Mediaboss Marketing

The social media landscape changes quickly. A new infographic from CJG Digital Marketing provides some context for the changes and challenges we can expect to see this summer. From the improvement of chat bots to continued growth in influencer marketing, here are the eight trends many BuzzPlant clients will be affected by in the months ahead

YouTube is still top dog when it comes to housing video content. However, a slew of live video products from Facebook, Twitter (Periscope), and Instagram are changing the entire nature of video creation and sharing. Brands can now connect with their audiences in real time from any location. If you arent using Facebook Live, consider jumping in with these best practices.

Bots allow brands to hold conversations with their customers without a human, that is. While chatbots werent quite there when Facebook first launched them, the tech is getting better and becoming more widely adopted. We expect many high-traffic Facebook Pages to start using these.

Webcast, April 13th: Accelerated Startup - Technologies of the 3rd Industrial Revolution and How to Beat Silicon Valley

This one is big especially after Facebook just launched Facebook Stories, a new product that allows photos and videos to disappear after 24 hours -la-Snapchat-and-Instagram. Its only a matter of time until the feature rolls out to Facebook Pages, too.

Facebook bought WhatsApp, Instagram and Oculus Rift. Twitter acquired Periscope. Microsoft spent $27 billion on LinkedIn. Whats next? And how will mergers affect the platforms we use?

Its getting harder and harder to win organic traffic on social. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all use algorithms to determine what audiences see. This means two things are necessary for success. One, your content has to be excellent to get exposure. Two, you will almost certainly have to pay-to-play.

Facebook Live is quick on Snapchats heels, experimenting with lenses, masks and other AR components. Its time to start thinking of your phones camera more as a sensory input device than a photo camera, as AR (which relies on the camera) is built into an increasingly large number of products.

As Facebooks ad targeting options become more sophisticated, users expect content that speaks more directly to their needs and interests. Content will become more personalized in the months ahead. Learn about the different types of data that can help you with this.

84% of marketers say theyre looking forward to using at least one influencer marketing campaign within the next year. Why? Content creators already have audiences and trust. Partnering with them can be an affordable and effective way for a brand to reach its audience.

For more, check out the full infographic below.

Bob Hutchins (Franklin, TN) runs Buzzplant (www.buzzplant.com), A 12+ year old Internet marketing agency targeting the faith/family market. His team was an integral part of the online campaign for Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, The Chronicles of Narnia, Soul Surfer, and many other movies, books, music releases, and Viewfullprofile

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8 Trends In Social Marketing Affecting Us This Summer [Infographic] - Business 2 Community

The report from Immediate Future (IF), 'What Has Social Media Ever Done for Us?', found that more than half (58%) of B2B marketers describe their ability to measure social media between 'average' and 'very poor'.

According to Immediate Future CEO, Katy Howell, the report reveals "a widening gap between the marketers that have mastered social measurement and are impacting the bottom line, and those B2B brands that are struggling with some of the basic metrics".

Most marketers (82%) said they were comfortable tracking website traffic data resulting from social marketing, and 65% said the same of content downloads. However, the struggles begin when tracking softer metrics such as email opens and website conversions. Yet, it is these metrics that are needed in the boardroom.

More than two-thirds (67%) of respondents are upbeat about the future and confident that their ability to measure social will improve in the next two years. Half plan to increase budgets and resources within the next year.

"The confusion and disconnect in measuring social media makes it a challenge to prove a case for further investment," added Howell. "But it appears marketers are optimistic and committed to social media regardless, as they have plans to invest more and get better at identifying the metrics that prove business value."

Tags: campaign measurement, metrics, research, social media, UK

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Report reveals widening gap in marketers' social media ... - BizReport - BizReport

Watching the presidents daily tweets, we must see that social media continue to evolve. Theres this guy named Donald Trump who, if you didnt know what Twitter was, you do now, social marketer Jim Sterne says.

