To win with small businesses, it is do or die time
Media companies understand that to help transition their traditional media companies into the future, one of the ways to combat revenue erosion is to target a wider array of advertisers on their Web properties. And, one of the easiest ways to do that is to reach an audience that many traditional media companies haven’t been able to serve due to cost: small businesses. By now, many of you have explored opportunities in adding a marketplace section and/or business directory to reach small businesses. And at the AIM Group, we have spent a considerable amount of time over the past several years working with many of our clients to launch these products and successfully target these new advertisers through product launch support, sales training, and events. The concept for the media company is a win-win, bring low cost and targeted advertising to small businesses and deepen your relationships with them while also diversifying your advertiser base and growing revenue.
In an effort to put my money where my mouth is (yes, even consultants try to do that!), I’ve spent the past several months out in the field working with small businesses to understand their needs in online marketing, their strategies, their perceptions of traditional media and media Web sites, and worked with them to execute their plans. The effort has been truly eye opening for me. While I have been advising our clients correctly that they need to get a solid (and affordable) small business solution quickly, what I had not anticipated fully was how quickly social media (Facebook, in particular) can overtake the local newspaper site as the prominent source of leads and traffic for a small business.
The strongest objection I have been hearing in the field when discussing the local media site offering is “Why do I need them when I can use Facebook?” In some markets, small businesses have more fans on their Facebook page than the local media company, and it becomes harder to argue the point.
According to research by Econsultancy and bigmouthmedia, 86% of companies plan to invest more in social media next year, but are struggling to find the time and resources to manage their activity. Only one-fourth of companies say that they have gained “real, tangible value” from social media, whereas 60% say that they have gained “some benefit but nothing concrete.”
According to the Small Business Success Index, small businesses are steadily increasing their adoption of social media to attract and retain customers at a low cost. Their study shows that 45% expect social media to be profitable in the next year.
My research is showing that even the smallest of businesses in a wide variety of business categories can quickly become very savvy in engaging and attracting an audience. And, nearly any industry conference you see, from Chiropractors to Realtors to the Auto industry has sessions on social media that rank among the highest attended. And, in the markets that I’m studying, which are small rural ones, small businesses are flocking to Facebook at the rate of several per day.
A key difference for media companies to note between many of their sites and marketplace offerings and Facebook is the interactivity, the ability for businesses to directly publish to their audience. Can they do this on your marketplace section that you offer today? Do you publish their press releases, news updates and offers throughout your site in addition to the marketplace section to reach passive and active seekers for their business? What are doing to better support small businesses in your market? What are you hearing in your market? To learn more, comment here or drop me a line: shannonk@aimgroup.com, on Twitter: @shannonkin, or Facebook: www.facebook.com/shannonkinney
Australia: social media epicenter
We might seem a long way from the rest of the world on most conventional measures but Nielsen Online has found that Australia is the global center of the social web universe, with the average Aussie spending an average of seven hours a month on social networking sites.
Nielsen, which attempted to measure the average time spent on social media, found that two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visited social media sites and that the global average for time spent socializing on the web was 5 ½ hours. It also found that time spent on social network sites was growing rapidly – from one in every 15 minutes in 2008 to one in every 11 now.
“Social networking has become a fundamental part of the global online experience,” said John Burbank, CEO of Nielsen Online.
The news had the country’s academics theorizing as to just why Aussies are spending so much time socializing on the web.
Distance is a tyranny in this country,” Mike Minehan, a communications lecturer from the University of Technology Sydney’s Insearch college told Britain’s Daily Telegraph.
“There’s a subconscious drive in Australia to step outside this isolation we find ourselves in. I think that’s what’s driving it here, the desire to be part of the world and not to be an insignificant island nation in the southern hemisphere.”
The good news for businesses with a strong social media presence is that Aussies are also spending an increased amount of time engaging with brands while they’re doing their socializing, with the number of people interacting with social media advertising rising by 60%. Aussie users are also increasingly using social media outside of the home or office, with one-in-four accessing via their cell phones.
“The opportunities for brands and companies to tap into the social media phenomenon are really just beginning to emerge and to date we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg,” said Melanie Ingrey, research director for Nielsen Online.
Who needs any more convincing that a social media plan is essential to any growing business.
Social media redefining advertising: More from OMMA Global
SAN FRANCISCO — “Welcome to the post-advertising world.”
