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Real-Time Search Gets Real

The tech community has been throwing the phrase “real-time search” around like a hot potato for at least the past year. However, most real-time search offerings simply haven’t lived up to the promise. They’ve been released to great fanfare, but have yet to be widely adopted by regular internet users.

That may change soon- Google, the 800-lb gorilla of the search engine world, just released its own real-time search offering, called (appropriately enough) “Google Realtime.” Realtime lets you search tweets, offering better results and more filtering options than Twitter’s own search feature does. For example, you can choose to limit results to a certain geographic area, and you can “rewind” the results to see what people were saying about your search topic in the past. This post from HubSpot also seems to indicate that results from other social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace will be included at some point, though right now all the results I’ve seen have been from Twitter.

Assuming it succeeds where other real-time search engines have not, what does Google’s Realtime search mean for marketers? Obviously, it provides another way to enhance the already considerable power of word-of-mouth on social networking sites. The ability to set alerts also provides an easy, free tool to tell you what people are saying about your company or brand on Twitter. As HubSpot puts it:

Businesses participating in social media will have a clear advantage in getting found online because of their automatic inclusion in real-time search results. Marketers now have a new tool to monitor online conversations about their business and understand which marketing events directly caused an increase in word-of-mouth buzz during a given time. Google real-time search is a huge boost for marketers not only in monitoring but also in demonstrating the value of social media to their business.

With real-time search, customers’ voices are only going to get louder. Give them something to talk about, and make sure it’s something positive.

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In Social Media, We Get By With a Little Help From Our Friends

Every time we log in, social networking sites inundate us with a flood of information, calls to action and advice. How do we decide which of it to take to heart and which of it to discard?

This is an important question for marketers, as we obviously would prefer that consumers not discard our messages!

Earlier this month, eMarketer examined the results of a study by Invoke Solutions that sought to pin down how social media users perceive advice they encounter online. The study found that people were more likely to trust information posted online when it came from people they know, rather than from brands or “independent” bloggers.

As eMarketer noted, the network the information was posted on made a difference, too. For example, 26% of people surveyed declared that they had “complete trust” in blog entries posted by people they know, while a slightly lower percentage, 23%, said the same about Facebook postings from people they knew. Interestingly, Twitter was the least trusted social networking site, even when the tweets came from friends.

However, no matter what the venue, the study participants were more inclined to trust information passed on by friends. Whether consumers blog, post on Facebook or tweet, social media means that everyone is now a potential influencer for their own friends and family. That potential for influence has always been there, of course, but now it’s easier than ever to use it.

In a post on the Web Strategy blog, Jeremiah Owyang examined the Invoke Solutions data and made the following recommendation for marketers:

Brands should focus on social marketing that harnesses the “social graph” which is getting friends to share with their own friends. By developing advocacy programs and focus on word of mouth marketing, brands can increase marketing and sales margins by getting customers to do the work for them.

Exactly!

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Social Media Research: The Email Wars

On the heels of the Econsultancy study I wrote about last week comes a new study from Nielsen analyzing the Internet usage patterns of Americans that shows email use is declining in favor of social media.

According to Nielsen, Americans spend 22.7% of their online time on social networking sites, mainly Facebook. That’s almost 14 minutes out of every hour, an increase of 43% over this time last year. Email, on the other hand, only accounted for about 8.3% of time spent online, about 5 minutes of every hour and a 34% drop from what it was last year.

Naturally, this prompted a flurry of somewhat sensationalistic headlines, like this little gem from Reuters: “Nielsen Says – In: social networking; Out: Email.”

Is it really that simple? Can we all scrap our email lists in favor of making new “friends” on Facebook and Twitter? Actually, no. We may be spending less time in our email inboxes, but it’s still the third most popular online activity. (Number two, in case you were wondering, is social gaming. Yes, Farmville and Mafia World et al. are huge time sucks.)

In evaluating the results of the study, even Nielsen made it clear that email’s not out of the game yet:

Despite some predictions otherwise, the rise of social networking hasn’t pushed email and instant messaging into obscurity just yet. Although both saw double-digit declines in share of time, email remains as the third heaviest activity online (8.3 percent share of time) while instant messaging is fifth, accounting for four percent of Americans online time.

To tell the truth, I don’t think that social media will ever unseat email completely. Rather, I think we’re evolving toward a “new normal” in which social sites take over the social functions that email was never particularly good at anyway. For example, sharing photos via email was always a clunky experience, as was planning an event or holding a conversation involving more than one person. On Facebook, all of these things are dead simple. So people will naturally want to spend more time on Facebook and other social networking sites, but that doesn’t mean that they’ll abandon email altogether. To thrive, marketers need to be comfortable using both email and social media to connect with customers.

