Online word of mouth outstrips every other form of promotion / endorsement

Two surveys that I picked up on that draw somewhat different conclusions. First of all (via Marketing Charts) comes this study by WorkPlace Media which says that 96% of employed consumers won't think less of a brand if it has no social media presence.

Moreover while 25% recommended a business or product on a social network, only 18% have actually acted on recommendations. Phew, that's ok then, I knew all this social media business was all a bag of b*llocks. Switch off the computer and get some fresh air like most normal people!

Or maybe not. Another study by Nielsen involving 25,000 people in 50 countries shows that 90% of Internet consumers worldwide (so in the developed world, that's most consumers full stop) trust recommendations from people they know, while 70% trust consumer recommendations posted online - I am assuming this means recommendations from people you don't necessarily know via sites like TripAdvisor.

Information on brand websites elicits a high degree of trust at 70%, as does (as you'd expect) editorial endorsements at 69%. My take on the brand website score is that by the time people visit it, they are already at least curious about the product or service and so are looking for validation.

And at the bottom? Text ads on cell / mobile phones (24%) and the much maligned banner ad (33%). The point is that according to Nielsen, word of mouth online recommendations outstrip every other form of marketing and even a good (editorial) review in a newspaper or magazine.

Commenting on the study, Jonathan Carson, President of Online at Nielsen says: "The explosion in consumer generated media over the last couple of years means consumers' reliance on word of mouth in the decision making process, either from people they know or online consumers they don't has increased significantly."

So going back to that first WorkPlace Media study, I wonder if it's simply a case of how the questions are phrased. Most consumers won't think less of you if you don't have a social media presence....and so what? Will they however think *better* of you if you communicate with them online?

And if the stat of only 18% having acted on online recommendations is true (I doubt it), that's still arguably a very high number in a recession filled climate where margins turn on single percentage points.

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Communicators: Twitter a 'fad'

Or at least that's what 54% told online publisher Ragan Communications and Pollstream in a study on the micro-blogging service, saying people will soon tire of the hype and move on.

"“[It’s a fad] because everybody’s doing it,” said one respondent. “Ashton Kutcher and CNN have a steady supply of fans who want to know what they do. People like us, people with a job to do, every so often we do something of interest to the general public [but] we don’t have that steady supply of stuff that the public is interested in.”

Well, you might or might not have a steady supply of stuff the public is interested in, but I am sure you have personalities and opinions that fit the bill. More to the point, at least some of the 30 million worldwide users (or 1.5 million heavily committed users) will be talking about things of relevance to you.

Waste of time = time waster?

The study also found that while 28% use it, 40% have no future Twitter plan in place (I'm surprised this % was so low), a key reason being fear of senior management who see it as a waste of time - that age old problem of social media at work being seen as skiiving off.

Another factor was that organisations are just not geared towards social media. For example, communicators at one New York architectural engineering firm cited in the survey "are required to pre-approve all communication with clients, so the spontaneity and transparency made possible by Twitter would be muted by approvals." Each tweet going through an approval process before being posted, now there's a thought!

Get back in your box?

However, I've often wondered whether it isn't so much about whether Twitter is a fad or not. Rather whether it's simply a case of there being a ground swell of opinion from people who want it to be. In that sense it is like the virtual world Second Life, which it is often compared to in terms of hype.

There were indeed flaws in Second Life's model, but the key factor in the air going out seemed to be that a lot of pundits tired of hearing about it and decided it was time to put it back into its virtual box.

Hence, a lot of statistics rolled out showing how Twitter is under used, in decline, are actually being interpreted in a fairly selective manner. For example:

Another survey says that "only" 22% of GenYers (born post 1980) use Twitter. You could just as easily invert those figures around to reach a completely different conclusion.

If we agree that 62% of Twitter's worldwide user base is in the US, that gives us 18 million Americans - which is far from one in five of the overall population. So by the standards of that study, Generation Y is if anything OVER and not under represented.

Image - Pick up JoJo

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A round up of Twitter stats - 3/4 joined Jan to May 2009, 60%+ in US

Erin Lamberty pointed me towards this 'in depth look inside the Twitter world' by Sysomos, which involved the company looking at 11.5 million Twitter accounts. The full report is here, but a few key points:

• Most - in fact almost three quarters - of Twitter users joined in the first five months of this year with a particular spike in February and March.