Sterne wrote Social Media Metrics: How to Measure and Optimize Your Marketing Investment in 2010 opening the book with 100 Ways to Measure Social Media (p. xx). Weve moved beyond measuring buzz, as social media managers focus on goals, strategies and tactics.

Brand marketing communication may be more sophisticated, but Sterne told my Social Media Measurement and Management students that there remains no good way to separate human from chat bot followers, although we can analyze growth and find meaning in context, emphasis and sentiment. So, the analysis part is always necessary, and measurement is a piece that you use to get some raw material.

Jeremy Harris Lipschultz

Statistical analysis may help social media analysis develop a predictive social marketing mix model that focuses on outcomes and business value. Sternes eMetrics Summit this summer is offered at a discounted rate for educators, and I will be in Chicago with funding from my universitys Center for Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Franchising.

An effective social media engagement strategy moves beyond reach and instead focuses on conversation and relationships. Social media real-time listening helps brands to move in the direction of audience-centered communication talking about what they are talking about, Sterne says. Planning, then, is about meeting customers where they are, and reflecting their words.

Sterne says trusted brand representation, for example, distinguishes between exploitive and meaningful hashtags, and it requires planning and organization before events happen.

Even for small non-profit organizations with a Facebook page and a website, specific tactics depend upon, what are you trying to do with it, Sterne says. Knowing the answer should drive a plan that helps guide measurement goals.

For every brand, there is a baseline conversation, and the easiest place to begin is with social media customer service and support, Sterne says. Let them know that you are available, and make it somebodys responsibility to respond. From there, a brand may work on outbound promotion. Non-profits have a need to cultivate donor relationships through social media channels. The key is to learn just enough to engage with them in a personal way, maybe post a fun picture that those people will share with their friends... thats the power of social.

Electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) can be used to raise awareness and spark social media engagement that move people toward desired actions. This may begin with earned and owned media channels that eventually inform an organization how to leverage limited resources for paid and promoted social media posts.

Too often, organizations pay for advertising without knowing the most effective ways to reach and engage brand fans.

Sterne, like a lot of social marketers, suggests photographs, gif animation and video as effective tactics once an organization locates its target audience and social media channels. While marketing ultimately requires great content, it may fall flat with the wrong audience on the wrong channel.

Short, digestible social media content tends to be viewed and shared more often than long-form media. In the competition for marketplace attention, content tone matters, Sterne says. Public relations (PR) may try to push their tone on the audience by crafting messages: its disingenuous, it is hard work, it is not necessarily valuable, Sterne argues. The real challenge is not can I get you to take on my tone, but can I take on a tone thats appealing across the board, and its not corporate speak.

Were just beginning to understand the impact of big data on social media marketing. Cambridge Analytica, for example, has claimed that its highly personal social media data helped the Trump campaign target malleable voters in key electoral states.

Sterne places an orange flag on the claims because social media marketers need more research on the effectiveness of artificial intelligence (AI) in the process. In the long run, Sterne believes we all will have our own AI assistant negotiating with brands about what information to send, and even paying consumers to receive desired content.

Consumer empowerment through personal filtering may take the edge off of data privacy concerns. It is clear that micro targeting based upon consumer needs and wants is the future of personal social media management communication.

Pre-order Social Media Communication: Concepts, Practices, Data, Law and Ethics (2018).

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Social Media Marketing: It's Personal | The Huffington Post - Huffington Post

It was going to be a glorious age. A pristine age. An age without advertising. Social media was going to kill everything from TV commercials to display advertisements. People were going to 'engage' and have 'conversations' with brands instead.

Too bad it was completely wrong.

Someone might want to tell that to Adidas chief executive Kasper Rorsted, who recently suggested that the company is dropping television ads in favour of pursuing digital "engagement".

Who do people follow on social media?

According to Socialbakers, here are the top US-based Facebook pages:

Count the brands.

The top UK-based Facebook pages:

Count the brands.

