Inside the Marketers Studio - David Berkowitz's Marketing Blog

What’s Your Take on 360i’s Social Marketing Playbook?

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:

360i Social Marketing Playbook

Forrester Marketing Forecast: 2008 to 2014

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

WhatsIn AName? Social Network Naming Conventions Revealed

Image via Wikipedia

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.

Social Network Naming Conventions

View more presentations from David Berkowitz.

BLINQ Media White Paper Questions Social Media Myths

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.

Compete's Major Trends of 2008 for Online Media and Search

Image via Wikipedia

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.

Online Media 2008

View more presentations from CompeteBlog. (tags: search 2008)

BlackBerry for President: Obama, BlackBerry Vie for Search Popularity

After reading yet another story about President-Elect Obama's love for his BlackBerry, I had to check how the search trends fared. While Mr. Obama still remains in control of the news cycle (see the news mentions in the bottom part of the chart), his search popularity is less consistent than the mobile device. Looking at only the US for the past 30 days in Google Trends, searchers in New York and New Jersey have been more partial to the BlackBerry, and Washington, DC skews the results toward Obama overall with what are undoubtedly inauguration-related queries.

Mobile Advertising for Newbies White Paper from Peggy Salz

Peggy Salz, a blogger friend who writes MSearch Groove, hands down the best blog about mobile search, just released a new white paper that's a great guide to mobile marketing.

It's called Mobile Advertising for Newbies, and while marketers new to the channel may gain the most out of it, I've been paying attention to mobile for a long time and focusing on it in a concentrated manner all year (running several campaigns for big brands along the way) and I learned a few things. You probably will too - just a hunch.

In the process, Peggy has also launched the Mobislim blog with additional resources.

Read about the white paper here, and or go directly to the download page at Bango.com.

And Peggy, I'll say this publicly so you can hold me to it - let's reconnect on that interview for the Search Insider.

Seven Buzz Monitoring Sites to Watch

Here's today's column, originally at MediaPost. I'll admit that this was an evergreen, one where I've been keeping tabs on these sites for awhile and wrote it up when I wasn't sure what else to cover this week. Fortunately it's also one of the more useful columns in terms of sharing tools marketers and others may want to use, so I hope at least one or two of the links here are useful for you. Share other favorites in the comments or email me at marketersstudio (at) gmail . com.

Seven Buzz Monitoring Sites to Watch
Posted June 3rd, 2008 by David Berkowitz       

       

What's the buzz on the latest and most improved buzz monitoring sites? Here's a guide to seven of the best, along with some of their peers and competitors.

In March, I reviewed eight search sites spanning a range of specialized subjects, including local, social, and mobile. Since then, I've been keeping tabs on dozens of innovators, many of which will be featured in future roundups. This week, we'll review some of the most useful and interesting tools that you can search for brand monitoring, competitive intelligence, and campaign planning, to name just a few ways you can use them.

Facebook

Facebook Lexicon: Lexicon is simply Google Trends for Facebook. Enter up to five terms separated by commas and find out the relative frequency of how often those terms appear on Facebook Walls, the public message boards on users' profiles. It doesn't work perfectly; try a search on "clinton" and then "hillary clinton" and you'll see that the two-word phrase returns a lot of missing spots. Still, Lexicon marks a first step to gauge some of the buzz on Facebook. For example, it shows that Yahoo closely trails Google and they spike at similar times, but there's not a lot of love for Microsoft. What you can't do is gauge the context of those mentions.

Twitter

Summize: In a column about searching Twitter several weeks ago, I mentioned Tweet Scan. Summize is another Twitter search engine with more functionality. Neither engine catches every post; routinely some will only show up on one or the other, so if you don't want to miss anything, check both. I'm generally more impressed with Summize, and Summize Labs offers even more potential. You can also use the "near:" modifier to narrow results to people writing from a certain zip code, like in this example for a search on Starbucks. One advantage for Tweet Scan is that it works better on a mobile browser, which comes in handy when you're at events trying to search for fellow tweeters.

Flaptor is another Twitter search engine, and given how it's hard to find one perfectly comprehensive resource, it helps to have options. The best part is that you can easily graph each search term, or you can go directly to its Twist trend tool. You can compare about as many terms as you can think of, though as you can see in this example of comparing ten terms, after a handful it gets hard to read all the lines on the graph.

Keyword Demographics

Quantcast: This measurement service isn't new, and I'm not sure how long this feature's been around, but you can track the demographics of searchers for a particular keyword. It's not readily accessible as a search option, so the easiest way to do it is to visit this link for the demographics of "weather" searchers and then replace "weather" with your keyword of choice. You'll see the estimated monthly unique searchers, and then U.S. demographic information for gender, age, household income, ethnicity, head of household education, and children 6-17 in the household.

Message Boards

BoardTracker: Much of this social media craze isn't all that new; people have been posting on online message boards for decades. BoardTracker offers a new way to search all those posts across thousands of niche message boards you've probably never heard of. You can also set up email alerts and other ways to track posts. New features appear regularly.

