Social Media is the hottest topic in marketing circles right now and many businesses are feeling pressured to get involved with social outlets such as Facebook, MySpace or Twitter. Small wonder — eMarketer is reporting that social media has reached the tipping point, with more than half of all U.S. internet users now frequenting social spaces in a typical month.

So at least half of us can now be found hanging out on social networks. Should marketers be there too? Absolutely, notes eMarketer, channeling the results of a February 2010 survey by Chadwick Martin Bailey, a market research firm. According to their data, 33% of U.S. Facebook users have become fans of brands on the network.

And plenty more social network users are talking about brands online. Whether it’s good news or bad news, if it’s hot it spreads in milliseconds across the social networks.

An unfortunate example? On September 26 2009 Kraft Australia launched its glorious new line extension to the iconic Australian Vegemite brand. Vegemite iSnack 2.0 was launched in the quarter-time adbreak of the Australian Football League Grand Final (roughly equivalent to the Superbowl in terms of national sporting importance) down under.

Before the adbreak was even over, tweets of death were resounding across Australia and thence across the world:

NO! Vegemite cream cheese product CANNOT POSSIBLY be called “Vegemite iSnack 2.0″. Bad joke or most epic FAIL in FMCG branding history” - tweeted by downesy

I said “do you speaka my language?” She just smiled and gave me an iSnack 2.0 sandwich. #vegefail – tweeted by jmappellekim

On the rather more positive side, a recent Nielsen/Facebook joint study showed significant uplift in Advertising Recall, Awareness and Purchase Intent amongst those brands “liked” in Social Media.

Nervous yet? Worried about your brand? Or just eager to take advantage of the added value if fans ‘love you’ socially?

It’s time to upskill yourself on social media — it’s too late to be an early adopter, but now would be a good time to start getting yourself socially adept.

For many marketers, however, the social media space is fraught with danger. Recent studies have shown that marketers have three basic fears about social media — and those fears can be crippling (on a professional level if not personally) if the right actions aren’t taken to deal with the problems.

Author and marketing specialist Michael Carney has put together an ebook on “Marketers’ Fears About Social Media (and how to overcome them)”, based on the Social Media Marketing course he’s been running for the past few months.

It’s available free of charge from www.MarketersFears.com, and it’s already attracting attention (and praise):

• “amazing and awesome”
• “That’s the best looking social media document I’ve ever seen”
• “love the comic art”

Michael has made the ebook available at no charge to our readers. Simply go to http://MarketersFears.com and organise your copy.

Tags: course, ecourse, Facebook, fear, learning, Marketing, myspace, social media, tipping point, twitter

Farmville, the scourge of Facebook, is coming to the iPhone & iPad. Farmville is a runaway phenomenon on Facebook, chalking up more than twenty million visits every day as users flock there to harvest crops and feed animals.

Now a large chunk of that misplaced attention threatens to migrate to the iSuite. Be afraid.

Tags: Facebook, Farmville, iPad, iPhone

Latest development on the paid content front, as news sites around the world consider locking away their content behind paywalls: BBC News (the website) is planning to flag (but not exclude) links that go to paid content.

Here’s the official word from BBC News web editor Steve Herman:

“As the [UK] Times moves into online subscription and others consider the options … there is likely to be a changing landscape with some sites and stories behind paywalls, some not, and some which are in between – a certain number of visits or part of an article free, all depending on the user’s individual circumstances.

“Some said they’d like us also to flag links which require subscription if you follow them.  That is broadly the direction we are going in. We will, where practical, aim to tell you if the link is going to a subscription site. Our automated Newstracker module, for example, should be able to do this and already signals when registration is required.”

What’s of particular interest is that the Beeb is actually planning to link to paid content with a caveat, rather than simply ignoring stories that aren’t freely available.

In the past, the few paid content providers that have existed out there (in particular, the Wall Street Journal) have often been excluded from news aggregators and search engines such as Google because their content hasn’t been readily accessible.

If this new BBC News policy becomes a new standard for online linking, the whole dynamic of paid content will become much more viable: instead of losing public awareness by switching to paid content, news sites will remain linkable (and thus able to benefit from passing mention in other articles) as well as searchable.

