21 Social Media Marketing Trends for 2012
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What’s in store for communicators, PR pros, and marketers in 2012?
It’s that time of year again! It’s time for the PR, communications, and marketing world to look at the challenges and opportunities ahead. It’s time we determine what’s in store for our businesses, our industry, and our way of working.
We spent weeks scouring the web, talking to industry experts, and listening to our customers. We wanted to boil down the changes we see shaping the PR and marketing landscape to ten essential trends.
After doing our research, we noticed a red thread going through the majority of the trends we highlight below. The changes in the PR and media landscape distinctly reflect the changes in human behavior we’ve been observing and experiencing ourselves over the past few years – changes brought upon by new technologies. Think about how we consume information nowadays, as well as what we expect from the creators of this information in terms of presentation and access. Think about how you as content creators aim to share and spread this information in order to gain maximum exposure and engagement.
For us, the trends below are about understanding these changes in human behavior, the technologies that affect them, and the engagement you can create from giving your audience a sense of achievement, empowerment, authenticity, and fun. Hopefully our research will give you – the communicator, the PR pro, or the marketer – the tools, the motivation, and the knowledge to tackle the challenges head-on.
We live in amazing times, but it can only get even better in 2012!
NB: The following trends were presented by Jonathan Bean, COO at Mynewsdesk, during the three-day Mynewsday conference. His and other presentations can be viewed in the Mynewsdesk newsroom.
Table of Contents
1. Digital First
We’re seeing a big shift happening – a shift that will most likely continue throughout next year. Companies and organizations are now, finally, giving digital marketing channels precedence over traditional, analog media. Of course an integrated marketing approach remains key, but digital comes first, both in strategy and in budget.
An important example of this is the Guardian newspaper in the UK. They are describing themselves as a digital organization, even though the majority of revenue still comes from print. However, a story published in print media is self-limiting. It forces stories to have a beginning and an end. It cannot adapt or keep up with rapid developments that might change the story.
However, if a story lives online, in social media, it can develop organically, quickly. It’s a new way of working for the journalists, but it’s clearly more effective in meeting the needs of their readers. This concept of social journalism, as Jeff Jarvis puts it, allows journalist to involve the people, the audience. You see things like live reporting a developing story to a broad audience, allowing them to interact and engage. A story becomes more expansive because it is open to outside, real-time influence.
The same concept can be applied to the business world. What this really reflects is a behavioral change that has been in the making for a number of years. A brand or organization’s audience is increasingly found online and is demanding the companies to be digital too. The consumption of media now happens through the web, through apps, through social media. It forces a structural change like the one Guardian is going through.
When it comes to PR pros and communicators, the focus will be to meet the needs of your online-savvy audience and influencers, needs that are actually quite similar to those of the Guardian’s audience. This means re-engineering your business, much like the media business has done. In other words, you must involve your stakeholders in your business. You must encourage your influencers to develop, share, and spread your story digitally.
2. Decentralize Social Media
Is social media decentralized at your company? Or is social media is controlled by a single department, or even just one person? Chances you would answer yes to the latter. Last year, we mentioned Jeremiah Owyang’s Frameworks for Social Business.
We believe that social media will become increasingly decentralized, forming the holistic “honeycomb” pattern, where everyone is socially enabled, has access to a company’s social networks, and represents the company even on their private accounts.
Concrete examples of this are Dell, SolResor, and, you guessed it, Mynewsdesk.
What we’re seeing is that social media is becoming integrated in to the whole organization. Ownership is spread and social media becomes a tool for conversation, not just a marketing, PR, or client services channel. And why? Because it’s now about people, not logos. Every employee should be a brand ambassador.
But there are risks in socializing your enterprise. You must relinquish control of your brand story, trust non-marketers to represent your brand, and accept an inconsistent brand message. But according to Paul Holmes, “the more consistent a company’s message, the less authentic it sounds. […] Any consistency should be organic – a natural result of shared values and cultural cohesion, rather than imposed by the message police.”
For PR and communications people, it will be vital to empower every employee and enable them to be the different faces of the company, each with a similar, but not identical, understanding of the company’s values. This means that cultural values must be communicated internally.
This could require a fundamental organizational change. If the employee is not “good” at social media, or isn’t willing to be represent your brand in this landscape, you might have to rethink your hiring criteria.
3. I Get By With A Little Help From My Friends
We’ve all heard about user-generated content, and maybe even attempted to get some. However, what do we do with this material once we have it? Unfortunately, not much at the moment. But in 2012, crowd-generated digital storytelling will (finally) be fully embraced.
