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Much is new at Nokia these days. The heightened focus on innovation has led to the brand doing some interesting work in using the voices of advocates to drive brand metrics and campaign conversions across many international markets.

Marketers have understood for many years that using product reviews on websites helps drives conversions. Technologies like Bazaarvoice have pioneered this area of digital marketing and the results have been impressive. If you can surface up positive product reviews to people that are on your website, then conversion rates go up. It is quite simple.

The great thing for marketers is that social media offers up a whole new capability for companies to use the voices of advocates to positively impact both campaign conversions and brand metrics. People are publishing posts and tweets on Facebook & Twitter, making recommendations on LinkedIN, publishing videos and photos to sites like youtube and flickr about your products and services all the time. The question is most brands don’t know how to tap into that, to find the voices of advocates and then publish those voices into their Facebook Page and website.

Nokia use EngageSciences to easily do this. It can take as little as 15 minutes a week to find and publish fresh advocacy from social channels. On the right is an example of how Nokia France are curating what is being said on the social web and then publishing the voices of those fans into a Facebook offer page to help drive conversions.

Nokia also implement entire tabs that are showcasing nothing but the material published by advocates. The below is a reactions page to the launch of the Lumia phone. It is surfacing up unboxing videos fans have published to youtube, photos uploaded to Flickr, as well as tweets and posts from fans on Facebook and Twitter and third party blogs published about the new phone. Being able to go beyond just understanding what people are saying, which is the standard fare from a social media monitoring platform, to actually being able to use what is being said holds great promise for social marketing. Having a console that allows marketers to monitor, filter, curate and publish the voices of their advocates is a new tool in the digital marketers armoury for driving brand metrics and campaign conversions.

Social media is just about fluffy metrics, right? Hard to justify the return in tough economic times, right? Wrong. We have been espousing loudly the real world hard business metrics you can improve with the right use of social marketing, down to revenue and conversions generated from social activity. Social media marketing being digital is completely trackable if you set it up right. No more arguments over ROI. We can show you the data that tracks performance down to dollars, pounds and pence as well as highlighting the media sources that are helping drive the seeding of those results.

In the vein of looking at how social media can drive commercial results I like this infographic from MR Youth that looks at how social media impacted the holiday season sales. If you are reading this and think you need social media marketing to drive more revenue or to be more transparent in terms of ROI, send tom@engagesciences.com an email for more information.
 

eMarketer published a great article this week looking at some research conducted by BzzAgent, the social media marketing arm of dunnhumby, who began studying the immediate and longer term results of social media marketing campaigns involving CPG brands and brand advocates.

OK so as the article states and I think you would expect, there was an immediate boost in the likelihood of brand advocates to recommend a product after being exposed to a campaign, with rates rising from 39% before the campaign to 61% directly after. That is interesting research which backs up the need to implement social campaigns, but I think where the research goes next is more interesting.

As you would expect the effect of the campaign diminished somewhat over time, but the statistics that we should really be blown away by is that 55% of brand advocates studied were still significantly more likely to recommend a product one year after their initial exposure. A year is a long time and only a 6% drop off rate…..

As eMarketer states, “When brand advocates studied were asked about their own purchase intent, the results were even more dramatic. Before the campaign, a similar number said they would purchase as would recommend the brand: 38%. Immediately after the campaign, the number shot up more than 30 percentage points and remained at 69% for three months. After a year, purchase intent was still elevated as high as 61%.”

We definitely see corollary data coming from our customers. However where the most marked difference exists between our clients is not really about the quality of individual campaigns, but in the frequency of campaigns. As eMarketer concludes the data above does not guarantee success of every social campaign. Quite often campaigns don’t work that well. Sometimes they are knock-outs. It can catch you quite by surprise.