According to Twitaholic, here are the top Twitter accounts in the United States based on the number of followers specifically there:

Count the brands.

The top Twitter accounts in the United Kingdom based on the number of followers specifically there:

Who do people follow on social media? Celebrities, sports teams, politicians and political causes, and news sources. Not brands. For most companies, only a small percentage of current and potential customers will want to follow them on social media.

With whom do people interact on social media?

Here are two mental exercises. First, go and look at your past 20 actions on your personal Facebook and Twitter accounts. Better still, look at 50 or 100. What percentage involved the pages of brands, and what percentage involved friends, family members, that person you secretly like and other flesh-and-blood human beings?

Second, imagine yourself entering a supermarket. Ask random people normal people, not marketers if they want to have a relationship with any of the products in their shopping carts. Theyll probably punch you in the face for being a pervert. (Due credit: Ad Contrarian Bob Hoffmans Refrigerator Test was the inspiration for this example.)

People use social media to catch up on the news, connect with friends and family and get updates on the things with which they have intense, personal connections such as their favorite celebrities and sports teams. The last thing that they think about is interacting with brands.

What is the reach and engagement rate of social media?

As of February 2016, the average organic post by a Facebook page is seen by only 11% of the companys followers. According to a late 2015 Forrester report, only 0.22% of the Facebook followers of major brands engage with organic company posts. In other words, only 1 out of every 455 followers will see as well as 'engage' with an organic post by a major brands Facebook page.

(I put engage in quotes because no one really knows the value of online 'engagement'. If I am watching the latest episode of Westworld, then my undivided attention is on the programme. I am truly engaged. But if I scroll through my Facebook news feed and like random posts that I will forget seconds later, what is the real value of each 'engagement'?)

Remember: Those organic reach and engagement numbers also take into account only the small number of consumers who have already chosen to follow a brand. The numbers are even lower in the context of the entire market.

In the United Kingdom, one has to go to number 30 in Socialbakers' list of the Facebook pages with the most followers in the UK to reach the first brand: Coca-Cola.

While a Coca-Cola Great Britain spokesperson would not divulge the number of Britons who regularly drink Coke specifically, the official told me over email that 46 million people in the UK have a soft drink every day. Coca-Cola has been estimated to have a 50% market share in the global soft-drink market, so I will use that percentage in the following calculations

A similar calculation found that Oreos famous Super Bowl tweet reached less than one percent of that products market.

The common response to these points is that it is valuable to target people who have actively chosen to follow a brand because they 'love' it. But most of the revenue of many brands comes from light, occasional users. I buy a small bottle of Coca-Cola Zero every day or two just like countless other people but Im not going to follow the companys Facebook page. I want no more engagement than simply to buy a bottle at the local kiosk every so often.

Seven years ago, Matt Dixon and Lara Ponomareff wrote almost exactly that in a Harvard Business Review article on the rise of self-service aptly entitled 'Why Your Customers Dont Want to Talk to You':

Maybe customers are shifting toward self service because they dont want a relationship with companies. While this secular trend could be explained away as just a change in consumers channel preferences, skeptics might argue that customers never wanted the kind of relationship that companies have always hoped for, and that self service now allows customers the 'out' theyve been looking for all along.

How social media can actually be helpful

Social media will never 'create relationships' between brands and consumers. But there is another problem that is worse than marketers falling for that grand delusion. Bad marketers have been spamming the world with crap marketing.

Digital marketers often talk about social networks in the context of the hack-infested world of 'inbound marketing' in which people do whatever it takes such as putting clickbait headlines on useless pieces of garbage 'content' to maximise direct response social shares and website clicks, no matter what the long-term brand damage will be inflicted.

But social media has the potential to be so much more if only marketers would think about it in the correct way.

