FREEDyourMind

The Best and Worst of Facebook

As a follow up to the post I just put up with the latest #ACSI results, Lora Kolodony at TechCrunch gave us the idea to do a word cloud for some of the questions we asked in the survey.

We did some research that was complementary to the ACSI, and we asked people: what do you like best and least about Facebook (and the other companies as well). Here are the results:

What do you like MOST about Facebook? (Grab the Wordle here if you want to use it)

 

What do you like LEAST about Facebook? Grab the Wordle here

What's interesting is that people said "nothing" a lot when asked what they like best and least about Facebook. You can see that what people like best is really the connection. Almost all the words have to do with connection. When it comes to what people like least, the answers are more varied, but the most popular have to do with privacy, functionality, the newsfeed, advertising, navigation, and security.

What do YOU like best and worst about Facebook or any of the other social sites we measured?

Facebook Flops, Google Drops, FoxNews Mops Up the Floor with CNN

So you may have seen by now that the big #ACSI report on e-business was released today (hyperlink to http://www.foreseeresults.com/research-white-papers/ACSI-e-business-report-2010.shtml) with a bang.

We've been doing the analysis for the ACSI since 2002, and there is usually pretty big news in one of the measured e-business categories, but this year, there's a shakeup in all three.

First thing's first: social media. This is the first year the ACSI has measured social media, and what a debut. With an average score of 70, social media has the lowest industry aggregate score of any of online industries measured by the ACSI. Wikipedia leads the social media industry with a score of 77, and YouTube comes in at 73. Industry darling Facebook registers a score of 64, only one point above MySpace (63). Facebook and MySpace have scores so low, the only other companies measured by the ACSI with such low scores are airlines and cable companies. Facebook seems to be suffering from concerns about privacy, frequent changes to the interface, and advertising.

	2010
Social Media Aggregate	70
Wikipedia.com	77
YouTube.com (Google Inc.)	73
All Others	72
Facebook.com	64
MySpace.com (News Corp.)	63

As for News and Information Sites, the big news in this industry is the debut of FoxNews.com at the top of the heap with a score of 82, which is five points above nearest competitor USAToday.com (77) and well ahead of other cable news providers MSNBC (74) and  CNN.com (73). NYTimes comes in at 76. FoxNews registers the highest score ever received by any news organization in the ACSI.Our data shows the high score could be in part because their viewers are very loyal and don't follow as many different news sources as users to the other measured outlets. Therefore, their expectations may be a little lower, which makes them easier to satisfy. But whatever the reason for their high satisfaction, it is off the charts for a news site.  If I were Fox, I’d be using this data in my media kit, because high satisfaction leads to high return visits and loyalty, which means more eyeballs for ads on FoxNews.com.

The Portals and Search Enginescategory is usually a pretty stable in terms of who dominates the field: Google has been at the top every year but this year and in 2007 (when Yahoo slipped momentarily ahead). This year, the "all others" group beats Google, which is a combination of all the other search engines not mentioned by name in this study. This year, they tended to be niche search engines. Google itself had a 7% decline this year (down six points to 80). Bing was measured for the first time this year, and it made a strong first showing with a score of 77, second only to Google.

So what do you think:

• Can Bing actually compete with Google, even with all the power of Microsoft? Last year I would have said no; this year I think Bing might actually have a glimmer of hope.

• Does Facebook's low satisfaction score pose any danger for the company? Or like other perennially low scoring companies like airlines and cable companies, does it have enough of a specialized market that it can dominate despite low satisfaction?

• Why can't the other cable news channels come close to FoxNews.com's high satisfaction score?

I'd love to hear what you think in the comments...

You can download the free report here: http://www.foreseeresults.com/research-white-papers/ACSI-e-business-report-2010.shtmlor catch me on Twitter (@larryfreed) with any questions about the findings.

Yes, You Can Calculate ROI for Social Media Efforts

Know what you know. Know what you don't know. I say it all the time to the people who work at ForeSee Results. And while those of us using social media to market our businesses know A LOT about how well it's working, we have virtually no information about the actual impact of social media marketing on our bottom lines

• We know how many tweets mentioned us or our competitors (but we don’t know if the people who are mentioning us or reading about us are buying)
• We know how many “likes” we have on our Facebook page (but not if they are more likely to visit a store than non-Facebook fans)
• We know how many people visit and comment on our own blogs
• We know what our customers and prospects are talking about (but not whether chatter contributes to dollars)

In short, we can count, but we can’t measure how social media is actually driving revenue. As the saying goes (you may have heard me say this one or one thousand times), you can’t manage what you don’t measure.
 

But we think we've figure out how to understand the effects of social media on revenue.
 

