As I plow through coverage of the Consumer Electronics Show, I've found some useful research on the consumer electronics industry and the discussion around the show. Here are some of my favorite posts. Please share others in the comments or email any other submissions to me at marketersstudio (at) gmail. com.
* Salesforce Marketing Cloud reviewed the top conversations and hashtags to see what was buzzing and who was doing the buzzing. The presentation's below, and there's also some related data as an infographic.
* paidContent reports on TDG research showing that "Pay TV will shrink" for the first time ever (subtract points for the misleading chart that shows the Y-axis starting at 90 rather than 0; it's powerful enough without screwing up the bar chart)
Thanks to a heads up from Jeremiah Owyang, I was able to review Altimeter Group's new report, "Career Path of the Corporate Social Media Strategist," with enough time to share a few thoughts now that it's released.
Who should read it:
Anyone who is a social media strategist (especially at a large corporation), reports to one, has one reporting to them, aspires to be one, or plans on hiring one will get something out of this report.
What you'll get out of it:
This depends on your vantage point, of course. The best served here are hiring leads or those who have social strategists reporting to them. The "10 standards for hiring and managing your social strategist" offers the most actionable material for any organization.
Social strategists, again - namely those at larger corporations, will be most intrigued to benchmark themselves against the criteria in the report.
Who's underserved:
There's a lot of talk in here about corporations with plus or minus 10,000 employees. People who have social marketing roles at small to medium sized businesses may not be able to relate quite as well, especially if social is a large but not entirely encompassing part of their job. Also, as a social strategist at an agency, I couldn't relate to too much of the report in practice, but it does strike a chord with what I deal with at clients. Granted, agency social strategists may one day work on the client side, so it's still an important read in that regard.
Biggest relief:
100% of social strategists have Twitter accounts. Whew. Median number of followers is 745.5, so you don't have to be some social celeb to succeed here.
What's missing:
I was hoping that there were action items for the social strategist akin to the top 10 takeaways for hiring leads and managers. There aren't. Tough noogies, social strategists.
What stat should NOT be taken out of context:
The executive summary stated that 41% of social strategists were located in the marketing department. I was REALLY confused. That's it? I know social media's bigger than marketing, but come on. Then the report noted later that another 30% fell under corporate communications, which should be noted up front, as the two are too interrelated. If you cited the summary and said that only 41% of social strategists worked in the marketing department, you'd be accurate with the quote, but it's misleading. Looking at more of the data, other disciplines where the role can full include "web/digital," and "social media/social strategy," both of which often fall under marketing.
A false dichotomy?
The report spends a good amount of time looking at the career decision point where social strategists can take a proactive role to create scalable social business programs, or a reactive role where they become a "social media help desk." Clearly route A is very good and route B is very bad, but I'm not convinced the paths diverge that neatly. I'd be hard-pressed to imagine any social strategist who is so proactive that he or she anticipates every need before it arrives and allows every business unit to be entirely self-sufficient. There will always be new business units looking to do more than they are, even if the architecture for social strategy is well established, and there will always be new people joining these organizations. Being only reactive can clearly be detrimental, but being only proactive doesn't exist.
Parting thoughts:
There isn't enough written about the field, and this is a great resource. Altimeter interviewed some of the best people in the field. There's just a lot more to say about the subject, and a smaller subset of the audience that would be interested in the report will be especially well served by it leaving others more marginalized. Kudos to Altimeter for putting this out there and advancing the conversation about social strategists' roles.
Report: Career Path of the Corporate Social Strategist: Be Proactive or Become Social Media Help Desk
I just heard from Jeremiah Owyang, the Web Strategist blogger at Altimeter Group, that he's got a new report out on social CRM which he wrote with R "Ray" Wang. This is more of a preview than a review because while I had a bit of time to read it, I have not gone through it in depth.
I can say that helping marketers with social CRM is an increasingly important part of my job at 360i, and I know a lot of my colleagues will appreciate Altimeter's take on it. I'm sure I'll have more to say about it soon, but it's good enough that I am excited to read it, so that alone makes it worth sharing here. And the report's totally free on Slideshare, embedded below. You can also find the charts and images on Flickr.
LeeAnn Prescott, a longtime research analyst friend, is sharing some great research on social media. I've embedded her presentation below and shared a couple bullets from VentureBeat (there's far more there, where she's a regular contributor), and you can find more analysis on her Research-Write blog.
A couple highlights:
One in four (25%) US Internet page views occurred at one of the top social networking sites in December 2009, up 83% from 13.8% in December 2008.
Nearly one in 10 visits went to one of these sites in December 2009, versus 5.8% in December 2008.
Mint.com, the personal finance tracking suite that I'm a proud user (and ignorer) of, released a bunch of trends from the holiday shopping season. It's all one (really) long image that I've taken the liberty of embedding. You can find an even larger image here. There will be a press release on this Monday, but I like the pictures better anyway, and they did a nice job with it.
