Social Churn
this is the third article in our Infographics series covering Facebook. The research make an interesting read for all businesses thinking of marketing or advertising on Facebook.
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Growth of Facebook in the UK
We see a lot of Infographics and statistics about Twitter so we decided to put our own together, we hope you find it useful.
Volcanic Infographic on Twitter
Some say that personality is more important than looks alone. Even if this is true, Jessica Ennis should have no reason to fret – for she has both! The Sheffield-born heptathlete has been often praised for a quality that not many ‘celebrities’ can boast of; normality. There isn’t much doubt that despite her various world-class sporting successes, she will remain as normal and accessible as the rest of us. During an interview for the Daily Mail after their engagement, her fiancé said that “It’s like you’re a really good athlete, but the dog needs walking” when relating to her solid, responsible upbringing.
I think that is one of the reasons why Jess is so popular, because people feel that she has something fundamental that they can relate to. She clearly has a grounded way of thinking, and is an approachable, friendly person. In social media terms, she is in a way, a great success. The fact that she has 602,220 followers on Twitter, and the existence of the ‘Jessica Ennis Fans’ account says it all. This however also seems to say a lot about Twitter itself. The amount of daily tweets has grown from 0 to 200 in a five-year period. This success can be seen as a result of the ‘level-playing field’ that the social networking site both created and actively encourages. You could say that this in itself is Twitter’s unique selling point.
Despite the ‘social status’ of different users, if you have an account you can interact with anyone in the world, whether it be a celebrity, politician or an old friend. They may not reply of course, especially when considering that many ‘high status’ users have several million followers and obviously cannot reply to all of them. The point is here though, is that Twitter allows anyone to have a voice. It breaks down the old barriers that existed pre-Twitter between people on the many levels of online society.
It is this lack of centralised control (to a certain extent) that also sums up the success of the Internet as a whole. Nobody really ‘owns’ it, everybody (if they have access) can contribute to it. According to the co-founder of Reddit, a social site related around news, says that any idea of a ‘privately’ controlled global web would immediately contradict, and kill itself. The New York based entrepreneur stated that: “I don’t believe it’s sustainable, because it’s the openness of the Internet that makes it so valuable. It’s the most level playing field in the world.”
If organisations are to succeed in the increasingly vast social space, it seems imperative that they take into account what the elements that cause people to use it in the first place. People, and consumers especially want it to be simple, honest and friendly when they interact with others, and preferably in an arena where they feel to be on the same level with the party they seek interaction with. Maybe, if organisations applied a touch more ‘Ennis philosophy’, they could win social media gold.
“I’m safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!!”. This, in case you haven’t been following was the first ‘post-landing’ tweet by NASA’s Curiosity Rover on the Red Planet. The rover touched down on the rocky, dusty surface at approximately 6:30am British Summertime on Monday morning (6th August) and was met by a swarm of interest on the social networks, especially Twitter.
Shortly after landing, Curiosity ‘tweeted’ several photographs illustrating its successful arrival, as well as the Martian sun hanging low over the blurry horizon. I think it would be safe to say that this was one of the most gripping extra-terrestrial events experienced since the explosive growth of Twitter from 2006 onwards. The Curiosity rover (or at least the three members of NASA’s social media team responsible) provided updates via Twitter along its journey, which got more and more intense as it got closer and closer to entering the planet’s atmosphere.
Using the hashtag ‘#MSL’ (Mars Science Laboratory) followers could keep up with Curiosity’s decent, and converse with other tweeters about the unfolding excitement. The rover’s account was giving updates in a way that seemed almost real-time, which also added a real sense of momentum to the event.
Let’s not forget though, that this mission, like previous missions to Mars was an incredible financial and reputational risk for NASA. I guess the most heart stopping moment was when the $2.5bn rover actually started to enter Mars’ atmosphere: “Entering Mars’atmosphere.7.Minutes.Of.Terror.Starts.Now. #MSL”. This ‘terror’ felt by NASA summed up the fragility of the whole mission, and maybe the repercussions if the landing was to fail!
For the first time here, the exploration of another world has been documented and shared though social media, which reveals a couple of interesting things. Firstly, that if used in the right way, social media can engage people in something that they would not normally have much access to. So far, space related projects have mostly been shown on traditional media, such as television, which has up to now allowed that much social interaction. Secondly, and possibly more importantly, it has allowed what is essentially a lab on wheels to have something much more human. Curiosity has a personality.
As more and more of the rover’s equipment become operational (hopefully!) over the next few weeks, I personally can’t wait to see what discoveries Curiosity will share with us!
What is Facebook worth? The company’s high profile IPO in May 2012 gave the social network a total value of $104bn, with an individual share price of $38. But what direction is it heading? And what are the right methods businesses can use it to appropriately engage with consumers?
The chief operating officer of Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg, stated prior to the company’s IPO that the long-term aim for Facebook is to emerge as the number one stage for online advertising, catering to the approximately 70 million global businesses. The big question on the lips of many people however is where will the revenue come from? There seems to be an attitude towards Facebook’s main current revenue stream, advertising which suggests that both businesses and regular users of Facebook are sceptical of the ability of paid adverts to effectively target consumers without damaging it’s brand (especially considering the poor click-though rates of banner ads).