The key to success amongst our client base is really campaign frequency. Those customers that run a calendar of activity, social promotions, competitions, exclusive content, quizzes and advocacy programs to reward sharing and engagement have on average a 5x increase in key metrics such as fan growth, fan interaction and Facebook referred revenue over those that run infrequent campaigns or single campaigns over the course of six months. Take a look at this Facebook referred revenue trending for Play.com below, who have a great ethos for frequency of campaign engagement.

The key to success is not ‘launch a campaign, get some results, stop your campaign and then monitor the diminishing returns over the next year’, it is to keep the trending going upwards continually through a calendar of campaigns and activity. As eMarketer points out the benefits of connecting people into a social campaign hang around for a long time, so for smart marketers this is activity they need to double down on. At least with tools like EngageSciences this is now easy to manage so you too can get results like Play.com.

This is a great infographic – a timeline for the evolution of Facebook features up to the end of 2011. Facebook have managed to roll out features on a continual basis and it can be hard for some marketers to keep up . That’s why I love this infographic as I think it gives a nice overview of how the platform has progressed to date.

Not keeping abreast of the changes does catch some companies out. For example the introduction of secure browsing has meant that many custom Facebook tabs and apps are now no longer accessible to people as they don’t support this feature change. Likewise the introduction of the Facebook Mobile App has been fantastic as it is now the worlds largest mobile app with 400m users, which has stimulated more people to use the site more often, but businesses have been caught out as they have not realised that apps and tabs they create currently cannot be accessed by users of the Facebook Mobile App. With up to 40% of traffic coming from smartphones that is a lot of lost interaction.

Fortunately using the EngageSciences software service to build your tabs and launch your apps and campaigns, means that you won’t get caught out by these changes. For example we worked with Facebook to ensure support for secure browsing so our customers did not have to worry about this. We also developed a solution using smartURL’s to ensure that Facebook Mobile App users get served up a mobile view of the tabs and apps when clicking on a link in their newsfeed – therefore extending your social media marketing to mobile users, who are also the most active segment on the social network. We work to take advantage of the many changes that Facebook makes so that you can connect with more people, in more ways, through more devices than before. Facebook’s innovation provides marketers with some great opportunities. Make sure you don’t miss out.

Search has been the primary way for most companies to get found online and has taken up the lions share of digital marketing budgets. Our prediction is that 2012 is the year that building connections will overtake search in the lexicon of the successful marketer. This is because 2012 will be the year when discovery is now powered on the social web through friends rather than through search. Those companies that do not reengineer marketing budgets and activities around this simple principle will be negatively impacted.

The top three reasons for why connections will beat search in 2012 are:

1) There are now 60 billion likes and comments monthly according to Facebook. There are 12 billion in the US alone. That is 1 billion more than all the Google searches.

2) Facebook has 850m users. The killer statistic though is that 50% of these users login every single day (source Facebook). Some 40% of the traffic accessing the site is through smartphones and over 350m people use the Facebook mobile app. Mobile users are also the most active on Facebook as a segment, logging in more times and spending more minutes connected than desktop users. As smartphones continue to penetrate the mobile market across the world expect this number to rise rapidly and the social web to become increasingly mobile.

3) All this usage, both desktop and mobile, equates to 53 billion minutes spent on Facebook each month – that is half of all TV viewing (source Facebook). Facebook has achieved this in just seven years. In took TV several decades to reach this level of media domination.

The latest data around where budgets will be spent in 2012 shows that a lot of marketers are getting to grips with this new reality.

Regardless of the amount of budget invested by brands in social media, it came of age in 2010.  Too big and too influential to ignore, too fluid to control, the more progressive brands tried to harness and guide the flow of interactions. The more cautious brands simply built pages and hoped they would not be caught like a rabbit in the headlights of the consumer eye. Very few brands actually ignored it.

2012 is destined to be a year of change. No brand can afford not to be actively using social media to further their marketing objectives. The question is how.

In an unstructured, fluid environment, brand owners feel least in control and most at the mercy of the whim of the consumer. They are less able to buy consumer views, to command their attention, to control and direct the conversation.

