Why and How Businesses Use Social Media

Social media marketing is a developing art form. In fact, you almost would find it odd that budgets to support social marketing and mobile social marketing are growing on a fairly widespread basis even though a majority of companies have difficulty measuring the return on investment from social media.

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In fact, according to a recent survey of marketing executives by Econsultancy, 61 percent say their organizations are “poor” (34 percent) or “very poor” (27 percent) at measuring social media ROI.

According to the Econsultancy survey, 61 percent report that they “have experimented with social media, but not done that much.”

A quarter say they are “heavily involved in social media”, while the remaining 13 percent are not engaging with social media at all.

So why are marketers using social and mobile social media? They do so for the same reasons they use other marketing channels: generation of sales and leads as well as softer objectives such as improved brand awareness and reputation.

As an intermediate objective, social media efforts often are measured by their ability to drive traffric to company Web sites. "Increased traffic to a Web site is the business goal that marketers are most likely to be trying to influence through social media marketing," says Econsultancy. Fully 74 percent of companies say they use social media to increase Web site traffic.

"Direct traffic to Web site is by far the metric most commonly used to measure the impact of offsite social media, measured by just under two-thirds of company respondents (63 percent)," says Econsultancy.

More brand recognition (64 percent) is the second most important business objective in terms of impact of social media. A similar proportion of respondents (62 percent) cite better brand reputation. And that might be a big part of the reason why social media is used.

Just over half of companies (56 percent) say that they try to achieve increased sales through social media activity. But only a quarter of companies (24 percent) use sales as a metric for measuring social media effectiveness.

Will Facebook Become a News Portal?

Is Facebook encouraging direct distribution of news content? Yes. Will it become an important "news portal"? That's hard to say, yet. But there is no question more news is appearing on Facebook, and that Facebook is encouraging that trend.

"Your friends on Facebook help you cut through the clutter so you can read what's most relevant to you, discover new items and carry on thoughtful discussions," says the Facebook blog.

"Just as your friends can post news throughout the day, so do many news outlets," Facebook says. By connecting with friends' Facebook Pages, users can stay updated and interact with outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian and CNN, CBS Evening News and CNBC, Facebook suggests.

"At any given time, the news on your home page can consist of celebrity gossip posted by your sister, sports scores from the ESPN Page, and a political debate among your friends as they cite their favorite blogs," Facebook notes. "With so much information at your fingertips on one site, Facebook can serve as your personalized news channel.

By way of comparison, Google Reader recently accounted for .01 percent of upstream visits to news and media websites Google News accounted for 1.39 percent of visits and Facebook 3.52 percent.

In fact, Facebook recently was the fourth-largest source of visits to news sites, after Google, Yahoo! and msn.

Who are the Media Gatekeepers These Days?

Media business models nearly always are a mix of end-user revenues and advertising or promotion. That likely won't be different as mobile media start to develop (click on image for larger view).

And though much attention always is directed at the role of "access providers" as key gatekeepers, that probably is not an issue in the mobile marketing and mobile media business.

Instead, it is device providers and application providers that are emerging as the key gatekeepers. Consider platforms such as the iPhone, with its App Store, or Facebook.

These days, the App Store and Facebook are emerging as distinct business ecosystems for application sales, gaming and advertising.

That is going to prove something of a shock for "service" providers, but that's just what seems to be happening.

Twitter Stats Still a Puzzle

Twitter continues to be a bit of a puzzle, for reasons beyond its search for a viable business model. It has enthusiastic users, but also high apparent levels of abandonment. And some studies might lead to the conclusion that Twitter growth is slowing sharply, while other social sites such as Facebook might be accelerating.

Data from hitwise, for examples, shows a peak in Twitter in July 2009, with declines since then. The caveat is that many Twitter users appear to use third party sites to access the service, so the actual Twitter.com visits do not fully capture actual Twitter use.

The hitwise data also might suggest that user engagement with Facebook, a larger and more-established social networking site, is growing much faster than Twitter seems to be growing.

One fact seems clear enough, though, and that is the increased amount of mobile use of the social tool. Although 60 percent of Twitter users say they only use their computers to access the service, about 40 percent say they do so using their mobiles, according to a study of Twitter use during August 2009, Crowd Science.

Crowd Science reports that in August 2009, although only 27 percent of Twitter users posted daily, 46 percent checked for updates every day.

Social Media, Networking Now 17% of Total Internet Use

Social networking and blogging sites accounted for 17 percent (about one in every six minutes) of all time spent on the Internet in August 2009, nearly three times as much as in 2008, according to the Nielsen Company.

“This growth suggests a wholesale change in the way the Internet is used,” says Jon Gibs, Nielsen VP. “While video and text content remain central to the Web experience, the desire of online consumers to connect, communicate and share is increasingly driving the medium’s growth.”

The popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Classmates.com more than quadrupled from 2005 to 2009 as well. In September 2009, Facebook had 90 million U.S. users and 300 million users worldwide. Also, those users increased the amount of time spent on social sites 83 percent from 2008 to 2009, Nielsen says.

As always is the case, marketing and advertising efforts "follow people."  U.S. advertisers spent an estimated $1.4 billion to place ads on social networking sites in 2008 and advertising expenditures are predicted to rise to $2.6 billion by 2012.

More specificially, advertisers in some verticals made huge new commitments to social media as an advertising medium. The entertainment vertical, for example, increased its spending 812 percent year over year. The travel industry increased its spending 364 percent, year over year.

To be sure, aggregate social site advertising remains a small percentage of overall ad spending. But rapid growth is the story.

Mobile Twitter Passes ESPN, Facebook, and Google

Subscribers to paid community Predicto are different from users of the free mobile Twitter community, says Nielsen Mobile. Twitter has a dominant presence among young and male oriented audiences while Predicto attracts a more mainstream following with a broader penetration, particularly with the female and older demographics.

Twitter is the leading free mobile community, and Predicto is the largest paid mobile community, Nielsen says.

In the fourth quarter of 2008, Twitter amassed approximately 812,000 unique text messaging users, while Predicto Mobile interacted with over 2,303,000 unique users, according to Nielsen Mobile.

Some other key differences in the user breakdown of the two leading mobile communities include 57/43 percent male/female ratio for Twitter versus 45/55 percent for Predicto.

Some 49 percent of Twitter users are in the 35-plus age group versus 68 percent with Predicto. About16 percent of Twitter users earn $100,000 or more compared to 20 percent for Predicto.

During the fourth quarter of 2008, Twitter overtook other free mobile services including ESPN, Facebook, and Google. At the same time, Predicto remains the undisputed leader in the premium mobile space, further distancing itself from NBC in second place, Nielsen Mobile says.

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/04/prweb2367764.htm

Outshouts Launches Voice Mashup Service

Outshouts has launched the beta version of its Web service allowing users to create introductions of their favorite audio tracks with their own voice before sending the files to anyone with an email address or mobile phone.

Outshouts can be sent to one person, or a group; marked public or private; or posted as a widget on blogs or social sites like Facebook or Myspace. Recipients do not need to be registered to receive Outshouts and the service is free.

Outshouts supports targeted, personalized micro-casting by making it easy to mash together your own commentary (recorded by phone or computer) on top of your favorite MP3s, and send or posted.

Tracks uploaded from a computer are accessible for sending directly from a mobile phone using an Ineractive Voice Response system.

EU Will Study Targeted Advetising: Much Hangs in the Balance

Targeted online advertising, an important revenue driver for all sorts of media and mobile services, is going to get serious regulatory scrutiny from European Union regulators next year, according to Astrid Wendlandt, Reuters reporter. At stake is the viability and robustness of media revenue models based on targeted messages, obviously key for Web sites such as Facebook, search providers, online media companies and mobile service providers alike.

The European Union's Article 29 Working Party already has ordered Google to curtail the amount of time it stores past Web searches to 18 months.

The EU's moves are a salient reminder that Internet services, especially media and content services and applications, increasingly are falling under the purview of regulators. Some have argued that Internet communications should be free of such rules. More important are regulations affecting content and media services. Historically, regulators have decided whether communications were legal, and under what terms. Now regulators essentially will be deciding what content and media forms are legal, and under what terms. One can argue that all regulators are doing is protecting privacy. It is more than that. Regulators also will be deciding "what" the basis of a new business can be; "who" can be a part of it and "how big" new media might become.

Skirmishes over "VoIP" will pale in comparison.

Email Communication Declining in U.K. Market

Most people would guess that teenagers send more instant or text messages than emails. In the U.K., says ComScore, it is a quantifiable trend. As it turns out, people now are communicating more from within the context of their social networks than using portal-based email. That isn't yet true for business communications, of course.

But it stands to reason that personal use of email is for communication with friends and family. And if those people are part of a social network, one doesn't have to go outside the network to send messages. Some day soon, people will launch and receive voice, video and other communications from within the social network as well.

MySpace Opens Platform; What About IMS?

MySpace plans to open up its platform to external developers in the next few months, company CEO and co-founder Chris DeWolfe says. So here's the question for you: as global service providers creep towards IP Multimedia Subsystem as their next generation platform, who is going to develop for those IMS platforms if all the developers already are working for Facebook, MySpace and Google?

