’s another stab at describing the post-digital world we’re entering.
eMarketer shared an interesting piece of research from the University of Maryland’s business school this week.
The survey looked at the use of social media tactics by small business.
The key takeaway: Small businesses are rapidly adopting social media. 75% have created a company presence on sites like Facebook and 69% say that they actively post status updates and articles of interest on those sites.
Twitter was used by about one quarter of the respondents, while almost 40% say that they blog.
This is an explosion of activity from the SMB sector. It makes sense: social media tools are easy to use and internet users are spending more time on social media sites than any other venue. The SMB social media adopters are just following their customers.
The January home sales report from NAR felt to some people like a letdown — the annual rate of home sales dipped from 5.4 million in December to 5.04 million in January. Some pundits, citing the wildly wrong consensus projections from economists, characterized the results as a bad turn for the housing market.
Step back and you’ll see some encouraging signs of a normalization of the existing home market.
The chart below shows the percentage change in January home sales versus prior year for the last 10 years. (This figures are not seasonally adjusted, reflecting the actual number of transactions in each period.) Since 2006, January sales had been down from the year before. January 2008 was the deep point of the housing slump, with the market coming to a screeching halt that winter. Last January improved somewhat, but still declined from a much lower base. This January, home sales were up 7% over last year. That is forward momentum.
2009 was a year of two halfs: Home sales were down versus the prior year each of the first five months, and then posted increases in each of the following seven months.
The huge year-over-year increases of October and November were anomalies, driven by buyers hurrying to take advantage of a tax-credit that they believed was expiring.
The composition of the housing market was highly unnatural in 2009. First-time home buyers made up close to 40% of the market; distressed sales made up close to 30% of the market. The jumbo mortgage market was essentially closed down for the year, putting intense pressure on the high-end.
And, many of the macro dynamics that contributed to the unnatural composition of the market continue to weight it down today. The job market is fragile and a high number of bank-controlled properties comprises a shadow inventory that puts pressure on home prices.
Despite those conditions, the market appears to be in the midst of a recovery.
The recovery is choppy, but it is being driven by a reasonable impetus. People are looking to buy homes, and sellers are reading the market more rationally, pricing homes in order to transact. The sheer human momentum of housing — families forming, expanding, contracting, moving — is creating the underlying energy for home sales. This activity is what has always been the foundation of a rational housing market.
This recovery in the home market isn’t going to lead the economy out of its slump, as in other recessions. To generate strong economic activity, we need an upswing in home building. For the foreseeable future, there is a surplus of existing housing stock — including bank-controlled properties that are held off market — and new construction isn’t needed to satisfy excess demand.
But a recovery in the existing home market is critical to helping to bolster the feeling of security, opportunity and flexibility among the American consumer. And that recovery is clearly underway.
Look at this! I’m more of a Millennial than a Millenial, according to Pew Research.
I think that the big driver of my score was the absence of TV watching and my propensity to use social media and mobile communications devices.
I wish the score meant that you would have to pay more attention to what I think. But, I know that it doesn’t (even though I’m a Baby Boomer, and probably think that everyone listens to everything I say.)
We’ve been working on several fronts to better understand the value of engagement to business results. Engagement — a term that has more definitions than you can count — is the underlying driver of most social media tool development, but creating engagement is more often a black art than a science. (A constant frustration to those of us who are into replication and measuring.)
eMarketer shared some of an interview they did with Brian Cooper, creative director at the digital agency Dare, that looked at how advertising and marketing agencies need to adapt to leverage new tools and opportunities.
Advertising isn’t about “advertising ideas,” Cooper says, but about developing ideas that can be told in any medium. And, in the telling, the goal is to create a self-propagating energy.
The ideas we create here are much more about engagement and driving
participation. If you can get participation, you can build a
relationship, and from that you can create advocates for your brand.
And those people will tell other people, and they’ll become engaged.
You create a virtuous circle, which you can speed up and drive with
other advertising channels. You can use any medium to drive that
circle—whether it’s online, TV, press, PR or direct mail, for example.
The thrust of Cooper’s comments is deceptively simple, but devilishly complex. To make an idea work across multiple platforms, and to drive engagement, you need to have a clear and basic statement about your brand. It’s not just story telling anymore, as one observer points out. As Tami McCarthy (yep…my wife) says in a recent post on BuzzCloud:
When you look to your communications experts and ask them, “Do we know
who we are?,” you need to feel confident that they are answering from a
deep understanding of your brand identity and that they aren’t just
rehashing your brand narrative.
That’s a lot more complicated than trying to toss a serving of engagement on a plate full of media-driven story telling.
This week’s report that more than 11.3 million homeowners owed more on their house than their house was worth has prompted a fair amount of discussion among the people I talk with.
The big question is what the data point means.
In practical terms, almost 1/3 of homeowners don’t have an ownership interest in their home. They are tenants to the bank, and at some point have to make a decision whether the cash cost of the mortgage is competitive with the cost of a comparable rental unit. Most experts agree that consumers executing short sales will get dinged on their credit report — though not as badly as in a foreclosure — and will need two years of credit seasoning before they can buy a new home.
Of course, emotions factor in to the consumer’s decision in the short-term. They’ll hope that values will recover enough to let them regain some equity. They’ll decide that they don’t want to leave their Home, with a capital H. And, they’ll wonder whether the government will find a way to step in and help them regain some value. (The continued paring of price declines in the Case Shiller reports fuels the hope that their home will rebound in value.)
Banks have a vested interest in managing the flow of foreclosures and short sales in the market. The more distressed properties that come into the market, the more downward pressure on prices, forcing banks to de-value the loans on their books. In the simplest terms, the banks have an incentive to keep the negative equity loans off the market.
Combine the bank and the consumer incentives and you have a stagnant market. The foreclosure and short sales inventory hangs over the market, but with little threat of creating another precipitous drop in prices.
Talking about this situation with a colleague, we speculated on what this unnatural market dynamic will mean for real estate this year. One scenario — which I advanced — was that the volume of home sales could easily stay flat, or decline slightly, in 2010, but that the value of those homes would be up significantly from 2009. The mix of inventory will shift, as more and more buyers gain confidence that market has bottomed out and begin to compete for the best inventory in the market.
This kind of activity will be the nature of the slow grind the real estate market, and the economy overall, is going to experience over the next couple of years. It’s not glamorous…not one bit…but it won’t be as traumatic as the past 24 months.
The survey looked at the use of social media tactics by small business.
I think that the big driver of my score was the absence of TV watching and my propensity to use social media and mobile communications devices.