Twing: Yes, there's even competition among new forum search engines, and while I haven't used either extensively, I'm partial to Twing for its design and how easy it is to refine searches. It also has similar features to BoardTracker for saving searches and alerts.

Blogs

Trendpedia: Hardly the first blog search engine (see Technorati) or even the first one with comparative charts for blog buzz (see BlogPulse and IceRocket), it's the newest entry, and one that's been making rapid improvements. One convenient feature is that when you enter two or three terms to compare, it instantly shows a pie chart with the percentage of blog posts mentioning each term. Additionally, clicking anywhere on the graph opens up a new tab on the screen to see posts by date.

It's hard to say if any of those sites are better than the other, though BlogPulse has been the most neglected recently. There's still an opportunity for others to establish themselves with more intelligent tools, such as accurately gauging sentiment and noting how influential the blogs are that are doing the buzzing. Technorati has offered a filter of blogs by authority level, and Summize Labs offers Twitter sentiment analysis, but these just scratch the surface.

Of course, I'm greedy and want access to the most sophisticated, public-facing tools I can imagine, and these companies can't give away everything for free. Then again, if you check out Forrester's social technographics profile tool, you can get a sense of how much can be given away in support of the core business. In the future, we'll see more of what buzz monitoring innovators are doing to build buzz for themselves.

8 Ways Job Hunters Can Use LinkedIn's Company Profiles

One of the best job hunting resources just launched on LinkedIn: company profiles (thanks to the LinkedIn blog and Jeremiah for the heads up). It tells you so much information about potential employers that it can make your job research so much more productive. Here are seven ways to do it.

1. Check out the parent or subsidiary company, if applicable. Understand where a company fits in within the corporate hierarchy. Research them, and pay attention to similarities and differences. Consider applying to one of the other companies if it's a better fit, if you know someone better at another, or for any other reason.


2. See where people go before and after. It's not a perfect sample, as this only represents what people declare in LinkedIn, but the sample size is tremendous for many industries now. You can also see if you have friends at one of these other companies to see if they have any thoughts on why people are going to or from there, and you can also try to understand why there's a connection (eg an agency may be feeding lots of talent to a major publisher they do business with, or many of the people who came from another agency actually arrived via an acquisition).


3. Research the top locations. Would you be willing to relocate? If so, they may have different needs in different offices, or they may be trying to relocate some of their existing staff already. Use your flexibility as another asset.


4. View the popular profiles and Google them. They may be influential in the company or the industry, so whether or not you interview with them, you'll gain points dropping names that you saw them quoted, speaking at an event, or doing a drunken holiday party dance on YouTube.


5. View the common job titles. If you're open to such a position, whether or not they're hiring, it means there are more likely to be openings in that area.


6. Did you go to any of the top schools they hire from? Run an advanced search to see which people went there just in case you can meet them, name drop, or make a reference to a college sports team rivalry.
   
7. Consider employees' ages, median tenure, and common job titles, but the LinkedIn sample size, age of the company, and industry can all be major factors influencing this. Other suggestions on this list are more universal.


8. For singles, check out the gender split and median age. If they're young and disproportionately your preferred gender for dating, consider the job perks. If you're into younger women, consider a career in PR where you can choose from Burson-Marsteller (65% female, average age 29), Weber Shandwick (64%, 29), Porter Novelli (67%, 31), Edelman (65%, 29), Fleishman-Hillard (65%, 30), Hill & Knowlton (63%, 30), or Ogilvy PR (65%, 30).

Two postscripts:

1. If you're considering new opportunities, send your resume my way at dberkowitz [at] 360i [dot] com as 360i (my employer, albeit unaffiliated with this blog) is always looking for the best folks in the business to join in a number of roles. The fact that you're reading this blog means you must be brilliant, or you have brilliant friends who forwarded this to you. See our openings in New York and Atlanta.


2. Now that all of 360i's senior management will see this post in the news alerts, I'll note publicly I'm not using LinkedIn in any of the ways described above, though the company pages do fascinate me for corporate stalking.

Take SEMPO's Definitive Survey on Search Engine Marketing

SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, wants people involved with SEM to take its 4th annual State of the Market survey. Marketers have come to eagerly await this, as it's the single most thorough resource on SEM trends that any firm puts out, and the past few years it has kept getting better in regards to the depth and breadth.

From SEMPO:

Why should you take the survey?
 

• Taking the survey will actually stimulate you to think about the    resources you devote to SEO and paid search - which is a valuable exercise    in itself.
• First dibs - you will receive the preliminary survey results before    they are released to SEMPO's membership.
• Support the SEM industry - this survey is highly regarded as a valuable    resource for the industry.
• 10% discount to Sprinkles Cupcakes with every five entries

Okay, the last bullet's mine, not SEMPO's, so don't hold them to it. The other three reasons are good enough.