Interesting Social Media Trends - A Study

Social media trends indicate that online marketing is set to undergo a dramatic makeover. Businesses are increasingly integrating social networking websites into their marketing strategy. A recent study conducted by the Association of National Advertisers (a representative body of American marketers) revealed that 26% of marketers found trends in social media taking it towards further growth.

Recession has called for accountability and efforts are being made towards innovating measurement techniques. This would help in calculating the ROI from marketing through social media. The Online Measurement and Strategy Report 2009 (conducted by Econsultancy in combination with Lynchpin) recorded that the proportion of firms looking at social media metrics has doubled during the course of a year from 21% to 40%.

The popularity of tools monitoring the buzz continues to rise. Be it staying alert with Google or inhaling the web on Addictomatic, such tools have become essential to internet marketing. Influence has emerged as a main indicator of success. The authority an account exercises over its followers and the networking activity as a whole are becoming the measurement tools.

# Social Media Engagement Trends
Over 60% of young consumers use social networking sites at least weekly, and about 40% check their networks every day. These young creators grew up in the age of personal computers, graphical user interfaces, and digital social annotations. The social computing boom of the past few years has created an online identity and digital hub, altered as frequently as one's clothes.



Adults are also researching news and creating content online. 22% of adults read blogs at least monthly, and 19% of adults surveyed are members of a social media site. Customer ratings and reviews was the most popular online activity, with about 40% of survey participants utilizing sites such as Amazon to read the thoughts and opinions of peers before making a purchase.



Forrester analysts identified six levels of social media participation in ascending levels of sophistication: inactives, spectators, joiners, collectors, critics, and creators. The categories are not mutually exclusive, as a blog author (a creator) will likely read other blogs (as a spectator), occasionally comment (a critic), and perhaps use web feeds or annotation tools (a collector).

These varied levels of social media participation highlight the need to better engage your audience across the board, easing them into the social media experience. Many social media sites focus on the joiners and creators, setting high barriers of entry and participation. A casual reader might mark a story or video as a personal favorite, or share a collection with friends. A collector might engage more audience members, creating a more focused community for a niche audience. Businesses and websites can engage multiple market segments and open up their community to wider participation.

# Comparative Analysis of Top Social Media Networks





# The Rise of New Business Models?

Frankly, predicting new business models within the media industry is difficult with its complex web of content distribution relationships spanning theaters, international distribution, cable and satellite distribution. However, with the success of industry ratified models like Hulu and the sense of inevitability that content is destined towards freedom, 2009’s recession will force new media models into play because the old models aren’t working any more.

Business Week’s Steven Wildstrom notes that consumers can’t find many great old movies on DVD or online in this era of the long tail retailing.

The battle is between an industry that wants to tightly control who gets to see what when and customers who want to watch what they want wherever and whenever. This clash is slowly being resolved in favor of consumers. Movies are becoming available for download and on DVD more quickly after theatrical release. Director Steven Soderbergh has a deal with Mark Cuban’s Landmark Theatres and HDNet that allows some of his movies to be released on disk and online the same day they show up in theaters. I expect more movies to be launched this way.

The day you can choose to see a new movie in a theater, on your TV, on your laptop, or on your iPhone is still some time off, but it is coming.

# The 2009 Recession will Elevate Social Media Marketing as a Corporate Cost Control Measure

Brand advertising has generally employed one-way messaging to consumers who typically respond to brand commercials as agenda-laden, or even spam. That’s why Tivo fast forwarding of ads is a value proposition. Brand advertising developed in the 1950’s with Madison Avenue’s recognition of the power of the new visual media to branding. It worked because broadcast TV was, at the time, the most optimal means to distribute the message.

Brand advertising is expensive because it employs the vertical professional services of advertising agencies – creative, research and production – to develop “campaigns”, and ad budgets for mass market placement. Social media in part threatens to disintermediate advertising professionals by leveraging “crowdsourcing” to test marketing and advertising concepts more quickly and cheaply.