This apparent ineffectiveness of Facebook’s paid advertising capability was summed up earlier this year when the news that General Motors would be removing its own adverts from the social network, citing them as having “little impact on consumers”. However, the fact that the automobile giant is still investing approximately $40 million a year on pure content generation for Facebook hints at where the advantages and limitations of Facebook for business lie.
It seems that the trends surrounding investments in Facebook illustrate how different the social media platform is in comparison to traditional formats of advertising. People get bored and frustrated at one dimensional, characterless adverts taking up valuable space on their news feeds, and therefore try their upmost to avoid them.
Creating interest and interactivity for consumers is seemingly the way to go. There are countless ways that organisations can compose fun, engaging online activities which customers can get involved with. An element of loyalty can also be developed via the use of ‘point systems’ where businesses can reward customers who are especially involved. Taking all of this new information in is increasingly important for companies, especially when seeking to know how these new elements of interaction can be improved. ‘Facebook Insights’ is a tool that Facebook have developed to allow businesses to do exactly this. Companies on the network can, for example see what status updates performed the best and what exact content had the most responses.
It is pretty obvious that the most successful Facebook campaigns are ones that are focussed around innovative content creation, not spending on tedious and irritating adverts. The fact that Facebook is a socially active, interesting place must be both remembered and applied by organisations to their respective online marketing campaigns, in order to achieve a higher level of success.
“The Klout Score measures influence based on your ability to drive action. Every time you create content or engage you influence others. The Klout Score uses data from social networks in order to measure:
True Reach: How many people you influence
Amplification: How much you influence them
Network Impact: The influence of your network
An interesting story that i stumbled across one evening was that of Sam Fiorella. He had been recruited for a position at a well regarded marketing agency in Toronto. He had over 15 years of experience working with the likes of Ford, AOL and Kraft but there was one question that stumped him during his interview. He was asked for his Klout score, Fiorella pondered on this question and shortly after confessed to having no idea what a Klout score actually was.
The interviewer went on to show him what Klout was. They eventually came to find out Fiorella’s score, as it turned out his influence throughout his network was 34. The interview was cut short, Fiorella was eliminated as a candidate and lost out too someone else who was packing a Klout score of 67.
Much as Google’s search engine attempts to rank the relevance of every web page, Klout—a three-year-old startup based in San Francisco—is on a mission to rank the influence of every person online. Its algorithms comb through social media data: If you have a public account with Twitter, which makes updates available for anyone to read, you have a Klout score, whether you know it or not. You can supplement that score by letting Klout link to harder-to-access accounts, like those on Google+, Facebook, or LinkedIn. The scores are calculated using variables that can include number of followers, frequency of updates, the Klout scores of your friends and followers, and the number of likes, retweets, and shares that your updates receive. High-scoring Klout users can qualify for Klout Perks, free goodies from companies hoping to garner some influential praise.
But even if you have no idea what your Klout score is, there’s a chance that it’s already affecting your life. At the Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas last summer, clerks looked up guests’ Klout scores as they checked in. Some high scorers received instant room upgrades, sometimes without even being told why. According to Greg Cannon, the Palms’ former director of e-commerce, the initiative stirred up tremendous online buzz. He says that before its Klout experiment, the Palms had only the 17th-largest social-networking following among Las Vegas-based hotel-casinos. Afterward, it jumped up to third on Facebook and has one of the highest Klout scores among its peers.
Klout is starting to infiltrate more and more of our everyday transactions. In February, the enterprise-software monolith Salesforce.com introduced a service that lets companies monitor the Klout scores of customers who tweet compliments and complaints; those with the highest scores will presumably get swifter, friendlier attention from customer service reps. In March, luxury shopping site Gilt Groupe began offering discounts proportional to a customer’s Klout score.
Here’s some high flying klout scores, who would have ‘belibed’ that Justin Bieber would have hit the perfect 100?
We like the idea of seeing how influential a person is when talking to them and that is why we have included Klout within Social Churn. You may be asking ‘why’? Well lets take for instance you find a good comment about your business, this is all very well and good but what if you could take the same tact as the hotel in Las Vegas? Be able to see an indication of how influential that person is and then cater to their needs. In return they may tweet/ comment about your service or business and the circle continues.
We’d love to know what you think of Klout? Our highest score in the office is 55, can you top that? Do you think it’s worthwhile or a load of hot air? Let us know via tweet
I was thinking about my business studies lessons at college the other day. I remember how they taught us always to create a business plan before even thinking of starting a company.
A Business Plan as defined by Business Link contains the following: -
This is a good practice but many entrepreneurs will tell you that business planning is a powerful tool for evaluating the feasibility of business ventures. However I’m also reminded of a proverb that says “He who fails to plan, plans to fail” but if you’ve ever prepared and launched a business then you’ll know that when you start looking at sales you can easily be too optimistic or underestimate the costs involved in running the business which can have a detrimental affect, resulting in little or no profit at best or business failure at worst.
