Why is business so hesitant to enter social media and social network spaces (SMN) despite the strong encouragement of consumers? Consumers love SMN. Facebook has grown to the size of a large country and China now hosts more social network profiles than North American and Europe combined. Consumers have clearly voiced for some time that they want business to be part of this space.

Mike Sachoff wrote in WebProNews


Not only do consumers want brands to be active participants in this SMN but they, in repeated surveys, have stated that they have greater confidence in brand messages received in SMN then any other source than family and friends. Given this it becomes particularly odd that business still shows such reluctance.

Thomas Crampton

So what is it that is keeping business away from SMN? Well there are a number of reasons but the one that seems to come up most frequent is "we are afraid of what people will say about us". Ms. Ochman recently wrote what she found to be the

BL Ochman, reposted in socialmediatoday, wrote


The reaction of business to avoid SMN has both logic and contradiction in it. The logic would suggest that by putting yourself in SMN then you open yourself up to comment. This only stands to reason. However, the contradiction is that consumers will and are discussing brands in SMN regardless of whether business is there or not.

If you consider the old adage "the opposite of love is not hate it is indifference" then the only thing worse than having consumers saying bad things about your brand is having them saying nothing at all.

My personal belief, after having talked to many clients about this concern of theirs, is that it is not based on fear but denial and lack of understanding. I say denial because there is the illusion that if business sticks to traditional marketing strategies then somehow they will go unnoticed in SMN. This is not the case at all. The only result of this is that brands miss the opportunity to know what is being said of them and to actively choose how to respond. So it begs the question for business; what would be considered worse? To find out consumers are speaking ill of your brand or that they are saying nothing at all?

Much success,

Doug

LG had just launched a massive Asia and Europe wide social media campaign. It appears from the postings that it is about recovering leaked technology before the launch of their new product the LG BL 40. But it looks a lot like a slick attention getting launch campaign. US10,000 dollars to recover a lost phone? Seems pretty steep.

Example of postings seen:

“Leaked, the newest technology threaten competitors”I’m sure the phone that LG is looking for is embedded with the latest technology. In truth, mobile manufacturers first purchase the competitors’ new handsets to examine and analyze. On the LG’s timeline, this technology must be related to the new Chocolate phone. The new Chocolate phone is the successor of the original Chocolate sold over 21 million globally. Accordingly, the new Chocolate must have jaw-dropping features.We need to keep our eyes on what the media states. What do you think?

And here is a look at the phone in question:

Social media has not been around for very long. Social networks and social media found their birth in the West with the likes of Friendster and YouTube. But it appears pretty clear that it is in the East that social media will grow up. Depending on which study you quote the numbers range from staggering to unbelieveable on how fast Asia is adopting social media.

70% of Chinese internet users have a social network profile


Hong Kong and Singapore have more registered users on Facebook per capita than the U.S.!

If all of these consumers are online where is business? Back in April I wrote an optimistic blog about how business would follow the rush of consumers to social media. However, a half year later we are still waiting for business to join the party. Prosperity Research has helped many brands make the smooth transition to social media but many are still cautious to move forward. But as business starts to adapt to the new model of social media marketing I am hopeful they will take on board the new rules that apply. After all what makes social media "social" is about people talking to people.

Much success,

Doug

There is a lot of discussion going about these days about the difference and effectiveness of broadcast and engagement styles of marketing.

Broadcast is the bastion of old school marketing. We still see it used extensively in the new "social media" arena primarily because it is less expensive, familiar and to some degree effective. However, if social media has a mantra at all, it is "engagement".

Engagement is the "social" part of social media. Where two individual (even if one individual is a multinational) can come together and converse. This theoretically creates a more powerful bond between consumer and brand which then compels (or propels) the consumer into spreading the brand's joy far and wide with no further motivation than the satisfaction of "engagement".

Well is there any truth to this? I for one sure hope there is. I have never been a fan of advertising and I am one of the biggest proponents of social media.

We conducted an 8 week longitudinal study testing the effectiveness of broadcast vs engagement marketing techniques in forums and on Twitter. This is an "early days" study, and so the experimental design is rough. Below describes the Forum study, the Twitter analysis will be presented at another time.

Over an 8 week period approximately 200 forum entries were posted to over 150 different English language forum sites each week. For the first 5 weeks a broadcast technique was used. On the 5th week through the 8th an engagement technique was introduced. There was no activity during the 6th week due to client review. The broadcast technique is described as:

• Threads were created using statements (not questions)
  
• Forum entries were written as a product message without intent to initiate a conversation or get opinion. There purpose was to deliver an informational message.
  

The engagement technique is described as:

• Threads were created as questions so as to elicit a response
• Forum entries were written in a conversational manner. Not all entries contained brand messages
• Replies to comments from readers were followed up and brand messages were included when appropriate
• The brand message was included at least once in all conversations
  

Results:

During the first 4 weeks of pure broadcast the view rate remained low in relation to total number of posts. What is most telling is that during this period there were no comments left on any of the forum entries despite the approximately 5000 views.

Engagement was introduced in week 5, however with week 6 being a temporary suspension of the campaign the effects were not reported until week 7. There we can see a significant effect. The view rate shot up to almost 3 times previous counts without increasing the number of weekly entries. But the most significant finding is the comments. Comments, which were absent from the broadcast phase now represented almost 10% of the view rate.


















Whereas it is too soon to make judgments about the effectiveness of engagement over broadcast based on this limited case study, it is clear that there is a definite change in behavīor which can be seen in both increase in views and more importantly comments.

Much success,

Doug

This last week Prosperity Research achieved its final milestone of creating a purely distributed business model. We brought down our website, www.SO-U.TV. Yes I know it sounds so archaic to talk about websites when social networks, mobile computing and Twitter are all the rage. However, it has taken four years to get out reluctant clients to live with out its reassuring presence. When Prosperity Research was established we came up with the simple idea; it is easier and cheaper to go to your consumers than to get them to come to you. At least this is true in the digital world. We saw social media coming and bet right.

Think of a website as a home, one that you can never leave. This is a romantic thought, but imagine the constant maintenance, lifetime mortgage, and since you can not leave you must spend huge amounts of time and money to attract and entertain your guests. Also, if the house needs remodelling or repair the cost can be excruciating.

Reference:Adam Broitman sez 4 reasons web sites are becoming irrelevant

Now imagine if you could live anywhere you wanted rent free. If you tire of someplace you can quickly move to another more attractive and spacious one. You can live in as many places as you like and spend as much or as little time as you like. You always have lots of friends around and someone else always pays the tab at the end of the party. Too good to be true? Not really.


It is called distributed marketing and whereas we started down this path more than 4 years ago it is just now starting to come into its own. Social media marketing is a similar concept and better understood. So putting it in the context of social media marketing, it is simply using "free to post" or consumer generated content areas of sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and more to host your content and conduct your business.

To prove the coming of age of distributed marketing and increasing acceptance of social media, David Ketchum of Upstream Asia was featured in an article recently discussing the huge discrepancy between how business uses the Internet and how consumers use it. Consumers have quickly adapted to distributed marketing and are head over heels in love with social media. So why isn't business? He states that business needs to start fishing where the fish are. Three years ago we coined the phrase "put yourself in the path of your consumer". Not quite as folksy sounding but the same concept.

BTW, www. SO-U.TV is not completely gone. You can find us on 100's of sites and if you feel nostalgic for an old fashioned website, we kept a bit of our past on Ning.com. Come join us!

Much success,

Doug