People are never going to 'organically engage' with most brands. The solution is simply to treat social media platforms merely as new, additional channels over which marketers can choose to do traditional marketing activities. After all, no one ever said 'television marketing' or 'print marketing', so no one should say 'social media marketing'. Its not a 'thing'. One does not 'do social media'.

Its time to fix the promotion mix by recognising and then viewing social platforms for what they really are additional mediums that can be used in brand advertising, direct response marketing, public relations, personal selling and sales promotions.

Using social media in the promotion mix

Brand advertising

Remember 'Back to the Future Day' in 2015? Lexus released an ad campaign on Facebook that featured its prototype hoverboard a working hoverboard! and received 14m views. That is not 'social media marketing' it is doing brand advertising over social media channels.

Direct marketing

You know those ads that you see in on almost all social media networks those 'suggested posts', sign-up forms, product advertisements and 'click to learn more' calls to action? That is not 'social media marketing' it is doing direct-response marketing over social media channels.

Sales promotion

Pizza Hut Israel is one of the few brands that I do follow on Facebook but only for the coupon that I see in my news feed every week. Ill usually order Pizza Hut once every weekend. (I have a problem.) That is not 'social media marketing' it is doing sales promotions over social media channels.

Personal selling

Salespeople love the telephone. But many of those conversations start elsewhere and sometimes they begin on social media. That communication is not 'social media marketing' it is doing personal selling over social media channels. (Note that I am talking about a flesh-and-blood person on social media. See the next point.)

Public relations

People hate when brands 'insert themselves into conversations' on social media. But people do talk to the real people who work for brands. Marketers can use social media when doing media relations, community relations and other PR work. That is not 'social media marketing' it is doing public relations over social media channels.

In the future, there will be no 'social media jobs'

Traditional marketers often approach strategies in this manner:

1. Determine and prioritise the different activities within the promotion mix mentioned above based on the companys goals and objectives.

2. Research the targeted audience segments and develop a specific media mix of channels over which to execute the campaigns.

Today, however, too many (digital-first or digital-only) marketers jump to 'social media' or even to specific platforms such as Facebook or Twitter without even bothering to determine if those channels should be used. If you ask, What are we doing on social media? before you even ask, Should we be on social media? then youve got a problem.

Its called being channel-neutral. Anyone who says that a specific marketing channel is always important is selling something.

And thats why there will be no 'social media jobs' in five years. Advertisers will do advertising over social media. Community relations people will do community relations over social media such as when they host Twitter chats. Publicists will do publicity campaigns over social media channels. Customer service representatives will do customer support over social media.

We need to separate marketing activities from marketing channels. Activities are done over channels. In five years, people will integrate social media channels into their existing activities at work just as print advertisers later had to learn how to do advertising over television.

Why? Imagine that a PR team wants to grow a community on Twitter. Which is easier to do:

Add it up, it all spells #duh.

Want proof that so-called 'social media marketing' will disappear? Earlier this year, MediaPost named BBDO as the 'social media agency of the year' for 2016. After you parse the overly complex language of the announcement as Hoffman noted at the time it turns out that the agency won for simply running ad campaigns on Facebook.

MediaPost summarised with this statement: The solution: Utilise Facebook not as a social network, but a media channel.

In other words, an agency won a 'social media agency award' for simply doing advertising over that particular channel. The company got applause for treating a social media platform just like how a brand would consider television.

Still think that 'social media marketing' is a separate and distinctive 'thing' unto itself?

The Promotion Fix is a new, exclusive biweekly column for The Drum contributed by Samuel Scott, director of marketing and communications for AI-powered log analysis software platform Logz.io and a global marketing speaker on integrated traditional and digital marketing. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Scott is based out of Tel Aviv, Israel.