# Entertainment Bubble
“Content creators are layering a multitude of media into entertainment for simultaneous consumption and engagement. For example, “LittleBigPlanet” users are gamers, social networkers and content creators, “The Hills” ‘Backchannel’ social networking site is where fans can gather to talk about the show as its happening on TV, and author StephenieMeyer has a playlist that readers can listen to while they’re reading the Twilight series. People are almost in an entertainment bubble of sorts”. -- Ann Mack, Director of Trendspotting, JWT (Source: sctimes.com)

# On Mobile
Social networks are going mobile. With devices such as the iPhone closely integrating the Web and cell phones, social networks like MySpace are working towards establishing their mobile presence.
“..Next year your media friend might start collecting dust when a mighty mini version takes hold, with the iPhone, the Bold and the Google phone, we’re beginning to truly be able to take our shows on the road. For example, the iPhonecan be a baby monitor and a Google phone, such as the T-Mobile G1, has a bar code scanner which allows you scan any bar code at the store and then immediately compare prices online. People are cutting their Internet service to save money and relying on their phones. After all, an iPhoneis much easier to fit into your pocket than an iBook”.
Mobilize Me -- Jane Buckingham, President, The Intelligence Group
Source: sctimes.com

Companies will continue to place a high priority on mobility initiatives primarily for productivity increases, with mobility activities heating up in emerging markets. In addition, we will see growth in the mobile "wannabe" user segment as employees bring their personal devices, such as the iPhone, into work and expect organizations to develop ways to support these new devices —even with the slowdown expected in consumer mobile device purchases. -- Forrester

# On Engagements
“The recession will put consumers in a more powerful position. Feedback 1.0 was the lone customer posting a review or complaint and companies ignoring him. Feedback 2.0 was when millions posted, with companies largely ignoring them.

Feedback 3.0 finds companies listening and replying. For example, Starbucks lovers can already “help shape the future of Starbucks,” by sharing their ideas online, and hotel managers can respond to complaints and praises posted on TripAdvisor”. -- ReinierEvers, Founder, TrendWatching.com

# “How Social Media is helping businesses?”
Facebook Connect, and its social network cousins Google Friend Connect, and the still obscure MySpace ID will facilitate the portability of social networks, or the “social graph”. This will be one of the most powerful applications towards creating a social media business model in 2009, but is hard to explain to social media newbies. What does it mean?

Through Facebook Connect, consumers log into other sites using their Facebook login details. Once inside the site, users can discuss or post their activities in real time to their Facebook network. The effect is to bring in their network of friends into the hosting site. For example, a teenage girl may visit a Facebook Connect – enabled retail fashion site like Forever 21, buy an awesome sweater at a deep discount sale price, and broadcast this fact to her large Facebook network. A few of her Facebook friends do the same thing, and by extension, you can imagine the instant viral marketing power of each new succeeding Facebook network put “into play” for a good sweater deal.

# Crowd sourcing will be a huge social media trend for 2009.



Crowd souring has the potential to take off pretty big, although i don’t see the online movement in that direction. The launch of Predictify suggest such a conclusion. Also, Idea Blob has been fairly successful. There are a number of crowd sourcing creative (graphic design and video) that are bubbling to the surface beyond the e-lance model. This will only continue to increase as the need for outsourcing and budget cutting continues in 2009. The trend known as crowd funding may also see an upward and exciting trajectory.

# Rise of video driven communities
Video driven communities that drive conversation will take off in social media. Winelibrary TV, Epic FU, and The Politico Playbook (aka Kotecki TV) have shown what video can do. Momversation, sponsored by Target, is driving conversation and community around the issues of moms. The video serves as a fantastic differentiator, creates emotional connection, and is potentially truly remarkable content.

Twitter under microscope - An HP Research Study

A study of social interactions within Twitter (via Snake Coffee), conducted by B. A. Huberman, D.M. Romero, and F. Wu (HP Labs) reveals that the driver of usage is a sparse and hidden network of connections underlying the “declared” set of friends and followers.

In a paper named Social networks that matter: Twitter under the microscope (PDF) the researchers investigated how relevant a list of “friends” is to members of the network. Practically, they were interested in finding out how many people each user communicates directly with through Twitter. They have defined user’s friend as a person whom the user directed at least two posts. By that the researchers were able to compare number of friends to number of followers.

