Andiamo! - Social Media Marketing Blog

From 20 emails to 1,000,000 views in a week

Have you listened to Kutiman yet? He's the musician that spent three months holed up in his bedroom mixing over 100 videos into 7 tracks for a project called Thru You. Take a listen, they are actually pretty good.

The interesting thing from a social media aspect is that within one week of it's release, it resulted in over 1,000,000 views! And all this from a total of 20 emails that were sent out from 3 people that helped with the project. Marketing budget? Zippo. The team says most of the buzz appears to have occurred on Twitter, which is no surprise. Easy to send a 140-character message about a cool new music project.

So these guys launched a musician on Twitter, think about ways you can harness Twitter to build awareness about a cool new product or feature of your brand. Remember to keep it concise, unique and interesting. And consider using video as the delivery tool. What ways have you used Twitter to drive awareness and sales of your products? Let us know.

Skittles - letting their customers do the talking!

Skittles is embracing social media and user-generated content big time! Yesterday Skittles replaced their home page with a Twitter feed. And today they replaced it with a Facebook Fan Page. What's the goal? Hey I'm not sure yet, maybe it's just an experiment to gauge consumer reaction. Will it increase sales? Hard to say. But I don't think anybody's going to argue the fact that it definitely increased brand awareness, and it may be more than just a 'blip'. They have almost 600,000 fans on Facebook (not sure how many have signed up today), and the tweet traffic was through the roof and is still going strong.

It's a gutsy move and I like it. All the content is live, so anyone who visits will see the good and bad opinions  about them. And people aren't being shy. I know one thing - I'm gonna hit their site tomorrow AM and see what's new!

Another thing I like about this - they are leveraging the same social media channels that their target market uses. They also have a media section that includes YouTube videos and pics. The front-line video today already had almost 30,000 views. And there are more than 16,500 pictures uploaded so far.

I do hope they are performing social media analysis to learn from consumers and determine the impact of this campaign on consumer awareness and brand perception - hey Skittles, contact us if you need help!

"Nobody goes there anymore - it's too crowded"

Yogi Berra's classic quote came to mind the other day. I had just been chatting with Loic Le Muer, Founder of Seesmic.com. He had created a little uproar, which he enjoys doing, this time by removing the 23,000 Twitter followers he had acquired over time. Why? For one, he had set up auto-following, which means that for every person who decided to follow him, he would automatically follow them back. The volume of incoming information was just too much, and was increasingly irrelevant to him. It doesn't take long for the sheer vastness of all this, increasingly irrelevant, incoming information to render the original utility of Twitter useless.

I've seen many other people do things like this as well - un-friending people in Facebook, or at least changing how much of their profile can be seen. Getting more selective about who they accept in LinkedIn.

All of these social networks are of course extremely popular and provide immense benefits, and have the ability to be valuable marketing tools as well. But in varying degrees they can all suffer from collapsing under their own weight. Personally I like to build my LinkedIn network with even pretty loose contacts because I use LinkedIn as a recruiting tool for Andiamo. But with my personal Facebook account, I have become very selective about who I accept, and invite as friends. And I think lots of other people are coming to the same conclusion. It's not about quantity, it's about the quality and relevance of the relationship. How are you changing your usage of these social networks as they continue their growth?

What's The Ratio of UGM Creators vs. Consumers?

Many people I talk to seem to have the opinion that, while a substantial portion of people read and share User-generated media (UGM), relatively few are actually 'creating' this media. So if you are among them, a recent eMarketer study might surprise you.

The ratio of 'consumers', people who read, comment, save and share UGM, to 'creators', people who actively write and create UGM, is 1.4. So for every creator, there are 1.4 people reading. That is a much lower ratio than many people I know would have guessed.

And according to this study, that ratio will drop slightly to 1.35 by 2013.

Both have fairly strong growth through 2013 as well, with consumers growing by 34% and creators growing by 39%.

What wasn't clear in the study is how eMarketer categorized Twitter. With the ease of getting a Twitter account and starting to tweet, it would seem reasonable that by 2013 the ratio of consumers to creators would actually drop much more than the .05 ratio that this study suggests. At Andiamo Systems, Twitter has rapidly become the top source of UGM for most of our clients, especially in the Consumer Packaged Goods and Technology segments. So do you buy eMarketer's numbers in light of this? Let us know your thoughts.

An exciting concept to measure influence - the 'Influence Scorecard'

I recently received an email from Philip Sheldrake, author of The Social Web Analytics eBook 2008. Philip outlined his thoughts and plans for about creating standards and metrics for using influence measurement to guide organization performance management initiatives - an Influence Scorecard, so to speak.

The goal of the Influencer Scorecard is to help front line social web analytics to the board room level, providing levels of authority, responsibility and accountability in planning, implementing and measuring the affect and value of influence.

Philip is among a small set of thought leaders on the topic of social web analytics, and I was pleased he invited Andiamo Systems to participate in a series of meetings to help define these metrics. More well-established and measurable metrics in social media (or social web as Philip prefers to refer to it)?

We're behind it 100% and are happy to participate. You can keep up with developments at Philip's blog as well as here.