In fact, here's a prediction: by the time most global carriers have fully functioning IMS networks in place, the compelling applications IMS will enable already will exist someplace else. So the issue will be: what value to the application owners and distributors will accrue as the result of a business relationship with a carrier? Or can carriers create their own versions of these already-popular applications in a walled garden setting?

Time Warner Launches Business TV

Time Warner Cable Business Class has launched BusinessLink.tv, an IPTV service that delivers real-time, high-speed broadcast TV video service directly to the computers of its business customers in select New York and New Jersey markets.

The BusinessLink.tv service delivers high-quality news and information video programming to clients via cable modem across their enterprise LAN using IP multicast connectivity. It is, in other words, bandwidth efficient.

The television networks included in the BusinessLink.tv New York City offering are: NY1 News, CNN, CNN Headline News, CNN International, CNBC, CNBC World, Bloomberg TV, Fox News, Fox Business News, and The Weather Channel. This 10-channel IPTV delivery service requires a 4 Mbps core local area network bandwidth.

And you thought people were wasting time using Facebook! Just kidding. I do the same thing in sneakernet fashion, having one of the news channels up all day in the background while working. It is quite helpful. Of course, I'm in the news and analysis business, so it is simply another form of "scanning" the environment. I would not give it up.

Friendvox Will Unify IM Boxes: No Download

I realize there are other ways to federate instant messaging clients. But it will be nice to do so without adding one more client. Hopefully this Facebook app will install and work as simply as most other Facebook apps. Sept. 28 is the expected launch.

Credit Facebook for Force.com

Force.com is an on-demand application development platform that will extend Salesforce.com's subscriber base far beyond traditional business software users sometime in 2008. And you can bet Facebook's success as an applications platform had something to do with the decision.

Force.com will give customers, developers and independent software vendors the ability to create custom applications and user interfaces that can be accessed from desktop PCs, iPhones or retail kiosks using the Salesforce.com service. That's the advantage from the end user perspective.

For developers and hosts, there are other advantages, such as ability to create and support new applications without the need for new Web servers and data center facilities. The new platform will operate in much more of an on-demand basis, as a result.

Visualforce uses HTML, AJAX and Flex programming languages.

Voice Mashups Disruptive or Not?

Iotum recently shifted gears and decided to take advantage of Facebook APIs to create a conference call app inside Facebook. Many of you know what Skype has been doing in the area of encouraging third party development around its client. And of course Microsoft has made clear its intention to place communications within the context of every expression of its desktop productivity suite.

Some people would argue this move to voice as an attribute of every application spells the death of traditional "communications as a service." So far, of course, there is no evidence of this, though there is plenty of movement within the service industry. Neither is there any evidence that people communicate less when they have the new tools; the reverse typically being the case.

So far, at any rate, one would have to say that the advent of voice as an application, as an inherent attribute of other experiences and activities, simply is creating incremental revenue opportunities and end user utility. To the extent that it negatively affects the "service" business, providers of services already are transitioning away from reliance on "voice" revenues in any case.

Enterprise phone system providers hope to do the same, and speak only of "unified communications" these days. It isn't the calling, they seem to say; it's the integration. Not an unwise choice given the fact that Microsoft Office Communication Server provides a complete alternative.

But maybe this time around we shouldn't worry so much about disruption. Choice will do nicely. Human beings are starting to have lots more choices, and that's a good thing. Companies will do well providing those choices. It will be enough.

Voice and communications increasingly are available to users as discrete services and integrated applications. This trend isn't going away. But the explosion of choices and richness do not inevitably spell doom, or automatic success, for any contestant. Calling entities "dinosaurs" doesn't hobble them. Nor does "disruption" always succeed. Quite the opposite seems to be true at this point.

Mitel Inter-Tel Merger: Dan York is Available

Maybe LinkedIn or Plaxo is useful for such things, though I prefer Facebook. So if you can help Dan, contact him at Facebook. His last day at Mitel is September 21. Here's what he's thinking:

"What's next? I'm not sure, to be honest, as there are several pathways. I'd love to run back up to the crow's nest and perform that kind of analysis, investigation, exploration/communication or evangelism for a company in the IP telephony and unified communications space, especially with a focus on social networking and social media.

I think its a great fit with my technical, strategic, marketing and communication skills - and I think sites like Facebook will have a profound effect on our communication. I'd love to help explore and guide people through that space. Having said that, I definitely recognize that those roles are few and far between. I may look into something focused in the VOIP security space, where I've obviously got some great depth and experience, or something related to IETF standards, another strong interest of mine. I've considered some form of strategic consulting, or joining the analyst ranks. There are a couple of books I'd like to write. There's a startup idea I'm pondering. As is obvious, I completely enjoy blogging, podcasting, etc. and may pursue a role focused in those areas - or in community development, another strength. And then there's always returning to my open source roots in the Linux space...