Research Findings:

1. Saturation of delivered content:
The researchers expected that users who receive attention from many people (hold many followers) will post more often than users who receive little attention. Indeed, the total number of posts increases with both the number of followers and friends. However, as Figure shows, the number of total posts eventually saturates as a function of the number of followers. This implies that users with a large number of followers are not necessarily those with very large number of total posts.



On the other hand, the number of total posts does not saturate as a function of number of friends, as seen on Figure below.



The researchers concluded that in order to predict how active a Twitter user is, the number of friends is a more accurate signal than the number of his followers.

2. Social saturation:
The research shows (see Figure) that even though the number of
friends initially increases as the number of followees increases, after a while the number of friends saturates. This trend can be explained by the fact that the cost of “declaring” a new followee is very low compared to the cost of maintaining friends. Hence, the number of people a user actually communicates with eventually stops increasing while the number of followees can continue to grow indefinitely.



3. Reciprocity:
The research presents evidence to reciprocated attention. On average, 90 percent of a user’s friends reciprocate attention by being friends of the user as well (see figure).



Research Conclusions:
1. Twitter users have a very small number of friends compared to the number of followers and followees they declare. This implies the existence of two different networks: a very dense one made up of followers and followees, and a sparser and simpler network of actual friends. The latter proves to be a more influential network in driving Twitter usage since users with many actual friends tend to post more updates than users with few actual friends. On the other hand, users with many followers or followees post updates more infrequently than those with few followers or followees.




2. A link between any two people does not necessarily imply an interaction between them. In the case of Twitter, most of the links declared within Twitter were meaningless from an interaction point of view.

Sources: HP Twitter Study

About the authors
Bernardo A. Huberman is a Senior HP Fellow and Director of the Social Computing Lab at Hewlett–Packard Laboratories, Palo Alto, Calif.
Web: http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/people/huberman/
E–mail: bernardo [dot] huberman [at] hp [dot] com
Daniel M. Romero is a graduate student at the Center for Applied Mathematics of Cornell University (Ithaca, N.Y.) and also a researcher in the Social Computing Lab of HP Laboratories.
E–mail: dmr239 [at] cornell [dot] edu

Measurement Metrics of Social Media

According to Wetpaint and the Altimeter Group, deep engagement with consumers through social media channels correlates to better financial performance. The ENGAGEMENTdb study (www.engagementdb.com) showed significant positive financial results for the companies who measured as having the greatest breadth and depth of social media engagement. These "Social Media Mavens" on average grew company revenues by 18 percent over the last 12 months, while the least engaged companies saw revenues sink 6 percent on average over the same time period.

The ENGAGEMENTdb study reviewed more than 10 discrete social media channels, including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, wikis, and discussion forums for each of the 100 most valuable brands as identified by the 2008 BusinessWeek/Interbrand Best Global Brands ranking. Activity in each channel was ranked for depth of interaction on measures that corresponded to that specific channel. Scores for overall brand engagement ranged from a high of 127 to a low of 1.

The top 10 ENGAGEMENTdb brands with their scores are:
1. Starbucks (127)
2. Dell (123)
3. eBay (115)
4. Google (105)
5. Microsoft (103)
6. Thomson Reuters (101)
7. Nike (100)
8. Amazon (88)
9. SAP (86)
10. Tie - Yahoo!/Intel (85)

Qualities of Success Companies that scored well in the study generally have dedicated teams, however small, active in the social media channels they utilize. The study found that the most successful teams evangelize social media across the entire organization to pull in a broad range of stakeholders. These companies view social media as an indispensable tool to help them achieve results, and their approach is conversational. This mode of operation differs from the approach of traditional communications and early corporate blog experimentation, which emphasizes messaging and talking points.

"This is the first study of this depth on the top global brands and we think the results provide a good guide for corporations and brand marketers in every industry," said Charlene Li, Founder, Altimeter Group. "The success stories we have uncovered provide a blueprint for companies making decisions about how to best apply their marketing and consumer relations resources." "The ENGAGEMENTdb study goes a long way towards validating the importance of social media for business," said Ben Elowitz, CEO of Wetpaint.

"The closer any company is to its customers, the better, and it's hard to argue with the ability for social media to create such proximity. In this day and age, companies should feel much more comfortable investing in social media -- the correlation to results is so clear." Four Quadrants of Engagement While each company in the study received a quantitative score, the ENGAGEMENTdb study revealed that companies fell into four specific categories in terms of their breadth and depth of investment in social media channels -- Mavens, Butterflies, Selectives, and Wallflowers.

