OMFG. Brands and Social Media in China.

August 11th, 2010 • View Comments Brands, Social, Underway
Tags: Brands, Business, China, Prediction, Presentation, Report, Social, Social Influence Marketing, Strategy, Trends, Truth, We like, World

Sometimes when you do research on tech adaption worldwide you get the impression it is completely enough to look at figures from the U.S. Take for example the excellent ‘State of the Blogosphere 2009‘ report by technorati. It presents all the charts and diagrams you need if you research statistics on blog usage….but if you dig a little bit deeper you find out that it’s actually nothing but a study about the American blogosphere.

This is particularly interesting if you take a serious look at the figures. China for example has surpassed the U.S. in social media usage last year. According to Netpop almost every Chinese online user is part of a social network. There are three times more bloggers per online user in China compared to the U.S. No major study will explain an average European or American strategist what these people do, what they talk about and how to engage them. By the way, we are talking about 1.6 billion Chinese and billions of Asians that I did not even consider in this calculation.

Check out this deck by Ogilvy One Shanghai (via Giles) about the connected Chinese digital landscape which is absolutely stunning. And afterwards do me a favor and answer one question: Is it actually possible to understand and lead the complexity of this world from a desk in Frankfurt, Paris, Amsterdam or London and to make the right decisions? How can we build cross cultural knowledge which is so important to get away from our subjective western perspective?

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The presentation. When Function follows Form.

August 6th, 2010 • View Comments Social, Tools
Tags: Funny, Presentation, Social Business Design, Strategy, Truth

The greatest sin in marketing is when function follows form. In fact this is more the rule than the exception – also in social. Like the comic. Thanks to Conversation Agent.

Study. The 8 success Criteria for Facebook Page Marketing.

Juli 28th, 2010 • View Comments Reports, Social, Strategy
Tags: Altimeter, Best Practice, Brands, Cases, Facebook, Reports, Social Influence Marketing, Strategy

Altimeter Group has just staged a new report that wants to define ‘The 8 success Criteria for Facebook Page Marketing‘. Seriously – the report is not a revolution. Nevertheless it works with quite an interesting empirical model. And I like the conclusion and case studies in the end.

The report ‘gleaned input from 34 vendors, agencies, and experts, to determine success criteria and develop a roadmap for Facebook page best practices‘. And about half of the reviewed brands did not do too well in activating full scale Word of Mouth. Take a look at Altimeter’s report. I am happy to hear what you pull out of it.

Social Monitoring. Sorry, we do only speak English.

Juli 26th, 2010 • View Comments Social, Tools
Tags: Analytics, Business, Monitoring, Radian 6, Semantic, Social Influence Marketing, Tools, Truth, World

The other week I attended a presentation by a major social analytics vendor from the U.S. If you have ever attended a telephone presentation of one of the many social-related tools you know how shiny and well applicable these tools seem to be when they get presented to you.

During the presentation the sales representative highlighted how easy and simple it is for his tool to identify and validate social leads according to the brand’s needs. I asked how the tool does it. He pointed at the tool’s sophisticated semantical algorithms. I answered ‘Fine, so it’s only applicable in the U.S., right?’ I am German, working in a Canadian agency in the Netherlands. This tool does only speak English. It is neither prepared to cluster German, Dutch, Italian, Polish nor French conversations. He replied ‘Well, that’s the problem with any analytics tool’.

I think that’s kind of funny. Among the hundreds of social media monitoring solutions there is almost none which is polylingual. Rather simple solutions such as Viralheat or Radian 6 are able to add transparency based on keywords. But mostly every ‘semantic’ tool does fail once we are talking about all non-English places on earth. And there are countries which are not the U.S. – I am quite convinced of that.

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google Me. Or: How I stopped worrying and learned to love Privacy.

Juli 12th, 2010 • View Comments Business, Social, Strategy
Tags: Business, Facebook, google, google me, Prediction, Presentation, privacy, Reports, Social Networks, Strategy, World

Most of you may have heard about the so called Facebook killer ‘Google Me‘ that supposedly binds half of google’s resources currently. And as most of you know, google has not exactly been successful with social networking by now. Especially after google Buzz also failed as a platform that is able to compete with Facebook. google knows they need to get their hands on social. Why? Steve Rubel explains it quite well…

google will ‘continue to dominate “pull.” But Facebook will aggregate content, make it social and rule “push.” Using our social circle it will surface content that we care about just when we want it – and allow us to comment on it all. As more people use Facebook to connect, share and create, a network effect takes over – and the system get even smarter.’ And that is exactly what google needs to do to stay alive in the long term.

No matter how successful Facebook is with its social strategy – they need to conquer Planet Push asap or become Facebook’s junior partner. In the middle of all the buzz about google Me we have to read the deck embedded below as a first rationale for google’s new platform – not as the ‘designing social networks’ deck that it wants to be. It was created by one of google’s lead User Experience architects Paul Adams and it criticizes Facebook existing social networks and the way they make people interact with a clear focus on privacy. What a surprise!

