FREEDyourMind

ACSI Results: Google & Fox Rule, Facebook and HuffPo Flop

Today is the release of the annual American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) E-Business report, which includes measures for social media websites, portals, and search engines. You can download ForeSee's commentary about the scores on our website.

Here's a quick infographic you can use with winners and losers; all scores are listed at the end of the post.

 

Social Media

Let's talk about social media first. Facebook's customer satisfaction score was up a bit, but still very low (66 on the ACSI's 100-point scale). This should be really scaring Facebook right now with the advent of Google+. Studies show that customer satisfaction (as measured by the ACSI) predicts sales, loyalty, and recommendations. If Facebook was sitting pretty with a customer satisfaction score of 80 or higher, I think it would be almost impossible for Google+ to break through that. It's hard to switch a social network--you have to reconnect with everyone, post new pictures, figure out a new interface... if everyone was happy with Facebook, there would be no reason to do it. But a score of 66 is just plain bad...which leaves the door wide open for Google+ to waltz through and steal market share from Facebook.

The other big news in the social space is that MySpace.com dropped out of the Index this year because we couldn't even get enough surveys to get a statistically significant sample, underscoring the widespread talk of MySpace's declining market share.

Search and Portals

I feel good about Google's chance to come in and possibly even own the social space with Google+, but in portals and search, Bing is making some serious inroads. I said before that if you are satisfying customers, you don't need to worry about people leaving, and that's true. Google search has a customer satisfaction score of 83, an excellent ACSI score by any standard. But Bing made huge improvements this year, and jumped from 77 to 82, just one point behind Google. Bing has built-in market share because it is the search engine on all Microsoft properties and partner properties. And while people are unlikely to go looking for a competitor if Google is meeting their needs (which it appears to be doing), they will undoubtedly run in to Bing and it seems to be basically as good after just a year in the market.

Online News

Foxnews.com has only been in the Index for two years and has topped the news category--by a lot--both years. This year we added HuffingtonPost.com for the first time, and it came in at the very bottom of the ACSI with a score of 69, the second-lowest score in the e-business category, behind only Facebook. When asked what people liked and didn't like about the site, the most frequent complaint was related to layout and navigation.

What's interesting to me is that in the news category, you have two sites that are basically designed for and frequented by "true believers" and they are at the top and bottom of the Index, although you could definitely argue that MSNBC.com is intentionally trying to be the anti-Fox for the left, and they are right in the middle. These news outlets and websites are clearly meeting user needs and expectations with a pretty wide variety of success. 

Here are all the scores reported today, and you can get much more complete analysis here.

 
We have a lot more data we haven't shared yet--the truth is that the turnaround time is pretty tight and so we analyze the basic ACSI numbers first and then go back and look at some of the other data we collected. Eric Feinberg, a director at ForeSee who has a ton of experience and knowledge about content, media, and entertainment sites like these will be guest blogging in the coming weeks about some of the other findings. We have some interesting data on how customers perceive ads that I'm looking forward to digging into a bit more.

Top 100: Social Media

Here is more information from our Top 100 Online Retail Satisfaction Index released earlier this month. Today's topic is social media.

Social media is turning out to be a touchpoint with enormous potential for satisfying shoppers and building loyalty and relationships. When we study our own clients using our Social Media Value Calculation, we see that social media has little direct impact on web traffic. In fact, in our most recent Social Media Value Calculation benchmark we saw that only 1% of site visitors came direct from a social media site.  However, 18% of the site visitors indicated that social media was an influence on their visit to the website. When applying this methodology we are able to attribute how much revenue is influenced by social media, helping companies truly understand the return on investment for their social media marketing efforts and also the value that the viral effect of social media is having on their business.   

Back to our Top 100 Online Retail Satisfaction Index.  First, when customers rate their satisfaction with various touchpoints, they are actually more satisfied with their interactions on Facebook and Twitter than many other customer touchpoints, including the website!

 
 

What social sites are most e-retail shoppers using? No surprise here. Facebook.

 

But where do they want to hear from retailers? 42% don't want to hear from retailers at all on social sites.

