Experian and Hitwise have published a report on social networking entitled The Impact of Social Networking in the UK. I attended my first webinar (woooo) to listen to Robin Goad and Tony Mooney talk about their findings. These are my notes…
The social networking landscape
Some examples of social network campaigns and activity, demonstrating the power and influence they are starting to gain.
The Primark Appreciation Society
This is a very successful Facebook group (essentially a social network within a social network) which was started by a ‘normal’ girl. Due to its success, Primark have stated that they are not going to be creating their own official group, because they don’t think it would be as popular as the existing user-generated one.
It is interesting to note, that the Primark group is not entirely for ‘appreciation’ and does feature negative comments, too. Perhaps this is why the group is so popular – the sense that it is not being controlled top-down appeals to users. Negative comments are not necessarily all bad for brands in this context, demonstrating different spin to make the group seem more ‘grass-roots’.
Cadbury’s Wispa
Cadburys decided to relaunch their Wispa brand, discontinued in 2003, following campaigns across a number of social networking sites e.g. Facebook’s ‘Bring Back Wispa’ group. Followed up by clever 80s nostalgia marketing campaign.
“This is the first time that the power of the internet played such an intrinsic role in the return of a Cadbury brand.” – Tony Bilsborough, spokesman for Cadbury, quoted on Brand Republic.
HSBC’s graduate accounts
Unlike the Primark Appreciation Society, the biggest HSBC group on Facebook was a forum for students to complain about the bank and its decision to scrap interest-free overdrafts for graduates. It generated lots of bad publicity and eventually led to the bank reversing their decision.
“We are a service-oriented organisation and we have to listen to our customers – that is a priority for us. It’s a good example of where a medium like Facebook has enabled customers to tell us something they feel strongly about.” – HSBC spokesman, Education Guardian.
Scrabulous
The unlicensed Facebook Scrabble application, Scrabulous, proved to be one of the site’s most popular applications, attracting over 500,000 daily users. Hasbo and Mattel have recently sued the creators over copyright infringement, and want the application taken off of Facebook.
In response to this, the Save Scrabulous Facebook group now has almost 50,000 members in a campaign to keep the application on the site.
Hasbro and Mattell may win on legal grounds, but the battle might be lost as the image is one of large corporations attacking small entrepreneurs. Scrabulous is now seen as the default online version of the board game. Twice as many people go to Scrabulous after performing a search in Google as they do to official Scrabble.
Successful niche social networks
As well as Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, there are also examples of very successful niche social networks emerging. Screwfix has a very successful online DIY community, with over 600,000 posting in its forums, pushing it up to the second most visited online DIY site.
Saga Zone is also worth mentioning, the online community for the over 50s
The Facebook Poppy Appeal
This is an example of a very successful ‘top-down’ approach to marketing on social networks. The British Legion created a poppy application which users could add to their profile for Armistice Day. It resulted in a big increase in traffic and new visitors to their Poppy microsite, and in turn received lots of traffic from the microsite to the main site. The Facebook Poppy application also attracted younger users to a typically ‘untrendy’ campaign.
Social media marketing in 2008
Tony Moody discussed the key factors businesses need to think about when planning their social media marketing campaigns. One of the key points he made was that social media should not been seen as another box to tick (“I’ve got a page on Facebook, therefore my social media marketing is complete”), and marketers need to focus on targeted, relevant messages rather than blanket, one-to-many advertising. Marketing needs to be timely and use people’s specific interests to create useful messages. But marketers also need to strike the balance between providing relevant content and respecting consumer’s privacy (Goad and Moody suggest that the existing use of data policies is inadequate).
How can companies use data to target consumers?
- Personalisation – configure the offer / communication to use personal data within the message
- Targeting – the consumer does not see their personal data beamed back at them, but the content of the communication is relevant to their interests
Often the best way to offer people relevant and timely communications is to go down a targeting route and tailor, personalise and configure, which will reduce junk and irrelevancy. Marketers need to also respect consumers’ personal data whilst ensuring relevancy, otherwise they will become critical.
“It’s popups all over again”
“Dumb and simplistic fashion”
“If you don’t use it wisely, don’t be surprised if your customers rebel against you”
The report suggested the three areas of focus for 2008 should be:
- Increased social media diversification
- The emergence of ‘super’ brand advocates
- Using a value scorecard to direct social media spend
Increased social media diversification
“84% of social network traffic is spread over just three sites – Facebook, Bebo and MySpace”
As well as the growth of the major players, we’ll also see the emergence of specialist social networks offering users a higher degree of relevance and exclusivity. Both niche and mainstream social networks look set to grow, however the growth of niche networks does not necessarily mean the decline of mainstream. Social networks do not exist in a vacuum, and cannot guarantee user loyalty.
Now that we are entering the second wave of social networks it will be interesting to see if the current top mainstream sites maintain their popularity, or how much will users be willing to switch or create multiple profiles across multiple networks. Tony described the situation we saw with MySpace and Facebook, and the network sigmoid curves which can easily occur.
The emergence of ‘super’ brand advocates
The examples of the Wispa and HSBC campaigns above well demonstrate how social networks are changing the ways consumer power can influence brands and businesses.
Opinion formers will start to become very powerful, having both positive and negative impacts on brands. Super-advocates will be great for successful viral brand marketing, but there are risks and even the potential for militancy e.g. www.fuh2.com
Companies need to ask themselves what they are doing about their super-advocates. How are they encouraging them? How are they finding and keeping track of them? Companies need to recognise the seriousness of super-advocates and be aware of how powerful their opinions can be. Care must be taken with these relationships because if an influential advocate turns, it could have a huge effect on the brand overnight. Super-advocates may get very demanding however, as they begin to realise how powerful their own opinions are!
So the speed of reaction is also very important, and marketers should be adopting realtime marketing strategies. They need to be prepared for any online backlash, and have a response or strategy in place, which could involve a reconfiguration of processes in order to react quickly. Tony puts forward the need for an executive mindset change, as criticism against brands is usually resolved by sending in the PR people – this needs to change. Mature organisations should allow for the ebb and flow, tolerating manageable levels of online criticism in order to appear transparent.
Using a value scorecard to direct social media spend
Measurement will become complicated. Marketers will need to establish ways to measure the effectiveness of all online marketing including social networks, and ensure that learning ensure subsequent activity. Goad and Mooney propose an online scorecard, which cuts through the hype to focus on end to end purchasing behaviour e.g. clicks don’t mean anything – it’s all about the money!
Businesses will also need to find ways and means to find out how their reputation is faring online, in order for the super-advocacy programme mentioned above to work. Marketers need to know how well their super-advocates are performing to inform them of the need to improve relationships.
This all runs in complete parallel to everything I’ve been reading recently about email marketing targeting and relevant advertisements.
