I was sent a copy of the book “The Real Truth About Social Media” by Eric Harr. Overall I found this book to be an easy read and full of real life examples of social media successes and failures.

Since the book mainly focuses on core social media fundamentals, strategies and platforms, it is not a book for someone who is experienced in social media, but those those who are relatively new to social media, this is a good buy.

There is a lot of information and insights in the book and some the best points I found were:

• Social media as a viable communication platform is here to stay. It is not a passing fad. Embrace it or be left out in the cold while your competitors reap the rewards.
• Social media requires a significant investment of time and resources. If you can’t allocate each of these, then don’t get involved.
• “Begin with the end in mind,” as Eric points out. Make sure before you dive into the world of social media that you have a strategy in place and you clearly define your Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). Measure the “metrics that matter.”
• Understand the permanency of social media. Once something is said, it can’t be taken back.
• Don’t just create content. Create awesome content that moves people to act.
• Transparency is paramount in the social media world. If you can’t adopt a transparent approach, modern culture is astute enough to figure out who you really are in about 5 seconds.

My favorite part of the book by far was the real life examples of social media successes and failures. Sometimes social media can seem abstract to new people to the space and it was great reading about successful campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIN. Also because the book is newly printed I was able to find the campaigns that the author Eric Harr was talking about to actually see them in action

You can find the book at Amazon and Barnes and Noble and is worth adding to your holiday wish list.

Surprisingly data from a University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research study that shows while many of the Fortune 500 companies are using Facebook, Twitter and corporate blogs, that usage has not grown in the last 12 months.

The study found that 61% of Fortune 500 companies had an active Twitter account, with at least one new post in the past 30 days.

Looking at previous reports from the Center for Marketing Research, this percentage is up from 35% in 2009 but about the same as 2010, which was 60%. Additionally, there hasn’t been much change when it comes to public-facing corporate blogs, with 23% of Fortune 500 companies using a blog in both 2010 and 2011.

This apparent slowing down of social media adoption is interesting, as many of the Fortune 500 companies, such as Coca-Cola, Starbucks and Levi’s, are well-known for their social outreach. However, this may be the saturation point for social media among the largest US companies. By now, if a large company with a big budget wants to be active in social, it probably already is. And those that are not may be larger holding companies or B2B brands that do not have public-facing social media as part of their communications plan.

This plateauing is also interesting when comparing the Fortune 500 to the Inc. 500, which is a list of the fastest-growing private companies in the US. Social buzz and outreach can contribute a lot to a company’s growth, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see a socially savvy company show up on the Inc. 500.

In fact, the latest Center for Marketing Research study on Inc. 500 companies, looking at 2010, found that 86% of Inc. 500 companies think social media is very or somewhat important to their business and marketing strategy. Their focus on social is something Fortune 500 companies can learn from and, possibly, grow.

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 +?

Companies seem to be in an arms race these days to get people to “like” their Facebook page, as they hope to win more social media fans.

Interestingly a new study from a June 2011 study from ExactTarget, “Subscribers, Fans and Followers: The Meaning of Like,” found that 25% of US Facebook users disagree that marketers should interpret “like” to mean they are a fan or advocate of the company.

One of the most interesting pieces of data was around why people do not “fan” a brand on Facebook.  More than half of users expect to be bombarded with messages or ads (54%) after fanning a brand, while 45% do not want to give companies access to profile information and 31% do not want to push content from a company into friends’ newsfeeds.

According to comScore, Internet users inArgentina, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico and Peru are overwhelmingly choosing Facebook over any other social network.

comScore also counted five Latin American countries among the top 10 worldwide in terms of Facebook penetration in June 2011, ranging from 86.9% in Venezuela to as high as 90.9% in Chile.

According to comScore’s report, Facebook users in Argentina outnumber those of the next largest social network, Windows Live Profile, by more than 8 million. The gap in Mexico, at more than 11 million, is even wider.

orkut remains the No. 1 social network in Brazil, but Facebook is the runaway leader in the rest of Latin America.