Whatever the case, my aim is to be with of an organization that is part of the disruption in this space (or at the very least chronicling the disruption).

Right now I'd love to hear from folks who have openings in any of those various areas (or know of such openings). Please do email me - or contact me via Facebook or Skype. For folks in the IT telephony/unified communication's space, I'll be out at the Internet Telephony Conference & Expo next week in Los Angeles and would be delighted to speak with folks there. (As I mentioned previously, I'll be speaking there.) Information about my background can be obtained at LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/danyork )

In my ideal world, I'd love to find a role that lets me continue to live in Burlington, VT, (with some amount of travel) since we're nicely settled in here and love the area."

Who Will Create the "Conference in a Pocket" Phone?

The rumored Google Phone will have to carve out a niche beyond "smart phone" or "feature phone" to get any serious traction. Perhaps it can create a new dual-mode position, since nobody really has that one nailed down yet. It might be a stretch to create a position based on "location based services," since it is doubtful most people will understand that.

But some new developments elsewhere suggest it might ultimately be possible for somebody to capture a new "conference in my pocket" position. Webex now has created an iPhone compatible PCNow capability, opening a bit of a wedge for conferencing. And iotum says it will develop a conference app running on BlackBerry and Facebook.

The point is not simply the size of the niche, but the ability to create a buyer reason to use one service or terminal instead of others. There are lots of devices that handle email. But BlackBerry created and "owns" the "email in your pocket" mental niche. That doesn't mean only the BlackBerry can do this, but that the mental position creates a compelling reason to buy and use a BlackBerry even though other smart phones can do so. The iPhone's position still is developing, though the initial positioning is as a fashionista device.

The point is that the creation of a compelling mental positioning allows a device or service to stand out in a crowd of alternatives that arguably can provide the same basic functionality. A "conference in your pocket" device can provide the same sorts of marketing value.

Voice From Inside Facebook

Pat Phelan points out that there are perhaps nine voice applications users can launch from inside Facebook, including GrandCentral, RebMe by Rebtel, Phonebook by Jangl, MyPhone by Jaxtr, SkypeMe, One Minute Friend, Yakpack, Sitofono and the new conferencing application for Facebook released by iotum.

Linked In is Like Email; Facebook is Like IM

I've never been a fan of LinkedIn (I'm not a "head hunter," and it undoubtedly is a useful tool for people who do that for a living). It might be a nice utility for updating contact information for a small subset of the people you actually know and communicate with. Beyond that I've never had occasion to use it.

Facebook seems like a better version of LinkedIn, though. I was able to get my son's new address when he went back to NYU without using LinkedIn. To be sure, the information wasn't pushed to me. I had to go view his Facebook page. But I got what I needed without emailing or calling.

So why is LinkedIn like email? It's a tool "older" people use for work. Why is Facebook like IM? It's a tool "younger" people (and increasing numbers of "not so young") use to keep up with other people they actually care about. In some important ways, IM also is a "richer" experience, as Facebook is.

Discovering Business Models

The problem with discovering business models is that what works for some does not work for all. Back in 1998 and 1999 the stock answer provided by just about any competitive local exchange carrier executive essentially was that the firm in question would get "one percent of a $250 billion market."

These days people ask how Facebook, messaging, collaboration, video or other portals will make any money. The most popular answer is some variant of the old CLEC standby. U.S. advertising currently is about a $153 billion a year business. Portal X will get one percent of that.

Look, it clearly works for four companies: Google, AOL, Yahoo! and MSN. The "four horsemen" get about 60 percent of all Internet advertising. It isn't going to work for most application, communications or portal providers, just as it never worked for most CLECs.

The biggest two "CLECs"--the former AT&T and WorldCom/MCI--threw in the towel in defeat. And those two had more than 40 percent of all "CLEC" revenues between them.

So people assume that fast-growing and useful sites such as Facebook will find some way to make money besides traditional advertising. And there is precedent for such discovery.

Google was equally clueless about its business model, but managed to discover one.
So just because a company has no idea how it will make money, doesn't mean it will not discover a means.

On the other hand, that doesn't mean it ALWAYS will find the answer. And though I'd have to say I am fairly confident Facebook will discover a model, as Google did, that doesn't mean thousands of other sites will be so lucky. Thousands of sites obviously cannot use the Internet advertising model, even if it is fast growing, because most fo the rewards will go a relative handful of companies.

Jangl to Voice Enable Facebook

Jangl is getting ready to announce Phonebook for Facebook, which puts calling and voicemail right in a user profile and inbox on Facebook. The new feature will allow Facebook members who both have the application to call each other, visually manage voice mail messages in the Facebook inbox and show a current online presence. Voice is becoming an application available within a user's current context.