We have on average (Dunbar Number) 150 social connections, so for me that represents 4650 potential social connections. There isn’t time to manage all these social connections effectively, we’d be mad to try but some people do and I’m seeing more people dump their profiles all together as they’ve hit social media burnout.

Social connections are important and valuable both to the individual and the communities they are part of. This has been well documented over the last two years and I won’t go over well trodden ground but I am concerned that people have begun to question the benefit of their social connections. This is on the back of feeling their commitment to keeping their social connections open has begun to affect their work and home life. There are lessons we can all learn to ensure we don’t find ourselves in a similar situation.

Chose to lose some social network platforms.

Dumping the social networks that you joined in a rush of enthusiasm but aren’t actually value social networks will free up your time to focus on the connections that really benefit each other. By value social networks I mean those social network that don’t feed you personally in terms of knowledge, learning and connections or you don’t feel contribute to the growth of the community.

Remove overlapping contacts.

If we stick to the principle of one person equals one connection, how many duplicate connections do you have with a person across your social networks? It’s easy to accept a friend and a follower, without giving it a second thought when we connect with them on other networks already. Consider how many people use Twitter to feed their Facebook profile or vice versa? If you follow people on both networks you’ll expose yourself to the same content twice.

Recognise what is social media noise and and then ignore it.

Remember when you were a kid traveling on holiday with your parents. You’d sit in the back of the car watching the cars coming in the other direction. Then you simply started to not see them. They were there, but you didn’t register them any more as they’d become part of the background noise.

Social network noise is the same. We waste a huge amount of time reading stuff that neither requires our input or really warrants it. I skim read quite a lot of content taking time over a few posts, comments and messages. If I can’t answer quickly, I’ll go back to it later in the evening if I have time. Important note here, no one will suffer if you don’t respond or comment. The world and your life continues regardless.

Time to read, time to respond, time to leave it be.

Be regimented about when you log onto your social networks. During work time (Unless your business is online and driven by social networks) focus on work. Keep lunchtime for re-charging the batteries, read comments, posts and messages during your lunch break but leave answering them until later in the evening after you’ve spent time with your family, done chores and have an hour or two spare.

I tend to leave Twitter and Facebook until evening and sometime don’t look at them at all if I don’t have time. If you refresh Twitter and Facebook on your smart phone, laptop etc. every couple of minutes, you’re spending too much time on your social networks and it will impact on your home life. How many of you have heard “Do I have to post a message to your Facebook to get your attention?” Be conscious of the amount of time spent online.

It’s all in the mind.

Ever spent hours and hours thinking about what someone has written on their Facebook or Twitter profile, trying to decipher if a message has more then one meaning or if it is meant for you or not? I have.

A hard lesson, but a useful one is to never take a post personally, it’s not worth giving it mind space. Some people write deliberately cryptic messages designed to attract attention and comments. It’s about control and you could be surrendering your control if your respond to them. Take control back and remember, maybe not everyone you know on your social networks are a real friend.

Do you really need to join?

I get lots of invites from friends and contacts to join them on new social network platforms something which is only going to increase over time. Most of these are automated features of new platforms designed to grow participation quickly.

Ask yourself:

Do you really need to be on this social network platform?
Does it provide the same features and benefits as other networks you’re on?
Are the same people on that platform as are on your existing social networks?
Can you contribute your knowledge and expertise to that network, is it of value?
Can that network provide learning and useful contacts for you?

It’s import that you value the social interactions you have and feel your contribution to them adds value to that community and in doing so you gain learning from them. If you feel burdened by your social media connections I hope these ideas will help you maintain your interest without sacrificing your work or home life.

The edges of our media space are expanding faster than our ability to make sense of them, of new technologies, of how people use them and of the shake out, that will mean some old media will fall by the wayside.

But this is an unravelling story seen from two very different perspectives. The user, swept along by the rush of the crowd to try new media, to make that media fit their lifestyle and the marketer, trying to position a brand where its’ target customer is.

We are at this juncture, living through exciting and yet worrying times because history repeatedly reminds us that the intervening years between the birth of something new and it being fully realised, is a path marked with successes and failures in equal measure.

It is our fear of failure that plays into the hands of those who make their living trying to predict the future we marketers so desperately want to know about.

A recent TimesOnline article has marketers raving about the simple insights of a young man, who whist on work experience wrote a short paper on how teenagers use media. According to him, teenagers (boys mainly) use their games console for conversations, not their mobiles, which incidentally is primarily used for text and music. They don’t read newspapers, preferring instead to get their news online and they don’t buy movies or music, seeing nothing wrong in pirate DVD’s and peer-to-peer downloads.

And what about teenage girls? I speak from experience here as I have a teenage daughter, who has Facebook, MSN and YouTube open simultaneously on her laptop and only uses her mobile or ipod for music / texting whenever she is on the move, and disconnected from her laptop.

What surprised me about this article wasn’t necessarily the insights it revealed, it was the reaction of people to these insights. It was like the volume had been turned up by this young man and for the first time these marketers could hear the authentic voice of a generation.

Who can really know where we’re going; the futurists, the edge dwellers and technology hipsters?

