Ready good interview by eMarketer’s Kimberly Maul of Kris Narayanan, vice president of digital marketing at Samsung. Narayanan oversees Samsung’s paid, earned and owned social media programs and had some interesting comments on how the consumer electronics giant uses social media, how social media ads have performed so far and what trends he sees in the marketplace.

eMarketer: What does Samsung focus on with the paid, owned and earned aspects of its social media program?

Kris Narayanan: For paid social media, the focus is roughly the same as is in regular media—it’s about driving effectiveness and it’s about enhancing our learning. For owned media, which extends well beyond social networks, it’s about driving the best content and news to our consumers and to our fans on a timely and relevant basis. And for earned media, it’s about conversations and listening.

eMarketer: When it comes to social media budgets, do you see an increase compared to last year?

Narayanan: The simple answer is yes. Over the past three years, we’ve seen consistent increases in our ad spend and overall marketing spend with regard to social media. I expect that to continue.

We have traditionally spent a lot of money on owned media trying to drive conversations and better listening. The paid side commenced this year, but we’ll be more aggressive in growing that next year. We’ve tried to grow our social base quite organically in the past couple of years and we’ll complement that with paid media in the next couple of years.

eMarketer: How well are the Facebook ads performing?

Narayanan: They’re performing well, but our ability to track and measure needs to improve. That’s really where the advances are happening, both in the tool sets that Facebook is making available and in the ability of companies like us and third parties that are acting as experts on Facebook advertising. Facebook built basic capabilities that are now getting more and more enhanced to be able to measure and target and segment and so on. That is going to drive ad performance a lot better in the coming months.

eMarketer: What are some social media best practices for consumer electronics companies?

Narayanan: One best practice is to leverage social media from a listening standpoint to drive the better products. For example, we learned from our social media that consumers were using our Blu-ray players as the hub for internet connections in their living rooms. That allowed us to amplify the messaging of that attribute of our Blu-ray players as well as enhance the lineup of Blu-ray players that have a connected feature.

Also, prelaunch marketing and launch time marketing are huge areas. Technology is such a buzzed-about category. Consumers are constantly asking, “What’s the latest? Should I buy this one now or wait for the next product?” Social media can be a huge engagement driver for people who are truly interested in the latest and greatest technologies and brands like Samsung that are constantly pushing the edge of technology.

eMarketer: Looking ahead to 2012, what trends are you seeing?

Narayanan: Google+ is truly exciting to me as a consumer. It offers the opportunity for me to manage my circles and my different social connections on a much more segmented basis.

As a brand, however, it’s not quite clear how Google+ will evolve. But we’re very excited because Google+ offers the possibility of combining the social graph and the interest graph. We can’t wait to get started.

Interesting stuff. How are you using Google +?

David Wilson

I have been in providing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services to clients for the last 8 years. I believe that SMO is where all the online services are going to converge over the next 18 months.

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New research from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the American Marketing Association looked at how high-ranking marketers look at social media within their organizations for the September 2011 edition of their “CMO Survey.”

The study found that companies are setting aside a greater percentage of their marketing budgets for social media and plan to continue that trend going forward. As of August 2011, marketers were spending an average of 7.1% of their marketing budgets on social media and planned to increase that to 10.1% in the next 12 months. Within five years, marketers expect social media to account for 17.5% of marketing budgets.

At first glance the increase in budget for social media marketing looks good.  But a look back over several past CMO Surveys shows that social media budgets are growing more slowly than marketers had expected or hoped. In August 2010, marketers reported that social media budgets were 5.9% of marketing budgets and expected that to reach 9.9% one year later—nearly 3 percentage points higher than actual August 2011 levels.

To prove the success of social media outreach and keep up budgets, marketers are looking at different metrics. Between August 2010 and August 2011, “The CMO Survey” found that customer-relationship-based activities became more popular to measure, while financial metrics lost steam.

Site visits and page views were still the top social media metric used by US marketers, with 52.2% of respondents highlighting that tactic in August 2011. However, counting the number of followers or friends jumped to 34.1% of respondents, up from 24% in August 2010, and buzz indicators or web mentions also increased, from 15.7% of respondents in 2010 to 20.5% in 2011.