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Econsultancy Study: Email’s Not Dead Yet, Captures Consumer Attention More Effectively Than Social Media

Social media is everyone’s new favorite shiny object, so much so that people like Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, are ready to start throwing handfuls of dirt on top of email’s coffin. But wait…a new study from Econsultancy shows that not only is email not dead, it’s actually more effective at grabbing customers’ attention than social media.

In a post on Search Engine Watch that summed up the study’s findings, Stefan Tornquist, Econsultancy’s US Research Director, made the following comments:

“Despite the current hype surrounding social media, social network adoption and its influence on e-commerce is far from maturity. More than a third of consumers (37%) do not use a social networking site, while those who have recently become a ‘fan’ or ‘friend’ of a company or brand online are still in the minority. Although a variety of media are competing for consumer attention, email continues to be the desired channel for many types of commercial communication.”

The study stresses that emails need to be relevant and timely, but as long as marketers don’t make pests of themselves, it seems that most customers are more than happy to invite them into their inboxes.

But that doesn’t mean that marketers can afford to ignore social media, either. Even if 37% of consumers don’t use social networking sites, that means that 63% of consumers DO use these sites, and more are joining all the time. Plus, social media offers an unparalleled opportunity to foster word-of-mouth, as status updates, posts and videos can quickly go viral.

As they try to grab a piece of the thought leadership pie, some marketers and social media professionals are ignoring the fact that email and social media are not necessarily mortal enemies. They can play nice. You don’t have to choose one or the other. For example, why not let your customers share the offers you send them via social media? Or use social media’s viral nature to help build a killer email list?

Fortunately, most marketers understand this. In fact, a recent study by e-Marketer showed that two-thirds of marketers have begun integrating social media with their email marketing efforts.

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Social Media ROI Round-Up: 5 Resources to Help You Develop a Measurement Strategy

2010 was supposed to be the year that we learned how to calculate the ROI of social media. However, as we learned last week, most marketers still aren’t sure what, if anything, they should be measuring. It’s almost August. Tick-tock, y’all. Now, when it comes to measuring the impact of social media on the ROI of an integrated direct marketing campaign, Dukky rocks. No false modesty here-our analytics can show you how many of your responses came from each social networking site and even which customers have the most influence and bring you the most business.

We’re all about bringing the social media revolution to direct marketing, but at the same time, what we do is only part of a comprehensive social media strategy. There are lots of other ways to use social media to market your business, everything from providing customer service through social media channels to setting up a company Twitter account and tweeting clever quips and helpful information. But how do you measure the ROI of all of that engagement? Hopefully this list of social media ROI resources from industry experts will provide some insight:

Brian Solis: ROI: How to Measure Return on Investment in Social Media

Written at the beginning of the year and still timely, this post from Brian Solis is a lengthy but worthwhile read for marketers struggling to quantify the value of their social media efforts.

Augie Ray/Forrester Research: The ROI of Social Media Marketing: More than Dollars and Cents

In this post, Augie Ray of Forrester Research outlines how to measure the value of social media from 4 different perspectives for a more complete picture.

Garry Przyklenk, Search Engine Watch: SMART Social Media ROI: Show me the Money!

Garry Przyklenk offers a simple, step-by-step guide to calculating social media ROI.

Altimeter Report: Social Marketing Analytics

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

Social Media ROI by Erik Qualman

Almost everyone in the social media sphere loves Erik Qualman, and this video is one of the reasons why. The sequel to the hugely popular “Social Media Revolution,” “Social Media ROI” is packed with statistics showing how companies that have used social media successfully are measuring its impact on their bottom lines.

Feel free to share your thoughts and any additional resources in the comments!

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New Study Shows Marketers (Still) Confused When it Comes to Measuring Social Media ROI

According to a new study by eROI, a digital agency based in Portland, Oregon, many marketers using social media are struggling in two very important areas: integrating social media with other marketing strategies and measuring the ROI of their social media efforts. (h/t ClickZ)

I can almost hear you thinking “Wait a minute…this is news?” These problems are not new, of course. Ever since companies began to incorporate social media into their marketing mix there has been a debate about whether it was even possible to measure the ROI of social media and if so, how one would go about it. However, there is a pretty clear consensus about which metrics NOT to use: numbers of friends and followers mean almost nothing. One follower who is willing to engage with your company and spread the word about you to his or her own followers is worth a thousand followers who never tweet or post about your brand. When it comes to marketing, engaged followers are the only followers that count.

Unfortunately, the study (available here) found that 65.5% of marketers surveyed were tracking an increase/decrease of friends and followers. 59.5% measured traffic coming in from social sites, while 39% tracked mentions of the company. Only 35.7% were tracking new leads, and only 28.5% were tracking sales.

The good news is that more and more marketers are recognizing the advantages of incorporating social sharing into their email campaigns, with 59.1% allowing customers to share offers with their networks.