Egos and reputations are at stake, which makes people, who in their time gave us clarity and made sense of where we were, look further and further ahead, not for us this time but to cement their own reputations, their own place in history. They fixate on new worlds, where they can coin new phrases, name new movements and re-claim their place in media folklore. They change the language (For no other reason it seems than that’s what they feel the world expects of them) from social to collaborate to individual and so on.

I don’t have much time for them to be honest. As a user I’m loving living through the revolution and as a Marketer I’m busy trying to make sense of the changing world for our clients and helping them understand how their brand engages their customer across social media spaces.

And what will win through in the end. Which media will still be around when this revolution reaches it zenith? Well history also has a lesson to teach us about this too. New technology is only revealed in retrospect to be turning points in a revolution.

So we need to accept we’re as bound to get it wrong as we are to get it right, so move forward or be prepared to get left behind. Enjoy being part of history in the making, leave the future to the generations to come after us.

Thankfully our tool chests are brimming with tools to help us carve out rich seams of knowledge and understanding relating to our audience that feeds our strategic thinking. That’s not all, add to this the torrent of real time feedback being generated across social media spaces about our products and some would say we’ve never had it so good. How could we fail to build strong brands?

Sadly, the truth is many brands are over communicated and tragically miss their mark and that’s a real shame, because it needn’t be so.

Seth Godin, recently posted about the purpose of a book cover was to create maximum impact. Reading it I remembered looking at some old movie posters and thinking that one of the hardest jobs in the world, in my mind, is describing a 90 minute movie in one sentence without loosing any of the impact of the narrative. Talk about a tough gig, big respect goes to those guys!

The one that sticks in my mind (though there are many others) was the theatre poster for Platoon. An iconic image with the line, “The first casualty of war is innocence.” It worked on me and millions of other who were draw in to see it.

Distilling a message out of all that marketing data without losing its impact and relevance is something we’re going to need to become better at because space and time is tight in people minds.

Marketers need to become effective miners and sievers of data. They need to measure information against the essence of their brand and shake out the insights and meaning that enables them to reduce and purify their message.

The strongest brands have the simplest message.

I’ve planned a few focus group sessions in the past when I was part of the team that re-branded Frisp Crisps and I have to say I remember them as being interesting and generating some useful feedback, particularly that the crisps were considered as being quite ‘foody’ and filling, more than a snack. That fed into the decision that new ‘foody’ such as Buttered Jacket Potato & Mature Cheddar would fit with our customers’ perception of the crisp brand.

It was also useful to see them place packaging in order of perceived quality, heavy gauge paper type bags being clearly seen as a premium bag and the rather flimsy film packaging of own label brands being a value brand. This was all good stuff for the re-brand, and we felt some real insights into how people relate to products came out of those focus groups.

I can’t help thinking though that 80% of what came out of the focus groups was understanding we already had and that’s the crux for me really. We are taught that to understand we must ask questions which is all well and good but when we consider asking a question we’ve normally considered a number of potential answers and are looking for verification, it’s human nature to do so. Do some of the answers generated by focus group attendees therefore reflect what they think or what the brand manager thinks?

Like focus groups, social networks and communities enable us to observe and engage with our target audience. Some of the biggest brands in the world, Mattel being one, have embraced the principle idea that listening to what their target audience talk about (Manly themselves and their families) will deliver as yet undiscovered insights and prompt questions that the brand team have not yet thought of relating to their products and importantly about their target audiences lives. The community in question for Mattel is ‘The Playground’, a private community for the mothers of young children.

I’d argue that the anonymity of talking freely online empowers people to say what the truly think without the influence of our own ‘self awareness’, of wanting people to perceive us in the way we want to be perceived. This will reshape how we learn about our target audiences but will this replace traditional focus groups or market research? I think not.

Social media isn’t a new broom to make a clean sweep of traditional marketing metrics. It’s offers brand managers another dimension of metrics, that will keep our thinking honest and our minds focused on our audience.

 

Social Media Funnel

I’ve seen lots of social media maps, some good some not so good.

The problem is they sit there in lofty isolation, a sea of mostly unfamiliar names and quirky identities.  They are a secret cypher known only to social media cool kids it seems. These maps are not connected to the real world (The one in which hard pressed marketing professionals are fighting hard for their budgets and their jobs) in any recognisable way. We’re missing an opportunity here and, if we’re honest, being a little bit condescending to boot. Another thing, social media buzz words are such a crock! Real people don’t talk like that!

So here’s something all marketing and sales professionals understand, ‘The Funnel’. Everyone, more or less goes through the same process of Awareness (I have a need), Consideration (Evaluate the alternatives), Preference (The sum of looking and listening to arrive at a decision) and finally Action (Satisfying the need).

I though it might be useful therefore to visualise how a number of social media channels working together (The list isn’t exhaustive by the way) can help sign post people through the funnel to some meaningful action connected to your brand, product or service.

Of course there is always a note of caution. Social media channels have to be aligned to target audience, and that means you have to get inside the minds and lives of the audience and build the right channels. The “If you build it they will come” attitude to building social media channels wont work and will more likely damage your brand.

