Social Media Optimization

Harris Interactive reported in its April 2008 issue of Youth Trends that more than half of US girls ages 13 to 15 used social networking Web sites in 2007. Overall more than twice as many children ages 10 to 12 reported using social networking sites in 2007 as did in 2006.

US teen girls take a much more active role within social networks than boys according to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project and the National Commission on Writing conducted from September to November 2007.

American Airlines has been in the news a lot recently because of the cancellation of thousands of flights due to mechanical troubles. What has been interesting is watching how AA have approached this PR nightmare. AA first step in conjunction with its PR agency of record, Weber Shandwick, was to immediately initiate a major crisis-communications plan.

AA Crisis Response

• Immediately issued a press release to drive passengers to the advisory section on its website for updates
• Communicated with frontline employees so they were prepared to deal with questions from travelers
• Proactively and reactively worked with media through its news desk

A just released survey, conducted with Compass Partners LLC, illustrates several surprising new trends in social media, specifically that 36.2 million women in the U.S write and  read blogs every week and approximately half consider blogs a “highly reliable” or “very reliable” source of information and advice.

The 36.2 million women who actively participate in the blogosphere is comprosed of 15.1 million who publish at least one post a week and 21.1 million who read and comment to blogs a week

Mediapost reported last week that American Airlines has launched a new marketing tool disguised as a Facebook widget.
The widget, called Travel Bag, lets Facebook friends share personal tips and experiences American Airlines is hoping that the widget will help them learn more about what consumers want.

“We want to understand how consumers interact with one another,” said Billy Sanez, American Airlines director of advertising, promotions and corporate communications, who admits the widget has become a “bit of an experiment.” Sanez, 34, who has been tinkering with Facebook apps for the past eight months, said: “There’s no controlling a widget. You just put it out there and hope it spreads virally.”

There is a common perception that marketing campaigns on sites like Facebook and MySpace do not produce the ROI that other online marketing efforts do. Social media marketing is still very new and one reason for the lack of success is that a lot of marketers are just not experienced in marketing to these types of communities. Last year I wrote abut A Successful Facebook Marketing Campaign from Target.

Adage recently had an article about how successful Disney has been on MySpace continually revitalizing the MySpace profile it created for its 2006 dance-themed movie “Step Up”.

From the article:

I am out at Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas and I had an interesting conversation with Carsten Cumbrowski about advertising on social networks, specifically Facebook Carsten made argument that Facebook can be a very good site to advertise on from a branding perspective.

The king of branding is traditional media. When you advertise on traditional media like TV, radio or print, it is always difficult to tell how well the campaign performed from a conversion perspective. You can estimate that X number of people heard, watched or read your ad, but that is about all. Your advertising campaign builds brand awareness and share of mind, which ultimately leads to more sales, but it is very difficult to translate one specific ad to that sale.

When someone talks about Web 2.0, they are usually referring to the current interactive phase of internet development, defined by blogging, social networking and “wiki” sites built with user-generated content.

But what is the next evolution? What is web 3.0? In an article in the Financial Times Dawn Bebe, managing director of the UK’s first social shopping site for women, Osoyou.com, ventures a guess that “The next evolution for the web is social networks that have a purpose - vertical social networks”

Earlier this week I wrote about how Forrester was recommending to their clients that they advertise on social networks because the cost is cheap, relative to other advertising opportunities. So it was pretty timely of BusinessWeek to have a article about how many users are spending less time on socal networking sites because they are annoyed with the ad deluge.

From the BusinessWeek article:

E-consultancy had an interesting post about Forrester Research who are advising clients that a recession is the time to be advertising on social networks. As Forrester put it:

Social applications in particular, such as communities and social networking sites, are cost-effective and have a measurable impact on prospects’ decisions in the consideration stage, which will be important to companies under recessionary pressures.

This is an interesting position for Forrester to take as social networks have not exactly been a boon for most advertisers. In their paper Forrester makes two points why this is a good time to switch your advertising dollars to social networks. The first point is:

It was July 19th, 2005 when Robert Murdoch surprised Wall Street when he spent $580m to purchase MySpace, So how does the investment look 2 1/2 years later?
When Murdoch bought MySpace it was predominately a US social network. Today it is a worldwide force with 24 local versions. Besides introducing new musicians and playing host to amateur filmmakers, MySpace is also signing artists to its own record label and developing online video series. Earlier this month it introduced a content guide called MySpace Celebrity.