This, possibly above everything else, has been the major barrier to entry for brands to focus an adequate proportion of their marketing budgets and resources on social media marketing. (Of course, much has been made of the perceived lack of metrics and difficulty in assessing return on spend but this feels more like a smokescreen or excuse – how scientific is brand awareness from focus groups; OTS in the age of catch up /delay TV etc?)

So 2012 is the year that brands realign around ‘connections’. The year when social media marketing goes mainstream.  The real challenge for brands in 2012 will be putting infrastructure around their social media efforts. Much like the early days of the digital web, the ‘strategy lite’ big ideas will gradually replaced by objective-centric strategies and comprehensive activity laydowns aimed at leveraging the strengths of social media and playing to the demands of the consumer.

And much like the digital web, and the golden age of email marketing, this new objective-rich, measured and tracked approach will not just be underpinned by technology but more than ever before it will be undeliverable without it. The likes of the EngageSciences social media marketing platform will be decisive factors in the successful execution of those strategies; providing the muscle to deliver the frequency of campaign and promotion demanded by both consumers hungry for new content and the facebook Edgerank algorithm which rewards brands that achieve high levels of interaction.

In 2012 brands will need a unique view of the consumer – how they interact with their campaigns and content, the shares and invites that influence the spreading of the brands message to their friends and the referral conversions that result from this activity amongst connections.  They will need to know how they are ‘discovered’ across the social web and what this means for revenue. Marketers will need to understand the value of each and every fan. The shift in discovery from search to connections is the very first stage in the democratization of marketing. The winners will be those companies that can build connections, then amplify and track the social discourse between friends about their content and campaigns.

2012 will be the year where marketing reorganises around people and the democratization of marketing comes of age….with a little help from its friend – technology.

The folks over at aytm.com have published an interesting infographic based on research conducted with over 2000 US internet users. This research is consistent with the findings published by many others over the last 12 months. However the infographic style makes it pretty easy to consume so I thought I would share it here as well.

Key takeaways for me were that consumers now prefer brand updates via Facebook and Twitter over email. Not all marketers have yet to really get to grips with this. It is time to shift focus from the email newsletter to building social media communities instead. So how do you do that? Well by far the most sought after types of content from brands on social media are promotions, coupons and discounts as the infographic shows. For more information check out this post on the perception gap of what consumers really want on social media.

EngageSciences and our customer Play.com have been short-listed for the eConsultancy Innovation Award in Social Media.

The recognition follows a very successful period of social media marketing at Play.com which has become an interesting industry case study of how to turn fans into buyers.

What makes this all the more pleasing is that EngageSciences is the only social media marketing technology that has been shortlisted whose awards entry was actually submitted by a client. Of course marketing departments of technology companies love to enter themselves for awards, but here at EngageSciences we think that lacks the punch of a satisfied client taking the initiative and putting the technology vendor forward for joint recognition. So thanks very much to the folks at Play.com for doing this!

Play.com implemented EngageSciences at the end of May. Since then they have increase Facebook referred revenue by 500% and driven up fan interaction levels by over 1000%. Channel Advisor has also named Play.com as the second fastest growing Facebook Page among retailers. The strategy of leveraging content from partners and running regular interactive promotions such as competitions and quizzes has brought a significant increase in fans from 38,000 to 220,000 in seven months

Being a retailer Play.com have key targets to meet for turning these fans into buyers. Using the EngageSciences platform the team at Play.com can run commerce promotions, flash deals and fan exclusive sales. Results have shown a 50% higher average order from fans engaging through Facebook.

Backing all this up is a solid data strategy, where using the EngageSciences platform Play.com can see on a per fan level, what campaigns they have interacted with, how many shares and invites they have made and the resulting conversions amongst their friends this activity has led to. Its a 360 degree view of the customer on social channels that helps inform future marketing activities.

The award nomination comes on the back of a great year for EngageSciences. Having only launched in April this year the platform has been adopted by more than 60 customers in 32 countries. Customers are recognizing the clear leadership position the product has for driving social media marketing goals and programs in Enterprise customers who want to stand out from the pack.

