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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.

Given the relative newness of social media marketing, it could seem a little strange to start talking about establishing rules. On the other hand, given the ability to evolve campaigns and learn from activity in almost real time, perhaps it isn’t so surprising.

We’ve  taken learnings from some of our best performing clients – from local, small brands to global brands working on an international scale.  The findings are not surprising but they do – in many cases – fly in the face of the conventional campaign approach.

The rules:

1)   Give the consumer what they want  - not what you want them to want – the ComScore report from earlier this year demonstrated the gulf between what brands thought the consumer wanted and what the consumer actually wanted. We have decades of information and learnings from the traditional media world – consumers want competitions, sweepstakes, coupons, previews and exclusives. And they want them – in general – far more than they want ‘brand updates’

2)   Make your activity bite-sized:  huge integrated campaigns and promotions need to broken out into bite-sized chunks to keep the attention of the social consumer over a longer period of time than that required to simply interact with it. A stunning one hit wonder has a very short shelf life due to the immediate nature of social media.

3)   Give it to them frequently: little and often is key. Social consumers expect to be engaged frequently. Failing to keep up a steady flow of interaction that consumers want will result in fans disengaging with your brand. And more dangerously, engaging with a competitor brand.

4)   Lots of little campaigns build relationships far more effectively than big one off campaigns. This isn’t just about size and frequency but about ensuring that brands give consumers what they want. Unlike offline, social media offers the opportunity to deliver multiple campaigns very effectively and efficiently – making the one size must fit all strategy redundant. There is no need to come up with one big campaign which loosely fits the target audience – now brands can and must carry out multiple smaller campaigns which social consumers can self select into. Equally, the more an action is repeated, the more it becomes a behaviour.

Not exactly revolutionary you might say, but it is a dramatic change from the way most brands have been working up until now.  A seismic shift from brands controlling the environment they operate in – TV, press, outdoor, DM etc – to one where the consumer is in control. This seismic shift demands an equally seismic shift in brand behaviour.

And this shift is even more important when you consider that the more fans interact with a brands’ content, taking into account both frequency and recency, the more the brands’ Facebook EdgeRank will increase – and the more prominently the updates and content will be displayed across News Feeds, attracting more likes, comments and clicks.

The brands that make social media work for them will be those that follow the rules above. As we move from simplistic KPIs such as number of fans to engagement scores and ultimately purchase, some brands will be held up as the success stories of the time, others will flounder and miss the huge opportunity that social media marketing offers them.

Whilst some naysayers still argue over whether marketing to consumers in the social media space can only be detrimental to a brand; the smart marketers are already forging ahead. The switched-on brands are embracing the opportunity that social media presents whilst the left-behind brands are still trying to make up their minds as to whether they should even be in this space. Given the 1bn+ people globally who are active in social media, it’s not difficult to figure out which brands are losing out.

The irony of the position the ‘left-behind’ brands are putting themselves in is that social media marketing is rapidly maturing. No longer the relative baby of the marketing mix, it is growing in maturity, learning to walk and soon to run. It may well still have some vestiges of an awkward teenager, a little bit gawky, and sometimes a bit temperamental but given that a few years ago, it was a newborn: social media marketing is growing up fast.

Curiously, for a media that is supposedly all about ‘brand’ the emerging driver behind this growth is more scientific. Data, and the abundance of it is the key driver behind social media marketing growing up.  Social media marketing learnt to crawl the day ‘likes’ were set as a KPI, walk when we learnt to track fan behaviour and run when we learnt to evaluate how fans were helping campaigns reach their friends. It finally grew up when we learnt how to use this data to deliver business objectives through social media marketing in a world where marketing and commerce is increasingly becoming democratized. The best marketers have learnt how to harness consumer power and friend-to-friend influence to drive campaign success. The conversation has moved on from pure ‘brand engagement’ to monetizing a brands’ investment. Converting fans to customers.

Of course, it’s easy to say but hard to deliver. Or is it? The power of the data lies firstly in the collection of it and then the translation of it, from millions of bits of activity, shares, likes, posts, comments, invites, entries etc to consumer or campaign level reporting. In a recent Reuters survey (Marketers struggle to harness social media – survey. Georgina Prodhan) IBM marketing executive Marcel Holsheimer was quoted as saying:

“We have entered the age of the smarter consumer. Marketing is going to become much more an automated and software play than it was in the past. “

There are few platforms that make sense of this data and therefore can help brands harness the power of social media – EngageSciences is one of the few.

If there’s one thing that hasn’t ceased to amaze me over the last few years, it’s the – at times almost hysterical – storm of commentary around social media and how it can be best used to further the ambitions of a brand.  There appear to be two camps (albeit that even these camps are a little like the UK government, uneasy alliances held together only by their disdain for the other camp) – those that live in fear of upsetting the social consumer and those that see the social consumer as a target audience to market to.

