FreshNetworks Blog

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Forrester Consulting recently surveyed 200 US marketers about their use of social media listening and engagement. (The report, commissioned by Dell-commissioned is available to read here.)

Some of the most interesting findings include:

• Information sourced by social media is now being used by more than 70% of B2B decision-makers.
• Interestingly, there is a significant uptake of companies adopting social media tactics (97%), but there is a plenty of opportunity for business returns to be improved.
• However, strategic social media is not being used extensively. Only 8% of the surveyed marketers claimed that their listening and engagement work is tied to corporate objectives.

Forrester identified that there are clear and unique approaches to social media monitoring and listening that depend on the company’s industry:

• Utilities, banking and services are least developed, using listening for customer service and to drive brand awareness. Security and privacy concerns pose challenges to these sectors.
• Media, entertainment and leisure companies, who are further along the social media curve, focus their social media metrics on reach. Here the measurements are likely to be for the number of ‘fans’ or ‘likes’, which is
• High-tech companies are geared towards lead-generation, which Forrester claim to place them as the most advanced on the social-media curve. By using real business metrics for measurement, these companies are also the ones facing the most challenges, as their efforts increase in complexity.

The report makes the following recommendations:

• Programs which receive executive sponsorship are the most likely to succeed and deliver results.
• Integration is essential to maximise ROI. Combining the information gathered from listening with existing customer data, systems and processes will allow companies to see the “big picture” of the effects on their business.
• Employee empowerment is crucial, to maximise existing resources, training and education is needed to allow employees to listen and engage in their day-to-day work, in a consistent way.

Integration is definitely one aspect that will become more and more important. As companies gain confidence in the potential for social media to offer more than a marketing channel and embrace using it across the entire business (from customer support to internal communications), the volume of information available will certainly be a game-changer.

In a recent article titled “The people formerly known as the audience”, The Economist looked at how social media technologies have changed how we gather, filter and distribute news.

Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, has termed this change “horizontal media”.

Thanks to the rise of social media, news is no longer gathered exclusively by reporters and turned into a story. Instead, it emerges from an ecosystem in which journalists, sources, readers and viewers exchange information.

Today it’s quick and easy for anyone to share links with large numbers of people via Facebook or Twitter and without the involvement of a traditional media organisation. In other words, people can collectively act as a broadcast network, sharing information in a horizontal way rather than top down from the traditional media organisation.

With this in mind it was interesting to see The Economist’s graphic about the traffic drivers to the main US news websites (see graphic above).

Typically around 20-30% of visitors to the websites of big news organisations still come from Google’s search engine or its news site, Google News. And while the proportion of visitors referred from Facebook is smaller, it’s growing quite quickly thanks to social sharing and the “Like” button becoming more commonplace and easier to use.

Josh Nieman of Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University believes that more and more news sites will see referrals from social networks exceed those from search engines:

“This year you’ll see more and more news sites where referrals from social networks exceed those from search engines…Facebook is beginning to join Google as one of the most influential players in driving news audiences.”

Some news sites already present visitors with a list of stories recommended by their friends because they realise an endorsement from ‘someone you know’ carries extra weight. And according to Liz Heron, social media editor at The New York Times, journalists are becoming more inclined to see blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media as a valuable adjunct to traditional media – an important shift in attitude and one that journalists will need to adopt if they want to keep at the forefront of new developments.

It’s also interesting to see that Twitter is notably absent from these statistics. According to The Economist, surveys in both the US and here in the UK show that only 7-9% of the population use Twitter, compared with almost 50% for Facebook. But Twitter users are the “influencers”, argues Nic Newman, a former media executive at the BBC and a visiting fellow at the Reuters Institute at Oxford University. So the news itself is on Twitter even if the audience isn’t, given the reason why increasing numbers of journalists are cultivating both their profiles and followers on Twitter.

So while its not necessarily true that everyone is now a journalist, social media has created a culture of “horizontal media”, helping to ensure that more and more people are involved in creating and sharing news.

Making purchases directly from within Facebook (a form of social commerce) has the potential to make the social network a place where we spend not just considerable amounts of our time, but also our money.

Social Media Influence has created this infographic which reflects on the past two years of Facebook commerce (known as “F-commerce“).

From the very first purchase ($34 worth of flowers) through to movie rentals and mobile phone credit purchases, F-commerce already has a varied history, and this is just the beginning.

Some key points of interest:

• 67% of shoppers spend more when they have received a recommendation from their online community of friends.
• Just 11% of the surveyed UK customers have bought something from Facebook.
• Only 8% of retailer Facebook pages are able to accept transactions.
• Predicted value of social commerce is set to reach $30bn worldwide by 2015.