Social media marketing – delivering campaigns to mobile isn’t only possible, it’s absolutely critical.

Most marketers don’t realise that when they create Facebook Pages, the tabs and apps they use to drive engagement with fans aren’t viewable to fans who are using smartphones and the Facebook mobile app to interact with the social network.

The explosive growth of smartphone penetration on a global basis and within that penetration the sheer number of people accessing Facebook via their mobile device – a staggering 350million people or 44% of users according to Facebook (Nov 2011) – means the mobile is almost as important as the PC/MAC for social media campaigns.

Additionally, mobile users are almost twice as active on Facebook as non-mobile users. At this point, the mobile channel moves from important to essential.

What the statistics are demonstrating is that a brands social media campaign delivery is only half complete if the technology behind the campaign or promotion cannot detect the device by which a consumer is trying to access the campaigns tab or app and serve up an accessible version for that device.

My advice to any brand is: if your current solution provider doesn’t have the ability to detect mobile users and then serve up your marketing tabs or apps to them, come and talk to EngageSciences. After all, 44% of the entire Facebook universe and by far the most active half, should not be ignored. Make sure your social social media marketing is also social mobile marketing.

Now I’m going to start off by being controversial. You do not always need to be creative or have a fantastically creative idea to ensure that your content, campaign or promotion goes viral. Of course, people will be more likely to share if it is creative but it is not a defining viral factor. Apologies to advertising/ digital/social /insert type here agencies the world over – your creative ideas are more the icing on the cake than the cake itself.

There are four key rules to amplification, and it is not rocket science, just common sense:

1)   the offer

2)   the mechanics

3)   the viral prompts

4)   the frequency of fan interaction

Let’s look at these four rules in a little more detail.

1)   the offer -  Comscore recently reported that what most people want from social media are offers, discounts and exclusives. Not exactly a surprise to most of us – except when you consider that most brand marketers thought that their fans wanted brand association, content and updates.

Give people something they want, and something they think their friends will want and they will share it. Some of the most effective promotions (usually aimed at data gathering or fan volume) are driven by ubiquitous, desirable product giveaways – such as iPad’s and such like.

So simple as it sounds, offer people something that they want and that they want to share with their friends.

2)   the mechanics – make it simple for people to interact with your content/campaign/promotion. Big ideas can be very powerful but often require a greater effort on the part of the consumer. Just because you know how brilliant the content is doesn’t mean the consumer will make the effort to find out.

Make it as easy as possible to interact – don’t take the fan away from the social media environment. Too many brands drag their fans out into the broader web environment, deliver the interaction there and then dump them. Hardly engendering fan happiness!

3)   The viral prompts – so you’ve put a great offer out there one that your fans (and, as importantly, the friends of your fans) will be interested in. You’ve kept the mechanics simple so there’s no friction or barrier to entry.  But people are people, they’ll share sometimes, they’ll invite their friends sometimes. Or they won’t.

This is possibly the most important part of the customer journey. The absolute bedrock of amplification is ensuring that your fans share with their friends. Without it, you’re lost. Great big ideas have fallen flat because fans didn’t share. The prompts to share must be built into the content/campaign/promotion user flow. I would go as far as to say to not have these built in would be irresponsible. When a fan interacts with the content/campaign/promotion, they should immediately be prompted to post to their wall supported by a personalised message. This should then be followed by an incentive to refer friends who might be interested to the brand page or promotion.

This isn’t about driving false behaviour, it’s about facilitating a behaviour that would otherwise not be actioned because it is not front of mind.  This is probably the single most important aspect of amplification – prompting and making it easy for a fan to share. Any activity that doesn’t feature these mechanics is flawed from the start.