The trick is to find your crowd, to find the people that will help you tell your story digitally. These are your influencers, your colleagues, or your friends. They are the people nearest to you. Southwest Airlines is a strong believer in this. According to Brooke Thomas, emerging media coordinator, stories can be found everywhere, especially on Twitter: “Every tweet is essentially a story idea.”
A recent example of Southwest embracing crowd-generated content was when frequent flyer Paul Lovine proposed to his girlfriend on a Southwest Airline flight and then tweeted that she had accepted. Southwest picked up the story, contacted Paul, and wrote a blog entry about it.
Why would Southwest Airlines go through this trouble for one passenger? In our personal lives, we are judged and defined by the company we keep, by the people that surround us. It’s the same for brands and companies. A brand is defined by its customers, its friends, and its influencers. Engaging with them and sharing the stories they tell about your brand ultimately reflects what kind of company you are or want to be – your influencers can add to your credibility. It is therefore essential that PR pros and communicators start building and interacting with their networks, both internally and externally.
But there are pitfalls, as Coca Cola can attest to.
The first video depicts one of the largest social media campaigns Coca Cola has ever made. The second is an initiative of Duane Perera, a regular Coke fan – an entirely grass-roots effort, so to speak. Coincidentally, both have similar concepts and both occurred around the same time, but Duane outshone Coca Cola’s official, corporate campaign in terms of subscribers, views, and mentions.
Why wasn’t Coke’s campaign more successful? The one thing to keep in mind with user-generated content is that authenticity is rewarded, while artificiality is, at best, ignored, if not condemned. However, the biggest problem is that Coca Cola haven’t made concrete steps to engage with Duane, despite talks earlier this year. Essentially, Coca Cola are ignoring the social network Duane built around his travel videos.
If you come across something that one of your influencers did or created, on their own initiative, embrace it. It will lend more credibility and authenticity to your brand than anything coming from an official corporate campaign.
4. Customize This!
Personalized content will make the Internet more effective, as increasingly the needs of the individual are catered to, rather than a larger demographic or target group.
A clear example of this is in the news world. Last year, we discussed the emergence of applications like Zite, Flipboard, Pulse, and Trove. What these and other tools do is allow the news to find us. We don’t look for news anymore, because we automatically receive news about the specific subjects we’ve asked for from our networks and services.
The behavioral change we observe is that people are choosing their own content, on their own terms. We don’t like being pushed suggestions by people we don’t know or trust. We are more interested in what our friends say is newsworthy, not what a news editor says.
A similar pattern can be seen in the continued rise of social commerce. Recommendation services have been around for a while, like on Amazon.com, but recently social commerce has been developing most rapidly on Facebook. As Mark Zuckerberg puts it, “If I had to guess, Social Commerce is next to blow up.”
Zuckerberg might be biased, because if the numbers add up, Facebook stand to gain big – up to 10-15% of total consumer spending could occur through Facebook (social commerce on Facebook even has its very own buzzword: f-commerce). Facebook is the perfect platform for a company to sell their products, because of the sheer number of active users and the way they interact with each other. Not only will this mean that users can recommend products and services to others, but it can also lead to a completely unique variety of products for each user to see.
What does this mean for you, the PR pro, marketer, or communicator? Remember that the concept of personalized news or social commerce relies on people creating a trusted and engaged network around them – a network that will help them achieve their expectations. Communicators have to be keyed in to those networks.
Companies, too, can build networks and have influencers – both externally and internally. As stated before, the people in these networks need to be empowered to share your products, services, and stories with their own network, on their own terms.
5. Brand News World
We’ve seen companies and organizations take a clear step towards being digital first, towards embracing crowd-generated content, and towards empowering both their external and internal influencers. But on top of all that, companies and organizations will start thinking like journalists when creating and curating stories around their brand.
White board notes from SXSWi
What is Brand Journalism then, and why do we need to distinguish it from content marketing? According to a panel discussion at this year’s SXSWi, brand journalism is described as:
- An editorial approach to brand building
- A nonfiction attempt at advertising
- Thinking more like publishers
- It’s all about real time marketing, brands acting as media in real time, as life happens
- It’s the responsibility of companies to help their customers succeed
The purpose is to tell stories, but this method of content marketing emphasizes a neutral tone, lending credibility and trust to the brand. This tone does not slant to favor your brand, nor is every piece promoting an aspect of your company directly. Stories could be about industry leaders, trends, or events too – anything that would be deemed newsworthy for your audience, in the editorial sense.