For businesses targeting consumers in Latin America, Facebook makes it easy to reach users across the whole continent through one platform.

Community-based knowledge creation for customer service and sales is not that new. However, enabled by the ubiquity and ease of use of the Web and the availability of social networking tools, it has gone to a whole new level, leading to the creation of the term “social knowledge.” While more prevalent in B2C sectors, social knowledge is also starting to matter in B2B sectors.

How can companies harvest the best of social knowledge for pre-sales and after-sales customer service they offer through their own contact centers? How should they engage with customers on social websites? The following five-step plan will help increase the odds of success in harvesting social knowledge for customer service and sales.

1. Assess the opportunity

Companies need to first assess the opportunity for social knowledge harvesting in the context of the nature of their business (e.g. B2B, B2C etc.) and the customer queries they get (simple vs. complex).

Social knowledge creation has been more common in B2C sectors because it is easier to attain “critical mass” with more contributors and less specialized knowledge. This means a bigger harvesting opportunity in B2C than in B2B (see Figure 1).

Customer inquiries fall broadly into four categories—informational, transactional, diagnostic, and purchase advice. Generally, informational and transactional queries tend to be of low-to-moderate complexity while diagnostic and advice-seeking queries are of moderate-to-high complexity. Informational and transactional queries, therefore, are more likely to be resolved by social knowledge, although social knowledge (e.g. product review sites) has become an important influencer, especially in B2C commerce.

2. Identify high-value knowledge

Social knowledge contributors have varying levels of reputation, prolificacy, and influence, which most social networking tools measure (number of posts, acceptance rate, number of connections, etc.). The Social Knowledge Value™ (SKV) of contributors can be estimated by using a combination of these metrics. Knowledge from high-SKV contributors is ideal for “deep dive” harvesting, while that from low-SKV contributors can be ignored or skimmed (see Figure 2).

3. Engage current customers

Customers are key to the initiative – as knowledge contributors, posters of queries and brand advocates on social sites. Businesses need to make sure that queries posted on social sites are resolved in a timely manner, especially if they are from high lifetime financial value customers, whom you usually provide “platinum service” (e.g. proactive offer to chat, rapid service levels, etc.). The risk of non-resolution of customer queries is high on social sites because of broad market exposure.

If high-financial-value customers are also high-SKV contributors, they not only present an opportunity for deep-dive knowledge harvesting but are also important for collaborative product development and social brand building. See Figure 2 for a framework for knowledge harvesting as part of customer service strategy.

4. Harvest and unify

Contact centers need to make sure that social knowledge goes through the same robust quality control processes as internally-generated knowledge, so that it can be made part of a trusted multichannel knowledge base. Likewise, social customer interactions should be added to other multichannel interactions as part of a unified customer interaction hub, which consolidates interactions, knowledge, business rules, analytics, and administration in one place for better customer experience, service consistency, context continuity, and process efficiencies. The hub approach allows agents to view customers’ social interactions, in addition to traditional one-to-one interactions with the business, for full context and rapid resolution.

5. Account for sector-specific and legal factors

Social monitoring tools, social knowledge, and robust customer service compliance workflows can help businesses in sectors such as pharmaceuticals and personal care products to track adverse incident reports and act on them rapidly in compliance with regulations.

All businesses should make sure they are not violating copyright laws while harvesting content from social websites.

When this step-by-step approach is implemented, social knowledge is bound to add significant value to any enterprise in the form of improved customer loyalty, enhanced brand equity, expanded knowledge ROI, and reduced customer service costs.

Author: Anand Subramaniam, VP of Worldwide Marketing, eGain Corporation, www.eGain.com
eGain provides customer interaction software for multichannel sales and service

The Sports Business Journal is reporting that the Phoenix Suns are boosting their social media strategy by offering a discounted ticket package for social media users and adding a social media sideline reporter during homes games at US Airways Center.

Team officials say the Suns will be the first NBA club to hire a dedicated social media sideline reporter for its home game broadcasts, which are shown on Fox Sports Arizona. It’s a new twist for one of the more active NBA teams using social media as a major marketing tool.