ForeSee Results uses a scientific methodology created at the University of Michigan to measure customer satisfaction and assess its impact on future behaviors. Using this proprietary methodology, we’ve created a way to link what drives customers to a website, store or call center with what they spend. We can help businesses understand how much revenue is being influenced by social media versus traditional advertising, marketing emails, brand awareness and other factors. We call it the Social Media Value Calculation.
 

It looks like this: we find out what influenced a customer’s visit to a store, website, or call center. Then we find out how much that customer did or didn’t spend. For a brand website, financial institution, nonprofit, B to B, or other non-retailer where there is no purchase, we can tie what drove the customer visit to another valuable, business-specific outcome such as opening a new account, signing up for a newsletter, requesting more information, etc.

 

Linking these two pieces of data (what drove a customer to a site, store, or call center PLUS what they spent or did as a result) allows for a proprietary Social Media Value Calculation that can help you actually determine social media ROI. You can accurately compare what you spend on social media marketing against the direct revenue it generates.

 

You may find out that social media is a primary influencer of $38 million of your revenue. If you’re spending $1 million on social media, then you’re making a pretty good investment. Or you may find out that social media is influencing $12 million in revenue, and you’re spending $15 million in advertising your social media presence, in which case you have some realigning to do.

 

The point is that you don’t know until you ask your customers, measure, and run the analysis. Do it in a smart, thoughtful way using the Social Media Value Calculation, and your customers will tell you everything you need to know about where to invest to get the most traffic, purchases, and loyalty.

 

We have a slightly longer version of this blog post available for download on our website as an executive brief, and of course I'm happy to answer any questions in the comments.

 

So what questions do you have about how this works?

 

 

Social Media Strategy for Retailers

Get a Facebook page!

Okay, so that's not so much a strategy, really more of a tactic. But research we released today clearly shows the value of a Facebook page to retailers. Among our key findings:

• Facebook is, by far, the best place to reach shoppers—both because it’s where they already are, and it’s where they want to hear from retailers.
• 56% of shoppers to top e-retail websites who interact with social media websites have elected to "friend" or "follow" or "subscribe" to a retailer on a social networking site like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube
• Customers mainly interact with retailers on social media sites to learn about products and promotions (rather than for help or technical support)—a marketer’s dream come true.
• Half of the top 100 retailers have a lackluster or nonexistent social media presence. If you can't find a retailer's Facebook page by going to Facebook and searching for their name, or if they are a top 100 retailer and have fewer than 10,000 fans... they aren't maximizing the value of this marketing opportunity.

Your customers want to interact with you! Make sure you're giving them what they want and that they can find you. And make sure you understand the needs of YOUR customers rather than industry trends (you know, like the one we're reporting in this research), because we see huge differences in preference and satisfaction from one retailer to the next.

Social Media Segments

Social Media, the often talked about and yet still very gray and fuzzy area.  Wikipedia defines Social Media as follows:

"Social media is online content created by people using highly accessible and scalable publishing technologies. At its most basic sense, social media is a shift in how people discover, read and share news, information and content. It's a fusion of sociology and technology, transforming monologues (one to many) into dialogs (many to many) and is the democratization of information, transforming people from content readers into publishers. Social media has become extremely popular because it allows people to connect in the online world to form relationships for personal, political and business use. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM)."

So, using wikipedia, a form of social media, to define social media.  Hmmmm...
This is a very broad definition and many things will fall underneath this definition. What should marketers do about social media?  The first step is to add some segmentation to the definition.

I would categorize social media into 3 areas:

1. Controlled Social Media: This is sponsored content within your own domain. This includes content that is sponsored by the company (site owner) such as interactive customer reviews on your own website, company blogs, etc.You can oversee and moderate this type of environment.
2. Sponsored Social Media: This is sponsored content outside your domain.  A company Facebook, Twitter page, YouTube channel, or a LinkedIn group are good examples.  You are in control of the messages in this segment of social media.
3. Viral Social Media: This is non-sponsored content outside your domain.  This is the category that keeps us all up at night--the comments and blog posts people are making about us  and the discussions that our customers are having about us  They are having them everywhere and we have no control over what is being said and what is being read.  We can try to monitor it, but we cannot control it.

The Controlled Social Media segment and the Sponsored Social Media segment are marketing driven.  Some efforts have been successful and although we have better ways to measure and manage these segments, many are still struggling to understand the value and impact these efforts have.

The Viral Social Media segment is out of our control.  Some have figured out how to monitor it and some have figured out how to count it.  But very few have figured out how to measure the impact it has and the value it provides us.

It is important as you move more down the social media path, you understand the difference between the three segments and adjust your plans, objectives and measurements to take into account all three segments.

What Drives the Best Quality Website Traffic?

