FreshNetworks Blog

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There has long been a debate in social media marketing between engaging people where they are at the moment (on Facebook or Twitter for example), and bringing them together to engage on your own site (such as your own forums or online community). This is, to some extent, an unhelpful argument. There has been no clear-cut answer, and the truth is that it all depends what you are using social media for, who your audience is, and how you want to engage them. The best approach has often been to combine both – in a hub-and-spoke model where you engage both in social networks and on your own site.

Through 2011 we expect this issue to become at the same time more complicated and more simple with the continued rise of the social graph.

To date, Facebook’s social graph has been underused by brands. It’s not surprising. The concept is quite complicated, and it also challenges what we think we know about social media marketing. Including the debate about going where people are or bringing them to your site. Social graph lets you do both. At the same time.

The social graph, at its simplest, allows you to use your friends, likes and other interactions in Facebook when you are browsing other sites. To put this in practical terms – on the Amazon.com site, you can use social graph to generate recommendations of things your friends might want you to buy them. It will recommend authors a friend says they like on Facebook, or if they say they like Football it will recommend products that might appeal to them. And what’s more it will recommend things for certain friends around their birthday so you get useful advice on what to buy people when it is relevant for them.Social graph brings insight and social to the shopping experience on Amazon.com – adding value and doing something that just hasn’t been possible before.

Through 2011 we expect to see more experimentation with social graph. More brands using the data and information on Facebook to add value to a consumer’s experience on their own site. This is part of a broader trend towards distributing social across a company’s consumer journey and contact points, and even across their business. But that’s the topic for another post in this informal series on social media in 2011.

This post is part of an informal series: Social Media in 2011.

With the launch of Facebook Deals in the US in November and its imminent launch in the UK, the opportunities for brands to engage in location-based marketing are growing and set to grow more in 2011.

We’ve already looked at the ways in which marketers can use Facebook Places, and the ways in which location-based services can add value to both consumers and to marketers. But with the launch and growth of Facebook Deals, we will see a rapid growth in use of these tools by brands. And, with luck, a growth in marketing innovation – using location to do things and engage with people in ways that have not previously been possible.

But there is a danger that marketers may not move beyond the use of location to target vouchers, discounts and coupons. That would be a real shame.

Facebook Deals and Foursquare lend themselves to easily provide discounts based on a consumer’s location – a voucher for checking in, a discount for checking in a fixed number of times, a group discount if you check in with your friends. All of these are possible and would be of interest to brands. Taking a tactic that is already used offline and both moving it online and bringing in the location element. But this misses out on the real opportunities for brands to experiment with location-based marketing and to engage with consumers in new ways.

Successful brands will be experimenting sensibly with social media in 2011 as part of their social media strategy. And location-based marketing should be one area for innovation. Rather than just discounting or offering vouchers there we will see innovations in how brands are interacting with consumers. They may be allowing consumers to leave a ‘wish list’ in shops for friends – dropping their wedding list in a department store for others to find when they are there, or leaving their virtual birthday gift list in stores around town through location based services. They may allow customers to sort reviews and find services based not just on what is closest, but what others, people like them, or their friends, think of them. Or they may allow consumers to keep a record of when they have visited a location (maybe a gym or swimming pool) and the activities they did when they were there as part of a training diary.

Location-based tools offer a new way to engage with customers. And the successful brands will be innovating with these in 2011. Vouchers, discounts and coupons are just one thing they can be used for. But the best brands will do so much more.

This post is part of an informal series: Social Media in 2011.

Social media marketing budgets are set to rise for 40% of firms across Europe in 2011 and budget for social media marketing is an issue for only 18% of brands. These findings come from Meltwater Group‘s Future of Content report, a survey of with marketing and social media decision makers from 450 brands across the world, including the US, UK, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Singapore and Australia. The news is undoubtedly good news for social media agencies, but also reflects a growing maturity of how brands are viewing social media as part of their marketing and communications mix.

Of those interviewed, 40% said that their organisation fully embraced social media, and a much larger proportion (82%) reported that budget was not a constraint. Social media sits alongside more established tactics for those interviews – being the third most popular means of getting content out, after e-newsletters (the most popular) and printed magazines (the second most popular). But with 40% of firms reporting that their budgets will rise in 2011, social media marketing is a growing part of this mix and is challenging the more established media.

This pattern is one that we have seen in 2010 at FreshNetworks – clients moving from traditional print magazines to social media, especially in the B2B market. Engaging customers and stakeholders in social media has grown significantly over the last 4-5 years, and we are now witnessing it taking over traditional methods of communication as opposed to just complimenting and adding to them. Brands are starting to rethink their overall marketing and communications mix and are putting social media at the heart of it.

This study from Meltwater Group supports this trend and reinforces a trend we expect in 2011 for successful brands to dedicate a greater proportion of  their marketing spend to social media marketing. Reviewing existing campaigns and processes and working out how social media can add greater value than what they have already. We have moved beyond social media marketing being experimental and for individual projects alone, and into it being central to a brand’s marketing and communications mix. In 2011 we will see this become more pronounced, see more experimentation, and see more brands able to report, and prove, the value they are getting.