That’s the key to brand journalism – taking out the middleman by thinking like the middleman (in this case, the journalists). Nissan is a great example of this. They hired a bunch of journalists (victims of a downsizing trend among news organizations) to run the Nissan newsroom. Simon Sproule, head of global marketing communications at Nissan, says, “It’s about killing press releases. We decided that if we’ve got good stories to tell, we’ll tell them ourselves.”
We talked last year about companies and brands becoming media houses and we see that continuing next year – even going a step further by convincing media people to make the switch from journalism to PR.
As a communicator you need to start thinking of your content in terms of newsworthiness. Offer value, think of all audiences, not just journalists, and don’t always talk about yourself.
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Look for "Part 2" to be published tomorrow (November 30, 2011) on Social Media Today.
Facebook, Seznam, Youtube... Vkontakte.ru. Mezi elitu nejnavštěvovanějších českých serverů se vloudil ruský sociální fenomén, který kopíruje Facebook.Podle dat, která HN exkluzivně získaly od největšího českého poskytovatele internetu Telefónicy O2, je Vkontakte.ru osmým nejpopulárnějším serverem mezi zákazníky O2 co do počtu zobrazených stránek.
"V současné době máme přes 60 tisíc uživatelů, jejichž profily pocházejí z České republiky. Jejich nárůst je za poslední měsíce obrovský," potvrdil mluvčí Vkontakte.ru Vladislav Cypljuchin. Tento počet odpovídá přibližně třetině všech rusky mluvících cizinců v Česku.
Rusové navštěvují Vkontakte.ru hlavně proto, že se chtějí spojit se svojí domovinou, kde je sociální síť Vkontakte.ru velice populární. Má přes sto milionů uživatelů, což z ní dělá největší ruský a ukrajinský internetový portál s tržbou kolem miliardy rublů.
Businesses that progress in 2011 will be those that craft a richer experience with the brand in the digital space. With distractions like device, interface, application, and platform, it’s easy to lose track of the importance of a meaningful message and an on-brand journey. Therefore there are five related areas for brand owners to focus in 2011 and beyond.
1. The journey defines the brand. Brand owners need to be asking themselves: Is the digital experience delivered on brand? I don’t mean usability (which ensures a user achieves his goal), but rather user experience. So, was the user delighted by his or her experience and was that journey reflective of what one would expect from this particular brand?
Interface draws an audience in, but the user’s experience throughout the interaction is critical to the impression of the brand. Offline this would take the form of an on-brand experience: from the shop front to the merchandise, from the dressing room to the store employee, from the cash register to the packaging, from returns to the customer service hotline, direct mail promotions, and so forth.
Digital interaction needs to move beyond functional and branded look-and-feel to a full experience reflective of the brand throughout the user’s journey. Is this the experience one should expect from this brand?
2. Next generation convergence. It’s a term we’ve heard for years in regard to devices. When applied to brands, convergence does not just ask do different interactions look the same, but rather do different interactions also act the same? Whether your customer is engaged with the website, app, podcast or dashboard, the entire experience should be recognizable and reminiscent of all other previous points of interaction with this brand.
Ideally as brands launch new products or services, the consumer will intuitively adapt and adopt because he or she is programmed to know it from all other interactions with the brand.
3. Personal access without the burden of ownership. Spotify, Zipcar, cloud storage—all wildly popular despite the consumer ceding the privileges of ownership. Turns out we don’t always need to own things; we just want to feel like it’s ours when we want it and for the duration of the interaction. That can be achieved by weaving personalization and individual preference into the service or product.
Providing a feeling of “mine” could involve programming an individual’s unique settings, but it also applies to smart services built in for general population groups. For example, tying in related interests based on typical population profiles, providing alternative functionality for low-bandwidth locations, or recognizing special needs groups with features appropriate to their abilities.
4. Getting to know the consumer. One way to deliver that individual experience in a shared service is by capturing user preferences and tailoring the journey. Employing artificial reality (AIML) or intelligent behavior personas, a system learns the user and tailors paths, content, and experience to the level of a user type or specifically for the individual.
This personalized experience helps foster brand loyalty as the consumer feels that the brand gets him or her. Of course, consider your audience and don’t end up defining your brand as “creepy.” It’s a fine line when employing artificial intelligence or behavioral tools—you have the opportunity to either delight or disturb with the uncanny knowledge of a user’s behavior.