Today saw the launch of a new job search engine Adzuna, which integrates Facebook and LinkedIn contacts to help job hunters get ahead of the competition.

Adzuna works by aggregating existing job postings from sites such as Monster, TotalJobs and LinkedIn, which in itself is a great time-saver for job hunters.

Where Adzuna really shines though is by “connecting” your LinkedIn and Facebook contacts, helping you get the most from your friends and connections on both social networks.

So how does it work?

Once you have shared your contact details, the search engine pulls up any of your contacts who work at companies which have vacancies on the Adzuna database. You can send a message directly from within Adzuna to your connection, with a link to the job details, and get the ball rolling from there.

It’s quite unobtrusive and you don’t have to create a new social network, unlike on  BranchOut and BeKnown, the other job hunting and professional networking tools on the market at the moment.  In fact the only time you need to contact your friend through Adzuna is to make them aware of your intention to pursue a job once you’ve found something that you’re really interested in.

We spoke to Andrew Hunter, co-founder of Adzuna and formerly of Qype and Gumtree, to learn some more about the social integration:

Could you tell us a bit about how and why you decided to develop Adzuna Connect in the way you have?

We want to make the job search experience much, much better.  Social is a key part of that and we believe a social layer gives job seekers a distinct advantage in the market. Understanding where you can get a quick intro through a friend to an employer or even get the low down on what it’s really like to work at a company is incredibly valuable job seekers – we want to make this a seamless part of our search.

Currently Adzuna seems to be geared primarily for job hunters. Do you have plans to offer services for recruiters to help them search for candidates?

Not for the time being. In the short run, we want to focus our efforts on building the best possible search experience for job hunters. Recruiters will benefit naturally from the traffic we refer to them immediately and in the future we will provide services to allow them to showcase their vacancies to a wider audience. For now though, it’s all about the job seekers.

Currently the LinkedIn jobs are just for your first-degree connections – are there plans to have the option for broader searches?

Absolutely. Watch this space, as what you can see now is only a beta version.  We see huge value in being able to leverage your friends’ networks as well as your own to find the perfect job.

You have stated that the job ads are just the beginning, and that you intend for Adzuna to serve property and car classifieds too. How will Adzuna manage social search for these listings?

There will be obvious differences and we’re keen to only make social connections where users find the connection / information genuinely useful. There’s no point in ‘doing social’ for the sake of being cool. So to take property as an example, users looking for a house in a new area might be interested in which of their friends live in the local area and what people on twitter say about it. We hope to fold relevant social signals like this into all of our verticals to ensure the best possible search experience.

Finally, is there anything else you would like to add about Adzuna?

For those of your readers who are wondering where the name “Adzuna” comes from, “Zuna” means “abundance” in a number of African languages. We aim to be the most abundant classified ads site on the the web, and to bring you the best ads sooner than anyone else. Hence the name Ad-zuna.

Oh, and make sure you try the connect feature here – http://jobs.adzuna.co.uk/connect.html

Adzuna is currently in beta and already has over  300,000 live UK job vacancies listed. We’re looking forward to seeing how it develops.

Today I attended an event hosted by WOMMA UK which covered the ways that word of mouth is impacting search and looked at how search and social media are overlapping more and more.

Search and social are becoming increasingly intertwined, especially with the arrival of Google+, a clear indication of the search giant’s intention to further develop and improve the social nature of search results.

There are several important areas brands should consider when thinking about how word of mouth affects their performance on search engines. Here are three areas that brands should keep in mind when looking at their social and search strategies:

1. Word of mouth drives search traffic – be ready

• People that “hear” about your brand (online, face to face, or otherwise) will want to search for you, for convenience, for education and for learning about new opinions. This means you need to cater for all the various different ways people will search for your brand and cover all the possibilities that  misspellings or misperceptions may cause.
• “Reviews” is a very popular search term, so hosting these on your own site is a great way to generate authenticity and long-tail search terms.

2. Social and your online reputation

• Consider the implications for reputation management. Is “scam” a prominent result on the suggestions for your brand in Google? Nobody wants to see that, but instead of covering it up, ask yourself why this is such a dominant sentiment. Maybe there is a miscommunication and customers are not fully informed as to what your provide? Treat this as an opportunity to intercede and communicate.
• You can be proactive by using third party sites such as Yahoo! Answers, which generally ranks well and gives you a neutral platform to respond to negative sentiment.

3. Conversions and social media

• Retailers – price is no longer a USP. Your customers will be seeking deep content, such as user reviews and friend’s recommendations. It is important for users to trust your site, or they will go elsewhere to research and/or purchase.
• Remember that peoples’ decision making can be rational, but is predominantly emotional. Having social recommendations appear in search results and on page will appease the latter.