Mavens -- brands that have made social media a core part of their go-to-market strategies and are very active in many channels; usually driven by dedicated teams assisted by company-wide awareness and participation.

Butterflies -- brands that recognize the need to be in many channels but have only met with real success in a subset of their activities; these companies are usually spread a bit too thin.

Selectives -- brands that focus on just a few channels and excel in those; these efforts are usually initiated by an internal evangelist.

Wallflowers -- brands present in only a few channels and very lightly in those; these brands are sitting on the sidelines and are wary of the risks. They are still trying to figure out the best next steps and investments in social media.

Source: www.wetpaint.com

Top Twenty Five Social Networking Sites – May 2009

According to comScore, Facebook totaled 70,278,000 unique visitors, up 97% from May 2008 to May 2009. MySpace audience shrank 5% over the same timeframe, falling to 70,255,000 unique visitors.




In April, MySpace visitors viewed 31.8 million ads, accounting for almost 47% of the total social network advertising space. Facebook was second, serving nearly 25 million ads and making up about 37% of the sector. In third place surprisingly was Tagged, which served 2.4 million ads, or 3.6% of publisher views.



eMarketer expects that the revenue gap will likely close in 2009-2010. MySpace entered into an advertising agreement with Google in 2006 that would pay the social network roughly $300 million a year, ending in June 2010. But TechCrunch reported that a new deal between Google and MySpace would be worth only $50 million to $75 million yearly, punching a big hole in the social network’s revenues.

Word of mouth (WOM) is the most trusted form of advertising in India

According to the Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey, conducted by Nielsen Consumer Research company that provides insights on the preferences of internet consumers across the world, word of mouth is the most trusted form of advertising in India with 93% votes, followed by editorial content such as articles in newspaper with 87% votes and Brand websites with 78% votes. This comes at a time when internet advertising is booming, with newer brands associating themselves with internet and testing new waters.

“The main problem is that there are too many online users and just very few websites, this results in just the same ads on every website or a great clutter. So the ads don’t attract the audiences at all, hence not serving the purpose they should,” says Rammohan Sundaram, Founder of Networkplay.

Alok Kejariwal, CEO, games2win.com, feels that internet is at its nascent stage, so it will take some time for internet advertising to catch. “Any medium takes at least 20-30 years to develop. Further more, internet advertising intrudes personal space. It strikes when you are reading your personal mail or browsing through the net; it gets very irritating.”

According to Sundaram, there are many ads which are placed just to have an online presence. The advertisers don’t get into a deep research as to which site will suit the product, the placement of the ad.

But does this mean that online advertising is not on the right track? “There’s no major flaw in online advertising or its approach, it’s just that people find word of mouth more credible since it’s an unbiased and unpaid review. There’s no hidden motive behind it, which makes people trust it blindly. This difference between the trust on word of mouth and any form of advertising will remain forever,” says Mudit Khosla, Founding General Manager, Strategic Relations Group, Yatra.com
“The only way one can improve the trust is by involving the audiences. In my website we invite our audiences to write comments of services they have used.
This not only gives these audiences a platform to speak up but the others also get a chance to read unbiased opinions on the same website, “asserts Khosla.

Harish Bahl, MD, Quasar Media has a positive outlook, “According to me, the search results are very contradictory. A major portion of online advertising are the social websites, where audiences write blogs, connect and exchange information, or in other words, spread word of mouth. The Nielsen report saying that word of mouth is more trustworthy than online advertising proves that it’s a win-win situation for online advertising.”

“Internet is definitely growing fast and so will internet advertising, it just that products should be sold in a better way to gain the consumers’ trust,” believes Khosla.

Indian entertainment and media industry to reach Rs. 929.5 billion in the next 5 years

The Indian E&M industry is estimated to grow from Rs. 563.9 billion in 2008, at a CAGR of 10.5% for the next five years to reach Rs. 929.5 billion in 2013, says the PricewaterhouseCoopers’s Indian entertainment and media outlook 2009.