4)   the frequency – finally, and more strategically, given how the Facebook Edgerank algorithm influences the positioning of posts on a fans wall, it is even more critical to drive frequent interaction between your fans and your brand on Facebook. Failure to do this or adopting a big campaign approach will also see your content/campaign/promotion sink without a trace. Having not driven interaction with your fans for a month or so, your latest offering will be deemed relatively unimportant to your fans and will feature on the ticker wall or ‘other stories’….not in their top stories.

Put simply,  give the consumer what they want; make is easy to access; prompt them to share and finally, give them frequent reasons to interact with your brand. Oh, and a good idea can help too.

Pot Noodle recently drove a 750% fan growth on their Sirens Facebook Page through a mixture of competitions and coupons. Drawing fans in with a series of prize draws to win iPhones and an iPad, they successfully cross-promoted on the confirmation page coupon offers for money off Pot Noodle, driving footfall into retailers to purchase the product. They received double digit conversion rates on the best performing cross promoted coupons.

Using viral features such as an auto-prompt of personalize share messages and refer a friend incentives offering more chances to win for every friend you invite that enters, the brand saw high rates of friend to friend interaction around the campaign leading to the high growth figures. Cross promoting coupon offers to entrants meant they defined a customer journey within the Facebook environment that led to bricks and mortar commerce activity, as well as increasing the level of interaction with their fan base.

By using EngageSciences to launch these campaigns they are also building up their social marketing database, allowing each fans activity to be tracked, showing not just what campaigns they have entered and their engagement score, but the amount of shares and invites they have made across these campaigns.

This gives Unilever a view of how each fan is spreading their campaigns and the ‘reach’ that this activity is having. This means the brand can easily see who its top advocates are and reward positive fan behaviour. It’s the democratization of marketing. We love it.

Nokia gave an intriguing presentation on how they are restructuring to put social media at the heart of their business as well as their marketing. Key to this is moving from a successful fan acquisition strategy (4m fans) to use social media for commerce activation across local markets. Hear how Nokia are using EngageSciences as the Social Media Engagement Platform, to power a major part of this global brands social business future.

Almost every conversation about social media starts with ‘how many fans does your brand have?’. Now don’t get me wrong, everybody (and every brand it seems) wants the adoration of hundreds of thousands of people, but what if they’re liking you for the wrong reason and what if they’re only pretending to like you. Is a deep gnawing sense of unease starting to play at the edge of your mind? How do you know if your fans truly love you?

Well, short of interrogating each and every one individually and trying to establish their motives, in the world of social media, if they love you, they’re engaged with you. Engagement is the analogy for honest intentions. Engagement says ‘I don’t pretend to love you because 3 months ago you gave me the chance to win a fabulous prize’ or ‘I felt like I should be your fan because all my friends were’. Engagement shows I care and I’m a real fan. I want your content, I want to talk to you and about you with my friends.

Taking this into the real world of customer value, building a base of, for example, 500,000 fans off the back of a couple of big campaigns, makes no sense unless you have an infrastructure and strategy to keep them engaged, as well as an idea of what you want from that engagement.

Engaged fans, i.e. those interested in your brand, what your brand is offering and critically in the social media environment, those who share content with their friends and invite them to interact with your brand are king. Without them, brands are missing out on the whole marketing raison d’etre of social media. You don’t market your brand to fans – your fans market your brand and your products to their friends.

So how is engagement driven? Simply put, by giving fans what they want, a blend of content, promotions, competitions, exclusives, opportunities to have their say. This list goes on.  And by giving it to them frequently, in bite sized chunks. It’s that simple. So rather than focus on just the number of fans you have, take a look at how many of them are actually engaged.

So engagement is king. But engagement and fan acquisition are one and the same thing if you use your advocates to help drive your campaigns. Play.com are tracking how engaged each fan is based on the amount of campaigns they have entered, as well as the amount of shares and invites they have enacted, which will help spread play.com campaigns to their friends, bringing more fans to the play.com page. It is through this fan to friend activity that play.com acquire most of their fans. True engagement is king for many reasons it seems.