2011 will see social media marketing budgets rise, but it will also be the year when we should expect, even demand, to see more demonstrable value from this expenditure. But that’s the subject of another post in this informal series of predictions for 2011.

This post is part of an informal series: Social Media in 2011.

Vodafone homepage

Vodafone has been running a great campaign in the UK for Christmas called ‘The 12 Days of Smiles’ – 12 days of offers associated with the 12 days of Christmas. Last week (and over this weekend) they launched a social media element to this campaign on Twitter and on their website homepage.

The idea was simple:

• Tweet something that made you smile today
• Add the hadhtag #mademesmile
• All tweets with this hashtag would be streamed live on the Vodafone homepage

The outcome was a homepage over the weekend riddled with thoughts on how much tax Vodafone should be paying, and various other less-than-ideal things. You can see two such tweets in this screengrab from the Vodafone homepage.

That this happened is not a surprise. There are many cases of similar things happening – brand live streams tweets with a certain hashtag to their homepage, and hashtag gets taken over by people wanting to say other things about the brand (Skittles and the Conservative Party in the UK being relevant other examples). It is a surprise that Vodafone opted for this and reminds us all that when we are coming up with social media campaigns, we need to balance the creative idea with the business objectives and the business and brand risks.

Now, I don’t think that this is actually going to do a huge amount of damage to the brand, but it is a shame. A shame that they didn’t think about it thoroughly and use this valuable homepage real-estate in a better way. Also it suggests a lack of a clear strategy and consistently applied strategy of why they are using social media. A clear view of what benefits any campaign of tactic should bring to the brand. Only this helps you to evaluate creative ideas and make sure the things that we are doing make sense and add value to the business.

You can read more about this campaign here:

• Tax protest turns Vodafone’s smile upside down
• Vodafone’s hashtag hash

Our recently launched  social media influencers report tests how effective nine of the leading social media monitoring tools  are at identifying influencers.

While these tools – Attensity 360, Brandwatch, Radian6, Alterian, Scoutlabs, Sysomos, Synthesio, Social Radar and PeerIndex – are certainly market leaders and offer comprehensive, cross-platform social media monitoring and influencer identification, they all come at a price.

So is there a way of finding influencers without paying for tools?

In a word, yes. There are a plethora of free (or free to a certain level of service) tools that you could use to identify social media influencers. However, unlike the tools we tested in our report,  very few of them work across the different social media platforms and most focus on one particular area of social media – mostly Twitter, but some also do blogs and forums.

And, as with all tools, the data and results require human analysis to ensure you identify the right people.

Here’s a list of some of the free tools that could be used to find influencers (in English language):

• Addict-o-matic – produces a a consolidated page with search matches across blogs, Twitter, Digg, Flickr and more.
• Alltop – the online magazine rack – search for influential bloggers listed by specific subject and topics.
• Blogpulse – an automated trend discovery system for blogs. It analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere.
• Boardreader – search engine for forums. Get fast and quality search for your own forum.
• Buzzstream – helps you build a dossier about your influencers.
  
• Dailylife - search news and editorial commentary for influencers in traditional media.
• Facebook – use the “search” function to identify topics and people who are talking about them.
• Google – possibly still the ultimate free tool for finding influencers, especially since the launch of  Google Blog search, Google Realtime search and their “Discussion” search option.
• HubSpot Twitter grader – check the power of a twitter profile compared to millions of others that have been graded.
• IceRocket – search social networking sites and blogs to find influencers and online creators (people who upload images or talk passionately on a social network about a brand).
• Klout – currently the most respected measure of Twitter influence, Klout allows users to track the impact of their opinions, links and recommendations.
• Lijit – build relationships with the online influencers and connect directly to their audiences.
• MentionMap – visualiser tool that allows you to quickly assess the most influential people on Twitter.
• Monitter – monitor Twitter for key words, phrases and topics that are being discussed online.
• ObjectiveMarketer – find your influencers and amplifiers across various social media platforms.
• PeerIndex – helps you discover the authorities and opinion formers on a given topic.
• PostRank analytics – discover your influencers, identify which social networks give you most traction and benchmark yourself against the competition.
• Pulse of the Tweeters – uses data mining and sentiment analysis to mine millions of tweets and find the most influential people on Twitter.
• Socialmention – features an interesting combination of metrics including reach, sentiment, passion, and strength for blogs, Twitter, news, images, video, and audio.
• Social Profile – keeps you informed of other peoples’ activity in the social web.
• Social Seek – helps you find out who is making the most noise about your brand.
• Technorati – considered to be the leading blog search engine – useful for finding influential blogs.
• TipTop – Search for current trends and topics of interest.
• TouchGraph – interactive graphs to help visualise links and for mind mapping.
• Trendistic – find out the what the most influential topics of discussion are on Twitter.
• Tribe Monitor – measure presence across several different social media platforms.
• Twazzup – real-time news based on Twitter focused sentiment, top links etc.
• Tweetlevel – measures an individual’s importance on Twitter.
• Twendz -helps  see who your influencers are on Twitter.
• Twitalyzer – Twitter focused tool looking at influence, impact and engagement.

Please let us know if we have missed any and we’ll add them to the list. It’d also be great to hear any thoughts you have about these tools, particularly if you’ve tried using them to find influencers.