What, we wonder, will Google do?

Tags: BBC, new paradigm, online news, paid content

Chief Marketer recently released results from its first survey on prospecting and lead generation, conducted at the end of 2009, which asked 1,000 U.S. marketers about their strategies and tactics for turning up sales prospects this year.

As is often the case (though not always wisely), almost half of the respondents (48.6%) said their main customer aim in 2010 will be to generate new leads, although one quarter of the response said they will concentrate on retaining the ones they’ve got.

Two-thirds of respondents suggested that they concentrate more on customers’ lifetime value rather than attempting to make a profit out of them from the first transaction; this good intention was unfortunately philosophical rather than actual — more than half those interviewed don’t track customers’ lifetime value by channel, making it somewhat difficult to hold the focus on their avowed longterm goals.

WHAT OFFERS?
Discounts were the big lure in economy-ravaged 2009, with 92.2% of marketers favouring this as the most used prospecting offer. Amongst the drawcards planned for business-getting in 2010:

• 94.9% Information Content (eg White Papers, Webinars)
• 93.7% Extra Services
• 93.0% Free Shipping
• 92.9% Entertainment Content (eg ringtones)
• 91.5% Contests or sweepstakes
• 89.0% Discounts
• 88.1% Gift With Purchase

Whether marketers can actually hold themselves back from price-cutting in 2010 remains to be seen.

Asked specifically if higher-value incentives will be required in 2010 to bring in fresh prospects, almost half the survey said no — but neary a third hedged their bets and said the answer is still uncertain. Taken with the “yes” vote, that’s a large proportion of marketers who believe that finding new customers may get even more costly this year.

Online & Social Expected to Boom
When it comes to what they’ll do more of in 2010 to uncover leads, survey respondents are undoubtedly thinking social and online. More than half expressed interest in deploying Web strategies to draw prospects, and almost three out of five said they intend to pursue social marketing.

Overall, respondents are pretty equally interested in using social connectivity to define their brand image (51.7%) and in creating customer relations that may lead to sales conversions at a later date (50.3%).

Only about a third said they use social media as a tactic to drive traffic to their Web site, and only 13.5% said they market products directly in social media, whether through e-commerce or clickthrough ads or apps.

Those relative proportions hold for all revenue segments. But it’s interesting to note that a higher proportion of small companies (54%) are using social media in the hope of turning friends or followers into future shoppers.

Tags: discounting, lead generation, new business, prospecting

Sam’s Club, Wal-Mart’s warehouse chain, is now offering a program called eValues that strives to offer discount deals tailored to each member, based on that member’s buying history.

Previously, Sam’s Club coupons had a typical response rate of 1 percent or 2 percent. With eValues, according to Linda Vytlacil, vice president for member insights and innovation, as many as 20 percent to 30 percent of eligible customers collect the discount they are offered.

The eValues program is the latest iteration in the fast-growing field known as predictive analytics, which uses vast amounts of data to spot trends and anticipate consumer behaviour.

Datamining on this scale does enable companies to provide very real benefits to consumers (and to influence their buying behaviors by offering carefully-tailored deals).

However it does raise at least a couple of questions:

(a) would consumers have bought the products anyway (so operators are just giving away margins); and

(b) will consumer watchdogs raise significant privacy concerns?

Tags: datamining, discounts, eValues, loyalty program, predictive analytics, Sam's Club, wal-mart

The Sunday Times (UK) reported at the weekend (Registration Required — this is Rupert Murdoch’s new PAID newspaper site) that the sheer number of new internet-connected devices, such as smartphones and tablets, has sparked a desperate need for more infrastructure to support all this flood of data. The proliferation of high-definition video and the launch of the iPad mean that the volume of data traffic will go on soaring.

It might not feel like it, but the boom is still in its infancy. “Less than 1% of all video is watched online,” said Tom Leighton, co-founder of Akamai, whose technology helps clients such as Microsoft and Amazon dodge the traffic jams on the data highways. “In the coming years you are looking at a factor of 1,000 increase and a system that is already under stress.”

Tags: boom, infrastructure, iPad, online video, shortages, smartphones, tablets