That’s how Laura Lang, CEO of Razorfish / Digitas Group started her speech last week during the OMMA Global conference here. To illustrate, she described a Mattel campaign to freshen up an iconic image: Barbie.
Mattel gave Barbie a Twitter account (http://twitter.com/barbiestyle), a blog (http://alldolldup.typepad.com/), a Facebook page and a YouTube channel. They gave her something she’d rarely, if ever, had — a voice. The result? Sales of Barbie dolls and products increased 20 percent last year, Barbie’s 50th birthday.
In describing the use of social media to a crowd of marketers and ad agency folks, Lang said, “Relevant marketing means a persistent and pervasive presence. It’s not just about campaigns.”
Other notes from the conference:
– Google’s vice president of product management, Neal Mohan, was bullish on the prospects for online display advertising, which he said is on the “verge of the biggest revolution in its history.”
Why so bullish? Technology is improving the measurement so that advertisers can look beyond the “click” at engagement, conversion rates and sales. At the same time, display has the potential to become the most creative form of online advertising, he said. “We are at the intersection of creativity and science. The possibilities are truly limitless.”
Google owns DoubleClick by Google, which runs a display ad network and provides creative services for online advertising.
– During a panel discussion about the health of the online advertising business, Jeetil Patel, managing director senior analyst, internet & interactive entertainment research for Deutsche Bank Securities Inc., predicted an upswing, but not in online classifieds.
In 2009, the online advertising spend in the U.S. was $23 billion, down 4 percent from 2008. Classified was down 12 percent. This year, Deutsche Bank is expecting a 7 percent to 8 percent increase in online advertising, but classifieds will be flat.
Aggregate page views continue to increase, and the resulting increase in available online advertising inventory will keep prices down, Patel said.
– Several speakers on a panel about mobile applications encouraged publishers to make sure their Web sites are optimized for the mobile Web before worrying about creating apps.
– Rich Silverstein, of the award-winning agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, gave a free-wheeling, irreverent speech lamenting the dumbing down of America. “We’ve got to make the content better. We must be good curators of the culture,” he said.
– Last year, Volkswagen marketed the 2010 version of its GTI by using a mobile game called Real Racing GTI. It didn’t buy any media — none, zip, zero, $0. The result: The game — available only from Apple’s iPhone App Store, became the number one download in 36 countries. Eight car sales were directly attributed to the game in the first week. So far, 175 sales have been attributed to the game. The cost per sale was reduced 97 percent. And 50 percent of the sales of GTIs were to folks who had never before owned a VW. The normal rate is 25 percent.
Light-speed change: Notes from OMMA Global
By Mark Whittaker
SAN FRANCISCO — I’m at the OMMA Global conference here in the City by the Bay, soaking up all kinds of comments and information about light-speed-changes in marketing and advertising.
Maybe I don’t get out enough, but I love coming to conferences like this because they’re usually full of really smart people with some really good ideas. But it took some time and thought to understand why a conference like this is important to AIM Group’s clients and potential clients.
Here’s why. Everyone here at this conference wants to help business — a.k.a. advertisers — make money. That description fits most of our clients, too. And the folks here at OMMA — probably a couple thousand because the conference registration was free — are hoping to learn about the newest and coolest tools to solve the advertising / marketing problem for their clients.
Not surprisingly, the main topics here are mobile and social media marketing. A few years ago I attended an OMMA conference in New York, and mobile marketing might have been the topic of one or two sessions. Now, nearly the entire conference is devoted to it. Although 2010 might not be the ever-ballyhooed “year of mobile,” it will be the year “that we’ll prove out the business model with case studies,” said Amielle Lake, CEO of Tagga Media, recently hired by Hearst to provide mobile marketing solutions for Hearst advertisers.
As far as social media marketing, Mark Kvamme, a partner in Sequoia Capital, said “If you can harness social media marketing, you don’t have to pay for advertising anymore.” It’s both a terrifying and thrilling notion for publishers.
Here are some more notes and comments from the first day of the conference:
How times have changed: Kvamme told his audience one of his favorite TV shows is “Mad Men,” but he’s never watched it on a television. He views it on his computer on his own time schedule.
Making the pie bigger: James Min, managing partner of Montgomery and Company, said that mobile marketing gives marketers a chance to actually grow their business instead of just taking share from one medium or another. It’s an ad spend that hasn’t been tapped yet.
From ethereal to solid: Min also said that mobile coupons are a way to connect the digital world to the physical world.