 
42% of survey respondents say they don't want to interact with retailers on social sites, but the next question indicates that only 29% aren't actually interacting with any retailers, which mean there are some people who SAY they don't want to interact with retailers on Facebook who are already doing so. That's why it's important to have a methodology that dig a little deeper. In fact, 69% of online shoppers are interacting with at least one retailer on social networks. This is a huge growth area for retail, and as people begin to be able to make purchases on Facebook and other social sites, understanding how this experience is impacting first-time and loyal customers will be critical.

 
 
Most people choose to friend, follow, or like a retailer on a social site to learn about sales, special offers and products. Very few do so for customer support. Understanding what your customers are coming to your site for can help you with the content on your social pages.

We also see that more than half of those who are interacting with a retailer on a social site have made a purchase because of it. Wow! This is a real testament to the power of those offers you're posting on your Facebook pages and Twitter accounts.

 

One final point of data related to the value of social media. We always ask about customer acquisition sources, and there are some major shifts year-over-year.

• Internet advertising and traditional media are both way down as a driver of traffic to websites.
• Social media, along with email marketing, are both way up.
• Company familiarity is also up (and could be due to more exposures/touch points on social media).

This data tells me we need to be doing a better job, as an industry, getting at the real value of social media.

Online Banking in the UK

We've been studying satisfaction with online banking in the U.S. since 2003, and this year we did our first study of customer satisfaction with online banking in the UK. For this study, we did more than 1000 customer surveys of customers of the top 5 consumer-oriented retail banks in the UK: RBS, Lloyds, Barclays, HSBC, and Santander. 

Despite 2+years of tumult in the global banking industry, customer satisfaction with online banking in the UK is fairly high, and customers are very satisfied with the top five banks (on aggregate they score 80 – generally considered the threshold for excellence on the study’s 100-point scale). Within the top five banks, the range of scores varied from 77 at the lower end to 82 at the high end indicating close competition between the top banks.

This surprised me--how can satisfaction be so high when so many banks and financial markets are in trouble? I think the answer lies in the online channel. Banking websites still have an amazing ability to connect with and satisfy customers even  faith is not high overall. Customers are able to have a satisfying and fulfilling online banking experience despite what's going on in the markets. This is great news for banks, because it means there is a channel that works and works well.

We can't compare satisfaction year-over-year in the UK (yet), but we can compare between UK and U.S. In other industries we study, there are much larger gaps in satisfaction between the U.S. and UK markets, but in online banking, it's only 3 points (this is comparing top 5 UK banks to an aggregate of satisfaction with all U.S. banks).

 

Another way to get some context around the number is to compare online industries. The next chart shows how satisfaction with online banking compares to satisfaction with online retail, both in the UK. You can see there is quite a gap, and where satisfaction is higher, financial returns are higher.

 

 Other key findings:

• Adoption of mobile banking is slow. Of survey respondents with a mobile phone, only 15% are aware of mobile banking apps or mobile sites for their bank (by my count, only 2 of the top 5 banks in the UK even havean m.mobile site--Barclays and HSBC--and even those do not appear to have apps. The other three (Santander, RBS, Lloyds) don't have either. Whatever the reason, only 10% of respondents are using their mobile phone to bank.
• UK customers prefer to hear from their bank through the post. When asked their preference for communications from their bank, 42% said they prefer post, 38% prefer email, 11% prefer the website, three% want text messages or mobile alerts, and only five% said they don’t want any communications at all.
• UK customers are not inclined to get social with their banks.When asked if they would like to friend, follow, or like their bank on social media sites like Facebook, 97% said no.
• There is a clear relationship between satisfaction and frequency of website usage. Customers who access their banking website roughly once a month report satisfaction of 71, while customers who access their banking website more than once a day report satisfaction of 89. 
• UK customers prefer the website to other channels by a huge margin. When asked which channel they are most satisfied with, 70% said the website (17% said the branch, 10% said the cashpoint, two percent said the call centre, and one percent said mobile banking).

Feel free to use these infographics or leave questions in the comments.

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.