Meanwhile, use of sales levels as a metric dropped from 17.9% of respondents in 2010 to 13.3% in 2011, and fewer also measured revenue per customer, with only 9.6% of respondents highlighting that option this year, down from 17.2% in 2010.

Little disappointed that social media marketers are still focused on softer, relationship-based metric instead of increasing sales or higher revenue per customer. In today’s economy it is harder and harder to get budget for social media and that will not change if marketers can show a positive ROI.

David Wilson

I have been in providing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services to clients for the last 8 years. I believe that SMO is where all the online services are going to converge over the next 18 months.

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The US Sports Social Media Report By Braveheart Sports Network for September 2011 shows that the Los Angeles Lakers are far and away the most dominate US sports franchise in social media.

Braveheart Sports Network looked at the number of Twitter followers and Facebook fans that every NBA, NHL, NFL, MLB and MLS team has, to see who is winning the social media battle online.

It is rare that a brand and/or team can successfully execute a winning social media strategy on both Twitter and Facebook, but the Lakers have found a way to dominate both social media platforms.

Twitter
With over 2.1m followers the Lakers dominate with over 2.1m followers, basically double that of the next most followed team which are the Orlando Magic (just over 1m followers). The 2.1m Lakers followers makes them the second most followed sports club on Twitter behind Spain’s Real Madrid who have 2.3m followers.

Out of the top most followed sports teams 4 are from the NBA, 4 from MLB and 1 from the NFL and NFL

Surprisingly, only 18 out of the 141 US sports franchises in the report have more than 100,000 Twitter followers showing that either US pro teams have not fully embraced Twitter yet. There is a huge opportunity on Twitter that is being missed by 87% of US sports teams.

Top Ten US Sports Franchises With Most Twitter Followers

Facebook
As mentioned above, not only do the Lakers dominate on Twitter, they also dominate on Facebook, with over 10m followers. That number is almost double that of their rival the Boston Celtics who have 5.3m fans

Out of the top ten most followed sports teams 4 are from the NBA, 2 from MLB and 4 from the NFL

The NFL teams do a much better job embracing Facebook than they do with Twitter, while the opposite is true of the NHL who only has one club in the top 20 rankings of Facebook followers.

With 24 out of the 141 US sports franchises in the report having more than 1m Facebook fans, it appears that that pro teams are doing a slightly better job embracing Facebook than they are Twitter.

But there is still a huge opportunity on Facebook that is being missed by 8 out or 10 (83% ) US sports franchises.

Ten US Sports Franchises With Most Facebook Fans

Data as of September 10, 2011

David Wilson

I have been in providing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services to clients for the last 8 years. I believe that SMO is where all the online services are going to converge over the next 18 months.

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Good article by Nichole Kelly titled six reasons not to create a Facebook page.

Nichole writes that ”

Many companies are rushing to try and jump into social media because they feel tremendous pressure to prevent being left behind.. It’s not surprising then that when faced with building a corporate social media presence, most are turning to Facebook as the answer. Facebook has become the strategy you “won’t get fired for.” “

So true. Having a Facebook page is the equivalent to building a web site 10 years ago. Back then, most businesses had no idea how to use the web, but having a web site meant that management could check that box off on their marketing list. Having a Facebook page works the same way. Just create on for us so that we can cross it off our to-do list.

Here are 6 reasons that Nichole writes that your company should NOT create a Facebook Fan Page.

Reason #6: You don’t know WHY you need a fan page

You don’t want to create a fan page just to have one. If you haven’t defined a clear goal that you are trying to accomplish with your fan page, it is well…really unlikely you’ll reach it. Fan pages without purpose are like grave yards, there are a lot of pretty flowers to look at, but once you get there you realize this isn’t a place for enjoying your morning coffee. Ask yourself what you want your fan page to do for the company; help you retain your existing customers, help you capture new leads, or help you generate awareness for your brand?

Reason #5: You don’t know HOW you are going to use Facebook to advance the mission

Okay, so you know why you have a Facebook Fan Page, but you don’t have a strategy for how Facebook can be used to actually accomplish your goal. If you are trying to capture new leads, stop and look at Facebook and ask yourself this VERY important question, “If you wanted to buy my services and you were on our fan page, could you?” It’s clear a lot of companies that are on Facebook haven’t thought about this question. If a fan wants to buy, you want to make it SUPER easy for them.