“We will still have our sideline reporter, but the [social media sideline] reporter is a new addition,” said Jeramie McPeek, vice president of digital for the Suns. “We want to try something different and add a new element and a social media personality into the broadcasts. Our fans [using social media] are most active and engaged about the Suns during games.”

The team’s plan for the reporter will include providing updates on where Suns topics are trending on social media during games, reading tweets and adding other social media game broadcast enhancements, McPeek said. In addition, the team’s sideline social media reporter will be used throughout the team’s in-game presentation.

The Suns also will offer social media users a 5 percent discount for a five-game ticket package. In past seasons, the Suns offered one-off discounts to social media users, but this year they are planning theme nights for users of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Google+.

The Suns also recently created a new front-office position dedicated to their social media efforts by hiring Greg Esposito, a columnist for ArizonaSports.com, as the team’s social media specialist.

Older social media users have grown more likely to follow brands on social media sites as they’ve gained more experience interacting on them, but younger adults still outnumber them in this activity. Millennials’ enthusiasm for making friends with brands, though, may not be too far above average.

The “American Millennials” survey, conducted by Barkley in advance of September’s Share.Like.Buy conference, found that over half of millennials, defined here as consumers ages 16 to 34, liked checking out brands on social media sites. That compared with just over a third of older adults.

The survey, fielded in partnership with the Service Management Groupand sponsored by Boston Consulting Group, also found that a third of millennials like brands more if they use social media. That was nearly double the percentage of older adults who said the same. Still, over 30% of millennials thought it was annoying for brands to be on sites like Facebook and Twitter—making this group less tolerant of social media marketing than those 35 to 74.

The Barkley survey did find that millennials were more likely than older adults to “like” a brand on Facebook, and did so more often. And interaction rates were somewhat higher as well.

Nearly one in four millennials (23.5%) interacted with content from a brand’s Facebook page at least once a daily, vs. 17% of older adults who did the same. Millennials were also 4.4 percentage points more likely to interact with brand content between one and six times per week. While similar shares of both age groups interacted at lower frequencies, overall older adults were nearly twice as likely never to engage with brand content on Facebook.

Brands have the opportunity not only to attract younger adults as fans of their brand, but also to interact with them frequently once they do. The fact that many millennials sign on to Facebook almost every day, and a substantial percentage are willing to engage with brands that often, means that a stream of updated and valuable content has the potential to attract their attention over and over—as long as it doesn’t annoy them.

As Twitter evolves its advertising platform, with the latest development being Promoted Tweets to followers, there is concern as to how consumers will react to seeing ads from brands in their Twitter feeds.

Market research firm Lab42 surveyed US Twitter users in August 2011, asking about their habits related to brand engagement. Only 11.1% of US Twitter users said that following brands was the leading reason why they use the site. The top reasons include following friends (17.4%), to get a good laugh (15.6%), to get the news (15.1%) and to share the news (13.9%).

Additionally, about half of US Twitter users follow between one and 10 brands on the site. Only 10.6% of respondents said they don’t follow any brands, while 8.2% of US Twitter users follow more than 50 brands on Twitter.

However, when it comes to consumers’ attitudes toward Twitter’s primary ad product, Promoted Tweets, things are promising. Only 10.9% of US Twitter users said Promoted Tweets are “annoying and take away from the Twitter experience.” More often, Twitter users are open to Promoted Tweets, with 24.8% reporting that they have seen Promoted Tweets from brands that are relevant to them. More than one-fifth of users said they have gotten a discount (21.6%) or have found out about a new brand through a Promoted Tweet (21.2%). Additionally, 14% of respondents said they have retweeted a Promoted Tweet.

As marketers become more noticeable to consumers on Twitter through Promoted Products advertisements, Twitter users seem open to engaging. If these ads stay relevant and allow consumers to control how they interact with brands, marketers will have yet another social ad platform to use to build up followers.

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.