Those that live in fear of the consumer make the case that in social media the consumer is king, they can switch off the conversation with brands with pressing of the ‘unlike’ button. And worse, if you upset them by having the effrontery to overtly market to them, they can blacken your brand name through the very channel you’ve been talking to them on. And of course, this negative comment will no doubt go viral in a way that the best efforts of the marketers hasn’t; ultimately causing irreparable damage to the brand. All of which is theoretically true – although in practice I’m not sure it’s really happened.

This camp tends to believe that brands must treat their facebook presence with kid gloves, they talk about posting content that will enrich the lives of their fans – in essence they believe that social media is almost solely a brand tool and should be used as such. This belief is often reinforced by two things – social media tends to be the preserve of the brand team within the clients marketing department. And brand teams by definition tend to work with advertising or brand focussed agencies.

Those in the ‘social consumer as a target audience’ camp believe that social media is simply another channel through which to market to consumers, and by market I really mean using marketing campaigns and techniques to deliver sales. So far more direct. They hold the view that building a fanbase for your page is simply the first step in finding a new way to market the brand and ultimately sell the product or service.

This camp poses a powerful argument – why else do people become a fan of your brand unless they want or aspire to buying your offering. And for those who don’t become a fan for this purpose, they’re a pointless fan, they’re not part of your target audience and so are of no further interest. If they unlike you, it’s no loss.

So a great divide – and who’s right? Well, there are certain types of brands where you can pretty firmly point to one camp or other but in the main, neither camp is right. The reality is that consumers want a combination of both camps. The IBM Institute for Business Value analysis report in 2011 exposed the myths of both camps viewpoints. It showed the disconnect between what consumers wanted from brands in social media and what brands thought consumers wanted. The top two reasons why consumers follow brands on social media are to get discounts and to make purchases. So they do want to be marketed to, they want offers, they want competitions, deals and coupons. But as any good marketer knows they only want these from brands that they like and trust. Thus there is a brand role too.

It’s not really that complicated – it just muddies the water a bit. A few years back when brand advertising started to be diluted with such monstrosities as calls to action, phone numbers and latterly web addresses or facebook links, someone coined the phrase ‘brand response’. Engaging content that also tries to drive action from the consumer. This same principle applies to social media marketing.

Marketing through traditional media (and I count digital in this) has long been structured around the campaign approach. But quarterly, seasonal or annual campaigns based on when the consumer is most likely to be interested in/purchase the product or brand doesn’t work for social media.

Social media is always on, brands can’t spend 9 months of the year making limited effort with the consumer only to launch a big Christmas campaign because that’s a big selling time for them. By the time it gets round to Christmas, the smart brands which have been properly engaging with the consumer throughout the whole year will own the relationship. The big burst campaign approach brand will no longer have the consumers attention.

Easy to say but this throws up two critical questions: ‘what’ and ‘how’ – what will maintain consumers engagement; and how do you deliver it.

The what.

Content that engages, starts a relationship between brand and consumer, drives interaction and ultimately moves the consumer down the purchase journey.

So what is this content? A steady drip of information, updates, competitions, quizzes, exclusive offers and opportunities to interact. In plain English – tell me exciting and interesting things I don’t know, give me the opportunity to see things before others, the chance to win things, ask me what I think and respond to me. Make me feel that I’m getting something out of me becoming and staying your fan. But – and importantly, don’t think you know what I want. Serve up a cocktail of content, interactive promotions and offers and let me choose which bits I interact with.

The how.

So how do you effectively and efficiently deliver a drip-feed to your consumers. Well, you can either put together your own social media team including designers and developers, pay an agency to manage your social media marketing for you or bring in help in the form of technology. Much is made of how technology is developed to make our lives easier, to free up time or simply to help us. In many cases, that has proven to be a double edged sword – smartphones have turned people into ‘always on’ workers – but the ability to put together and publish competitions, coupons, flash deals and offers, schedule content, republish consumer generated content and track the behaviour of not only your fans but how they are helping spread your campaigns and content to their friends, all from one platform, will help you get results in a cost and time efficient way.

Build a promotion, schedule campaign messages to help drive traffic, activate auto-prompts for entrants to ‘share’, choose refer a friend incentives to encourage invites, define next best actions to drive the customer journey or cross promote offers to participants, select the data and permissions you wish to capture from consumers – all in 45mins.

So if one person can build an interactive promotion in 45mins, imagine what they could do with a whole day, or week, or month….

Getting smart on social channels involves being active with promotions, quizzes, competitions, contests, offers, games and exclusive content – all the while giving fans opportunities to share your promotions and branded content with their friends. Your job is to facilitate that and EngageSciences has made it simple and time efficient to do so.

But don’t take my word for it – go to www.engagesciences.com and look at the case studies and testimonials form brands such as play.com, Speedo and Nokia.

Welcome to the drip feed approach – made easy.