Reason #4: You don’t know WHO you are reaching on Facebook

It isn’t effective to create a fan page and sit and wait for just anyone to show up and like your page. It is important that you know exactly who your target audience is and how you can attract them to your page. Your page needs to be relevant and interesting to your audience. If you think people will like your page because they “like” your brand, you will be sorely disappointed. Once you understand who your audience is you have to show a compelling reason for someone to want to engage with your brand. Ask yourself if your one-size fits all approach typically will actually end up being one-size fits “none”.

Reason #3: You don’t know WHAT value you will provide to your fans

Once you know who you are targeting you need to figure out what you will do to keep them engaged. A few clever status updates won’t cut it, if you want to inspire your audience to take action. Ask yourself, “if a fan likes our page, what’s in it for them?” Why would someone want to be a fan of your page? Facebook moves quickly and the best way to stay at the top of someone’s news feed is to have content that results in “likes” and comments. If your content doesn’t provide value…it won’t inspire people to click on the fancy hand with a protruding thumb.

Reason #2: You don’t know WHEN you audience is on Facebook

Managing a Facebook presence takes time and resources; therefore you want to help create efficiency so you or your team members can get their other jobs done too. The best way to do that is to maximize every post by understanding when your audience is engaging on Facebook and scheduling posts to hit during times that have shown they elicit high times of engagement. Dan Zarrella and the folks over at Kissmetrics did a study of the best times to post on Facebook called the Science of Social Timing. They determined that you should post on Saturdays at noon and that you should post no more than every other day. While this may be true for the average user, we know that your users are anything but average and that may or may not be a good time for them. Ask yourself “when is my audience most likely to use Facebook” and you’ll have some great times to test.

Reason #1: You don’t know WHERE your audience is

Have you stopped to ask yourself whether or not your audience is actually on Facebook? Okay with 500 million users, you are guessing they probably are. All right then, did you ask if they would even want to engage with you on Facebook? While Facebook has amassed a large pool of users, we are fools if we think that people are jumping onto Facebook just to engage with our brands. People are going to Facebook to keep in touch with their friends, their families and possibly even their co-workers. There are some audiences who spend a lot of time on Facebook engaging with brands, but they certainly aren’t the majority. So before you jump in and say you need to be on Facebook, as yourself, “is my audience on Facebook? And then, can I create a “natural” relationship with them there?” If you think there is a chance it will feel a little stalkerish for your audience…put down the keyboard.

The common theme here is understanding your audience and their behaviors before you jump on the Facebook bandwagon. Creating a fan page comes with a responsibility to your fans and to your company. Don’t sell yourself or your fans short by jumping in just to be their.

David Wilson

I have been in providing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services to clients for the last 8 years. I believe that SMO is where all the online services are going to converge over the next 18 months.

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According to a survey last month by MerchantCircle of nearly 5,000 local business owners  “Creating a profile on a social network” was named the most effective marketing or advertising tactic.

Additionally, 34% of respondents in the Deluxe Corp. study in May who had used social media said it helped them reach new potential customers and 15% said it increased sales.

Couple of things from the table stood out for me. One is that almost 41% of small business owners say that simply creating a profile on a social network is an effective marketing move. The survey also mentioned that 66% of local merchants are using Facebook for marketing, so I assume that most of those profiles are being created on Facebook.

In a related tactic, that almost 26% (25.9%) of respondents says that using local search and review sites like Yelp is effective is eye-opening.

No longer are SMB’s focusing on one tactic like search or display advertising to reach customers online. Now they are creating social profiles (40.9%), capturing email addresses (37.1%), and asking people to leave reviews on sites like Yelp or Tripadvisor (25.9%).

In short, SMB’s are not focused on one tactic. They are going where users are online and trying to reach and engage with them wherever the customer is online.

David Wilson

I have been in providing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services to clients for the last 8 years. I believe that SMO is where all the online services are going to converge over the next 18 months.

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Good interview with Melissa Sowry, Content and Social Media Manager for Burt’s Bees recently on eMarketer, in which Melissa spoke about how Burt’s Bees uses social media to create buzz about its products, especially Facebook. Burt’s Bees have been able to grow their Facebook fan base from 98,000 to more than 370,000.

