As a social media agency, FreshNetworks aims to bring you the best posts in social media, online communities, marketing and customer engagement online. In case you missed them, find below our top five posts in July.

1. Social media monitoring review 2010 – download the final report

Over the first few months of 2010 we conducted an in-depth review of the leading social media monitoring tools in conjunction with our sister company, FreshMinds Research. We compared how Alterian, Brandwatch, Biz360, Neilsen Buzzmetrics, Radian6, Scoutlabs and Sysomos performed when monitoring conversations about global coffee brand Starbucks, analysing over 19,000 online conversations.

Many thousands of you have already read our posts about the review and downloaded the final whitepaper. If you haven’t yet, you can find a more detailed analysis of all these tools and more in our final report – Turning Conversations into Insights: a Comparison of Social Media Monitoring Tools.

2. 93% of the world is not on Facebook

In June, Facebook announced that it had reached 500 million users. This number is incredible, and perhaps even more impressive is the rate at which the social network is growing. Just five months ago they had 400 million users. But whatever we might think and however impressive these numbers are, Facebook is not an all-encompassing social media tool. It does not reach everybody and it is not always right for us to use. 500m is a large number but is only a small proportion of the online population. And if you take the whole global population (as we did more to make a point than for the accuracy of this statistic), 93% of the world is not on Facebook.

What does this mean? Well Facebook is often not the right place for brands to play – just because the numbers seem big doesn’t mean it is the most suited to help your social media strategy.

3. Social media does not just take place online

One of the biggest dangers with social media is to assume that it is only exists online. We see this in the way some brands approach social media – developing a social media strategy that is focused on the tools they are going to use rather than the business aims they are going to contribute to. We also see this in the way some brands allocate budgets for their social media work – associating it with their ecommerce or digital spend can mean that they need to work harder to make sure that social media efforts integrate with what is happening offline.

In truth, the rise of social media for marketing is less about technology and more about brands realising the benefits of closer engagement with customers and others. Social media tools provide a great way to do this but always remember to think how you can get this engagement offline too.

4. Why a museum is the UK’s top brand on Twitter

The Famecount dataset is, like much data, not perfect but it does highlight some surprises that we can all learn from. The brand it has as the top Twitter brand in the UK is one such surprise. Rather than the big FMCG, fashion and media firms they include in their brands ranking, the top UK brand on Twitter for them is a museum, @Tate.

There are some structural reasons why the Tate will attract followers. Twitter is great for events and experiences and a museum has lots of these. But the success and popularity of the Tate is about much more than this. It’s thanks to the way they use Twitter. In this post we look at the three simple characteristics of the way the Tate uses Twitter that all brands can learn from, and that contribute to their success.

5. Developing a European social media strategy

An issue for many brands who are developing a social media strategy is how they translate what they do in one country into other markets in which they operate. As a European social media agency, we are very used to helping clients take a US or UK strategy and then roll this out across the rest of Europe. And in doing this we have looked at organisations who have done this well. And those who have done it badly. The usual mistake is to assume that what works in one country can be taken and implemented in another country with no changes. More often than not this is not the case.

In this video post, Matt Rhodes talks about how to approach developing a European social media strategy and why what works in one country might not work in others.

Social Media Hub and Spoke

We’ve always had strong views about the best ways for companies to get value from social media.

We’ve battled against the consensus view: only fish where the fish are swimming. We’ve campaigned for recognition that people operate in different modes in different social spaces (online communities vs social networks) and as a result have always pushed the concept of an integrated social media Hub-and-Spoke model.

That’s why I was delighted to read Jeremiah Owyang’s latest post and see his excellent slide show about integrating social tools within your website.

Enjoy:

In online communities it is the content that matters most. People talk to and with each other not because they know each other or are already connected. Rather, because they share a similar interest, question, concern, ambition, query, challenge or other issue. People engage with each other on content and not on connections. You can meet and share ideas with strangers because you are both interested in the subject.