Our new VP of Retail Strategy, Kevin Ertell (well, I guess he's not so new anymore) has a white paper out today about what kinds of customer acquisition sources drive the best traffic to retail websites. He did this analysis based on our Top 100 research, where we survey about 23,000 visitors to the top 100 retail websites (by sales volume).

The short answer? There is no short answer! You have to look at what drives the most traffic and what drives the best traffic. In the chart below (and in the white paper, available on our website as part of our Top 100 research), you can see which customer acquisition sources drove the MOST traffic (familiarity with the brand, promotional emails, advertising, word of mouth) and which drove the BEST traffic, meaning that it drove visitors who are more likely to buy (online or offline), recommend, and return to the site.

What most influenced your decision to visit the site?	% of respondents	Satisfaction	Likelihood to Return	Likelihood to Purchase Offline	Likelihood to Purchase Online	Likelihood to Recommend
Brand
Familiarity with site/company/brand	32%	77	84	66	76	79
Email Marketing
Promotional e-mail(s) from the company	13%	75	83	61	74	77
Advertising
Advertising: internet	12%	72	74	60	70	72
Advertising: TV, radio, newspaper, magazine	9%	72	75	65	69	73
Advertising: social networks	1%	66	67	63	67	67
Word of Mouth
Word of mouth: recommendations from someone I know	8%	74	79	58	73	77
Word of mouth: recommendations from a social networking site	3%	74	77	61	72	76
Word of mouth: product review website(s)	2%	71	74	65	70	72
Word of mouth: blogs or online forums	1%	67	72	52	67	69
Search
Search: search engine results	9%	69	71	55	66	70
Search: Link from a shopping comparison site	2%	67	70	55	66	68
Other
Couldn't find what I was looking for in one of its stores or catalogs	4%	68	73	67	66	69
Had a gift card I wanted to redeem	2%	70	75	60	71	71
Mobile phone text messages or alerts	0.3%	63	64	62	68	65

Kevin explores the value of social media customer acquisition sources and comes to the conclusion that while there is a lot of potential, they are still not the end-all-be-all you might think they are based on how much we talk about them.

The chart above represents aggregate data from the top 100 e-retailers. Tell me in the comments how you evaluate the quality of different acquisition sources? Have you integrated clickstream and satisfaction data so that you can compare and contrast traffic from specific sources? Tell us what surprised you most.

Where Do You Spend Your Time Online?

Nielsen Online recently came out with a survey showing that social media has eclipsed email in terms of where people spend their time online. Time spent on social networking sites now accounts for almost 10% of all Internet time (not from 9 to 5, right? Right!) and is growing twice as fast as any of the other four largest online sectors (search, portals, PC software and email),

1. Search : 89.5%

2. General interest (portals and communities): 85.2%

3. Software manufacturers: 73.4%

4. Member communities (social networks and blogs): 66.8%

5. Email: 65.1%

However, this may be another area where Nielsen has some blinders on about the importance of time spent. A 2008 study performed by IDC found that 43% of social network users never clicked on ads, and only 11% of those who did actually purchased anything.

So people are spending more time there, but how do you harness that fact and convert it into information that impacts the bottom line?

Our research of the top e-retailers consistently shows year-after-year and month-after-month that the two things that STILL drive the best quality traffic are 1) a previous satisfying experience with the brand and 2) email promotions. What do I mean by the best quality traffic? The people who are mostly likely to buy, return, and recommend.

Social networks are hugely important and becoming increasingly so. But 3% of online shoppers say that social media influenced their visit, whereas 28% were influenced by an email promotion and 40% by a previous satisfying experience with a brand. So, you know, keep it in perspective.

The Facebook Generation Runs For Public Office

I was talking with a colleague last week about what will happen in, say, 2030, when both candidates for president grew up in the era of Facebook and MySpace? We were talking about the indiscretions we see on teenagers' Facebooks: when they post ridiculous quotes and pictures of themselves doing beer bongs, they aren't thinking that a future employer might see it, much less someone in 20 years who would splash it all over the New York Times when they're running for President or Senate or governor.

There's a guy in our office who went to high school with Madonna (as he often reminds us). He has her picture in his yearbook and everything. Imagine if he could claim that she friended him on Facebook and written on his wall.

The Onion needs to get on this: creating hypothetical Facebooks for McCain, Obama, Biden, and Palin, had they had social networking technology as teenagers. What groups would they have been members of? How many friends would they have had? Actually come to think of it, why stop there? Let's see Facebooks for George W. Bush (talk about beer bong photos!), Dick Cheney (all the personal info would be blank, and his hometown would be "undisclosed location"), Condi Rice, Bill Clinton (relationship status would always be set to "single")....someone could have a lot of fun with this.