Here are some excerpts from that interview:

eMarketer: What drives online word-of-mouth for your brand?

Sowry: Beauty is a category where people take recommendations from their friends and talk about what’s new. They also look to experts for suggestions. For example, if we get a placement in Marie Claire or Lucky where they’re raving about the new tinted lip balm, we might share the link to the page.

We also find fans of the brand are recommending products to one another in this space. That’s the normal activity that takes place around beauty products. It’s mostly women talking to other women and finding out what works, but it’s taking place online in social media venues. For example, a mother might ask other moms about products that stop diaper rash: “What works for you?” These are important conversations and I think online social media is a place where people trust one another to get that information.

eMarketer: What is the brand’s approach to Facebook?

Sowry: Facebook is a channel for us to provide compelling content. When I came on board, we started doing simple things—posting content and behind-the-scenes images on a daily basis and discussing new products coming to market.

We use social media and Facebook in particular as relationship-building tools. We also create opportunities for consumer education around skin care, for example, and sampling offers. We ran successful sampling programs on Facebook for our relaunched body lotions and new tinted lip balm.

We talk about our products on Facebook but we also spend time talking about the culture at Burt’s Bees through our involvement with Habitat for Humanity, sustainability efforts, product ingredients and so forth.

eMarketer: How do you track the ROI from your social media activity and how do sampling efforts impact sales down the line?

Sowry: We monitor the traffic we have going from Facebook to Burtsbees.com. We’re constantly looking at ways that we can monitor traffic, fan growth and sentiment about the brand.

We’d like to be able to say that because we launched a Facebook sampling tab we’ve increased our fan count and increased sales by a certain percentage, but we’re not in that place yet to have those sorts of metrics. But we do know that we’re driving more traffic to our ecommerce site due to the activity on Facebook.

eMarketer: Burt’s Bees has a “Shop & Share” feature on Facebook where brand fans can ask their friends about a purchase. How successful has it been?

Sowry: That tab was designed as a first generation of us looking at shopping on Facebook. You can’t complete a transaction with the Shop & Share tab—the technology is not at that stage yet. When you click on a product, we can import a product feed. We could have all of our products up there if we want, but can only display 10 products per page. If you click on the “Shop” button on the tab, you go to Burtsbees.com, our ecommerce site, to complete the transaction and the order.

Shop & Share was sort of a test to see if it’s something that we should invest in. We’ll be looking at it in the next fiscal year since more brands are starting to offer the ability to complete transactions within Facebook. People want to stay within the Facebook environment.

eMarketer: What kind of content gets the most traction on your Facebook page?

Sowry: Everything from video, product recommendations, news about new products, ingredients, guidance in selecting the right products.

One thing that really engages people are questions. For example, we asked people on a Friday what they’re thankful for. We said we were thankful for honey. We did one around lip care: “What makes your lips like nobody else’s?” We had 106 comments on that post in a day.

David Wilson

I have been in providing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services to clients for the last 8 years. I believe that SMO is where all the online services are going to converge over the next 18 months.

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I was looking over HubSpot’s “The 2011 State of Inbound Marketing” report and it really hit home what sites have won the social media battle.

If you go back about three years, the big sites within the social media space were Digg and StumbleUpon. Companies spent a lot of time and effort to get on the first page of Digg because of the traffic that it brought. They even had a name for it the “Digg effect”.

The problem with sites like Digg and StumbleUpon was that while they could send tens of thousands of visitors to a web site, the Digg user rarely returned for a second or third visit.

That type of transient traffic made in difficult to build engagement online and marketers started looking for other social media channels to reach users through. Enter Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Look at the dramatic rise in the importance of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to marketers since 2009. Huge growth in their importance to marketers as all three only trail a company blog in importance.

David Wilson

I have been in providing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services to clients for the last 8 years. I believe that SMO is where all the online services are going to converge over the next 18 months.

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Dan Rose, VP of partnerships and platform marketing at Facebook gave an April 6 keynote address at the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit and he touched on a couple of companies who are seeing a measurable increase in revenue by being on Facebook.

Rose said marketers that are seeing results from integrating Facebook social components on their websites include American Eagle Outfitters, Levi’s, OpenTable, ShoeDazzle, Ticketmaster, Travelocity and Benefit Cosmetics.

