If you’re a creative who wants to market your work, comScore knows where to find your audience. They’re on Facebook.
Social media continues to attract more viewers and advertisers, according to comScore’s report “The 2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review.” Nine out of every 10 U.S. Internet users visits a social networking site every month, accounting for 12% of all time spent online in 2010, the digital measurement firm reports in the whitepaper. Facebook leads the pack of sites that receive that traffic with nearly 154 million unique visitors last year.
Advertisers have followed, serving up 4.9 trillion display ads, an increase of 23% over 2009. Social networking publishers delivered 34% of those ads, up 11% over the previous year.
Creatives interested in marketing their work on a shoestring might want to follow the trend. As they say on Wall Street, don’t fight the tape.
How much of what we do is by choice? How much is influenced by others?
Apparently quite of bit of what we consider choice is programmed from an early age, and a crucial part comes from the classroom. That’s according to a pair of university researchers who studied the effect of surnames on buying habits.
Chances are if your last name starts with a letter toward the end of the alphabet your teachers had you sit in the back of the class, or stand at the end of the line. That meant while people in front were chosen for various opportunities, people in the back had to wait.
When they became adults, they made up for lost time. So goes the theory by Kurt Carlson of Georgetown University and Jacqueline Conard of Belmont University, who conducted the research.
They think the reverse is also true. People whose first names begin with the first letters of the alphabet, the people who sat near the front of the class or stood first in line, got first crack at opportunities. They’re used to being first, so as adults they tend to “buy late.”
The issue of choice is more than academic, especially if we want to remain free of most propaganda, both political and commercial. Several authors have made this kind of research accessible. In OutliersMalcolm Gladwell discusses the case of the Korean co-pilot who, because of cultural inhibitions, didn’t aggressively challenge his errant pilot before a crash. Blogger Laura Rowley writes about the issue and happiness in general on Yahoo! Finance. And Columbia professor Sheena Iyengar explores the positive and negative effects of decision-making in her book The Art of Choosing.
The Internet has redefined the way people produce and distribute information. Now it’s up to organizations to figure out how to generate interest and revenue in the new environment.
In the new ecosystem top-down distribution doesn’t work. Spreading information does. That’s how online social networks operate and why advertisers are clamoring to reach the influencers who dominate those networks. But the network is only half the issue. The other half is content. Here an organization’s goal should be to create information that others want to spread. Think humorous YouTube videos.
This is all by way of Henry Jenkins, the founder and former co-director of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT and author of Convergence Culture. In his new book, Spreadable Media, Jenkins takes the idea of media convergence a step further by discussing how and why the digital generation distributes information. And in that explanation is a clue for corporations, journalists and other news generators about how to join the conversation.
So how do organizations survive in the digital ecosystem? His mantra on information is simple: If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead.
Take the case of bloggers, people Jenkins calls “grassroots intermediaries” who help spread news by way of their online social connections. They don’t treat their information as proprietary. The best news sources and brands create content and then “actively encourage readers to spread their materials, often directly courting them as participants in the process of distribution.”
To make this distribution process work a source must ensure the content is relevant to the audience. “People are making conscious decisions to aid the circulation of certain content because they see it as a meaningful contribution to their ongoing conversations,” he says. That requires sources to reframe their view of content and distribution. “For the producer, the content may be a commodity or a promotion; for the consumer, it is a resource or a gift.”
You can read the full interview with Jenkins by Nikki Usher at the Nieman Journalism Lab of Harvard University.
What does it take to create a trend, a movement, a runaway success? Leaders? Followers? Or someone in between? An important question for creatives, marketers and others who try to harness the wildfire properties of the Internet.
Along comes Derek Sivers, a musician who founded CD Baby, which became the largest seller of independent music on the web. From this three-minute video clip he calls “Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy,” Sivers has extracted several lessons in inspiration and group-think that apply to artists as well as executives.
The first is obvious. The second is amazing, maybe even a little unsettling.
We need leaders. But we might need what Sivers calls the first follower even more.
It takes guts to be a leader. But it also takes guts to be a follower (just ask the apostles). The dancing guy has no effect on the people around him except to provide mild amusement . . . until a second person overcomes his aversion to risk and gets up to dance. And then a third, and then. . . .
“The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader,” Sivers says, echoing Malcolm Gladwell’s contention that any viral movement is spread not by the creator but by people he calls mavens–those with both the contacts and the social standing to gain the attention of followers. It’s those first followers who use their influence to help the movement achieve critical mass–or to use Gladwell’s term, the tipping point.