Continued here:
'Social media marketing' is completely useless but it could be a lot better - The Drum

April 05, 2017 10:49 ET | Source: Sysomos

Brands and Agencies can Search, Discover, Listen, Publish, Engage and Analyze across earned, owned and paid social media

RALEIGH, NC--(Marketwired - Apr 5, 2017) - Leading social marketing software company Sysomos today announced the industry's most comprehensive and flexible social marketing and analytics platform that not only unifies all social management functions and capabilities, but also gets smarter as it shares content and insights across all Sysomos applications. The Sysomos Platform provides more prescriptive insights for marketers by consolidating and cross-informing campaign initiatives.

Social media spending as a percentage of the overall marketing budget has tripled in recent years, paving the way for the social analytics market to grow to $5.4 billion by 2020, representing a 27.6 percent compound annual growth rate. However, the industry has struggled to unify social media marketing and analytics for building campaigns. Customers have wrestled with disparate data silos, service that doesn't meet their needs and high costs of licensing multiple tools.

By intelligently linking applications to Search, Discover, Listen, Publish, Engage and Analyze on social media, the Sysomos Platform now gives marketers access to all the paid, owned and earned data needed to create strategic campaigns, take action in real time and measure those actions in one upgraded user interface. Furthermore, with role-based customization, users can design their own workspaces to access the insights that matter most to them.

"Identifying insights, creating campaigns and measuring the effectiveness of those efforts -- all with increasingly strained resources -- have become challenging for marketers," said Peter Heffring, CEO of Sysomos. "We built the Sysomos Platform to meet these challenges head on, by providing a single technology platform that guides marketers to the exact insights needed to increase commercial opportunities for our customers."

The Sysomos Platform also is one of the first to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) that discovers and automates unseen insights, showing marketers how to instantly take intelligent action. The algorithms uncover correlations, anomalies and associations by using machine learning to process trillions of data points every second. With the Sysomos Platform now integrating and aggregating millions of digital data streams, the company plans to accelerate development of more advanced AI for the social analytics industry.

In addition to the Platform's ability to instinctively inform and share data insights across applications, Sysomos -- which counts brands like Mondelez, Coca-Cola, Marriott and Yamaha among its customers -- distinguishes itself from the competition with unique strengths, including:

Apply listening insights to paid, owned and earned content within a single workflow: The Sysomos Platform integrates listening with publishing and engagement capabilities, allowing users to discover trends in real time and curate content that can be applied immediately to cross-channel campaigns. For instance, if a company discovers its brand virally trending on Instagram, it can engage with users and leverage their content all within the same platform.

Improve the effectiveness of paid media campaigns: Sysomos can measure campaign efficiency as well as evaluate the earned media impact within the same platform. Using Sysomos' market-leading listening and search technologies, marketers can assess the effectiveness of their ad messaging based on the text and visual content their audiences share, and whether it had an impact on the overall conversation for the brand.

"Having access to all of the tools that Sysomos has to offer under this new integrated platform will deliver valuable insights for building accurate customer profiles," said Fabiola Romero of Yamaha Motor Corporation. "The platform succinctly marries data, allowing us to understand and act upon essential information when timing is of the essence."

While the complete Sysomos Platform encompasses all the Search, Discover, Listen, Publish, Engage and Analyze applications, companies that have one of the applications easily can activate the others. The Sysomos applications previously were named Map, Gaze (acquired in 2015), Heartbeat and Expion (acquired in 2015); now Map is part of Search, Gaze is part of Discover, Heartbeat is part of Listen, and Expion is part of Publish, Engage and Analyze.

About Sysomos Sysomos is the global leader in social marketing and analytics empowering brands and agencies to turn data-driven insights into actionable customer engagement opportunities. Our unified, insights-driven social platform gives marketers the easiest way to Search, Discover, Listen, Publish, Engage and Analyze at scale across earned, owned and paid media. Sysomos serves more than 1,200 customers including 80% of the world's top agencies and global brands. The company has offices around the world including Toronto, Raleigh, New York, San Francisco, London, Singapore and China. For more information, visit sysomos.com or connect with us at @sysomos.

Alexandra Vaughn avaughn@wcgworld.com 512-298-1166

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