American Eagle implemented a “like” button on its site and found Facebook users it tracked spent 57% more than non-Facebook customers. Rose said Levi’s implemented “like” buttons on all product pages last year, and more than 50% of its Cyber Monday traffic came from Facebook.

Benefit Cosmetics is allowing customers to add product reviews on their Facebook page. Those reviews flow to the Benefit website through the Bazaarvoice SocialConnect Suite platform. Within two weeks, he said, 80% of Benefit’s products were reviewed and rated on Facebook.

Ticketmaster has a new feature that allows concert ticket buyers to tell friends about the purchase on Facebook. Through tracking, Ticketmaster says that it receives $5.30 per link shared on Facebook in revenue. At first glance that it not a big number. But when you realize that there are hundreds of millions of people on Facebook, then that $5.30 per link suddenly looks very impressive.

“We now have a direct link between sharing on Facebook and revenue generation at e-commerce sites,” Rose was quoted as saying in the New York Times. “This is word of mouth on steroids,” Rose said, according to Direct Marketing News. “This is how you take advantage of the social Web.”

 

David Wilson

I have been in providing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services to clients for the last 8 years. I believe that SMO is where all the online services are going to converge over the next 18 months.

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Came across a great page on Social Commerce Today that has some great stats about F-Commerce, Facebook enhanced e-commerce.

Social Commerce identify three basic types of F-Commerce:

• on Facebook (f-stores, Credits)
• on the Web (using Facebook open-graph/social plugins/FB storefronts with web-stores)
• in-store (using Facebook open-graph/social plugins/Deals for ‘bricks and mortar’ retail)

So what sort of numbers are companies seeing from F-Commerce? Social Commerce has a lot of numbers but these are the ones that stood out to me:

Facebook drives word of mouth sales

• $2.52: what a Facebook share generates for ticketing site Eventbrite
• 130: Average number of Facebook friends of a user (who receive their word of mouth recommendations)

Facebook drives loyalty sales

• 117%: the additional amount a fan will spend on a brand compared to a non fan
• 51%: the increase in likelihood a customer will purchase, after clicking the ‘like’ button
• 41%: the increase in likelihood a customer that a customer will recommend, if they have liked the brand

Industry adoption of f-commerce is accelerating

• 76%: percentage of retailers who plan to use Facebook for ‘social commerce’ initiatives
• 50%+: proportion of the global top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook using it’s social plugins
• 10,000: number of new websites integrate with Facebook every day (with social plugins) (since April 2010)
• 2m+: Number of sites that have integrated Facebook social plugins

What do you think of F-Commerce? Are you using the Facebook plugins? Are you having success with them?

David Wilson

I have been in providing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services to clients for the last 8 years. I believe that SMO is where all the online services are going to converge over the next 18 months.

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According to Adweek, there is bad news for brands who are rushing to social media sites. Young people don’t want to be friends with you! According to a new report from Forrester Research, just 6% of 12-17-year-olds who use the web want to be friends with a brand on Facebook.

Among Web-connected 18-24-year-olds, that figure doubles, which means that only 12% of 18-24-year-old think is ok to friend a brand. Even scarier for brands: Young people don’t want brands’ friendship, and they think brands should go away.

“Many brands are looking to social media as a strong digital channel to communicate with these consumers, since it’s where 12- to 17-year-olds are spending so much time,” wrote Jacqueline Anderson, Forrester’s Consumer Insights Analyst, who authored the report. “But research shows that it is important to consider more than just consumers’ propensity to use a specific channel. Almost half of 12- to 17-year-olds don’t think brands should have a presence using social tools at all.”

So if you are a brand on Facebook and your target audience is 12-24-years-olds what do you do? One option is to use social media as a listening tool instead of pushing your brand forward. According to Forrester’s report, while 16% of young consumers expect brands to use social media to interact with them, 28% expect those brands to listen to what they say on social sites and get back to them.

That last data point is the key one. Young consumers are basically telling brands, when I interact with you I want you to listen to me and interact with you. I don’t want to interact (friend) a brand that just engages in a one-way conversation with me.

David Wilson

I have been in providing Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services to clients for the last 8 years. I believe that SMO is where all the online services are going to converge over the next 18 months.

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