Even beyond the google Me hype – definitely a deck worth to take a look at (even though it is looooong).

Big question: Do you think google might make it this time? Do you believe privacy will be an USP strong enough to differentiate google Me from Facebook? Leave a reply.

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Social Activation. An Overview about U.S. Grocery Chains.

Juli 8th, 2010 • View Comments Brands, Business, Social
Tags: Brands, Business, Diagram, Facebook, Groceries, Social Media, Twitter, US, USA, visual

First up, I hate info visual wallpapers. They just seem to pop up everywhere and there is nothing which has not yet been transferred into an info visual of some sort. But there also are the good ones.

The following diagram by Pace Communications gives a good, brief overview about fans and followers of U.S. grocery chains. No doubt, this is quite a specialized market. Nevertheless you can spot the relevance of Facebook and Twitter (in comparison to Youtube and Flickr) for these major companies – with Walmart and Wholefood being frontrunners here. At least as long as you accept fans and followers as indicators of social activation.

Bad News. Nobody is interested in your Social Platforms.

Juni 23rd, 2010 • View Comments Social, Strategy, Tools
Tags: Brands, Prediction, Social Influence Marketing, Social Networks, Strategy, Truth, World

Actually I hate documents about social media. Honestly. I hate these decks almost as much as infographics about social media.

But I have to admit, I started smiling while I read this deck by Bart De Waele. It is not an analysis, it does not stage new insights or come up with a new conclusion to what marketing is all about – it just says what needs to be said. “Nobody is interested in your social stuff, as long as you do not interact constantly, honestly and wholeheartedly. Marketing in the social sphere should not revolve around rollout plans but around conversations.” Period.

Thanks to ‘We are social‘ for sharing it.

Update. The ‘Social Media Revolution’ Strikes Back.

Mai 9th, 2010 • View Comments Social, Social Business, Trends
Tags: Cool, Creativity, Diagram, diagrams, Figures, Funny, Future, Media, Prediction, Social, Social Influence Marketing, Social Media, Social Networks, Tools, Trends, visual, World

I love good info visualizations. But I hate social media info graphics. There are just too many of it. Nevertheless I like this little movie. It is called “Social Media Revolution 2″ and it is an update to its very successful predecessor which flooded twitter half a year ago. Now with updated statistics and images. Created by author Erik Qualman and based on the #1 Best Selling book Socialnomics. Enjoy.

Social Currency. Where Brands meet Dynamic Context.

Mai 2nd, 2010 • View Comments Brands, Social, Social Business, Strategy
Tags: Adaptation Marketing, Brands, Business, Report, Reports, Research, Social, Social Business Design, Social Currency, Strategy, Study, Trends, Vivaldi, World

One of the really good studies about brands and their social environments has just been published jointly by NYC think tank Vivaldi Partners and Professor Johann Füller (University Innsbruck) in cooperation with Lightspeed Research.

The report ‘Social Currency’ asks what a brand’s social currency is, and what it takes to build and nurture it. And, the report indeed brings a couple of crucial things across – it defines the buzzy term Social Currency and attributes success metrics for brands here.

Defining Social Currency

So what is Social Currency and why is it important? From the report’s perspective it is the contextual sum of experiences users can have in relation and interaction with a brand. And a brand’s social currency is bound to a dynamic process that we call reality.

Social Currency is the extent to which people share the brand or information about the brand as part of their everyday social life at home or at work. (…) It is neither a product feature, nor a communications or PR campaign that is completely managed by any one company. From this perspective, social currency is a far more delicate asset to build, nurture and maintain than is brand equity.

Social currency represents a shared asset of consumers and company-owned brands. It originates from interaction between customers and consumers. And it is the material a brand’s success will be fundamentally influenced by…

1. Across categories and brands, 53% of consumers’ brand loyalty can be explained by social currency
2. Users of brands with high social currency show a significantly higher willingness to pay a price premium (correlation=0.73)

The study’s explanatory strength does not only lie in these results – it is remarkable as it tries to define what social currency is made of. Since the research assumes that social currency is crucial for brands to create customer loyalty it consequently also reveals its components. No, a brand does not necessarily have to access all levers – this varies in regard to which industry and brand is involved…

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Awesome. Meet the Cupcake Cannon.

Mai 1st, 2010 • View Comments Social, We like
Tags: Brands, Cool, creativitiy, Experimental, Fashion, Funny, Ideas, johnny cupcakes, Lifestyle, Presentation, video, visual, We like, World

I love good events. And I love good events being celebrated by good brands.

My favourite hipster vendor Johnny Cupcakes is on tour to bring great t-shirts to their friends all across the U.S. and Canada. A lot of things are happening underway. Such as on day 17 of the tour in Portland‘s Kamp Grizzly where the guys encountered a pneumatic cupcake cannon. I am not really sure what it is with hipsters and cupcakes but here we go…looks like fun.