My one recommendation for them: include these on Slideshare one by one too - might be easier to digest frame by frame and it's stjll embeddable, plus easier to share.
The really amazing thing here, to me at least, is how many new products made the wish list for 09. I'm curious if the hype on tablets and 3D tvs lasts long enough to carry over to the end of the year.
On top of writing a weekly column, contributing to Ad Age, and posting at 360i’s Digital Connections blog, I’ve had another side project that’s kept me – and quite a number of my colleagues – busy over the past couple months. Today, my agency 360i released its Social Marketing Playbook, a comprehensive guide for how marketers should consider strategically approaching social media.
We’ve been keeping this under wraps for a bit, so now that it’s out, I really want to know what you think. You can comment here, blog or tweet your thoughts, of just email me privately – dberkowitz @ 360i . com. The last thing I want is for this to be a bunch of 360i people talking to ourselves.
Read 360i’s blog post on it at http://blog.360i.com/social-media/playbook or just download it directly at www.360i.com/playbook .
It’s a long read, but if the subject is relevant to you, I hope you’ll find it interesting.
Update: It’s now on Scribd so you can embed it if you’re so inclined:
Thanks to Forrester’s Jon Symons (@jysmons) for getting this to me, after I shared a grainier version in covering Shar VanBoskirk’s keynote. You might want to save this version.
Technorati Tags: FMF09,Forrester,Forrester Marketing Forum
I've been meaning to post this for awhile, hence using January data from a February Compete.com blog post, but after someone was asking for my take on naming their social network, I wanted to see if there are certain patterns that jumped out. There definitely are, and I share them in the brief presentation below.
The top 25 social networks predominantly use names that are newly formed compound words like Facebook and MySpace (36% of the 25), real words like Twitter and Classmates (28%), and made up words (not appearing in dictionary.com) like Bebo and Ning (24%). There's a fourth category of names that are based on real words or are homophones - namely Friendster, Flixster, and Hi5 (12%).
What's also interesting to see is that social networks based on new compound words accounted for 66% of unique visitors and 88% of traffic in January. This is really more of a power curve / long tail effect.
Lastly, the biggest reason I sat on this and am not making this some big agency white paper is that the it's more of a human interest story. There aren't any brilliant take-aways here. If you're creating a social network around flowers, there is no reason that naming it TulipLane (a compound name) will make it fare any better than Tulips (real word), Wackachooku (made up word), or TwoLips (homophone). It's just a different way to look at something we tend to talk about quite a bit, whether the we means social media practitioners or Internet users.
Your feedback's welcome, especially as I may update this down the road or look at it from another lens if there's more to get out of it.
Today, BLINQ Media just released a new white paper that’s very academic (read: you need a high school education to read it) but still accessible enough for marketers invested in marketing through Facebook and other social media channels.
I’ll share some highlights below, but it’s important to note that this is a first step. This shouldn’t be seen as universally applicable to all Facebook applications and social media campaigns. The data is from a single application developer, albeit one that recorded 9.1 million users and 117 million actions. Data for gender and ages should vary based on the nature of applications, and much of the data should stem from the nature of this application.
It is a good start though. Produced in conjunction with the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative, it gives a snap shot of application power users and the lifecycle for application usage. Consider the graph below, available on Flickr, showing precisely how the small number of power users on the right side account for most of the interactions:
Other report highlights, from the press update:
A small percentage of the users accounted for a large percentage of the activity. For example, only 6% of the users were responsible for 56% of the activity.
Not all users are in the 18-24 age bracket as assumed: The top 50% of high activity users of the social media app were 32 or older, while the lower app activity users were predominately 32 and younger (80%).
While females represented the largest group of application users (73%), 54% of the men were more likely to be heavy app users.
The majority of users (70%) took over 30 days to respond to a gifting request. Acceptance activity picked up after 30 days and continued until 132 days later.
Research firm Compete published slides highlighting major 2008 trends. The slides are downloadable, and I've embedded them below. You can go to Slideshare and download them if you're registered.
A few highlights from the research:
Google captured 68% of the 116 billion search queries (the total breaks down to 9.67 billion monthly).
Google's searchers are also the most loyal, with the majority sticking with Google for all their searches.
The top 1,000 media sites totaled 2.1 trillion pageviews in 2008; 85% of those pageviews went to social media sites.
Social media sites commanded 79% of the 9 billion hours spent at the top 1,000 media sites.
David Berkowitz is Chief Marketing Officer at agency MRY. A frequent speaker and media pundit, he has been published hundreds of times in MediaPost, Ad Age, eMarketer, Mashable, and elsewhere. Get to know him in the links below the blog's header.
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