I love stories and storytelling, and in this environment they are all important. From the short stories on Twitter and other micro blogs, to the stories you share with people on message boards or the longer stories you might post on a blog or in a discussion. Social media is about stories that people share with each other.

This great presentation from Jenni Lloyd at NixonMcInnes highlights the importance of storytelling and of the storyteller in social media. Showing the role that stories play in the discussions that happen in social media and why they are critical to any brand to understand and to harness if they want to make the most of what social media has to offer them.

We’ve been extolling the virtues of word-of-mouth marketing over big-budget advertising for some time now, and when a firm of consultants like McKinsey start doing the same thing it really feels like our message is hitting home.

A recent article in McKinsey Quarterly looked at the impact of word-of-mouth-marketing for businesses and how companies can take better advantage of buzz.

The article shows how many marketers are spending millions of dollars on elaborate advertising campaigns when often what’s really needed to help influence consumers is a  “word-of-mouth recommendation from a trusted source” which “cuts through the noise” of traditional marketing methods.

This is nothing new to us here at FreshNetworks. We’ve always said that online communities and social networks amplify word-of-mouth and that the right message can resonate and expand, affecting brand perceptions and increasing sales. But what is interesting is the way the article looks at at the impact of word-of-mouth marketing – or, what McKinsey term, “word-of-mouth equity”.

Word-of-mouth equity is a brand’s power to generate messages that influence the consumer’s decision to purchase. In essence, this is the average sales impact of a brand message multiplied by the number of word-of-mouth messages.

When assessing the impact of word-of-mouth marketing the following factors need to be taken into account:

1. What’s being said

In order to influence consumer decisions a successful word-of-mouth message should address important products or service features. (While marketers tend to build campaigns around emotional positioning, consumers actually tend to talk—and generate buzz—about functional messages).

2. The identity of the person who sends the message

The word-of-mouth receiver must trust the sender and believe that they really know the product or service in question. Otherwise that message will not trusted or spread any further.

3. The environment where the message is circulated.

Messages passed within tight, trusted networks have less reach but a greater impact than those circulated through dispersed communities (Think about the difference in hearing an opinion from someone you know and trust, to someone you’ve just met on the street), so there’s usually a high correlation between people whose opinions are trusted and the members of networks that are most valued.

If businesses take these key driving forces into account when pursuing excellence in word-of-mouth marketing, the potential benefits are huge. Yet many marketers avoid actively using word-of-mouth as it’s seen as an immature and somewhat unsophisticated approach to marketing.

As a starting point, marketers should look at word-of-mouth through social media. Social media monitoring can be used to track how the message is being spread online as well as the impact it is having on your brand or business. Marketers should also engage in social networks and online communities where they can help guide and stimulate word-of-mouth by interacting with customers and people who are interested in their business or services.  Any negativity or derogatory comments can be addressed and managed in an appropriate and timely manner and, more importantly, any good comments and recommendations will be broadcast to the entire online universe. Now that’s really spreading the word.

The McKinsey article is our Required Reading at FreshNetworks this week, and you can read the full article online.

YouTube is five. It was on April 23rd 2005 that the first video was posted on YouTube. Now it has become a ubiquitous social media tool allowing people to share videos with each other, to comment on them and to sort and rate videos they enjoy. But why would people upload videos in the first place and what sort of videos do they upload. As YouTube turns five it is worth reexamining the nature of YouTube videos and the anthropology that is going on here.

Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University and head of the Digital Ethnography Working Group, presents a great view of YouTube from an anthropological perspective. From exploring the fact that more content has been added to YouTube in the past six months than in a lifetime of network TV in the US, through a catagorisation of YouTube videos, this is a really informative video. It’s long (just shy of an hour) but I think time spent watching this is time well spent. Michael is a captivating speaker and manages to express things we think we know in different ways. From social media to online communities and social networks; you’ll learn something new and understand better why people are motivated to take part and contribute online.