“We’re told we all need to be leaders, but that would be really ineffective,” Sivers says. “The best way to make a movement . . . is to courageously follow and show others how to follow.”
Peter Krainik has a word for those who would separate marketing and PR functions: don’t.
The founder of an organization for chief marketing officers, the CMO Club, Krainik believes CMOs need to align marketing and PR/corporate communications if they want to defend and build their companies’ brands and reputations. The rise of social networks makes it mandatory.
The statistics aren’t encouraging. Only 23% of CMOs have lead responsibility for employee communications on products, services and messaging, according to a survey of 129 CMOs conducted by Hill & Knowlton. Some 66% have lead responsibility for media relations but only 55% have overall responsibility for blogger relations. Most (70%) do not have an active employee-engagement program (read brand ambassadors).
Krainik thinks CMOs need to address that disconnect.
“Marketing and public relations have overlapped, thanks to the explosive growth of digital communication that created an unprecedented level of transparency between businesses and their audiences,” Krainik writes. “The result is that brand reputation and brand image have become intertwined; the synchronization of the two is more critical than ever.”
Consider us the lucky ones. Most of our clients understand the need for a strategy that encompasses both marketing and communications. So does the agency, which allows copywriters and PR pros to flow across departmental boundaries. Copywriters run projects that include public relations components while PR pros write copy for collateral and advocate for employee ambassador programs. The process is driven by the clients’ marketing and communications functions and supervised by the agency’s account executives.
It’s not a typical arrangement but it works. And that’s what counts.
There’s a scene in the movie “Minority Report” where digital screens read the eyeballs of Tom Cruise’s character and serve up personal ads. A trio of articles this week shows that, as the Borg like to say in “Star Trek,” trying to escape the long arm of marketers has become futile.
Starting on June 17, ESPN will display its broadcast of golf’s U.S. Open on trucks near sports bars and festivals in New York and Chicago. At 14 ft. by 8 ft. those digital displays will be hard to miss.
Separately, the New York Times is reporting that Automated Media Services is testing a system that allows agencies to buy commercial time in stores. By placing the 3GTV displays near the items being sold, advertisers hope to reach consumers as they’re making a decision to buy.
And finally comes word that digital will surpass newspaper advertising in the United States by 2014. Digital ads are projected to increase to $34.4 billion while the print equivalent will drop to 22.3 billion, the Wall Street Journal reports. The channels of choice? Your computer and smart phone.
This morning on BBC World Service, Val Curtis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in London says the single most cost effective way to save lives in developing countries is washing hands with soap and she’s tapped a credible source for the campaign: marketers.
The problem, Curtis explains, is that in many developing countries, certain hygienic practices like hand-washing are not supported by the culture. (The London School estimates that 1 million children die of diarrhea each year, a situation that can be prevented by washing hands with soap.) To change perceptions, the school partnered with personal-care products companies, who know how to sell behavioral change as well as suds.
Curtis’ comments about marketing are interesting. She like many academics think of the discipline as one of the black arts, a process created by big business to coerce people into buying things they don’t need. In addition to saving lives, her project may go a long way toward changing that impression.
There’s a decent article over at PRSA on how companies can more effectively use social media to promote their business.
Yes, it says the usual things but author Anthony Rotolo makes a point worth repeating: social networks aren’t broadcast media. They’re about conversation. You don’t push a message, or a product. You create a dialog with clients and customers. You help them solve problems. You ask them for advice. And you use that feedback to make your products and services more useful.
American conductor Eric Whitacre spliced nearly 250 submitted videos to form an online choir performing his composition “Lux Aurumque,” then posted the assembled piece on YouTube. Whitacre conducts his virtual choir from a window in the center of the screen while hundreds of faces float in space beneath stage lights. The result is remarkable. The music is beautiful, reminiscent of Gorecki’s “Third Symphony.” And the project itself is audacious, a stunning example of how creatives can merge art and marketing into something remarkable.
“You can’t buy attention anymore.” Alex Bogusky, co-chairman of Crispin Porter + Bogusky
Dell has sold $3 million worth of computers on Twitter. Lenovo cut call center activity by 20% by directing customers to a community website for answers. Retweets supporting Susan G. Komen for the Cure resulted in 11,000 visitors to the Atlanta Chapter’s website.
What works in the business world can also work in the literary world. Writers who want to promote their careers might take a tip from Socialnomicsauthor Erik Qualman, who supplied those stats, and makes the case for using social media to drive engagement and sales, in this video.