Whither the salesperson?: Purchasing advertising will become more and more automated and self-service, one panel agreed, but there will always be a need for a knowledgeable and helpful salesperson. They compared the growth in “commoditized advertising” to the financial services industry, where folks can buy stocks themselves if they want, but there are still a lot of salespeople. “There’s still value to help customers put together the right package. There’s a lot of opportunity add value even when you have real time bidding,” said Nick Johnson, vice president p of digital media sales at NBC Universal.
I’ll have more from the conference as time allows.
Social followers buy more from those they follow, says study
Research and consulting firm Chadwick Martin Bailey just announced the results of its recent study about social media usage, saying that Facebook fans and Twitter followers of particular brands are much more likely to buy from those brands, and to recommend them to others. Well, duh! The fact that 60 percent of Facebook fans and 79 percent of Twitter followers feel this way is much like saying that those who buy season tickets for the Boston Red Sox root for the team. What’s far more important to know is who convinced them to buy the tickets, and how.
Facebook and Twitter are great viral marketing tools, yes, but before these post and tweets start performing their viral magic for the companies, blogs, sites, services and products that are the subject of the social messages, someone has to be convinced to tweet, retweet and post. Or, if it’s the company itself doing the social networking, how they do it, and how often, are crucial. Telling business executives that they need Facebook followers and Twitter followers without guiding them about things such as the 80/20 rule (do you know what this is? If not, don’t post your profile until we tell you. Read on.) is like telling them to go make a first-time impression without teaching them the fundamentals of a good impression.
Oh, the 80/20 rule: 80 percent of the time you post to a social site you should be providing free help, information, entertainment, links and so forth; anything self-serving should only make up 20 percent of all your posts.
On this topic, we’re delving right now into the results for auto dealers of their social media efforts. Watch for the helpful tips in an upcoming CIR.
Social media, essential to your reputation
Social networking has been hot for quite some time, and sites and companies have been doing it awhile without clearly understanding why, or how to determine what they’re getting out of it. Now the prevalent question is, “What is the ROI on social media, and how do you gauge it? One public radio station, however, offers another reason for social networking, in its article on the NPR site.
Seattle, Wash.’s KPLU says that ROI or not, social networking is crucial to your company’s reputation; that many companies are hiring social networkers who do nothing but interact with customers, and try to resolve complaints before they end up as a virally-reposted bad rep on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and so forth.
As an example of what can happen, the article, “Social Media Gets Down to Business,” talks about guitarist Dave Carol, a recent passenger on a United Airlines flight.
“Somebody noticed they were throwing guitars around and one of them turned out to be his. And he wrote a song about it and posted it on YouTube because United wasn’t getting back to him.” According to the NPR piece the YouTube video of Carol’s song has been watched more than eight million times. United Airlines suffered from a lot of bad press as a result.
While the article doesn’t totally resolve the issue for companies too small to hire a team of social networkers, it does offer some tips on what these staff members are doing. It also makes it clear the kind of damage control social media can mean for a business.
Social media needn’t all be a reactive tool, however. It can help build your company’s goodwill and good branding as well as prevent customer complaints from bad press. That doesn’t take a team of social networkers. If all you can do is set up alerts for what is being said online about your company, join LinkedIn, set up a Facebook fan page and ask your staff to tweet, you’re farther ahead than a lot of media groups. This is especially noticeable with newspapers, many of whom, rather than being out there on major social networks responding to the “death of newspapers” or other bad press about their products, let these posts and tweets go unanswered and talk among themselves about what they should do.
I’ve been watching – and commented once – in a LinkedIn discussion in the Newspaper Professionals Group. The question posted was “How do we get out of the mess we’re in?” So far there have been 110 responses. I can’t tell you all that was said because I stopped reading quite some time ago. What’s interesting is that most in the discussion are not newspapers but industry vendors, consultants or educators. But there are some newspapers. In the time spent writing and reading these very wordy posts these newspaper folks could have each posted several times on Facebook, tweeted about their latest promotion, or product, or just about hot local news content their publication carried. They could have responded to alerts about what was being said about them good or bad. Instead they choose to talk (some would say whine) among themselves. And I want back through the posts today to see if anywhere a newspaper had said, “That’s a great idea. I’m going to try that.” No, there was / is none of that.
If you’re a media group, after you read this article, don’t talk to another colleague about how poorly things are going in your business. Take the time instead to do one social media something. Talk to your online followers. If you have no followers, find some. Follow what others are saying about you online, respond, and build your new reputation.
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