Over the next five years, television industry is projected to continue to be the major contributor to the overall industry revenue pie and is estimated to grow at a stable rate of 11.4% cumulatively, from an estimated Rs. 244.7 billion in 2008.

The overall television industry is projected to reach Rs. 420 billion by 2013. In the Television pie, distribution is projected to garner a share of 60% in 2013. On the other hand, television advertising industry is projected to command a share of 41.0% in 2013, having increased from a present share of 39.0% in the total ad industry pie. The relative share of the television content industry is expected to remain constant at 4%.

The Indian film industry is projected to grow at a CAGR of 11.6% over the next five years, reaching to Rs. 185 billion in 2013 from Rs. 107 billion in 2008. The relative shares of the film industry are expected to shift marginally from the traditional revenues to the new emerging revenues.

The Indian film print media industry is projected to grow by 5.6% over 2009-13, reaching to Rs. 213 billion in 2013 from Rs. 162 billion in 2008. The relative shares of newspaper publishing and magazine publishing are not expected to remain the same at around 87%, in favour of newspaper publishing. Magazine publishing is expected to grow at a higher rate of 6.5% as compared with newspaper publishing which is expected to grow at 5.6% for the next five years.

The radio advertising industry is projected to grow at a CAGR of 18% over 2009-13, reaching Rs. 19 billion in 2013 from Rs. 8.3 billion in 2008; more than double its present size. In terms of share of ad pie, it is projected that the radio advertising industry will be able to increase its share from 3.8% to 5.2% in the next five years.

The animation, gaming and VFX industry will continue to maintain its growth pace and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 22% to Rs. 42.5 billion in 2013 from Rs 15.6 billion. In the animation space, domestic demand will create the fillip in its growth, as well as contribution from international co-productions, in the film and television space.

The Indian gaming industry is projected to grow from an estimated size of Rs. 3.9 billion in 2008 to an estimated Rs. 16.3 billion by 2013; translating into a cumulative growth of 32.7% over the next five years . Mobile gaming will dominate the segment with 74% share , driven by the growth in the high end segment of the mobile users, new content by mobile operators and the availability of 3G spectrum that enables easy of play.

Online gaming will be the next highest contributor followed by console gaming. This will be fuelled by the growth of internet users and especially the growth of the target segment of users aged between 15-34 years. The growth in solo gaming will also be aided by falling cost of console prices and availability of local games.
Given the trends of increased internet usage, internet advertising is projected to grow by 32% over the next five years and reach an estimated Rs. 20 billion in 2013 from Rs. 5 billion, currently. The share of the online advertising too is projected to grow from 2.3% in 2008 to 5.5% in 2013 of the overall advertising pie.

The estimated size of the OOH industry is Rs. 15 billion, which is projected to become almost twice its current size in 2013 to 25 billion. Its share in the total ad pie is expected to go down marginally to 6.8% in 2013 from 6.9% in 2008.

The key growth driver for the music industry over the next five years will be digital music, and its share is expected to move from 16% in 2008 to 60% in 2013. Within digital music, mobile music will continue to increase its share and maintain its dominance.

Source: http://www.audiencematters.com/newsdetails.aspx?tbl_type=news&n_detail=2551&news_type=Media

Online advertising market to grow 27% by 2013: Study

Netscribes (India) Pvt. Ltd., a knowledge consulting solutions company, has launched the Online Advertising Market – India Report.

According to the report, the industry has grown at 74% per annum from 2004-08, driven by increasing awareness among advertisers and increase in internet penetration. Online ad networks have started gaining acceptance in the Indian market in the past 2-3 years.

Online advertising in India, largely dominated by search engines and portal, is fast gaining acceptance and offers an ever increasing user base. Increasing awareness among advertisers, low input costs for advertisers, and increase in Internet penetration are driving growth of the online medium and its horizontals.

The market is expected to witness only a 27% p.a. growth from 2008-2013. primarily due the massive advertising budget cuts in the industry.

The developing online advertising market in India is already witnessing stiff competition among domestic as well as international players. Niche and emerging nature coupled with low barriers to entry in this industry could lead to rise in competition. BFSI, Online publishers and IT/Telecom are the major revenue contributors for the online advertising industry in India. Acquisitions and investments by foreign players as well as private equity firms are providing a boost to this industry in the nascent stage.