WHAT’S all the buzz around social media?

The explosion that is social media came about due to the convergence of three forces: people, technology and economics. People wanted to talk, and technology caught up to the extent that it became possible to connect to friends in real time using a multitude of devices. These are made affordable because the infrastructure is now in place making it easily accessible to the vast majority.

The easiest way to think of social media, I believe, is as a conversation that millions of people are having, one that’s growing louder as more and more voices join in. And guess what the topics are: they are talking about you, your brand, your product and your services.

This is no flash in the pan either; it’s a sea change that businesses have to get to grips with.

At no point so far have you seen it referred to here as a sales channel, but it can be. Companies, Dell for instance, have successfully developed a sales channel that uses social media channels to tap into its consumer base. Don’t rush to the phone and call your digital agency and ask for one just yet though. Dell spent years building trust and putting real people in the firing line to take on customer issues, being visible and saying, “Hey, we’re here and we’re listening.”

We are a discerning bunch who regularly use social media. We like to be informed, entertained but not, I repeat not, overtly sold too. The number of companies I see tweeting “I’m thinking up great ideas to promote my online store at www……….” Please, show me some respect, some originality, some idea that you know who I am and what I like.

I advise people to listen, listen, listen before they engage with social media. Discover where your customers are online. What tools do they use? Are they creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators or inactive in social media? Without this understanding you could invest time and energy in creating a forum and discover that your customers are predominately spectators who like to read but not contribute to online conversations.

Clever businesses are developing listening strategies that harvest feedback and provide fresh insights into what their target audience is thinking. They are talking with their audience, taking down the corporate wall and getting closer to the people who buy their products and use their services.

It is these companies, the ones taking social media seriously as a tool – opposed to a frivolous distraction their employees spend too long using – that will reap the benefits.

——- ENDS ——-

Declan Metcalfe is marketing director of Stokesley-based Better Brand Agency (www.betterbrandagency.com).

For more information about our Brand Graphic Design and Creative, Marketing, Social Media and Social Networking,  Web and Digital services please Contact the Better team.

The decline in advertising revenues coincides with greater availability and use of television-style content online and the growth of digital video recorders (DVRs) that allow users to skip adverts, putting even greater pressure on advertising revenues.  A report by OFCom found that up to 78% of DVR owners regularly used them to skip through adverts.

OFCom also found that online advertising continues to grow and Google have now announced that research undertaken by them has found that ads on its YouTube portal have a greater impact than those on television.

View the full article here avaible on Marketing Magazine website

Roughly 86% of respondents in a survey conducted by Locomotion Creative in Nashville say they expect social media to impact the way companies do business and generate sales. Additionally, 64% believe their competitors are probably incorporating social media into their strategic plans.

The survey, which explored awareness and usage of social media — including social networking, Wikis, podcasts, e-mail and blogs — was sent to Locomotion Creative’s opt-in e-mail distribution list.

“While not a scientific study per se, the survey gives us a reasonable and reliable snapshot of attitudes held by business executives about the growing importance of social media,” said S.A. Habib, founder of Locomotion Creative, a marketing firm. “It reinforces the fact that companies must continue to give increasing emphasis to social media as part of their marketing plans.”

Survey respondents also acknowledged the growing importance of social media beyond business communications. More than 80% said social media will impact the way colleges and universities deliver instruction, while 77% say it will impact the way they interact with family and friends.

Download the social media survey by clicking here.

Mobile marketing is set to take off as major brands look to invest in the platform over the next five years, according to an independent survey commissioned by O2.

The survey shows brands will have increased their spend on mobile marketing by 150% come 2013 and do not anticipate any impact on budgets as a result of the economic downturn.

The survey, which was carried out by Vanson Bourne in May this year and included marketing and IT directors at 100 leading brands, also found that the personalised nature of mobile marketing campaigns means they generate a higher response rate than traditional advertising.

Of those marketing directors questioned, 60% favoured mobile marketing because it was considered better for close targeting, especially in financial services advertising.

The use of mobile marketing is increasing with specific services gaining in popularity. Text-to-win competitions and text-to-call-back or email campaigns have increased in use by more than 20% each, while retail and financial services ads were judged the most popular mobile advertising areas.

SMS was used by nearly a third of all businesses interviewed, yet half of the marketers questioned who have yet to make use of mobile marketing campaigns claim they are concerned that their customers will view the text messages as spam.

Simon Dean, head of mobile media at O2 UK said there has “never been a better time for brands to engage with their customers via mobile”.

Dean said: “One in 10 of those we surveyed already think mobile marketing has saved their business at least £1m when compared to other marketing solutions.

“With more consumers than ever browsing the web through their mobile handsets, there is a significant and largely untapped audience for brands to target their customers directly.”

View full article and more related articles at http://www.brandrepublic.com/News/852401/Mobile-marketing-spend-rise-150-five-years/

Join Media Week editor Steve Barrett and news editor Tristan O’Carroll as they discuss the effect of the financial crisis on media with Google’s Mark Howe, ZenithOptimedia’s Steve King, the IPA’s Moray MacLennan and other leading names from the industry.

Click here to go to the download link.