• Something that's done the rounds a lot already, a small number of users account for the lion's share of Tweets - 5% account for 75% of activity. Assuming a user base of 30+ million worldwide, that would translate into a core of 1.5 million committed users. With Twitter having previously been tagged as the 'new Second Life' in terms of a bubble, it's worth noting that 600-700k people log onto Second Life every month (not the same as power users, whose numbers would be lower)

• 'The more followers, the more you tweet' - when you pass the 1000 followers mark your average tweets per day doubles from three to six. So Twitter works a little chicken and egg. When you start off and don't have anyone listening, the motivation to essentially talk to yourself is low. Once your follower numbers increase you imagine there is a point to using Twitter.

• As expected, the US is the biggest Twitter country by population, dwarfing all others with 62% of the total. The US is followed by the UK (8%), Canada (5%) and Australia (3%). In fact, something that struck me when doing research for a European client was how English-speaking biased Twitter is. 100+ followers is not unusual in the US, UK et al, but it is high if you look at (say) continental Europe.

• The statistics on age can be treated with a pinch of salt. Sysomos says that "65% of Twitter users are under the age of 25", which flies in the face of other studies as well as most users' personal experience. However Sysomos admits that this is based on the 0.7% who actually disclose their age on Twitter...I wasn't even aware of anyone actually doing so.

Finally, even people who call themselves social media marketers on Twitter are sometimes not as social as they make out! While 85.3% of the general Twitter population posts less than once a day, the same is true of two thirds for self proclaimed social media specialists.

Novel road safety campaign features Bill Gates and Brad Pitt

Found completely randomly while doing research for my last post, is this article from Mosnews about Brad Pitt's latest role...as a cardboard cut out traffic policeman.

According to Mosnews, authorities in the Siberian city of Omsk have installed the Brad Pitt and Bill Gates (eh?) cut-outs at dangerous intersections to slow traffic.

You'd think that drivers gawping at the celebrity policemen would actually cause more accidents, but not so. Mosnews says that, "The campaign seems to be working. Omsk officials say accidents are down as star-struck drivers ease off the gas to gaze at the unusual images."

As an aside, Mosnews.com is full of bizarre little gems, like: Lithuanian WCs auto lock if you spend more than five minues inside, Russian artist bites air hostess after getting drunk on liquid soap and, er, Russian woman sets world record by lifting 14kg glass ball with a part of her anatomy...

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Useful chart - the top 20 countries for social media engagement

Comscore has published a fascinating chart looking at the top 20 countries worldwide in terms of social media engagement - i.e. the amount of time users on average spend on social networks.

The leaders include some surprises and one name that crops up again and again. Russia comes top with an average of 6.6 hours per visitor per month, followed by Brazil (6.3 hours), Canada (5.6 hours) and Puerto Rico and Spain tied in 5th place with 5.3 hours.

The figures for the UK were 4.6 hours, the US 4.2 hours and Australia 3.4 hours.

Canada usually scores near the top of these surveys, beating the UK into second place in an OFCOM study on the % of the population in social networks, and also coming top when it comes to online video usage (what is it with Canada? More friendly? The weather? Or simply more advanced than the rest of us!).

Russia is an interesting case though as well. Though Comscore says that 616k Russians now use Facebook, up 277% year on year, that's still tiny compared to the numbers attracted by home grown networks Vkontakte.ru (14.3 million) and Odnoklassniki.ru (7.8 million).

In fact, recently Vkontakte announced that it was doing a Facebook in opening its platform up to developers.

Talking head quote:

"Social networking has become a popular online pastime not only in mature internet markets like North America, but also in developing, high-growth internet markets such as Russia." (Mike Read, SVP & managing director, comScore Europe)

“In a country as geographically large as Russia, social networking represents a way of connecting people from one corner of the country to the other.”

Source - Marketing Charts

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It's not only newspapers feeling the digital chill - book publishers hit too

According to Paid Content, Penguin has made 100 staff, equivalent to 10% of its workforce, redundant.

The reason? Based on a memo by CEO John Makinson, it's not recession led:

"We have to think about what kind of company we might have in five years time if we sat back and changed nothing...Penguin has been in the vanguard of many of the changes sweeping our industry - the rise of the digital economy and the impact of emerging markets are just two current examples."

According to Paid Content, publishers are facing some of the same problems as newspapers - how to make money from the web for digital content where 'free' is the norm. Apparently illegal file sharing is an increasing problem for audio book publishers, with five Swedish publishers having to resort to court action to stop a file sharer downloading 2000+ titles.

At the same time, today's figures from Britain's Office for National Statistics show that the continued drop in (UK) output in May was actually driven by the print and publishing industries...a real sign of the double whammy of increased digital engagement and the recession taking their toll?

Certainly, there is some evidence that increased Internet use has an adverse impact on book consumption, something I personally am sad about, but I guess another sign that people get their information in different ways.

Last year's Digital Entertainment Study (UK) found that 14% of respondents using social media read fewer books.