B2B Tech Buyers Influenced by Social Media

A recent study by Hill &  Knowlton reinforces the trend of the importance of social media and word of mouth when it comes to informing purchase of technology goods & services.

The study, focused on the multi-billion dollar B2B technology industry, shows that 'word of mouth' was just as important as industry analyst reports, both tied at 51%. Add in the respondents who listed 'user generated media' - 28% - and in total the 'social media' category tops the list at 79%.

The least influential media sources for B2B tech buyers? Traditional advertising (17%) and direct marketing (21%).

At Andiamo Systems, the technology industry is one of our strongest client areas. It's also one of the 'buzziest' due to the competitive environment and the passion that people have toward their favorite, and least favorite, brands, services and features. So technology marketers, you better be listening!

UFO On Virgin Flight?

It's  likely that in the last ten days, somebody forwarded you this complaint letter to Virgin Airways:

An excerpt from the frustrated traveler, just wanting to enjoy a decent meal aboard a recent Virgin flight:

"I’ll try and explain how this felt. Imagine being a twelve year old boy Richard. Now imagine it’s Christmas morning and you’re sat their with your final present to open. It’s a big one, and you know what it is. It’s that Goodmans stereo you picked out the catalogue and wrote to Santa about.

Only you open the present and it’s not in there. It’s your hamster Richard. It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing. That’s how I felt when I peeled back the foil and saw this..."

Sounds like an Unidentified Fried Object on one of Branson's flights.

This is not another blog post about how the customer now owns your brand,
you've heard that already.  This is about how long it often takes for a
story like this to take hold.  We searched our data sources for a
distinctive phrase that the letter writer used, "culinary journey of hell"
and here's the timeline we discovered (y-axis = date, x-axis number = of posts):

Over and over again we talk about how in an instant one issue can greatly
affect your brand, either positively or negatively.  That's true, of
course, but can also be an exception. The 'firestorm' that has nailed Kryptonite Locks, Dell (Dell Hell) and others, is a brand equity killer, but in our experience we find that most
stories take time to develop.

Imagine if Richard Branson (or one of his Corp Comm people) had been able to react quickly to this letter?  Maybe the story peaks with 60 posts on the 26th and thousands of passengers
don't inhale deeply before peeling back the tinfoil on their Virgin Airlines meals.

Lesson: Ignoring customer complaints is an implicit admission of guilt in many consumers minds. So Listen, Learn, Act and Prosper.

All too often we confuse the maximum speed of social media with the average speed.  If you're paying close attention, the consumer will give you time to correct your mistakes. So listen, take action and preserve, and grow your brand value!

What The New Forrester Brand Wave Report Says

Forrester's Brand Wave report just came out. Forrester publishes this report annually, and this year they rated half a dozen select 'enterprise-focused' social media analysis vendors (they decided to call it 'Listening Platforms' this year).

The top 2 highlights?

• Our category is rapidly evolving from a pure metrics-driven environment to one where vendors help deliver actionable consumer insights, especially leveraging consumer sentiment.
• Sentiment analysis and influencer identification are key to understanding conversation impact and customer engagement. Most of the vendors reviewed needed improvement in these areas, if they offered them at all.

Although we were not included in Forrester's report this year, the good news is that at Andiamo Systems, we do provide sentiment analysis as well as influencer rating and identification within our platform. We believe this benefits marketers by allowing them to determine and act on the most impactful and important conversations around their brands and industry.

Are there other areas of social media analysis that you think should be focused on more? Let us know!

The importance of sentiment in social media analysis

At Andiamo Systems, we are continually working with our clients to determine new metrics to help them discover and act upon consumer conversations to increase their Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI). One major factor that our social media analysis includes is semantic scoring.

Semantic analysis applies to the tonality or opinion communicated in these dynamic conversations. What it comes down to is telling our clients "are people praising or bashing my brand?"

This analysis allows our clients to immediately measure the impact of social media on their brand - it directly relates to and affects brand equity, health and reputation management issues.

It's not easy to do, and several companies in our space have decided to simply not offer it. But we feel that reporting on the true expression of consumer emotions - consumer sentiment - is a key indicator to:

• Determining true impact of conversations
• Winning & keeping customers
• Enhancing your product
• Creating & delivering effective marketing programs
• Improving the value & health of your brand

What do you think? Is understanding consumer emotion important to increasing the value of your brand? Let us know!

Using Twitter for quick focus group snapshots

Are you Tweeting? Well, even if you are not, you can bet that people may be Tweeting about your products or brands on Twitter. So just like with all forms of social media, even if you are not actively participating that doesn't mean conversations aren't occurring. What it means is, you actively need to listen and learn from what's being said.

And if it seems daunting, start small - just use any of the Twitter search tools - new ones like Twitority that also provide some authority rankings and filtering or Tweetscan where you can sign up for email alerts, or even old Twiiter search. See who is talking about you or your product category. Even if you don't participate at least listen - you can glean some valuable, actionable information here. Think of it as a quick focus group.

At Andiamo Systems, we're finding that Twitter is often one of the most active social media platforms for brand conversations.  It's certainly not the only social media venue to monitor, as the 140 character limits can make it much less robust than typical blog content. But the nature of the texting can provide some timely insights!