So no matter how many times you write that business plan or forecast those sales, it’s very rare that you get the figures right so managing a business then revolves around making adjustments to the books by either increasing sales or reducing costs or both.
One thing that wasn’t available to me at college was the social community, the principle of doing research existed but access to sales, customers and opinion was not possible without hard graft of doing the physical market research. If you got that wrong then you’d only discover this after the business started and only after incurring excessive costs.
Today with social media your research is available for free through your various social networks, you can get access people opinions and you can establish whether your business or products have demand.
Utilising the social networks enables you to fail faster allowing you to make changes to products and services quickly and tapping into the sentiment of your customers and thus make changes. In the worst case, if you can’t meet the expectations of your customers then the business will close but at least you can close faster and incur less costs.
I also remember a phrase from 1987 film Wall Street ‘Greed is Good’ the modern 2010 film Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps ‘Is Greed Good?’ the strap line in my fictional 2012 film Wall Street it would be ‘ Fail Faster to Succeed’
Being one of the older members of the company I’m classed as a digital immigrant (i.e. I was introduced into the digital world rather than grew up with it) rather than a digital native, however that said, I was the first person at my school to use a personal computer (1976), was in the first year of children to be allowed to use a calculator in my maths exams (1978) and was very active at the start of the dot com boom in the 90′s.
With all this background and experience you would think that developing a product, be it a application or a website or an App. then I’d be pretty comfortable in this space which in truth I am but unlike the early days the speed of development means that getting to market is faster but also that failure also is faster.
I cannot get over just how fast developers can produce code, it seems that when I developed some of my first website systems (theAA.com or IF.com) then the process was slow and cumbersome, the user requirements seemed to take almost a third of the project time but never stopped, the development took another third and testing the remaining time but significantly the overall effort was a lot bigger and the capability a lot smaller but the secrecy around the projects were vital as it was always felt that you must keep it secret until the launch so that you had a competitive advantage of being the first to market.
Today everything has changed, secrecy has been replaced and users are being engaged earlier, the development and testing has been rolled into one and the overall effort has been reduced from the thousands of hours to hundreds maybe a tenth of what we did all those years ago.
By engaging earlier, even prior to development, using social networks we can get feedback almost immediately and with the use of crowd sourcing then product refinement is substantially improved.
I am really getting excited with the impending “official” launch of our new social marketing tool socialchurn.com. But enough of the sales pitch. I want to talk about some of the interesting things we have discovered developing and testing it.
People come to social media from different angles. Some will feel worried about making a mistake or being inundated with requests and information, whereas others will have already built up a strong audience or network, but are coming with the question “how can I use it to benefit my business?”.
All valid stuff, but even with the array of tools out there to make it easier, including our own wonderful socialchurn.com, it is surprising what you can see.
We are using the product ourselves for to promote socialchurn itself, but also to test how powerful it could be covering a popular topic. And what could be more popular than football, particularly with recent events and the use of social networks in publicising them!
So we set up soccersocial.net with feeds for both fans and players. Using Social Churn we are publishing interesting content from social networks into the website. The oxygen is the player tweets, which in turn gets the fans commenting. For example we have seen that there is quite an interesting Come Dine With Me competition going on an Manchester City and some interesting medical insights at Spurs! It’s just like being in the dressing room.
The really interesting bit is that we also notify all fans that get published, which they seem to like quite alot! The point here is that by focusing on a specific topic, pulling out and publishing the relevant bits in a real time stream, you can get an insight into what’s really happening, but also sight of player personalities – who is shy, who is confident and who is daft!
We had not anticipated this outcome, but it is not surprising when you think about it. When you see a conversation mapped out in front of you, it is possible to see more than the conversations themselves. We’ll keep you updated to see what other developments take place but I’m sure a new career in social media psychology is on the horizon!
“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
One philosophical argument revolves around the distinction between our understanding of ‘sound’ (being the excitement in our ear in response to vibrations in the atmosphere) and of ‘noise’ (being a scientific measure of the vibrations regardless of whether or on they affect human hearing). Another revolves around the nature of perception, and yet another might confuse us by denying all physical reality in favour of a model created in our psyche based upon our perceptions. (A series of movies embodied and extended this notion as The Matrix trilogy.)
In all cases there is a dependence upon someone else’s understanding and/or perception of the event. The cartoon brings in a modern twist – Twitter. In today’s connected world we know that whatever we tweet about on Twitter or comment about on Facebook someone will hear it, and not just one, or even a few. Our social media networks extend globally and reach millions. We live in an increasingly connected world. We feel we’re losing out if we don’t know what our friends, family, business contacts or favourite celebrities are up to.
These events are significant in that they are all reliant on others, and have no value on their own or without more of the same or a wider take-up.
So Alexander Graham Bell may have been there at the beginning of the social media revolution over 130 years ago! It’s a good job someone heard him!