Meanwhile the way we consume information is changing as well as the medium - according to Nicholas Carr in his seminal piece in Atlantic Magazine, 'Is Google Making us Stupid', a study at University College London identified a trend where researchers now 'power browse' relevant work.

Image -Florian B

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Over a third of Facebook users now 35+, use by seniors at record levels

From Inside Facebook come the following charts looking at the latest demographics for the social network. The over 35s in the US now account for 36% of all users with over 45s making up 17%. Meanwhile usage levels by the over 55s has reached "all time highs", in particular women 55+, who now number 2.5 million users.

And younger users? Use by 18-25 year olds went down 3% in the last month. Whether that's simply due to the summer break, or whether that's a tentative sign of younger users starting to tire of the service, this research is yet another stat to file away for when someone tells you that 'it's not for us, it's all about kids' (which even in 2009, I still hear!).

Images - Inside Facebook

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Agencies and Twitter - The good, the bad and the ugly

AdAge has an interesting article about agencies using Twitter - or not as the case may be (thanks to Liz Nicole for spotting it). The article looks through agencies active on Twitter, and others that advise clients on it but don't have a feed themselves:

"As Twitter moves into the business mainstream -- nearing some 35 million unique global visitors, according to ComScore -- it's increasingly clear that one community has yet to fully embrace the social-networking tool du jour: agencies.

"The irony is that the same people clients hire to erect communications and social-media strategies often appear uncomfortable using Twitter themselves."

The piece by Rupal Parekh also has some good advice about how brands and agencies can use Twitter more effectively:

Don't over promote (don't hit people on the head with press releases), be human, remember - Twitter is public (and your clients will spot what you tweet), keep clients looped, listen, respond.

From personal experience I fully admit that at Cow we could do more in terms of getting the first two points right. Because the same person (me!) maintains the company and a personal feed, what more often than not happens is that the 'official' feed is used for fairly run of the mill announcements and my own one for stuff that interests me - result, that one (not surprisingly) has 5x as many followers.

It's a question I've talked about before, does a company feed without a named individual behind it giving the stamp of his / her personality have value?

In our case, the solution we'll probably go for is for me to give up the Cow feed to one of the other Cows on Twitter and to follow the lead of a company like Kodak, which does use a company ID but also has an identifiable person behind it.

Image - Mykl Roventine

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Yes I blog...what you mean it's useful for work?

Heard this one before?

"Very surprising also – and I would have thought newsworthy – is the attitude of regional media and journalists to online and social media. Many of them blog, Tweet and are active on informal online channels, yet few seem to recognise the influence of social media on perceptions, and indeed news."

The comments come from the chief of the Middle East PR body, Dave Robinson, responding to a less than flattering study carried in Campaign Middle East on the state of the industry (the usual - sending out pointless info, not answering calls or emails etc).

However what he says about the disconnect between people using social media in the personal sphere and then the internal online switch going 'off' once they get into work is generally applicable. I am sure a lot of people reading this see it all the time.

Reasons why? A tendency to circle the wagons. And the fact that often no coherent internal sell has been made to internal clients: The decision makers behind the decision makers.

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Good presentation - Motivating consumers online and 2009 trends

Digital Research - Motivating consumers online - DNA09

View more presentations from Digital Now Australia.

Though it relates to Australia, the themes touched upon in this presentation by Jonathan Sinton of research firm TNS are just as applicable to the UK, the US, Canada et al. The presentation was given to coincide with the Digital Now Australia conference (via Get Shouty). Some highlights:

After introducing us to the 'Digital Needs Wheel' (slide five), the presentation goes through five digital trends (slide nine): The informed consumer, the year of the mobile, multi-tasking, voyeurism and one degree of separation.

Some useful stats for anyone who still tells you that online chatter is irrelevant:

An illustration of how TV and the web compliment each other in the way that print and online often don't: 68% of Australians said a TV show sparked online search, while 54% say an ad sparked online search.

At the end there are a few two minute talking head segments about the iPhone and the mobile Internet. The conclusion:

Although the overall market share is still small, the iPhone is changing the mobile Internet game. It's moving consumers from going online via their mobiles only when they have no other alternative and having a second rate experience, to creating a completely different online ecosystem.

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How to promote a play: Up the number of actors

While looking for (Sydney agency) Happy Soliders human website video for my 'what's your website good for' post, I came across this nice little case study that they put up on You Tube.

Happy Soldiers wanted to up audience numbers at Sydney's Spirithouse Theatre Company around their production of Maurice Panychs Vigil.

Their solution? Not advertising. Instead working on the principle that people are more likely to see a play if someone is in the cast, they added 25 additional cast members a night by putting in an extra five minute scene at the start.