In the report, eROI notes the importance of tracking and measuring all social media initiatives:

No matter how small they start, marketers should start tracking and measuring their social media efforts (currently one-fifth of respondents said they don’t track anything).

At Dukky, we also believe that it’s important both to incorporate social media into your marketing mix and to track its impact. That’s why we make it easy to create direct marketing campaigns that use social media to amplify your company’s message, raise awareness and help you get to know your customers a little bit better. Plus, our detailed, real-time analytics leave no room for doubt when it comes to social media’s impact on the ROI of your campaign.

How is your company measuring the ROI of its social media marketing efforts? Does social media seem to be paying off for you? Let us know in the comments!

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Tweeting Away “This Commercial Break”

When companies buy advertising space during a major television event, they are supposedly paying a premium for viewers’ attention. But we viewers have never liked having our attention bought and sold-it’s been a cat-and-mouse game to get us to actually watch commercials since the invention of the remote control in 1950. Interesting fact, by the way-the remote control was invented by Zenith Radio Corporation’s engineering team expressly for the purpose of providing an escape hatch from commercials.

Now, as MediaPost’s George Simpson has noted, it seems that social media may have provided us with yet another way to deprive TV advertisers of our attention. The conclusion of Lost, for example, spawned 437,613 tweets, and the number of tweets sent spiked during every commercial break. Simpson observes:

This probably gives a little heartburn to the media buyers who bought time on the finale (probably at a premium, since the ratings were expected to be high — if you can call under 14 million viewers high any more). Moreover, only about 200,000 viewers watched the big ending from start to finish. Most were too busy thumbing their cell phones to look up at the commercials.

Simpson doesn’t understand why anyone would want to tweet about “Lost” to begin with, but of course if you paid any attention to the show at all (or had friends who did), you know that half the fun was trying to decode Lost’s sprawling, incomprehensible mythology, an activity best undertaken with a group of other like-minded fans. Twitter provided Lost geeks with the opportunity to discuss the show with an entire Twitterverse of fellow fans during commercial breaks, inadvertently depriving media buyers of their eyeballs.

There is a lesson to be learned here: Certain traditional marketing tactics are becoming less and less powerful as consumers become better and better at screening them out.

Used wisely, social media gives you an opportunity to create an experience that’s more interactive and draws your customers in without annoying them. It can also be a great place to harness the power of word of mouth. People appreciate getting recommendations from their family, friends and other social networking connections, so these have more power than all but the catchiest TV jingle.

While there are very few companies that can get by on social media alone, integrating it into your existing marketing mix gives you a powerful tool to help you connect with your customers- especially the ones who head for Twitter when the commercials start!

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Social Media Gives Consumers a Microphone to Broadcast Their Opinions About Brands…And They’re Using It!

In our consumption-oriented society, people love to talk about brands. This isn’t a new thing-we’ve been defining ourselves by what we buy and where we shop for decades. However, the rise of social media has given consumers a new venue to share their opinions and experiences about their favorite brands and products. It also acts as a microphone, amplifying individual customer voices and allowing their opinions to influence more people than they would have been able in a less connected world.

The results of a new Harris poll released last week show that consumers have been using social media to broadcast their opinions, both positive and negative, about the brands they are familiar with. Adweek notes that 34% of the people surveyed said that they use social media to “rant or rave about a company, brand or product.”

Fortunately for marketers and PR folks, social media aficionados seem to be about as equally inclined to use social media to praise brands they like as they are to use them to vent about brands they dislike. No doubt you’ve heard the saying “a happy customer tells one friend, an unhappy customer tells everybody?” That old adage doesn’t seem to be quite as true when it comes to social media, at least not if the customers themselves are to be believed.

Adweek reports that an almost equal number of consumers (23%) use social media to plug brands that they like as use it to vent about brands they don’t like (26%). No doubt you can think of at least a few instances where social media was used to punish a brand on a scale that would have been all but impossible without social media (United Breaks Guitars, anyone? Or how about Nestle?), so it’s reassuring to see proof that consumers are also willing to use their newfound power to reward brands that make a positive impression on them.

Another interesting nugget from the poll: 45% of respondents said that opinions from their social media connections influence their purchasing decisions. As you might expect, younger respondents gave greater weight to opinions encountered through social media: 50% of respondents age 18 to 34 found them to exert “a great deal” or “a fair amount” influence.” For respondents 55 and older, only 37% said that social media was influential.

Statistics like these demonstrate why it is vital to get people saying good things about your company on social media. At Dukky, we understand how important it is to generate positive word of mouth, which is why our platform encourages customers to share your offer on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. We also track the responses to those shares, so you can identify your biggest brand advocates and reward them accordingly.

What steps are you taking to encourage positive conversations about your brand?

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