We have recently built a social network – a community for sharing stories and support – for a CPG client. Our client had no ROI expectations and no comparable past experience. This was a completely new tactic, in a new medium, targeted at unquantified attitudinal goals. How would you benchmark this kind of activity?
Advertisers often struggle over what benchmarks to use or whether benchmarks are even relevant. Here’s what we did to provide accountability and justify the expenditure.
It is an unfortunate but understandable reality that while we often marvel at digital projects that spread like wildfire across the web, we rarely get a chance to look at the numbers behind them. Between January and May, we built, launched and monitored Jerzify Yourself (warning: sound on autoplay) to get just such a glimpse into the dynamics of spreadable content.
The results from our location-based social network poll are in. We asked the question, “Why do we check-in?” And overwhelmingly, the answer is to accumulate social currency, read insider tips, and compete to be #1.
With YouTube now seeing 2 billion video views per day, Twitter producing 2 billion tweets per month, Facebook users spending over 500 billion minutes per month, and Foursquare adding 15,000 new users per day, there’s no doubt that Social Media is here to stay. And brands have embraced it as an important part of their overall marketing mix.
But brands must be careful when engaging within the social web to avoid what seem like common sense mistakes (yet they continue to still be made). I wrote an article for Business Week that describes 5 social media marketing mistakes: Continue reading »
Last month, I blogged about the differing “social voices” on Twitter and how different brands use the popular microblogging service across a spectrum of objectives. As a follow-up to that post, I wanted to re-affirm Twitter’s importance to social media marketing and address the commonly asked questions around Twitter’s “ROI” and social media measurement.
In February, Twitter announced that it is seeing more than 50 million tweets per day and climbing. The fact that 2007 daily tweet volume was .000001% of what it is today (5,000 tweets per day in 2007) and Twitter now averages 600 tweets per second is further evidence of the platform’s explosive growth and usage.
What’s the opposite of “jumping the shark?”
“Taking the leap,” maybe?
Whatever it is, that’s what’s mobile just did. After years of false starts and lofty predictions that didn’t come true, mobile is clearly here and now.
The iPhone and other smartphones (or “App Phones,” as David Pogue calls them) have certainly driven this shift, but a very interesting trend is quickly taking shape in the less glitzy realm of “dumb” phones.
Here’s an interesting data point that rolled through the blogo-twitto-sphere last week. Zappos.com plans to have ten full working video studios by the end of 2010, bumping the number of product videos on the site from the current 7,000 to around 50,000.