A great campaign - and clever use of word of mouth and human networks.

What's your website good for?

What's your website good for?

View more documents from Dirk Singer.

(6 July, see update below) This is a theme I've been meaning to post about for a while. The tendency of more and more sites (especially agency ones) to be social media based - either blogs, or mirrors of online chat (like Twitter feeds).

The most recent example - Ad agency CP&B giving a lot of its site over to news, blog and twitter mentions.

Is a lot of this a publicity stunt, a way to get people to people to coo about something they'd never otherwise, a website? Hell yes, but in the long run, who cares?

That's because long term the principle is I think sound - a realisation that especially online you are what people say about you, and that people don't visit run of the mill brand sites for fun.

Anyway, a presentation that looks at some agency examples and what some smart people are saying about it, is above.

Update (6 July) - Ben Kunz has a good take on Crispin Porter and social engagement sites in general, pointing out that they are potentially as much threats as they are opportunities.

For example, someone could create a site all about you, pulling in feeds and online chatter, and there is little you could do about it:

"Aggregation, it seems, opens the doors for anyone to erect an exciting hub about a topic. Google has become the world's largest case study of offering up content without ownership.

"If what people say about you has become more important than what you say, what happens if someone else gains control of your conversation first?"

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How trends spread / taking real life dating into virtual worlds

To coincide with the sixth birthday of the virtual world Second Life, two posts, one part-recycled from 18 months back:

How trends spread and the limits of social contagion

First of all a piece of research from the University of Michigan who looked at the virtual world to see how trends spread.

When you create an avatar in Second Life, the starting point is fairly basic - a rudimentary 'skin', clothes, shape, and gestures / moves. Hence a whole economy has sprung up where enterprising residents create add-ons that you can use to customise your AV. The University of Michigan researchers looked at these enhancements - in particular gestures - to see how things get forwarded on virally.

The full paper is available here, but a few findings that arose after they looked at 100,229 users and 106,449 gestures:

1 - Early adopters, the first 5-10% to acquire new 'assets' are by and large not the same as influencers who distribute things far and wide. This corresponds to offline research that shows that if you want a product to spread virally and by word of mouth, your first customers (so the ones who queue up at Midnight in front of the store for a new iPhone) are not your 'hero' ones.

2 - Existing social networks play a huge role in spreading trends, but at the same time the 'contagion' is fairly contained. On one hand, the academics found that 50% of these gestures were disseminated among existing social groups, but on the other hand, that once they were inside a circle of friends they tended to stop there.

According to Science Daily, "the researchers found that the gestures that spread from friend to friend were not distributed as broadly as ones that were distributed outside of the social network, such as those acquired in stores or as give aways." So there is a role for straight forward non WOM marketing after all!

The researchers say that this huge study gave them the chance to validate some hypothesis that exist in the real (non virtual) world: According to one of the authors Lada Adamic, "There's been a high correspondence between the real world and virtual worlds."

Using virtual worlds as a place for real world dates

In an interview around Second Life's sixth anniversary with V3, Tom Hale, Linden Lab's chief product officer floated the following idea:

"Linden Lab also plans to introduce more services, and to integrate with other popular social networks and online services, further associating the avatar with the person’s real identity."

"Hale gave the example of working with other online agencies, such as dating sites, to offer another step in the meeting process by letting users create avatars that could explore the world on a ‘virtual date’, allowing people to get to know each other even better before meeting in person."

I refer to a post I wrote 18 months ago after I pitched the very same idea to a major dating agency!

"A while back we posted on how our Vauxhall Corsa Guide could be used as the basis for practice dates in the virtual world Second Life.

"The idea was that Second Life dating could sit between getting to know someone on the phone, on IM or on email and actually meeting them face to face. We subsequently suggested this concept to a major dating site, putting forward the notion that they could offer a bespoke virtual service for their members.

"We proposed setting up a separate log-in site and orientation zone on Second Life for new avatars (characters), along with clothes, skins, accessories to choose from.

"Then, both parties would have had a kind of trial run, where they would have seen from their behaviour if they were compatible. And if they wanted to take it further, they could have then arranged a date in the real world - where, according to research from Stanford, they would actually have found each other better looking in the flesh if they selected ‘attractive’ avatars, thereby theoretically increasing the chances of a successful outcome!

"Overall it was designed to be a low risk, cheap and fun way to get to know someone before wasting three hours in a bar or restaurant constantly looking at the clock and desperately trying to fill dead air."

Good to see that the time for this idea has finally come!

Above image from Torley Linden, what you see when a starter avatar doesn't appear or 'rez' properly in Second Life

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