5. It’s the message not the medium. It’s easy to get caught up in the medium and forget content and message. Whether it’s a social media opportunity or a 3D depiction, the content must be reflective of the brand. In fact we can argue that there will always be a new thing on the horizon—five years ago Twitter, iPads, and 3D television weren’t on the scene, but the value and importance of what is actually communicated will never go out of fashion.
V roce 2006 přišel 22letý student informatiky Maciej Popowicz s internetovým portálem Nasza Klasa (Naše třída), který hodlal – stejně jako Zuckerberg Facebook – využít hlavně jako platformu komunikace mezi spolužáky. Server, který teď osciluje mezi všemi myslitelnými sociálními sítěmi, tehdy zvedl vlnu nadšení. Dnes se k němu hlásí dvě třetiny Poláků.
Nk.pl má čtrnáct milionů aktivních uživatelů a 21 milionů kont. Avšak také Facebook sklízí v poslední době na polském trhu úspěchy. Za jediný rok zvedl počet uživatelů z 2,5 milionu na osm milionů.
Polský serverový kříženec je stále lídrem, a to i přesto, že má podle klientů spoustu nešvarů. Naposledy rozčílil fanoušky rozhodnutím dát povinně veškerý soukromý obsah klientů k bezplatnému užívání a do vlastnictví portálu. Přestože se vedení bránilo, že chtělo využít materiál jen pro chystané herní aplikace, které umožní uživatelům „vidět“ při hře spoluhráče, část klientů přešla na protest k Facebooku. Aniž by nejspíš věděla, že ten si privátní obsah nárokuje už dávno. O službě Nasza Klasa kolují na internetu dokonce vtipy: „Pojďme vymyslet službu, něco jako Facebook, nacpanou až k prasknutí reklamami. Ale bez všech těch aplikací a multimédií, jinak by se z toho server po…“ nebo: „Co kdybych napsal nějaký komiks? Třeba o serveru Nasza Klasa? Ale napíšu ho malinkým, rozmazaným písmem, aby ho nikdo nepřečetl.“
Mladá generace Číňanů zbožňuje sociální sítě, diskusní fóra a webové nástěnky, na kterých vydrží mnoho hodin denně. Podle průzkumů čínské agentury iResearch 36 % z přibližně 420 miliónů uživatelů internetu stráví na sociálních sítích 1 - 3 hodiny denně, 45 % věnuje této činnosti 3 - 8 hodin denně. Více jak 60 % se zaloguje nejméně na třech stránkách třikrát za týden. Co Číňané na těchto stránkách celou tu dobu dělají?Hrají hry na sociálních sítích. Ty nejsou v první řadě používány pro komunikaci, ale pro levnou a snadno dostupnou zábavu. Není divu, že například Farmville, který dnes hraje přibližně 25 miliónů uživatelů po celém světě, vznikl v Číně (hra, ve které se staráte o virtuální slepice a pašíky na farmě, kradete obilí svým sousedům nebo spolu s vašimi přáteli zakládáte malé virtuální kibucy). Mezi největší favority se letos zařadily parkovací bitvy, v rámci kterých vyděláváte virtuální peníze za parkování na místech vašich přátel nebo udělujete pokuty za špatné parkování na vašem plácku. Když získáte hodně peněz, můžete si koupit lepší auto. Milióny lidí se v Číně několikrát denně přihlásí, aby si „přeparkovali“. A proč? Protože je baví si hrát.
Odkaz na FB page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ctyrlistek-ze-stranek-STRACHcz/181040503853
According to the results of the 2010 Mom Social Influencer segmentation study by BabyCenter, five unique segments of social moms are broken down into two categories, the Influencers, Field Experts, Lifecasters and Pros, and the Influenced, labeled in the report as Butterflies and the Audience. The Influencers make up only 18% of social moms, but they wield 78% of the influence.
Tina Sharkey, Chairman and Global President, BabyCenter says "Since 2006, the number of moms using social media has skyrocketed more than 500%... marketers (can) shift their mindset from social media to social marketing by gaining a better understanding of who the mom influencers are... "
Influence, in this study, was measured by how often social moms post or comment on social networks and the size of their networks on these platforms. All five segments of social moms have distinct characteristics and behaviors consistent across the major social media platforms.
Všichni ti "socialmediaguru" se už pořádně zajídají každému marketérovi. Pravděpodobně nás ale skutečně čeká i únava samotných uživatelů - vlna nadšení nemůže trvat věčně.
